This essay takes a look at two short stories from the novel Krik? Krak! written by the Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat. The short stories “Caroline’s Wedding” and “New York Day Women” are about mother-daughter relationships where the mothers and daughters are either first or second generations immigrants from Haiti. This essay focuses on these relationships and how they are related to immigration. To address these issues of relationships and immigration, several critics and their opinions on the subject are presented as well as an examination of key events in the short stories.

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This article studies the possibility of perpetrator trauma in Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker. The article gives a brief historical background of the political violence in Haiti that occurred under the Duvalier dictatorship and focuses specifically on the role of Tonton Macoutes, the violent enforcers of much of Duvalier's oppression. Drawing on trauma theory, the article argues that perpetrators have been very little studied within trauma studies because of the possible moral implications of giving research time to individuals who have often chosen their own path of violence. Along with theorists such as Kali Tal and Dominick LaCapra, this article investigates the difficult position of perpetrators who are also victims or those who have been traumatized in the act of violence. The paper finally argues that perpetrators may benefit from the opportunity to work through their trauma in the same way that victims work through trauma as a means of healing. In making this argument, this article shows the need for trauma theorists to study perpetrators in addition to current studies on victims and also shows an in depth study of the main character and primary perpetrator in The Dew Breaker.

The Body and the Parent-Daughter Bond: Negotiating Filial Relationships in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Dew Breaker est une étude sur les différentes façons dont le corps déséquilibré, torturé et traumatisé influence la relation parent-fille. Cette thèse examine l’impact du pouvoir et de la violence sur le corps aussi bien des parents que celui des filles et les différentes manières dont ces corps deviennent déséquilibrés. Cette thèse porte sur la construction et la négociation de chacune des conditions de parents et de filles sous l’angle du corps sexué traumatisé. Le premier chapitre traite la littérature précédemment écrite sur le corps en premier lieu, et sur les liens de filiation dans les deux œuvres en second lieu. J'ai introduit ma contribution au domaine et les différents aspects de la relation parent-fille qui ne sont pas pris en considération et que ma thèse essaye de démontrer. Ce chapitre contextualise ces deux œuvres pendant l’ère de la dictature des deux Duvaliers, père et fils, en exposant et discutant l’impacte néfaste de cette dictature sur les familles. Ce chapitre conceptualise et définit le corps, qui est une construction culturelle et un site d'interaction entre le pouvoir et la violence, par rapport aux relations filiales. Dans le deuxième chapitre, l'accent est mis sur la relation de Martine et Sophie par rapport à la pratique rituelle du test de la virginité. Dans ce chapitre, j’ai soulevé des questions sur le pouvoir de Martine de discipliner et contrôler l’attitude et le corps de Sophie et la manière avec laquelle la fille peut réagir au contrôle et à la subjugation de sa mère. J’ai examiné le conflit intergénérationnel qui est intensifié par le désordre corporel. J’ai essayé de démontrer comment Sophie souhaite rejeter et se séparer du corps de sa mère et son incapacité à le faire. Dans le troisième chapitre, j’ai étudié la relation de M. Bienaimé avec sa fille Ka qui est perturbée à la fois par le corps de son père et l’identité antérieure de ce dernier en tant qu’ancien Tonton Macoute. La question soulevée dans ce chapitre concerne le corps du père comme un agent de violence politique et comme une source d’inspiration artistique pour sa fille. L'identification de Ka avec et plus tard sa séparation du corps de son père est au cœur de mon étude, car c’est ce corps là qui modifie cette relation filiale particulière, qui résulte en un traumatisme transgénérationnel. Mots-clés: corps, relation parent-fille, pouvoir, violence, Edwidge Danticat / The Body and the Parent-Daughter Bond: Negotiating Filial Relationships in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Dew Breaker is an investigation of the different ways the disordered, tortured and traumatised body alters the parent-daughter relationship. It explores the mechanisms of power and violence on the bodies of both parents and daughters and the ways these bodies become as disordered as the psyche. This thesis will deal with the construction and negotiation of both parenthood and daughterhood from the angle of the gendered traumatised body. The first chapter deals with the scholarship that has been written on either the body or the filial relationships in both works. I have introduced my own contributions to the field in addition to the different overlooked aspects of the parent-daughter bond that my thesis tries to demonstrate. This chapter contextualizes both fictions with the era of Duvalier’s dictatorship and conceptualizes and defines the body in relation to filial relationships as a cultural construction and a site of the interplay of power and violence. The second chapter focuses on Martine-Sophie’s bond in relation to the ritual practice of virginity testing. In this chapter, I raise questions about the extent of Martine’s power to discipline and control Sophie’s body and behaviour and how the daughter reacts to her mother’s empowerment. I examine the intergenerational conflict that is intensified by body dysmorphia. I also demonstrate how Sophie wishes to separate herself from her mother’s body and why she fails to do so. In the third chapter, I study Mr. Bienaimé-Ka’s relationship that is disturbed by both the father’s body and his past identity as a former Tonton Macoute. The question raised in this chapter concerns the father’s body as an agent of political violence and his daughter’s source of her artistic inspiration. Ka’s identification and later separation from her father’s body is at the heart of my study because it is this body that alters this particular filial relationship, resulting in transgenerational trauma. Key words: body, parent-daughter bond, power, violence, Edwidge Danticat

