Writing Against Empire and Constructing Postmemory in Occupied Hispaniola

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The Occupied Strike Back: Writing against Empire and Constructing Postmemory in Occupied Hispaniola

Langley, Elizabeth https://scholarship.miami.edu/discovery/delivery/01UOML_INST:ResearchRepository/12355213430002976?l#13355500820002976

Langley, E. (2019). The Occupied Strike Back: Writing against Empire and Constructing Postmemory in Occupied Hispaniola [University of Miami]. https://scholarship.miami.edu/discovery/fulldisplay/alma991031447264402976/01UOML_INST:ResearchR epository

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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

THE OCCUPIED STRIKE BACK: WRITING AGAINST EMPIRE AND CONSTRUCTING POSTMEMORY IN OCCUPIED HISPANIOLA

Elizabeth Langley

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of the University of Miami in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Coral Gables, Florida

August 2019

UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

THE OCCUPIED STRIKE BACK: WRITING AGAINST EMPIRE AND CONSTRUCTING POSTMEMORY IN OCCUPIED HISPANIOLA

Elizabeth Langley

Approved:

______Lillian Manzor, Ph.D. Alexandra Perisic, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Assistant Professor of Modern Languages Modern Languages

______George Yudice, Ph.D. Guillermo Prado, Ph.D. Professor of Dean of the Modern Languages Graduate School

______Kate Ramsey, Ph.D. Professor of History

LANGLEY, ELIZABETH (Ph.D., Romance Studies) (August 2019)

The Occupied Strike Back: Writing against Empire and Constructing Postmemory in Occupied Hispaniola

Abstract of a dissertation at the University of Miami.

Dissertation supervised by Professor Lillian Manzor. No. of pages in text. (217)

The Occupied Strike Back: Writing against Empire and

Constructing Postmemory argues that the specter and experience of occupation have inextricably influenced the island of Hispaniola. The centenaries of the US Occupations of Haiti (1915-1934) and the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), which took place in 2015 and 2016, serve as a mnemonic point of departure for this work. Using a comparative approach, this manuscript analyzes narratives in French, Spanish,

English, and some Haitian Creole that contribute(d) to a project of resistance against US occupation and intervention over time—spanning the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. It further avers that these narratives foment a project of postmemory, or memory by adoption or transmission rather than lived experience.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION: HISPANIOLA, THE OCCUPIED ISLAND ...... 1

Chapter

1 THEORIZING POSTMEMORY AND RESISTANCE ...... 15

2 SIMULTANEOUS OCCUPATIONS AND A GAP IN CRITICISM ... 60

3 RECALLING OCCUPATION AND FORESEEING INTERVENTION .. 93

4 RESISTING FORGETTING IN THE 21ST CENTURY ...... 142

CONCLUSION ...... 200

WORKS CITED ...... 206

iii

Introduction: Hispaniola, the Occupied Island

A cursory history of Dominican-Haitian relations nearly immediately turns to events such as the Parsley

Massacre of 1937 and the more recent stripped citizenship and forced deportations of Haitians and Dominicans of

Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic. The former event, which occurred under the Trujillo dictatorship, saw the deaths of thousands of Haitians, Dominicans of Haitian descent and likely other Dominicans as well on the basis of race, even as the name of the event in English carries the cultural vestiges of a supposed linguistic test of belonging: being able to pronounce perejil with a tapped r.

The second event is based on the 2013 high court decision,

TC-168-13, which retroactively removed citizenship from the children of undocumented workers born in the Dominican

Republic who had enjoyed citizenship from 1929-2010, something the 2010 Dominican constitution also previously supported (Aber and Small 84). Despite some attempts to mitigate the full repercussions of this decision, deportations have been occurring since 2015. Although each of these events belongs to specific political contexts, each is rooted in antihaitianismo, an ideology that attempts to cement supposedly inherent differences between

Dominicans and Haitians through an intersection of race

2 and culture. This ideology is often thought to stem in part from the seemingly painful memory of an event that is commonly known as the Haitian Occupation of the Dominican

Republic (1822-1844), an event that is recalled by

Dominicans as brutal despite the circumstances of this moment, which, scholars like Anne Eller have clarified.

That is, the arrival of Haitians in the territory in 1822 was supported by many Dominicans after previously seeking

Haitian support during the waning, negligent colonial days of Spain (Eller 5). For twenty years, there was relative stability and widespread support, but problems began to emerge economically and politically in 1844. Eller claims, for example, that: “Boyer’s autocratic style, the political and economic burden of a so-called indemnity debt to

France, regional divisions, and a plurality of other grievances rankled an increasing number of political opponents” (23). There was a plurality of positions and causes for dissent at least by 1844, including natural disasters, but members of la Trinitaria from this time period, who were members of the Dominican elite, have since come to be seen as the founding fathers of the Dominican

Republic.

Still, some members of the elite voiced their opposition at the time of Haitian rule, and official

3 histories in the Dominican Republic came to recognize— especially under Trujillo and Balaguer—this event as a cause for discord between the two nations. Thus, although the 1822-1844 moment cannot be easily classified as an occupation, it is frequently referred to as one by scholars and figures who are not associated with the Trujillato, and this moment and its contested relationship to the idea of occupation is still significant and often informs the understanding of the relationship between the two countries. That is, the postmemory—or memory by adoption or transmission—of this event for many is related to occupation.

Although this event certainly had repercussions for the relationship between these burgeoning nations, I would argue that the US Occupation of the Dominican Republic in the early twentieth century (1916-1924) is a catalyzing force for antihaitianismo because of the question of US racism and racialization, the training and empowerment of

Trujillo, as well as the resulting turn toward identity and nationalism for Dominicans, especially Hispanic heritage.

That is, some accounts of the occupation indicate that the occupying Americans institutionalized racism during the occupations on both sides of the island mirroring the severity of the contemporaneous Jim Crow South in the US

4 while recalling the pigmentocracy of colonial times (Wright

21; 23-24). At the same time, the Americans may have contributed to the development of bateyes for the sugar industry in the Dominican Republic where Haitian laborers would predominate. Trujillo was trained during the occupation by US Marines and in this racialized context, rose through the ranks to become the head of the army, and eventually contributed to a coup leading to a 30-year dictatorship. For some Dominicans, Haitian rule and US

Occupation served to highlight difference and foment nationalism. There were also attempts to respond to and resist the present or occupying power. It is, however, following the US Occupation that Trujillo and Balaguer use

Haitians as an economic, racial other and scapegoat for their own political ends. This coupled with a turn toward the Hispanic portion of Dominican identity becomes a further reason for the citing of the supposed Haitian

Occupation of the Dominican Republic1 as a cause for difficulties between the two nations and subsequent decisions on the part of Dominican leaders in the latter

1 I refer to this moment at times in the text as the supposed Haitian Occupation of the Dominican Republic because recent scholarship suggests that the unification of Hispaniola is a more apt name; yet, I use this term when referring to the way the event has been viewed and named by those who view it as an invasion and a threat to sovereignty and identity, so that that context and experience can be better understood.

5 twentieth century. This is, of course, in spite of a lack of a continued threat of Haitian invasion.

Indeed, invasion and occupation have persistently influenced this island from the landing of Columbus to the present. In the nineteenth century, as previously mentioned, occupation was specifically intra-island with

Haiti occupying the Dominican Republic, as both nations had recently gained or were still in the throes of establishing their independence from colonizing powers. Occupation, nonetheless, continued to affect these nations--and all the more profoundly--in the twentieth century. That is, the

United States’ somewhat limited relations with the

Caribbean and Latin America prior to the nineteenth century changed profoundly with the bourgeoning independence of

Latin-American countries from Spain, the establishment of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, along with the Spanish-

American War. The former warned against future colonization in the region by European countries, while the war in question resulted in US control of the Philippines,

Guam, Puerto Rico and, temporarily, Cuba. Theodore

Roosevelt—the president of the United States between 1901 and 1909—also promulgated Big Stick diplomacy within the region: the combination of peaceful negotiation with displays of military prowess. This posture toward the

Caribbean and Latin America was further justified through the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904): a policy that permitted the intervention of the United States in moments of conflict between European powers and Latin

America. It is on the heels of this speech in 1905 that the United States takes over the customs receivership in the Dominican Republic because of an accumulation of foreign debt there. This turn of events had different motivations of varying degrees to keep Europe out of the

Caribbean, to pursue expansion, to satisfy Americans with interests in the Dominican Republic, and to aid Dominicans

(Rippy 419-420). The turn of the twentieth century, then, saw an increased interest in occupation and intervention in the Caribbean, as the United States sought to keep Europe out of the Americas and solidify its own imperial influence.2 In this context, the US occupied Haiti from

1915-1934 and simultaneously occupied the Dominican

Republic from 1916-1924. The Dominican Republic was again invaded in 1965 during its civil war, and this intervention or second occupation lasted until 1966. Haiti, in turn, experienced US intervention with the reinstatement

2 This trend would continue well into the 20th century, affecting much of the Caribbean and Latin America. By the 21st century, however, outside of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, the United States had largely set its imperial sights elsewhere, especially toward the Middle East.

(Operation Uphold Democracy, 1995-1996) of President Jean-

Bertrand Aristide following a coup and exile and later a

U.N. occupation with the subsequent removal of Aristide during his second presidential term (initially Operation

Secure Tomorrow and then MINUSTAH, beginning in 2004 and continuing into the present).3

Although in varying degrees and manifestations, each of these occupations and interventions has sparked responses of resistance that range from the armed to the artistic. Exploring how occupation has inextricably shaped the island of Hispaniola, intra-island relations along with its relationship to the United States, I will investigate how works written during occupation and those written to recall it foment postmemories in order to remember, in order not to forget (I contend that they are not the same), but, more importantly, to challenge narratives of the occupier.

Research Questions

There are three primary research questions that inform this dissertation:

1) How has occupation shaped relations between Haiti and

the Dominican Republic along with the United States

3 It can also be argued that the extraction of Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier in 1986 was also a particular kind of brief intervention by the United States.

(intra-island, each nation to the United States and

triangularly), and how have these relationships been

represented in literature?

2) How do works produced on the theme of occupation

contribute to a postmemory/ies of these events? How

does context affect these works’ role(s) as

contributors to postmemory/ies?

3) How do these works of cultural production serve as

resistance tools? With these particular works and

their historical and political contexts in mind, where

and in what ways do postmemory and resistance coalesce

and dissociate?

These research questions engender two levels of analysis:

a) A theoretical analysis that deploys and contributes to

the concepts of resistance and memory/postmemory as

modes for understanding the projects undertaken by

authors in works that treat occupation or intervention

b) A critical analysis that utilizes close reading of the

primary texts in conjunction with existing

historiographical, theoretical and critical (literary

criticism) works while addressing the lacunae of,

especially, literary criticism for occupied works in

the Dominican Republic and occupied works in Haiti

outside of novels from the 1915-1934 occupation.

Chapter Delineations

Chapter 1

The first chapter serves as a theoretical chapter, outlining the history of the use of the concepts of postmemory and resistance. I focus on the origin and predominant use of these terms in different arenas, including but not limited to Caribbean studies, memory studies, as well as postcolonial studies. World War II informs this chapter because the term postmemory was developed out of the study of the Holocaust, and I argue that the valorization of the term “The Resistance” stems from the cultural production—especially films—that treats

World War II. This chapter lays the groundwork for the theoretical framework and argument of this dissertation, which posits that a project of postmemory is often a project of resistance.

Chapter 2

Centenaries are a time for recollection, and they allow us to take stock of historical moments to remember them and shed light on stories untold or those nearly forgotten. The one-hundred-year marks since the beginning of the U.S. Occupation of Haiti (2015) and the Dominican

Republic (2016) are one of the catalysts for this dissertation and for this chapter in particular. The second

10 chapter compares the resistance movements against US

Occupation in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. I also analyze the critical reception of plays written during the occupations by Dominicans that were produced early in the occupation prior to more sustained censorship. The

Dominican plays Una fiesta en el Castine and Un yanqui en

Santo Domingo, both staged in 1916 and written by Rafael

Damirón, are not available in print form. This portion of the chapter, thus, involves a performative reading of announcements and reviews in Listín Diario and analyzes the reception of these works. That is, I imagine the content and context of the play and its significance based on its reception as well as reading across the newspaper page.

Chapter 3

The third chapter draws on narratives written during the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965-1966 and narratives written during or around the time of the US and

UN interventions in Haiti related to Aristide. With regard to the former, I analyze Marcio Veloz Maggiolo’s La vida no tiene nombre. As to the latter, I focus on Gary Victor’s A l’angle des rues parallèles. This chapter is informed by questions such as how looking back (works that write about a past occupation during a present one) and forward (works written in a climate of political uncertainty that seem to

11 have a prophetic element with regard to sovereignty and security) contribute to an understanding of postmemory and resistance when the context is not singular or easily defined. The chapter also explores how the experience of occupation intersects with history and identity in the literary imaginaries of the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Chapter 4

The fourth and final chapter considers two novels that look back to the initial occupations of the 20th century, partly in an attempt to remember them. Both L’Œil-totem by the Haitian writer Evelyne Trouillot and Song of the Water

Saints by the Dominican-American writer Nelly Rosario were written within ten years of Haiti and the Dominican

Republic’s centenaries of these major occupations. Both novels construct postmemories of these events and simultaneously exploit the visual—postcards and photos in

Song of the Water Saints and painting in L’Œil-Totem—and language shifts in an effort to remember these events when very few survivors remain, and contemporary cultural tools may not be robust. This chapter also investigates the tensions between memory and postmemory within these works.

Terminology

For the purposes of this dissertation, intervention can refer to any moment in which a foreign power intervenes

12 in political affairs in an international context. It can also refer to military invasion, especially when that invasion is short lived. Occupation, instead, refers to a sustained military intervention, often lasting for a year or far longer. Its related definitions refer to the job world (occupation, profession), having something to do, taking up space and/or protesting. Its disambiguation in

Spanish and French also correlates the idea of being in charge of or responsible for something. All of these corresponding definitions inform military occupation, especially the idea of taking up space, protesting, and being responsible for something. That is, military occupying powers take up space on a previously sovereign, foreign territory, and the reasons and policies of occupation often involve paternalism. Lastly, occupation tends to engender protest.

Conclusion

This dissertation is a work of comparative Caribbean studies as well as Dominican and Haitian studies, especially in terms of literature / literary criticism, but also history and international relations to a lesser extent. On the Dominican side, many works of literature from the occupations are unavailable (i.e., plays that were only performed; no script was published), but for those

13 that do exist, literary criticism is nearly non-existent.

On the Haitian side, much criticism exists, but it is mostly limited to the novel and to the occupation of 1915-

1934. This dissertation, then, addresses plays and later works that have not been considered at length or with regard to occupation. The dissertation also seeks to understand the implications for occupation across the island (Haitian-Dominican relations), especially in cultural production, a theme that has been rarely explored beyond the connection between the unification of the island—thought of or reconceived of as an occupation—and the development of antihaitianismo.

Many works of Dominico-Haitian relations in literature tend to relate to the Parsley Massacre, and more recent works across the humanities and social sciences are concerned with the border and the social implications and moral imperatives of TC-168-13. This study isn’t divorced from these events and concerns, but it aims to consider

Haitian-Dominican relations beyond these two events. More specifically, this dissertation seeks to contribute to the conversation around transnational Hispaniola studies and

Dominican-Haitian relations begun by scholars such as Anne

Eller, Lorgia García Peña, Amelia Hintzen, and Samuel

Martínez who have challenged predominant assumptions about

14 the history and relationships between these two nations.

They take care to avoid, challenge, and/or appropriately frame what Martínez calls “the fatal-conflict model,” a model where these countries are continual nemeses, in complete conflict, and where this conflict involves people from all social strata (81). This project, ultimately, investigates occupation and intervention across time on the island through the lenses of postmemory and resistance and argues that occupation has profoundly influenced the island. As a comparative project focusing on Hispaniola and its diaspora, this dissertation engages with texts across languages, including Spanish, French, English, and

Haitian Creole. This focus on literature of a multilingual variety differs from many works on occupation. I have supplied my own translations for ease and readability as needed.

Chapter One: Theorizing Postmemory and Resistance

In this chapter, I lay the groundwork for the theoretical framework of my dissertation, which concerns the role of postmemory and resistance in works written about or against occupation and intervention in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I engage with the history and role of these terms in Caribbean studies and related fields as well as their relationship to occupation and intervention and literary works more generally. Analyzing these terms and developing my theoretical usage of them from their contexts will produce greater clarity for the theoretical underpinnings and terminology of subsequent chapters, which comparatively analyze literary works from similar time periods with related themes that represent Haiti and the

Dominican Republic. I also show how postmemory can serve as a particular kind of resistance as well as why these terms are particularly pertinent to Caribbean studies and the work at hand.

Lacunae, Nonhistory, and Creative Memory in the Caribbean

As a site of multiple migrations and displacements— movements of people both forced and voluntary—and a place where the indigenous were largely decimated by disease and hard labor brought on by conquest and colonization, the

Caribbean is a distinctive space of diaspora—with many

16 inhabitants belonging to multiple diasporas due to colonization, creolization, and subsequent migrations.

Although compiling and accessing products of collective memory may be precarious for any community or space, the particular nature of arrival of peoples in the Caribbean exacerbates the disparities of access to articles of a usable past. That is not to say, however, that memory and history for those forced into slavery ended nor that some oral and written histories do not remain. Generally speaking, Caribbean spaces contain a series of known customs and cultural practices from ancestors or tradition on the one hand, and many that have been lost due to displacement and migration, the passage of time, and the change of space on the other. The level of creolization or the degree to which these different factors blend depends of course on the island and some questions of language and culture tend to depend on the colonizing nation.4 As Martin

Munro points out, the Caribbean is the site of historical

4 In the Spanish Caribbean, for example, Creole languages seem to have developed to a lesser degree than in French and English colonies in the same region. There are many possible explanations for this, one being the timing of the arrival of the Spanish, the intentions to establish long-term colonies, the existence of community spaces for African peoples, such as cofradías and later cabildos de nación in Cuba, where people could continue some traditions and religious practices with their ethnic community in a particular space. For more on cofradías and cabildos de nación, see “Interpreting the African Diaspora in the Americas” and Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century, both by Philip Howard.

17 traumas whose vestiges and ramifications continue into the present. He states:

It almost goes without saying that trauma is an inescapable aspect of Haitian and Caribbean historical experience. The memory of slavery’s brutal uprooting and its enduring after-effects remains to be lulled, domesticated, and made sense of. The great works of Caribbean writing have almost without exception addressed the historical legacies of the traumatizing, forced displacement of slavery. (“Writing Disaster” 81)

He further posits that “lacks, lacunae and traumatized absences” characterize individual and collective memory in the Caribbean (“Writing Disaster” 81). Since memory itself is fragmented, these lacunae reflect, in a sense, the nature of memory, which further compounds these gaps.

These lacunae are the result of a specific history and characteristic of collective memory and its intersections with that history. His argument around this question of traumatic memory and fragmentation are supported by

Caribbean thinkers such as Edouard Glissant and Derek

Walcott. Simultaneously, however, both Glissant and

Walcott point toward imagination as a possible point of resistance against these lacunae.

While the Caribbean for Glissant is characterized by nonhistory5 resulting from colonization and forced

5 Nonhistory for Glissant refers to the ruptures of forced migration, which could not be fully absorbed at the time, resulting in a loss of collective memory. It is also related to a one-sided telling of

18 migration, he also “strives in all his literary and theoretical contributions to redefine and celebrate the

Caribbean as a place of distinct creole culture” (Radović

477). Glissant illustrates how the creativity and imagination of writers (Dash “Introduction” xiv, xix) and their influence on the imagination of readers can help mitigate alienation in the colonial context (Glissant

“Toward Caribbeanness” 234). I would argue that the broad idea here also applies to postcolonial nations in the

Caribbean and that the ameliorative effect lies in the capacity for reader engagement in questions of history and identity and these creative works serve as potentially useful cultural tools for memory.

As mentioned, underscoring Creolization was one of

Glissant’s concerns in his philosophy surrounding the

Caribbean, and this goal coalesces with imagination at the same time it is tethered to memory. In other words, on the surface, collective memory in the Caribbean appears to bifurcate between lacunae and absences and losses, some connected to trauma, on the one hand and innumerable articles and products of memory and memorialization and official histories, especially of more recent events, on

history. (Glissant “Caribbean Discourse” 62; Dash “Introduction” xxxii).

19 the other. The reality, however, is that these poles coexist in individual and collective memories, and there is a continuum of degrees of accessibility, usability, reliability and recallability for cultural products or articles connected to the past. Although this does suggest that all memory sits on a continuum between forgetting and complete recall and is characterized by a combination of absence and information, which varies in its usability and reliability, the Caribbean is arguably one of the more transcultural memory sites based on its relationship to diaspora and displacement and the ways that cultures and traditions combined and evolved.

For Palmié, the use of cultural creolization as a concept by scholars has developed, at least in part, out of the work of linguists and their work on creolization, as it relates to languages in the Caribbean. It may be problematic to transmute this concept to culture because of a reliance on limited data as well as the lack of a clear consensus or the existence of varying theories surrounding the genesis of Creoles (Palmié 179-180). Many theorists of the Caribbean and scholars alike continue to think about

Creolization in different ways ranging from the linguistic, to the cultural, from hybridity to contestation. The history of this use of creolization is informed by the work

20 of scholars such as Melville Herskovitz, Richard Price, and

Sidney Mintz. Herskovitz was likely one of the first to make the analogy between language and culture in this way

(Palmié 182). Sidney Mintz and Richard Price also sought to move past the idea of the transplantation of African origins when confronting slavery and its consequences and instead to study the social relations and history of the

African-American experience that is specific to the New

World. Some of their work, too, has been criticized for its reliance on grammar and linguistic structure on

African-American cultures (Palmié 184-185). For David

Scott, many of these works rely on continuities where slavery and Africa essentially mean the same thing (Scott

263). He argues that there is an ideology wherein peoples of African descent “require something like anthropology, a science of culture, to provide them with the foundational guarantee of an authentic past” (Scott 268). To this end, although I do rely on the work of Creolization and its relationship to culture—which is not always tied to analogies of linguistics I might add—this work is concerned with the creation of a usable past by authors, the people they tend to represent, and those who read their work.

This is not the work of corroborating or verifying an authentic past.

With this in mind, it is useful to consider an example of nonhistory and fragmented memory as it relates to this work. That is, while a place like Haiti, on the one hand, signals nonhistory and fragmented memory because of culture loss6 brought on by the forced migration of slavery, it remains a space where events and people are memorialized and people, as elsewhere, seek to find, construct, and hold on to a usable past. The memorialization of figures of the

Haitian Revolution are an example of this, which stands in contrast to the way the world treated Haiti and its revolution—relegating it to the degree it was possible as a non-event—until recently.7 That is, it was ignored, shunned even for fear of a similar event in other parts at the same time that France saddled the country with indemnity debt as punishment, but recent studies have proliferated showing its influence and significance despite these international, silencing efforts.8

6 Although widely used in anthropology, for the sake of clarity, I should state that I draw from the work of Fernando Ortiz in Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y del azúcar when using the terms neoculturation and transculturation in this text. I am using the term culture loss instead of deculturation due to criticisms of that construct. I also do not suggest that culture loss is absolute. 7 In “Unthinkable History: the Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event,” which is the third chapter of Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot advances the idea of the Haitian Revolution as an unthinkable, impossible occurrence and as one that was frequently reframed or recast to accommodate more convenient, palatable narratives (95-96). 8 Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall has noted the positive reception and generative nature of Trouillot’s work and the way it has contributed to further work on the Haitian Revolution in “Still Unthinkable?: The

Like Glissant, Derek Walcott has also described the fragmented nature of memory in the Caribbean and points to imagination as a possible space of resistance against this gap. For example, in his notable acceptance speech for the

Nobel Prize in Literature, Walcott refers to this fragmented memory, especially that which no longer remains of the history and collective memory of African traditions.

Yet, as he explains, these fragments are the result of a concerted memory effort:

All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory; every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase. (np)

It is this effort of memory and imagination and the resistance they engender that concerns the work at hand.

In many Caribbean islands, transculturation and

Creolization are helpful concepts for thinking about memory. As mentioned, lacunae, fragmentation, and nonhistory are still present, especially with regard to indigenous and African cultures, due to genocide and slavery; but, the influence of colonial forbears and their cultures have comingled with West African cultures to

Haitian Revolution and the Reception of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past.

23 profoundly influence identity. When using the term transcultural memory, I refer not only to the expansion of the understanding of memory beyond unequivocally fixed notions of nation, territory, social or ethnic group or the

“movement of mnemonic archives” across broadly conceived borders—including time—and the mixing of memories (Erll

178) but also to the variable and combined nature of memory even within a specific community or space where culture loss, transculturation, and neoculturation are all present depending on which part or event of cultural memory is examined. For the island of Hispaniola, then, memory of certain events may seem to correspond predominantly to a nation and its language(s), but many of these events and memories are difficult to delineate completely along these lines. That is, while the initial twentieth century US occupations of each nation are often referred to separately, their simultaneity is a reminder of the somewhat problematic nature of attempts to consider memory within strict national and linguistic boundaries.

Creolized memory can have a similar meaning to transcultural memory, but I find Kevin Bruynee’s notion of creolizing collective memory to be particularly useful.

That is, when a minority or oppressed group challenges

24 predominant and simple narratives of the past, they creolize memory. He elucidates:

In many ways, the most fraught politics and fights over collective memory occur when a non-dominant group dares to creolize a community’s relationship to its past as a means to assert critiques about and liberating alternatives to the conditions and forms of oppression in the present. This sort of politics of creolizing collective memory refuses the inclination or dominant expectation to fall back on ready-made and neat categories, myths, logics, and approaches as one constructs the relationship of the past to the present. (Bruynee 36-37)

Creolizing memory, in this case, means not only challenging and resisting predominant and/or oppressive narratives of the past, but it also signifies complicating overly neat or simple ways of recalling the past. For works of this corpus, such as Veloz Maggiolo’s La vida no tiene nombre, where writing about the present concurrent to the publishing of the work involves an analysis of the past, the notion of creolizing memory is particularly relevant.

Ultimately, although some of the Caribbean literature that treats traumatic events may do so in a fragmented way, each of these “pieces of sunlight” has the potential to help pierce the fog to channel Walcott’s terms (np).

Because this study is concerned with the question of resistance and memory as they relate to narratives produced in relation to (in opposition to or to remember) occupation over time within or concerning Hispaniola, the clarity or

25 level of fragmentation of these efforts varies, but the collective effort of recollection through fiction, in this case, remains clear.

With this in mind, I propose that postmemory and resistance are salient lenses for considering the Caribbean because of the permeating idea of nonhistory and lacunae with regard to memory in the theory and cultural production of this region. That is, postmemory serves as a way of remembering the past that one has not personally experienced, and resistance is a way of fighting against these lacunae or—put in less oppositional terms—it is a way of filling in this nonhistory and lacunae or constructing a usable past when thought of in conjunction with a project of postmemory. To better understand the terms and theoretical leaning of this dissertation, I will now turn to a discussion of postmemory and resistance and they ways they coalesce.

From Memory to Postmemory

Fictionally representing occupation is part of a process of postmemory, and writing historical fiction—which is applicable to many of the works in my corpus—relates to

Ricoeur’s conceptions of historiography and memory. In

Memory, History, Forgetting, memory, for Ricoeur, is temporally marked (e.g., recalling the past in the present)

(15). For an individual, there is the act of remembering as well as the memories themselves, which constitute memory. He also posits that there is an important social dimension to memory such that individual memories of a group lead to a notion of collective memory, although the fact that one is born into a discourse does present a counterview. Collective memory is related to historiography because historiography may seek to refute or establish a new version of collective memory (Dauenhaugher and Pellauer). Although Ricoeur distinguishes between imagination and memory (the imagination having a draw toward the fantastic), he does hold that historiography involves imagination because an agenda (a set of questions) and interpretation are involved in considering historical documents or the archive when developing an account

(Hannoum 128). Similarly, with historical fiction, historical events are considered through the lens of an agenda, yet imagination is likely more persistent in this venture. Forgetting is a part of memory as well because, in part, of the potential intentionality behind the act.

