Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction (Reading Trauma and Memory) 1666909645, 9781666909647

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Ghosts in New World Literature
“Anthropology of the Dead”
Haunting and Affect
Haunting, History, and Imagination in
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives

READING TRAUMA AND MEMORY Series Editors: Aimee Pozorski, Central Connecticut State University and Nicholas Ealy, University of Hartford Reading Trauma and Memory offers global perspectives on representations of trauma and memory while examining the tensions, limitations, and responsibilities that accompany the status of the witness. This series attempts to bridge the gap between trauma studies and new directions in the fields of memory studies, popular culture, and race theory and seeks submissions that closely read literature and culture for representations of traumatic wounding, the limits of memory, and the ethical duty to depict historical trauma and its effects. Given its breadth, this series will appeal to scholars in a number of interdisciplinary fields; given the specific angle of trauma and memory, it will capture those who see ethics and responsibility as key factors in their scholarship. Such areas include: Holocaust studies; war trauma and PTSD; illness and disability; the trauma of migration and immigration; memory studies; race studies; gender and sexuality studies (which has recently had a resurgence with the #MeToo movement); studies in popular culture that take up television and films about witness; and the study of social and historical movements. We are seeking projects that question how to honor the past through close readings of literature focused on trauma and memory—which would necessarily take on international perspectives. Examples include a consideration of literature, justice, and Rwanda through a postcolonial and trauma lens; recent thinking on the phenomenon of “American Crime Story” and the resurgence of interest in the OJ Simpson trial that parallels the narrative of the Black Lives Matter movement; readings of the attempts of popular culture to address issues of historical injustice as exemplified by 12 Years a Slave and HBO’s Westworld. Recent Titles in This Series Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary U.S. and Caribbean Fiction, by Kristina S. Gibby Black Feminism and Traumatic Legacies in Contemporary African American Literature, by Apryl Lewis Violence, Trauma, and Memory: Responses to War in the late Medieval and Early Modern World, edited by Nicholas Ealy and Alexandra Onuf 9/11 Gothic: Decrypting Ghosts and Trauma in New York City’s Terrorism Novels, by Danel Olson Philo-Semitic Violence: Poland’s Jewish Past in New Polish Narratives, by Elżbieta Janicka and Tomasz Żukowski Trauma in 20th Century Multicultural American Poetry: Unmuted Verse, by Jamie D. Barker

Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction Kristina S. Gibby

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-1-66690-964-7 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-66690-965-4 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For my mother.

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Phantom Ache: Ghosts, Fiction, and Alternative Histories 1 Chapter One: Ghosts in New World Literature



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Chapter Two: “Anthropology of the Dead”: Ghosts, Subaltern Knowledge, and Alternative History in Louisiana

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Chapter Three: Haunting and Affect: Ghosts and Nostalgia in Te di la vida entera and Caramelo

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Chapter Four: Haunting, History, and Imagination in Victoire

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Conclusion

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Bibliography Index



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About the Author



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Acknowledgments

I began this project almost a decade ago while a doctoral student in the Comparative Literature program at Louisiana State University. While preparing for my general exam I was struck by the consistent appearance of ghosts in fiction from the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. I was especially inspired by female authors who, across languages and cultures of the Americas, commented on historical trauma and female kinship through the figure of the ghost. These early observations led me to analyze female literary ghosts in my dissertation, “Ghost (Hi)stories: Fiction as Alternative History in Brodber, Valdés, Cisneros, and Condé,” completed in 2017. Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives is an iteration of that study. I am grateful to Lexington Books and Holly Buchanan for working with me through the revision process and giving me the opportunity to revisit such beautiful, important novels and the valuable critical work of scholars whom I admire. I would first like to acknowledge the invaluable guidance and expertise of my dissertation committee (Adelaide Russo, Katherine Henninger, and Solimar Otero) and the amazing faculty at LSU, including Pallavi Rastogi, who influenced the direction of my research early on. I am also grateful to Amy Catania, a fellow Comp Lit student and my writing partner at LSU; our weekly meetings renewed my morale and boosted my productivity. I am especially indebted to my dissertation committee chair, Andrea Morris, who believed in my project from the beginning and saw its potential to be published as a monograph. She was the perfect committee chair, incredibly sharp and full of enthusiasm and positivity. A version of chapter three was published by Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures (vol. 2, no. 1, Fall 2017) as “Ghostly Narrators in Zoé Valdés’s Te di la vida entera and Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo: or Puro Cuento.” I am grateful to Solimar Otero for inviting me to contribute to the special issue on “Poder y cultura: Latinx Folklore and Popular Culture” and to Chiricú for publishing my early work. ix

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Thank you to my students, colleagues, and the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at Utah Valley University for their support and encouragement as I completed this project. UVU has been a wonderful academic home for me, and I am grateful to be a member of its community. Several people have supported me by reading and editing drafts of various chapters. Many thanks to my brother Bryan Gibby for his thoughtful and extensive feedback on the introduction; to Katie Young for copy-editing chapter two; and to Victoria Morrison for reading chapters, checking my French translations, and providing much needed words of encouragement in the final stretch. Special thanks to Jessy Goodman, who helped me keep a consistent writing schedule in the fall of 2021—when I started revising—with daily check-in texts. I am also exceedingly grateful to Kelly Jensen, Joseph Parry, and Loren Marks for their constant friendship and emotional and academic support. An enormous thank-you to my mentor and friend George Handley for fostering my intellectual growth as a graduate student and introducing me to Caribbean literature. His counsel to live my passion gave me the courage to pursue a doctorate in Comparative Literature. I would not be where I am now, in a career that I love, if not for him. And finally, I would like to thank my family, especially my mom, Haydée, who has read almost every novel I have written about (and intends to read them all) and has read or listened to me read each chapter of this book through various drafts. She has always been my greatest cheerleader. Writing a book about women and their family history has not only increased my appreciation for our relationship but has also connected me to my maternal grandmother Amanda and great-grandmother Soledad, neither of whom I knew in this life. I do not know the whole of their stories but, like Chayo in Sandra Cisneros’s “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” I am proud to be “my ancestor’s child.”

Introduction Phantom Ache: Ghosts, Fiction, and Alternative Histories

Ghosts indicate a troubling absence, a proverbial blind spot, leading many authors of fiction to invoke figurative and literal ghosts to reveal effaced history and unresolved trauma. Fiction from across the Americas consistently features ghosts and other supernatural beings as literary devices to unearth repressed histories of violence and suffering. Literary ghosts serve a profound sociological role, allowing us to confront our anxieties about the past and “to narrate the unnarratable.”1 The supernatural provides a unique rhetoric and mode of thought to conjure what defies or eludes conscious, rational understanding, such as historical trauma. “The horrors of history,” Teresa Goddu explains, are often “articulated through gothic discourse,”2 evoking suspense and terror. And yet there is another, oft overlooked function of literary ghosts. Yes, they can terrify, but they can also facilitate healing as they demand our attention—as they call us to witness, to confront the wounds that refuse to heal. Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives analyzes the role of female ghosts in four novels from the Americas: Louisiana (1994) by Jamaican author Erna Brodber, Te di la vida entera [I Gave You All I Had] (1996) by Cuban born Zoé Valdés, Caramelo: or Puro Cuento (2002) by the Mexican American author Sandra Cisneros, and Victoire, les saveurs et les mots [Victoire: My Mother’s Mother] (2006) by Maryse Condé of Guadeloupe. These female ghosts, which in three of the novels are (or represent) ancestors of the narrators, draw the characters’—and our—attention to absence, the missing pieces of history—whether gaps in personal, family, or national memory—that perpetuate the effects of intergenerational trauma. Emotional and psychological trauma, as the novels highlight, is often passed down through the generations (termed “absent memory” by Ellen Fine and “postmemory” by Marianne Hirsch), which makes the ghosts’ return a necessary intervention for the descendants of those who suffered the horrors of plantation slavery, war, and political upheaval.3 Via storytelling, the ancestral spirits recuperate 1

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memory, inspire female authorship and creativity, and initiate healing across generations. These maternal figures establish a matriarchal lineage of knowledge as an alternative to the patriarchal hegemony in history and in literature. The novels do not conform to the chronological progression of linear time, an organizing principle in Western thought that can be interpreted as phallic and thus patriarchal.4 Moreover, according to Matthew Draper and Brett Breton, “Linear time divides us,” isolating us from one another as it assumes a cause-and-effect chronology in which we are affected solely as individuals, separate from those who came before and those who will come after.5 Cyclical time, however, is relational. My select novels adopt cyclical, gynocentric temporality to reveal creativity’s healing potential and to assert a matriarchal mode of remembering; knowledge and memory are passed from woman to woman outside of the constraints of linear time. These novels disrupt the progressive and exclusionary nature of Western time and epistemology to enlarge the limits of historical consciousness, transforming the nightmare of history into an artistic and communal experience that builds bridges across time and space. To position my argument, this introduction will establish (1) the comparative context of New World (gothic) literary criticism; (2) Hegelian history and colonial epistemology; (3) women and the historical archive; (4) the role of the female ghosts not as metaphors but as spiritual realities; and (5) the social science behind family narratives and healthy psychological development. AMERICAN GOTHIC: COMPARATIVE CONTEXTS Ghosts have a long history in the literature of the Americas (appearing as early as 1702 with the publication of Cotton Mather’s religious history of New England, Magnalia Christi Americana) and are frequently examined in literary criticism. Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives considers questions similar to those examined in Teresa Goddu’s Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (1997); Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture (2015), edited by Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner; and Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture: The Americas (2016), edited by Justin D. Edwards and Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos, to name only a few.6 These scholars fruitfully investigate the role of literary ghosts and other gothic tropes to comment on national and hemispheric historical trauma. Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives contributes to this diverse scholarship with a narrow focus on female authors who, through the female ghost—often a maternal figure, confront the horrors of history. It is the first project to pair Louisiana, Te di la vida entera, Caramelo, and Victoire, traversing languages and cultures across the Americas.

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Historical, cultural, and political processes of the Americas have not occurred in a vacuum and cannot be fully understood unless contextualized hemispherically. My analysis of novels by Jamaican, Cuban, Mexican American, and Guadeloupean authors draws out similarities between seemingly different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, bearing in mind the shared history of violence and oppression. This comparative approach is influenced by New World studies, which defines “America” hemispherically, to explore the shared historical trauma of conquest, colonization, slavery, and political instability throughout the region. Deborah Cohn and Jon Smith, editors of Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies, explore how “the experience of defeat, occupation, and reconstruction [. . .] is something the South shares with every other part of America.”7 In their volume Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South, Jessica Adams, Michael P. Bibler, and Cécile Accilien extend Southern studies (which has come to be understood implicitly as the southern United States) to include the Caribbean, a claim made by authors outside of the United States. In “Me and My Head-Hurting Fiction,” for example, Brodber argues for the need to understand similarities between the South and the Caribbean, explaining that her novel Louisiana “was a lecture to African Caribbean and African American people. I wanted to make the point that we have a long history of cooperating to produce a diaspora culture and it would suit us politically in the contemporary period to find our way back to each other and together face the problems that are so similar.”8 Gabriel García Márquez likewise calls for an expanded definition of the “Caribbean.” He asserts that the Caribbean is “not simply a geographical area bordering the sea of the same name.”9 Rather, “it is a zone that is vaster and more complex, with a homogeneous cultural makeup that runs from the north of Brazil to the southern part of the United States.”10 Within this broader definition of the Caribbean, García Márquez claims William Faulkner as a fellow “Caribbean writer,” who taught the Colombian novelist to “decipher” the “demons of the Caribbean.”11 Whereas Louisiana and Victoire wrestle with the legacy of slavery, specifically the disruption of family history, Te di la vida entera and Caramelo explore the costs of political and personal upheaval in post-Revolution Cuba and Mexico. It goes without saying that similar atrocities have occurred globally, yet conquest, colonialism, slavery, and political instability have uniquely shaped the contour of American realities. The parallels between the four novels reinforce the validity of a uniquely American (and female) experience. Like testimonies, whose strength is more powerful when multiplied, these voices—although fictional—support one another, further destabilizing a Eurocentric historical paradigm.

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HEGELIAN HISTORY AND COLONIAL EPISTEMOLOGY The literary ghosts analyzed in this book do not invoke fear, rather they are spiritual guides and restorative figures who reveal and challenge the power dynamics of a monological historical discourse. In the words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “History is the fruit of power” because it is “a story about those who won.”12 In the modern age of European colonization, the West not only enforced its culture, language, and religion but also perpetuated colonial oppression by imposing the “history” of their triumphant conquests upon the colonized. This official history becomes the dominant narrative, approaching the absolute and eclipsing other histories. In other words, it reinforces hegemonic discourse that displaces the voices of the conquered as it claims epistemological supremacy. Throughout this project I use the term Hegelian history to summarize the totalitarian, exclusionary history espoused at the height of European colonialism. Straddling the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Hegel sought to establish history as an objective and scientific discipline, which ultimately led to a rigid, inflexible model. As many have observed,13 Hegel’s philosophy of history is, to quote Michael Dash, “discriminatory [. . .] towards non-European cultures.”14 Hegel’s “Universal History,” which points toward an absolute and total history,15 is rigidly set and defined against creative traditions that are not born of “reason,” which, for Hegel, not only guides the historical process, but also defines reality: “Reason is the substance of the Universe; viz., that by which and in which all reality has its being and subsistence.”16 “Legends, Ballad-stories, [and] Traditions,” Hegel writes, “must be excluded from such original history.”17 Those who draw upon stories and legends, which according to Hegel are “dim and hazy forms of historical apprehension,” to make sense of their past have no place in European “rational” discourse; their “intelligence is but half awakened.”18 The novels I analyze reject this discriminatory, Hegelian paradigm by invoking oral traditions, folk knowledge, and the supernatural. By their very nature ghosts destabilize Hegelian temporality and reality, or “historical rationalism,” as Arthur F. Redding puts it.19 Ghosts challenge official history because they subvert the binary logic upon which Western historiography is predicated. These supernatural figures occupy the liminal space between opposing realities. “Neither living nor dead, present nor absent,” Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock writes, “the ghost functions as the paradigmatic deconstructive gesture.”20 As they elude categorization, ghosts decenter the hegemonic historiographic system of the West, breaking the dialectical logic of linear history. Female ghosts, then, further undermine the patriarchal paradigm of official history. I will further explore why the female ghost is

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an especially subversive figure in the following section on women and the historical archive. My select novels also wrestle with postcolonial and postslavery realities, including epistemological colonization. In An Intellectual History of the Caribbean, Silvio Torres-Saillant asserts that Caribbean intellectual discourse and history have been eclipsed by Western epistemology, citing Drew Milne’s 2003 anthology, Modern Critical Thought, as a contemporary example of the West’s exclusionary and authoritative claim on knowledge. Milne’s anthology, which presents “theorists writing about theorists,” is markedly limited to European thinkers, mostly French and German.21 Torres-Saillant traces this Eurocentric thinking to the early periods of conquest, colonization, and the demonization of the non-European “other.” He examines the “cognitive politics of the conqueror,” a figure who “recognizes the existence of knowledge only when he possesses it.”22 Walter Mignolo likewise outlines hegemonic Western epistemology in The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. He examines the ways in which European colonial powers wielded language as a tool to colonize and subdue the New World subject. The colonial system justified its inherent authority and epistemological dominance by the supposed (innate) superiority of the Latin alphabet. The colonial subject’s lack of alphabetic writing, and therefore lack of “history,” “located [them] in a time ‘before’ the ‘present,’”23 forever suspended in temporal progression. This assumed lack signaled their fundamental inferiority and inability to reason and, as Mignolo affirms, caused German sociologist Max Weber to celebrate, by comparison, the West’s “possession of true knowledge, an Occidental achievement of universal value.”24 European colonizers saw themselves as the makers and keepers of history: “People with history could write the history of those people without.”25 Consequently, they deemed those whom they colonized as objects to be studied and evaluated, not agents capable of documenting or commenting on history (though they indisputably were; take for one example, Mexica record keeping). This presumed epistemological hierarchy justified conquest and abuse and continues to disenfranchise descendants of the colonized in the postcolonial era. In Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge, and Border Thinking, Mignolo challenges the destructive continuity of colonial epistemology through what he terms “border thinking,” which is “enactive” (i.e., creative, performative, and imaginative) as opposed to “denotative” (i.e., literal or rational).26 He cites Rigoberta Menchú’s memoire, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú [I, Rigoberta Menchú], as an example of this subaltern epistemology. Although the memoire’s publication sparked intense controversy as critics denounced the book’s fictional elements, Mignolo argues that the value of Menchú’s narrative is not dependent on “truth.” Menchú’s

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border epistemology had to be performative and imaginative to subvert the denotative, “territorial epistemology” of colonialism.27 In this context, the imagery of the border evokes movement and liminality while the territorial epistemology of the (implied) West imposes limits that cannot be questioned or transgressed. Like Menchú’s memoire, the novels by Brodber, Valdés, Cisneros, and Condé explore subaltern epistemologies from the doubly othered: women of color. In many ways they practice an enactive epistemology that illustrates the multiplicity of possible experiences beyond the limits of reason. The novels assert the value of imagination and creativity as they play with the boundaries between fact and fiction. Their authors make a compelling argument for the aesthetic power of fiction, like Aristotle who asserted that poetry “is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history, in that poetry tends rather to express the universal, history rather the particular fact.”28 Because these novels are not constrained by the limits of territorial epistemologies, they can lead readers to expand their historical understanding and transcend particular facts. We can unpack the assumed absolutism of recorded history when we consider how it (like fiction) is a constructed narrative of how we want to remember the past. As Michel de Certeau asserts in L’écriture de l’histoire [The Writing of History], “le passé est-il fiction du présent (the past is a fiction of the present).”29 The boundary between history (supposed fact) and story (fiction) is often blurred. For example, in Spanish and French (in which several of the novels I examine were originally published) the distinction between the two is not always definitive: historia and histoire can both translate to “history” and “story.” In his novel Texaco, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau plays with this ambiguity in a bold declaration: “Toi tu dis l’Histoire, moi je dis les histoires (You say History, but I say [hi]stories).”30 In this brief, but powerful, statement Chamoiseau challenges the concept of an absolute, totalitarian History with plural histories, which could be translated as both histories and stories. Thus, Chamoiseau gestures to the power of storytelling and creativity to counteract territorial, colonial epistemology. In Le discours antillais [Caribbean Discourse], Édouard Glissant asserts the need for creativity in the wake of traumatic history: “Le trouble de la conscience collective rend en effet nécessaire une exploration créatrice (The trouble of the collective consciousness in effect renders the necessity of creative exploration).”31 History, for Caribbean people, is not the continuous, progressive phenomenon described by Hegel. It is a rupture. A European concept of history is inadequate in the Caribbean, or in Glissant’s words, “un handicap paralysant (a paralyzing handicap).”32 The violence and dislocation of Caribbean history cannot be processed or understood by “une philosophie souvent totalitaire de l’histoire (a totalitarian philosophy

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of history).”33 Fiction, however, is not totalitarian; it allows for multiplicity and possibility. I seek to explore the healing nature of this enactive process in the novels by Brodber, Valdés, Cisneros, and Condé, as they recuperate the voices and (hi)stories of those who have been judged inconsequential by totalitarian history. WOMEN AND THE HISTORICAL ARCHIVE My argument hinges on the fact that the novels’ authors, narrators, and protagonists are women. Female ghosts tell female stories that challenge the patriarchal bias of the official archive, which often omits the female voice. Absence, Susan Gubar argues, has been women’s defining characteristic in the Western tradition. She explains, “Woman has been defined symbolically in the patriarchy as a tabula rasa, a lack, a negation, an absence.”34 According to Barbara Ladd, history’s “most fundamental exclusion, and the exclusion upon which others rest, is the exclusion of women.”35 The novels I analyze challenge the patriarchal tradition that “excludes woman from the creation of culture, even as it reifies her as an artifact within culture.”36 The ghosts are empowered agents who participate with the narrators in the creation of (hi)stories from a feminine perspective, allowing for a more complex understanding of the past. They defy reason through spiritual, supernatural, and affective elements and consequently resist the effects of colonization, subverting the totalitarian claims of the dominant historical discourse. The narrative voices of the ghosts invoke the tradition of oral literature, which although traditionally discounted in the Western canon, is vital to women’s literary history and various indigenous literary traditions.37 Margaret Higonnet posits that “women have always been verbal artists,” citing the lullaby as an early oral form.38 Gubar likewise refers to “the matrilineal traditions of oral storytelling” that existed “before man-made books.”39 Female storytellers, in Gubar’s words, invite us to “hear the voice of silence.”40 This is true of my select authors as they imaginatively recuperate marginalized stories and experiences through a matrilineal succession of knowledge and history. In the case of the novels analyzed in this book, orality resists hegemonic, patriarchal history on two levels by invoking indigenous and female literary traditions. The ghosts further subvert Western literary expectations by disrupting linear temporality, another feature of women’s writing. The ghosts’ uncanny returns create a cyclical temporal space, which, as noted by Julia Kristeva, is an example of “women’s time.”41 Cyclical time is maternal (gynocentric), rather than patriarchal (phallocentric); it disrupts masculine linear temporality that projects into the future. In “Maternité selon Giovanni Bellini”