The Body and the Parent-Daughter Bond: Negotiating Filial Relationships in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Dew Breaker est une étude sur les différentes façons dont le corps déséquilibré, torturé et traumatisé influence la relation parent-fille. Cette thèse examine l’impact du pouvoir et de la violence sur le corps aussi bien des parents que celui des filles et les différentes manières dont ces corps deviennent déséquilibrés. Cette thèse porte sur la construction et la négociation de chacune des conditions de parents et de filles sous l’angle du corps sexué traumatisé. Le premier chapitre traite la littérature précédemment écrite sur le corps en premier lieu, et sur les liens de filiation dans les deux œuvres en second lieu. J'ai introduit ma contribution au domaine et les différents aspects de la relation parent-fille qui ne sont pas pris en considération et que ma thèse essaye de démontrer. Ce chapitre contextualise ces deux œuvres pendant l’ère de la dictature des deux Duvaliers, père et fils, en exposant et discutant l’impacte néfaste de cette dictature sur les familles. Ce chapitre conceptualise et définit le corps, qui est une construction culturelle et un site d'interaction entre le pouvoir et la violence, par rapport aux relations filiales. Dans le deuxième chapitre, l'accent est mis sur la relation de Martine et Sophie par rapport à la pratique rituelle du test de la virginité. Dans ce chapitre, j’ai soulevé des questions sur le pouvoir de Martine de discipliner et contrôler l’attitude et le corps de Sophie et la manière avec laquelle la fille peut réagir au contrôle et à la subjugation de sa mère. J’ai examiné le conflit intergénérationnel qui est intensifié par le désordre corporel. J’ai essayé de démontrer comment Sophie souhaite rejeter et se séparer du corps de sa mère et son incapacité à le faire. Dans le troisième chapitre, j’ai étudié la relation de M. Bienaimé avec sa fille Ka qui est perturbée à la fois par le corps de son père et l’identité antérieure de ce dernier en tant qu’ancien Tonton Macoute. La question soulevée dans ce chapitre concerne le corps du père comme un agent de violence politique et comme une source d’inspiration artistique pour sa fille. L'identification de Ka avec et plus tard sa séparation du corps de son père est au cœur de mon étude, car c’est ce corps là qui modifie cette relation filiale particulière, qui résulte en un traumatisme transgénérationnel. Mots-clés: corps, relation parent-fille, pouvoir, violence, Edwidge Danticat / The Body and the Parent-Daughter Bond: Negotiating Filial Relationships in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Dew Breaker is an investigation of the different ways the disordered, tortured and traumatised body alters the parent-daughter relationship. It explores the mechanisms of power and violence on the bodies of both parents and daughters and the ways these bodies become as disordered as the psyche. This thesis will deal with the construction and negotiation of both parenthood and daughterhood from the angle of the gendered traumatised body. The first chapter deals with the scholarship that has been written on either the body or the filial relationships in both works. I have introduced my own contributions to the field in addition to the different overlooked aspects of the parent-daughter bond that my thesis tries to demonstrate. This chapter contextualizes both fictions with the era of Duvalier’s dictatorship and conceptualizes and defines the body in relation to filial relationships as a cultural construction and a site of the interplay of power and violence. The second chapter focuses on Martine-Sophie’s bond in relation to the ritual practice of virginity testing. In this chapter, I raise questions about the extent of Martine’s power to discipline and control Sophie’s body and behaviour and how the daughter reacts to her mother’s empowerment. I examine the intergenerational conflict that is intensified by body dysmorphia. I also demonstrate how Sophie wishes to separate herself from her mother’s body and why she fails to do so. In the third chapter, I study Mr. Bienaimé-Ka’s relationship that is disturbed by both the father’s body and his past identity as a former Tonton Macoute. The question raised in this chapter concerns the father’s body as an agent of political violence and his daughter’s source of her artistic inspiration. Ka’s identification and later separation from her father’s body is at the heart of my study because it is this body that alters this particular filial relationship, resulting in transgenerational trauma. Key words: body, parent-daughter bond, power, violence, Edwidge Danticat

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / For women in patriarchal societies, life is stitched with silence and violence. This is especially true for women of color. In a world that has cast women as invisible and voiceless, to create from the margins is to demand to be seen and heard. Thus, women’s art has never had the privilege of being art for art’s sake and instead is necessarily involved in the work of articulating and (re)writing female experience. When women seek, through their work and art, to feel deeply and connect with other women, they tap into what Audre Lorde has famously termed “the power of the erotic.” Lorde suggests that to acknowledge and trust those deepest feelings within our bodies is a subversive power that spurs social change. In the following work, novels by Kate Chopin, Gayl Jones, and Edwidge Danticat are linked by their female characters who seek the erotic via their art of choice and, in doing so, resist disempowerment and explore the life-giving nature of female connection. Furthermore, because the authors themselves are engaged in rendering the female experience visible, the novels discussed actively converse with their respective waves of feminism and propel social activism and feminist discourse. Hence, this project provides both a close reading of The Awakening, Corregidora, and The Dew Breaker, and a broader contention on the role of women’s literature in social justice.