In the establishment of an official memory, forgetting and forgiveness become important to institutions seeking to move past an event for political reasons (127, 132). For

Ricoeur, the manipulation of memory is due to ideology

(126). The question of official memory and the role of imagination will be important questions for works within my corpus, such as Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints and

Victor’s A l’angle des rues parallèles.

Considering the children of Holocaust survivors and cultural production surrounding the Holocaust, Hirsch coins the term postmemory. She includes herself as a child of postmemory, although this has confused some readers who have misunderstood this assertion, believing her parents to have been victims of concentration camps. Her family was

Jewish, lived in Romania where they faced oppression and discrimination, and they eventually immigrated to the

United States. For her, the post in postmemory is not just a temporal marker. Instead, it “reflects an uneasy oscillation between continuity and power” (“The Generation”

106). She further elaborates that:

postmemory is not a movement, method, or idea; I see it, rather, as a structure of inter- and trans- generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike post-traumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove. (The Generation” 106)

Although Hirsch’s work generally concerns those with direct generational ties to the Holocaust, she does not limit the term postmemory to family or even ethnic identity, and she allows for the possibility of a broader use (“The

Generation” 9-10). Thus, it serves more generally as a

“retrospective witnessing by adoption” that deals more with an “ethical relation to the oppressed or persecuted other for which postmemory can serve as a model” (“The

Generation” 10).

Sandra So Hee Chi Kim elaborates upon Hirsch's use of the term postmemory. Kim considers the term as a phenomenon and wishes to expand its use beyond trauma and second- generation experience. She relates it more broadly to the idea of diaspora. For Kim, “Postmemory is . . . a characteristic aspect of diaspora and not the other way around” (340). She further contends that, “The ‘aesthetics’ of diaspora, marked by feelings of loss and processes akin to mourning, is actually born of the dynamics of postmemory” (Kim 340). She also describes the relationship between identity, postmemory, and diaspora and the possibility of evolution:

The transfer of diasporic postmemory and identification to subsequent generations can occur vis-à-vis a variety of “inheritances” of proximity, such as the effects of racial and ethnic categorizations circulating in larger society, marginalization as an “Other,” social and cultural practices of “boundary maintenance,” identification with already-formed parental identities/ideologies, the affect and practices of long-distance nationalism, and so forth, that are passed onto the subject of postmemory. Diasporic postmemory reproduces and evolves when buttressed by reinforcements of external exclusion as well as internal “likeness.” The passage

from postmemory to diaspora happens when an individual’s consciousness coheres to cultures, values, bodies, and places from the familial past as properties of itself. (Kim 350)

Because postmemory involves the transmission of another person's experience, recall becomes creative if not imaginary (Kim 342). In this way, Kim highlights that postmemory becomes a hybrid point between Ricoeur's imagination and memory (343).

In Voices of Collective Remembering, James Wertsch suggests that the purpose of memory in memory studies is often divided between “an accuracy criterion” and memory as a vehicle for creating “a usable past” (31). He, then, argues for considering the two together because they don’t often operate in isolation. He posits:

In the approach I shall be taking, memory typically involves a complex mix of meeting the needs of accurate representation and providing a usable past. . . . On the one hand, we judge memory by its accuracy, and we raise objections when inaccurate representations of the past are put forth as truthful. On the other hand, memory functions to provide a usable past for the creation of coherent individual and group identities. To argue that memory serves both of these functions is not to say that one cannot differentiate one form from another. The role of the two tendencies in this functional dualism may vary greatly. In some cases, the focus may be on accuracy no matter how threatening it is to identity commitments and in others the motivation of presenting a coherent identity may lead to sacrificing objectivity and accuracy. Approaching these orientations in terms of a functional dualism provides a means for avoiding the

temptation to place the two functions in simple opposition. (Wertsch 31)

The accuracy criterion tends to dominate studies of individual memory; whereas, collective memory is more contested because of the varying voices involved, including the different institutions that have vied for influence with regard to the collective postmemory of particular events.

Wertsch further contends that cultural tools can be used in a project of collective postmemory, but he specifies that singular cultural tools are not taken as the definitive story of collective postmemory of an event.

Instead, these cultural tools exist in conversation revealing different facets of an event. He also highlights the use of narratives as cultural tools for mediated memory. In this case, he refers to a referential function of narratives that is tied to characters, settings, and events in texts, and this is associated with the accuracy criterion. In contrast, he states that the referential function of narratives relates to the creation of a usable past because this concerns the relationship or conversation that exists between varying narratives (57).

My use of the term collective postmemory resonates with Kim’s development of Ricoeur and Hirsch as a condition

31 of diaspora, although I do not limit the term to diaspora, and I also consider the term as an effort to recall an event through cultural tools with the goal of raising awareness about or generating a dialogue with respect to a particular historical occurrence. This is a development of the ethical concern of remembering for others that Hirsch theorizes along with James Wertsch’s work on the use of cultural tools by groups for collective memory and identity formation. I also consider postmemory to be a type of resistance against forgetting and toward the fomentation of identity, a question to which I will return.

For some works in my corpus, there is a troubling between memory (as lived experience) and postmemory (at a remove whether generational or otherwise). This is especially true of works produced during occupations or interventions because the artist may have experienced the event in question but may be writing about it for purposes of resistance and posterity (remembering the event). In contrast, some of the latter works I will be dealing with are more clearly associated with a project of postmemory, although memory becomes an important theme in the texts.

With this in mind and with the many texts that deal with or partially treat occupation and/or intervention, this project will initially focus on texts that straddle the

32 bounds between memory and postmemory and texts where the question of its resistance quotient may be rendered more complex due to varying factors, the specter of censorship and the availability of the text within the occupied national space being examples. One such text that falls within this category is Marcio Veloz Maggiolo’s relato, La vida no tiene nombre. This text was published during the second occupation (or intervention) of the Dominican

Republic by the United States in the 20th century, yet it considers the first occupation.

Although an abundance of work on trauma and memory concerns the Caribbean, the concept of postmemory has not been frequently deployed in this work, despite its frequent use in reference to artistic works related to and extending beyond the Holocaust. The exceptions to this include usages of the term to describe phenomena in or the writing of Anglophone Caribbean literature and some works of

Caribbean-American and ethnic fiction in the United States.

Specifically, this term has been applied by writers such as

Claudia Marquis and Arlene L. Keizer. Marquis has argued that Andrea Levy’s emphasis on crossing over in her novels is tied to the work of postmemory (30-31). Keizer, similarly, albeit more broadly, claims that:

African American and Anglophone Caribbean writers, from the mid-1960s on, have been writing from the space of postmemory with regard to slavery. This fact is made explicit in Walker’s “How I wrote Jubilee”; in fact, Walker’s family stories about slavery were, for Walker herself, third- or fourth-generation memories. Even when these writers were not dealing with memories of slavery in their own families, all of them were grappling with the difficulty of addressing a trauma that was constitutive not only of numerous features of African American and Afro-Caribbean everyday life and thought, but of contemporary economic, social and political arrangements as well. (6-7)

Patrick Campbell, too, briefly engages with Hirsch’s postmemory in “Portraits in / between Black and White:

Traumatic Performativity and Postmemory in a Jamaican

Family Album.” In this text, Campbell analyzes family portraits in terms of social aspiration as connected to discourses and performativity of whiteness and whitening in

Jamaica. Upon interpreting the vestiges of his family history, his encounter with this at once personal and collective archive, he briefly turns to postmemory and trauma, as it relates to his family history:

Faced with these photographs, I am taken back to the silences of my childhood; the gaps in the family history, the shame around race, the implicit violence in the sudden, brooding uncommunicativeness of my father; the evasiveness of my aunty, my grandmother’s many prejudices. If, as Luckhurst (2008) suggests, trauma is a symptom of history whose effects are felt on a deeply embodied level but cannot be fully known consciously, then the unconscious trace of colonial trauma has indelibly shaped my family and been passed on intergenerationally. (Campbell 70)

Some of the same concerns will appear in my analysis of

Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints in Chapter 4, wherein performance, performativity, memory, and trauma become tied to images.

Beyond the Caribbean, in her recent work, Bridges to

Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Fiction,

Maria Bellamy argues that the empowerment struggles (i.e., movements toward civil rights and equal rights for minorities and women) of the 60s and 70s created a space that allowed for artists and writers to begin to work on collective trauma. She, thus, argues that the works in her diverse corpus of US ethnic fiction—amongst them two

Caribbean-American works that include Cristina García’s

Dreaming in Cuban and Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker— are examples of postmemory and reflect what she terms

“trauma’s ghost.”9 Bellamy describes “trauma’s ghost” in the following way:

… trauma’s ghost, which today haunts every person descended from American slaves and slaveholders who has been imprinted by the institutions of racism that have so defined the United States; everyone whose cultural identity or collective history is colored by experiences of violence in and exclusion from mainstream American society; and every American-born child of immigrants who bring to their new home traumatic histories from their nations of origin. (8)

9 I mention these two texts because they are Cuban-American and Haitian- American respectively. The other texts in her corpus come from other ethnic fiction traditions, such as Asian-American.

Trauma’s ghost is revealed in her corpus, and it invites readers—readers that may not have an identitary relationship to the texts—to engage in a postmemorial reading of these texts or an ethical approximation to these experiences through what is essentially compassion. She states:

Trauma’s ghost manifests the unacknowledged suffering of others and implicates us (the contemporary haunted) in their traumatic histories. Exposing the root causes of social dysfunction in contemporary society, trauma’s ghost challenges those it haunts to respond to the repressed knowledge it reveals. (Bellamy 9)

Nonetheless, Bellamy’s use of trauma’s ghost is also telling because the ghost is that which insists on being heard, and this aligns with Wertsch’s notion of re- experiencing, or unintentionally remembering something (a memory that is foisted upon you) as opposed to remembering— an effort purposefully undertaken by a person. According to Bellamy, this is an ethical relationship to a text and a set of experiences rather than an identitary one, and that implies choice. However, what affects the reader, what is revealed and insists on reaction, is forced by the monster or ghost as it were. Although this claim may be compelling for the texts of her corpus, this opposition presents some concerns. Can a person have an ethical relationship to a set of traumatic experiences or texts that represent those

36 experiences, which implies a choice, yet also be forcibly haunted by trauma’s ghost? Even if an audience does not necessarily belong to the particular identity represented in a text, does identification with characters and the supposed partaking of trauma actually render this relationship closer to the identitary rather than a singularly ethical relationship? While I certainly agree that we don’t generally choose what haunts us, the choice to engage with this trauma means choosing to be haunted or allowing for that possibility in a certain sense.

Additionally, the haunting of trauma’s ghost actually implies an identitary relationship to the texts—albeit not an ethnic one—at hand because it allows one to see one’s own relationship to a series of experiences that may not be one’s own. This is significant because the haunting of trauma’s ghost could imply appropriation; yet, seeing how one is implicated in a series of events and experiences moves past pure appropriation and into a realm of historical role and responsibility.

As previously implied, Bellamy argues that the empowerment movements for civil rights and feminism of the

60s and 70s widen the possibility for postmemory work. She avers:

I would argue that the civil rights, feminist, and ethnic empowerment struggles of the 1960s and 1970s represent a critical “historical, generational moment” in American society, realizing, of course, that many of these struggles gained momentum in the aftermath of World War II and, therefore, should be considered among its generational consequences. When these domestic phenomena are connected to decolonization and independence movements in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and Asia (with their attendant warfare, political volatility, exile, and displacement), the possible applications of postmemory grow exponentially. (Bellamy 10)

Although Bellamy doesn’t elaborate much beyond this reference to movements of empowerment or rights in the

United States in the 60s and 70s, this is significant for my analysis because my use of postmemory is grounded and connected to questions of resistance including resistance struggles. In her case, it seems that resistance struggles lay the groundwork for allowing later postmemory works to emerge, for these preoccupations to exist. For my work, postmemory can be more concurrent with resistance struggles, and, importantly, I would note that many of the independence movements and power struggles in the Caribbean and Latin America are predecessors to World War II and the empowerment movements in the United States; however, there is certainly a dialogue between some of these movements and struggles.

Although I will return to some of these critics’ works in my corpus, it is important to consider that my usage of postmemory differs in some respects:

1) in its connection to narratives that feature

occupation and intervention as opposed to texts—

whether they be fictitious or archival—related to

the Holocaust or colonialism (although, certainly,

US empire is not entirely divorced from

colonialism),

2) its deployment in connection to the Hispanophone and

Francophone Caribbean, in addition to

3) my use of the term not only in connection with

historical trauma and the passing of memory through

generations (a memory that was not a lived

experience), but also as a project that seeks to

remember and foment identity and as a term that is

tethered to resistance in the context of my corpus.

This connection to resistance refers both to the

notion of resisting forgetting as well as to

movements or projects of resistance against

occupation.

It is worth noting that my use of postmemory is not antithetical to memory studies and the work on memory in the Caribbean. Indeed, many works on memory may be

39 participating in a project of postmemory without calling it by that name. Like some memory work in the Caribbean, such as that of Myriam Chancy or Nick Nesbitt, postmemory permits an attempt to begin to fill the lacunae that result from nonhistory. Postmemory, however, allows for a more precise way of thinking about history and memory as they relate to identity in the Caribbean, not only the attempts to remember both sides of an event later in time in a space that continues to deal with its former and current colonial relationships, but also an investment in the memories of ancestors and non-relatives alike and how they continue to shape the region. Additionally, there are many layers to postmemory in this respect. There is the level of representation in the novels, including, for example, the historical events of concern and the experiences of the characters. There is also the work of the writers in producing these stories, the readers who may feel a connection to these stories, be it ethnic, empathic, identitary, or kindred, and the critic who writes about this work, too, contributes to a project of postmemory.

Certainly, for each, this project differs, but there is a fundamental concern with remembering something that is not generally the personal memory of one of these actors, although an author could write during a particular event of

40 their own time and experience or from their familial postmemory archive to contribute to an understanding of the event, that is, to a broader and later project of postmemory for those who read it.

Engaging with postmemory in a comparative and multilingual framework transcends the frequent memory work that adheres to national and linguistic boundaries. It also correlates to a multilayered project of resistance, which is typically reflected in the content and style of the narratives at hand and sometimes to the timing of their production and publication. Postmemory and resistance are multivalent and layered in the narratives of this corpus.

They also coalesce in unique ways because this project is concerned with narratives that resist and remember occupation(s), and this particular memory work is distinct in this regard.

Resistance

A word that is elusive due to its transmuting nature, resistance is often best understood through context—its usage during or to describe a particular time, place, action and/or event. In the United States of 2017 and

2018, this term tends to evoke the resistance against the presidency of Donald Trump in which prior supporters of

Hillary Clinton or those simply fearful of his presidency

41 seek to remain vigilant, participating in protests and accountability measures such as communicating with their elected officials and refusing to take the word of the

White House and its rhetoric (anti-press ethos) at face value. According to Kathryn Schulz, in the weeks following the inauguration, constituents contacted congressmen at unprecedented rates, calling and emailing to the point of full voicemail boxes and inboxes, and even resorting to faxes when traditional technology failed. Resistance in the United States of 2017 and 2018 also evokes the Black

Lives Matter movement, other social (justice) movements10 such as the women’s marches on Washington with the first occurring the day after Trump’s inauguration, protests in

D.C. related to science and its importance for policy along with nationwide marches and demonstrations calling for impeachment. Although gay pride marches have never been truly divorced from political activism, 2017 saw the Los

Angeles parade recast itself as a “resist” parade.

Washington D.C. also joined in on the political activism, although it split these concerns into two parades where one supported gay pride and the other promoted equality

(Severson; Wortham and Morris). While all of these

10 Terry Osborn defines social justice as “members of a society sharing equitably in the benefits of that society” which is apt for movements connected to social change for social minorities.

42 movements have some intersections with the anti-Trump movement, it is worth noting that the Black Lives Matter movement has operated since 2013, long prior to the election of Donald Trump.

The aforementioned are all examples of social movements or movements concerned with particular political or social issues. To some extent, social movements are movements of resistance because they tend to work to incite awareness, promote empowerment, and/or, most notably, bring about social change. That said, as James W. Vander Zanden points out, social movements should not be viewed uniquely as vehicles that bring about social change since they often beget counter movements, which impact the speed at which social change occurs (312-313). While both social movements and counter movements can be understood as resistance movements, it is important to note that resistance movements can encompass civil resistance (“Civil

Resistance”) or nonviolent resistance of a portion of a society, often a minority group—whether numerically, socially or both—against a dominant power, or a resistance movement can use violence in addition to other means and refer to a portion of a civilian population that is fighting against an established government or occupying power. The difference between a violent resistance

43 movement and terrorism appears to be based on a judgment call and a politics of position. Additionally, the term terrorism in the US tends to revolve around religious extremism, especially related to Islam, although the term is sometimes deployed in reference to militant Christians.

Recently, it has been used to characterize acts of violence without overt religious motivations—such as mass shootings— that are predominantly meant to strike fear and create notoriety rather than effect change or draw attention to an issue.

The word resist comes from the 14th century Old French resister and the late Latin resistere, which means to take a stand against or to oppose. The Oxford English

Dictionary from 1939 defines resistance as "organized covert opposition to an occupying or ruling power" (Online

Etymological Dictionary). Interestingly enough, the word resist has a Latin root of sistere or to stand, the origin of which seems to repeat itself in the phrase “to take a stand.” Stand is from the same root as tank (earlier form of stank), which originally referred to water held in a vessel on a wagon, leading to the name for armored vehicles

(Shipley 349).

The theory of resistance seems to stem from the early modern period during the Reformation wherein rationales for

44 resistance developed as a reaction to religious difference and as a justification for religious wars. Most of these theories were constitutional rather than democratic and supported the efforts of individuals as parts of institutions to resist without anarchical intentions.

Relatedly, these ideas of resistance did not generally support the resistance of private citizens nor the right to resist of the people at large. Because of the early pacifist roots of Christianity, many of these theories had limited scriptural support. Despite their seemingly limited arena of use, versions of these theories helped influence the French and American Revolutions (Kingdon np).

In modern usage, the phrase “the resistance” tends to recall the opposition movements in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. Such movements are examples of resistance movements, which vary between civil and violent resistance depending on the opposition group. Because of the proliferation of cultural products and histories treating World War II and the Holocaust, the notion of resistance in this context has been rendered positive and often evokes heroism. That is, I theorize that the continuous presentation of World War II as a war with clearly delineated sides and moral stakes, with a virtuous resistance during an unlawful occupation and the noble

Allies standing in contrast to the reprehensible Nazis in a plethora of cultural products, especially films, has led to a valorization of the term resistance in reference to movements against German occupation or encroachment. In contrast, it is worth noting that the term rebel and rebels is being frequently employed to refer to those fighting against “autocratic” governments, as in Syria in recent years. Although the circumstances between 1930s and 40s occupied Europe and the War in Syria are far from identical, they both fall under situations that could be described as resistance movements (a movement against occupation; a movement against a previously established government). That is, the portion of the resistance that resisted or engaged in acts of disobedience in Germany, or those Germans that participated in the Resistance would be engaged in something similar, at least in a theoretical sense, to that of “rebel” Syrians. Nevertheless, the

Resistance is often characterized as a more underground or covert movement with a large civil resistance component despite some active attempts to thwart the Nazis with violence, whereas the terms rebels or rebellions seem to be deployed for more open acts of violence or opposition, especially that of an organized and armed militia. That said, the connotation of rebel and rebellion lends toward

46 the more ambiguous, with a negative connotation closer at hand than for resistance. Other terms that have been used to refer to rebels in particular conflicts include freedom fighters, insurgents, counter-revolutionaries and guerrillas. The first two denote participation in rebellion involving violence, but their connotations vary with freedom fighters seeming more positive outside of it being used as a part of a proper name, and insurgent being more frequently deployed in a negative sense, especially with respect to the Middle East. The latter two are a bit more distinct. A counter-revolutionary opposes revolution and often seeks to restore the pre-revolutionary order, and guerrillas are independent groups that engage in irregular warfare or attack larger forces.

Resisting Limitation

From sit-ins to body piercing, the range of potential acts of resistance can be seen as infinite (Pile 14). The solution for many to the problem of these endless possibilities is to consider resistance in context as well as “the position of people within networks of power” (15).

In The Problems of Resistance, Steve Martinot elaborates on the conditions and context of resistance:

Resistance does not seek power, but an alleviation of the effects of dehumanizing power. It goes far beyond protest, however. Protest assumes that a dialogue

with power is still possible, and that what one says will be heard. Resistance is the sign that one’s request and need for respect has fallen on deaf ears. For that reason, resistance always implies a certain crisis, and a certain desperation; it is the absence of alternative to silencing social structures in the face of an absolute need for an alternative—if only because one’s words go unheard. (9)

Furthermore, for Martinot, movements are an indicator that a system is not working. They demonstrate how the system is not democratic, that is, not providing “open access to information, permanent arenas for public discussion, and informed decision by the people” (Martinot 11). He also contends that these movements begin in the form of protests because the political decisions being made do not represent public opinion, which has been seen in recent years in the previously mentioned resistance movement in the United

States. While I generally agree with this and his statement that movements increase pressure on political representatives (reminding the representative that they have a constituency and that their votes should align with their bloc), I would point out that such movements certainly mean that the system is not working for everyone, but the argument doesn’t account for other voices beyond those of the resistance movement. Counter-movements also demonstrate this point.

Taking Place & Space

Geographies of Resistance seeks to elucidate the relationship between geography(ies) and resistance(s), and how each influence and even create one another (or render the other impossible). Pile argues that,

This in itself unsettles discussions of resistance that see it as the inevitable outcome of domination, since power — whether conceived of as oppression or authority or capacity or even resistance — spread through geography can soon become uneven, fragmentary and inconsistent … So, while there are different forms of control that work through distinct geographies, geographies of resistance do not necessarily (or even ever) mirror geographies of domination, as an upside- down or back-to-front or face-down map of the world. (2)

In contrast to Martinot, Pile moves past the effects of dehumanizing power and oppressive practices and the attempts of resistance to rectify these situations.

Instead, “resistant political subjectivities” may also refer to experiences that do not easily fit under an umbrella of authority or power, experiences related to

“desire and anger, capacity and ability, happiness and fear, dreaming and forgetting” (3). The author argues that the contributors to the book disagree with any obvious or fixed notion of resistance—including spatial ones—as well as a facile relationship between geographies of domination and geographies of resistance (Pile 4).

A Typology of Resistance

Citing the proliferation of studies using the term resistance in diverse ways, Hollander and Einwohner developed a typology of resistance based on recognition (by the target of the resistance or an observer of said resistance) and intent (the question of whether the actor intended for the act to be perceived as resistance). That is to say, that they have found the varying scale and usage of the term resistance to be problematic, so they have attempted to address this problem by looking at diverging patterns of usage through an analysis of major sociological articles from 1995 to the early 2000s. The terms that they coin vary according to the entities enacting, receiving

(the targets of), and observing resistance. They include overt resistance (intended as resistance by actor and recognized by target and observer), covert resistance

(intended by actor, not recognized by target, but recognized by observer), unwitting resistance (not intended by actor, recognized by both target and observer), target- defined resistance (not intended by actor, recognized by target but not by observer), externally-defined resistance

(not intended by actor, not recognized by target, only recognized by the observer), missed resistance (intended by actor, recognized by target, but not recognized by the

50 observer), attempted resistance (intended by actor, but not recognized by the target or the observer) and not resistance (not intended nor recognized by any party)

(544). Hollander and Einwohner do point out, however, that all of these types of resistance have not been treated equally in scholarly work; for example, they state that they “did not come across any published work on either

‘missed resistance’ or ‘attempted resistance’” (546). They also point out that everyday and externally defined resistance may result in individuals or groups

“support[ing] the structures of domination that necessitate resistance in the first place” because the goal of the resistance may not be perceptible by its targets (Hollander and Einwohner 549).

Johansson argues that although this approach is interesting and original, it is superficial in its treatment of the relationship between power and resistance

(93-94). He further posits that context should guide analyses of resistance rather than “grand theoretical models” and questions the role of scholars in Hollander and

Einwohner’s typology (Johansson 95). That is, Hollander and Einwohner find that it is problematic for different actors to interpret acts in different ways, and Johansson claims that this “alludes to a positivistic epistemological

51 position where the researcher’s experience is supposed to be invisible” (95). Although I agree with Johansson that context is important for interpreting and analyzing acts of resistance, I do not find that Hollander and Einwohner are necessarily seeking to encourage an invisible or neutral scholar with their typology. Their typology certainly does not unfurl all of the power struggles over concepts and definitions to which Johansson alludes (96), but it does allow for some specificity with regard to intent and recognition of resistance and a way of breaking down a capacious term.

Foucauldian Resistance

Foucault has been critiqued for not allowing for the possibility of resistance even as his own work “has offered at least some resistance to a number of disciplinary practices” (Muckelbauer 72). This viewpoint on resistance in his work--his seeming lack of treatment of this subject— is likely due to the inescapable nature of power in his work as well as the decentering of the subject.

Furthermore, he has refused “to provide normative foundations for ethical action” when it comes to resistance

(72). According to Muckelbauer, these critiques of

Foucault result from programmatic notions of resistance that require “a space outside of power, a unified subject,

52 and normative foundations” (73). Additionally, his reading of Foucault continually promotes the idea that power relations are what produce subjects, and that there is a repeated necessity of resistance in Foucault’s work

(Muckelbauer 75-77). Despite the mostly limited use of the term resistance in his writing, Foucault did say: “As soon as there is a power relation, there is the possibility of resistance. We can never be ensnared by power: we can always modify its grip in determinate conditions and according to a precise strategy” (np). Although this does not provide a great deal of clarity with regard to what resistance looks like, it does demonstrate its significance. Muckelbauer concludes from his reading that:

“Resistance is simply the convergence of multiple and conflicting powers” (79). Like power itself, it is local.

It is engaged with the conventions of particular power relations or technologies of power. Foucauldian resistance is not a binary affair, and context is paramount.

Resistance, Slavery, and the Diaspora

In “On Agency,” Walter Johnson seeks to disentangle terms like humanity, agency, and resistance. He avers that specific forms of agency under slavery were not consistent with resistance against slavery. He cites the examples of collaboration and betrayal (Johnson 116). He later argues

53 that “Collective resistance is, at bottom, a process of everyday organization, one that, in fact, depends upon connections and trust established through everyday actions: covering for a friend, slowing down on the job, stealing …

(Johnson 118). Like David Scott, he wishes to rethink the concern with continuities or finding “a present at any moment in history, that is, which flows out of its past”

(Johnson 119). He concludes this work, however, by pointing to the importance of engaging with the demands of the present if scholarship is about “redress,” and argues that mass incarceration of African Americans is the return of slavery (Johnson 121). Whereas Johnson is concerned, in part, with how one may or may not be acting or have agency that is resistant to slavery, my concerns here are with resistance to occupation, but also how different actors resist within these situations. In other words, collaboration may mean survival or a specific type of resistance that does not benefit sovereignty or national identity.

Vincent Brown writes that many understandings of slavery tend to follow certain trajectories. Two dominant ones are the idea of social death and resistance on the other hand (1249). He contends that many scholars have examined black agency through the retention of Africanness

54 to follow Melville Herskovitz’s lead (Brown 1246).