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[Motherhood according to Giovanni Bellini], Kristeva further establishes the relationship between maternity and cyclical temporality, exploring childbirth as a means to connect to the matrilineal past: “En enfantant, elle touche à sa mère, elle la devient, elle est elle, elles sont une même continuité se différenciant (By giving birth, she touches her mother, she becomes her, she is her, they are the same differentiating continuity).”42 Kristeva describes the birthing process as a collapse of linear time, dissolving the barrier between past and present as a new mother becomes “one” with her own mother, forging a new link in the matrilineal chain that paradoxically moves forward while circling back, like a woven garment whose threads must loop backwards in order to complete its design. Kristeva’s theories support my analysis of the ghosts’ return, which allows for the maternal spirits to nurture and heal their female relatives. SPIRITUAL REALITIES: GHOSTS IN THE NEW WORLD The ghosts in these select novels are not mere metaphors but real and effective agents who play critical roles within the narratives. Readers, Western readers especially, are asked to take the spiritual reality of the ghosts seriously and by extension accept the validity of the characters’ cultural and spiritual traditions and the real people they stand in place of—people who have routinely been dismissed as “distorted echo[es] of what occurs elsewhere.”43 Anne Margaret Castro’s call to read and study Afro-diasporic “literary depictions of spiritual phenomena” with the same “rigor of theology” is especially relevant here as I argue for the spiritual power and reality of the ghosts in my select novels.44 Although fictional, they give insight to spiritual and cultural experiences that are often fetishized or derided in the West.45 Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, in her survey of Caribbean gothic literature, notes that as early as the eighteenth-century authors in and outside of the Caribbean treat the region’s “African-derived belief systems, chiefly Haitian Vodou, Jamaican Obeah, and Cuban Santería” as symbols of “the islands’ threatening realities, of the brutalizing, bizarre sacrifices, cannibalism, and sexual aberrations” to thrill and entertain their readers.46 In contrast to the sensational and escapist European gothic conventions, the spiritual reality of the female ghosts evokes Alejo Carpentier’s theory of lo real maravilloso americano, the marvelous reality of a uniquely American experience. They assert the validity of Caribbean and Mexican spiritual folk practices and syncretic religious traditions, which share many characteristics, including “a cult of dead ancestors and/or deceased members of the religious community who watch over and influence events from beyond.”47 The spirits in these novels thus direct readers toward traditions that have been “devalued

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by dominant cultures.”48 By so doing, they challenge the Eurocentric bias that denies the legitimacy of non-European religions.49 The spirits in the novels I analyze point to common religious practices within the African diaspora, such as ritual spirit possession, while simultaneously subverting Western epistemological and religious expectations. As Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert explain, such rituals “constitute practices of resistance.”50 These religious traditions assert communal memory, belonging, and autonomy in the face of slavery, colonialism, and oppression. Solimar Otero’s Archives of Conjure examines the political and cultural implications of contemporary spiritual traditions in Afro-diasporic religious practices, from Cuban Espiritismo to Brazilian Candomblé. In a chapter on Afro-Cuban misas, Otero observes that the spirits and their mediums engage in “rebellious remembering” against “a universal ordering of the past,” thus subverting the history and legacy of colonialism.51 Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives explores the politically subversive quality of the spirits in the novels by Brodber, Valdés, Cisneros, and Condé, but also highlights their healing potential as maternal figures, guiding the narrators to make sense of the past and their family history. HEALING NARRATIVES I argue that the spirits in my core novels help the characters secure themselves within a relational network as an antidote to existential crises by recovering their family stories. In this section I introduce genealogical isolation as a psychological wound, especially in the case of slavery, and explore how knowing one’s family history can heal this wound. In Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson examines how slavery severed individuals from their genealogical networks; the slave had “no socially recognized existence outside of his master.”52 Denied a claim to ancestors and descendants, the slave experienced a “secular excommunication,” rendering him socially dead.53 The individual slave without tether to past nor future was lost in an existential abyss, “truly a genealogical isolate.”54 Despite the abolition of slavery in the Americas, descendants of slaves suffer a similar existential crisis.55 The Middle Passage and plantation slavery disrupted communal memory and identity, leading to perpetual genealogical isolation. In “History as Social Death,” Brodber rhetorically questions, “Are we, the descendants of enslaved Africans, like our forefathers socially dead even after nearly two centuries of official emancipation?”56 Although no longer defined in relation to a master, descendants of black slaves who cannot contextualize themselves within their family lack a clear picture of the past. They struggle to “anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory.”57 The solution,

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Brodber asserts, is family history: “Logic would insist that a person or people who can access the heritage of their ancestors, who can integrate their experience of reality into their lives to help them to interpret their experience of reality, attach the present to the memories of the past, would no longer be natally alienated, no longer socially dead; no longer a slave.”58 Brodber’s 1980 prose-poem, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, presents this argument within a bildungsroman of a black Jamaican girl. The genealogical rift between Brodber’s protagonist, Nellie, and her ancestors halts her individual development. She is lost until experiencing a spiritual awakening in the form of a vision of her ancestors (known and unknown), “popping up like geometric progression” (i.e., innumerable).59 This vision prepares Nellie to shed the burden of internalized racism embodied by her black great-grandmother Tia who “did everything to annihilate herself,” believing that her disappearance would directly affect her children’s success in a white world.60 Tuned in to the voices of the spirits, Nellie realizes that the dead and the living can participate in reciprocal healing across time and space: “I saw that I only had half of the questions and answers and they the other half. I saw that if I knew all my kin [. . .], I could no longer roam as a stranger; that I had to know them to know what I was about.”61 She cannot become herself until she learns who has come before her: “We walk by their leave, for planted in the soil, we must walk over them to get where we are going.”62 Brodber’s fictional narrative contains powerful truths about family history recently documented by social scientists. In “The Intergenerational Self: Subjective Perspective and Family History,” Robyn Fivush, Jennifer G. Bohanek, and Marshall Duke study how knowing one’s family history fosters healthy psychological development, providing “powerful models, frameworks, and perspectives for understanding [one’s] own experiences.”63 Family history is an informal process of storytelling, but is not trivial knowledge. These stories “create meaning beyond the individual, to include a sense of self through historical time and in relation to family members.”64 The intergenerational self is “defined as much by one’s place in a familial history as a personal past.”65 Contextualizing oneself within one’s family history is a powerful weapon against psychological wounds. But what can one do in the face of historical rupture, when there is no access to one’s family history, either because of slavery or familial neglect? In Louisiana, Te di la vida entera, Caramelo, and Victoire, spirits are the key to the problem of genealogical and cultural isolation. Their supernatural intervention bridges the gap between past and present, circumventing the “laws” of time that would make one genealogically isolated. In this project, I examine how the female spirits provide the narrators access to their ancestral

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heritage to integrate those experiences into their own stories, attaching the present to the past to escape the abyss of genealogical alienation. CHAPTER OVERVIEW Chapter one, “Ghosts in New World Literature,” addresses the larger tradition of literary ghosts in novels across the Americas to contextualize my hemispheric approach. It focuses specifically on works by the following authors from the United States, Caribbean, and Latin America: William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Dulce María Loynaz, Carlos Fuentes, and Isabel Allende. These authors not only theorize the concept of history, destabilizing the notion of a linear and absolute history, but also implement the figure of the ghost to address and confront a traumatic past. In the case of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Loynaz’s Jardín, the ghosts are figurative; the horrific legacy of slavery haunts the present. The literal ghosts of Morrison’s Beloved and Fuentes’s Aura cause trouble for the protagonists, threatening the stability of their sense of self. Silko’s indigenous spirits in Almanac of the Dead subvert the historicity of the status quo, while Allende’s female spirit works to preserve family memory in the face of political oppression and violence. My analysis of these twentieth-century novels establishes the broad spectrum of literary ghosts in the Americas and contextualizes the core novels that I will analyze in the subsequent chapters. The second chapter, “‘Anthropology of the Dead’: Ghosts, Subaltern Knowledge, and Alternative History in Louisiana,” analyzes spirit possession as a means to recuperate subaltern knowledge in Erna Brodber’s 1994 novel. Brodber positions unofficial (folk) knowledge and unofficial histories against the dominant historical discourse, specifically represented in the novel by the Federal Writers’ Project. The novel’s protagonist abandons her academic training and government assignment to become a spirit medium, not only to recover the voices of two black female spirits, but to become the prophetic voice of the contemporary black experience. I begin by exploring the novel’s spiritual epistemology as the ghosts relate knowledge that disrupts Western secular and rational paradigms. I then examine the emphasis of oral culture in the text, which destabilizes the hegemony of written history. Lastly, I analyze Brodber’s use of Jamaican folklore and jazz to subvert colonial epistemology. Others have explored the role of spirit possession in Louisiana to resist colonial desires, yet this chapter provides an in-depth textual analysis that reveals how this resistance is accomplished, focusing on the ways in which the sex of the ghosts and the protagonist subvert the historiographic authority of the state.

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Chapter three, “Haunting and Affect: Ghosts and Nostalgia in Te di la vida entera and Caramelo,” examines ghosts’ affective nature to resist linear time. I first situate the novels within the Latin American testimonio tradition to establish the spirits as viable witnesses before exploring the affective quality of their testimonies. Relying on nostalgia and music, which—like ghosts—also disrupt linear temporality, the spirits re-create the past on an affective level, transcending the cold, hard facts of the official archive. These novels, like Louisiana, challenge the territorial epistemology of the West as the ghosts, by engaging readers’ emotions and senses, bring us to what Avery Gordon calls a “transformative recognition”66 inasmuch as the spirits evoke a creative, enactive epistemology that ushers a return to knowing, evoking the cyclical nature of time that the spirits represent and access. In other words, the spirits in Te di la vida entera and Caramelo pull readers into a “structure of feeling”67 that exists outside of a rigid temporal space, opposing the rational epistemology upon which Hegelian history is based. In the fourth chapter, “Haunting, History, and Imagination in Victoire,” I explore the role of imagination in Condé’s (auto)biographical novel about her maternal grandmother, Victoire Élodie Quidal. To contextualize Condé’s personal project, I begin this chapter with an analysis of Condé’s 1986 novel Moi, Tituba Sorcière . . . Noire de Salem [I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem], which was also inspired by a female ghost and likewise subverts the dominant, patriarchal historical narrative. Whereas Tituba is based on a historical figure, Victoire questions what makes one worthy of history as Condé (both narrator and author) asserts her grandmother’s historical significance despite being an illegitimate, illiterate, mulâtresse cook. I trace the similarities and differences between Condé’s two novels to highlight the difficulty of recovering and inventing her grandmother’s story. For one, Victoire’s ghost, unlike Tituba’s, is silent. I examine this haunting silence not only as commentary on black Caribbean family history—too shameful or painful to remember— and Victoire’s marginalized existence, but also as an invitation to Condé to write her grandmother’s story. Like Brodber and Cisneros, Condé plays with the tension between fact and fiction, arguing for a poetics of history that transcends the limits of historical fact. Although Victoire’s ghost is a silent apparition (in contrast to the vocal spirits in Louisiana, Te di la vida entera, Caramelo, and Tituba), her haunting presence effectively motivates Condé to mediate her grandmother’s history and reclaim Victoire’s subjectivity. Although various literary works use the figure of the ghost to address the weight of the past, these four novels uniquely explore how women (both mortals and spirits) are especially equipped to challenge the dominant historical discourse via orality, gynocentric temporality, and playful transgression. These texts not only demonstrate how fiction can reclaim memory and (re)construct history, but also illustrate how this imaginative process asserts

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the place of a female author against the hegemonic historical paradigm. These novels confront Western and patriarchal historical constructs as they oppose not only the idea of a linear, universal history, but also resist a rational reality. The female ghosts in these texts, by their very ontology, defy such rational desires. Consequently, their narratives become alternative histories, reclaiming women’s voices and expanding historical consciousness. NOTES 1. Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 4. 2. Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 2. 3. See Ellen Fine’s “The Absent Memory: The Act of Writing in Post-Holocaust French Literature” and Marianne Hirsch’s The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. 4. Official history is often, to borrow Jacques Derrida’s term, phallogocentric; it privileges the masculine in the making of meaning. 5. Matthew R. Draper and Brett M. Breton, “Rethinking Time in Psychology” (Paper presentation, twelfth annual Utah Valley University Humanities Symposium, Orem, UT, February 23, 2023). 6. See also Arthur F. Redding’s Haints: American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fictions (2011) and Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (2004), edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. 7. Deborah Cohn and Jon Smith, “Introduction: Uncanny Hybridities,” in Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies, eds. Deborah Cohn and Jon Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 2. 8. Erna Brodber, “Me and My Head-Hurting Fiction,” Small Axe 16, no. 3 (November 2012), 123. 9. Gabriel García Márquez, “Faulkner, A Caribbean Writer,” in A Faulkner 100: The Centennial Exhibition, ed. Thomas M. Verich (Oxford, MS: University of Mississippi Library Special Collections, 1997). 10. García Márquez, “Faulkner.” 11. García Márquez, “Faulkner.” 12. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), xix, 5. 13. See Walter Mignolo’s Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge, and Border Thinking, Silvio Torres-Saillant’s An Intellectual History of the Caribbean, and Édouard Glissant’s Le discours antillais [Caribbean Discourse]. 14. J. Michael Dash, introduction to Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, by Édouard Glissant, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989), xxix.

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15. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1956), 1. 16. Hegel, Philosophy, 9. 17. Hegel, Philosophy, 2. 18. Hegel, Philosophy, 2. 19. Arthur F. Redding, Haints: American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fictions (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 2. 20. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, introduction to Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 4. 21. Silvio Torres-Saillant, An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 4. 22. Torres-Saillant, Intellectual History, 119. 23. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 3. 24. Mignolo, Darker Side, 3. 25. Mignolo, Darker Side, 3. 26. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 26. 27. Mignolo, Local Histories, 26. 28. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. James Hutton (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), 54. 29. Michel de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 17. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 30. Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 102. 31. Édouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 223. 32. Glissant, Le discours antillais, 223. 33. Glissant, Le discours antillais, 223. 34. Susan Gubar, “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity,” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 89. 35. Barbara Ladd, Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William, Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 2. 36. Gubar, “The Blank Page,” 77. 37. Elvira Pulitano, “Writing in the Oral Tradition: Reflections on the Indigenous Literatures of Australia, New Zealand, and North America,” in Teaching World Literature, ed. David Damrosch (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009), 217. 38. Margaret R. Higonnet, “Weaving Women into World Literature,” in Teaching World Literature, ed. David Damrosch (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009), 234. 39. Gubar, “The Blank Page,” 89. 40. Gubar, “The Blank Page,” 89. 41. Julia Kristeva, “Le temps des femmes,” 33/44: cahiers de recherche de sciences des textes et documents 5 (Winter 1979), 5–19.

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42. Julia Kristeva, Polylogue (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977), 411. 43. Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America,” trans. Lynn Garafola, David Arthur McMurray, and Robert Márquez, in “Caliban,” ed. Robert Márquez, special issue, The Massachusetts Review 15, no. 1/2 (Winter–Spring 1974), 7. 44. Anne Margaret Castro, The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 2, 14. 45. Take for example, William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929) and the consequent fixation on zombies in Western media initiated by Victor Halperin’s 1932 film White Zombie. 46. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: the Caribbean,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 234. 47. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, introduction to Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo, ed. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 9. 48. Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert, introduction, 12. 49. Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert, introduction, 7. 50. Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert, introduction, 12. 51. Solimar Otero, Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 95, 91. 52. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 5. 53. Patterson, Slavery, 5. 54. Patterson, Slavery, 5. 55. See Elaine Pinderhughes’ “Legacy of Slavery: The Experience of Black Families in America,” Na’im Akbar’s Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery, Alvin F. Poussaint and Amy Alexander’s Lay My Burden Down: Unraveling Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African-Americans, Ron Eyerman’s Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African-American Identity, and Joy DeGruy’s Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. 56. Erna Brodber, “History and Social Death,” Caribbean Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2012), 114. 57. Patterson, Slavery, 5. 58. Brodber, “History,” 112. 59. Erna Brodber, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2014), 79. 60. Brodber, Jane and Louisa, 139. 61. Brodber, Jane and Louisa, 80. 62. Brodber, Jane and Louisa, 12. 63. Robyn Fivush et al., “The Intergenerational Self: Subjective Perspective and Family History,” in Self Continuity: Individual and Collective Perspectives, ed. Fabio Sani (New York: Psychology Press, 2008), 131.

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64. Fivush et al., “The Intergenerational Self,” 134. 65. Fivush et al., “The Intergenerational Self,” 132. 66. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 8. 67. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8.

Chapter One

Ghosts in New World Literature

In this chapter I establish the various roles of literary ghosts in fiction from the Americas as a prelude to my analysis of the novels by Brodber, Valdés, Cisneros, and Condé. I specifically explore how literary ghosts encourage readers to confront the problem of history—its construction and dissemination through official channels—by examining six twentieth-century novels from the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean that destabilize official historical discourses through the supernatural. This analysis will contextualize my reading of Louisiana, Te di la vida entera, Caramelo, and Victoire, novels which build upon (and in some instances dramatically divert from) the fiction discussed in this chapter. GHOSTS IN U.S. LITERATURE The gothic tradition in U.S. literature is rich and varied, including works by Washington Irving (1783–1859); Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864); Edgar Allen Poe (1809–1849); Henry James (1843–1916); Edith Wharton (1862–1937); William Faulkner (1897–1962); Shirley Jackson (1916–1965); Toni Morrison (1931–2019); Leslie Marmon Silko (1948–), and many more. From the New England Gothic to the Southern Gothic, the figure of the ghost is repeatedly invoked in U.S. literature to confront historical issues that have haunted and continue to haunt the national imagination. In the words of the editors of Undead Souths, “To see dead people is to face the past and its many cultural irruptions in the present.”1 Although ghosts appear in U.S. literature before the rise of the gothic novel in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe (take, for example, the writings of seventeenth-century New England minister Cotton Mather), supernatural themes progressively emerge parallel to the increased production of European gothic texts.2 This fascination with the supernatural persists into the twentieth century and, in the case of Southern Gothic literature, often reveals guilt for the traumas 17

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of plantation slavery. There are too many works from the United States to discuss in a single chapter, and so for the purpose of this project I will examine three, including: William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991). Haunting, figurative and literal, in these novels indicate that the horrors of the past cannot be repressed; they will continue to return until they are witnessed. The supernatural elements not only confront the horrors of the past, but also question our assumptions about absolute History. The history of the South, Faulkner posits, is a conscious construction and therefore contestable. Absalom, Absalom! illustrates this through the mysterious legacy of Thomas Sutpen, a white planter who “came out of nowhere and without warning” and “built a plantation,” or as his sister-in-law, Miss Rosa, asserts, “Tore violently a plantation.”3 Absalom, Absalom! destabilizes official discourse by presenting multiple (biased) narrators who relate different accounts of Sutpen’s life, troubling the idea of absolute history as readers attempt to locate the truth. The novel begins with Miss Rosa relating to Quentin Compson, a young man about to leave for Harvard, a disturbing version of her dead brother-in-law’s history. Rife with dark intrigue, Miss Rosa’s narrative reads like a ghost story; Max Putzel calls the meeting between Miss Rosa and Quentin a “séance.”4 Together Miss Rosa and Quentin attempt to make sense of the troubling past of “the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts.”5 There are no literal ghosts in Faulkner’s novel; yet it has often been cited as a gothic novel.6 The gothic tone is established early on with the zombie-like descriptions of the elderly Miss Rosa. She is more dead than alive: her face is “wan” and “haggard,” her voice has a haunting quality, and her scent suggests the “rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity,”7 which in this case represents finality rather than potential fecundity. Her womb has become a kind of tomb, which is reflected in the claustrophobic setting of Miss Rosa’s parlor, “a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers.”8 Quentin imagines that Miss Rosa herself is “one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times.”9 The macabre setting of Miss Rosa’s home and her ghoulish presence prepare readers to uncover the sinister history of her brother-in-law’s plantation, Sutpen’s Hundred. Sutpen himself is a ghost-like figure, a “demon,” who emerges out of thin air without a past, without an established identity.10 “He was not articulated in this world,” Miss Rosa narrates, “He was a walking shadow. He was the light-blinded bat-like image of his own torment cast by the fierce demoniac lantern up from beneath the earth’s crust and hence in retrograde, reverse; from abysmal and chaotic dark to eternal and abysmal dark.”11 She describes

