From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic

Preface: The Stories We Cannot Tell

The Incommensurability of Shared Histories The genesis of this study took place in a moment of reflection when, putting down one historically based novel (The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat ) and picking up another (In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez), I realized that a method of recomposition I had utilized to make sense of Caribbean women’s lives, their effaced and erased histories, could no longer hold.1 I had initially intended for the scope of this text to be much wider, to codify and analyze the numerous emerging voices from the Latin Caribbean in a cross-cultural context, anchoring the work in the mythology of Haiti often echoed in the texts of other writers, especially from the Caribbean. One haunting part of history—the cane field massacres of 1937, as the event is known to Haitians, or El Corte, as it is known to (some) Dominicans—reflected in the work of Edwidge Danticat and Julia Alvarez, narrowed my explorations. I hoped to build my investigations of Haitian and Latin Caribbean women’s literary representations around the shared tragedy both authors had sought to elucidate in their writings. In revisiting their novels, I discovered that the texts I was reading struggled with interstices in time, gaps in knowledge that they were valiantly seeking to fill in order to make sense of a moment in Caribbean history shared across the border of two independent nation-states. AlthoughthestoriesIreadabouttheauthorswerecompelling,thehistoriesthey soughttofleshoutstilllayincompleteasIclosedthecoversoftheirbooks.This ix PREFACE The Stories We Cannot Tell is not to say that fiction should serve as a stand-in for historical archives, but that such lacunae are striking, given the fact that the Caribbean novel has traditionally served the purpose of filling in the gaps of official history. Thus, even though Danticat’s and Alvarez’s novels follow a long-established trajectory of Caribbean literature used by writers of the region to compensate for the excision of historical records and memories of the area’s vast population by writing fiction, poetry, and theatre—the novel being the chief medium that authors have used to build an archive giving testament to the region’s varied history—I was left to wonder to what extent fiction today can fulfill such a need. There are two problems here: on the one hand, it may be that we are still too close to the historical incidents under discussion to do them justice, since the events of these time periods are still being sifted through by trained historians , and on the other, the genre of fiction remains in the arena of the imaginationand ,assuch,cannotpurporttofullydisclosethefactsofhistory.Fiction and other literary forms born of the imagination may put life into the proceedings of history, and though we now accept that the process is one that bears its own features of facticity, and that history, as we once understood it, is under revision, the author still has the liberty to mould their story to their intended effect. Between fact, fiction, and readers’ expectations (especially in the case of readers of Caribbean fiction, who are used to finding in it traces of historical moments not revealed in official versions of history), then, there are fissures aplenty. Still, given the fact that the Caribbean as a whole experiences entrenched struggles over sovereignty, human rights, and neo-colonialismthroughNorth –Southtradeandculturalexchanges,itstandstoreasonthat writers emanating from the region would respond to the need to historicize their creative works. We might consider, then, that today’s Caribbean writers, like their eighteenth-century counterparts, are engaged in a discourse concerning national and regional identity whether they are conscious of it or not. Like those authors who followed the Napoleonic wars, they are awake to the fact that “in this mass experience of history, the national element is linked on the one hand with the problems of social transformation; and on the other, more and more people become aware of the connection between national and world history” (Lukács 342). For the writers who concern me in this study, the question is not so much about the connection between national and world history (though such considerations may come into play on a more philosophical level, these are beyond the scope of this book), as it is about the connection between national, regional, and transnational history, given that many of the textual archives about the Caribbean are currently being x PREFACE producedoutsideofthatregion.TheculturalproductionofCaribbeanauthors, whether inside or outside of the region, is such that...