Toward Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Three Novels from Haiti

The literary scholarship on novels focusing on the 1937 massacre of Haitian seasonal workers that took place along the river separating Haiti from the Dominican Republic during Rafael L. Trujillo’s dictatorship (1930–1961) has often made use of trauma theory. The approach underscores the tenacious grip the event has had on the popular imagination. This paper, however, focuses on key moments in three canonical works in which authors give glimpses of the conditions that might arrest trauma and give way to reconciliation in three regions: the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the Haitian Dominican diaspora. But the paper also extends this examination some fifty years after 1937 to cover the legacy of violence in the Duvalier governments and beyond. By scrutinizing the fictional interactions between male and female victim, victim and victimizer, and predator and prey, the paper considers the ripple effects of their associations on the unfolding of recovery and the possibility of restoring peace. The paper draws on the history of Hispaniola, on Julia Kristeva’s and Jacques Derrida’s theories of forgiveness, on the insights of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa, and on the literature of trauma and of human rights. It isolates instances aimed, on the one hand, at arresting the cycle of repetition that renders trauma the endless reenactment of terrible events and, on the other, at investigating how the protracted processes of forgiveness and reconciliation can unfold decades after the trauma. These moments result in a small measure of forgiveness that sometimes fails and other times carries deep ambivalence. They reveal an ideal that should be continually fought for and that inspires concrete paths for sociopolitical action.