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Sutpen like a gothic anti-hero; he is a barbarous outsider and a threat to the “civilized” inhabitants of Jefferson, Mississippi. Despite his calculated moves to claim a place among the esteemed planter class, Sutpen fails to create the new Eden that he thinks will legitimize him. Rather, Sutpen’s Hundred is a site of potential incest, fratricide, manslaughter, and arson. Implicitly Sutpen’s plantation and the revelation of these horrific acts is a commentary on the horrors of plantation slavery in the South. It is fitting then, that the plantation is destroyed by Sutpen’s illegitimate black daughter, Clytie, who sets the house on fire, killing herself and her half-brother. Her father’s house, now a “monstrous tinder-dry rotten shell,”12 is a powerful metaphor for U.S. slavery. This tragic and chilling ending underlines the nightmare that is the history of the South—a site of violence and inhuman cruelty that will never be absolved. Slavery’s legacy—as Quentin’s Harvard roommate, Shreve, suggests— will always haunt the South. “What is it?” he asks Quentin, “something you live and breathe in like air?”13 As a Canadian, the history of the South is entirely foreign to Shreve: “it’s something my people haven’t got [. . .]. We don’t live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves (or have I got it backward and was it your folks that are free and the niggers that lost?)”14 Shreve’s geographic distance from the South intensifies his psychological distance from that history; yet his questions illuminate the South’s inability to escape the horrors of its past. Despite the lack of literal ghosts in Absalom, Absalom!, the novel is haunted—by slavery, by Sutpen, and by the tragic consequences of his actions. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, published half a century after Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, also addresses the traumatic history of slavery through haunting. Whereas Faulkner’s novel focuses on the effect of slavery’s haunting persistence on a white Southern young man, Morrison’s depicts slavery’s uncanny return in the form of a literal ghost who haunts a former slave. Beloved is inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave mother who, when captured by slave catchers, kills her three-year-old daughter to spare her from returning to slavery. Morrison’s novel provides context for this gruesome history of infanticide by giving a psychological and emotional reality to the many horrors endured by slaves that continued to haunt them after emancipation. Beloved takes place in post-emancipation Ohio where Sethe, Garner’s fictional counterpart, lives with her daughter Denver in house number 124. Memories of slavery continue to haunt Sethe as does the ghost of the baby (named Beloved) she murdered to protect from the cruelties of the plantation. Beloved’s haunting presence is announced in the novel’s opening lines: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”15 Although Sethe has survived to witness abolition, her quotidian existence is anything but peaceful;

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her dead baby’s malice prevents Sethe from forgetting the horrors of her past: “I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house.”16 Both the “tree” on Sethe’s back, scars from the whip which had created a “decorative work of an iron-smith too passionate for display,” and the haunting spirit represent the uncanny past of slavery.17 As Avery Gordon observes, “Sethe knows through the powerful mediation of haunting that as a proclaimed fact abolition is not emancipation.”18 Slavery may be abolished, but its lingering presence represented by Beloved’s ghost denies Sethe true freedom. This connection between slavery and Beloved’s character is further established when the baby’s ghost takes on human form, emerging fully grown out of a nearby pond.19 Her return via water parallels an infant’s entry into the world but also conjures the history of the Middle Passage. These seemingly contradictory allusions come together in Édouard Glissant’s concept of the slave ship as a perverse womb, a terrifying abyss: “Le ventre de cette barque-ci te dissout, te précipite dans un non-monde où tu cries. Cette barque est une matrice, le gouffre-matrice [. . .]. Enceinte d’autant de morts que de vivants en sursis (The belly of this boat will dissolve you, it rushes you into a non-world where you scream. This boat is a womb, the abyss-womb [. . .]. Pregnant with as many dead, as those living on borrowed time).”20 Like the African slaves who emerged from the womb-abyss of the slave ship, Beloved’s emergence from the water is an uncanny rebirth. This allusion to the Middle Passage is further emphasized by the collective slave memories that haunt Beloved as if they were her own: “We are not crouching now we are standing but my legs are like my dead man’s eyes I cannot fall because there is no room to the men without skin are making loud noises I am not dead.”21 The visual effect of the spacing and lack of punctuation in this passage reminds readers of the empty spaces in the history of slavery—the silences that represent what Glissant calls “une non-histoire (non-history).”22 Morrison captures at a formal level the delirium of the Middle Passage; this is a fragmented, ghostly memory. Morrison further explores the haunting nature of memory through the concept of “rememory,” which Sethe explains to Denver as the phenomenon of individual memories persisting through time to haunt specific spaces: “Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.”23 Sethe explains that the haunting persistence of memories affect more than the individual—they affect a collective consciousness: “even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”24 Individual trauma does not remain individual; it is “out there, in the world,” which is why Sethe warns Denver against ever returning to Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation where she was a

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slave: “you can’t never go there. Never. Because even though it’s all over— over and done with—it’s going to always be there waiting for you.”25 Slavery, the unnamed “it,” will always haunt Sweet Home. Sethe, however, cannot protect Denver from the memory of slavery when it comes to Ohio in the form of Beloved. Initially, Sethe is joyfully overwhelmed that her baby has returned to her and attends to Beloved’s every whim to “make up for the handsaw,” but the haint becomes insatiable with her demands: “Beloved was making her pay for it. But there would never be an end to that.”26 Sethe’s doting acts of restitution do not satisfy the ghost. As Beloved becomes stronger in her mortal frame, Sethe becomes increasingly weaker and begins to waste away, as if Beloved feeds off of her mother’s pain and regret. Their troubling symbiosis is a warning about our relationship with the past: although it cannot be repressed, it ought not to be indulged. It must be confronted; however, this task is too overwhelming for Sethe as an individual. It takes thirty neighborhood women to exorcise Beloved from her mother’s house through song, freeing Sethe to finally live facing the future.27 As Morrison re-creates Margaret Garner’s history, she asks readers to consider the full weight of the horrors of U.S. slavery by contextualizing those atrocities within the terrible story of a mother desperate enough to murder her own child to protect her from those cruelties. Beloved’s ghost represents the past and its persistent irruptions in the present; her uncanny return is the uncanny return of historical trauma and indicates the threat that, if unresolved, it poses to the nation and the individual. Like Absalom, Absalom! and Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead invokes the supernatural to comment on traumatic history, specifically that of indigenous Americans. In this complex novel (with various plots and subplots that explore the struggle for power via crime, emotional manipulation, and physical violence), spirits (of the earth and of men) subvert the official historical discourse by echoing the voices of the oppressed and enslaved. For the purpose of this chapter, I will examine how these spirits destabilize official narratives and disrupt linear time. The subversive spirits in Silko’s novel make trouble for state agencies, like the spirit of a nameless Apache warrior who protects the outlaw Geronimo from Mexican and U.S. authorities. According to the official history, Geronimo died while a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. In Silko’s novel, however, Apache tribal elders insist that the real Geronimo was never caught. According to the elders, he evaded capture because there were various warriors named Geronimo and officials did not know what the man they hunted looked like. This created widespread confusion about the outlaw’s identity which only intensified when the image of an unknown man—whom the Apache assumed to be the spirit of a deceased warrior—materialized in photographs of the various Geronimos: “The image of this man appeared

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where the faces of the other Geronimos should have been.”28 This spirit guarded Geronimo’s identity and subverted the official narrative with misleading “evidence.” Moreover, the tribal leaders’ account of this subversion not only counters the official government record in content, but in form also, reinforcing their indigenous oral tradition that defies the so-called logic of linear storytelling: “The story they told did not run in a line for the horizon but circled and spiraled instead like the red-tailed hawk.”29 Silko’s novel further challenges the dominant discourse by deconstructing the logic of spatial and temporal borders at multiple levels; they are “[i]maginary lines.”30 One of her indigenous characters exclaims: “We don’t believe in boundaries. Borders. Nothing like that. We are here thousands of years before the first whites. We are here before maps or quit claims. We know where we belong on this earth. We have always moved freely. North-south. East-west. We pay no attention to what isn’t real.”31 The verb tense in this passage blurs the difference between boundaries of space and time: “We are here thousands of years before the first whites.”32 Silko’s argument about the arbitrary nature of borders underlines the arbitrary nature of official historical narratives. For example, the novel discredits American exceptionalism by highlighting the ugly side of U.S. history, citing the cruel and gratuitous murder of Yaqui women and children in the early twentieth century: “In 1902, the federals are lining Yaqui women, their little children, on the edge of an arroyo. The soldiers fire randomly. Laugh when a child topples backwards. Shooting for laughs until they are all dead. Walk through those dry mountains. Right now. Today. I have seen it.”33 Once more the present verb tense collapses a linear concept of time, illustrating how the traumatic past haunts the present. Moreover, Silko stresses how these vile acts haunt the landscape (reminiscent of Morrison’s concept of rememory). The arroyo will be forever a site of “human bones piled high. Skulls piled and stacked like melons.”34 The land is a witness to this brutal history. It remembers even if History forgets. Almanac of the Dead sets forth an indigenous paradigm that opposes Western territorial epistemology via spirits, time, and narrative. As Silko’s indigenous characters well know, the past is “alive with spirits.”35 This paradoxical idea, like the novel’s title, breaks down expectations of a rational and linear quality of time. As Silko explains, the novel does not follow the linear structure of an almanac in the West; it is “more like an old Mayan almanac in which all days, all months, and all time are living beings who are interconnected.”36 Spirits of time, of the earth, and of the ancestors subvert and resist the expectations of Western epistemology, temporality, and geography. Silko’s spirits are different than Beloved or the figurative ghosts that haunt Faulkner’s South, but these three U.S. novels similarly invoke the supernatural to highlight the traumas and sins of the past.

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GHOSTS IN LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN LITERATURE Fiction from Latin America and the Caribbean may not form as rich of a ghostly tradition as that produced in the United States yet ghosts and spectral figures do appear in these literatures with the same objective—to address the nightmare of history. Caribbean and Latin American authors, like their U.S. counterparts, employ supernatural tropes to explore the terrible ramifications of conquest, slavery, and political upheaval, including Dulce María Loynaz (1902–1997); Juan Rulfo (1917–1986); Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012); Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014); Isabel Allende (1942–); Patrick Chamoiseau (1953–); Daína Chaviano (1957–); Cristina García (1958–); and many others. For the purpose of this chapter, I will highlight the following works: Dulce María Loynaz’s Jardín (1951), Carlos Fuentes’s Aura (1965), and Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus [The House of the Spirits] (1982). Like the novels by Faulkner, Morrison, and Silko, Cuban author Dulce María Loynaz’s Jardín, written in 1935 and published in 1951, implements supernatural tropes to address the burden of history. Of the three U.S. novels, Jardín shares the most similarities with Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner and Loynaz wrote during the same period and both of their works illustrate how the blight of slavery corrupts the elite planter class, which is physically manifested in the decaying plantation. Like Faulkner, Loynaz explores this dark theme through a young, naïve protagonist who must uncover and make sense of the mysteries of the past. Loynaz’s protagonist, Bárbara¸ orphaned at a young age and raised in her family’s ancestral mansion, is an heiress to the waning aristocratic legacy in early twentieth-century Cuba. She represents the precarious position of the creole Cuban elite at the twilight of their (in)glorious reign. Bárbara’s struggle to make sense of her place in the world (and of her family history) reflects the weight of Cuba’s past and its many specters. Loynaz emphasizes this struggle through Bárbara’s faulty memory, further complicating how the young woman relates to the past. She cannot remember her own childhood very well, and even the memory of her mother, “la más muerta de todos los muertos (the most dead of them all),” is vague.37 Bárbara’s memories are enveloped in a fog so thick she cannot distinguish them from dreams (“[N]o se sabe si son de la vida vivida o de los sueños soñados [She does not know if her memories are from her lived experience or from dreams]”), leading her to question what is real: “La vida vivida se vuelve, a veces, tan inconsciente como un sueño; es quizás un sueño largo (Life becomes, sometimes, as inconsistent as a dream; perhaps it is one long dream).”38 This distortion will further complicate Bárbara’s ability to process what she discovers about the past. Bárbara’s amnesia (unusual for a young

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woman) mirrors the flawed memory of the creole Cuban elite who (willfully) forget the violent deeds of their predecessors. The narrative begins with Bárbara sorting through portraits of deceased relatives, which not only establishes her preoccupation with death, but also sets the somber, mysterious tone of the novel. Although (like Faulkner’s novel) no actual ghosts appear, the house is full of “los fantasmas del pasado (ghosts of the past).”39 The portraits, letters, and other relics that Bárbara discovers in the house and its garden allude to a dark family history, though she struggles to unearth the truth. The crippling weight of the unknown past seizes Bárbara’s individual identity and autonomy; she feels that she cannot escape the past and that, because of her ignorance and her lack of memory, nothing belongs to her. Everything she possesses and is has been inherited from the dead: “Vivimos de lo que nos dejan los muertos (We live off of what the dead have left us).”40 She only fills the vacancy of their absence; she does not live her own life: “ocupamos el sitio que ellos han tenido que dejarnos; nada tenemos que ellos no hayan tenido antes; les copiamos hasta las facciones y los nombres (we occupy the space that they have had to leave us; there is nothing that we have that they did not previously own; we copy everything from them including our features and names).”41 The realization that the present is an echo of the past (and therefore merely comprised of shadowy copies) destabilizes Bárbara’s sense of self. Even her name is another inheritance from the dead, which she learns after finding love letters addressed to her great aunt Bárbara. She instinctively feels an uncanny connection to this long dead aunt and the author of the letters, which not only blurs the boundary between the present and the past, but also between her sense of self and the other Bárbara to such an extent that she has to remind herself that her aunt is the one who is dead: “Ella ha muerto, ella ha muerto [. . .]. Ella no es ella (She is dead, she is dead [. . .]. She is not her).”42 Despite her efforts to assert her own identity separate from her great aunt, Bárbara falls in love with the author of the letters, a man who has been dead for decades. This unnatural desire warps Bárbara’s conception of love, leading her to associate it with death: “Las cartas desprenden un letal perfume de amor y de muerte (The letters give off a lethal perfume of love and death).”43 This macabre romance is one of several episodes in the novel that illustrates the uncanny return of the past. As Bárbara comes to understand, “no podemos escapar de los muertos (we cannot escape the dead).”44 This is quite clear in the novel’s allusions to the specter of slavery. During one of her many meditations on death, Bárbara muses that the sea, above all, must understand death because it is full of corpses: “El mar lo sabe porque él también está lleno de muertos. No hay nadie que sepa tanto de la muerte como el mar (The sea knows because it is also full of the dead. There is no one else that knows as much about death as the sea).”45 The image of a

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sea of corpses is a thinly veiled, yet potent, allusion to the Middle Passage and the countless slaves who died en route to the New World who are now one with the sea: “[b]one soldered by coral to bone,” as Derek Walcott’s haunting poem declares.46 Although Loynaz does not explicitly name the Middle Passage, Bárbara’s rumination evokes that particular historical trauma, especially when she compares the sea to an infinite nightmare: “[E]s también como un sueño largo, interminable, que sueña el mundo mismo. El mar es la pesadilla de la tierra ([The sea] is also like a long, endless dream that dreams the world itself. The sea is the nightmare of the earth).”47 For the countless African slaves who were packed tightly in a ship’s hold, forced to sit in blood, urine, and other bodily fluids, the Middle Passage was a nightmare. Jardín also alludes to the blight of slavery through Bárbara’s black maid, Laura, her only living companion in the abandoned mansion. Laura, however, seems to be haunted by ghosts of her own, frequently appearing to converse with an invisible companion: “a veces gesticulaba extrañamente, como discutiendo con alguien que era invisible, y en otras, más escasas, pronunciaba entre dientes palabras entrecortadas (sometimes she would gesticulate strangely, as if she were arguing with someone who was invisible, and at other times, less often, she would utter short words between her teeth).”48 Tormented by the ghosts of her past, like Bárbara, Laura is not fully in the present (“Parecía ya vivir en otro mundo [It seemed as if she lived in another world]”).49 The text’s dehumanizing descriptions of the black maid imply that she was a former slave owned by Bárbara’s family: [Es] tan rígida y tan negra que, a no ser por el ligero temblor de su rosario de semillas de aguaribay, se la hubiera confundido con uno de los figurines de tallada cantería que, enmohecidos por la humedad, sostenían angustiosamente los arquitrabes del portón.50 [She is so rigid and so black that, except for the slight trembling of her rosary made of aguaribay seeds, she would have been mistaken for one of those figurines of carved stone that, moldy from humidity, in anguish support the architraves of the doorway.]

This imagery alludes to Laura’s figurative position in the mansion; she carries the weight of the house upon her shoulders. What burden, other than the history of slavery, would she carry in anguish (“angustiosamente”)? Like Bárbara, Laura cannot escape the mansion or its ghosts, yet she is, seemingly, more savvy than her young mistress. She seems to resent Bárbara deeply (though the narrator does not explicitly say why), which is apparent in the following silent exchange: “Ella vio las redondas pupilas muy opacas, muy duras, vueltas hacia ella, asestadas en ella; pero no sintió la mirada sin

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luz y sin expresión ([Bárbara] saw [Laura’s] very opaque, round eyes, very hard, turned towards her, aimed at her; but [Bárbara] did not feel the dull and expressionless gaze).”51 The phrase “asestadas en ella” indicates severe hostility, even violence. “Asestar” can mean to aim or to deal a heavy blow. Laura’s eyes are trained on Bárbara, as if her eyes could cause physical harm. Laura then curses the girl: “Tienes el diablo dentro del cuerpo; lo tuviste siempre [. . .] desde hace cien años (You are full of the devil; you always have been [. . .] for a hundred years).”52 Laura’s spiteful words are not necessarily aimed at Bárbara, but what Bárbara represents. A tempting interpretation is that Laura’s curse is intended for the “other” Bárbara, the protagonist’s namesake and great aunt who would have been alive before the abolition of slavery. Perhaps Laura was this other Bárbara’s slave, a compelling interpretation when we consider Bárbara’s discovery of a hidden pavilion while exploring the garden. Inside this forgotten pavilion she finds “un latiguillo de caña de Indias, en cuyo puño, tallado en una sola piedra de color, alcanzaba a ver una B de turquesas incrustadas (a whip made from sugar cane from the Indies with a handle carved out of colored stone and the initial B encrusted in turquoise).”53 The cruel irony of this sugar cane whip indicates that Bárbara’s family brutally participated in plantation slavery. The jewel encrusted B adds another, more personal layer to the mystery of the pavilion and its forgotten “treasure.” Could the whip have belonged to the great aunt, and would she have used it to beat her slaves? This would explain Laura’s bitterness towards the young Bárbara, despite the young woman’s innocence. The initial on the whip signals Bárbara’s inherited complicity. She has inherited everything that she owns, and everything she is, from her ancestors, including—the narrative suggests—their guilt. The pavilion scene effectively encapsulates the idea that the past is not as far removed from us as we might think. When Bárbara first enters the pavilion, the whip, hanging from a nail in the wall, swings as if barely placed there: “como acabado de poner,”54 signaling a temporal collapse between past and present and further implicating Bárbara in the sins of her ancestors. Loynaz emphasizes this point when Bárbara has the unsettling feeling that this is not her first time in the pavilion though she has no memory of visiting it. This feeling of déjà vu suggests that the traumas of the past will continue to trouble the present especially if they have been willfully repressed. Unlike Morrison’s Beloved, which explores how the specter of slavery haunts former slaves, Jardín proposes that this traumatic past plagues descendants of slave-owners. The ancestral mansion in many ways is a prison for Bárbara. She and Laura are its only inhabitants and have no contact with the outside world for the first half of the novel. This intense isolation, emotional and physical, is the catalyst for Bárbara’s exploration of the house, its grounds, and its relics, leading her to grapple with her family’s unsavory past.