Considering Johnson’s work on agency, he claims:

It might be even clearer then that the struggles of slaves were not simply beset by the depredations of slavery but were shaped and directed by them. The activities of slaves could be more easily understood as having been compelled by the very conditions that slaves have been described as resisting. This would imply a politics of survival, existential struggle transcending resistance against enslavement. (Brown 1246)

Although Brown is right to point out that the conditions of bare life necessitated certain behaviors for survival, this does not mean that slaves weren’t resisting. It is also worth noting that agency and resistance are not identical.

Agency refers more directly to the capacity to act in a situation, which implies that certain situations are too dangerous for action or that a person must choose to act for moral reasons; whereas, resistance is a capacious term that would allow for any act “against” power or expectation.

Resistance Literature & Culture

According to Barbara Harlow, the concept of resistance was first applied to literature in 1966 by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. This resistance exists due to the presence of an “occupying power” that has subjugated and exiled a people, contributing to “exile literature” and

“occupied literature,” and represents a significant

55 intervention in the “literary and cultural development of the people it has dispossessed and the land it has occupied” (2). Literature, here, is a site of struggle.

Whereas Kanafani maintains a distinction between exile and occupied literatures, Ngugi wa Thiong’o offers instead “the aesthetics of oppression and exploitation and of acquiescence with imperialism; and that of human struggle for total liberation” (4) José Carlos Mariátegui has also contributed to resistance by insisting that European modes of literature classification through movements are not sufficient or apt for describing or analyzing Peruvian literature’s special character. He instead contends that literature in a previously colonized space is divided into three periods: colonial, cosmopolitan and national. He claims that:

In the first period, the country, in a literary sense, is a colony dependent on the metropolis. In the second period, it simultaneously assimilates the elements of various foreign literatures. In the third period, it shapes and expresses its own personality and feelings. (Harlow 9-10)

Harlow sums up these three writers as offering challenges particular to their particular historical moments and claims that they “suggest nonetheless the general parameters of a collective opposition and concerted resistance to the programmatic cultural imperialism which

56 accompanied western economic, military, and political domination of the Third World” (10). Nevertheless, for

Kanafani, cultural resistance was no less important that armed resistance.

In the case of Amilcar Cabral, the “armed liberation struggle” doesn’t only come out of culture but also determines it. While a political and economic occupation necessarily affects culture and tends to suppress indigenous culture, Cabral maintains that a liberation struggle is dependent upon culture, having a deep knowledge of the people’s culture and embodying its popular and mass character. Despite his emphasis on the sacrifice of the masses and the important role of popular culture to the liberation movement, he claims that the contribution of different social groups to the movement should not be forgotten. Those members of privileged classes who may suffer from a colonized mindset, due to the attempts of the colonizer to provide them with privileges under their system and to convince them of their difference from other indigenous peoples, will need to undergo a reconversion or

“re-Africanization” as Cabral calls it “through daily contact with popular masses in the communion of sacrifice required by the struggle” (Cabral, “History,” np). Cabral insists that culture can play an important role in this

57 movement if there is a preservation of positive cultural values of each significant social group, thus adding a confluent national dimension to this struggle and a growth of its values.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o similarly has referred to the cultural devastation of imperialism as a bomb. This cultural bomb “annihilate[s] a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves” (Ngugi “Decolonizing the

Mind” np). In the context of neo-colonial imperialism, he writes of a tradition of resistance undertaken by the working class, students and intellectuals, soldiers and parts of the middle class. Like Cabral, this resistance is bound up in maintaining or defending peasant or popular roots of national cultures. The weapons of struggle can be found in the cultures affected by imperialism. The obvious

“united language of struggle” exist within the languages— the indigenous or native languages—of the people (Ngugi

“Decolonizing the Mind” np).

Said has referred to culture as a way of struggling against annihilation. It is a kind of memory in the face of erasure as well as a challenge to the disingenuous narratives of authority. Culture looks for alternatives to

58 these lies. He also explains the role of the intellectual in this endeavor: “I think one of the roles of the intellectual at this point is to provide a counterpoint, by storytelling, by reminders of the graphic nature of suffering, and by reminding everyone that we’re talking about people. We’re not talking about abstractions” (Said

187). Such a point is key for this study, which primarily focuses on the work of intellectuals, although their connections to popular struggle and culture will be considered.

Conclusion

Rather than naming the US Occupation in its title,

Dantès Bellegarde’s chronicle of the American Occupation invokes resistance: La résistance haïtienne. Indeed, resistance is a key theme of studies of occupation in the

Caribbean, although the greater focus in works on occupations has been on the armed side of that resistance, with Haiti and perhaps Trinidad being somewhat exceptional in the amount of work done on cultural resistance. As a site that has been subject to various forms of imperialism— including colonialism, occupation and intervention, and neocolonialism—and its continuing ramifications, especially with regard to questions of history, memory, and identity, postmemory serves as a useful lens for those Caribbean

59 cultural products that deal with these questions, and it functions as a tool for thinking about and building a usable past or creating a project of postmemory.

Resistance also serves as a lens for understanding this project and reading the texts that examine these issues.

Additionally, it offers a way of challenging outside or occupier narratives, understanding armed and cultural resistance that occurred during or in response to intervention, I intend to examine resistance comparatively with regard to occupation in Hispaniola and to contribute to an understanding of postmemory as resistance, although I do not contend that postmemory is necessarily always a form of resistance. The manifestation and variation of the notion of resistance in this work will span contexts— occupied and non-occupied spaces and moments—as reflected in literature and its deployment will vary between the tensions of occupation, imperialism and neo-imperialism that this study engenders, given its movement across time.

Chapter Two: Simultaneous Occupations and a Gap in Criticism

The United States occupied both Haiti (1915-1934) and the

Dominican Republic (1916-1924) in the early 20th century with eight years of those occupations being concurrent. It is with the way that occupation fully engulfed the island of Hispaniola that I propose a comparative analysis of the resistances it engendered across both nation-states.

Whereas much has been written on occupied narratives from

Haiti, less criticism exists with respect to Dominican occupied narratives. Part of this may be motivated by the medium of these narratives in the Dominican Republic. That is, while other literary genres that dealt with the occupation exist—such as a few novels and print media—some of the narratives that deal most directly with the occupation and the occupiers seem to have been plays, which were staged in the early days of the occupation before widespread censorship, and whose scripts no longer remain or cannot be found. I suggest this because of the mention of several plays in historical and literary accounts of the occupation as well as the criticism in the news of the time, which I will turn to shortly. Additionally, the novels that I have encountered from the Dominican Republic of this time period tend to use the occupation as more of a

61 backdrop with somewhat limited plot and character development hinging on the occupation. In this chapter, I will consider and compare the armed and artistic resistances the occupations engendered, engage in a reading of the criticism of occupied plays from the Dominican

Republic that contribute to resistance and toward a project of postmemory despite the ephemeral nature of performance in this context. This chapter, then, is predicated on looking back at vestigial cultural products from the time of the occupation in order to understand what resistance meant in the context in which it was produced as well as over time. To that end, I engage in a performative reading of the Dominican plays Una fiesta en el Castine and Los yankees en Santo Domingo (1916) by Rafael Damirón by using the criticism and commentary these plays evoked in El

Listín Diario11 in juxtaposition to the other news and concerns across the newspaper page. I posit that the performances of that time served as a popular, comedic form of artistic resistance, and the resulting criticism along with the move toward censorship in the Dominican Republic

(by the Americans) substantiate this. That is, censorship

11 El Listín is one of the most well-known and longest running newspapers in Santo Domingo. It was founded in 1889 and has continued to publish since then, excluding twenty years under the Trujillo dictatorship (“Historia”).

62 was a feature of both occupations; yet, artists and authors still managed to contribute to a project of artistic resistance. The reception of these plays also further contributes to the wider postmemory and history of occupation in Hispaniola.

Armed and Artistic Resistance in Occupied Hispaniola

In Haiti, resistance began even prior to the landing of troops in the country as the United States had tried to make an agreement with Haitians to organize something akin to the customs receivership established in the Dominican

Republic, and Haiti did not want to cede its financial control and economic sovereignty. Eventually, however, the

Americans succeeded in controlling the Central Bank of

Haiti. The considerable debts of the country—despite timely payments—along with the assassination of then

Haitian president Guillaume Vilbrun Sam served as justification for the subsequent occupation (Dubois 204,

210). A Caco resistance movement ensued, but disarmament and the removal of the Cacos from Port-au-Prince diminished its initial success. Myriam Chancy has referred to the

Cacos as “descendants of Taino and African maroons who lived hidden away in the mountains” (52), and she elaborates on their participation in resistance against colonialists in the seventeenth century, in armed

63 resistance in the late nineteenth century as well as active resistance against the US invading and occupying forces

(52). The Caco rebellions in the nineteenth century were associated with defending the rights of the masses against the excesses of national government (Renda 140). Another form of peasant resistance from the nineteenth century was the effort to resist plantation style agricultural work, a form of resistance that continued under the US Occupation where peasants rejected what the occupying forces considered more efficient technologies. Renda describes how some Haitians came to accept these practices, but “the majority continued to vote with their feet, their backs, and their hands, for economic independence” (120).

According to Hans Schmidt, the institution of corvée, a kind of forced labor focused on public works like road construction, under the US Occupation led to considerable resistance and even revolt (“The Gendarmerie” np). The Caco

Wars against the US occupiers began in 1915 and began to break up in 1920 with the assassination of Benoît

Batraville, the Caco leader (Renda 128-130, 155), but their resistance did not end until 1922. Despite the eventual removal of the Cacos from Port-au-Prince, resistance gradually further solidified in Haiti both on the armed and

64 artistic front, with the former supported largely by paysans and the latter by the Haitian elite (Castor 127-

128).

On the journalistic front, beginning in 1915, nationalistic newspapers such as La Patrie and Haïti

Intégrale began to rise that protested the occupation and the violation of Haitian sovereignty engendered by the

American presence (Castor 160). Other nationalist newspapers that commented on the injustices of the occupation included La Nouvelle Ronde, La Trouée, La Revue

Indigène, Le Petit Impartial, Le Courier Haïtien and

Stella, although their reach was limited by the extent of illiteracy in the country (Castor 163). The Indigenist movement associated especially with Jean Price-Mars’ Ainsi parla l’oncle (1928) aimed at valorizing authentically

Haitian culture, especially the practices of peasants, including recognizing Vodun as a religion. It was a movement away from collective Bovarism or “copying” French cultural practices, and although the audience of this movement was primarily the Haitian elite, its subject was often the Haitian masses. In reference to Le Petit

Impartial (1927-1931), the more political newspaper between it and La Revue Indigène, J. Michael Dash asserts:

This newspaper documents the uncompromising nationalism of the members of the Indigenous movement … These constituted violent critiques of American imperialism the Haitian élite and the Catholic Church. The latter were repeatedly condemned for collaborating in cultural imperialism or what was termed l’occupation de la pensée. (“Literature” 78)

This explains the attempts to convince the elite of the value of Haitian culture and its role in shaping the

Haitian future, and, of course, the importance of this in the context of the US Occupation. To this effect, Price-

Mars issues a warning in the preface of So Spoke the Uncle, as previously mentioned, for the Haitians, especially the elite, to shift ideologically before “darkness falls”—that is, before all is lost to US imperialism (10). This is probably also connected to the history of peasant rebellions in the country, as a revalorization of their role with the elite could help ideologically unite forces against the occupiers.

Other literary questioning of the US Occupation appeared in fiction such as the novels La Blanche Négresse

(1934) by Virgile Valcin and Le Nègre masqué (1938) by

Stephen Alexis. In these allegories of the occupation, sexual relationships between Haitians and Americans are juxtaposed to the occupier / occupied relationship engendered by the political situation. Despite this, the

66 sexual alliances in the novels between a “victimized upper class female” and a “clumsily amorous officer” remain unfulfilled (Dash “Haiti” 38-39). As Dash posits, “The savage caricature of the Marine officer in these works is equaled only by the unmitigated scorn that is directed against those Haitians who collaborated with the Americans”

(“Haiti” 39). While Dash has argued that Annie Desroy’s Le

Joug presents an alternative to the previous motif of allegorical sexuality where the American officer is the one seduced by Haitian culture (“Haiti” 40), Nadève Ménard maintains that Desroy and Valcin “problematize sexuality in more complex ways than their male counterparts [other novelists of the time] … [Desroy and Valcin] explore the ways in which nationalism is couched in gendered terms”

(161). Race and class also come to the fore in their work.

Similar to the situation in Haiti, the arrival of troops in Santo Domingo also led to movements of resistance, although “Most of the anger and opposition generated by these events [those of the occupation] was expressed peacefully” (Calder 12). Nevertheless, the US military sought to disarm the public in September of 1916.

This contributed to cases of violence and protests. In addition to disarmament, however, other acts of violence developed. Calder cites several instances of Marine

67 violence against Dominicans in 1916 including the attack of a schoolteacher, the shooting of a deaf-mute who failed to follow a directive and accusations of molestation of girls by Marines. Often, these violent incidents developed out of an overreaction to perceived Dominican violence. Given the power dynamic, many of the accusations of Marine violence against Dominicans were unpunished in contrast to the swift action taken on US complaints of infractions by

Dominicans (Calder 15). Despite a temporary halt in resistance on the part of Dominicans, Calder explicates the soured relationship that resulted from occupation:

“Continuing conflicts between US military personnel and

Dominican citizens changed the attitude of the residents of the republic from one of friendliness to one of nearly universal hostility” (18).

In addition to these initial peaceful and violent manifestations of resistance to the occupation, there was a peasant struggle in the eastern region of the Dominican

Republic from 1917 to 1922 (Calder 13, 115). The caudillo system was strong in the east, a region less controlled by

Santo Domingo, which allowed for the development of a guerrilla war against the occupiers due to its leadership role prior to the occupation and its ability to recruit followers (Calder 116). Calder describes the rationale for

68 this resistance as ranging from the political to the personal. Reasons included resentment of unemployment, anger at Marine aggression, as well as a desire to serve as political revolutionaries who “claimed regional or national goals” (Calder 121). These guerrilla peasants were often referred to as gavilleros or bandits (Calder 121).

Resistance also emerged in a struggle of words.

Specifically, the elite participated in resistance through the press, books, letters, theatre and lectures. The newspaper was a particularly useful vehicle for protest of the occupation and was utilized by writers such as Fabio

Fiallo, Enrique Deschamps and Américo Lugo who “criticized policy or its implementation, and they were always anxious to publicize the incidents of friction which occurred with increasing regularity during 1916 between the general population and the armed intruders” (Calder 13). During the initial moments of the occupation, the theater also served as a tool of resistance with Cuadro Lírico presenting plays concerning the US military presence such as El intruso, No más yes and Un matrimonio a lo yanqui by

José Narciso Solá (Calder 13). Los civilizadores by

Horacio Read is the primary occupied novel written during the occupation of which I’m aware, and it treats foreign presence in Haiti, although it deals less directly with the

69 relationship of occupier to occupied than many occupied narratives. Theater, then, appears to have been a more prolific and useful tool to comment on and satirize the occupation and the American presence. This climate and these acts of resistance contributed to the movement toward disarmament as well as the push of censorship by the US that reduced anti-occupational protest in the theatre and the press (Calder 14, 18).

Both countries, then, engaged in artistic and armed resistance against occupation with some more specific commonalities in terms of guerrilla warfare style resistance as well as the popularity of theater as a medium to criticize the US. Both artistic movements led to a valorization of traditions and customs reflecting national identity. In the Dominican Republic, there was a turn toward costumbrismo in theater reflecting Hispanic heritage as well as characters from Dominican Carnival. In Haiti, artistic resistance involved a valorization of the culture of paysans or the Haitian masses and, hence, a turn toward

African heritage. There was also collaboration and collusion across the border with the goal of resisting

American invasion and influence (Paulino 40). The Haitian artistic resistance appears to have been more robust in terms of producing novels, and it appears to have lasted

70 longer and has certainly been studied in more detail.

However, this is likely due to increased censorship early on during the occupation of the Dominican Republic as well as the ephemeral nature of performance and the limited number of printed texts produced during the occupation of the Dominican Republic.

On Reading Performatively

My reading of these plays relies on what I term a performative reading, which, in this context, is a reading that aims to recreate or—at the very least—imagine the content of a source text, its meaning, and its impact through critical reception. Because the primary critical commentary I am analyzing come from newspapers, this interpretation will also involve reading across the page because the texts at hand—those in the newspaper—would not have been read or at least seen entirely in isolation. The idea of performative reading here combines the notions of performance and performativity, literary texts and performances as networks, and close reading.

A performative utterance involves the use of language, which serves as an action, and it brings about some kind of result (Smith 7). In this way, a performative utterance is judged not on whether it is true but whether it is successful in bringing about a result. Barry Smith

71 describes the overarching hypothesis of Searle’s Speech

Acts as follows: “[S]peech acts are acts characteristically performed by uttering expressions in accordance with certain constitutive rules” (9). Constitutive rules for

Searle are those that can create or define behaviors in a given context. When considered in conjunction with institutions, speech acts can create a certain juridical reality as in the pronouncement of man and wife at a wedding: that is, this pronouncement equates the status change of marriage. Within Butler’s vein of performativity, one finds many influences including, notably, Austin. In

Bodies That Matter, for example, she states that, “Within speech act theory, a performative is that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names”

(xxi). Drawing partially on speech act theory, Butler develops her performative notion of gender. Relying on de

Beauvoir’s famous statement about becoming a woman (rather than innately being a woman), Butler states that: “In this sense, gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time— an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts”

(“Performative Acts” 270). Gender, then, is an illusion.

Its construction relies on a series of discontinuous acts

72 that provide the “appearance of substance” (“Performative

Acts” 271). In this sense, one does or performs gender through a multiplicity of acts. Relying on Merleau-Ponty,

Butler states that the body’s “concrete expression in the world must be understood as the taking up and rendering specific of a set of historical possibilities. Here, there is an agency which is understood as the process of rendering such possibilities determinate” (“Performative

Acts” 272). Austin and Searle’s idea of the performative as doing and bringing out results, and Butler’s concern with historical possibilities and context for performativity are particular useful for this chapter.

For the purposes of this reading, then, a performative does or performs rather than merely describes, and the performative reading, which is contingent on the historical moment and space in which it was created, involves a close reading of the available text at hand, its context and references and imagines its source text as well as the experience of reading across the newspaper page. Although the criticism and related texts I will be interpreting here long precede the internet, the literary network and the concept of the hypertext is useful for understanding this type of reading. In other words, each of the references to the source texts here bring the reader closer to a source

73 text that can never be found—a kind of broken hyperlink.

At the same time, though, they are a reminder of the existence of that source text, what it meant and inspired, and allow the reader to imagine the source based on its linked texts. Additionally, the experience of reading a newspaper prevents a fully isolated reading of particular columns or articles, which denotes a kind of network of texts that are linked across the newspaper page.

Reading the Reception of Cultural Resistance

The threat of invasion brought about a turn toward patriotism and criollo or Creole traditions as well as a reinvigoration of the notion of Hispanic identity in the

Dominican Republic (Moya Pons 526-527).12 In this cultural context and with the arrival of the Americans and the occupation came the work of Rafael Damirón, which Frank

Moya Pons describes in context:

En apenas seis años se representaron más de treinta y ocho obras dramáticas, muchas de ellas con un claro matiz político, de crítica y protesta contra la intervención. En la vertiente del teatro politico, Rafael Damirón escribió Una fiesta en el Castine y Los yanquis en Santo Domingo, en colaboración con Arturo Logroño; Delia Quesada Quisqueya y la Ocupación Norteamericana (Molinaza, 1984) y el grupo teatral de José Narciso Solá presentó sus obras El intruso, No

12 In contrast to the other uses of the term Creole in this dissertation—such as to refer to cultural mixing or creole languages such as Haitian Creole, Creole here (criollo) would generally refer to someone who is Hispanic, often of predominantly Spanish (white) ancestry. During colonial times in Latin America, it tended to refer to a “Spanish” person born in the colony.

más yes y Un matrimonio a lo yanqui (Molinaza, 1984). Las representaciones teatrales fueron la diversión favorita de los dominicanos desde la época colonial. … Durante la intervención norteamericana el teatro fue espacio de encuentro de los dominicanos con su realidad y también de crítica y participación. El resurgimiento del género fue esplenderoso pero breve, pero según coinciden los cronistas de la época ya en los años veinte el cinematógrafo había desplazado a las compañías del teatro. (527)

In just six years, thirty-eight plays were performed, many of which had a clear, political aspect of criticism and protest against the intervention. On the political theatre side, Rafael Damirón wrote A party in the Castine and The Yankees in Santo Domingo, in collaboration with Arturo Logroño; Delia Quesada Quisqueya and the North American Occupation (Molinaza, 1984) and José Narciso Solá’s theatre group presented their plays The intrusion, No more yes, and A Yankee Style Marriage. The theatrical performances had been the favorite diversion for Dominicans since colonial times. During the North American intervention, theatre became a space for Dominicans to confront their reality as well as for criticism and participation. The resurgence of this genre was brilliant but brief, but historians of that time period seem to agree that the cinematographer took the place of theatre companies.

In addition to the move toward film in the Dominican

Republic, US censorship also affected the production of texts that included “inflammatory statements or expressions of hostility toward the military government” (Soderlund

93), which may also partly explain the reduction in the number of plays that considered the occupation.

Similarly, there was a nationalist movement in plays prior to and during the occupation in Haiti; these plays dealt with the threat of intervention and eventual

75 occupation of Haiti by the US. The Indigenist era of plays in Haiti also led the way for the greater development of a theatre scene in Haitian Creole (Ndiaye et al 180-181).

Ndiaye et al also explain the wider concerns of the plays and Haitian reality of this moment:

À cet effet, on peut dire que presque tous les aspects de la vie haïtienne sont plus ou moins vécus sous le mode théâtral : de la politique aux cérémonies vaudou, en passant par le carnaval, qui est mise en scène du présent et du passé, lieu où le refoulé s’exprime sans crainte ni contrainte, à la manière d’une vraie scène du théâtre, sorte de cercle magique qui protège les acteurs de la sanction du réel. À partir de l’indigénisme, on assiste plus à la fin du drame historique, comme si le présent était lui-même assez tragique pour servir de sujet. (181)

To that effect, one could say that nearly all aspects of Haitian life are more or less lived through theatre : from politics to Vodou ceremenies, to Carnival, which is staged from the present to the past, place where the suppressed express themselves without fear or constraint, like a true theatre scene, a kind of magic circle that protects the actors from the sanction of reality. Beginning with Indigenism, we see the end of the historical drama, as if the present itself were sufficiently tragic to serve as the subject.

This suggests that Carnival is a kind of performance in itself, and that the inclusion of Carnival characters in plays offers a possibility for a safer way of criticizing the Americans while allowing Haitians to both reflect on the reality of their presence and to enjoy themselves.

Simultaneously, this kind of interpretation may be more likely to be misunderstood by the occupiers. Dominicans

76 used characters from Carnival in their plays to criticize the American presence, which I will explore in more depth through the criticism of the Damirón plays that concern this chapter. This also points to commonalities between

Dominican and Haitian Carnival and the nature of their satire in theatre through the carnivalesque mode.

Additionally, comedic plays served as a politically engaged diversion in both cases.

The versions of the two aforementioned Damirón plays, which were performed in 1916 in Santo Domingo, concern this reading of criticism that comes from El Listín Diario. On

Page 4 of the September 13th edition of El Lístin Diario, there is a small section in the bottom left corner of the page that references a future production (Friday, the 15th) at the Teatro Colón of Los yankees en Santo Domingo, which is also the title of the section. The nameless writer describes this work as “la aplaudida obra bufa de Logroño y

Damirón” (4; “the applauded comedic play by Logroño and

Damirón) and offers that: “Se le han introducido adaptaciones de actualidad. Dicha obra, como recordarán nuestros lectores es una crítica muy sabrosa de personajes de nuestra política y de costumbres criollas” (4; “They have introduced adaptations to reflect the present. The aforementioned work, as our readers will recall, is a very

77 salacious critique of personalities from our politics and

Creole customs”). This text also demonstrates that the play is an adaptation of a previous work that presumably satirized the relationship between the United States and the Dominican Republic, and this version is meant to reflect recent occurrences in Santo Domingo, including the invasion of the Yankees. This interpretation is apparent not only because of the moment in which it is written but also by reading across the page of the newspaper. That is, directly above this section on the left-hand side is a headline that reads “Un gavillero muerto” (4; a dead gavillero), which speaks to the armed resistance movement and the violence encountered in opposition to the US invaders. Above this is a larger editorial section with the title “¡Insólito!” (4; Unbelievable!)13, which lambasts

North-American (i.e., US) interference in the country by questioning their contradictory behavior as they claim to be “defensores del derecho y amigos de la libertad” (4: defenders of the law and friends of liberty) and asking a series of questions. One of the first is, “¿Somos nosotros o son ellos, los yanquis, los dueños del país? (4; Do we are do they, the Yankees, own this country?). The

13 Insólito can mean unheard of or unbelievable.

78 questions increase in frequency as the editorial reaches its penultimate paragraph of eight total:

¿Qué quieren del país? Cuáles son las exigencias que aspiran formular después de tener entre sus manos la mísera tierra quisqueyana? …Tendremos derecho, tras las pretensiones del Fierabrás invasor, a respirar nuestro aire dominicano? …Nos darán permiso para continuar viviendo en nuestro hospitalario suelo? Permitirán que ondee sobre los aires, cual un bello y amado pájaro tricolor, nuestra bandera santa y reverenciada? …. La culpa es nuestra, si el silencio es la respuesta yanqui, por ser infinitamente más pequeños que Alemania la guerrera o que el sagaz Japón irresistible. (4)14

What do they want with the country? What are the demands they aim to develop after having the miserable Quisqueyan land in their hands? Will we have the right, following the pretensions of the invading Ferumbras, to breathe our own Dominican air? Will they give us permission to continue living on our hospitable land? Will they permit our revered and sacred flag, like a beautiful and beloved, tricolored bird, to flap high above? … The fault is ours, if silence is the Yankee answer, for being infinitely smaller than warlike Germany or sagacious, overpowering Japan.

The piece is unrelentingly forthright in its interrogation of the Yankee presence. At the same time, though, it demands a somewhat careful reading because of its reliance on word play and literary references. Specifically, the inclusion of the name Fierabrás or Ferumbras, which comes from the French fier à bras and implies that someone is cocky and quarrelsome, is a reference to a knight of large

14 The ellipses in this paragraph are a recreation of those that appear in the original text. I have included the full paragraph here.

79 stature and great strength from French chansons de geste15 who fought many battles. In addition to this reference to a quarrelsome, warlike nature and possible arrogance of the

United States and its recent—in a contemporaneous sense— role in the Dominican Republic is the flag that flaps like a bird sobre los aires. This expression likely relies on a play on words between the idea of a bird or flag literally flying high in the air and, on the other hand, the flag—as a symbol of Dominican national pride, heritage, and sovereignty—flying above the airs or the pretensions of the invaders. The last line speaks to the position of Germany and Japan as world powers involved in the First World War.

More specifically, the US was concerned that Germany was taking an interest in the Caribbean and Latin America and would pursue a greater presence there for resources or strategic positioning during the war. Keeping Europe out of the Americas was a part of US policy and a motivation for US invasion and occupation in the Western Hemisphere.

The effect of reading this literary editorial alongside the informational news of the death of a member of the armed resistance together with the reaction to the production of Los yankees en Santo Domingo is a sense of

15 Chansons de geste are medieval, epic poems of early French literature.

80 the varied forms of resistance that the occupation engendered from the violent to the cultural. It also demonstrates a variety of genre on the cultural side with the editorial leaning toward the sincere and concerned and the play coming across as humorous and satirical, although both are clearly critical of the political situation. The mention of Creole customs also implies that Damirón is a

Costumbrista writer or one who focuses on national customs

(“Encyclopedia” 209). This, along with the references to the flag and the use of the term Quisqueya16 in the editorial speak to the way that the occupation encouraged

Dominicans to define themselves and reinforce traditions and other characteristics that define dominicanidad or

Domincanness in the face of challenge to their sovereignty and national identity.

