Trauma Lost in Translation: Teaching Gisèle Pineau’s L’espérance-macadam / Macadam Dreams

…the unspeakable spoken may reveal those texts to have deeper and other meanings, deeper and other power, deeper and other significances.

—Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unpoken”

…literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet.

—Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience

Gisèle Pineau’s novel L’espérance-macadam/ Macadam Dreams is a work of trauma fiction that chases and charts the gaping chasm between experience and event in the wake of repressed sexual violence. This relationship between experience and event lies at the core of the conceptualization of trauma and reflects the intersection of knowing and not knowing mentioned in the epigraph of this essay. Contemporary trauma theory has routinely identified its representation as a fraught act of translation unto itself.¹ Caribbean literature has long been preoccupied with representing traumatic events whether in the violence of the Atlantic slave trade, slavery and colonialism, or patterns of political and familial violence. When we consider the inexpressibility and incommunicability of pain often explored in these contexts, to express the psychictrauma that results from physical violation complicates the process of narrative creation. At the same time, as Toni Morrison has eloquently argued, speaking the unspoken adds depth and power to these literatures of trauma. As Laura DiPrete explains, “the literature of trauma, bearing witness to the voice, the remembered and the forgotten, the known and the unknown … is frequently a double telling” (10). My interest here is how this double telling or dual process is infused with yet another meaning or layer when we take on trauma in literary translation and teaching. It is in this context of multiple translations—first psychically of trauma into text, then linguistically from the original French to English, then pedagogically from teacher to student—that I reflect here on the experience of teaching L’espérance-macadam / Macadam Dreams in French and in English by looking at several passages from the novel. Using the definition of trauma as “an injury to mind or body that requires structural repair,” I explore how Pineau attempts to put back together the pieces beyond repair through structure and language, and how this process unfolds in the teaching and use of the translated text (Horvitz 5). Because traumatic experience imposes limits on the subconscious in terms of what is known, trauma essentially resists translation; my reading of the original and translated versions of L’espérance-macadam performs this same type of resistance as I move from one text to the other. Rather than looking for what is said through these translations, I focus on what is lost, what is untranslatable, and what cannot be said.

L’espérance-macadam stages a trenchant encounter with the occurrence, proliferation, and cycles of violence against women and the psychic trauma that ensues as a result. The novel is set in Ti-Ghetto, a section of the village Savane Mulet in the Ravine Guinée section of Guadeloupe, during the 1980s. Even this location, as one that brings us further and further into a particular place, suggests a certain unknowability that lies at the core of traumatic memory. L’espérance-macadam tells the story of protagonist Éliette, a survivor of incest. In 1928, on the eve of one of the worst cyclones to ever hit the island of Guadeloupe, Éliette was raped by her father. L’espérance-macadam opens against the background of Hurricane Hugo taking place in the present, and early in the novel Éliette learns that her fifteen-year-old neighbor Angela is being abused by her father. The older protagonist decides to help the girl whose situation, unbeknownst to Éliette at first, mirrors her own experience with rape as a child. The realization that Angela is being sexually violated right next door is accompanied by the slowly unfolding realization that Éliette was also sexually violated as a child. Thus we are presented with...