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Just as she has inherited the house, portraits, letters, and her name she also has inherited the troubles of the past despite her innocence and her ignorance. By contrast, Mexican author Carlos Fuentes’s Aura does not tackle a specific national trauma; rather it probes male anxieties about the past through the juxtaposition of an academic male protagonist and a female ghost. Fuentes associates women with the supernatural and men with logic and reason, establishing this binary with the novel’s epigraph—an excerpt from Jules Michelet’s history of witchcraft, La Sorcière—in which the two sexes are defined as opposites. Whereas the man hunts and fights (“El hombre caza y lucha”), the woman plots and dreams (“La mujer intriga y sueña”); she is the mother of fantasy (“es la madre de la fantasía”) and possesses visionary powers. This epigraph sets the paranormal tone of the novel and establishes women as the guardians of mysticism. Whereas the male protagonist, Felipe Montero, is a historian—an intellectual interested in facts located within linear temporality, the female characters (Aura—a beautiful, mysterious phantom—and Consuelo Llorente—a one hundred-and-nine-year-old sorceress) represent the threatening allure of the supernatural. The novel begins with Felipe answering Consuelo’s advertisement for a historian to organize and complete the memoirs of her dead husband, General Llorente. Felipe moves into her house and is immediately enchanted by her beautiful niece, Aura, whose name indicates her otherworldly beauty and intimates her true nature. Aura is not a real woman; she is a projection of Consuelo’s younger self to perpetuate “la ilusión de juventud y belleza de la pobre anciana enloquecida (the illusion of the youth and beauty of the poor, crazy old woman).”55 Consuelo conjures Aura with the objective to seduce Felipe, hoping to transform him into a surrogate for her dead husband. Felipe realizes the old woman’s plan when he finds a photograph of a young Consuelo and her husband, who, Felipe is horrified to realize, looks exactly like him. Fuentes’s second person narration heightens Felipe’s panic at this realization: “[E]res tú. [. . .] [S]iempre te encuentras, borrado, perdido, olvidado, pero tú, tú, tú ([I]t is you. [. . .] [I]t is always you, faded, lost, forgotten, but you, you, you).”56 Like Aura, Felipe is a strange double. His individual identity is swallowed up in Consuelo’s desire to lure him into the past. The repetition of the second person familiar pronoun “tú, tú, tú” not only emphasizes Felipe’s uncanny resemblance to Consuelo’s dead husband (it is undeniable), but also creates a sense of horror as Felipe confronts his own disappearance into the past. He, like the photograph, will be faded, lost, and forgotten. Despite this disturbing discovery, Felipe surrenders to Aura’s seduction. While making love, the illusion of Aura fades to reveal Consuelo’s grotesquely sagging breasts (“senos flácidos”), white hair (“el pelo blanco”), and broken face, whose onion-like layers are pale, dry, and wrinkled (“el rostro

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desgajado, compuesto de capas de cebolla, pálido, seco y arrugado”).57 Felipe, however, does not shrink from this horrifying revelation. He is no longer himself. The narrator asserts: “[T]ú has regresado también (You also have returned).”58 There is no longer a clear distinction between past and present; Felipe has become General Llorente. Consuelo’s spiritual and seductive powers illustrate a cyclical, gynocentric temporality that threatens the patriarchal urge to project into the future. Fuentes describes Consuelo’s house in womb-like terms; it is insular, dark, and humid: “puedes oler el musgo, la humedad de las plantas, las raíces podridas, el perfume adormecedor y espeso (you can smell moss, humidity from plants, rotten roots, a numbing and thick perfume).”59 When he enters Consuelo’s house, Felipe figuratively reenters the womb. However, this return to the womb is not a path to creation or regeneration. Rather, it solidifies a kind of death for Felipe. It erases him from history, a tragic fate for a historian. Through Consuelo’s house/womb, Fuentes explores masculine anxieties about time and women. The supernatural female figure is simultaneously seductive and threatening, yet the story’s horrific force is not necessarily Aura’s ghostly presence, or even Consuelo’s grotesque aging body. The true horror is the erasure of Felipe’s individual identity and masculinity as he is pulled back into the past, negating any possibility of projecting his lineage into the future. It is a dead end. Fuentes’s model of gynocentric time is an important foil to my select novels, which posit that gynocentric time and female ghosts engender healing and reconciliation. Chilean author Isabel Allende’s concept of feminine temporality in her novel La casa de los espíritus more closely corresponds to the objectives of the novels I analyze in the following chapters. The ghosts in Allende’s novel act as guides to the female protagonists and ultimately aid in the recovery of a would-be forgotten history. Like Fuentes, Allende crafts a unique association between women and the supernatural; however, in Allende’s novel this association is therapeutic. Like several of the novels examined in this chapter, La casa de los espíritus addresses national trauma, specifically the 1973 coup initiated by General Augusto Pinochet, during which Allende’s cousin and then-president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was killed. According to Allende, she was inspired by spirits while exiled in Venezuela to write her novel as a way to confront the terror of the coup and recover her family history: “I had the need to recuperate the beneficent spirits of the past. [. . .] I thought that if I would write down what I wanted to rescue I could reconstruct what I had lost, revive the dead and hold onto the memories.”60 La casa de los espíritus is a family saga that is often compared to Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] (1967) because of its broad scope and magical realist style. Allende’s novel,

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however, is a female centered text. The novel focuses on three women of the del Valle family and their relationships with each other, beginning with the otherworldly exploits of Clara the Clairvoyant, who passes on her mystical knowledge to her daughter, Blanca, and granddaughter, Alba (the novel’s main narrator). Since childhood Clara could read the future, interpret dreams, and conjure spirits. Although many expected her strange abilities to fade as she grew into womanhood, her powers only become more exact as she matures. In fact, they magnify after menstruation, indicating a uniquely potent connection between women and the supernatural to contrast the male characters who are firmly rooted in the rational.61 As Ruth Y. Jenkins notes, Clara poses a threat to the patriarchal status quo represented by her childhood priest—who declares that she is possessed by the devil, her father—who worries Clara will sabotage his political career, and her husband.62 The men in her life cannot recognize her abilities as gifts to be appreciated, unlike the women. Even after death, Clara remains an influential force in her family. Clara’s ghost and her spirit accomplices (“espíritus cómplices”) do not terrify; rather they are spiritual guides and helpers.63 In this novel, the living are more dangerous than the dead. Clara counsels her daughter, Blanca, “no debía temer a los muertos, sino a los vivos (one should not fear the dead, only the living).”64 Pinochet will prove her right. Unlike Aura in Fuentes’s male fantasy, Clara’s ghost is neither threatening nor seductive. She rescues her granddaughter, Alba, from succumbing to the physical and psychological horrors of rape and torture while a political prisoner under the Pinochet regime and, consequently, saves her family from the abyss of history. Clara’s spirit appears to her granddaughter in Alba’s tiny cell, an airless, dark, and frozen tomb (“una tumba sin aire, oscura y helada”) just at the moment Alba is about to surrender to death and gives her the saving idea to “write” with her mind (“escribir con el pensamiento”).65 Although Alba is physically imprisoned, she is still able to move through the mental exercise of “writing” as a kind of therapy, just as writing the novel was a therapeutic act for Allende to “reconstruct what I had lost.” This mental and creative activity preserves Alba’s sanity, enables her to endure imprisonment, and prepares her to record a testimony of Pinochet’s atrocities. After her release, Alba writes the history of the coup and the histories of her mother, Blanca, and grandmother, Clara. The result is La casa de los espíritus. Alba relies on her own memory (and that of her grandfather, Esteban Trueba), but also turns to her grandmother’s notebooks of life (“cuadernos de anotar la vida”), which the spirits had miraculously saved (“se salvaron milagrosamente”) from Pinochet’s henchmen.66 Clara’s notebooks correspond to feminine time (the stories are not in chronological order: “separados por acontecimientos y no por orden cronológico”) and represent the healing potential of female storytelling.67 They are a matriarchal gift of knowledge

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and healing: “Clara los escribió para que me sirvieran ahora para rescatar las cosas del pasado y sobrevivir a mi propio espanto (Clara wrote them so that they would serve me now, enabling me to recover the things of the past and survive my own terror).”68 Clara’s foresight signals her alternate understanding of time; the structure of her notebooks and their intended purpose to serve Alba (who was not yet born when Clara began to write) collapses the expectation of linear, progressive time. Past, present, and future are simultaneously accessible to Clara. Whereas Fuentes imagines gynocentric time as a morbid (though provocative) threat, Allende highlights how cyclical returns, via female ghosts, can lead to healing. Clara’s spirit—unlike Aura—is a savior; she protects her family and its stories, especially the women’s stories. Through its emphasis on feminine time, female ghosts as healers, and women’s writing as an antidote to myopic official narratives, La casa de los espíritus prefigures the novels I analyze in chapters two through four. Whether American literary ghosts figuratively haunt the text, as in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Loynaz’s Jardín; are threatening and consuming, as in Morrison’s Beloved and Fuentes’s Aura; defiant and subversive, as in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead; or nurturing and protective, as in Allende’s La casa de los espíritus, they invite readers to confront the traumas of the past. These representative novels establish important roles ghosts play in the literature of the Americas, specifically in regard to cultural anxieties and national traumas. They also demonstrate how literary ghosts collapse time, transgress boundaries, and represent the uncanny return of trauma. The chapters that follow build upon what I have established here, exploring further the unique role of the female ghost that, as Allende proposes, disrupts linear, progressive time not to trap man in the past, but rather to rescue the stories forgotten by History. This matriarchal mode of remembering is not linear but cyclical. I explore in greater detail how female ghosts specifically nurture memory while subverting the status quo and inspire an alternate history of the past. A male ghost could easily address the same violent past and its uncanny return; however, the female perspective stresses an added layer of otherness and marginalized identity. Moreover, because the female ghosts in the texts by Brodber, Valdés, Cisneros, and Condé are related to the protagonists and narrator-authors they emphasize a matriarchal succession of knowledge that opposes hegemonic patriarchal discourse. These fictional texts allow for a greater understanding of truth, reminding readers of Aristotle’s preference for poetry over written history. Poiesis, or the creation of art, is key to illuminating and overcoming the wounds of historical trauma.

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NOTES 1. Eric Gary Anderson et al., introduction to Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture, eds. Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 4–5. 2. Faye Ringel, “New England Gothic,” in A Companion to American Gothic, ed. Charles L. Crow (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 140. 3. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random House, 1964), 9. 4. Max Putzel, “What Is Gothic About Absalom, Absalom!,” The Southern Literary Journal 4, no. 1 (1971): 70. 5. Faulkner, Absalom, 9. 6. See Malcolm Cowley’s “William Faulkner’s Legend of the South,” Michael Millgate’s The Achievement of William Faulkner, and Philip Goldstein’s “Black Feminism and the Canon: Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Morrison’s Beloved as Gothic Romances.” 7. Faulkner, Absalom, 8. 8. Faulkner, Absalom, 7. 9. Faulkner, Absalom, 9. 10. Faulkner, Absalom, 9. 11. Faulkner, Absalom, 171. 12. Faulkner, Absalom, 375. 13. Faulkner, Absalom, 361. 14. Faulkner, Absalom, 361. 15. Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 3. 16. Morrison, Beloved, 14. 17. Morrison, Beloved, 17. 18. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 162. 19. Morrison, Beloved, 47. 20. Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (Poétique III) (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 18. 21. Morrison, Beloved, 201. 22. Glissant, Le discours antillais, 224. 23. Morrison, Beloved, 34. 24. Morrison, Beloved, 34. 25. Morrison, Beloved, 34. 26. Morrison, Beloved, 238. 27. Morrison, Beloved, 247–248. 28. Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 228. 29. Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 224. 30. Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 216. 31. Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 216. 32. Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 216 (emphasis added). 33. Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 216 (emphasis added). 34. Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 216.

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35. Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 517. 36. Laura Coltelli, “Almanac of the Dead: An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko,” in Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko, ed. Ellen L. Arnold (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 122. 37. Dulce María Loynaz, Jardín: Novela lírica (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1993), 26. 38. Loynaz, Jardín, 26. 39. Loynaz, Jardín, 125. 40. Loynaz, Jardín, 139. 41. Loynaz, Jardín, 139. 42. Loynaz, Jardín, 137. 43. Loynaz, Jardín, 138. 44. Loynaz, Jardín, 139. 45. Loynaz, Jardín, 26. 46. Derek Walcott, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Baugh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 137. 47. Loynaz, Jardín, 26. 48. Loynaz, Jardín, 92. 49. Loynaz, Jardín, 92. 50. Loynaz, Jardín, 91. 51. Loynaz, Jardín, 93. 52. Loynaz, Jardín, 93. 53. Loynaz, Jardín, 81. 54. Loynaz, Jardín, 81. 55. Carlos Fuentes, Aura (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1993), 42. 56. Fuentes, Aura, 58. 57. Fuentes, Aura, 61–62. 58. Fuentes, Aura, 62. 59. Fuentes, Aura, 14. 60. Marjorie Agosín, “Ghosts of Democracy Past,” The Women’s Review of Books 2, no. 10 (1985): 15. 61. Isabel Allende, La casa de los espíritus (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1990), 73. 62. Ruth Y. Jenkins, “Authorizing Female Voice and Experience: Ghosts and Spirits in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Allende’s The House of the Spirits,” Melus 19, no. 3 (1994): 62. 63. Allende, La casa, 363. 64. Allende, La casa, 219. 65. Allende, La casa, 347, 348. 66. Allende, La casa, 363. 67. Allende, La casa, 363. 68. Allende, La casa, 363.

Chapter Two

“Anthropology of the Dead” Ghosts, Subaltern Knowledge, and Alternative History in Louisiana

The tension between fact and fiction in Erna Brodber’s Louisiana leads readers to consider how power structures shape the conceptualization of history and epistemology. The novel resists hegemonic desires by endorsing unofficial knowledge and unofficial histories through its ghosts who defy and transgress (as they move through time and space) the constraints of official history. June Roberts argues that the spirit possession in Brodber’s novel is an act of resistance against colonialism and the effects of Hegelian historicism on the colonial subject, “recasting and recuperating the colonial orientation of canonical imperializing historiography.”1 Shirley Toland-Dix likewise asserts that Brodber “identifies spirit possession as a strategy of resistance to oppression as it constitutes a realm that colonial powers cannot control.”2 Although many Louisiana scholars have commented on the role spirit possession plays in resisting colonial legacies, this chapter explores how this resistance is accomplished through an examination of spiritual epistemology, oral culture, and folklore. I will further complicate this analysis by exploring the ways in which the ghosts’ gender and the gender of the protagonist subvert historiographic hegemony.3 As they commune with the novel’s protagonist, the female spirits engender reconciliation with the self, the community, and ancestral memory. This act of healing, an effect of matriarchal remembering, anticipates similar processes in the novels by Valdés, Cisneros, and Condé analyzed in chapters three and four. Louisiana depicts the spiritual and cultural awakening of Ella Townsend, a black Jamaican-American anthropologist studying at Columbia University. Ella is hired during the 1930s by the U.S. government—via the Works Progress Administration (WPA)—and supplied with a recording device by Columbia to interview Sue Anne King (also known as Anna and Mammy) 33

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and record the black oral history of Louisiana.4 These plans are frustrated when Mammy unexpectedly dies before Ella can record anything substantial. Mammy, however, has plans of her own for Ella. She is to be a “horse,” a living person who is possessed (“ridden”) by spirits and deities in Voodoo, Santería, and other Afro-Caribbean religions. As a “horse,” Ella becomes a vessel through which Mammy and her deceased friend, Louise Grant (Lowly), can inhabit the physical world.5 Mammy and Lowly’s spirits “mount” Ella in order to communicate from beyond the grave, relating histories of slavery in the United States, the post-emancipation realities for black Americans, and Lowly’s experiences as a Jamaican immigrant in the United States. Through spirit possession, the ghosts also facilitate Ella’s recuperation of memories as an infant in Jamaica, allowing her to reconcile her complex identity as a Jamaican-American. Although not biologically related to Ella, Mammy and Lowly act as maternal figures and assert a matriarchal and spiritual alternative to the patriarchal historical hegemony. Lowly uses birthing metaphors to describe Ella’s initiation as a “horse”: “The baby is turning. [. . .] Our headwater is breaking.”6 Paradoxically Mammy’s death completes the process of Ella’s “rebirth” as a spiritual medium. The rite concludes when a bewildered Ella hears a voice when no living person has spoken. Lowly—the midwife of this process—triumphantly announces, “The ears are hearing other frequencies. The child has come through.”7 Ella’s initiation cements an adoptive relationship between the two female spirits and herself, reflected in Ella’s new name, Louisiana, a combination of the spirits’ names: Louise (Lowly) and Anna (Mammy). “In me,” Ella declares, “Louise and Sue Ann are joined.”8 Ella owes her spiritual and intellectual rebirth—her epistemological framework is completely transformed—to these two women. She abandons her assignment to write the official, patriarchal history commissioned by the U.S. government in order to record Mammy and Lowly’s subaltern, matriarchal histories that reconnect Ella to her Jamaican past and culture. These alternative histories underline the tension between history (accepted facts) and story (spiritual truth, as Louisiana argues). The nontraditional and fragmented form of the novel—comprised of spirit voices, transcriptions, field notes, and Ella’s personal diary—further destabilizes the fact/fiction binary. This tension is explicitly established in the novel’s prologue when an editor’s note from the fictional Black World Press explains how they ended up with Ella’s manuscript. This playful beginning disrupts readers’ expectations and establishes the tension between truth and fiction that will persist throughout the narrative. Although Brodber creates certain reader expectations by designating Louisiana as a novel on the cover, the editor’s note asks readers to suspend their disbelief and approach the text as they would ethnographic material,

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despite the spiritual and supernatural details. The fictional editors at Black World Press establish an example for readers. Although lacking concrete evidence, the editors accept the veracity of the manuscript, declaring it a “social history and out of body experience.”9 In this instance the historical and supernatural are joined without question or qualification. With this prologue, readers are primed to accept Ella’s testimony that the spirits’ stories are true: “They are facts. I defend that, though I can’t prove them to be so.”10 Ella’s word as an anthropologist and a scholar reinforces the text’s ethnographic weight; yet this is a work of fiction. Readers find themselves caught between truth and invention, but ultimately narrow categorization is inconsequential. Fiction casts a broad net that can cover a multiplicity of experiences. Ella ultimately embraces the power of fiction and its potential for healing. “I do not doubt you Mammy,” she asserts, “even if what you relate did not happen to you, it happened to someone’s granny, someone’s mother. Someone. Some baby was hurt.”11 Ella’s declaration recalls Walter Mignolo’s defense of Rigoberta Menchú’s enactive (or performative) epistemology discussed in my introduction. Even if Ella cannot prove the veracity of Mammy’s testimony, she knows that it holds value as enactive knowledge that recuperates a collective history, unifying the singular and communal experience. Thus, fiction becomes an alternative history. The novel’s first chapter, “I heard the voice from Heaven say,” is narrated by Lowly’s ghost. She addresses Mammy from the “other side,” encouraging her to prepare Ella for her initiation as a “horse” at Mammy’s passing. Lowly’s spectral narration reinforces the tension between truth and fiction, history and story, disrupting Western definitions of knowledge and history. The spirits in this novel, and those by Valdés, Cisneros, and Condé, do not behave like ghosts in European gothic novels whose frightening presence is often sensationalized; rather, because of their liminal qualities, they provide an alternative mode of being and knowing that destabilizes Western dichotomous thought and, thus, create a space through which alternative histories can emerge. Brodber establishes the need for such histories by illustrating the dangers of official history, embodied by the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP)—the same program that commissioned Ella to interview Mammy. Sponsored by the WPA during the 1930s, the FWP was initiated to preserve the history of former slaves. This project, however, was not as altruistic or benign as it may now seem. The FWP produced an official, government-mediated history, creating jobs for mostly white field workers and government bureaucrats.12 There were, however, black writers employed by the FWP, most notably the famous anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston, who began working in the “Negro Unit” of the Federal Theater Project in New York in 1935. She left the project after six months to do fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti and in 1938, after returning to the United States, Hurston took a position

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as a junior interviewer for the Florida state office of the FWP. Eventually, she became the “Negro Editor” at that office but faced pointed antagonism from her white superiors.13 Jenny Sharpe sees Hurston as a model for Ella’s character; both are young black female anthropologists recruited by the government to research and document African American folk traditions and history. Although the WPA hired black field workers, like Hurston, to interview members of the black community, their writings and the subsequent, edited versions do not, and cannot, adequately represent the black experience. They are diluted histories. Sharon Ann Musher asserts, “The WPA interviews might appear to have come literally out of the mouths of ex-slaves, but they do not represent unmediated reality. Instead, it might be more accurate to consider them third-hand or even fourth-hand accounts.”14 Musher enumerates the various levels of mediation from the typists who interpreted the handwritten notes of the field workers to the scholars and folklorists who consciously selected certain interviews and often edited them extensively prior to publication. She writes, “[A]t least some of the WPA interviews may represent interviewers’ biases and editors’ agendas more than the ex-slaves’ actual memories.”15 Brodber consciously illustrates the questionable function of the FWP; its authenticity is suspect. Ella’s government assignment may have preserved black (subaltern) history but ultimately it would reinforce state power by enlarging the national archive and asserting the epistemological dominance of white U.S. elites. Lowly alludes to the implicitly racist, colonial desires of the FWP’s throughout the novel’s first chapter. Before Mammy’s death and Ella’s initiation as a “horse,” Ella takes her government assignment very seriously, but Mammy refuses to contribute to the official narrative. Lowly uses the rhetoric of slavery as she narrates Ella’s unsuccessful attempts to get Mammy to talk: “Anna sighed another sigh that leaked from our history and the girl made a note to be sure to find some way of transposing those sighs and those laughs and other nonverbal expressions of emotions into the transcript she would submit to her masters.”16 “Masters” clearly refers to Ella’s supervisors at Columbia and the FWP—illustrating that slavery’s legacies are persistent and relevant in the twentieth century. Despite her education and status as a government employee, Ella is still subservient to the white elite. She is a cog in the grand American machine, given the task to write the “white people’s history of the blacks of South West Louisiana.”17 This black history will not belong to the blacks themselves. Although it is their history, it is not theirs to own. Ella feels pressure to produce a useful transcript for her white supervisors and becomes frustrated with herself and Mammy after using a whole side of a recording tape with nothing substantial to send back: “[Mammy] they say has important data to give; is important data; [. . .] her story is crucial to the history of the struggle of the lower class negro that they want to write.”18 Ella