The bottom center section of page 4 of the September

15, 1916 edition of the newspaper dedicates itself to a reflection on Una fiesta en el Castine and the reception and criticism of the play along with the wider

16 Quisqueya and Haiti are both said to be Arawak-Taíno terms for the entire island of Hispaniola. The usage of these terms, however, tends to divide somewhat along national and linguistic borders with Quisqueya being used often in the Dominican Republic and Ayiti or Haïti being used in Haiti to refer to the whole island. Kiskeya in Haitian Creole does appear as a name for entities in Haiti, such as Radio Kiskeya. Other terms, such as Hispaniola, are used by both Haitians and Dominicans to refer to the island.

81 dramaturgical scene in the Dominican Republic. It is worth noting that the Castine was a gunboat during the Spanish-

American War, which suffered damages from ocean waves during its recommission in Santo Domingo in 1916. The

Memphis was alongside it, suffered damage to its hull and the loss of the ship, resulting in the deaths of more than forty men (Cox np). Articles on the tragedy of the Memphis pepper the pages of El Listín Diario. The use of the name

Castine in the title is telling because it references a gunboat that was used both during the Spanish-American War, which was partly fought in the Caribbean, and in the contemporaneous invasion and occupation. It is also less polarizing than referencing the Memphis whose wreckage resulted in loss of life likely as a result of the aftermath of a hurricane,17 an event which appears to have largely been treated as a tragedy in the Dominican press.

In reference to the play, Don Hilario writes:

Decididamente, ahora en este país como antes en Francia, vá acentuándose cada vez con más lastimosa precisión la idea infeliz de que en las obras teatrales no es la sustanciosa y criolla originalidad del libreto lo que prevalece, sino la mala, pueril y repugnante interpretación que de ella hacen a veces los artistas. (4)

Decidedly, now in this country like before in France, the unhappy idea that is emphasized more and more with

17 At the time, it was thought that a tidal wave damaged the gunboats. More recent reports suggest that it was likely wind-generated ocean waves that may have resulted from a hurricane (Cox np).

piteous accuracy is that in theatrical works, it is not the substantive, Creole originality of the libretto that prevails, but rather the terrible, puerile and repugnant acting that artists sometimes make of it.

Taking this as a point of departure, the author elaborates on the reaction of spectators, claiming that: “un disparo fallido por descuido del guardarropía, es suficiente para que el público la tilde de mala y la silbe y la censure acervamente [sic]” (4; a failed gunshot due to oversight by the props and wardrobe department is enough for the public to brand it as bad, whistle at it and condemn it ).18

Although he does call the play a triumph for the playwrights, he hesitates before praising the play’s quality. Instead, he opts for an analysis of the reaction of the play’s audience, positing: “Simplemente analizo primero la psicología del pueblo dominicano para más tarde señalar sus lunares o hacer sobresalientes sus encantos”

(4; First, I will simply analyze the psychology of the

Dominican people in order to later point out its flaws or draw attention to its charms [of the play]). In this respect, he alludes to the variety of people in the theatre as a popular form of entertainment, creating a variety of possibilities for spectator reaction:

18 The whistling highlighted here is akin to booing.

Y es que en la sala de un teatro, en ese conjunto de hombres, de mujeres y de niños de caracteres tan diversos y de moralidad tan diversa, hay un pudor mal entendido, una necesidad de mentira de virtud y de grandezas falsas, que impulsan a los espectadores a protestar cuando los autores se atreven a ceñirse a la verdad y han escudriñado honradamente la vida…… (4)

And it is in the theater hall, in that ensemble of men, women and children of such diverse character and diverse morality, there is a poorly understood embarrassment, a need for fabrication of virtue and false grandeur, which drive the audience to protest when the authors dare to adhere to truth and have examined life honestly……

The author eventually lambasts the criticism of a tal

Cantaclaro, presumably another critic, for having mocked the acting in the play without further analysis and a deeper engagement with the performance, but he agrees with his assessment of the acting. In effect, then, although the author appears to criticize the way that any audience member can critique a play and ideates that because each member is so different, each may have a different reaction, this is actually a pretense to criticize the interpretation of someone who is likely a literary critic. In addition to agreeing with Cantaclaro about the quality of the acting, he also concurs with the work of Arturito Pellerano A19 who suggests that another actor would have been better suited to the role of Champol. Don Hilario also cites the

19 This likely refers to Arturo Joaquín Pellerano Alfau who founded El Listín.

84 character Roba la Gallina as another performance that suffers and that could benefit from a different actor.

Although little is known specifically about these characters in the context of this play, both names are associated with Dominican Carnival. Tejeda Ortiz holds that the Dominican Carnival character Califé comes from

Champol, a figure who took to the streets to protest the US invasion in verse (212-214). The later manifestation of this character, Califé evokes a figure from Dominican vodú,

Baron del Cementerio who allows people to pass between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The

Carnival character wears dark clothing, an exaggerated hat, a cane, as well as dark makeup with white around the mouth.

He is also a very vocal critic and satirist of politics and the government. This is one of the principal figures of modern Dominican Carnival. Roba la Gallina is said to originate from the time of Haitian governance on the eastern side of the island (1822-1844) wherein those who stole chickens were punished by having feathers attached to their bodies. The character is usually played by a man who dresses as a woman, and the costume generally includes an exaggerated chest and hips. The inclusion of Carnival characters speaks again to the valorization of Dominican traditions in these plays as a part of their projects of

85 resistance. At the same time, Carnival celebrations in the

Caribbean frequently involve criticism of politics through over the top performances. The reliance on exaggerated

Carnival characters and the criticism of potentially false overacting recalls a likely raucous, ridiculous costume with an over-the-top portrayal of characters who symbolize

Dominican tradition and mock the invaders.

On September 16, 1916, the two plays are mentioned again, but this time they make the front page. According to M. de la C., the play was shown for the third time at the Colón Theatre. He also uses the language of invasion with the verb invadir, which can mean “to invade” or “to storm or pour into” to describe the audience experience.

He states that: “La concurrencia que invadió el teatro celebró mucho los chistes de la obra” (1; The audience that poured into the theatre really enjoyed the jokes from the play.). Although the specific play is not mentioned, he compares the performance of an actor to another in Una fiesta del Castine and references the writers Logroño y

Damirón, which makes it reasonable to assume that the play that he is referring to is Un yankee en Santo Domingo.

Additionally, as previously mentioned, a different version of Un yankee en Santo Domingo was performed two years prior to the arrival of the Americans, which suggests that the

86 performance criticized the impending invasion and likely the historical relationship between the United States and the Dominican Republic. Put in other words, these two plays not only criticize the intervention and occupation in the Dominican Republic of 1916, but they also underscore the longer neo-imperial relationship the US has had with the Caribbean, especially since the Spanish-American War, which Stephen Kinzer has argued sets the tone for US foreign policy for the remainder of the twentieth century

(np).

Additionally, to the left and above the literary criticism leveled at the acting in Una fiesta en el Castine on the September 16, 1916 news is a correction made by the governor who challenges a piece of reporting in another paper, which claimed that he refused to leave his post and implied a step toward an unpeaceful transfer of power (1).

Above the commentary on the play is a fairly lengthy rumination on oratory by Jean Quarantedeux, and the right- hand column brings a series of ads, several of which are for international beers including Red Star from the United

Kingdom, the Danish beer Tuborg, A.B.C. and Bohemia beers from the Massachusetts Breweries Company as well as the now defunct American beer from Milwaukee, Schlitz. The top left of the same page includes another editorial that

87 comments on the misuse of Dominican monies by the

Americans, which is significant because part of the rationale for US presence was to administer Dominican customs houses to pay off debts.

The effect of reading across this page is an interaction of literary and political concerns and a reminder of the fraught relationship between the Dominican

Republic and the United States at the moment.

Simultaneously, however, the newspaper is a business and needs to sell advertisements for revenue. So, there is an interaction of high and low culture as well as a complication of the US-Dominican relationship based mostly on the occupation because trade is still present, and US companies—along with other international companies—are marketing beer to Dominicans. It is a reminder of the commercial relationship that exists between the two countries. Still, the sheer number of beer ads is striking if not telling in juxtaposition to the fraught political situation that the columns detail.

Engaging with this archive, much of which is now available digitally through the Digital Library of the

Caribbean, permits an interpretation and the potential to help fill a gap with regard to the literary resistance of the time. This project of postmemory reflects the layer of

88 the work of the critic, although it certainly also relies on the resistant nature of the scathing editorials and the plays on which the critical commentaries in the newspaper pay homage.

Conclusion

The Dominican and Haitian theatre scenes from the early to mid-twentieth century were both successful in promoting nationalism and satirizing the relationship between the United States and Hispaniola. There are also similarities in the focus on satire and the use of comedy in this endeavor. The wider cultural resistance movements do appear to differ, however, in that the Dominican turn toward nationalism involved costumbrismo and an investment in Hispanic identity and Spanish roots; whereas, the

Indigenist movement in Haiti included a valorization of the

African heritage and customs of Haitians and a turn away from collective Bovarism (bovarysme) or a primary focus on

European influence. That said, the influence of Carnival in Dominican works does indicate some concern with the transcultural nature of Dominican society. It is also worth noting that most Haitian literature of the time was still written in French, but Indigenism helped pave the way for a more substantial body of literature in Kreyòl. To some degree, the Haitian elite’s appreciation of African

89 cultures and influences is a result of Haiti’s having overthrown France in revolt, so that rethinking many of the vestiges of colonial and imperial ties—not just its identity to the United States—was important in the context of the occupation. This is significant, however, because the reduced homage to African influences in Dominican society likely contributes to later understandings of identity and relations between the two countries.

The Damirón plays, as the reception in this newspaper indicates, were a hit and attended by many people from different walks of life. Their success engendered sufficient critical debate to warrant a conversation about the performance of particular characters and whether this hindered the overall perception of the play. The characters in question appear to have been derived from

Carnival and may have included costumes with exaggerated features, so the idea of critiquing overacting or false performances initially seems ironic. On the other hand,

Carnival has often been a site of political protest, and these characters and plays were criticizing and resisting

US intervention in the Dominican Republic; thus, the believability of their performance or the ability to convey the satire of their bufo or over-the-top, comedic characters was important to their overall success, and it

90 speaks to the importance of the work of resistance and the stakes of sovereignty at play, even if mockery and raucous satire are the tools to that end. Certainly, too, the critical dialogue they sparked points to the significance of the spectacle.

Although it certainly makes for a more complicated and interrupted reading—somewhat similar to the experience of reading hyperlinked materials in the 21st century—reading the criticism of a play as a way of approaching a non- existent source text as well as reading across the newspaper page contribute to a better understanding of the content and the context of the plays Una fiesta en el

Castine and Un yankee en Santo Domingo. That is, reading across the page from these critical commentaries provides greater clarity as to what was at stake in terms of resistance. It also offers another side of artistic resistance in the sincere and powerful editorials that were written in opposition to the occupation. These coupled with the news pieces that more directly report on occurrences related to the occupation and armed resistance round out the array of texts that inform the reading of the critical reception of these plays speak to the different fronts and manifestations of Dominican resistance in 1916.

The ads serve as a reminder of the business of the

91 newspaper as well as the international trade relationship between the Dominican Republic and other nations. Whereas the reading of various texts together creates greater context when they both relate in some way to political events of the day, conversely, reading across the page creates a kind of disruption because of the movement of the eye between a mix of genres, the variety of headlines, and the—at times—narrative dissonance between sections. There does, then, remain some opacity when reading this text because of the time that has transpired since their writing, the lack of source texts for the plays at hand, as well as the nature of reading across the page itself.

Additionally, there is considerable removal from the performance itself because it is ephemeral, but the closest rendering or understanding of that experience at this point in time is the criticism the plays elicited. Despite this, these editions of the newspaper contribute to the archive of resistance narratives against occupation in the

Dominican Republic, and they are significant as texts that contribute to the memory and history of this event. At this point in time when there are likely no remaining living Dominicans who remember this event, these texts contribute to a project of postmemory. Whereas Damirón himself, ironically, would come to write propagandistic

92 novels for the Trujillato, El Listín continued to resist.

These newspaper sections, then, are part of the legacy of this newspaper, a publication that continued to resist hegemony and autocracy, which resulted in a twenty-year hiatus under Trujillo who did not take kindly to the newspaper’s interventions (Di Pietro 53).

Chapter Three: Recalling Occupation and Foreseeing Intervention

Resistance narratives like resistance itself often teeter between appropriation and challenge. This can be true for armed resistance and artistic resistance in the context of colonialism, occupation, or other conflicts. It also holds true for literary movements that react against other movements. That is, each often challenges or responds to its predecessor or dominant force based on its operating criteria or logic. One example of this is the use of the novel by writers in the Global South. As Barbara Harlow puts it, “The use by Third World resistance writers of the novel form as it has developed within the western literary tradition both appropriates and challenges the historical and historicizing presuppositions, the narrative conclusions, implicated within the western tradition and its development” (78). Due in part to the attempts of resistance novels of the Global South to challenge History, these works often bear some resemblance to or may even fall in the category of experimental and / or postmodern narratives. On the one hand, they may incorporate the experiences of minority and / or marginalized peoples and traditions and include stylistic elements of experimentation, attempting to break with traditional

94 features of their time and literary context. They may also defy linear chronology, temporal clarity, or traditional notions of plot. Nevertheless, resistance narratives necessitate careful readings in terms of historical context because understanding “their historical referencing and the burden of historical knowledge such referencing enjoins” is paramount to the message such texts often contain (Harlow

80). These works of literature may also demand a

“politicized interpretation,” which is the case for the works I will be considering in this chapter (Harlow 80).

The works of literature that this chapter addresses respond to past cases of occupation or intervention as well as interventions contemporaneous to or perhaps even future to the writing of the texts in question. These texts are a

Dominican novelette entitled La vida no tiene nombre

(Capítulos de una intervención) by Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, and a Haitian novel by Gary Victor called A l’angle des rues parallèles. The first novel in question was published in 1965, coinciding with a second US intervention in the

Dominican Republic during the Dominican Republic’s civil war, and this intervention lasted until 1966. Whereas the novel was published around the time of a second US intervention, its content considers the US Occupation of

1916-1924. The second novel came out initially in 2000 in

Haiti, although I’m working with the re-edition that was published in France in 2003. These two versions respond to events in Haiti—including questions of intervention and US empire—relevant to the late 90s and early 2000s, although the version I am analyzing deals more directly with the early 2000s than the first because it is published in 2003, and it is edited with an international readership in mind

(e.g., a glossary of terms is included). Both the

Dominican and Haitian works that concern this chapter, then, deal with questions of intervention and US empire at different moments in Hispaniola’s history, but what renders these novels particularly similar is the way that they engage with past US interventions or imperial pursuits, even as they predict or allude to present or future imperial concerns. By looking back at these events, these works rely on the history and memory of them to contribute to a project of postmemory or memory by adoption or transmission rather than lived experience. Because of the circularity of such kinds of writing and the projects they inherently propose, I would contend that these works engage in work of what I will term meta-postmemory or works that contribute to the (post)memory of particular events by invoking the (post)memory of past ones with similarities of theme or context. In so doing, they contribute to the

96 resistance against contemporaneous or future interventions relevant to the moment of their publication.

Situating La vida no tiene nombre and A l’angle des rues parallèles

The first text that concerns this chapter is La vida no tiene nombre, a first-person narrative recounted by

Ramón, also known as El Cuerno, a gavillero or member of the armed Dominican resistance who is awaiting death by a firing squad at the hands of US occupying forces in the

Dominican Republic. Significantly, Ramón is the product of an affair between a man of Dutch origin living in the

Dominican Republic who is married with children and Simián, a Haitian woman who had come to find work in the Dominican

Republic, experienced repeated mistreatment on her journey, and who ultimately found room and board for herself at

Ramón’s father’s home. The result of Ramón’s and Simián’s continued existence there is repeated blame and mistreatment because they remind the family, especially the wife and children, of familial betrayal and shame. The only exception is in Ramón’s relationship to his sister

Santa who was his playmate and confidante as a child and the only family member besides his mother who didn’t treat him like a slave (9).

In Ramón’s narration, there is a blend of his experience as a child, questions of identity, along with the experience of occupation and his participation in the resistance to US forces. Whereas Ramón becomes a gavillero leader and a defender of Dominican freedom, his half- brother and his father become collaborators, providing information as well as Dominican women to the occupiers in exchange for protection and maintaining ownership of their properties in contrast to other Dominicans. His brother,

Fremio, even dedicates himself to tracking down and likely torturing gavilleros as part of his allegiance and collaboration with the occupiers (7-8).

Gary Victor’s novel A l’angle des rues parallèles focuses on a period of violence and chaos in Haiti, which speaks in part to the US and international intervention around this time period with the reinstatement of President

Jean-Bertrand Aristide following a coup and exile

(Operation Uphold Democracy, 1995-1996) and later a U.N. occupation with the subsequent removal of Aristide during his second presidential term. This was initially termed

Operation Secure Tomorrow (February to July 2004) and then the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti or

UNSTAMIH, also known as MINUSTAH, which began its mission in 2004 and ended in 2017 at which time UN presence was

98 significantly downsized and the resulting mission was renamed United Nations Mission for Justice Support in Haiti or MINUJUSTH.20

The language and events of the novel are apocalyptic in nature. Andy Leak describes the novel’s style as a

“mishmash, comprising elements of detective fiction, noir thriller, fantasy and satire. But it also has clear

‘realist’ pretentions: it references the topography of

Port-au-Prince very precisely and is replete with allusions to a precise historical moment” (433). As I am working with the second version of the novel that was published in

2003, it is worth noting that Victor’s author’s note to the text explains that minor modifications were made to the novel; however, Leak argues that these changes were quite significant and reflected the relationship between Haiti and France at the time, with the latter serving potentially as the primary readership for the text. In particular, he categorizes the variations between the texts in the following way:

(1) Corrections of typographical errors, punctuation, minor inconsistencies, stylistic infelicities and grammatical errors (2) Modifications designed to explicate or elucidate cultural or linguistic particularities that would

20 MINUSTAH being the more pronounceable acronym of the two comes from the French version of the name: Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti.

otherwise remain obscure for a non-Haitian readership (3) Additions clearly attributable to the author which fall partly into the second category but which are primarily intended to reinforce certain aspects of the political ‘message’ of the text.

Although the first two categories have their significance for any comparative reading of Victor’s original and rewritten text, for the purposes of this chapter, I am primarily concerned with the third category. I will return to Leak’s assertion of possible politicized goals aimed toward an international audience in my analysis of the novel.

Despite the redaction or conversion of many of the names of major figures into more mythic monikers, the details of the novel along with its timing suggest the late nineties at which time René Préval was the president, succeeding and preceding Jean Bertrand Aristide’s presidencies. That is, in the novel, there is an unnamed president who serves as the mouthpiece of a figure called l’´Élu, which translates to “the elected one,” or to “the chosen one” in a religious sense, the latter of which is the more appropriate translation here. This correlates to

Aristide who was the first democratically elected president in Haiti as well as a priest, and many viewed René Préval as a puppet president being influenced by Aristide, given

100 that they were allies at the time. In the text, the president is also referred to as the marasa or twin of the

Chosen One (154).21 The president character in the novel is presented as an alcoholic as Préval is rumored to be (Leak

433). These similarities are important because the novel is clearly criticizing many entities and their behavior during this time period; however, it is important to note that this novel relies on extremes in its criticism in terms of violence and its apocalyptic tone. It also relies on incongruities that remain inexplicable, such as the novel’s title. This text’s protagonist is Eric, a one-time civil servant turned murderer. His firing and subsequent unemployment result in the loss of his girlfriend, and he blames this on structural adjustment by the government.

Both of these events have driven him to seek revenge and kill Mataro, the Minister of Finance, whom he believes to be either an agent of the IMF or the CIA as well as responsible for his loss of employment. Although the driving forces of this novel are strange occurrences in

Haiti such as the blinding of mirrors and the inversing of words, which punctuate Eric’s movement through the city in search of revenge and eventually as a fugitive, the

21 Marasa are important to Haitian culture and especially to Voduizan or practitioners of Haitian Vodun.

101 backdrop is a multivalent kind of turmoil that includes relatively frequent references to the United States and its relationship to Haiti. Although this is not strictly an occupied novel to use Nadève Ménard’s term, that being a novel written about and during occupation or intervention, it still responds to questions of US intervention and empire more generally as well as the United States-Haiti relationship.

The Effects of Time: Recollection and Prescience for Resistance

Metapostmemory, which informs my reading of these novels, is a concept that draws on metamemory, which

“refers to the processes and structures whereby people are able to examine the content of their memories, either prospectively or retrospectively, and make judgments or commentaries about them” (Metcalfe and Dunlosky 349).

Here, however, metapostmemory would refer both to a project of postmemory in a fictional cultural product that seeks to recall an actual past event and comment on it while also referring to another critical and current event. In other words, metapostmemory is invoked for the purpose of criticism and resistance, to comment on present or prescient conditions, thereby providing material that could raise awareness about current events or draw historical

102 parallels for readers. These texts thus border on political prescience because of their timing: my use of prescience here oscillates between prediction and the predictable, as there are signs and decisions that usually lead to these timely choices by artists. I should also acknowledge that reading this type of narrative after the fact can lead to reading them as prophetic. Speculative fiction tends to be especially adept at this. For science fiction in particular, authors seem to be most successful at predicting the future when they ground their ideas in social, ethical, environmental, and ecological issues of the moment in which they write (“Can Science Fiction

Writers”).22 Similarly, novels that write about politics may also correctly imagine the future by analyzing and expounding upon current trends and issues. To offer a contemporary entertainment example related to the kind of political prescience I am referring to in this chapter, The

Post (2017) is a historical, Spielbergian film that treats

The Washington Post’s choice to publish The Pentagon Papers and the battle over issues of the first amendment that ensue during the Nixon administration. Spielberg sought to

22 For example, Arthur C. Clarke was able to predict something akin to the future broadcasting of television via satellite in 1945 (not occurring until 1962), and Edward Bellamy foresaw a utopian credit borrowing system via card In 1888, 62 years prior to the release of the Diner’s card (“8 Pieces”).

103 direct and produce this movie quickly because of the timeliness of its message (Freedland). In other words, hearing the anti-press rhetoric of the Trump administration, he saw parallels between the Nixon administration and the current one. The result is a film that seems prescient, as the president has continued this rhetoric, heralding “fake news” as a primary retort against news or news outlets he finds unfavorable. This and further developments in the Mueller investigation make this parallel appear even stronger. Nevertheless, as mentioned, at the time the film was created, there were already signs that lead Spielberg to focus on this story. This film, then, coming out at the moment that it did, teeters between evidence and prescience.

In “The Passing of Time and the Collective Memory of

Conflicts,” Nets-Zengut builds upon the ways that previous literature has demonstrated the influence of time on collective memory. The initial two spheres of influence are 1) the declassification or recent availability of documents related to particular conflicts or events and 2) the way that recent generations tend to reassess past events with a critical eye (Nets-Zengut 254). I would also add a third category of forgetting with time, as the generation who experienced a conflict or dictatorship may

104 no longer be living and the younger generation may not necessarily be aware of this history. Nehts-Zengut’s own elaborations on the question of time and memory come out of an analysis of many Israeli publications pertaining to the causes of the Palestinian exodus of 1948.23 The categories of influence of time on collective memory found in his study are:

(1) Dynamic environment—this relates to various social-political occurrences that influence the given society; (2) Time passing since the occurrence of the given event—this relates to the amount of time that has passed after the occurrence of the subject of the memory (in our case, since 1948); (3) Time passing since the country’s foundation—the country whose memory is in question; (4) Time passing since the signing of a peace agreement—an agreement between the rivals that finalizes the conflict. (Nets-Zengut 260)

Although each of these influential factors may not be generalizable to other conflicts, dictatorships, and experiences of trauma at the hands of the state, the first two relate to the time and conflict dynamic inherent to the novels in this chapter. That is, sociopolitical factors affect how different events are perceived at different moments, and the passing of time may lead to different changes related to documentation or memory. In the context of this chapter, although each novel differs in terms of

23 This refers to the period between 1947 and 1949 where many Palestinian Arabs were either forced to flee or voluntarily left Palestine during the formation of the Israeli state (Flapan).

105 context, both novels reflect on a past event or events in order to think about a present or future one.

Experimentation and Containment: Writing on the Brink of War

To return to La vida no tiene nombre, Marcio Veloz

Maggiolo, the author, is a prolific, celebrated author from the Dominican Republic whose work relies on multiple disciplines, including history and anthropology.

Experimentation is a hallmark of his work:

As a novelist and a short story writer he is vastly experimental. Some of the characteristics typical of the boom novels, and those that preceded and followed them, are also evident in Veloz Maggiolo’s work. Notably, the absence of an implicit, narrative voice, the lack of chronology in the story line, the focus on history, and the suggestion of an alternative interpretation of it are all characteristics of the boom novel and Veloz Maggiolo’s texts. Veloz Maggiolo examines the Trujillo era and explores Taíno and gagá mythology, intricately weaving them into his works. In this way, he has raised Dominican conscience over the importance of these aspects of Dominican history as part of the foundation of its culture. (Brown 118)

Although the narrative voice is clear in La vida no tiene nombre, Isabel Brown’s description demonstrates how Veloz

Maggiolo’s incorporation of history and histories inform his work. In the case of this text, instead of incorporating Indigenous mythologies, the main character and narrator, Ramón, is of Haitian descent and a defender of Dominican sovereignty against US occupation. The story also focuses on the point of view of a gavillero, or a

106 member of the armed resistance movement, rather than a story centered on the occupiers.

The time of this novel’s publication coincides roughly with the Dominican Civil War and US intervention. General

Bruce Palmer, Jr. who was to command all US forces upon his arrival in the Dominican Republic offers his own account of the intervention in Intervention in the Caribbean: The

Dominican Crisis of 1965. He offers this explanation by

General Earle G. Wheeler regarding President Johnson’s decision to intervene:

President Johnson had just decided to intervene in the Dominican Republic with the force necessary to prevent a Communist takeover. Not only did he fear that the leftist side would win the ongoing civil war and sooner or later be subverted and overpowered by the Communist elements of the revolution; he believed that a sudden, direct takeover was a distinct possibility and that the swift introduction of powerful U.S. forces was the only sure way to nip a Communist coup in the bud. The president was also determined to bring an end to the fighting in Santo Domingo and avoid a festering sore in the Western Hemisphere, particularly at this critical juncture when the United States was about to become deeply committed in Vietnam. (5)

By drawing parallels to Vietnam and to avoiding “a festering sore in the Western Hemisphere,” the politics of this intervention relate to containment, especially of communist leadership. It also relies upon the discourse of contagion, a question to which I will return in my discussion of Victor’s novel. A further rationale for the

107 intervention was to “prevent another Cuba” (Palmer, Jr. 4).

In addition to other US interventions meant to thwart leftist governments in Latin America, such as in Chile and

Nicaragua, in the latter half of the twentieth century, containment is particularly significant in the imperial historical relationship between the United States and the

Caribbean. In the “Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe

Doctrine,” Roosevelt makes an argument for US interference in the Caribbean in certain circumstances:

It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. (np)

The text also states that “If the great civilized nations of the present day should completely disarm, the result would mean an immediate recrudescence of barbarism in one form or another” (np). Beyond the justification of

108 preventing wrongdoing and encouraging peace in the region, then, the goal is one of containment and, specifically, containment, as it relates to the civilization and barbarism dichotomy. Whereas the Monroe Doctrine sought to keep Europe out of the Americas, the Roosevelt Corollary actively pursued this through intervention in addition to containing any conflicts or socio-economic and security factors that would be unfavorable to US interests.