The increased contact between nations and cultures in the globalization of the twenty-first century requires an increased accountability for the ways in which individuals and countries negotiate these points of contact. New World and Caribbean Studies envision the cross-cultural and transnational encounters between indigenous, European, and African peoples as important contributors to a paradigm within which identity in relation offers an alternative to identities rooted in national and filial frameworks. Such frameworks limit the ability to construct identity without relying upon static representations of history, culture, and ethnicity that tend to privilege one group over another. In the literature of Edwidge Danticat and Julia Alvarez, however, a fictional space is created that rewrites national histories and problematizes rooted identities through their novels' characterization. This fictional space is a transnational paradigm that—in the vocabulary of the critical theories of Édouard Glissant, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, and David A. Hollinger—explores the effects of cultures founded on ideas of relation and affiliation rather than on rooted socio-cultural legitimacy and ethno-political authority. Danticat and Alvarez's characters engage in a process of present living that allows them to negotiate their experience of diaspora and maintain a stable construction of identity in relation.

“Telling Otherwise: Rewriting History, Gender, and Genre in Africa and the African Diaspora” examines counter-discursive postcolonial rewritings. In my first chapter, “Re-Writing the Canon,” I examine two works that rewrite canonical texts from the European tradition, Jean Rhys’s retelling of the life of Jane Eyre’s Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea and Maryse Condé’s relocation of Wuthering Heights to the Caribbean in La migration des coeurs. In this chapter, I contend that re-writing functions not only as a response, as a “writing back” to the canon, but as a creative appropriation of and critical engagement with the canonical text and its worldview. My second chapter, “Re-Storying the Past,” examines fictional works that rewrite events from the historical past. The works that I study in this chapter are Assia Djebar’s recuperation of Algerian women’s resistance to French colonization in L’amour, la fantasia and Edwidge Danticat’s efforts to reconstruct the 1937 massacre of Haitians under Trujillo in The Farming of Bones. In my third chapter, “Re-Voicing Slavery,” I take for my subject neo-slave narratives that build on and revise the slave narrative genre of the late eighteenth- through early twentieth- centuries. The two works that I examine in this chapter are Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose and the poem sequence Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, based on the 1781 murder of Africans aboard the slave ship Zong. My fourth chapter, “Re-Membering Gender,” examines texts that foreground the processes of re-writing and re-telling, both thematically and structurally, so as to draw attention to the ways in which discourses and identities are constructed. In their attempts to counter masculinist discourses, these works seek to re-inscribe gender into these discourses, a process of re-membering that engenders a radical deconstruction of fixed notions of identity. The works that I read in this chapter include Daniel Maximin’s L’Isolé soleil, which privileges the feminine and the multiple in opposition to patriarchal notions of single origins and authoritative narrative voices and Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove, which rewrites Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Solibo Magnifique so as to critique the exclusive nature of Caribbean identity in his notion of créolité. / text

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The fragmented bodies and lives of postcolonial Caribbean women examined in Caribbean literature beget struggle and psychological ruin. The characters portrayed in novels by postcolonial Caribbean writers Edwidge Danticat, Michelle Cliff, and Shani Mootoo are marginalized as “Other” by a Western patriarchal discourse that works to silence them because of their gender, color, class, and sexuality. Marginalization participates in the act of fragmentation of these characters because it challenges their sense of identity. Fragmentation means fractured; in terms of these fictive characters, fragmentation results from multiple traumas, each trauma causing another break in their wholeness. Postcolonial scholars have identified the causes and effects of fragmentation on the postcolonial subject, and they argue one’s need to heal because of it. Danticat, Cliff, and Mootoo prove that wholeness is not possible for the postcolonial Caribbean woman, so rather than ruminate on that truth, they examine the journey of the postcolonial Caribbean woman as a way of making meaning of the pieces of her life. This project contends that fragmentation – and the fracture it produces – does not bind these women to negative existences; in fact, the female subjects of Danticat, Cliff, and Mootoo locate power in their fragmentation. The texts studied include Danticat’s "Breath, Eyes, Memory" (1994) and "The Farming of Bones" (1999), Cliff’s "Abeng" (1984) and "No Telephone to Heaven" (1987), and Mootoo’s "Cereus Blooms at Night" (1996) and "He Drown She in the Sea" (2005).