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was chosen for this particular project because of the color of her skin; “they” believe a black woman will successfully coax Mammy into divulging her stories. Initially, Ella considers this assignment to be an honor, but this passage clarifies that white American intellectuals will be the ones to mediate and implicitly benefit (either financially or professionally) from the history of the struggle of the “lower class negro.” The African American’s history will no longer be her own if it is to be claimed by faceless, white authors. Moreover, Mammy’s humanity is diminished in this historiographic process; the white elites see her as important “data.” Her individual story and history are not what the government is after; rather, it is interested in the data, which will be added to the state archive. At this point, Ella is complicit in Mammy’s commodification. Her initial attitude toward Mammy and the data that she both is and has to give illustrates an inherent problem within the discipline of anthropology, specifically its colonial heritage. Diana Taylor explains that early anthropologists fashioned a “paradigm that fetishized the local, denied agency to the peoples they studied, and excluded them from the circulation of knowledge created about them.”19 Taylor also notes that to move beyond this colonial heritage, anthropologists must treat “the people with whom [they] seek to interact [. . .] as colleagues rather than as informants or objects of analysis.”20 Initially, Ella only sees Mammy as an object of analysis: “data.” She is blind to Mammy’s spiritual power. Eventually Ella appreciates Mammy as a colleague, a sister in spiritual work, as well as a model to follow; this is apparent in the final product of Ella’s ethnographic project. Although originally intended to be an official government record, Ella’s finished manuscript, which she titles Louisiana and which poignantly ends up in the hands of a small black press, is utterly subversive and antithetical to an official state document; it is an “anthropology of the dead.”21 Not only has a ghost possessed the first chapter, but the narrative also eschews a clear or linear style expected within Western historiography. The tone and style of Ella’s manuscript is deeply affected by the spirits whose stories she records; it defies reason. Mammy does not give Ella a clear and chronological account of her life; rather, Mammy (and Lowly), through spirit possession, introduces Ella to a spiritual mode of knowing. SPIRITUAL EPISTEMOLOGY Mammy and Lowly’s ghosts convey knowledge through spiritual conduits, asserting the value of a spiritual epistemology that opposes and destabilizes the Western “rational” epistemology of colonial powers. “The passing on of history through spirit possession,” Toland-Dix writes, “is deeply

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subversive because it circumvents all the checkpoints at which censorship takes place.”22 Ella’s anthropology of the dead directly resists the FWP, which would have mediated, edited, and cataloged Mammy’s history; it then would have been forgotten in the archive—a second kind of death. Ella saves Mammy’s memory and voice from the abyss of the archive, but Ella is also saved and her own past redeemed, as she moves from a restrictive, academic bias toward a spiritual sensibility. The value of spiritual illumination is represented in Ella’s memory of her mother’s West Indian church in New York, specifically its stained-glass window: “The picture was a mosaic, like a jigsaw puzzle. Someone must have painted it on glass, broken it into pieces of uneven sizes then stuck the parts together in that large window sited over the altar.”23 Although this is an inaccurate description of how stained-glass is created (individual pieces of glass are arranged to create a whole; the whole is not broken and then reassembled), it works to underscore the overall theme of the novel. This image becomes a commentary on a knowledge and a history that was once whole but is now fragmented. Ella explains that the stained-glass image “responded to light,” but there were no streetlights nearby, making it so that “revelation had to depend on God’s natural light.”24 The only way that the reassembled, fragmented whole can be “read” is through the illumination of God’s light. This pivotal memory teaches Ella that she must surrender to spiritual knowledge. Ella’s new spiritual orientation transcends the limits of academia. Her university training taught her to rely on reason and the scientific process. The spirits, however, initiate her into a higher knowledge that is not restrained by materiality. To borrow Mignolo’s opposing terms, spiritual knowledge is not denotative knowledge; rather, it is enactive or performative.25 This is apparent when (after her initiation as a “horse”) Ella takes on the role of a spiritual medium patronized by African American and Afro-Caribbean sailors in her New Orleans home. To describe her first prophetic experience, Ella writes, “I was pushed centre-stage.”26 She is compelled to perform, so to speak, without warning or preparation. The sailors begin to sing the Jamaican folksong “Sammy Dead,” which throws Ella into a spiritual fit. She unwillingly taps into an extra-worldly bank of knowledge. “Then it was prophesying,” she recounts, “I saw long deep stories, stretching back and back.”27 Ella does not prophesy the future, which would be expected of a prophetess; rather, her prophecies regard the past. This inversion of a prophetess’ role underlines Brodber’s objective to recuperate the past, however disturbing it may be. The future cannot matter if the past, and its traumas, is not confronted and resolved. Ella’s prophesying is a performance, complete with a captive audience. It is not merely an act (i.e., artificial and deceitful) but it is enactive. It is creative

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and productive. Ella heals her patrons, mending their emotional and psychological wounds as she conjures the past. One particular relationship—with the Jamaican sailor Ben—becomes “mutual therapy” as they help each other recover memories.28 Via this reciprocal remembering, Ben and Ella validate the other’s pain, allowing for catharsis to take place. This is in part accomplished through Ella’s ability to embrace the role emotion plays in her new calling as a spiritual medium. Ella’s transformation from intellectual to spirit medium has little to do with reason; it is based on feelings. She will declare, “Feeling is knowing.”29 As Sharpe asserts, emotion and feeling transcend the rational mode of understanding to “elicit a more intuitive, rather than rational, response to a misrepresented or hidden past in order to break an archival violence enacted against the dead.”30 Ella understands that her emotions will help guide her to new understanding and discovers a different kind of epistemology—one that is in opposition to rational thought—that is possible because of her new spiritual intuition. Her seemingly radical and irrational actions (e.g., deserting her WPA assignment, moving to New Orleans, and working as a spiritual medium) distance her from the intellectual and rational world of Columbia University and the FWP. However, she cannot deny the reality of her spiritual experiences. Ella explains that she could have invented a narrative (using Jung and “parapsychology”) to complete the government project and further her academic career, but it would not have been the truth.31 She had become a spiritual medium and was on a “journey into knowing,” albeit a different kind of knowing than Ella had been trained to embrace at university.32 For one, her new epistemological framework disrupts temporal boundaries. Before Ella’s spiritual initiation, Lowly conjures a repressed memory of Ella’s Jamaican grandmother combing and braiding her hair as an infant.33 The memory is so deeply buried that Ella does not realize it is a fragment of her past; she assumed she was dreaming and “jerked herself into the present” when she heard her infant self speak.34 Ella cannot recognize that the old lady in this memory is her beloved grandmother. She is too entrenched in Western academic reasoning and resists this process of remembering. At this stage, she is not ready to cope with the pain of loss this spiritual journey will cause her to revisit. Thus far, she cannot comprehend that Lowly and Mammy could help her inhabit the past, holding her steady as her grandmother did through a spiritual mode of understanding. Eventually, Ella will grow to trust Lowly and Mammy and, through their spiritual tutoring, learn to prophesy the past and heal the present. The spiritual epistemology offered by the ghosts— which values emotion and transcends temporal boundaries—is just one of many elements that makes the novel an alternative history.

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SUBVERSIVE ORALITY Like spiritual knowledge, orality shapes Brodber’s text and subverts a hegemonic historiography and epistemology that privileges written language. Orature is a performative narrative that, to use Taylor’s words, “challenge[s] the preponderance of writing in Western epistemologies.”35 Various scholars have recognized that Brodber’s novel addresses orality as a cultural practice; however, they do not analyze how the narrative is affected by orality on a formal level.36 Initially the ghosts connect with Ella aurally, establishing themselves as storytellers while also referring to a shared African heritage and cultural system based on an oral literary tradition. For enslaved Africans, orature had a “sacred character,” because it preserved “memories of gods, of myths, rites, rhythms, tales, legends, proverbs, songs, dances, sculpture—all fundamental vectors of their religious thought.”37 Through orality the novel recuperates subaltern knowledge and traditions that undermine the official, written state history (i.e., the FWP). It may appear contradictory to analyze the orality of a written text, yet Brodber allows tension between these two literary traditions to exist in her novel. There is a distinct aural quality to the first chapter, which is comprised of an extended verbal exchange between Lowly’s spirit and Mammy before her death. Lowly begins the chapter by asking, “Anna do you remember? Can you still hear me singing it?”38 Lowly then sings to Anna “It is the voice I hear,” and readers are invited to hear her song through the poetic formatting of the lyrics that illustrate the way that it should sound.39 Readers “hear” Lowly’s voice from beyond the grave. The self-referential nature of the song—it is about a voice—also signals to readers that orality is vital to the novel’s overall message. Considering the communal quality of oral literature, this emphasis on aurality at the beginning of the novel invites readers to be more active in their engagement with the text. The importance of listening is stressed throughout the first chapter, beginning with its title, “I heard the voice from Heaven say,” a reference to Revelation 14:13: “And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.”40 This biblical reference emphasizes the value of spiritual knowledge and introduces the important role Lowly and Mammy will play as spirits (“blessed are the dead”) and highlights the role of a spirit medium to record Heaven’s voice. This allusion to the Book of Revelation, and John the Revelator, underlines Ella’s prophetic status as a spirit medium who gives a forgotten or repressed history back to the African American and Afro-Caribbean sailors who frequent her New Orleans parlor. Moreover, the

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heavenly and disembodied voices in this opening chapter create a sense of timelessness and destabilize physical locality. Linear history has no meaning in this aural space. The voices come from another realm that eludes rational understanding. Ella does not see apparitions of the ghosts; rather, she hears them. She first hears Mammy’s spirit voice soon after her informant dies, which signals Ella’s initiation as a spirit medium. Hearing other frequencies indicates a shift from a rational Western epistemology toward a spiritual mode of knowing. Like John the Revelator, Ella is now receptive to heavenly voices. Not only is sound a catalyst for Ella’s transformation, but her relationship with the spirits is nourished through aural processes. Initially, Lowly and Mammy speak to her through the Columbia tape recorder with which Ella was to capture Mammy’s oral history. Although she breaks ties with Columbia and the government-sponsored project when she disappears into Southern Louisiana, Ella keeps the recording machine to continue receiving messages from the spirits. Eventually, however, Ella becomes strong enough to hear the spirits without the device and takes the place of the machine, becoming a mouthpiece for the dead—a bridge between the material and spiritual worlds as well as the present and the past. In addition to subverting Western epistemology through Ella’s spiritual and revelatory experiences, orality also points toward the significance of folk culture, which is often perpetuated through oral forms. Like oral culture, folk culture is not accorded much value within Western hegemonic systems precisely because it constitutes “unofficial knowledge” that is “informally learned.”41 Michel Foucault likewise explains that “local popular knowledges” are often “subjugated” and “disqualified knowledges.”42 In short, folklore opposes the assumed authority of the archive and, like oral culture, subverts the status quo. FOLKLORE: CULTURE, MEMORY, AND MUSIC Brodber argues for a reconsideration of the value of folklore and its role in creating and maintaining a unified community. The ghosts enable Ella to reconnect with her Caribbean heritage by revealing aspects of Jamaican folk culture to her. Although born in Jamaica, Ella was raised in New York by parents who rejected their island heritage and willfully repressed their Jamaican identity—a seemingly common practice among the West Indians of Brodber’s novel who emigrated to the North. Although they did not assimilate into North American culture, they did not perpetuate their own. Ella observes, “Each was a history book, separate, zippered and padlocked. Some like my own parents had even thrown away their keys!”43 The Jamaican immigrants

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are complicit in the loss of their history. Her own parents buried Ella’s early memories of Jamaica and the grandmother who braided Ella’s hair as a baby. Ella’s mother, a foil to Lowly and Mammy’s maternal influence, “dismissed those days: she never talked about them.”44 Ella did not know how to grieve for a lost culture she never knew was hers. Her parents’ desire to ignore the past negatively affects Ella’s personal history and sense of self in the present. A severe example is when they seek to erase her from official records after Ella’s disappearance into the South. Her parents go to great lengths to pay for the tape recorder so that the official records do not show that the machine was missing. Ella relates that they “paid off whatever else was necessary to expunge me and my history from their records.”45 Ella’s parents preferred to whitewash and erase the past rather than face the discomforts and difficulties that accompany certain histories. Without the intervention of Lowly and Mammy, Ella never would have had the opportunity to recuperate her peoples’ history, let alone her own. Her parents, the ones who should have guided her, were an obstacle to this knowledge. As a teenager, Ella attempted to reach out to other Jamaicans in New York in hopes of reclaiming her history, but, as she explains, getting them to share about their home country “was as difficult for me and as painful for them as pulling teeth.”46 It is unclear why the West Indian community of Ella’s youth rejected assimilation as they simultaneously resisted a recovery and continuation of their collective history. Implicitly, the past was too painful to confront. The novel pushes against this fear, suggesting that there is no possibility for growth, no future, without confronting the past. Ella’s personal journey toward healing begins with discovering her Jamaican identity through folk culture, specifically music. The spirits repeat a refrain from the Jamaican folk song “Sammy Dead” to induce Ella’s spiritual experiences. Not only does Ella “hear” the repetitive phrase, “Ah who sey Sammy dead,” but she also catches herself reciting it aloud without knowing why. The tune represents a distinctly Jamaican folk culture from which Ella had been cut off. Although Ella had no conscious knowledge of this folk song (she notes that her parents would have never sung “Sammy Dead” and would not have associated with Jamaicans who would sing it), it summons specific images of her grandmother and her grandmother’s house in Jamaica, pulling Ella back to a cultural authenticity she did not realize was lacking until she met Mammy.47 “Sammy Dead” becomes the “signature tune” between Ella and the spirits and in certain instances it triggers her visions.48 As mentioned previously, the black sailors who come to her for spiritual guidance also sing this song with the same effect: igniting Ella’s prophetic powers. Not only does folk music act as a spiritual catalyst for Ella, but it

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also threads a sense of solidarity among the black sailors who come from the United States and the West Indies. Although both groups represent the African diaspora, they are initially antagonistic toward each other, arguing about the origins of their songs; each side claims ownership and accuses the other of cultural theft. Ella, who at this point in the narrative goes by Louisiana, heals the strife between the two parties: “The songs are equally ours now. We just sing.”49 Through folk music, the black American and Caribbean sailors are able to find a shared heritage, a “common chord.”50 In addition to “Sammy Dead,” Brodber also weaves jazz throughout the narrative. A musical form pertinent to folk culture and “black vernacular discourse,”51 in the words of Henry Louis Gates Jr., jazz emerged out of the subaltern experience on American plantations as “an expression of those who were oppressed by poverty and racism.”52 It is a syncretic form that “grew as a fusion of diverse musical and cultural elements, galvanizing aspects of work songs, church music, folk songs, classical, and popular songs.”53 Its emergence from a violent and oppressive history highlights the heterogenous triumph of jazz in the face of a totalitarian epistemology. Moreover, in its lack of form and transgression of form, jazz underscores the novel’s objective to resist hegemonic systems. As Thom Holmes explains, “Jazz is highly interpretive music and every work of true jazz includes IMPROVISATION, in whole or in part. You cannot experience jazz by reading a score. You have to listen to it.”54 Reading a score would give someone an idea of how the music ought to sound, but it would fail to capture the soul of jazz. Because it eludes denotative and authoritative epistemologies, readers are encouraged to see a connection between jazz and Mammy and Lowly’s alternative oral history, which resists the regulating process of the FWP and attempts to get at the soul, the spiritual essence, of their experiences. As Lowly tells Mammy, “My song Anna. It has no written score. Succeeding generations of us, on each of our occasions have, like you, simply appointed their own tenor, their own alto, their own timing to descant and fill out gaps built into a score by those who wrote it.”55 Lowly’s song (her story) fills in the gaps within the official archive, which ignores, or fails to fully represent, the subaltern experience. It is homogenous and incomplete. Lowly’s concept of history is a description of jazz. It evolves; it is not static. It is full of individual personalities yet works harmoniously as a whole. Furthermore, jazz, through repetition with difference, destabilizes linear time. Repetition in a work of art, according to Gates, brings it “and all its connotations back, so that there are always two dimensions, past and present, repetition and revision, working at the same time.”56 Brodber’s novel, like jazz, evokes two dimensions and blends the two into a complete, polyphonic, whole. In Ella, the past and the present converge. In order for her to make sense of the alternative histories, she must attune her “ear,” like any jazz

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novice, and “concentrate on hearing the words” now that she recognizes Lowly and Mammy’s voices.57 Not only does jazz repeat and quote old works (Gates cites as an example Jelly Roll Morton’s 1938 “Maple Leaf Rag (A Transformation),” which “signifies upon” Scott Joplin’s 1916 “Maple Leaf Rag”) but it is also based on the synthesis of various sounds and rhythms from different cultural traditions, connecting the United States with the rest of the Black Atlantic.58 There were “reciprocal influences” between New Orleans and the Caribbean in the early formation of jazz, a “process of creolization” marked by complex “borrowing” and rapidly evolving adaptations.59 Although the “parallel and independent invention” of jazz occurred in the United States and the Caribbean, New Orleans has long been the accepted birthplace of jazz.60 This connection between jazz and New Orleans underlines the significance of Louisiana within the novel—as a site of diverse cultural exchange, as Ella’s new name, and as the novel’s title. Like jazz, which unifies various forms and musical traditions, Louisiana (especially New Orleans) acts as a bridge between the Caribbean and the United States. Louisiana’s history reflects the colonial history of the Caribbean; before becoming a part of the United States, it was controlled by the French, the Spanish, and the British. Its geography placed Louisiana “at the crossroads of the three main empires that established colonies in the New World.”61 Consequently, its history is unlike any other state in the United States. New Orleans specifically embodies the distinctively Caribbean history and culture of Louisiana. Often referred to as a Caribbean city, New Orleans maintains a “significant position in the African diaspora and in physical, cultural, and psychic proximity to the Caribbean.”62 As Brodber’s novel emphasizes these connections between Louisiana and the Caribbean via folklore, it accomplishes what New World studies scholars, like the editors of Look Away! and Just Below South, seek to achieve on a theoretical level. In this way, the novel, according to Toland-Dix, “performs the intercultural story it tells. Each of its six section headings is an excerpt from a song or saying or custom that Louisiana blacks and Jamaican blacks share.”63 Brodber emphasizes the shared folk traditions by stressing the significance of place—bringing us back to a discussion of Louisiana. Brodber creates a link between the United States and the Caribbean through an uncanny repetition of placenames. Ella begins her field work by interviewing Mammy in St. Mary, Louisiana, United States, and Lowly is from a parish called Louisiana in St. Mary, Jamaica. This mirroring reinforces the shared traumatic history of African slaves and their descendants in the United States and Caribbean islands, including Jamaica. Like the repetition in jazz that allows for two dimensions to exist simultaneously, the uncanny

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repetition of “Louisiana” conjures two dimensions that overlap and merge through shared history, trauma, and personal relationships. Louisiana is a site of crossroads and synthesis and, as Ella’s new name, functions on multiple symbolic levels. It indicates that (1) she has been reborn of two women (Louise and Anna), marking her spiritual initiation; (2) she connects the history and people of the United States and of the Caribbean; (3) she is a link between the living and the dead; and (4) she is a bridge between the past and the present. As Louisiana, Ella comes into her authentic self: “I am Louisiana. I give people their history.”64 To explain her role as spirit medium and prophetess, Ella writes, “I am the link between the shores washed by the Caribbean Sea, a hole, yet I am what joins your left hand to your right. I join the world of the living and the world of the spirits. I join the past with the present.”65 Through her, “everything is related.”66 Ella describes a “poetics of relation,” to borrow from Édouard Glissant, who uses the metaphor of a rhizomatic root structure to represent the productive and healing ideal of relation. Glissant juxtaposes the “rhizome” (expansive and polyphonic) with the “root” (insular and homogeneous), which kills everything that surrounds it. The rhizome, however, is an interconnected root system that rejects the idea of a totalitarian root (“récuse l’idée d’une racine totalitaire”).67 Glissant’s poetics of relation celebrates rhizomatic thought (“La pensée du rhizome serait au principe de ce que j’appelle une poétique de la Relation”).68 Ella reflects Glissant’s ideal on three separate levels: cultural, spiritual, and temporal. On a cultural level, Brodber reveals a rhizomatic relation between folk traditions, especially music, as the African American and Afro-Caribbean sailors realize that they share a repertoire of folk songs. The novel demonstrates a spiritual poetics of relation as Ella is reborn of two women from different, yet connected, cultural backgrounds (St. Mary, Louisiana, United States and Louisiana, St. Mary, Jamaica). Moreover, Brodber illustrates how history is more rhizomatic than root-like. A Western conceptualization of history, like Hegel’s Universal History discussed in the introduction, justifies the root system that conquers and silences the “Other.” However, as I have argued throughout this chapter, history has many stories branching out in all directions, like the yam vines from her grandmother’s Jamaican home, which Ella sees during a spiritual trance.69 Through cultural, spiritual, and temporal poetics of relation Ella blurs difference. She shows the African American and West Indian sailors that they are two hands of the same body, while blurring the boundaries between spiritual and material, dead and living, past and present, there and here. This is embodied by the rainbow, another “bridge” that reappears throughout the text, specifically to mark Lowly’s, Mammy’s, and, ultimately, Ella’s transition from this world to the next. In the novel’s closing paragraph, Ella’s