The experimentation of resistance narratives, such as the novels at hand, offer a challenge to containment narratives by defying literary conventions and predominant structures. They also criticize and satirize political figures and the consequences of policies that lead to violent conflict, including US intervention in this case.

Veloz Maggiolo chooses to challenge this narrative by giving oice to a gavillero hero who is a Dominican of

Haitian descent, which not only challenges US containment narratives but also challenges some Dominican narratives related to national identity. In addition to scathing criticism and indictment of Haitian political figures and history, Victor’s novel also satirizes the US discourse of containment as it relates to contagion and the Haitian experience.

109

Race, Resistance and Dominicanidad en La vida no tiene nombre

Veloz Maggiolo’s novel opens with a reflection on the

Dominican Republic, extolling the virtues, especially the work ethic, of Dominicans, and it then transitions to the fear of anyone and everyone that has mounted since the arrival of the invaders with their machine guns and

Mausers. The narrator further explains how their rule of law has been established by force and immediately connects this situation to foreign invasion either as the result of colonialism or occupation in Dominican history:

Antes este país fué de los españoles. Contaban los viejos de mi campo lo mucho que se tuvo que pelear para echarlos fuera. … Los haitianos nos invadieron una vez, y los franceses y los ingleses; todo esto me lo dijeron los que saben de estas cosas y se han guardado sus historias para que los que vivimos en el campo no olvidemos que morir por nuestra tierra es un honor. (3)

Before, this country belonged to the Spanish. The old folks in my town used to talk about how much they had to fight to kick them out. The Haitians invaded us once, and the French and the English; this was all told to me by those who know about these things and have held on to these stories so that those of us that live in the country don’t forget that dying for our land is an honor.

This information and the direct reference to a captain by the name of Knapp by the second page of the text situate the occupation as that which occurred between 1916 and

1924. That is, Vice Admiral Harry Shepard Knapp occupied

110 the role of the Military Governor of Santo Domingo under the occupied military government in the Dominican Republic in addition to serving as the Military Representative of the United States in Haiti at the same time.

As mentioned, the narration in the text comes from

Ramón, who tells his story during his wait for execution in a jail cell for having participated in the armed resistance and killed his father. In this sense, this novelette is written through recall or as a retrospective.24 This style of narration reflects the wider project of the text, which recalls an occupied past for political purposes. Ramón, for example, states:

Hay escenas en mi vida que no olvidaré nunca. Es una tonteria recordar en estos momentos, cuando dentro de instantes no podré volver a hacerlo. Pero como siempre hago lo que creo prudente, me pongo a recordar y a recordar y creo que nadie molesto con eso. … Soy rencoroso porque me hicieron así. (8)

There are scenes in my life that I will never forget. It is trivial to remember in these moments, when within moments, I will not be able to do it again. But, like always, I do what I believe to be prudent, I start to remember and remember and I don’t believe I bother anyone with that … I am resentful because they made me that way.

24 I am using the term novelette (7,500 to 17,000 words) to refer to a piece of fiction that is longer than a short story (3,500 to 7,500 words) but shorter than a novella (17,000 to 40,000 words) (Meer).

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This complicated relationship with remembering comes from his experiences growing up that are tied to racial and national identity. Ramón explains that:

“Era el hijo de la negra, el hijo de Simián la sucia, descendiente de unos que cierta vez invadieron a Santo

Domingo: los haitianos. En la hacienda había otras negras que eran major tratadas que Simián. Esas no venían de

Haití, eran dominicanas y mi padre no las odiaba tanto”

(12; “I was the son of the black woman, the son of the dirty Simián, descendant of those that once invaded Santo

Domingo: the Haitians. In the hacienda, there were other black women that were better treated than Simián. They weren’t from Haiti, they were Dominican, and my father didn’t hate them as much”.). Although gender may also play a role, there is a direct correlation between the treatment of Simián and national identity or cultural belonging; that is, she is viewed as an invader and history used as a part of anti-Haitian ideology is invoked as justification.

Despite this, Ramón’s father is revealed to originate from the Netherlands despite living in the Dominican Republic for many years:

Sin embargo mi padre no era dominicano, era de un país muy lejano que se llama Holanda, pero tenía muchos años en Santo Domingo. ¿Qué culpa teníamos Simián y yo de todo esto? En todos los bateyes había haitianos que

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vivían en paz con los de aquí, solo en casa sucedían esas cosas. (12)

However, my father wasn’t Dominican. He was from a faraway country called Holland, but he had lived in the Dominican Republic for many years. What fault did Simián and I have for all of this? In all of the bateyes, there were Haitians that lived in peace with those from here, only at home did these things happen.

The narrator offers a counter to this seemingly nationalist and racialized rhetoric by suggesting that other Haitians live in relative harmony with Dominicans in the country.

Notably, as well, his father is not originally Dominican, and so the ideology toward whiteness here is associated with a European figure and—by extension—this is a commentary on the legacy of colonialism and empire on the island. Nevertheless, Ramón’s viewpoint of their home as an anomaly isn’t quite accurate or consistent even in the text, as he recalls Simián’s story of multiple assaults during her trip across the country in search of work. It is also significant that the cultural harmony the narrator invokes refers mostly to bateyes, which are very specific spaces—typically communities of agricultural workers, which have developed around the sugar mill industry and where community numbers may be largest during the time of the sugar harvest—that may be predominantly Haitian or populated by workers of Haitian descent.

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As a result of his upbringing, Ramón expresses a need to prove himself. He recalls:

Yo llevaba en mi alma el deseo profundo de demostrarle a los Vieth (así se apellidaban mi padre y sus hijos) que era más dominicano que ellos, que sentía mucho más que ellos amor por esta tierra que tanta traición ha engendrado en los últimos años. (12)

I carried in my soul the profound desire to show the Vieth (this was the last name of my father and his children) that I was more Dominican than they, that I felt much more than they love for this land, which had produced so much betrayal in recent years.

This is how he ultimately joins the gavilleros. It is to prove his bravery and his dominicanidad or Domincanness.

As a resistance hero and as someone recounting his story on the verge of martyrdom, Ramón’s trajectory in the text rewrites the justification of anti-Haitian ideology. That is, he is a Dominican with European and Haitian heritage, with the latter heritage serving as a source of pride rather than shame, and he is a member of the resistance.

He is not an invader, but a defender of Dominicans and their sovereignty. In a way, then, his collaborating white relatives become both the enemies of his childhood for his treatment by them and his adulthood as a resistance fighter. It is, in fact, his brother who betrays him and paves the road to his execution by firing squad:

Fremio heredó aquella [como del padre] sangre fria, aquel temperamento cínico y servil. Él es el verdadero causante de que hoy me encuentre casi frente

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al pelotón de fusilamiento. Me puso trampa en la que caí como una rata cualquiera. (20)

Fremio inherited that cold blood [like his father’s], that servile and cynical temperament. He is the real cause of the fact that I now find myself nearly in front of the firing squad. He set a trap for me that I fell into like any rat.

By focusing on a Dominican resistance member of Haitian and

Dutch origin whose pride rests in his Dominican and Haitian origins, this text attempts to resituate blackness and, to some extent, Haitianness from the margins or periphery to the center. It also reminds the reader of the colonial roots—the consequences of a pigmentocracy under slavery in the Caribbean—that have contributed to anti-Haitian ideology. By assigning anti-Haitian ideology to collaborators of European origin, it also speaks to the way that the Marine occupiers treated Dominicans and Haitians under occupation as well as the racism that informed it.

The takeaway in this occupied narrative, then, is that white European and Anglo-American masculinity and power can ideologically contaminate and corrupt Dominican identity and sovereignty.

Relatedly, the novel also deals with the specter of

Trujillo as a product of US intervention. That is,

Trujillo was trained by US Marines as a member of and eventual leader of the Dominican National Guard. He, of

115 course, also became the nation’s president and a brutal dictator between 1930 and 1961. Ramón describes him as violent and quick to torture gavilleros:

Los [prisioneros gavilleros] traía aquel oficial delgado, alto y requemado por el sol. Los soldados lo llamaban Trujillo. Me extranó ver a tantos dominicanos con el uniforme de la armada yanqui, y más que nada me dolió la presencia de aquel oficial joven que servía incondicionalmente a los gringos. (32)

That skinny, tall and sunburned official was bringing them [the gavillero prisoners]. The soldiers called him Trujillo. It shocked me to see so many Dominicans in the Yankee military uniform, and, more than anything, the presence of that young official who served the gringos unconditionally offended me.

In the last paragraph of the text as well, he is named as the example par excellence of a collaborator (42). This further solidifies the goal of the text, as Trujillo’s collaboration presents him as an enemy to Dominican sovereignty and challenges ex-post facto—at least in terms of when the text was written—the anti-Haitian ideology he would later espouse.

The episode that ultimately lands Ramón in jail leading to his demise results from Simián’s illness: she has tuberculosis and needs medical treatment in the capital. This takes place while both she and Ramón are hiding in the countryside. He decides to visit his family in the hopes of procuring financial assistance to pay for

116 her treatment. He arrives finding his father near death from cancer and his brother as untoward as ever. The latter entreats him to kill his father otherwise threatening a gunshot to Ramón’s head. He decides to comply, saying:

No sé como no permití que mejor me diera un balazo, pero ahora comprendo que lo hice porque así me vengaba de papá. Fremio me daba la oportunidad de aniquilarlo. Una vez lo prometí. Hace tiempo. Ahora veía la ocasión de cumplir con mi palabra” (39).

I don’t how I didn’t allow him to give me a bullet instead, but now I understand that I did it because in this way I could take my vengeance out on dad. Fremio was giving me the opportunity to kill him. I had once promised him. A long time ago. Now I saw the opportunity to keep my word.

Because Ramón also knows that his brother will turn him into the authorities (the occupiers) for the sizeable reward that his head demands, killing his father is both the revenge of the jilted son and a last stand against the occupiers, given his father’s collaboration.

Although Ramón’s narration often presents generalities that he later belies or contradicts, it does manage to render some of the complexities of the invasion in terms of

Dominican resistance and collaboration. On the one hand, he extolls Dominican virtues such as hard work for little reward and an ascetic approach to food. On the other, he explains that Dominicans are quick to turn in gavilleros

117 for a bite to eat or a few dollars because their stomachs dictate their behavior under the occupation. With the gavilleros, too, he describes them as patriots with the cards stacked against them in terms of numbers and fire power; yet, he also presents himself as someone who knows how to steal and the gavilleros more generally as figures capable of robbing and pillaging. Dominicans also range from soldiers and executioners to martyrs in the text. The final lines of the text continue this contradiction of

Ramón realizing that he has little time yet, his mother will die awaiting his return and his last hope is the gavilleros. In the same breath, however, his doubts about their success continue.

On Reception and Politics: Framing the International Question in A l’angle des rues parallèles

Victor’s novel relies heavily on the reader’s knowledge of Haitian history and political figures, condemning them harshly. These figures come across as corrupt orchestrators of Haiti’s problems, which reach apocalyptic proportions in the text. There are several moments and concerns—often inexplicable and violent—that point to apocalypse in the text, which include but are not limited to, the killing of God, the reversal of text / writing so that it can no longer be read, the blinding of

118 mirrors or their loss of the capacity to reflect, references to the biblical plagues in Egypt, and the cataclysmic opening of the earth—an earthquake—that kills many. This last reference to an earthquake speaks to the prescient and prophetic nature of this novel. As the aforementioned implies, one of the challenges of analyzing

A l’angle des rues parallèles through a lens of postmemory as resistance or analyzing it at all is its disorienting, somewhat opaque quality. This disorientation is due in part to the confluence of dissociative tendencies in the text. The novel is grounded in Haitian history and experience, which it frequently criticizes and mocks, but it includes frequent fantastic elements and inexplicable occurrences. Characters respond with both surprise to these events and a sense that they can believe anything can happen in this imaginary of Haiti. The text also tends to profane even the most sacred or celebrated aspects of

Haitian history, such as the Haitian founding fathers and the beginning of the Haitian Revolution at Bwa Kayiman.

This style, then, challenges containment narratives in its variability and its opacity. In addition to its content, the experimentation of this writing demonstrates resistance.

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Whereas this writing openly criticizes many aspects of

Haitian society and history as well as the international community through its content and its style to a degree, I would argue that the elite do not stand out. Put in other words, a fundamental concern in reading this text lies in its relationship to the question of responsibility for the conditions in Haiti in the late 1990s to the early 2000s.

That is, one of the initial textbook-like questions often asked of the specific challenges, such as poverty, income inequality and/or the nature of governance, facing many

Latin American countries is whether 1) colonialism and / or its consequences, 2) neocolonialism, neoliberalism, or imperialism more broadly, or 3) governmental corruption or other internal elements is / are responsible. While this is certainly a fantastic novel with an imaginary of Haiti, this political question does tend to inform readings of this text because of its grounding in a particular context.

In Leak’s reading, for example, Aristide’s having raised the specter of the indemnity that France demanded of Haiti for recognition following the Haitian Revolution as well as a series of articles published in the time period and afterward in France lend credence to the idea that Victor’s rewriting of the text is meant to satisfy a foreign, particularly French, audience, and to promote a particular

120 agenda—painting Haiti under Aristide as violent and brand him as an incapable and, even, dangerous leader. I concur with the idea that the French media and international media tend to depict Haiti as impoverished and imply an incapability of peaceful, sustainable self-governance; however, it isn’t clear that the rewriting or at least the points of convergence Leak notes convey particular concern with France’s agenda. The problem, I would say, is that this kind of media coverage was not limited to that time period; that is, it remains relatively continuous.

Nonetheless, concerning the question about responsibility that was previously raised, this novel does demonstrate that all three factors are responsible in a sense, but internal elements shoulder more blame. In this regard, I agree with Leak’s assessment of the portrayal of Aristide as a detrimental leader in the context of this text.

Munro, on the other hand, argues that Victor’s take on

Haiti is more nuanced than many foreign critics were willing to admit:

Victor implicitly challenges the prevailing idea among influential Anglophone intellectuals that Aristide was solely a victim of external influences. In Victor’s view, Aristide and Lavalas were the beneficiaries of foreign support, at least at this point in time. Victor further complicates received notions of Haitian political relations in insisting that while the ruling classes constitute a “morally repugnant elite,” the “excluded venerate their chains,” that is the poor are

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to some extent implicated in and responsible for their own condition (ibid.). Already, Victor suggests a far more complex idea of social and political ties in Haiti than is sometimes allowed by foreign critics, who seem at times too ready to present the poor as absolutely powerless in determining their own destinies. (“Tropical Apocalypse” 96-97)

I agree with Munro’s assertion that foreign critics can be

guilty of reading Haitian people and cultural products that

represent them, and I would argue more broadly the people

and cultures of the global South, through a lens that

reduces or undermines their agency. It is also true that

Victor’s writing does not limit itself to a single group of

people or aspect of Haitian experience or history as the

unique culprit or cause of the events in the text. At the

same time, however, in the context of the novel, the Chosen

One and his followers bear the brunt of the blame. He is a

primary architect of the apocalyptic events in the novel,

and his repeated interventions in the novel point to this.

Munro, too, attests that:

Victor’s close alignment of the demagogue with Jean- Bertrand Aristide constitutes one of the boldest and starkest denunciations of Aristide and Lavalas in any form, and contrasts sharply with the depiction of the Haitian leader in some of the influential Anglophone discourse discussed earlier in this chapter. (“Tropical Apocalypse” 96)25

• 25 Peter Hallward’s Damning the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment is an example of a text that tends toward blaming external influences for the fall and exile of Aristide. For more on the debate on this text and the question of Aristide, see the section entitled “Book Discussion: Alex Dupuy, The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti; And Peter Hallward,

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One of the more extreme examples of this in the text occurs when the Chosen One decides to kill God and declares his decision to do so. Mataro elucidates that:

<> (154-155)

The Chosen One declared that he would kill God. With God dead, there would be neither morality nor transcendence. Then, power would henceforth belong to him, the Chosen One. We were the first independent black republic of the world, we would also be the first people to commit a murder of this nature to revolutionize the history of humanity. … I am going to quote a phrase that the Chosen One spoke this morning: “At the intersection of parallel streets, our people will pass to a higher stage of its evolution. After having drunk the blood of the pig for more than two centuries, we will drink the blood of God from now on.”

This is emblematic of the level of control the Chosen One has in comparison to the President in the text, and it is extreme not only in its indictment of the lengths the

Chosen One will go as a power-hungry and delusional

Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment” of Small Axe, Volume 13, Number 3 from 2009, which includes pieces by Lyonel Trouillot, Alex Dupuy, Peter Hallward, Valerie Kaussen, and Nick Nesbitt.

123 character but also in the way it renders Haitian history, specifically the Haitian Revolution as profane. This part of the exceptionalist discourse of Haiti—that of the first independent, black republic—is put on notice here and elsewhere in the text.26 Although this novel differs from many others in my corpus in that it does not limit its critique and focus to occupation or intervention, the way that it grapples with the role of the United States and the international community in the Haitian political situation speaks to a particular kind of resistance, an engagement with memory as well as evoking the symbolism of imperialism.

US and International Intervention: A Discourse of Contagion and Containment

In Victor’s novel, the CIA and the IMF are the US and international organizations that the protagonist, Eric, blames for his loss of work. While they are entities that hang over the novel and have affected the protagonist’s sense of control over his life and identity, at least in his own mind, the question of empire that permeates the text and connects to its apocalyptic elements is the discourse on contagion or disease. To place this in

26 The other predominant discourse of exceptionalism around Haiti is its being the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

124 context, the US media has a history of presenting the emerging world in terms of poverty, disease and disaster.

This means focusing on natural disasters such as earthquakes or hurricanes, the prevalence of particular diseases or maladies endemic to a region (i.e., Zika,

Chikungunya), and/or diseases exacerbated by limited health care resources (i.e., HIV, cholera, or tuberculosis). In the case of Haiti in particular, in the 1980s, the CDC listed recent Haitian immigrants as a group at risk for contracting AIDS, a move that many Haitian immigrants contested (Altman np). In the text, this history comes to the fore after mirrors begin to go blind or no longer reflect images. Relatedly, Eric hears a news bulletin on the radio that projects fear toward Haiti’s current state of affairs:

Le Département d’Etat américain envisageait d’interdire aux avions américains de se poser en Haïti pour éviter la contagion. La contagion de quoi? m’étonnai je. Les Haïtiens et les étrangers en provenance d’Haïti arrivant sur le térritoire américain étaient systématiquement fouillés, dépouillés de tout ce qui ressemblait de près ou de loin à un miroir. (34)

The American Department of State planned to prohibit American planes from landing in Haiti to avoid contagion. The contagion of what? I asked, surprised. The Haitians and the foreigners coming from Haiti were systematically searched and stripped of anything remotely resembling a mirror.

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Thus, this inexplicable occurrence in Haiti becomes a question of containment against contagion when those leaving Haiti arrive in the United States and their mirrors and similar objects are confiscated. Simultaneously, there is a seeming moratorium on travel to Haiti. Nevertheless, as the chaotic events of the novel reach a fever pitch, the

Americans change their tune:

J’entendis un ronronnement dans le ciel. Il ne s’agissait pas d’une nouvelle nuée de mouches, mais d’une escadrille d’hélicoptères de l’armée américaine survolant la ville. ‘Tous leurs scientifiques sont sur le coup! s’esclaffa Mataro. S’ils avaient compris le danger que nous représentions, la Caraïbe n’aurait pas ce cancer en son sein. Maintenant, il est trop tard. Ils ne peuvent que le contenir.’ (170)

I heard a whirring in the sky. It wasn’t a question of another swarm of flies, but a squadron of helicopters from the American army flying over the city. “All of their scientists are on the case!,” Mataro burst out laughing. If they had realized the danger that we represented, the Caribbean wouldn’t have this cancer in its breast. Now, it is too late. They can only contain it.

At this point, it is too late to reverse any of the bizarre goings on in Haiti, at least according to Mataro and Eric.

At the same time, though, the Americans appear to be there to collect data and contain the spread of the contagion.

In other words, this is about learning about the apparent disease and preventing people from leaving the island rather than offering help. Ironically and tellingly, Eric compares the looming, invading army to the swarms of flies

126 that have been afflicting the city. The arrival of the

Americans creates a kind of synergy between the discourse on contagion and the political motivations behind invasion and peacekeeping, which plays out through containment here.

Additionally, the narrator places the American invasion into the broader experience of contagion, disease, and other apocalyptic events at play in Haiti within the text by comparing their arrival to one of the ten biblical plagues of Egypt. It also uses a language of containment, which is a hallmark of US imperialism, as previously discussed with Veloz Maggiolo’s text. Although this scene is chaotic and does not come across as empowering within the context of the novel, it is interesting that the text exaggerates and recasts the discourse of contagion in such a way that Haiti—as a place that cannot be controlled according to the text—comes across as resistant to pathology. In other words, the efforts to control and sanitize from the outside have rendered it more resistant, to channel the concept of antimicrobial resistance. I choose the wording resistant to pathology rather than pathological resistance because of the associated negative connotations related to common collocations with pathological such as pathological liar. Whereas the discourse of contagion has been used against Haiti and

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Victor recreates it here, the text seems to fuse the apocalyptic with the carnivalesque, leading to a subversion of the discourse of contagion. Perhaps inadvertently, this resistance to pathology within the text suggests that greater sovereignty would mitigate some of the more harmful events in the novel.27

Furthermore, it is worth noting that the symbol of US intervention in the novel is the helicopter. This symbol also reappears in L’Œil-totem, a novel to which I will turn in Chapter Four: Resisting Forgetting in the 21st Century.

What I would argue, then, is that the gunboat of gunboat diplomacy signified US interventionism and US imperialism more broadly in the early 20th century, although artists wishing to recall that moment still deploy it.28 Now, aircraft carriers, which are essentially far more technologically advanced gunboats or warships with the capability of housing and deploying multiple aircraft—in

27 I do not wish to suggest that Haiti is perennially resilient as many writers have. However, the language and events of the novel together with the discourse on contagion point toward the possibilities of antimicrobial resistance or, what I term, resistance to pathology. 28 Reimagining and commenting on paintings related to expansionism in the Caribbean from the 19th century, Edouard Duval-Carrié developed a set of paintings and statues entitled Imagined Landscapes (2013). One of the paintings from this collection, After Bierstadt: The Landing recreates the Bierstadt painting, The Landing of Columbus. In this endeavor, he humorously includes many popular culture figures from the United States in the arriving boat with Columbus, such as Minnie Mouse and Bugs Bunny. In the background, however, a US gunboat looms to ensure their safe arrival.

128 the world are a symbol of US imperialism, but the specific aircraft that manifests in recent Haitian novels to depict

US involvement is the helicopter.

Dominican Presence in the Novel

Most of the Dominican works in my corpus contain references to Haitians or Dominicans of Haitian descent living in the Dominican Republic. In contrast, the Haitian works in my corpus generally do not contain references to

Dominicans or Haitians of Dominican descent who live in

Haiti. Part of this is a question of numbers: there are more Haitian migrants to the Dominican Republic than the reverse. I should also note that the settings of the works tend to correspond to their authors’ origins. That said, A l’angle des rues parallèles does contain references to

Dominicans in Haiti as well as the relationship between the two countries. The primary character in this regard is

Vicky, a companion of Mataro, whom Eric describes upon his initial confrontation with the latter:

Un homme s’était réfugiait derrière Mataro. Enfin, pas vraiment un homme. Une sorte d’androgyne. C’était un mulâtre, probablement un Dominicain, à en juger par son accent. Il portait uniquement des sous- vetements de soie noire: un soutien-gorge, une culotte, des jarretières et des bas. Je fus fasciné par ses talons hauts. (35)

A man had taken refuge behind Mataro. Well, not really a man. A kind of androgynous person. He was a mulatto, probably a Dominican, going by his accent.

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He was only wearing black silk underwear: a bra, panties, garters, and stockings. I was mesmerized by his high heels.

When he comes out from behind Mataro, Eric shoots him, resulting in Vicky’s death. At the end of this interaction between Eric and Mataro, Mataro cries and states: “Il n’y avait aucune raison de tuer Vicky. Il peut se transformer en une emmerdeuse géniale quand on lui fait du mal” (43;

“There was no reason to kill Vicky. He can become a great pain in the ass when someone hurts him”). Indeed, for much of the remainder of the novel, Vicky haunts Eric, primarily in his dreams.

Although Vicky’s character and occupation aren’t clearly defined, his attire shows that he has an intimate relationship with Mataro.29 This characterization of a

Dominican character is a reminder of the migration of

Dominicans to Haiti, however small the numbers may be in comparison to Haitians to the Dominican Republic. He is also a primary figure of haunting in the novel. Although

Vicky’s appearance in his dreams does not truly stop Eric’s rampage, it does influence his decisions and Vicky is a constant disturbing reminder of Eric’s murderous behavior.

This is in an ironic way an embodiment of trauma’s ghost to

29 I am using the pronouns he and him to refer to Vicky as that is how Mataro, his lover or intimate partner, usually refers to him.

130 use Bellamy’s term; yet, it is Eric, in this case, who is largely responsible for this particular haunting.

The other intimation of Dominican presence or involvement with Haiti appears in a similar vein to that of the Americans. When Eric calls Mataro and demands his help to leave the country, Mataro responds:

Le gouvernement tente de retarder l’annonce de la nouvelle, Eric. Les Américains ont suspendu toutes les liaisons aériennes, maritimes et meme téléphoniques avec nous. Les Dominicains ont verrouillé la frontière. Je crois que vous êtes au courant: tout ce qui est écrit dans ce pays s’inverse et il n’y a plus de miroirs pour décoder. (90)

The government is trying to delay the announcement of the news, Eric. The Americans have suspended all maritime, air, and even telephone contact with us. The Dominicans have closed the border. I think that you are aware: everything that is written within this country is reversed and there are no more mirrors to decipher.

The two countries with the strongest connections with Haiti in terms of spaces of migration close their borders or communication as a result of the catastrophe. The other major incident is an atrocity at the Dominican-Haitian border:

J’espère que vous avez quitté votre projet de quitter Haiti. Parce que, sur la frontière, c’est un veritable massacre. Et nous n’y pouvons rien. Les Dominicains paniquent. Chez eux, rien ne se passe. Les miroirs sont normaux, mais on prétend que dans les batey, dans les communautés haïtiennes, on a observé le meme phénomène qu’ici. Alors, les militaires dominicains brûlent hommes, femmes, enfants, animaux, maisons. Un caravane composée d’une vingtaine de

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Jeeps transportant quelques-unes de nos grandes familles a tenté de traverser la frontière. Les soldats dominicains ont ouvert le feu sans les sommations d’usage. Ce qui restait de la caravane a été passé au lance-flammes. La commmunauté internationale, trop désireuse de se protéger, ne dit rien. Aux USA également, c’est la meme hystérie. La garde nationale a encerclé Little Haiti à Miami. C’est la chasse aux Haïtiens, qui sont placés dans des camps spéciaux pour examen scientifique, dit-on. Il est encore heureux qu’ici il n’y ait aucune flambée de violence. Les gens se terrent chez eux et dans les églises. (120-121)

I hope that you have given up your project of leaving Haiti. Because, at the border, it’s a real massacre. Over there, nothing is happening. The mirrors are normal, but they pretend that in the bateyes, in the Haitian communities, they have seen the same phenomenon as here. Now, the Dominican military are burning men, women, children, animals, homes. A caravan composed of twenty or so Jeeps transporting some of our grand families attempted to cross the border. The Dominican soldiers opened fire without warning. What remained of the caravan had been taken out with a flame-thrower. The international community, overly desirous to protect itself, says nothing. In the United States, it is the same hysteria. The national guard has surrounded Little Haiti in Miami. It’s the hunt for Haitians who are placed in special camps for scientific study, they say. It is fortunate that there isn’t an outbreak of violence here. People are bunkered down in their homes or churches.

