Writing against the Record: Emma's Corporeal Archive

This article considers how voice and body unite in Marie-Célie Agnant's novel Le Livre d'Emma to resist the exclusion from the archive that threatens the plurivocal oral history Emma seeks to transmit. Beginning with remarks on a colonial-era ledger, this study relies on Diana Taylor's understanding of archival knowledge and embodied practice to read Emma's transmission of oral histories to her interpreter, Flore, as a performance in which a corporeal archive is passed on through embodied practice. The approach here is twofold, first detailing how Emma's performance challenges archival knowledge as the preferential source for understanding the past and then demonstrating how information about Emma is written in such a way that it resists the rigid structure of provable facts. Transmitting and maintaining Emma's story as a corporeal archive, Agnant envisions a way of overcoming silence and preserving orality while avoiding the pitfalls of the imposed coherence of the colonizer's archive.