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husband describes her death with the image of a rainbow and the sound of jazz: “Different chords, different tunes, different octaves. Sheer jazz. One sound. From one body. A community song: It is the voice I hear.”70 He sees Ella pass “over the rainbow’s mist with her knowing smile. I know now what she knows: Mammy would not tell the president nor his men her tale for it was not hers; she was no hero. It was a tale of cooperative action; it was a community tale.”71 The visual and auditory imagery of this concluding scene conjures a New Orleans jazz funeral, a celebration of life through music and dance. The jazz funeral is communal—anyone can join the procession—and unofficial. As Malik J. M. Walker writes, the jazz funeral undermines the “notions of power and prestige associated with the state funeral.”72 Brodber’s closing passage not only emphasizes the spiritual epistemology of Ella, Mammy, and Lowly, but also emphasizes the value of oral and folk culture in the face of official power (namely, the president and “his men”). By drawing upon othered and disqualified epistemologies, Louisiana becomes an alternative history to subvert Western epistemology and written literary practices. The female ghosts in Brodber’s novel provide a matrilineal succession of subaltern knowledge that is reclaimed through female production: Ella’s transcription of oral histories. In this way, the novel offers a matriarchal mode of knowing that counters patriarchal and hegemonic systems. This feminine tradition—supported by spiritual knowledge, oral culture, and folk culture—moves toward a multiplicity that is inclusive, communal, and creative, confirming, in this case, Michael Taussig’s observation that “spirit possession often implies being possessed with the power of grace, the transformation of a bad situation into a good situation.”73 Brodber highlights these elements to illustrate how fiction as alternative history has the potential to heal and unify. NOTES 1. June Roberts, “Erna Brodber’s Louisiana: An Alternative Aesthetic, or Oral Authority in the Written Text,” Literary Griot 14, no.1–2 (2002): 81. 2. Shirley Toland-Dix, “Hurston, Brodber, and Rituals of Spirit Possession,” in Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South, ed. Jessica Adams, Michael P. Bibler, and Cécile Accilien (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 205. 3. See Angeletta K. M. Gourdine’s “Carnival-Conjure, Louisiana, History and the Power of Women’s Ethnographic Narrative.” 4. Sue Anne’s nickname, Mammy, reminds readers of the racist and sexist stereotypes that persisted throughout the post-emancipation period and into the twentieth

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century. This loaded nickname initially conceals Sue Anne’s autonomous power from readers and from Ella. She is anything but the stereotypical “Mammy.” 5. See Nathaniel Samuel Murrell’s Afro-Caribbean Religions: An Introduction to Their Historical, Cultural, and Sacred Traditions. 6. Erna Brodber, Louisiana, A Novel (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 22. 7. Brodber, Louisiana, 28. 8. Brodber, Louisiana, 124. 9. Brodber, Louisiana, 4 (emphasis added). 10. Brodber, Louisiana, 102. 11. Brodber, Louisiana, 139. 12. Sharon Ann Musher, “The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews,” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Slave Narrative, ed. John Ernest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 101. 13. Deborah G. Plant, Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 80. 14. Musher, “Slave Narratives,” 106. 15. Musher, “Slave Narratives,” 106. 16. Brodber, Louisiana, 14 (emphasis added). 17. Brodber, Louisiana, 14 (emphasis added). 18. Brodber, Louisiana, 21. 19. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 8. 20. Taylor, Archive, 10. 21. Brodber, Louisiana, 61. 22. Toland-Dix, “Spirit Possession,” 205. 23. Brodber, Louisiana, 57. 24. Brodber, Louisiana, 57. 25. Mignolo, Local Histories, 26. 26. Brodber, Louisiana, 87. 27. Brodber, Louisiana, 89. 28. Brodber, Louisiana, 103. 29. Brodber, Louisiana, 116. 30. Jenny Sharpe, “When Spirits Talk: Reading Erna Brodber’s Louisiana for Affect,” Small Axe 39 (2012): 94. 31. Brodber, Louisiana, 90. 32. Brodber, Louisiana, 38. 33. This memory of her grandmother taking care of Ella’s hair is full of cultural and historical meaning. This particular act has specific resonance for women of African descent, whose traumatic history has affected their hair care, as chronicled in Willie L. Morrow’s 400 Years without a Comb. Bell hooks, in “Straightening Our Hair,” explains how hair care is a ritual and communal process that affects black women’s identity. 34. Brodber, Louisiana, 25. 35. Taylor, Archive, 16.

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36. See Roberts’s “Alternative Aesthetic,” Gourdine’s, “Carnival-Conjure,” and Sharpe’s “When Spirits Talk.” 37. Lucie Pradel, African Beliefs in the New World: Popular Literary Traditions of the Caribbean, trans. Catherine Bernard (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000), viii. 38. Brodber, Louisiana, 9 (emphasis added). 39. Brodber, Louisiana, 9. 40. Rev. 14:13 (KJV). 41. Martha Sims and Martine Stephens, Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions, 2nd ed. (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2011), 8. 42. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 82. 43. Brodber, Louisiana, 58. 44. Brodber, Louisiana, 92. 45. Brodber, Louisiana, 134. 46. Brodber, Louisiana, 58. 47. Brodber, Louisiana, 31. 48. Brodber, Louisiana, 115. 49. Brodber, Louisiana, 129. 50. Brodber, Louisiana, 129. 51. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 55. 52. Thom Holmes, American Popular Music: Jazz (New York: Facts on File, 2006), xxii. 53. Holmes, Jazz, xxii. 54. Holmes, Jazz, xxi. 55. Brodber, Louisiana, 9. 56. Gates, Signifying Monkey, xxxi. 57. Brodber, Louisiana, 62. 58. Gates, Signifying Monkey, 69. 59. Roger Abrahams et al., Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America’s Creole Soul (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 29. 60. Abrahams et al., Blues, 35. 61. Cécile Vidal, “Introduction: Louisiana in Atlantic Perspective,” in Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World, ed. Cécile Vidal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 2. 62. Toland-Dix, “Spirit Possession,” 203. 63. Toland-Dix, “Spirit Possession,” 203. 64. Brodber, Louisiana, 125. 65. Brodber, Louisiana, 124. 66. Brodber, Louisiana, 157. 67. Glissant, Poétique, 23. 68. Glissant, Poétique, 23. 69. Brodber, Louisiana, 88.

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70. Brodber, Louisiana, 161. 71. Brodber, Louisiana, 161. 72. Malik J. M. Walker, “Jazz Funerals and the Transcendental Politics of Struggle,” ARTS 26, no. 2 (2015): 23. 73. Michael Taussig, “Carnival of the Senses,” in Hope: New Philosophies for Change, ed. Mary Zournazi (New York: Routledge, 2003), 55.

Chapter Three

Haunting and Affect Ghosts and Nostalgia in Te di la vida entera and Caramelo

Sociologist Avery Gordon suggests that because “[b]eing haunted draws us affectively,” ghosts allow us to access a different kind of knowledge—not “cold” facts, but a “transformative recognition.”1 In Zoé Valdés’s Te di la vida entera (1996) and Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo: or Puro Cuento (2002) this “transformative recognition,” or return to knowing, links the past to the present through the affective nature of spirit possession and haunting. Although emerging from distinctly different geographical locations and cultural traditions, Te di la vida entera and Caramelo treat similar issues using the figure of the ghost as a vehicle to address the past and transcend temporal boundaries. The two novels invoke female spirits who, like Mammy and Lowly in Brodber’s Louisiana, recuperate memory and inspire the production of alternative histories recorded by female narrators. Temporal boundaries collapse and “history” is re-evaluated as the spirits relate their stories to a living narrator. Te di la vida entera and Caramelo reconsider the past from a female perspective, centering on the intimate suffering of lovelorn women to comment on the larger social and political issues of their respective Cuban and Mexican American cultures. The novels confront the traumatic past on both a national and familial level. The ghosts narrate historical events (the Mexican and Cuban Revolutions of the twentieth century) from a woman’s position. In this way, the novels connect the personal, feminine experience to national history. As liminal beings, the female spirits facilitate movement from an intimate to a communal experience, connecting the singular to the plural. This process validates the (female) individual experience, which is often lost or excluded from the official archive. The result is a matriarchal alternative to the male 51

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dominant, hegemonic historical discourse, the “cold knowledge” to which Gordon refers. Like Mammy and Lowly in Louisiana, the female ghosts in Valdés’s and Cisneros’s novels provide an alternative knowledge, specifically an alternative perspective of history. The ghosts are witnesses, an important distinction that I will analyze shortly, and communicate their stories orally. The narrators hear the voices of the spirits and transcribe their words. Like Louisiana, Te di la vida entera and Caramelo privilege orality and re-present oral traditions of discourse that disrupt a hegemonic framework of history. The subversive nature of the ghosts’ alternative histories is accentuated by their affective discourse, which according to the narrator in Te di la vida entera makes them better storytellers: “[L]os espíritus cuentan mucho mejor las historias que los vivos, porque lo hacen con nostalgia, con dolor, luchando contra la impotencia (Spirits tell better stories than the living because they do so with nostalgia and with pain, struggling against powerlessness).”2 Nostalgia is a key tool of affect in both novels. Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer coined the term nostalgia when he diagnosed it as a disease in his 1688 thesis, Dissertatio medica de nostalgia. Hofer joined two Greek words, nostos (return to home) and algos (grief), to capture the unique traits of this condition.3 Svetlana Boym defines nostalgia within the context of the twentieth century not only as “a sentiment of loss and displacement” but also “a romance with one’s own fantasy.”4 She further describes nostalgia as “an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.”5 Nostalgia can be simultaneously personal (“one’s own fantasy”) and communal (“collective memory”), functioning as an “intermediary between collective and individual memory.”6 Nostalgia fulfills a complex role, characterizing, as Boym puts it, “one’s relationship to the past, to the imagined community, to home, [and] to one’s own self-perception.”7 The novels I analyze in this chapter reflect nostalgia’s various nuanced effects as they simultaneously explore the loss experienced by women whose love was unrequited and recreate a Cuban and Mexican past that no longer exists, connecting the intimate experience to the collective, cultural history. The novels specifically articulate what Boym calls reflective nostalgia, as opposed to restorative nostalgia. Whereas restorative nostalgia is the drive to recuperate a homeland and prizes “truth and tradition,” reflective nostalgia dwells in the feeling and aesthetics of longing; it does “not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once.”8 In other words, restorative nostalgia characterizes fanatical nationalism and aims to reconstruct the past physically and ideologically. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, is ironic, humorous, and playful. Valdés’s and Cisneros’s novels

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are both playful, and often ironic, as they lament loss on the personal and public scale. TE DI LA VIDA ENTERA Zoé Valdés’s Te di la vida entera follows the life of Cuca Martínez, foregrounding her private suffering within the turbulent political upheavals of twentieth-century Cuba. Valdés relies heavily on affective discourse in recounting Cuca’s history; it is at once tragic and comedic. Although Cuca is our heroine, the narrator’s descriptions also make her the butt of a pathetic joke. The novel is a fairy tale parody: Una mujer soltera, habitante de una isla musical y pretenciosa, más sola que la una, y mil veces más pobre que Cenicienta, lo que necesita es un tronco de bolero para ponerse a soñar. A soñar con el príncipe azul, acompañado de su correspondiente bolista repleta de monedas de oro.9 [A single woman, living on a musical and pretentious island, more alone than the number one, and a thousand times poorer than Cinderella, who needs only to hear a bolero to throw her into a dreamy state. To dream of a prince charming complete with a purse filled with gold coins.]

As a teenager, Cuca leaves the Cuban countryside for Havana. Finding herself out of place in the flamboyant pre-Revolution capital, Cuca falls in love with the first man to notice her, Uan—a notorious playboy whose name suggests to Cuca that he is the only “one” for her.10 Their romance, however, is short lived. Uan is forced to flee Cuba on the eve of the Revolution, leaving a pregnant Cuca alone in a dramatically changing political landscape. The narrative then follows Cuca’s pitiful and lonely life up until the nineties when Uan returns to Cuba in search of an encoded dollar bill that he had entrusted to Cuca before abandoning her decades earlier. Cuca’s story is transmitted to the narrator-author via spirit possession. The Valdés persona is “mounted” by the spirit of Cuca and Uan’s daughter, María Regla, though the spirit’s identity is not revealed until the novel’s final chapter. Her disembodied voice begins the narrative with the following destabilizing announcement: “No soy la escritora de esta novela. Soy el cadáver (I am not the author of this novel. I am the cadaver).”11 She then asks readers to “paren las orejas, o mejor, zambúllanse en estas páginas a las cuales, no sin amor y dolor, en tanto que espíritu he sobrevivido (lend me your ears, or better yet, dive into these pages where my spirit has survived not without love or suffering).”12 The aural language used by the spirit (“paren las orejas,”

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a phrase that Valdés uses throughout the novel) indicates that this text will be extra-literary, moving beyond the expectations of written literature, and therefore has potential to transcend the constraints of a conventional novel. Moreover, the second person plural imperative paren indicates a communal audience. The individual reader is automatically part of an imagined community of listeners. “PAREN LAS OREJAS”: ORALITY AND TESTIMONIAL LITERATURE Valdés (and Cisneros, as we will see) connects readers’ typically solitary act with a larger communal experience, facilitated by the collaboration between the spirit and the narrator. By utilizing certain elements of oral storytelling, the novel approaches ritual, creating communion between the storyteller and her listeners. Solimar Otero argues that through the trope of a disembodied narrator, Te di la vida entera mirrors rituals performed within Afro-Cuban religious traditions. The novel becomes a ritualistic narrative space wherein the “‘muerto,’ or ancestor as narrator of the tale, helps create a textual bridge between the multiple Cuban communities, past and present, dispersed and separated from each other due to politics, geography, and time.”13 Valdés invokes the religious rituals of Santería when she includes a Yoruba prayer as an epigraph.14 Otero argues that Valdés uses “sacred language in a manner that is consistent with the sociocultural, religious contexts of Afrocuban religion. That is, she begins the text, (as you would begin a ritual), in the style of a traditional Yoruba responsorial liturgy.”15 This prayer not only establishes the importance of the Cuban folk religion, as Otero explains, but also highlights the importance of voice and aurality, as the prayer is meant to be spoken aloud. The ritual prayer prepares readers to hear the voice of María Regla’s spirit, whose name is full of religious significance. Uan and Cuca’s daughter was born on the day of Yemayá, the Yoruba deity whose Catholic counterpart is the Virgin de Regla. Like Broder’s Louisiana, spirit possession in Valdés’s novel is linked to oral traditions. In the context of Te di la vida entera and Caramelo, orality recalls testimonial literature in the Latin American tradition, defined by George Yúdice as “an authentic narrative, told by a witness who is moved to narrate by the urgency of a situation,” war or revolution, for example.16 Testimonial literature, as opposed to official state discourse, relies on “popular, oral discourse,” and “the witness portrays his or her own experience as an agent (rather than a representative) of a collective memory and identity. Truth is summoned in the cause of denouncing a present situation or exploitation and oppression or in exorcising and setting aright official history.”17 By this

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definition, both spirits in Te di la vida entera and Caramelo act as witnesses in the testimonio tradition; their credibility is privileged above even that of the main narrators. Specifically, three of Yúdice’s claims regarding testimonial literature directly relate to the novels analyzed in this chapter. First, they both emphasize oral discourse. The testimonialista (witness) tells her story to an anthropologist who will record it. Just as the testimonialista collaborates with an anthropologist, the spirits in Valdés’s and Cisneros’s novels collaborate with the narrators, who like academic field workers “must record, transcribe, and edit” the testimonialista’s story.18 Similar to Louisiana, which brings to light the voices of the silenced and marginalized, the spirits in Te di la vida entera and Caramelo give shape to their own stories (and to those of their families), validating their unique subjectivity, which leads to Yúdice’s second point that testimonial literature connects collective memory and identity with an individual agent: “[the] personal story is a shared one with the community.”19 The testimonialista “performs an act of identity-formation which is simultaneously personal and collective.”20 This allows for the witness to retain autonomy and individuality while relating their specific experience within the larger collective one. Finally, testimonial literature exorcises and sets aright official history. Valdés’s novel exorcises official history by highlighting the brutalities of the Castro regime and questioning the idealized historiography of the Cuban Revolution. Louis A. Pérez Jr. explains that some Cubans imbued the Revolution with “historical authenticity” by positing it as the climax of a century-long struggle for independence and sovereignty.21 In their view, history was a forward projection with the Revolution being the climax of that historical progression, a “fulfillment of the past.”22 This idealized vision cemented the Revolution as the resolution to the perpetual struggle for Cuban independence beginning in the nineteenth century. Pérez explains that this mythology had a direct impact on the historiography of the Revolution; it created “a new founding narrative, with 1959 consecrated as the realization of the historic project of nation.”23 This paradigm endows the Revolution with absolute, sacred historicity. Fidel Castro capitalized on this historical construct and romanticized the continual struggle of the Cuban people.24 Valdés dismantles the myth of the Revolution and its aftermath by describing in gruesome detail how the average Cuban sacrificed and suffered, specifically during the Special Period, El período especial en tiempos de paz, officially declared by the Cuban government in the summer of 1990. Inaugurated by the fall of the Soviet Union—Cuba’s greatest political ally and economic support—the Special Period implemented a “new series of austerity measures and new rationing schedules to meet deteriorating economic conditions.”25 Although the U.S. dollar was accepted as legitimate currency and foreign tourists were

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encouraged to exploit Cuba’s exotic locale, Cubans endured harsh food shortages, job loss, and displacement.26 Valdés parodies the Special Period to censure the Revolution and Castro’s regime to capture the “hopeless decay” of this era.27 Cuca’s material and emotional distress reflect Cuba’s collective anguish. She represents the many Cubans who starved or were forced to eat the inedible: “Intenta acordarse de lo que comió ayer. No, no comió. Ingirió tajada de aire y fritura de viento. Hoy puede que se haga un bistecito de la frazada de piso vieja que adobó hace quince días (She tries to remember what she ate yesterday. No, she didn’t eat. She swallowed a slice of air and fried wind. Perhaps today she would make a steak out of the old floor mop that she had been marinating for fifteen days).”28 Food shortages caused Cubans to become especially inventive with their recipes. Valdés highlights this reality in a particularly affective scene when at a party Cuca is served meatballs made from boiled shoes, quicklime, rubber bands, and cod liver oil. She pointedly states that no one vomits after because that is a luxury they cannot afford: “Nadie vomita, no pueden permitirse ese lujo.”29 The harsh experiences of the Cuban majority sharply contrast with those of foreign tourists and their luxurious accommodations. These sardonic descriptions of the Special Period undermine Castro’s historiographic project to idealize the Revolution; they also fulfill the third element of testimonial literature. The novel sets official history aright, summoning truth “in the cause of denouncing a present situation.” María Regla repeatedly clarifies her commitment to the truth and often chides the narrator for the embellishments she adds to the spirit’s story. María Regla’s initial declaration, “No soy la escritora de esta novela. Soy el cadáver,” summarizes her preoccupation with truth. She stresses that she did not invent the narrative; she is evidence of it. She is the cadaver. Her body is physical proof of what has transpired—the events that will unfold for readers as they move through the text. Moreover, within the folk religious context that Valdés establishes through Santería, María Regla, as the “muerto” (deceased) in this ritual, is a reliable voice.30 Although her spirit appears to fade into the margins after her opening remarks, it re-emerges in the sixth chapter with a declaration similar to that in the book’s introduction. In this passage, however, she addresses the tension between truth and fiction, establishing herself as a credible witness to the historical events: No soy la escritora de este libro. Ya lo anuncié al principio. Soy el cadáver. La que ha ido, e irá, dictando a esta viva lo que debe escribir. [. . .] La verdad me pertenece, la fantasía la pondrá quien transcribe mis sentimientos. [. . .] He puesto confianza en la elegida. Pero no toda, no estoy como para confiar demasiado en los vivos a estas alturas de mi muerte.31

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[I am not the author of this book. I already stated this to begin with. I am the cadáver. The one that has been, and will be, dictating to this living one what she should write. [. . .] The truth belongs to me, fantasy will be added by the one who transcribes my sentiments. [. . .] I have put my trust in her, the chosen one. But not all of it, I am not about to trust too much in the living at this stage in my death.]