This event recalls the Parsley Massacre in its violence and senselessness. It differs, however, in that class and its relationship to race are not deciding factors over treatment. That is, even the grandes familles crossing the border are affected by this massacre. Seemingly, then, the

Dominicans in the imaginary of the novel have chosen to

132 take out their distaste for all Haitians as cultural others on those crossing the border and use the discourse of contagion to justify it.

The Not So Static Statue: On Memorialization and Resistance

Victor’s novel has a sense of circular history, and the memory of this seems to haunt the story and some of the characters. The inclusion of an animated statue of Saint

Peter speaks to the role of public memory in the imaginary of Haiti in the novel. I am using Houdek and Phillips’ definition of public memory, which is as follows:

The term public memory refers to the circulation of recollections among members of a given community. These recollections are far from being perfect records of the past; rather, they entail what we remember, the ways we frame it, and what aspects we forget. Broadly, public memory differs from official histories in that the former is more informal, diverse, and mutable where the latter is often presented as formal, singular, and stable. (1)

Animating the public statue in the novel re-animates the past and what a group of people have chosen to commemorate, and the behavior of the statue also calls into question what we choose to monumentalize and memorialize.

Eric first comes into contact with the statue after riding a tap-tap in search of Marjorie, a prostitute. He falls asleep at a roundabout containing the statue of Saint

Peter after disembarking and awakes to something poking him in his ribs, but he doesn’t see anyone:

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Aucune trace non plus du cauchemar que je cragnais, à part la statue que les habitants de Pétion-Ville appelaient communément P’tit Saint Pierre. Toutes sortes d’histoires couraient, les unes plus étranges que les autres, sur cette statue. Elle refusait, disait- on, de rester dans une église. Finalement, on l’avait emprisonnée ici. Ce rond-point était le théâtre, certains soirs, de cérémonies que des âmes pieuses qualifiaient de diaboliques, mais qui, pour d’autres, n’étaient que’hommages rendus à un saint qui les avait comblés de bienfaits. Je finis par me convaincre que le cauchemar m’avait tellement affecté que je me mettais désormais à délirer. (84)

Not another trace of the nightmare I was fearing apart from the statue that the inhabitants of Petionville commonly called Little Saint Peter. All sorts of stories circulated, some stranger than others, about this statue. It refused, they said, to remain in a church. Finally, it was imprisoned here. This roundabout was the theatre, some nights, of ceremonies of pious souls considered diabolical, but that, for others, were nothing but homages rendered to a saint that had showered them with good deeds. I wound up convincing myself that the nightmare had affected me so much that I had started to hallucinate.

The protagonist falls asleep again and is prodded with an elbow once more. He then encounters the statue who knows

Eric’s name and convinces him that what he is experiencing is real. The statue asks him to be freed, and when Eric asks why he should do such a thing, the statue replies: “Parce qu’il n’y a que moi, peut-être, à pouvoir vous protéger de la peste” (84; “Because there isn’t anyone but me, perhaps, who will be able to protect you from the plague”). In his attempt to convince Eric to release him, he offers a narrative of

Port-au-Prince:

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Je peux te raconter toute l’histoire de cette ville, me proposa la statue. Et aussi la petite histoire , la vraie, celle qu’on ne raconte pas dans les livres, et pour cause! Les jeunes mulâtres qui partent à la chasse des jeunes négresses pour les pervertir, les engrosser et ensuite les abandoner sur les trottoirs, les étrangers qui trouvent Haïti merveilleux parce qu’ils peuvent se trouver de beaux jeunes culs de mineurs pour une bouchée de pain, surtout sans être inquiétés, les gens de la haute société qui ratissent les putains aux carrefours obscurs pour les besoins de leur partouze de fin de semaine, les GI’s qui, pour ne pas profaner leur pénis de race supérieure, perforent les femmes avec d’étranges instruments achetés dans les sex-shops des grandes villes du Nord, les imposteurs qui déciment la population à la grenade pour se faire un capital politique, les prêtres qui forniquent, les défroqués qui valsent avec Bawon Samedi,30 les journalistes qui se vendent aux prophètes, les trafiquants de drogue qui font pleuvoir du dollar sur les autorités prétendument constituées, les comédiens en costume cravate qui, pour tromper l’étranger, font semblant de croire à la démocratie et à la justice, et bien d’autres choses encore. (86)

I can tell you the whole (hi)story of this city, the statue proposed. And also the anecdotal one, the true one, the one that isn’t told in books, and for good reason! The young mulattos who chase after young black women to pervert them, impregnate them and then abandon them on the streets, the foreigners who find Haiti marvelous because they can find beautiful, underage pieces of ass for a bite of bread, especially without being concerned, people of high society who rake in the prostitutes at obscure intersections for the needs of their weekend orgies, the GI’s who, in order to not profane their penises of superior race, pierce the women with strange instruments bought in the sex shops of the large cities of the North, the imposters who decimate the population with grenade attacks for political capital, the priests who fornicate, the defrocked who waltz with Bawon Samedi, the journalists who sell themselves out to the prophets, the drug traffickers who make the dollar rain over the supposedly established

30 Bawon Samedi is best known as a lwa of the dead and the leader of the Guédé family, but he can also resurrect or cure people.

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authorities, the comedians in suit and tie who, to fool the foreigner, pretend to believe in democracy and justice, and many other thingsl.

Although it is only the help that the statue offers Eric with regard to his nightmares of Vicky (to help rid him of this particular torment) that convince him to free him, this tirade is an indictment of entities who take advantage of the marginalized and refers to a confluence of influences in

Haitian society. It is as though this statue has been able to see and hear of all oppressions as a figure to which many pray or pay homage. Upon his freeing, the statue cries out:

“Ayibobo!31 Je suis libre” (88; “’Ayibobo!’ I am free.”).

Instead of helping Eric, the statue flees, eventually coming across Marjorie whom Eric asks about the statue:

C’est lui, s’effondra en pleurs la pute. J’avais pensé qu’il s’agissait d’un enfant. On voit et on s’habitue à tout de nos jours. Il a exigé qu’on fasse cela sans préservatif. J’ai refusé. Même avec un enfant, on ne sait jamais. Il s’est alors faché, disant qu’on n’avait pas le droit de traiter un saint de cette manière. Il m’a frappée. C’est alors que je me suis rendu compte qu’il ne s’agissait que d’une statue. J’ai voulu me défendre, mais il est aussi fort qu’un adulte. Si vous n’étiez pas arrivé, il m’aurait violée. (93)

That’s him, the whore said, bursting into tears. I had thought that it was a matter of a child. We see and we get used to everything these days. He demanded that we do it without a condom. I refused. Even with a child, you never know. He then got mad, saying that we didn’t

31 The text includes an asterisk next to the word ayibobo and the glossary in the back of the novel indicates that this term is a salutation from Vodun. Furthermore, it is used to express enthusiasm, with some equating it to Hallelujah or Amen. Additionally, it can convey congratulations.

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have the right to treat a saint that way. He hit me. That’s when I realized that it was only a statue. I wanted to defend myself, but he is as strong as an adult. If you hadn’t arrived, he would have raped me.

The statue’s behavior profanizes the intention of its creation as well as contradicts the expectations of saintdom, something he uses to challenge those who do not acquiesce to his desires. The statue then becomes this vessel of contradiction and unintended encounters: the sacred and the profane, stasis and movement, and sanctioned and unsanctioned worship.

This section of the novel reminds me of the period following the departure of Baby Doc in Port-au-Prince known as dechoukaj or uprooting32 wherein some Haitians advanced on property belonging to the Duvalier family, tearing apart a statue of Papa Doc stone by stone. Other Duvalier properties were taken, and members of the Tonton Makout—the former violent militia under the Duvaliers—were sometimes attacked or killed. The specific incident to which I refer however is the removal of a statue of Columbus, which, according to Marlise Simons, was twice taken from its pedestal and thrown into the sea during the period of dechoukaj:

32 A second definition from the Haitian Creole-English dictionary from the Indiana University Creole Institute holds that dechoukaj can also refer to mob justice.

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On the morning Columbus's pedestal was found empty, a cardboard message was left in his place. ''Foreigners out of Haiti,'' it read. A young man in a dark suit addressed a small crowd. ''Columbus was the first Nazi,'' he said. ''He caused the extermination of the Indians; he caused the slave trade.'' ''Vagabonds!'' shouted a bystander above the faint applause. ''What has Columbus to do with anything? He was here long before Duvalier.'' ''It's the left doing this,'' said a woman from her car window. ''Who else would call Columbus a Nazi? Ordinary Haitians don't know such things.'' On a street nearby, someone had left another hint in charcoal letters: ''Long live Charlemagne Peralte.'' That referred to an army officer who rebelled against the United States occupation of Haiti earlier in this century, formed a guerrilla group and was killed in 1919 by an American marine. A few days after Columbus was removed from his pedestal and city workers had hoisted the statue back on shore, he was pushed back into the sea again. He will stay there until further notice, the Mayor's office said. (Simons)

Although there isn’t consensus with regard to Columbus and the statue in Haiti even within the previously cited article from The New York Times in 1986, the crux of the statue’s removal and the notes left indicate that this act of defiance relates to the issue of power and foreign influence in Haiti. These notes—those left by individuals who presumably contributed to the statue’s uprooting—equate or at the very least assume commonalities between colonialism, occupation, and the Duvalier dictatorship. On the one hand, this lends credence to the idea of Duvalier as an invader from within, but it also speaks more

138 generally to the way that powerful entities have left behind a legacy of oppression that must be uprooted. Viala claims that:

The collective anger transferred to the Columbus statue in Port-au-Prince … reveals the importance of the slave heritage in the Haitian imagination and the collective instinct of the people to unite forces thanks to meaningful symbols of their past. It is obvious that in a Caribbean country like Haiti, black national pride is powerful. Still, there was not any anti-Columbus project in Haiti in 1992, and no desire to engage with other islands where the anti- commemorative struggle was rooted in the defense of black heritage, as in Jamaica for example. Toppling Columbus statue was an impulsive, unpredictable, and popular performance, with which the ruling elite did not want to deal at all. (207)

The reason I draw together the statue from Victor’s novel and this act in 1986 is not just because both challenge the supposedly static nature of a monument. Instead, I would argue that both represent defiance and an articulation of resistance that recognizes how to demonumentalize or change the narrative of the monument. Henri Lefebvre, for example, describes monumentalization in terms of the sacred and the profane:

Any object - a vase, a chair, a garment - may be extracted from everyday practice and suffer a displacement which will transform it by transferring it into monumental space: the vase will become holy, the garment ceremonial, the chair the seat of authority. The famous bar which, according to the followers of Saussure, separates signifier from signified and desire from its object, is in fact transportable hither and thither at the whim of society, as a means of separating the sacred from the

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profane and of repressing those gestures which are not prescribed by monumental space - in short, as a means of banishing the obscene. (225-226)

In the case of the transformation of the statue of the novel and the uprooting of Columbus, the meaning of the statue is profoundly changed, the intended purpose of the statue is transformed or upended, and the sacred becomes profane. The goal in the novel is to call into question all of the confluence of factors that have led the Haiti of the book to that moment. Uprooting Columbus, too, was a reminder of the legacy of colonialism and its relationship to other forms of oppression, especially that of the

Duvalier dictatorship, to Haiti. The novel challenges the cults of personality and cults of heroes. In so doing, it rethinks commemoration, but it is a shocking and profound meditation on Haitian history and memory. It is also a novel of pure resistance in content and style with sometimes disturbing results.

Conclusion

To conclude, both La vida no tiene nombre and A l’angle des rues parallèles are texts that treat the question of US empire. Although written at different historical moments and in varying political contexts, each is informed by past instances of invasion, occupation, or other aspects of US empire, and at the same time focuses on

140 a present or prescient question of empire. In Veloz

Maggiolo’s text, this means recalling the 1916-1924 occupation while writing on the verge of a second US occupation during the Dominican Civil War. For Victor, the events of the 90s in Haiti inform his novel, and the publication of the rewriting of the novel in 2003 occurs around the same time as violence escalates in Haiti ultimately leading to a second Aristide ouster with US and international involvement. Both of these novels are invested in recalling past events to resist forgetting but also to draw attention to political events, including US intervention, in the present (that is, the present that is contemporaneous to their novels’ publication). At the same time, they have an almost prescient quality, especially in the case of Victor’s novel, which relies heavily on apocalyptic imagery. The two novels, ultimately, serve as resistance narratives—writing against anti-Haitian ideology and a colonial viewpoint on identity and belonging in La vida no tiene nombre and, challenging both narratives that mythologize Aristide as well as denouncing many aspects of

United States-Haiti relations in the case of A l’angle des rues parallèles. At the same time, their resistance goes beyond only “writing against” as they also create. They serve as experimental narratives in terms of style as well

141 as in the role of time and recent history in their construction (prescience), and they challenge the reader in this regard. They are, thus, significant albeit unique examples of postmemorial, resistance narratives.

Chapter Four: Resisting Forgetting in the 21st Century

Although the majority of US intervention and occupation of Latin America had ended by the turn of the millennium, 2001 saw the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which resulted in the war in Afghanistan and, somewhat less directly, in the war in Iraq.33 This resurgence of occupation along with the approach of centenaries of occupation in the Caribbean sparked interest in the question of intervention and occupied history in artistic and academic pursuits.34 Two novels that come out of the early to mid-aughts that treat the question of US occupation from almost a century prior in the Dominican

Republic and Haiti respectively are Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints (2003) and L’Œil-Totem (2006) by Evelyne

Trouillot. The former is a Dominican-American historical novel that is divided into sections called songs; it treats four generations of women from the same family across time, beginning with Graciela, the daughter of a family of limited means living in or near Santo Domingo. It begins

33 The primary justification for the War in Iraq was the possession or development of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), but other reasons were also cited, including a relationship to Al Quaeda and human rights concerns to name a couple. For more on this subject, please see James Fallows’ “The Right and Wrong Questions about the Iraq War” and Esther Pan’s “Iraq: Justifying the War.” 34 In addition to novels, paintings, and documentaries by artists and thinkers, there have been symposia, conferences, and special editions of journals devoted to the question of occupation and intervention at or near the time of their centenaries. 142

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at the outset of the US Occupation in 1916, includes the

Parsley Massacre of 1937, continues into the Trujillo regime, and treats the wave of Dominican migration to the

United States in the second half of the 20th century. The latter is a short Haitian novel that furnishes a textual dialogue between generations through the voices and thoughts of Marie-Jeanne, an elderly woman still living in

Port-au-Prince and Dimitri, her grandson who lives in the

United States. That is, instead of traditional chapters, each section is titled with either Marie-Jeanne or

Dimitri’s name, and that section is presumably told from the point of view of that character. Through the grandmother’s recollection of past events—which range from reminiscence to haunting—the reader learns about her experience with the US occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). As both novels were written in the 21st century about prior US occupations in Hispaniola, they each contribute to a project of postmemory, serving as cultural tools that intend to represent and recall these events.

Whereas Rosario writes about the occupation as a historical recreation, Trouillot’s novel examines the occupation from the early 2000s, utilizing recall and the process of memory. Despite these temporal differences, both novels treat occupation largely through the

144 experiences of female protagonists who survive and witness violence against women at the hands of the occupiers. The violence of invasion and occupation is, then, represented through female suffering—although these characters do resist, exhibiting at times cunning and/or defiance—and draws both on the feminization of the nation or metonymy of the female protagonist or other female characters as nation. This usage of female characters in novels treating occupation in Hispaniola hearkens back to contemporaneous occupied novels of the early 20th century in Haiti, wherein sexual encounters, including affairs, rebuffed sexual advances, and rape corresponded to complicit behavior

(i.e., seeking benefits or career advancement furnished by the occupying forces), contributing to resistance against occupying forces or the occupied culture, and the experience of invasion and the loss of sovereignty more generally.35 The novels also linguistically engage the questions of sovereignty, resistance, and performance of

35 In Cléante Valcin’s La Blanche Négresse (1934), for example, Fernande Vernon’s (a Haitian woman) rejection of Colonel Murray (an American military figure and part of the occupying forces) is one example of this kind of resistance. For additional analyses of sexual encounters in some of the occupied novels from Haiti, see Nadève Ménard’s dissertation, The Occupied Novel: The Representation of Foreigners in Haitian Novels Written during the US Occupation, 1915—1934, Myriam Chancy’s Framing Silence, and J. Michael Dash’s Haiti and the United States.

145 identity: in L’Œil-Totem, this means transitioning between languages and in Song of the Water Saints, a hybrid of

English and Spanish emerges. Additionally, image—postcards and photos in Song of the Water Saints and painting in

L’Œil-Totem—becomes a medium for understanding

(post)memory, identity construction, and resistance for the protagonists and their families and their relationship to occupation in the text. These texts also further delve into questions of class, gender, race, and migration as they relate to US occupation in Hispaniola. Additionally, both of these texts specifically link gender with memory through their female protagonists. Both protagonists exhibit resistance to occupying forces, and the behavior of the occupying forces corresponds to violence against women, including treating them as second-class citizens because of who they are: their race, their gender, and their nationality. In addition to the question of gendered violence and resistance, women are often key purveyors of family history and traditions. In contrast, they are usually not key players in official histories. Because these novels task themselves with unearthing history or stored memory that may have been forgotten as well as

146 potentially rewriting a US version of these events, utilizing female protagonists becomes an integral part of that revision.

In some ways, however, these women do contrast in their relationship to remembrance and memory culture.36

Reading Graciela’s experience in Song of the Water Saints transports the reader into a coming of age historical novel, which differs from Marie-Jeanne’s retrospective approach in L’Œil-Totem—telling her story of occupation toward the end of her life. Their relationship to place also varies. Graciela longs for a home that differs from where she grew up, and her desire to travel begins from a young age. I term Graciela’s sense of dissatisfaction and desire to leave as unrootedness. I am using the term unroot in contrast to uproot as a way of indicating that this wandering nature relates to her own desires and agency. That is, to uproot often has the connotation of being forced to move or leave against one’s will. Marie-

Jeanne, in contrast to Graciela, refuses to leave what she considers her home, even as her children make this more difficult for her. They are in fact trying to uproot her.

36 I am using Schraut and Paletschek’s definition of memory culture where the term describes “the contents and the forms of representation of memory as well as the social functions of memory” (8).

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I argue that the opposed personalities of the protagonists— where Graciela is an example of unrootedness and Marie-

Jeanne is her more rooted counter—contribute to an understanding of Hispaniola and national identity tied to gendered resistance. Specifically, Graciela wants to unroot herself and move beyond her small shack and neighborhood, whereas Marie-Jeanne is fighting the uprooting and migration that her family attempts to force upon her. With this in mind, I propose that each protagonist participates in a kind of rooted errantry. I am drawing on Glissant’s terminology, but I am redeploying the term to some degree. That is, Glissant designates

Saint-John Perse’s poetry as an example of rooted errantry because, in part, of its constant rerouting, its lack of grounding in singular times and places, as well as its being rooted in the idea of history, rather than actual, totalizing histories. Glissant also states that this root is not a rhizomatic one (Poetics 41). Because the term remains relatively vague but points to the melding of elements of root and relation, I am using the term to refer to a convergence of varying aspects of root and relation.

That is, Glissant characterizes the differences between root and relation identities in the following way:

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Root identity -is founded in the distant past in a vision, a myth of the creation of the world; -is sanctified by the hidden violence of a filiation that strictly follows from this founding episode; -is ratified by a claim to legitimacy that allows a community to proclaim its entitlement to the possession of a land, which thus becomes a territory; -is preserved by being projected onto other territories, making their conquest legitimate – and through the project of a discursive knowledge. Root identity therefore rooted the thought of self and of territory and set in motion the thought of the other and of voyage.

Relation identity -is linked not to a creation of the world but to the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures; -is produced in the chaotic network of Relation and not in the hidden violence of filiation; -does not devise any legitimacy as its guarantee of entitlement, but circulates, newly extended; -does not think of a land as a territory from which to project toward other territories but as a place where one gives-on-and-with rather than grasps. (“Theoretical Frameworks” 76)

The convergence of identity markers of root and relation are the crux of what I wish to show by describing aspects of Graciela and Marie-Jeanne’s protagonism as rooted errantry. That is, there are moments in which errantry, relation, filiation, and possession are not entirely exclusive.

Image and Occupation in Song of the Water Saints

Rosario’s novel begins with the apparent title and captions of a postcard followed by a description of the image it captures. It reads:

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They are naked. The boy cradles the girl. Their flesh is copper. They recline on a Victorian couch surrounded by cardboard Egyptian pottery, a stuffed wild tiger, a toy drum, and glazed coconut trees. An American prairie looms behind them in dull oils. Shadows ink the muscles of the boy’s arms, thighs, and calves. His penis lies flaccid. Cheekbones are high, as if the whittler of his bones was reveling when She carved him. The girl lies against the bay. There is ocean in her eyes. Clouds of hair camouflage one breast. An orchid blooms on her cheek. (3)

This postcard asserts the importance of image from the outset of this text and introduces its first song—the text is divided into two sections entitled Song One and Song

Two—which opens on Graciela and Silvio kissing on a pier.

Silvio quickly realizes they are the object of a yanqui’s 37 gaze: “Graciela [then] turned to see a pink man standing a few yards away from them. She noticed that the yanqui wore a hat and a vest—he surely did not seem to be a Marine.”

The narrator further states:

With her tongue tracing Silvio’s neck, Graciela couldn’t care less that Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘soft voice and big stick’ on Latin America had dipped the yanqui the furthest south he had ever been from New York City….Of no interest to a moaning Graciela were the picaresque postcard views that the yanqui planned on selling in New York and, he hoped, in France and Germany (7-8).

Although the yanqui here is not a marine, his presence is associated with the US Occupation of the Dominican Republic

37 Rosario uses the Spanish form yanqui instead of Yankee frequently in the text.

150 as evinced through the reference to Roosevelt’s continuation of the Monroe Doctrine through military intervention in Latin America (“soft voice and big stick” diplomacy). The yanqui, then, offers pesos in exchange for pictures of the couple, which the former hopes to add to his collection, already including “brothel quadroons bathed in feathers, a Negro chambermaid naked to the waist, and, of course…the drunken sailors with a sow” (9). It is curious that Rosario describes these postcard views that the yanqui wishes to sell as picaresque as opposed to picturesque, which is a common malapropism, yet it also speaks to the social status of the subjects of the photo and the photographer himself—both described as being of modest means—as well as the questionable nature of this photograph. The picaresque genre is also often confessional, and, correspondingly, the image that results ultimately reads as revealing, however manipulated it is.

This image is also the first of a series that affect the perception of a subject or subjects’ identity/ies in the text, and it recalls Hirsch’s preoccupation with images and, especially, photographs in her work on postmemory. In reference to the repetitive use of images related to the

Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch affirms that: “The repetitive visual landscape we construct and reconstruct in our

151 postmemorial generation is a central aspect of that work

[the work of postmemory]. To understand it, we must begin by reading the images themselves” (18). In a certain sense, too, this image that frames the novel from the start, becomes a frequent flashpoint for understanding

Graciela’s identity and construction of memory; her relationship to the occupation, to North Americans and

Europeans in the Dominican Republic, and her relationship with her daughter; as well as interpreting other images in the novel. Additionally, it is important to note that this novel along with Trouillot’s text utilize image as a means to help recall these occupations and challenge occupier narratives, especially those that perpetrate the idea of the United States helping countries in need or countries struggling with governance through occupation as well as the outcomes of some court cases and legal matters at the time wherein a distrust of Hispaniola locals favored the occupiers. Relatedly, in Resistance Literature, Barbara

Harlow explains that:

Photographs, like the symbols and images of poetry and lyricism, while they preserve the memories and genealogical existence of a culture and a heritage, nonetheless stop short of disclosing the context within which they are implicated. Like the Solentiname peasants’ painting, the images require their historicizing dimension in order to expose fully the parameters of the resistance struggle. Without that dimension, the symbols themselves are endangered

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by a fetishizing appropriation of nostalgia and lament seeking to recover a past rather than to prepare a future. (83)

Here, Harlow is considering photographs along with symbols and imagery more broadly where knowledge of sociohistorical context or the factors of (re)production may not be clear, and she contrasts them with narratives such as novels where she claims that the historical context is further fleshed out, thereby implying that the context is more easily interpreted and absorbed by the reader. Thus, I would argue that the two novels at hand here utilize image for its evocative power, yet situating the concept of image in a novel—without visually reproducing the image—allows the reader to more carefully interpret the context and imagine the image at hand.

As a part of the staging of the photo in Rosario’s novel,

West, the photographer, wipes Graciela and Silvio with white powder to reduce the shine of their skin: “Their bodies shone like ripe fruit, so West wiped them with white powder. Too light. So he used, instead, mud from the previous day’s rain” (10). This manipulation of the skin prefigures images of racial construction throughout the novel. That is, West is seeking an audience for exotic erotica, so he resorts to having his subjects rub mud on their naked skin. If this aspect of the act weren’t

153 sufficiently degrading on its own, Graciela immediately wonders after the transaction about gossip of the event and her own reputation: “Graciela rubbed caked mud from her arms while Silvio, still naked, wet his fingers to count the bills. Graciela wondered if he would hog up the money, then go to the porches and storefronts to resoak her name in mud” (11). Although both Silvio and Graciela actively participate in the staging and are conflicted during it, they are not actually aware that they have been immortalized (Francis 12).

Her return home from the encounter with the yanqui photographer and subsequent trip to the market also speaks to male gaze and yanquis, but this time it is the Marine occupiers and a violent sexual encounter:

Tall uniformed men in hats shaped like gumdrops sat on the roadside. They drank from canteens and spat as far onto the road as they could. Graciela squatted in the dense grass to see how the fearless swan woman would move safely past them. The yanqui-men’s rifles and giant bodies confirmed stories that had already filtered into the city from the eastern mountains: suspected gavillero rebels gutted like Christmas piglets; women left spread-eagled right before their fathers and husbands; children with eardrums drilled by bullets. Graciela had folded these stories into the back of her memory when she snuck about the outskirts of the city with Silvio. The yanqui-man in the warehouse seemed frail now, his black box and clammy hands no match for the long rifles aimed at the swan woman. (13)

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The scene with the yanqui photographer is juxtaposed to one with Marine occupiers, further reflecting the how of the former’s presence in the Dominican Republic. The two scenes are also juxtaposed to remind the reader of what is being sold to foreign audiences as a paradisiacal and exotic island in contrast to the violent American presence there. Despite this seeming contrast, I would argue that the two are related in that the marketing of the Caribbean relates to promoting expansion into and investment in the

Caribbean and that this is not inextricable from military intervention.

The scene continues with a soldier shouting, “Run, you

Negro wench!” (13), which is followed by a barrage of whistles and a pop. As Graciela hides, she hears another pop and “saw the woman drop to the ground. The soldiers milled around the screaming and thrashing in the grass.

Some already had their shirts pulled out of their pants”

(13). This probable murder-rape scene is treated as typical and a confirmation of the rumors Graciela had stored away in her memory. Because this scene raises the question of the relationship between West’s camera and the occupiers’ weapons because of their juxtaposition, I will now turn to the relationship between these two apparatuses through Hirsch’s reading of images from the Holocaust.

