Remaking Identity, Unmaking Nation: Historical Recovery and the Reconstruction of Community in In the Time of the Butterflies and The Farming of Bones

Postcolonial texts that contest the notion of history often do so by destabilizing history at a very fundamental level, recognizing that it represents one discourse through which we come to know the past. When histories are related from the perspectives of women, the process of historical rehabilitation further entails a redefinition of the parameters that determine national identity because of the traditional exclusion of women from these collectivities. In addressing this exclusion, writers often attend to the ways in which gender has been deployed in formations of the nation. Within the last several years, feminist analyses of gender and national identity have demonstrated that, in constructions of the nation, women are often left out of the national collectivity in that they are denied any national agency. That is, in the gendered divide between public and private that characterizes national structures, women are confined within the private space, and their contributions to public formations of the nation are often ignored or erased from history. Nations are frequently conceived as masculinized entities, as Benedict Anderson's widely recognized idea of the nation as an imagined community and "fraternity" indicates.¹ Further, the nation form is revealed to be a legacy of imperialism because the masculinization of the nation is reproduced with each imperial encounter. In her discussion of the nation, Lois A. West emphasizes that in colonial struggles, women are perceived as the booty of the male conquerors and as the symbols of the land "caught in the struggles between men, not as powerful symbols in their own right" (xviii). Anne McClintock further contends that national communities often rely on the male recognition of identity (that is, national power is recognized as male power) and the interchange of power between men. The nation as such is formed through homosocial bonds and through exchanges of power between men (353-4). In imperial situations, women become the objects of exchange, evidenced in processes like the feminization and eroticization of the land and of the colonial subject. Consequently, they are constructed into symbols of the nation, themselves unrecognized as active participants.² Although women have engaged in nationalist struggles in many ways, they are consistently perceived as secondary to men, their efforts hidden or invalidated.

Women's contemporary texts that attempt to rewrite imperial history not only reconstruct collective identity but also redefine the very boundaries of this collectivity, renegotiating the masculinized national identity that is inherited from imperialism. By disrupting accepted notions of community, such texts offer alternative communal definitions at the same time they strive to present an alternative to imperial history. These recoveries re-imagine the national community perpetuated by imperialism, thus often rejecting a male-defined nationalism and the collective identity it produces.

Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies and Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones are two such texts that, paired, cogently demonstrate the significance of locating new methods of defining national community. Written about two countries constituting one island cleaved by colonizations and joined briefly by United States occupation, these important texts converge on several levels. Both focus on the conflicts that arise in women's involvement within nationalist struggles. The texts investigate and critique the very structures that produce patriarchal nationalism. In the process they reveal the ways in which gender is necessary to national identity, delineating how this nationalism often relies on the subordination of women to men and the gendered division between public and private spheres. Illustrating historical events through the eyes of women, their texts do not simply include women in their native histories or in the forging of national consciousness to thus "recover" their voices. Rather, through demonstrating how gender plays into constructions of national collectivities, they articulate the ways in which the boundaries of imagined communities may be radically revised without reproducing them.

For each author, the re-envisioning of national collectivity is executed with some ambivalence. Although Alvarez's and Danticat's interventions in United States history may locate a new communal definition for their respective countries, both...