Whereas the living are fallible and cannot be trusted completely, the spirit, by asserting the living’s unreliability, reinforces her own trustworthiness. However, María Regla must rely upon the living to share her story, to make it public and accessible, like the testimonialista who must rely on the ethnographer to record and disseminate her story. Through this process history becomes less absolute and hegemonic and more inclusive of multiple voices, leading us to a closer examination of Valdés’s use of nostalgia, which likewise allows for a reconsideration of history, especially reflective nostalgia, which allows for multiple planes of consciousness.32 “NO SIN AMOR Y DOLOR”: NOSTALGIA AND MUSIC Valdés relies on the affective weight of nostalgia to engage her audience, especially the Cuban reader, who, whether still living on the island or a part of the Cuban diaspora, carries a unique nostalgia of her own. The first chapter’s epigraph, a quote from the Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante, establishes the importance of affect and nostalgia in the novel: “Recordar es abrir esa caja de Pandora de la que salen todos los dolores, todos los olores y esa música nocturna (To remember is to open a Pandora’s Box of pains, smells, and nocturnal music).” Unlike an official historical account that deals with “facts,” Valdés’s novel explores the affective pull of memory. In a way Te di la vida entera is a “Pandora’s Box” of pain, smells, and nocturnal music. Valdés’s narrative re-creates the past via color, smell, and, perhaps most effectively, sounds. Valdés’s use of nostalgia reflects the literature of the Special Period (during which Te di la vida entera was published), which is set apart by a “particular brand of nostalgia” that invokes pre-Revolution music to return to the past: “Cuban music from the forties and fifties represents one of the portals or apertures which conveys [the listener] back to an idealized pre-revolutionary Habana.”33 In this case, music, like ghosts, collapses the boundary between past and present. Through the affective force of listening to (or remembering) a particular song one can (figuratively) reinhabit the past. The novel makes this point through Cuca’s fascination with the bolero—an especially affective genre that allows Cuca to return the past: “Cuca Martínez escucha como se

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escuchan los boleros a su edad, como a cualquier edad, como la primera vez (Cuca Martínez listens to boleros like all people listen to boleros at her age, or at any age for that matter, as if it were the first time).”34 With music, Valdés invokes rich and complex feelings to recreate the past while also reinforcing the novel’s affective weight. The pre-revolutionary boleros activate nostalgia, weaving their lyrics and sentiments into the narrative structure of the text and the narration of Cuca’s personal life. Each chapter begins with lyrics from a bolero to set the tone and provide the theme for the chapter. These lyrics not only remind readers of a uniquely Cuban past, but also reinforce Cuca’s personal suffering. The melancholy lyrics of the boleros, which mostly deal with abandonment and disillusionment, reflect Cuca’s heartache but also comment on the Special Period.35 The bolero is an especially sentimental genre that effectively evokes nostalgia through the theme of absence. “Boleros are all about erasure,” writes José Quiroga, “What other musical genre can be so invested in its own sense of disappearance that it seeks to proclaim absence by belting out songs claiming that the only thing that remains is disappearance itself?”36 The following “bonito y triste bolero (beautiful and sad bolero)” quoted in the novel reflects Quiroga’s point: Qué te importa que te ame si tú no me quieres ya, el amor que ya ha pasado no se puede recordar. Fui la ilusión de tu vida un día lejano ya, hoy represento el pasado, no me puedo conformar.37   [What difference is it to you if I love you since you don’t love me anymore, our love has already passed and cannot be remembered. I gave meaning to your life, but that was a distant day, today I represent the past, which I cannot accept.]

These lyrics summarize Cuca’s profound suffering after Uan’s abandonment. The speaker is like a ghost, trapped in the past yet also a symbol of the past. Their voice continues to haunt the present just as this bolero continues to haunt Cuca when it plays once again (“una vez más”) on the radio, a medium that creates an imagined community of listeners, forging a link between

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Cuca’s intimate personal suffering and the rest of Cuba.38 Music, through the affect of a pretty and sad bolero, connects all Cubans, despite their different forms of suffering and loss. Writing about the reappearance of the bolero, which regained popularity in the 1990s in and outside of Cuba, Quiroga explains that “as a recuperated genre” the bolero “demands that we break the tenuous border between the self and the other, between objective and subjective discourse.”39 The bolero thus bridges a link between the present and the past, between contemporary and past listeners, through the nostalgia it evokes. As Boym explains, nostalgia has this effect because it seeks to “revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”40 It “obliterate[s] history.”41 Nostalgia’s disruption of linear time was documented as early as the seventeenth century when symptoms of nostalgia included hearing voices and seeing ghosts, which, in other words, is to see and hear the past in the present temporal space.42 Valdés uses ghosts with nostalgia to collapse the temporal boundaries that separate the living and the dead, the present and the past, destabilizing the linear, progressive historical narrative that Castro’s regime promoted. María Regla is not the only spectral presence in the novel; literal and figurative ghosts abound. Cuca’s friend Fax becomes a spirit medium after electroshock therapy to cure her of, what the state officially terms, “melancolía capitalista (capitalist melancholy),” but was really a breakdown after her lover’s unjust execution by Castro’s military.43 The electroshock treatment does not alleviate her grief but it does give Fax the uncanny ability to communicate with Marx, Engels, Lenin, and other dead revolutionary figures, making her into “un Fax comunista (a communist fax machine).”44 Fax is a minor character, but her story underlines the trauma of Castro’s regime while emphasizing the significance of ghosts to Valdés’s narrative. Cuca is figuratively haunted by the memory of Uan after he flees Cuba, leaving her behind: “el fantasma del Uan me perseguía a todas partes (Uan’s ghost pursues me at every turn).”45 She finds herself pursuing his “ghost,” following men who resemble her errant lover through the streets of Havana: “A veces iba colgada en una guagua, y tenía que lanzarme antes de que ésta parara, porque de pronto había creído verlo doblar por una esquina (At times I would be hanging from a bus and would have to jump off before it stopped because suddenly I had thought I had seen him turn a corner).”46 Cuca imagines that she sees him all over Havana; she cannot let go of the past that he represents. When Cuca and Uan finally reunite after thirty-something years, in a graveyard of all places, both assume the other is a ghost. Cuca immediately recognizes the “ghost” of Uan, assuming he died in Miami and his spirit returned to visit her. Although Uan does not recognize Cuca initially, he too

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wonders if she is a ghost: “[E]spero que no sea un espíritu burlón (I hope that you are not a mischievous spirit).”47 Despite the unusual and macabre setting for this would be romantic reunion, for which Cuca has been waiting the majority of her life, it seems as if no time has passed at all: “[P]arece que fue ayer (It’s as if it was yesterday).”48 Past and present seemingly collapse in the graveyard, a liminal space where the dead and living meet. Toward the end of the novel past and present do converge, providing an unexpected closure to Valdés’s distressing narrative. The narrator writes María Regla back into the text in the final chapter, bringing her back to life within the pages of the novel. María Regla, a journalist, was killed when her apartment complex collapsed just as she was leaving to conduct an interview. When revived by the narrator, she awakes in the back seat of a car en route to a work assignment in the country. Although confused and unable to account for her miraculous survival after the building collapse, María Regla resolves to fulfill her journalistic obligation. That is all she has left after losing everything: “[S]e da cuenta de que lo perdió todo. Lo único que le queda es su reportaje. Y lo hará (She realizes that she lost everything. The only thing that remains hers is her duty as a reporter. And she would do it).”49 As she drives deeper into rural Cuba, María Regla notices increasingly odd changes: the billboard advertisements look midcentury, her hair and dress transform to the style of the ’50s, and even the car, a ’58 Chevy, reverts to the condition that it would have been circa 1959. Her journey to the countryside takes her into the past, 1959 specifically, the year of the Revolution and the year of her birth. She realizes she is no longer in 1995 (a poetic inversion of 1959): “Intuye que no está en su época.”50 When she makes it to the rural village, she is startled to see a pregnant woman, around her age, with features similar to her own. It is uncanny. They only speak briefly, but María Regla promises the woman that she will return to do a special interview with her. Two days later she makes the journey back to the country; however, this time she does not travel into the past. The billboards, her dress, and condition of the car do not alter. Instead of the pregnant young woman, María Regla finds her mother, but Cuca does not recognize her daughter. Rather, she recognizes the journalist whom she met decades earlier. After her daughter’s death, Cuca moved back to her country home to await the journalist’s return so that she could finally share her story. Although firmly in the present (1995), Cuca speaks to the journalist as if it were 1959: “Cuca Martínez se dirige a la periodista del año mil novecientos cincuenta y nueve.”51 This complex and compelling ending illustrates an uncanny return to the past, obliterating linear, phallocentric history. This episode marks the novel as a model of cyclical time, an example of Kristeva’s women’s time (le temps des femmes). Up to this point the novel has stressed Cuca’s longing for Uan, making their impossible love the presumed focus of the narrative; however,

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this touching finale focuses on the relationship between mother and daughter. Uan is no longer important to the story. This ending emphasizes the relationship between women in a temporal space other than a linear, masculine timeline. It allows the two women to connect meaningfully for, perhaps, the first time. Cuca and María Regla’s relationship was quite strained. Whereas Cuca resented the Revolution for disrupting her romance and defiling Havana, María Regla, born in 1959, considered herself a child of the Revolution and could not understand or identify with her mother’s sense of loss and longing for the past. With the temporal collapse in the final scene the two women finally relate to each other in a feminine, cyclical temporal space. Only now can María Regla understand and appreciate the history she is about to hear: “María Regla escucha, piensa que lo único que queda es eso: grabar. Más tarde se ocupará de buscar a una persona con vida de verdad que pueda escribirlo por ella (María Regla listens, thinking that the only thing that remains is this: to record her mother’s story. Later she’ll worry about finding someone who is truly living who could write it down for her).”52 The novel’s resolution comes about because of a collapse of linear temporality, which the novel builds toward through orality, nostalgia, and, of course, ghosts. Valdés bridges the past and the present while also linking the personal to the public, connecting Cuca’s intimate suffering with Cuba’s national deterioration. It cannot be a coincidence that Cuca and Cuba are, except for one letter, almost identical in spelling, reinforcing the connection between the two so that the feminine, personal subject can give voice to her unique experience and present an alternative to the dominant historical discourse. The same is true of Cisneros’s novel. CARAMELO: OR PURO CUENTO Like Te di la vida entera, Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo: or Puro Cuento collapses the boundary between past and present through orality, nostalgia, and a female spirit. Unlike Valdés’s novel, however, whose protagonist is wholly fictional, Caramelo is loosely based on the biography of its author. Cisneros’s fictional counterpart is the young narrator-author Celaya Reyes, called “Lala” by her family. She recounts her family’s history, including her ancestors’ experiences migrating from Mexico to the United States, as well as her own memories of crossing the border every summer to visit her father’s family in Mexico. The novel seems straightforward enough, until the ghost of Lala’s abuela, Soledad Reyes, also known as “the Awful Grandmother,” interrupts the narration to assert her version of events. Soledad’s narrative demands a reconsideration of the past from a new, feminine perspective as an alternative to the hegemonic and patriarchal historical narrative. Like Te di la vida

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entera, affective discourse via communion with a spirit is key to accessing a “transformative recognition” of the past. Just as Cuban culture is shaped by the spiritual tradition of Santería, Mexican culture is also marked by a distinct worldview regarding the dead and their relationships with the living, specifically in the way that Mexicans and many Mexican Americans honor and remember their deceased relatives during Día de los muertos (Day of the Dead), “the most important celebration in the yearly cycle.”53 In an interview with Ruth Behar, Cisneros contextualizes the Day of the Dead within Mexican culture, explaining that the “border between the dead and the living, if you’re Mexican, doesn’t exist. The dead are part of your life.”54 Although Cisneros does not specifically refer to this holiday in Caramelo, an examination of this fiesta will highlight a uniquely Mexican view of death and clarify the significance of Soledad’s return to the realm of the living. Día de los muertos, Stanley Brandes explains, “has come to symbolize Mexico and Mexicanness.”55 The unusually (by Western standards) cheerful depictions of death in a variety of unexpected media have become iconic images of Mexican culture. From papier-mâché skeleton dolls, to candy and breads in the shape of skulls and skeletons, death is presented as universal and inevitable. For the present discussion the most important aspect of Día de los muertos is its purpose to honor and remember family. This is not a public ritual, although decorations and festivities can be seen in public spaces. Essentially, it is about the intimate familial relations that persist beyond death. As Brandes states, this holiday creates “conditions which promote a kind of spiritual communion” with deceased ancestors.56 Living relatives and descendants lovingly prepare an offering, including food and drink, for the deceased, whose spirits are expected to return to the land of the living during this brief period. These offerings are “an obligation, a vital part of maintaining good relations with the dead;” if the spirits are nourished properly, they will move on to the afterlife peacefully.57 If souls are unable to rest, they will surely “trouble the living,” as is the case with Soledad in Caramelo.58 Soledad’s narrative voice, set off by bold font, is strong and assertive, making her, as Heather Alumbaugh puts it, a co-narrator with Lala.59 Soledad’s voice is first “heard” in Part II, When I Was Dirt, meaning the time before Lala existed. Lala begins this section by addressing the early years of her grandmother’s sad life. Lala and her grandmother’s ghost discuss, or argue rather (Soledad continually interrupts Lala’s narration), how best to tell Soledad’s story. Although initially these disruptions seem to halt the narrative, it becomes clear that the process of co-narration is mutual therapy for Lala and her deceased grandmother. The two come to depend on each other. Soledad’s spirit finds peace in death by sharing her history, and Lala is finally

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equipped to understand her complex family dynamic, leading to an increased capacity to cope with the difficulties of her own life. Like the spirits in Louisiana and Te di la vida entera, Soledad asserts her spectral presence by speaking. Lala first hears her grandmother’s voice at a pivotal point in her adolescence when school bullies chase her into the middle of the Interstate. Frozen by fear, she is unable to move forward or turn and face her tormentors until she hears a disembodied voice say her name. From this point on Lala is aware that her grandmother is “haunting” her, although she does not know why. Similar to Cuca and María Regla’s relationship, Lala and her grandmother’s was fraught while Soledad was alive (hence her nickname, “the Awful Grandmother”), but Soledad’s spirit depends on Lala to help her progress in the afterlife. Even in death Soledad cannot escape the weight of her name, solitude. She laments: “I’m halfway between here and there. I’m in the middle of nowhere!”60 Unable to pass on peacefully, Soledad asks Lala to write her story—which would release Soledad from the solitary limbo in which she is trapped. “I need everyone I hurt to forgive me,” Soledad exclaims, “You need to tell them for me, I’m sorry Celaya. You’re good with talk. Tell them, please, Celaya. Make them understand me. I’m not bad. I’m so frightened. I never wanted to be alone, and now look where I am.”61 Soledad was unable to ask for forgiveness herself before she died because of a seizure that left her frozen, “without words,” with “[s]o much left unsaid.”62 This inability to speak in her old age is a literal manifestation of Soledad’s figurative muteness throughout her life, which I will return to. Lala steps into the role of spirit medium and ethnographer, like Ella in Louisiana and the narrator in Te di la vida entera, and recuperates her grandmother’s marginalized voice and memories. By exploring her grandmother’s early life and marriage to Narciso Reyes (whose name—Narcissus—signals his selfish and adulterous character), Lala learns to empathize with Soledad and comes to understand how she could evolve from a timid mestiza orphan girl into the “Awful Grandmother.” Lala’s skill with “talk,” or the art of storytelling, will finally allow Soledad’s spirit to progress peacefully. Cisneros, like Brodber and Valdés, incorporates oral traditions, including proverbs and common Mexican sayings, to supplement and even challenge the written, official archive. Storytelling itself is an important theme in the novel and Cisneros often highlights the tension between official written narratives and oral history.

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“CUÉNTAME ALGO”: ORALITY AND TESTIMONIAL LITERATURE The novel’s epigraph immediately establishes the importance of orality: “Cuéntame algo, aunque sea una mentira (Tell me a story, even if it be a lie).” This opening creates an atmosphere that is informal and communal (typical of oral literature), while also establishing the tension between truth and fiction (similar to Brodber’s and Valdés’s texts). On a following preliminary page the author states that her objective in writing the novel is to continue in the family tradition of storytelling, “telling healthy lies.” She writes, “The truth, these stories are nothing but story, bits of string, odds and ends found here and there, embroidered together to make something new. I have invented what I do not know and exaggerated what I do to continue the family tradition of telling healthy lies.” This invention and exaggeration transform family history into art. The known stories remain an important foundation, but the exaggeration, or embroidery, allows Cisneros to move beyond the particular to the collective experience. The novel’s title, Caramelo: or Puro Cuento, also emphasizes the art of storytelling. The phrase “puro cuento” seems deliberately ambiguous. Puro may mean pure, as in true, but it could also mean pure, as in absolute. Either the novel is a true story or absolute cuento—complete fiction. This ambiguity allows for both to be simultaneously correct. Moreover, caramelo has several layers of meaning but the most prominent is found in the unfinished caramel colored rebozo, a shawl-like garment worn by Mexican women, that Lala inherits from Soledad. The novel’s title implicitly conflates weaving and storytelling (after all, “text” comes from the Latin texere, to weave). Lala inherits the legacy of both creative acts from Soledad, who was born into a family of weavers, los Reyes, “famed reboceros from Santa María del Río, San Luis Potosí, where the finest shawls in all the republic come from.”63 The rebozo is specifically connected to Lala’s family’s legacy, but it also represents a larger Mexican national identity. The rebozo is a garment for all women, regardless of class or ethnic background.64 The rebozo is an important cultural artifact that is uniquely Mexican and represents the diverse origins of Mexican identity. Cisneros writes, “The rebozo was born in Mexico, but like all mestizos, it came from everywhere”; it represents indigenous, Spanish, and Chinese influences and traditions.65 The rebozo, as a symbol of storytelling, connects Lala’s personal family history to the broader cultural history of Mexico. Cisneros thoughtfully fashions the rebozo into a symbol of storytelling (“bits of string [. . .] embroidered together to make something new”) that transcends her personal family history.

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Although both the male and female members of the Reyes family labored together to produce the rebozos, the women were the ones to add the embellishments and designs—the affective elements: “the empuntadora’s art of counting and dividing silk strands, of braiding and knotting them into fastidious rosettes, arcs, stars, diamonds.”66 The connection between weaving the rebozos and the art of storytelling places emphasis on the value of women’s voices and their self-expression. In this case, history and knowledge is shared between women as mothers teach their daughters the art of weaving, “as if all the mothers and daughters were at work, all one thread interlocking and double-looping, each woman learning from the woman before, but adding a flourish that became her signature, then passing it on.”67 Soledad should have been an heir to this feminine folk knowledge, but her mother died when she was very young, leaving her “without the language of knots and rosettes.”68 As Soledad’s descendent, Lala is a successor to this art of weaving (figurative and literal) and although Soledad does not have much knowledge to offer her, she shares the little she does have. From beyond the grave, Soledad instructs Lala on the delicate process of telling a story, repeatedly interrupting her granddaughter with the admonition, “Careful! Just enough, but not too much”—the same instructions, verbatim, Soledad’s father gave for dyeing the family’s famous black rebozos.69 The repetition of this phrase emphasizes that the same principles are used in the creation of a story and the making of a rebozo. Lala and her grandmother’s spirit, via the process of recording Soledad’s story, enter into a matriarchal and creative temporal space, embodied by the caramelo rebozo. Not only does the rebozo demonstrate women’s artistic talent and creativity in the designs, but it also contains important information like family names, dates, and dedications, making the garment an alternative female production of a historical record. This knowledge represents what Diana Taylor calls the repertoire, which “stores” knowledge passed down through performance, oral traditions, and cultural practices of memory—what the official archive cannot “capture.”70 The way that the Reyes women create the designs (by “double-looping” the threads) illustrates a cyclical rather than a linear progression in the artistic creation of the rebozo and in a narrative style. Like Brodber’s and Valdés’s texts, Caramelo does not follow a linear narrative progression. The novel moves back and forth in time and space (between Mexico and the United States). In this way, the narrative is embellished and embroidered with “double-looping” like the rebozo, making Cisneros’s novel another example of women’s writing, exemplifying Kristeva’s concept of women’s time. As a child, Lala imagines that her grandmother’s caramel rebozo collapses time: “The candy-colored cloth unfurling like a flag—no, like a hypnotist’s spiral [. . .] circling and circling,” which conveys “the idea of going into the past. The past, el pasado. El porvenir, the days to come. All

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swirling together.”71 By combining the past (“el pasado”) and the future (“el porvenir”) within the body of the rebozo (representing both women’s textile art and women’s storytelling), Cisneros emphasizes that feminine time is not linear or progressive, as reflected in both the garment and her narrative. The fact that the caramel colored rebozo is unfinished illustrates Soledad’s trouble with the past and her inability to make sense of her story when she was alive. Her alienation from matrilineal folk knowledge divested her of the power to weave her own life story. Soledad’s latent gift for weaving, for storytelling, is reinforced by the way she handles the unfinished caramel colored rebozo, the only thing her mother left her when she passed away: “All she had was the caramelo rebozo, whose fringe she plaited and unplaited, which was a kind of language.”72 Although this action becomes a “kind of language,” it is forever stalled; Soledad’s repetitious plaiting and unplaiting never results in the completion of the garment. She is frozen in silence. Lala emphasizes Soledad’s figurative muteness by drawing a parallel between her grandmother and Soledad’s father-in-law, Eleuterio, who after suffering from a stroke “turned into a half-mad invalid whose drooling speech everyone ignored except Soledad.”73 Although Eleuterio could not physically speak, he was able to express himself through music—a valuable consolation for his muteness. Soledad, however, had no such comfort: “She understood Eleuterio because she was as mute as he was, perhaps more so because she had no piano.”74 Eleuterio is physically mute and Soledad’s muteness is only figurative, but he is at least capable of self-expression. It is only as a spirit that Soledad is able to voice her painful past and reclaim her subjectivity. Similar to the relationship between María Regla and the narrator, Soledad acts as a witness and her granddaughter becomes an ethnographer who will “unearth residual memories that lie beneath the usually unspoken family narratives.”75 In this role Lala provides a platform for the voiceless, a key function of testimonial literature. Caramelo, like Te di la vida entera, shares many traits, according to Yúdice’s definition, with testimonial literature by emphasizing orality, as previously explored, connecting the singular to the collective experience, and setting history “aright.” Lala changes “the form of her grandmother’s story from a private, solitary narration to one that is public and communal.”76 Cisneros symbolically gestures to this through Soledad’s name, Spanish for solitude. She is a potential allegorical figure, representing any Mexican (woman) who has felt abandoned in love or isolated by a traumatic experience, like Lala, who—once she comes to understand her grandmother—realizes that she is more like Soledad than she had imagined: “I am the Awful Grandmother.”77 Lala’s sense of solitude stems from a continual feeling of unbelonging, especially within her family. As the only girl out of seven children, Lala is a perpetual outsider. Despite being the only daughter,