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The Shutter and the Crosshairs

Highlighting Fink’s work, Hirsch considers how certain photos have become highly emblematic of the Holocaust: the entrance to Auschwitz with the sign “Arbeit macht frei,” or

“Work makes you free,” an image of a primary guard house to

Auschwitz II-Birkenau including the train lines that lead to it, the watchtowers of a camp linked by barbed wire fences and the bulldozers that transport cadavers into mass graves. The context of these images has been lost in large part due to their frequent reproduction. That is, it is sometimes difficult to tell if they are images produced by the perpetrators or the liberators, as she terms the Nazis and the Allies. She, then, suggests with some trepidation that these images serve as tropes for Holocaust memory and for photography (the act of looking) itself (“Surviving

Images” 16). She compares the Auschwitz gate image that states that work will make you free to the work of memory and mourning (the idea of entering the gate to go to the past and come back out again) even as the closed gate represents the risk of (post)memory. This notion of a gate as a “threshold of remembrance, an invitation to enter and, at the same time, a foreclosure” imbues her reading of multiple images (“Surviving Images” 18). With respect to

156 the gaze and the look that inform an understanding of these images, she posits:

I have tried to extricate us from the monocular seeing that conflates the camera with a weapon. Thus I have argued that while the gaze is external to human subjects situating them authoritatively in ideology, constituting them in their subjectivity, the look is located at a specific point; it is local and contingent, mutual and reversible, traversed by desire and defined by lack. While the look is returned, the gaze turns the subject into a spectacle. (“Surviving Images” 23)

Channeling Lacan, she holds that looks are shared through a screen that “filters vision through the mediations of cultural conventions and codes that make them seem visible,” whereas the gaze is mediated by the screen and

“interrupted by the look” (“Surviving Images” 24). Vision here is multiple and “power is shared” (“Surviving Images”

24). Despite her previous attempts to extricate the camera from the weapon, she does reference images that have been taken by a photographer whose viewpoint is the same as that of the executioner. In this case, the subject victims are

“shot before they are shot” (“Surviving Images” 24). It can be especially difficult to make the distinction between the cameraman’s perspective and that of the executioner’s when we confront images of the perpetrator. The paradox is that in looking at an image, we may reanimate the subjects, as Barthes does in Camera Lucida, fearing their future

157 death, which has actually already occurred, but the lethal

Nazi gaze has, in contrast, structured how these images will be viewed, negating this ironic reanimation for Hirsch

(“Surviving Images” 27). Although I agree that the lethal perpetrator gaze here connected with the Nazi death machine structures how many images are viewed, especially identity documents, which can no longer be viewed outside the role of surveillance (i.e., limited possibility of nostalgia in viewing them), the idea of looking at an image and being aware of the impending death of the subject (even as it has already occurred) is, arguably, more haunting in this context and provokes a kind of empathy. These images remind us that these subjects were in fact alive and may provoke an affective response, even if the subjects represented were already condemned by the Nazi gaze.

Now, I will return to Song of the Water Saints where this debate over the relationship between the camera and the weapon—the shutter and the crosshairs—and the conflating of the gazes behind them is raised. As previously mentioned, in the first section or song of the novel, Graciela, the initial protagonist, and her boyfriend, Silvio, are offered money to take pictures by a man who is significantly named

Peter West. Chevalier elaborates on the significance of his name:

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Her ekphrastic description dramatizes the author of this visual production as “West”; the Western imagination that organizes this site of fantasy is singularly “West(ern).” At the same time, “peter,” vernacular slang for “penis,” is synonymous with the phallicism of the Western gaze, however challenged, that Rosario’s text sets out to critique. (40)

The man forces them to participate in the staging of a photo in which they are naked subjects and the background includes a hodgepodge of exotic objects such as glazed coconut trees and a stuffed wild tiger. Peter West had already managed to take pictures of other Dominicans and the Marines stationed on the island; in fact, the “lush

Dominican landscape had left marks on the legs of his tripod” (8). Silvio attempts to destroy the camera and the image created of the couple, and I would argue that this figuratively constitutes Hirsch’s “look” and serves as an attempt to interrupt the gaze, however unsuccessful it turns out.

This scene is juxtaposed to Graciela’s return home during the course of which she runs into a woman with “the carriage of a swan” who warns her about the “yanqui-men ahead” (13). Several tall uniformed men are sitting alongside the road drinking from canteens. Graciela watches as the fearless and surefooted swan woman attempts to pass. As she reflects on her realization that the rumors she has heard are true (i.e., violence committed by

159 the occupying forces on Dominicans), she thinks to herself:

“The yanqui-man in the warehouse seemed frail now, his black box and clammy hands no match for the long rifles aimed at the swan woman” (13). The woman is shot down and presumably raped as Graciela runs home.

This sequence of scenes reiterates the complex relationship between the shutter and the crosshairs that has troubled Hirsch’s work, ranging from an attempt to eliminate a monocular conflation of the two and an understanding of how a perpetrator’s gaze blends these two views and objects and can affect the ways in which a photograph is viewed. In Rosario’s novel, there is an attempt to associate the camera and the weapon by offering a comparison of Peter West taking pictures with the occupying soldiers who attack the swan woman. That is, the proximity of the scenes and the mention of the different male gazes and their object of capture or of shooting in the aforementioned quote encourages the reader to relate the shutter to crosshairs. Nonetheless, the same quote establishes how Graciela begins to hold Peter West and his black box as a weaker foe to the occupying forces and their rifles. While the image produced will not indicate the

Dominican Republic in its description nor the name of the subjects rendered, that is, the context is largely lost in

160 its reproduction, it does promote a visual consumption of the Caribbean through exotic imagery, and it can’t be divorced from the promotion of the Caribbean as a site to be explored. While the Dominican landscape has left its mark on the camera, Peter West and the occupiers have left their mark on Dominicans. This kind of cultural production, then, speaks to the ways that image and the right of looking become intermingled with the forging of empire. Furthermore, while the shutter and the crosshairs are not identical, in the situation of occupation, the notion of a subject of a camera lens and a target in the crosshairs of a firearm are not easily distinguishable.

While Graciela survives her encounters with both, her participation in Peter West’s image haunts her life

(Francis 55) and connects to other visual constructions and interpretations in the text.

Race, Resistance, and Postmemory

This scene transitions into the next violent, however comparatively mild, interaction with the occupiers in

Graciela’s home. When she arrives, she is surprised at the calm and silence outside, which contrasts with the sound of tin from the kitchen:

Inside, Mai knelt by a soldier whose fists entangled her hair and had undone the cloth rollers. Fausto, a statue in the corner. A man wearing the mustache in

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the handlebar style of the yanquis calmly asked Mai where her husband hid the pistols and why he was away in the hills. Mai’s face was marble as she explained that her husband had no weapons, he was a God-fearing farmer, and there was her daughter at the door with yucca from his plot, see how dirty she was from working so hard with her beloved father … (15)

After shoving her against the hearth, Graciela insists to the interpreter that her father only has cane rum and points to the shed outside:

The man twisted the ends of his mustache. With the same fingers he clamped Graciela’s nose and held it until there was blood, which he wiped against her blouse. –Now you’ve got my aquiline nose, he said, then sucked the rest of her blood from his fingers. This overeager display of barbarism fueled in Graciela more anger than fear. (15)

The incident with the Marine echoes encounters during the occupation related to race including expectations of black subservience as was predominant in the United States at the time and the lack of trust of non-white witnesses (Calder

124-125). This violent attack on Graciela’s nose along with the manipulation and molding of skin appearance through mud in the photograph speak to North American racial ideologies and racialization. Relatedly, it is only in Graciela’s interactions with North Americans and

Europeans that her appearance is described in predominantly racial terms. The other encounter occurs when she leaves her home for Santiago and ends up sitting by a German man named Eli Cavalier on the train. By happenstance, he is a

162 subscriber to Peter West’s exotic postcard collectors club, which the latter describes as specializing in “exotique erotique beauty of racial types” (64). After looking at the cuticles of her fingers, Cavalier recognizes her as black and imagines her body naked, which is described in crass, racial terms. The reader also learns that he believes the white woman to be “insipid” and that he has developed a way of maximizing the “erotic perfume” of the black woman by “rubbing her flesh with dry lavender or fresh thyme” (67). After the train ride, there is an earthquake in Santiago (1921), which they both survive.

Shortly thereafter, Graciela, who no longer has any money, indulges his advances and contracts syphilis from him.

After leaving the inn where she stayed with Cavalier, she travels on foot out of the city and finds work as a housekeeper with a relatively well-off, young couple.

In contrast to these manipulations of race by the part of

North Americans stands Graciela’s own possible attempts at constructing her identity through racial ideology and image. This racial ideology is borne out of the colonial pigmentocracy common to the Caribbean as well as anti-

Haitian ideology indicative to the Dominican Republic and its fraught history with its neighbor. That is, Graciela steals a photograph from the aforementioned wealthy, white

163 couple for whom she served as a housekeeper. This is their wedding portrait, which the narrator describes thus:

“Orange-tree blossoms, roses and white lilies trailed from

Ana’s left arm, while Humberto clutched her right bicep”

(92). It is also worth noting that when Graciela first sees this photograph, she does not recognize Ana and

Humberto, the couple in question, because of how white their teeth are in the image. Ana responds, “—We went to the studio in town after the wedding, and, ay, what a glorious day, but I had to ask them to touch up the flowers, ¿see?,38 and to lighten up Humberto a bit, and then they did the teeth”… (89). Upon seeing this image,

Graciela imagines herself and Silvio in a panel and shudders that others may be watching them. Prior to pocketing the photo, Graciela had taken several other items over the course of her journey, storing them in a hatbox.

Examples include a catalogue as well as a cup and saucer from the same couple. By taking the photo, however, her daughter, Mercedita, who comes into contact with this image, believes that this is an image of her mother’s

38 The inclusion of an inverted question mark serves as an orthographical or mechanical reminder that the conversation being recounted occurred or would have occurred in Spanish. It is reminiscent of the cinematic convention common in American cinema of having foreign characters speak English with an accent. For the Spanish and English bilingual reader, it is easy to quickly read the English question ¿see? as ¿ves? with this punctuation mark.

164 wedding, and that she comes from a predominantly European racial background. In other words, she invents a narrative related to her familial identity and the father she has never known—Silvio—to explain away her mother’s previous departure. She considers her “royal white blood” to be one of her values in addition to being industrious and having a good reputation (162), and eventually shares with her friend that she has “a rich father that no one knows about”

(163) while proceeding to show her the photo in the hatbox.

A related counter case occurs in Patrick Campbell’s experience with a found family album of photos in his theoretical and familial exploration of postmemory entitled

“Portraits in / between Black and White: Traumatic

Performativity and Postmemory in a Jamaican Family Album.”

There, photos that many in the family want to discard challenge the narratives of whiteness and some familial racism in his Jamaican family by the discovery of black ancestors as well as family members who now appear or seem white to the author but appear multiracial in the photos.

This study makes use of performativity, postmemory, and subalternity, and he refers to his own identity crisis viewing these images and claims that there was a performative aspect to this construction of identity, which partly functioned through silence. He states that:

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a performative negation of African American identity present in nineteenth century narratives of passing, which are frequently undermined by eruptions of traumatic silence, aporias that destabilize attempts at a coherent discursive articulation of the radicalized self. (69)

In the case of Mercedes’ identity, Graciela’s attempts at hiding both the matchbox and her father’s identity from

Graciela shroud these matters in mystery, and Graciela uses her imagination to construct a story that renders her mother’s previous absence less painful and allows her personal and familial identity to favorably conform to the racial ideology she has begun to harbor despite her friend’s insistence that the woman in the photo does not look like Graciela. In essence, Graciela whitens herself with the photo, thereby, manipulating postmemory for

Mercedita who eventually adopts anti-Haitian ideology.

In the sections of Marine encounters, Rosario seems to combine the question of disarmament in Santo Domingo with the resistance movement in the eastern portion of the country because Graciela’s family home is located near

Santo Domingo. Although, initially, the Marine attack on

Graciela’s family seems random and unprovoked, it becomes clear that her father was at least harboring arms if not supplying them to the guerrillas in the east (16). In the subsequent section, the reader also learns of Silvio’s joining of the Dominican National Guard, which would appear

166 to respond to the history of certain Dominicans using the occupation to their advantage—economic or otherwise—yet

Silvio’s murder as a result of supplying weapons to gavilleros39 or at least the rumor of it, speaks to resistance (31). In addition to these moments of resistance, the text itself also responds to the cultural resistance of the occupation by textually representing the experience of the occupation, the armed resistance to it, and it serves to contribute to the postmemory of this event.

In several portions of the novel, Graciela indicates her desire to travel—whether that be her wish to follow

Silvio on his fishing trips or her memory of pointing to where she would like to go on a globe as a child in a classroom. The text also indicates a connection between

Graciela and her grandpai who was a maroon. The irony of this is that her wandering—a feature which connects her to her maroon heritage—is also what leads her to a photograph that ultimately serves as a familial postmemory for whitening and replaces this genealogy with a European one.

Nevertheless, Graciela’s desire to see the world also differs in that she usually seeks to do so through her

39 The term gavilleros refers to the Dominican armed resistance fighters who fought against the US Occupation.

167 partners with the exception of the time she leaves her daughter and partner to see more of the Dominican Republic, but she does return. This is after having experienced racial fetishism at the hands of a German who had previously been a member of Peter West’s postcard subscription, experiencing an earthquake, and working as a housekeeper to a relatively wealthy couple in Santiago.

There is a class climbing element to Graciela’s dreams as well. For example, one of her conditions for “marrying”

Silvio is that he buy or build her a house with a zinc roof, an expensive material that was not commonly used in the area at least according to the description of the houses in the novel. The objects she acquires in the hatbox are items to which she would have limited access, such as a teacup and a saucer, and the hatbox itself was an item that Casimiro, her partner, stole and that she failed to return.40 In contrast to Graciela’s itchy legs,

Mercedita clings to her mother, even when she leaves for short periods. The narrator explicates:

At three years old, Mercedita could already recognize the faraway stare that stole Graciela’s gaze from hers. When Graciela sat at the table to eat,

40 Casimiro is presented as an involuntary kleptomaniac in the novel. Graciela generally returns the items he brings home, but she often returns them to the wrong places, so that people go on missing items and finding inexplicable ones.

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Mercedita crawled under her skirt and stayed there until Graciela nudged her away with a foot. –Go away, little runt, and let me live! (57).

This contrast denotes a kind of rootedness in Mercedita that differs from the rooted errantry of her mother.

Zamora, however, relates all of the women in the novel to movement and fluid identity, something more akin to errantry. She claims that:

The symbolism behind the title of the “water saints” is an echo of the mystic imagery of La Cigüapa [sic]—a river-creature woman with wild hair that walks forward with her feet backwards. This forward, but backward direction creates a centrifugal force that highlights the qualities of constant movement and circularity that are present in the key female characters of Rosario’s novel. The song hints at the poetics of the memories and stories that are strung along to create continuity of the genealogy of her main characters— Graciela, Mercedes, Amalfi, and Leila. Rosario’s writing process is a combination of memories and imagery that are carried throughout the narrative by the spiritual poetic process of remembering and recreating memories. (4)

Zamora rightly points out that the title of the text relates to Dominican mythical creatures, although it isn’t abundantly clear as to which persona or figure is a water saint. It does seem to recall aspects of la ciguapa in terms of the idea of a chirping or song but also possibly la sirena, as a water figure. That is, la ciguapa is typically found in the forest or mountains. While I agree that la ciguapa is a useful figure for understanding movement and circularity for female protagonists in the

169 text, I would stipulate that the degree and manner in which movement influences each of these characters varies.

Certainly, circumstance leads to movement for Mercedes later in life, as she immigrates to the United States.

However, Leila and Graciela are driven by movement: it is more intrinsic to their identities. This points to circularity in the family, as Graciela inherited a maroon grandfather’s “hot leg,” and her great-granddaughter Leila has a similar demeanor to Graciela (46). In other words, the agency of the female protagonists and its relationship to movement are significant here. Thus, for Mercedita as a child, stability and rootedness motivate her, as opposed to her mother and her experience growing up. This rootedness, however, ultimately becomes problematic as she eventually adopts anti-Haitian ideology to cement her sense of identity. That is, her sense of place and belonging, her root, become intertwined with an identity of exclusion, a question to which I will return.

In each of her interactions with foreigners (i.e., a

North American, a German, and Puerto Ricans), Graciela notes how different their accents are or how relatively unintelligible the Spanish is. The text also represents this meeting of languages and/or language varieties through markers such as Hispanicized words like yanqui, direct

170 translations into English, and occasional malapropisms.

This hybrid language intimates the idea that Spanish is the primary language of many of the characters in the novel, despite being written predominantly in English. At the same time, however, it stylistically engages the question of language contact in the novel and Rosario renders this engagement in a partially Creolized, hybrid language. This linguistic expression and interest in the novel (on

Graciela’s part) along with Graciela’s desire to travel— despite also missing her family and eventually returning home when she does leave on her own—posit a meeting between root and relation identities. That is, Graciela has an errant nature and seeks to unroot herself from a single place and lifestyle; yet, she still feels attached to her family and returns to them. Her inheritance of a tendency toward marronage also differs from that of her grandfather because of its connections to movement out of or between social classes. The desire for cultural contact and the evidence of this in linguistic terms in the novel speak to errantry and relation, even though Graciela is ultimately more tethered to her community than her maroon roots might suggest.

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Postmemory and Haitian-Dominican Relations

In addition to the US Occupation of 1916-1924, this novel addresses other moments of Dominican history, including the Parsley Massacre, the Trujillo regime, and

Dominican immigration to the United States. Although I don’t address all of these periods, it is important to consider the impact of Graciela’s experience and actions that partially result from the occupation on Mercedita, her daughter and the second-generation female character of the novel, whose behavior presents the primary embodiment of antihaitianismo in the text. I will consider two scenes in this regard: the first is one where Mercedita performs an ideological identity and the second treats the Parsley

Massacre and her reaction to it. Before turning to these scenes, I would like to point out that by writing about the

Parsley Massacre, Nelly Rosario participates in the construction of a collective postmemory about this event, such that she may potentially raise awareness in her readership or at least provide them with a fictional representation of a history of which they were likely unaware. In this novel, she also portrays the event as complex: Dominicans were the perpetrators of the massacre, yet antihaitianismo to the extent of genocide was not a universally held belief or practice. As a Dominican-

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American writer, this is important to her project of postmemory: to remember the perpetration of this event, but to recognize the lack of universality of antihaitianismo, which, in itself, presents an alternative to this ideology.

As to the former example in the novel, during the celebration of Carnaval, Mercedita attacks a child dressed in blackface (103). The child is likely dressed as an africano, while Mercedita wears the mask of the diablo cojuelo, both being traditional roles in Dominican

Carnival. As Mercedita attacks the child, the other children shout, “Beat the Haitian!” (103). From this reaction by the other children, it is likely that Mercedita has already identified the child as Haitian, and, although this does not become an actual reality, the speech act serves to convince the other children to behave as though it were (i.e., to participate in the performance). The mother of the injured child later complains to Mercedita’s mother, Graciela, that her child knows that they are not of

Haitian descent, and that many other children are also wearing blackface (104). In this example, the wearing of masks and the celebration of Carnival already place the situation into the realm of performance. Mercedita, however, reconceives of the Dominican child dressed as an africano as a Haitian. That is, the africano is likely

173 meant to signify the slaves brought to the country during colonialism, yet Mercedita’s racial conception of Haitians, coming out of antihaitianismo, allows her to imagine this child as performing Haitianness. Her aggression results from ideology, and she acts in a way that positions herself as powerful. Ideology and national identity are linked here as they were with gender. Through Mercedita’s attack, she performs a kind of dominicanidad where Haitians are racial, linguistic, and economic others to be feared and hated.

The previous scene anticipates Mercedita’s reaction to the Parsley Massacre. First, the description of the Parsley

Massacre in Song of the Water Saints expresses the violence of the event and its emphasis on race, privileging it above other criteria of geopolitical belonging:

The army had used machetes so that the Dominican peasantry could spontaneously participate in the massacre. Decapitations were commonplace. And in the Haitian-Dominican border towns, the stench of human blood did battle with the air. Killings happened within Dominican families with Haitian, part-Haitian, or dark-skinned relatives. (181)

Mercedita, who works at a kiosk, encounters customers such as Desiderio who recount the horrors of the event. He claims that pregnant women were raped, and many Haitian survivors were taken in by sympathetic Dominicans (181).

Mercedita responds to this with anti-Haitian ideology:

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Haitians have been polluting us with their language, their superstitions, their sweat, for too long, Mercedes said, as Desiderio’s pornographic descriptions attracted an audience. She did not care what anyone thought about her views . . . —How lucky for you that your tongue can taste the “r” in parsley, she said to Old Man Desiderio. – Otherwise, your blood would have blended with that river just as well, she said. Without looking at him, Mercedes pushed away his arms and wiped away the sweat spots on the countertop. (181-182)

His comments demonstrate that all Dominicans did not necessarily agree with this violence, while Mercedita’s reaction implies that she also dislikes Dominicans of

African descent because of their supposed association with

Haitians. Additionally, the shopkeeper Mustafá, the actual owner of the kiosk, suffers the loss of an arm during the massacre because of his inability to pronounce parsley and because of his violet skin. In this specific instance, as in the one Desiderio describes, both racial appearance and linguistic performance determine belonging. Ironically, it is Mustafá who helped fuel Mercedita’s anti-Haitian views:

He explained to Mercedita that Haitians could not be trusted. Animals, he said they were, who had, in their twenty-year rule, destroyed the fabric of the country by expelling its best white families; and as the beasts came, with their savage religion and their savage tongue, they took away the honest work from people like his grandfather, a hardworking Syrian who had hailed from the sultans of Spain, and Mercedita was never to behave or compare herself to people like that little boy, never to act so hungry, so slave- minded, so indolent, so black . . . . (107)

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This diatribe serves as an ideological manifestation of postmemory. That is, Mustafá did not experience the occupation first hand, but rather heard stories about it through his family and may have also solidified anti-

Haitian beliefs by learning a distorted version of history at school (Sagás). In this way, ideological conceptions of identity can be developed and fomented through a collective postmemory of historical events. It is also ironic that

Mustafá champions his ties to Spain as Dominicans might valorize their Spanish heritage in contrast to African heritage when the Moors were ultimately ousted from Spain and/or subject to practices of exclusion. The performance of identity as manifested in Mercedita on Carnival is an indirect result of this Dominican collective postmemory, a manipulated official memory. Thus, these two events in

Mercedita’s life demonstrate how familial postmemory—the way that Mercedita whitened herself by taking another couple’s wedding photograph—and official memory—the way the

Dominican Republic used the supposed Haitian occupation of the 19th century to justify anti-Haitian sentiment—can coalesce with damaging effects. It is also worth noting that Graciela’s use of the wedding photo to whiten herself likely resulted in part from her interactions with Peter

West, the American soldiers, and Eli Cavalier who sought to

176 mold and manipulate her appearance for financial gain, power (to invoke violence and fear), and sexual gratification respectively, and these interactions with foreigners have lasting detrimental effects on her health and well-being as well as on her family and their conception of who they are. Rooted errantry, too, is connected to this familial postmemory, as Graciela’s tendency toward errantry and her collection of souvenirs from her travels have detrimental effects on Mercedita and foment her development of anti-Haitian ideology.

Painting and Sight in L’Œil-Totem

Trouillot’s novel is a retrospective of Marie-Jeanne, but it is also a textual dialogue between herself and her grandson. This is indicated in the text by the titles of sections corresponding to their two names. This separation and indication of who is speaking or references is further complicated by the movement between first- and third-person narration, as well as the occasional intrusion of a “je” other than the voices of Marie-Jeanne or Dimitri. This textual dialogue reflects the relationship between grandmother and grandson, which is quite close and stands in contrast to the relationship Marie-Jeanne experiences with her own children—excluding to a reasonable extent

Dimitri’s father Jean-Marc—who disapprove of her decision

177 to remain in Haiti and pressure her to sell her paintings

(she is an artist) and live in spare living quarters to help support them abroad.

The beginning of Trouillot’s text references the smells and sounds of the neighborhood of Port-au-Prince in which Marie-Jeanne, the matriarchal protagonist, resides.

Although bizarre and inexplicable sounds still bother her, she claims that: “je n’entends plus que ce que je veux entendre,” and she also challenges those noises with her own dialogues and delirium (13; “I no longer hear anything but what I want to hear.”). In contrast, smells are what remind her that her home is no longer what it once was:

“Mais je suis encore prisonnière des odeurs qui me rappellent que mon permis de séjour a expiré depuis bien longtemps dans ce quartier qui ne se définit pas par ce qu’il n’est plus” (13; “But I am still a prisoner of the smells that remind me that my residence permit expired a long time ago in this neighborhood, which isn’t defined by what it isn’t anymore.”). Despite this, the mantra of

Marie Jeanne’s portion of the text and the words that constitute the very first line of the novel are: “Je ne bougerai pas d’ici” (13; “I will not leave here.”). This mantra has meant and means that Marie-Jeanne refuses to leave her home, even as two of her children, Josie and

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Daniel, repeatedly encourage her to move elsewhere and insist that they should have access to their inheritance before she passes, prompting Marie-Jeanne to slowly sell off many of her paintings—she is an accomplished painter whose works are worth a great deal of money—and to move to smaller living quarters, which are a mere portion of the house she once owned. Her children—Josie and Daniel without their brother Jean-Marc—have subsequently rented out the other portions of the home and take advantage of those renting by charging exorbitant rates, which does not contribute positively to Marie-Jeanne’s own place in the neighborhood. Josie states:

Si tu t’obstines à y vivre alors que nous t’avons proposé de réparer entièrement la maison de Thomassin ou celle de grand-mère aux Cayes ou même à Torbeck, si tu persistes à ne pas autoriser qu’on vende ce tas de ruines où tu t’accroches à l’illusion d’un trésor enfoui auquel personne ne croie, alors il faudra la louer. Car nous avons besoin d’argent, Daniel et moi. Sans protestations, Marie-Jeanne avait pris logement au sous-sol et assisté à l’invasion de sa maison par des locataires, rendus de plus en plus destructeurs au fil des ans, par les augmentations de loyer abusives de Daniel et de Josie. (42-43)

If you insist on living there when we have offered to completely repair the house in Thomassin or that one of grandmother’s in Aux Cayes or even in Torbeck, if you persist in not authorizing us to sale this pile of ruins where you cling to a buried treasure that no one believes in, then it will be necessary to rent it. Because we are in need of money, Daniel and I. Without protest, Marie-Jeanne had taken lodging in the basement and attended the invasion of her home by

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tenants, rendered more and more destructive with the passing years, by Daniel and Josie’s abusive rent hikes.

Her attachment to this home lies in its relationship to her family and the past. She was born there and has not been to the other homes owned by her family in Haiti, in

Thomassin and Les Cayes, since she was 78, and she is now

88 years old. Additionally, as implied in Josie’s comment, she is obsessed with finding an artifact that was supposedly buried by an ancestor in the yard of the home:

La jarre doit être quelque part. Mon père dit que l’aïeul l’avait probablement enterrée à quelques pas de la maison. Mon grand-père disait qu’elle doit se trouver entre l’emplacement de l’ancien puits et le flamboyant. Quel flamboyant? Celui que grand-père a abattu parce qu’il menaçait de tomber. Quel grand- père? Celui de papa ou le mien? L’arrière petit-fils du général de l’armée de Boyer qui en s’enfuyant a enfoui sa jarre non loin de la maison. Quelle maison? Celle qui a été détruite par le cyclone? Quel cyclone? Quel grand-père? (19)

The earthenware jar must be around here somewhere. My father says that a great-grandfather probably buried it a few steps from the house. My grandfather said that it must be between the location of the old well and the flamboyant [a tree with red flowers in the tropics]. Which flamboyant? The one that grandfather cut down because it was threatening to fall. Father’s or mine? The great grandson of the general of Boyer’s army who while fleeing buried his jar not far from the house. Which house? The one that was destroyed by the cyclone? Which cyclone? Which grandfather?

