Voicing a Lost History through Photographs in Hispaniola’s Diasporic Literature: Junot Díaz’s “Aguantando” and Edwidge Danticat’s “The Book of the Dead”

VOICING A LOST HISTORY THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHS IN HISPANIOLA’S DIASPORIC LITERATURE: JUNOT DÍAZ’S “AGUANTANDO” AND EDWIDGE DANTICAT’S “THE BOOK OF THE DEAD” Melissa D. Birkhofer Overview In this article, I examine the ways in which references to photographs in Hispaniola’s diasporic literature create a space from which to recoup a history that has been long silenced both on the island and within migrant communities abroad. The photographs mentioned in the works I address do not appear as photographs alongside the text, but rather as descriptions in the text. Nevertheless, these photographs serve to uncover a past that has been in large part erased on both sides of island. I address two diasporic writers from Hispaniola: Junot Dı́az, born in the Dominican Republic who currently resides in New York and Edwidge Danticat, born in Haiti who currently resides in Miami. Comparing the stories “Aguantando” from Dı́az’s Drown to “The Book of the Dead,” from Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, I will demonstrate how photographs trigger historical memories that often coincide with darker episodes in Hispaniola’s history, specifically the François “Papa Doc” Duvalier regime in Haiti and the aftermath of the Trujillo years in the Dominican Republic. Although the history of Hispaniola is one of silencing, it is through the literature of the island and its diaspora that these silences are/can be uncovered. In these stories, the photographs are of family members, but they also carry historical references with them: the photograph of Yunior’s father in his Guardia uniform and Ka’s father trying to hide his scar when being photographed. These references interlaced within the descriptions of the photographs act as “evidence” of a history that has been silenced, be it the extreme poverty of the Dominican Republic and the breakdown of the family unit as adult men leave the country for work elsewhere or the atrocities carried out by the secret Tonton Macoute division of the “Papa Doc” Duvalier regime in Haiti. The photographs these characters regard unearth missing pieces of national and transnational histories. Additionally , the photographs described in these stories and the stories themselves work together to recoup this lost history. Although the photograph is commonly referred to as a silent picture, having no voice, the photographs in these stories serve as points of access for the characters to uncover and give voice to silenced events. Therefore, the photographs are the “evidence ” that the history ever existed and the story is the re-vindication and 43 SECOLAS Annals, Volume 52, 2008 re-voicing of the history through literature. This re-visioning, as Kirsten Silva Gruesz rightly states, “more than simply encouraging an additive process of restoring” lost histories, interacts with the mainstream U.S. based-diasporic literature explosion both by reclaiming lost stories but also by re-imagining the ways in which these stories are/can be told (xii). Introduction: Photography and the Short Story In 1939 when the daguerreotype was first introduced, writers including Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman praised the new art form and embraced it. This new art, “writing with light,” brought life-like representations of the wonders of the world into the home and created keepsakes to remember those who had passed on (Rabb xxxv). Poe, one of the daguerreotype ’s staunchest fans, hailed the invention as one of the most important of the time and “understood its mechanical origins and processes far better than most authors did, writing two pieces on improvements in the medium” (Rabb 4). In “The Daguerreotype” published in 1840, Poe decries that “the instrument itself must undoubtedly be regarded as the most important and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science” (Rabb 5). As photography as an art progressed, the relationship between photography and literature grew stronger. By 1918, critics, writers, and photographers alike began noticing the “cross-fertilization” occurring between literature and photography (Rabb xli). Walker Evans notes that photography “seems to be the most literary of the graphic arts. It will have – on occasion and in effect – qualities of eloquence, wit, grace, and economy, style, of course; structure and coherence; paradox and play and oxymoron. If photography tends to be literary, conversely certain writers...