The disorientation in this passage demonstrates Marie-

Jeanne’s confusion and the failure of her memory with

180 respect to this object. It also points to how this object became a source of family lore, although no one seems to recall the details of its location or to have ever found it. In contrast to this example, the repeated mentions of this earthenware object typically occur in short paragraphs in the sections of the text devoted to Marie-Jeanne’s point of view; however, these specific sections seem to be Marie-

Jeanne’s recollection of her neighbors’ interactions with her. They occur in these offset paragraphs in third person in which Marie-Jeanne is referred to as Madame Karolis, the

Haitian-Creole orthography for carolus, a term that refers to coins or money derived from King Charles or a leader with the name of Charles (i.e., Carolus is the medieval

Latin form of Charles) (Frey 40-41). In other words, this is a way of calling her Mrs. Money. The proximity of the name Karolis and the obsession with a buried artifact leads the reader to believe that the buried item is likely some sort of treasure. The final line of the text, which is also the last offset paragraph where the third person address of the protagonist occurs, confirms the association of money with the jarre: “Madame Karolis, ne pleure pas parce que tu ne retrouves pas tes carolus. Ta jarre est au coeur de la tourmente à portée de tes doigts” (136; “Madame

Carolus, don’t cry because you can’t find your carolus.

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Your earthenware jar is at the heart of the storm in reach of your fingers.”). At the same time, the name Madame

Karolis and her relationship to the jarre speak to the way the neighbors of Marie-Jeanne view her (they see her as eccentric), and her sobriquet alludes to her position in the community. In many of these interactions, they ask her for small amounts of money or favors, and if she asks for a favor, she promises money in return. The jarre then constitutes one of the main symbols of the text, and it is the principal one that ties Marie-Jeanne to her home, even if she is relegated to the basement. The other significant symbols of her past are the two remaining paintings she owns, both of which reflect important moments in her life, one being a moment in 1916 and another following her later imprisonment. The paintings symbolize and creatively constitute her memory, and the jarre recalls familial postmemory at the same time that it reflects the waning nature of our memories on the one hand and the way that vestigial memory hangs like a carrot on a stick on the other. It also reflects the desire to unearth the past more generally. I will now turn to the question of the protagonist’s eye, which also constitutes the title of the novel, as well as the painting that recalls a particular moment in 1916.

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As the initial reflection on sounds and smells in the text indicates, all five senses are at play in the novel.

Yet, when it comes to remembering the US Occupation, image and, thus, sight predominate in its relationship to memory in the text as Marie-Jeanne contends: “l’occupation américaine – cette pause si lourde qui marque toujours les références à cette époque et les images qui doivent accompagner un souvenir qui demeure” (36; “the American

Occupation—that heavy pause that always marks the references to that time period and the images that must accompany a memory that remains”). Another major symbol of the text and reference to sight and seeing is the title of the book and a key characteristic of Marie-Jeanne: l’œil- totem or the totem eye. This neologism plays on the idea of seeing and knowing all, and at the same time it corresponds to an ailment. For example, in the dedication of the book, Trouillot writes in part: “A toutes ces figures de femmes, porteuses de l’histoire et d’avenir, qui ont nourri mon enfance et posé sur moi leur œil-totem” (11;

“To all of these female figures, bearers of history and the future, who nurtured my childhood and posed their totem eye on me.”). Here, there is a combination of knowing, seeing and watching, as well as foreseeing that intersect in the figure of the totem eye. This usage is also repeated in

183 the main body of the text. Additionally, this eye also corresponds to Marie-Jeanne’s moods as the narrator suggests: “Finalement, Marie-Jeanne se décide et l’œil- totem se dévoile tumultueux, fragile et complice” (117;

“Finally, Marie-Jeanne makes up her mind and her totem-eye becomes tumultuous, fragile, and complicit.”). Dimitri describes her eye in this way: “Grand-mère accueille chaque nouvelle avec un battement de la paupière gauche – cet œil qui semble toujours brumeux et fixe, son œil-totem, comme elle l’appelle (35-36; “Grandmother welcomes each piece of news by batting her left eyelid – that eye that always seems cloudy and fixed, her totem eye, as she calls it.”).

This alludes to an injury or ailment, which is later revealed to have occurred during a two-day period of imprisonment during which Marie-Jeanne was tortured with the goal of revealing the location of her lover Léopold

Blanchard, a militant suspected of plotting against the government. This torture caused her to nearly lose her eye and suffer from a reduction of 60% of her vision in that eye.

The name may also reference a totem as well as the eye of protection. The former serves as an emblem, symbol, spirit being, or sacred object of a tribe, clan, family or individual (Bani 151; Shahbazi 192), and the eye of

184 protection is said to ward off the evil eye or the power of a malevolent gaze. Relatedly, this notion of the eye in the novel may also be a reinterpretation of the eye of

Horus, the ancient Egyptian symbol. That is, the eye of

Horus usually refers to the left eye unlike the eye of Ra, which is the right eye, and contains references to multiple senses. The novel privileges senses from its outset, and

Marie-Jeanne’s left eye is the one referred to as the totem-eye. Secondly, the eye of Horus is linked to the falcon as a type of totem, and it is associated with the moon. Additionally, like Marie-Jeanne’s totem eye, the eye of Horus is thought of as an all-knowing eye. Lastly, it is a reconstructed eye, having been gouged out by the god of chaos, Seth and replaced by Thoth, the god of writing and wisdom (Ulmer 276-281). Trouillot, then, appears to combine common notions of the eye of protection and more specific elements of the eye of Horus into her protagonist whose eye relates to knowledge, suffering or illness, and protection to some degree. The previously mentioned dedication of the text also highlights this eye as a feature of women who relay history but also carry its burden.

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Manipulating Memory through Visual & Linguistic Expression

Marie-Jeanne’s eye then binds her experience and her knowledge to history. It is also a visual reminder to her family of the burden of her past and the memory/ies she carries. Continuing in that vein, the questions of image and the visual also manifest in the connection between painting and memory that appears early in the text through her narration:

Nous sommes réduits à interpeller nos images de tendresse et de bonheur comme si elles n’avaient jamais été à nous. Souvent, nous devons même accepter qu’elles nous reviennent accompagnées de souvenirs inopportuns, venant nous rappeler malgré nous des scènes que nous aurions voulu à jamais enfouies. Dans l’un des premiers tableaux que j’ai peints, j’ai saccagé ma mémoire pour y retrouver l’enfance avec des grandes taches bleuies de mer et de larmes, avec le souffle de vent et du temps…J’y avais mis les yeux de Mathilde adolescente, pleins de douceur et de courage, la voix nette et pure de Suzanne, prête à la riposte, sans compromis, fière et tranchante. Les yeux, les voix, les mains des quatre filles Thévenot et des trois cousins Désir qui m’ont soutenue en cet après- midi d’avril 1916, un jour de vent persistant et doux. Un jour qu’on ne raconte pas aux grandes personnes pour que la douleur n’en devienne pas plus forte, et que l’humiliation ne grandisse pas davantage. Quelquefois, quand ma mémoire se fait complice de ma honte, elle ne garde de cette journée que l’écho des voix bouleversées et sourdes de mes sœurs et de mes cousins, le bruit des feuilles et des branches contre les tôles et sur le pavé, et les reflets d’un visage rubicond. Et d’autres fois, tout me revient avec une netteté de film au ralenti, comme si ma mémoire m’avait joué un tour cruel auquel je m’étais volontiers prêté. Lè m sonje / sa yo fè peyi m / kè mwen fè mwen mal … (24)

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We have been reduced to questioning our images of tenderness and happiness as if they had never been our own. Often, we must even accept that they come accompanied by inopportune memories, coming to remind us despite ourselves of the scenes that we would have wanted to remain buried forever. In one of the first paintings that I painted, I ransacked my memory to rediscover my childhood with large stains made blue by the sea and tears, with the breath of wind and of time…In this painting, I had placed Mathilde’s adolescent eyes, full of sweetness and courage, the pure and clear voice of Suzanne, ready for retaliation, without compromise, proud and cutting. The eyes, the voices, the hands of the four Thévenot girls and the three Désir cousins who supported me that afternoon of April 1916, a day of pleasant and persistent wind. A day that one does not recount to adults so that the pain doesn’t become greater, and the humiliation doesn’t grow stronger. Sometimes, when my memory becomes complicit with my shame, it only retains the echo of the deaf and devastated voices of my sisters and my cousins from that day, the noise of the leaves and the branches against the metal and the cobblestone, and the reflections of a ruddy face. And other times, everything returns with the clarity of a film in slow motion, as if my memory had played a cruel trick to which I had willingly participated. When I remember / what they did to my country / my heart aches…

The text here considers the variable nature of memory where recall can be limited to a few sensory, fleeting cues or return as a slow-motion film. Additionally, when recalling the occupation in the text, there are momentary instances of Haitian Creole, in contrast to French, which suggests a kind of traumatic code-switching41 or affective diglossia

41 This notion of code-switching can be relatively expansive, meaning that it is a reference to moving between languages and language mixing, and I am not using it to uniquely refer to language mixing within single phrases or sentences. Although I do not use the term in this way, there is increased usage of this phrase as the act of moving,

187 related to the memory of the US Occupation in Haiti. When using the term diglossia, I am referencing more recent uses of the term that involve the revision and expansion of

Ferguson’s original use of this construct. Ferguson held that diglossia referred to a situation where two related languages or language varieties were used for different purposes, one being a high variety with a body of literature and generally serving as the language of education, whereas the low variety would be used for informal, everyday conversation (“Ferguson’s (1959)

Concept”). My usage of the term, however, draws on

Fishman, Stewart, Tollefson, and Saxena. When reading

Trouillot’s text, compartmentalization (Fishman) and stylistic variation (Stewart) as related to diglossia are useful. Saxena’s critical diglossia and lifestyle diglossia are also helpful. That is, Fishman refers to the importance of compartmentalized roles in bilingual, diglossic communities (32). Tollefson describes this phenomenon in the following way: “diglossia is defined as the association of compartmentalized language varieties with compartmentalized social roles and situations” (5).

Relatedly, the transitions to Haitian Creole occur in

often performatively, between registers or dialects, especially for minority populations interacting in different circumstances. For this reason, I develop affective diglossia in more detail.

188 varying thematic portions of the text, and in the majority of cases, they are set apart in the text by centered, bold italics and are, in a sense, spatially compartmentalized.

For Stewart, linguistic movement between Haitian Creole and

French can sometimes correlate to style shifts in English

(158). More recently, Saxena has coined the term critical diglossia, which “suggests that while diglossia is generally imposed from above it can also develop from below in people’s practices” (94). His term lifestyle diglossia builds upon this term and “explains HOW and WHY diglossia can also develop from below in the way individuals’ everyday socio-cultural practices and projection of identities shape their language practices which may lead to language attrition” (95). Although Saxena is likely referring to language attrition as the gradual loss of a language as the result of disuse, the inclusion of Haitian

Creole in novels written by Haitian authors primarily in

French speaks to a kind of attrition or a resistance involving the wearing away at linguistic convention. In this novel, the use of Haitian Creole is relatively limited in comparison to French in the text, but the attention drawn to it through text enhancement privileges it, which marks a challenge to traditional high / low separations or usages of different varieties or languages that Ferguson

189 espoused.42 Instead, I would argue that what is at work here is more akin to stylistic variability; yet, in some instances, the use of Creole highlights pain or distrust at the hands of Americans, which suggests resistance, and takes on an affective and identitary consideration.

For Marie-Jeanne, one remembers when one doesn’t wish to, yet painting serves as a way of combining memories to creative effect. As a painter, she combines aspects of the people who supported her during a traumatic moment in 1916, as seen in the previous passage, which is soon more directly shown to be a violent encounter during the occupation. With respect to the connection between painting and memory, Alison M. Gingeras states:

Certain contemporary painters have long since understood the mnemonic insufficiency of the photograph and have capitalized on their own medium’s strength in this domain. The painted image, with its material sensuality, tactility, and atmospheric possibilities, corresponds more closely to the imprecision of the human brain’s mnemonic functions. Memory is often triggered by the banal, by otherwise vacant or impressionistic details that prompt the senses through association. Painted images – precisely because they lack the pictorial authority and truth- telling capacity of photography – can more easily trigger a free play of association or become a catalyst for a web of connections that relate to the

42 Haitian Creole, although less frequent in the text than French, has a kind of visual privilege in the text because of the way that the text is centered, italicized, or appears in bold. This challenges the idea of a high / low relationship between related languages or language varieties because the written form is not limited to one language— normally the high variety for Ferguson—or the other. In this case, both are important—one is not merely an aside—in the text.

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viewer’s own memory bank. Inverting the photograph’s claim to instantaneity, the painstaking, artisanal nature of a painting’s own making metaphorically relates to the mental intensity and time required by the act of reminiscence. (np)

The link between memory and painting is also enmeshed in the question of selling paintings throughout the text. As the need arises to sell paintings for economic reasons at different moments, Marie-Jeanne seems reticent to do so, and I would argue that this is because they are creative compositions of her memory, and they are subject to her own construction rather than the flippant nature of recall.

They also serve as posterity of her memory and could serve as postmemory for her children and grandchildren, yet their potential economic benefit tends to outweigh the question of memory for many of her relatives.

The scene that the aforementioned painting recalls is that of a group of Marines teasing the protagonist, attempting to kiss her and then violating her. This is the personal memory that haunts the protagonist and that she recalls with shame:

Quand je vois les marines, il est trop tard pour rebrousser chemin ….Je jette un coup d’œil rapide et furtif de leur côté. Tous trois se mettent à rire sans retenue. Alors, j’essaye de courir. Ils m’entourent de partout, le plus rouge est juste devant moi, les bras ouverts, les deux autres se mettent l’un à ma gauche, l’autre à ma droite. Je sais que je pleure … Ils rient encore plus fort, me dévisageant de la tête aux pieds. Ils me parlent aussi mais je suis

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trop terrorisée pour comprendre. Un seul mot arrive à franchir cette brume de frayeur qui me tient debout devant eux : « Kismi, kismi » … Je le regarde, la bouche serrée. KISS ME, KISS ME, j’ai finalement compris car il a presque collé ses lèvres contre les miennes. Je le repousse violemment. Ma gifle l’atteint de plein fouet, et la seconde d’après je suis projetée contre un mur … Il m’attire tout contre lui et me donne un baiser de bête enragée, je sens sa langue m’insulter tandis que ses mains remonte ma jupe et me touche avec brutalité… (25-26)

When I see the Marines, it is too late to retrace my steps. I glance quickly and furtively in their direction. All three start laughing without restraint. Then, I try to run. They surround me completely, the reddest is just in front of me, with open arms, the others are on my right and my left. I know that I’m crying … They laugh even louder, and look me up and down. They also talk to me, but I’m too terrorized to understand. A single word manages to break through this haze of fear that keeps me standing in front of them : « Kismi, kismi » … I watch him with my mouth closed. KISS ME, KISS ME, I have finally understood because he had practically pressed his lips against mine. I reject him violently. My slap reaches him at full force, and the second after, I am thrown up against a wall … He pulls me completely up against him, and gives me the kiss of an enraged beast, I sense his tongue insulting me while his hands pull up my skirt and touch me with brutality…

This scene speaks to an attempt at resistance through a slap as well as the violent retribution taken by soldiers to those who did not bow to their authority. It also implies the extent of violence against women and their resistance under occupation (Chancy 39). This specific moment of resistance also further references the literary resistance of the occupation, which, not coincidentally, is known as la génération de la gifle (the generation that was

192 slapped or the generation that was insulted).43 There is also a similarity in the protagonist’s role as an artist during and after the occupation. Significantly, the name of the painting that represents and recalls this attack is

Interpellation. Although skin color does not clearly manifest as a direct rationale for this attack, the name of this painting links the experience of race with Marie-

Jeanne’s creative composition, her painting, and memory of the event as well as the relationship between occupier and occupied. Indeed, this title calls to mind the notion of interpellation as both a Marxist and Althusserian term as well as its racial correspondence in Frantz Fanon.44 This particular instantiation, then, is intersectional and combines an invading state apparatus and its norms of hailing, which view black women as subservient, othered wards. At the same time, however, the act of naming the painting interpellation indicates the protagonist’s awareness of her experience of interpellation as well as defiance.

I have previously described both Marie-Jeanne and

Graciela as emblematic of a rooted errantry or a

43 See, for example, Beaudouin’s “Quand une idée est altérée et dépouillée de son contenu.” 44 See “Interpellation,” “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” and Black Skin, White Masks for more development of interpellation.

193 combination of root and relation identities. In the case of Marie-Jeanne, the root portion of her identity and behavior come to the fore in her obsession with the jarre and staying in an ancestral home. At the same time, however, she is likely aware she will never find this object from the lack of definitive information passed down in the family as well as her sometimes failing memory.

This, then, creates an errant situation in which she remains in the home for the idea and the search of an ancestral treasure, which will never be found.

Furthermore, by acquiescing to her children’s claims to their inheritance and moving to the basement, she relinquishes part of her hold on the area and she generally accepts and willingly interacts with her neighbors, although she complains about noises and smells. Even as she holds to these vestiges of the past and her identity, she adapts to her changing living situation—the much- reduced quarters and the ever-evolving neighborhood—as well as the wider world around her. Furthermore, her painting presents the idea of a root in its depiction of or attempt to capture particular moments at time; however, it combines aspects of various perspectives and demonstrates hybridity, which complicates its root. This sense of rooted errantry in Marie-Jeanne relates to postmemory because of the

194 importance of familial and personal identity and her attempt to connect to the past even as her surroundings continue to change. In a sense, in both texts, then, rooted errantry becomes tied to developing identity by creating or clinging to a usable past, however complicated, messy, problematic, or improbable it may be.

In addition to the occupation, this text deals with other moments of Haitian history, although the often telegraphic nature of the text renders these moments less than immediately discernible to the reader. This includes references to the Duvalier regime as well as Aristide’s presidency and some of the violence surrounding both. I will focus on the latter because of its connection to the history of US invasion and occupation and the way that the fragmentation and circularity of Marie-Jeanne’s memory become intertwined with the unfortunate circularity of some events in Haitian history. With respect to the Aristide period, there are references to ajustement structurel, chimères, and helicopters coming to the country. Although the moment is not abundantly clear, Marie-Jeanne’s description alludes to this moment:

Malgré cette liesse indécente de ce matin fatal de septembre face aux hélicoptères porteurs d’opprobre et de honte. Malgré le poids encore plus lourd de ce nouvel outrage imposé pour une chimère. Chaque jour, j’apprends à respirer au rhythme de la démence pour

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accorder mes peurs aux sueurs des corridors. Je ne bougerai pas d’ici. Et quand au fond de moi, le feu tend à s’éteindre, je m’accroche à la majesté de mon ciel de décembre, au regard triste de ce GI au patronyme haïtien sous son casque d’envahisseur: s’il vous plait! N’applaudissez pas, please. Ne dites pas ‘merci’, s’il vous plait! (84)

Despite this shameless jubilation on this deadly morning of September as we face the helicopters bringing scorn and shame. Despite the even heavier weight of this outrage imposed by a chimère. Each day, I learn to breathe at the rhythm of insanity to render my fears compatible with the sweat of the corridors. I will not leave here. And when deep within me, the light starts to give out, I come closer to the majesty of my sky of December, to the sad look of this GI with a Haitian last name under his invading helmet; please! Do not applaud, please. Do not say ‘thank you,” please!

Although it is difficult to interpret with certainty,

Marie-Jeanne’s description seems to portray a moment of mounting violence in the country as well as a possible foreign intervention because of the helicopters that are mentioned. In addition, she mentions a chimère, which although this term in French usually refers to a mythological Greek creature or an illusion, it is more likely the French version of the Haitian Creole chimè or a violent political instigator.

Ultimately, this text responds to the US Occupation of

Haiti by offering a textual account of the occupation, which concerns itself with women, sexuality, race and class, themes explored in the literature during the

196 occupation. It also considers the memory of a character who experienced this moment and uses painting as a way of commenting on the role of image in memory as well as the recourse of the protagonist to construct and mediate memory and manage trauma. While these paintings could serve as postmemory for the children and grandchildren of the protagonist and do for Dimitri, her grandson, it is the text itself that contributes to a postmemory of the event for those who read it. The text is also concerned with the role of forgetting, a part of memory itself, and selling the mnemonic paintings is a kind of act in the construction of postmemory for the relatives of Marie-Jeanne, although it is questionable if the decision meets the criteria of ethics that Hirsch elaborates.

Conclusion. Memory and Resistance.

For both Graciela and Marie-Jeanne, then, image becomes a catalyst or vehicle for memory and postmemory.

Graciela experiences violence at the hands of the occupiers and, arguably, at the hands of Peter West, the photographer who has managed to arrive in the Dominican Republic as a result of the occupiers. In both cases, they serve as entities who want to capture or shoot her. Her cunning ensures her survival with the occupiers, yet these experiences haunt her, and I argue, contribute to her

197 decision to whiten herself through image. A combination of a wandering spirit and a desire to control her own narrative—in opposition to the occupation and its fallout— speaks to resistance, a construction of identity, and eventually postmemory for Mercedita, her daughter, who endures the legacy of the occupation as a child of a survivor and one of its victims and, in a political sense, because of her adoption of anti-Haitian ideology. That is to say, that dictatorships prone to ideology often followed

US occupation in the Caribbean, although it is important to note that US imperialism was not their sole cause.

Marie-Jeanne also uses image to control her narrative, although not in opposition to a specific gaze of the occupier or an international entity. Painting becomes a creative repository of memory wherein she combines different elements of a single day or group of people to creative effect. Her memory, as an aging woman and a victim of trauma during the occupation, is notably fragmented, variable in depth, and not easily manipulated.

In fact, memories sometimes come to her that she would prefer to suppress. Painting, then, serves as a working through, and her own kind of curated collection or album of memories. Working through her trauma and against the caprices of her memory is her own unique brand of

198 resistance. Problematically, then, for financial reasons, her family encourages her to sell her paintings and gradually lose many of them, these images that are Marie-

Jeanne’s memory and the family’s postmemory. Additionally,

Marie-Jeanne’s eponymous eye serves as a reminder of her own suffering and role in history at the same time that it reflects how she carries memory and wisdom and is a living link for postmemory in her family.

To conclude, the project of writing these two texts is a project of postmemory because both texts attempt to recall these events and remind readers about their role in the lives of Dominicans and Haitians. They, thus, function as cultural tools that augment readers’ memory of history and collective postmemory of the wave of US invasion and occupation, especially, in this case, in Hispaniola. Such a project resists the tendency to forget historical events and has the potential to foment identity through its work on memory. For readers with less direct connections to

Hispaniola, a project of postmemory can still engage in an ethical undertaking of memory by adoption or transmission rather than lived experience. In fact, an ethical stance toward cultural memory tools allows for the development of empathy in addition to an engagement with history.

Ultimately, then, Graciela’s and Marie-Jeanne’s stories are

199 bound up in resistance and memory, two interconnected reactions or ways of approaching occupation, and their stories reflect the wider project of postmemory of their corresponding novels as well as that of other texts that depict US imperialism in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Conclusion

In this dissertation, I have argued that occupation has inextricably shaped the island of Hispaniola as well as its relationship to the United States. The supposed

Haitian Occupation of the Dominican Republic (1822-1844) is often cited as a historical precursor or reason for twentieth century Haitian-Dominican relations. Whereas it is true that this occupation engendered different forms of resistance from Dominicans and it affected their relationship, I have argued that the US Occupation of the

Dominican Republic (1916-1924) is a catalyst for a revalorization of Hispanic identity and it is the event that trains and empowers Trujillo prior to his eventual dictatorship and anti-Haitian rhetoric and acts. The occupations, however, are complex matters because the simultaneous occupations of the Dominican Republic (1916-

1924) and Haiti (1915-1934) engendered similar forms of resistances along with some moments of cross-border alliances and acts of resistance against the Americans. In addition to the aforementioned, there are many other instantiations of resistance against occupation and intervention from colonial attempts to reacquire the

Dominican Republic and Haiti (Santo Domingo and Saint

Domingue), Haitian invasion into the Dominican Republic, US

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intervention during the Dominican Civil War, as well as US and UN intervention and occupation during the

Aristide years and after in Haiti. Like much of the

Caribbean and some of Latin America, Hispaniola has been profoundly marked by colonialism, occupation and intervention, as well as neocolonialism. It is all the more notable, however, because of the frequency and continuation of occupation and intervention as well as the question of intra-island invasion between newly formed states.

The first chapter in this endeavor served as a critical engagement with the terms postmemory and resistance and their use in different fields. My use of postmemory built primarily on the work of Marianne Hirsch and Sandra So Hee Chi Kim, and my use of the term resistance relies on context and draws on Barbara Harlow’s work on resistance narratives. I argue that postmemory serves as a specific type of resistance against forgetting and oblivion, and that it is a particularly useful construct for thinking about the Caribbean: a site with a confluence of cultures, frequent lacunae because of forced migration, slavery, and genocide of native populations, as well as a history of colonialism, invasion and occupation.

In other words, postmemory serves as a conduit for

202 recalling and constructing memory or a usable past in a space where certain histories and memories may be particularly contestatory or limited. It allows for the consideration of how the memories of those from the past influenced subsequent generations as well as the present one. It functions as a way to think about characters within novels with multi-generational ties, especially when their stories are linked to past events that may no longer be salient or easily recalled to the present reader. It also serves as a way to think about the project of writers who create this kind of narrative as well as the reception of this work.

The second chapter reflected on and compared the resistance movements in Haiti and the Dominican Republic during the partly simultaneous occupations of both island nations. I also engaged in a performative reading of the literary criticism of successful plays from the Dominican

Republic with the purpose of engaging with the cultural postmemory of the event, which has been somewhat limited in the literary realm. Engaging in a close reading of the criticism of plays and reading across the newspaper page from those critiques serve as new way of approaching an absent source text. Additionally, this chapter contributes to filling the gap of criticism related to artistic

203 resistance during the US Occupation of the Dominican

Republic (1916-1924) and, thereby, draws attention to the historical archive of this event and contributes to its project of postmemory.

The third chapter examined narratives from both Haiti and the Dominican Republic that narrate or recall a prior intervention or occupation during a contemporaneous or looming one. These novels also have some element of the prophetic, or they tend toward foreseeing because of their careful engagement with current and past international relations. I argue that these novels contribute to what I term metapostmemory, or an engaged awareness of postmemory.

That is, these texts engage in a project of postmemory to recall prior historical events, including intervention and occupation, for the purpose of resisting contemporaneous or impending invasion and occupation when people may not otherwise recall. This term further develops the notion of postmemory as it relates to awareness and its use over time.

The fourth chapter focused on a Dominican-American novel and Haitian novel written in the twenty-first century. These novels both remember occupations in

Hispaniola. Although the language and style of the texts differ, they both feature female protagonists, a focus on

204 image, as well as a preoccupation with history, memory, and identity even into the realm of diaspora, reminding the reader of how occupations often generate later migration(s). I posit that the protagonists of each novel participate in rooted errantry, a particular kind of opaque resistance, which connects to the transfer of memory in families, which becomes familial postmemory over time.

I have also demonstrated how my corpus of narratives, which span the early twentieth century to the early twenty- first century, serve as resistance narratives and contribute to a project of postmemory. In the case of the texts written during the time of intervention and occupation, these narratives directly contribute to the resistance movement of the event. For those written in the early twenty-first century, recalling these events is a direct project of postmemory and encourages the reader to reflect on the history and memory of these events. For those texts, postmemory is a type of political and identitary resistance long after the event itself because it insists on remembering even as these texts recognize that forgetting is a part of the process of memory. Other texts reflect an in-betweenness as they recall a previous occupation or intervention with the purpose of criticizing current politics and the threat of impending intervention.

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The texts of this corpus, ultimately, allow readers to engage with the occupied history and memory of Hispaniola through an identitary, ethical, or empathic rapprochement.

Works Cited

Aber, Shaina and Mary Small. “Citizen or Subordinate: Permutations of Belonging in the United States and the Dominican Republic” Journal on Migration and Human Society 1.3 (2013); 76-96.

Alexis, Stephen. Le Nègre masqué. Miami : Butterfly Publications, 2013.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971. Marxists.org

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