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she is unable to connect with her mother, further accentuating her feelings of alienation, her sense of soledad. In addition to bridging the divide between the private and communal experience, Soledad’s narrative also sets official history “aright” through her unique testimony. Although her story does not confront a specific historiographic process (like that of María Regla’s), it provides an alternative perspective. That is to say, it fills in the gaps of the official history. Soledad provides a female perspective to the Revolution that erupted in 1910 just after she moves to Mexico City. She was not a camp follower or soldadera who accompanied men into combat. She remained at home, and so her perspective is radically different than what has been immortalized in art and novels. However, her experience of war in the capital city is no less traumatic. She is a witness to many horrors.78 The tragedy of the Revolution is a constant thread throughout the novel, and Soledad’s memory of it illustrates how that tragedy affected the everyday Mexican civilian. Soledad’s testimony adds to the historical understanding of the Mexican Revolution, providing an alternative, but no less valid, perspective. Cisneros also confronts the official historical record by compiling a history of her own within the detailed endnotes to many of the chapters. These endnotes further flesh out Lala’s personal family history but also include historical and cultural information, including translations of common Mexican sayings, explanations of important Mexican historical figures, descriptions of material culture, and notes on popular icons. The novel thus serves a double function as a family history and as an encyclopedic endeavor cataloging telenovelas, the history of the rebozo, the Mexican Revolution, the 1914 U.S. invasion of Tampico, and popular music and dance. Cisneros subverts the absolute status of official history by placing it in the margins, so to speak, of her family history. The endnotes may seem like an academic move on Cisneros’s part, but they are often ironic and playful, illustrating rather a critique of academic and official writing. This is in part apparent in her whimsical descriptions of Latin American pop culture icons, like Libertad Lamarque, “an Argentine singer and film star with a voice like a silver knife with a mother-of-pearl handle.”79 The endnotes, however, can be decidedly political and also function to set official history aright by filling in its gaps. One such example is the endnote that describes the expulsion of Mexicans from their ancestral Texas homes by the Texas Rangers in 1915. This particular endnote is a direct censure of the “bullying” of Rangers that “led to the death of hundreds, some say thousands, of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, who were executed without trial.”80 In the official archive, the deaths of those Mexicans and Mexican Americans are inconsequential—the San Antonio Express News claimed that these deaths were so “commonplace” that there was “little or no interest” in

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them—but Cisneros’s endnote challenges that cruel history.81 By including endnotes that are both playful and subversive Cisneros undermines the official and hegemonic historical discourse. “ACUÉRDATE”: NOSTALGIA AND MUSIC The endnotes also reinforce the novel’s theme of nostalgia. Lala is constantly aware of “[t]hat terrible ache and nostalgia for home when home is gone.”82 She assumes that recovering her family history will lead her to discover a Mexico and a past that always seem just out of her grasp. She documents the many trips that she and her family make across the physical border with seeming ease (despite the psychological and social complications to these border crossings), yet a return to the past is virtually impossible. Lala questions, “[W]here’s the border to the past [. . .]?”83 Her preoccupation with the past affirms Boym’s description of nostalgia as “an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.”84 Like many Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans, Lala exists in perpetual exile—a displaced person on either side of the border. In Mexico she is not Mexican enough and in the United States she is too Mexican. Like her grandmother’s ghost, Lala floats in a liminal space, neither here nor there. Her desire to contextualize her family history within the larger Mexican history and cultural repertoire—evidenced by the extensive endnotes—illustrates a “longing for continuity in a fragmented world.” Alumbaugh asserts that Lala’s narrative, by its encyclopedic nature, rescues forgotten and repressed histories, including those of her father, grandmother, Mexican Americans, and Mexican cultural icons. This is how she creates a sense of continuity despite the world’s apparent brokenness. “Lala’s migratory narrative voice,” Alumbaugh argues, “is rascuache [subversive] precisely because it excavates, reclaims, and preserves the concealed and forgotten memories of her grandmother, the Reyes clan, and los de abajo [the subaltern] in general.”85 The various endnotes (and the descriptions of Mexico and Mexican culture within the body of the text) illustrate a desire to connect the fragments of a Mexican identity—an identity complicated by emigration and historical trauma. One of Cisneros’s most powerful tools to heal the fragmented Mexican community (on either side of the border) is music. As in Te di la vida entera, music reinforces the nostalgic longing for the past and presents another example of the text’s affective force. Like Valdés’s novel, which began each chapter with song lyrics to invoke a specific mood, Caramelo begins with the following lyrics from “María Bonita” by Mexican composer Augustín Lara: “Acuérdate de Acapulco, de aquellas noches, María Bonita (Remember Acapulco, from those distant nights, pretty María).”86 The

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imperative “acuérdate (remember)” establishes the novel’s central themes of memory, the past, and nostalgia. Lala clarifies that the version of “María Bonita” readers ought to have in mind is the one sung by Lara “accompanied by a sweet, but very, very sweet violin.”87 This affective description allows readers to feel (or to imagine a feeling of) nostalgia. Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs posits that Augustín Lara is himself a nostalgic figure, and that by using his lyrics Cisneros magnifies the novel’s nostalgia. She writes, “Lara is the perfect example of impossible nostalgic love, ‘a sufrido,’ [. . .] a suffering musician who expresses in most of his work the metaphysical melancholy of displacement. He had been displaced by his culture, his family, and his lovers.”88 By invoking Lara at the beginning of her novel, Cisneros sets the nostalgic mood for her story. This affective beginning underlines Soledad’s experiences of displacement as an orphan, a victim of her husband’s infidelity, and as a widowed immigrant in the United States. “María Bonita,” which commands the listener to remember Acapulco, sets the stage for the novel’s opening scene, Lala’s childhood memory of a family vacation in Acapulco. Although these lyrics conjure a specific Reyes memory, they simultaneously gesture to a collective Mexican cultural memory and evoke a sense of nostalgia for those familiar with Lara’s work. Readers are thus affected and emotionally primed for the novel as a literary and cultural encounter. Although the unique experiences of the Reyes family are the focal point of the novel, the narrative simultaneously serves to recuperate and heal a Mexican cultural identity. Lala attempts to recover a sense of wholeness through mexicanidad. She exclaims, “[E]ach and every person [is] connected to me, and me connected to them, like the strands of a rebozo.”89 Lala’s creative duty is to finish Soledad’s caramel rebozo and close the loop of her family history to make it whole—to heal the wounds of the past on an intimate and communal level. Lala recognizes this familial and cultural obligation toward the end of the novel when she postulates, “Maybe it’s my job to separate the strands and knot the words together for everyone who can’t say them, and make it all right in the end.”90 By cataloging Mexican history and popular figures, Cisneros creates an imagined community where Mexicans and Mexican Americans can share a space of belonging based on appreciation for cultural icons, artifacts, and mutual longing for a mythic past, whether it be pre-Columbian, colonial, or post-Revolutionary. This imagined community transcends geo-political borders and deterritorializes mexicanidad. Cisneros locates mexicanidad affectively; she makes it possible for readers to “feel” Mexico without having to be in the physical location. In Cisneros’s Mexico the sensory experiences are more intense than in the United States: “Sweets sweeter, colors brighter, the bitter more bitter.”91 She affectively re-creates Mexico for readers by describing its unique cacophony of sounds, smells, and sights. These vibrant descriptions of Mexico create a

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nostalgic longing in readers, but also reflect Lala’s own nostalgia, which is captured in the novel’s closing passage: “[F]or me these things, that song, that time, that place, are all bound together in a country I am homesick for, that doesn’t exist anymore. That never existed. A country I invented. Like all emigrants caught between here and there.”92 Lala’s nostalgia for a Mexico of her own invention recalls Boym’s definition of nostalgia as a “romance with one’s own fantasy.” However, Lala’s invention is not self-indulgent or without purpose. Through storytelling Lala has not only recovered her familial past but has also (re)created a version of Mexico accessible for all. She has completed her grandmother’s unfinished caramel rebozo, looping back to the novel’s title, Caramelo: or Puro Cuento. Soledad and María Regla draw “us affectively,” to return again to Avery Gordon, toward “transformative recognition,” by pulling readers into a “structure of feeling” that exists outside of a rigid temporal space. These spirits conjure an affective bridge to the past via orality (pointing toward the Latin American genre of testimonial literature), nostalgia, and music. The ghosts enable us to access an affective locality that is not physically or temporally circumscribed; rather, it is defined by a cyclical, matriarchal concept of time, rejecting a linear, progressive model of history. Te di la vida entera and Caramelo continually loop back to the past, not to be trapped in the past like Fuentes’s Aura, but to explore its depth more fully. The result is a richer, more complex version of history with the potential for relational healing. This “transformative recognition,” is a return, a re-knowing, engendered by a matriarchal process to oppose the “cold knowledge” of a patriarchal historical discourse. NOTES 1. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8. 2. Zoé Valdés, Te di la vida entera (Madrid: Planeta, 1996), 360. 3. Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 14, no. 54 (1966): 85. 4. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xiii. 5. Boym, Nostalgia, xiv. 6. Boym, Nostalgia, 54. 7. Boym, Nostalgia, 41. 8. Boym, Nostalgia, xviii. 9. Valdés, Te di, 166. 10. Valdés, Te di, 48. 11. Valdés, Te di, 13. 12. Valdés, Te di, 13. 13. Solimar Otero, “Spirit Possession, Havana, and the Night: Listening and Ritual in Cuban Fiction,” Western Folklore 66, no. 1/2 (2007): 46.

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14. Otero, “Spirit Possession,” 50–51. 15. Otero, “Spirit Possession,” 50. 16. George Yúdice, “Testimonio and Postmodernism,” Latin American Perspectives 18, no. 3 (1991): 17. 17. Yúdice, “Testimonio,” 17. 18. Linda Marie Brooks, “Testimonio’s Poetics of Performance,” Comparative Literature Studies 42, no. 2 (2005): 182. 19. Yúdice, “Testimonio,” 15. 20. Yúdice, “Testimonio,” 15. 21. Louis A. Pérez Jr., The Structure of Cuban History: Meanings and Purpose of the Past (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 238. 22. Pérez, Structure, 239. 23. Pérez, Structure, 239. 24. Pérez, Structure, 239. 25. Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 293. 26. Paul B. Miller, “The Prison-House of Allegory: Reflection on the Cultural Production of the Cuban ‘Special Period,’” INTI 59/60 (2004): 195. 27. Esther Whitfield, Cuban Currency: The Dollar and “Special Period” Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008): 37. 28. Valdés, Te di, 178. 29. Valdés, Te di, 230. 30. Otero, “Spirit Possession,” 47. 31. Valdés, Te di, 166. 32. Boym, Nostalgia, 50. 33. Miller, “Prison-House,” 198. 34. Valdés, Te di, 174 (emphasis added). 35. Miller, “Prison-House,” 199. 36. José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 152. 37. Valdés, Te di, 174. 38. Valdés, Te di, 174. 39. Quiroga, Tropics, 151. 40. Boym, Nostalgia, xv. 41. Boym, Nostalgia, xv. 42. Boym, Nostalgia, 3. 43. Valdés, Te di, 214. 44. Valdés, Te di, 214. 45. Valdés, Te di, 118. 46. Valdés, Te di, 118. 47. Valdés, Te di, 236. 48. Valdés, Te di, 235. 49. Valdés, Te di, 346. 50. Valdés, Te di, 352. 51. Valdés, Te di, 360.

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52. Valdés, Te di, 361. 53. Elizabeth Carmichael and Chloë Sayer, The Skeleton at the Feast: The Day of the Dead in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 14. 54. Ruth Behar, “Talking in Our Pajamas: A Conversation with Sandra Cisneros on Finding Your Voice, Fear of Highways, Tacos, Travel, and the Need for Peace in the World,” Michigan Quarterly Review 47, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 420. 55. Stanley Brandes, Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 7. 56. Brandes, Skulls, 8. 57. Carmichael and Sayer, Skeleton, 24. 58. Carmichael and Sayer, Skeleton, 18. 59. Heather Alumbaugh, “Narrative Coyotes: Migration and Narrative Voice in Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo,” Melus 35, no. 1 (2010): 64. 60. Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo: or Puro Cuento (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 406. 61. Cisneros, Caramelo, 407. 62. Cisneros, Caramelo, 91. 63. Cisneros, Caramelo, 92. 64. Cisneros, Caramelo, 93. 65. Cisneros, Caramelo, 96. 66. Cisneros, Caramelo, 93. 67. Cisneros, Caramelo, 93. 68. Cisneros, Caramelo, 94. 69. Cisneros, Caramelo, 92, 95. 70. Taylor, Archive, xvi. 71. Cisneros, Caramelo, 254. 72. Cisneros, Caramelo, 151. 73. Cisneros, Caramelo, 150–151. 74. Cisneros, Caramelo, 151. 75. Maya Socolovsky, Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature: Explorations of Place and Belonging (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 90. 76. Alumbaugh, “Narrative Coyotes,” 62. 77. Cisneros, Caramelo, 424. 78. Cisneros, Caramelo, 135. 79. Cisneros, Caramelo, 335. 80. Cisneros, Caramelo, 142. 81. Cisneros, Caramelo, 142. 82. Cisneros, Caramelo, 380. 83. Cisneros, Caramelo, 380. 84. Boym, Nostalgia, xiv. 85. Alumbaugh, “Narrative Coyotes,” 63. 86. Cisneros, Caramelo, 3. 87. Cisneros, Caramelo, 3.

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88. Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, “Sandra Cisneros and Her Trade of the Free Word,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 60, no. 2 (2006): 26. 89. Cisneros, Caramelo, 389. 90. Cisneros, Caramelo, 428. 91. Cisneros, Caramelo, 17. 92. Cisneros, Caramelo, 434 (emphasis added).

Chapter Four

Haunting, History, and Imagination in Victoire

Maryse Condé’s Victoire, les saveurs et les mots (2006), like Cisneros’s Caramelo, is dedicated to recovering a grandmother’s legacy. In this fictive recuperative process Condé (both author and narrator) explores her own creative identity as a writer and finds herself in a position similar to Lala’s in Caramelo, walking the thin line between fact and fiction in order to validate the seemingly inconsequential existence of her maternal grandmother, Victoire Élodie Quidal. Like Lala, her grandmother’s ghost inspires Condé’s narrator to write, but unlike Lala, she is at a disadvantage having never met her grandmother and knowing virtually nothing about her. Whereas Lala is haunted by Soledad’s incessant and demanding voice, Condé’s narrator is haunted by her grandmother’s silence. The novel’s opening line emphasizes Victoire’s haunting absence in Condé’s life: “Elle est morte bien avant ma naissance (She died long before my birth).”1 This sets the tone and objective of the novel, establishing Condé’s longing to know her shadowy ancestor and the responsibility she feels as a granddaughter and author to recover her from obscurity. Victoire is not Condé’s first work inspired by a female spirit. In the epigraph to her 1986 novel Moi, Tituba Sorcière . . . Noire de Salem, Condé claims to have conversed with the spirit of Tituba Indian, a historical figure who has been largely forgotten by the archive. This visitation inspires Condé to re-create Tituba’s reality and imagine her unique story via fiction. Both Tituba and Victoire confront the issues faced by Caribbean subjects, especially women, who have been effaced from the dominant historical discourse. Despite this key similarity, there are intriguing differences that highlight Condé’s struggle to rewrite the history of an ancestor in Victoire. Like Lala, Condé’s narrator is handicapped by a lack of information and so must also rely on imagination to complete her project. 75

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Victoire’s ghost represents more than the absence of her grandmother; her spirit’s uncanny presence points to the absence of historical memory or what Nick Nesbitt calls “Antillean Amnesia.”2 Victoire is more than a personal family project. It is an assertion of Caribbean identity and culture in the face of historical obliteration, reminding us of Glissant’s claim that creativity is the only meaningful response to historical rupture. Through revising (and often inventing) family history, Condé exorcises the traumas of the past and re-creates Victoire’s story despite the lack of historical fact, just as she did for Tituba twenty years earlier. In this chapter, I will contextualize Condé’s objectives in Victoire by first examining the following motifs in Tituba: historical myopia; spirits, time, and knowledge; and escaping the abyss of history. This preliminary study of Tituba will help readers appreciate Condé’s artistic choices in Victoire, comparing Condé’s method of re-creating a historical figure to the recovery of her own grandmother who seemingly has no historical significance. BLACK WITCH OF SALEM Tituba Indian, a slave owned by the Puritan minister Samuel Parris, was one of the first to be accused in the infamous 1692 Salem Witch Trials. Consequently, Tituba has been classified as a historical novel. However, Condé rejects this designation, asserting that though Tituba is a historical figure, the Tituba of Condé’s novel is her own invention: “Tituba is just the opposite of a historical novel. I was not interested at all in what her real life could have been. [. . .] I really invented Tituba. I gave her a childhood, an adolescence, an old age.”3 Condé’s Tituba was conceived on a slave ship, born in Barbados, taken to New England by Parris, and then returned to her island after surviving the Salem Witch Trials. No such detailed history exists about the real-life Tituba. Though at the center of one of the most notorious events in early colonial America, Tituba was ultimately consigned to the margins of History. Primary sources give little information about her; she was a slave from the West Indies who practiced “hoodoo.”4 Her ransom from prison is the last document to name her before she disappears from the historical record.5 With limited historical sources, including Tituba’s court deposition from the Salem Witch Trials, Condé attempts to fill in the gaps of history, working with “imagined memories of events and the information available through official history.”6 Condé’s novel is an invention, yet it is a powerful statement about fiction’s ability to expand historical consciousness, guiding readers to consider alternative historical realities that have been repressed. Condé invites Tituba to emerge from the fog of history, allowing for alternative possibilities to the exclusionary, monological historical archive.



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MYOPIC HISTORY Condé resists the totalitarian urge of official history by claiming a unique subjectivity for Tituba. On a formal level, she accomplishes this by way of first-person narration. Condé imagines and presents Tituba’s voice, which is skillfully nuanced in that it is at once incredibly potent and vulnerable. She does not sound like a caricature or a stereotype in how she expresses herself, though other authors portray her as such. Moreover, her individual identity is emphasized in the novel’s title, which begins with the first-person pronoun moi, a disjunctive pronoun, which is especially emphatic, further reinforcing Tituba’s claim to autonomy and subjectivity that was not acknowledged during her lifetime or in the historical record. Condé’s Tituba was not born into slavery. She chooses the life of a slave over her isolated, yet autonomous, existence in the woods to marry John Indian, a half Arawak, half Nago slave. Tituba relinquishes her freedom, gaining a husband-master and a white mistress, Susanna Endicott, who introduces Tituba to the dehumanization of slavery and racism: “Je n’étais plus que ce qu’elle voulait que je sois. Une grande bringue à la peau d’une couleur repoussante (I was only what she wanted me to be. A beanpole with a repulsive skin color).”7 Tituba learns the destructive power of words when Susanna and her friends shape Tituba’s reality with their verbal abuse: “Elles me rayaient de la carte des humains. J’étais un non-être. Un invisible. Plus invisible que les invisibles, car eux au moins détiennent un pouvoir que chacun redoute. (They were striking me from the human map. I was a non-being. An invisible. More invisible than the invisibles [spirits], for at least they have power that everyone fears.)”8 Tituba loses herself to the women’s twisted view of her: “Tituba devenait laide, grossière, inférieure parce qu’elles en avaient décidé ainsi (Tituba became ugly, crude, inferior because they had decided her to be so).”9 Speaking about herself in the third person signals Tituba’s dissociation and self-abandonment sparked by their abuse. Like many conquered and colonized subjects, Tituba begins to see herself through the eyes of her abusers. Tituba became ugly (“laide”), crude (“grossière”), and inferior (“inférieure”). She was not born that way; the women had transformed her through their words. The official historical narrative likewise denies Tituba’s subjectivity. Court documents acknowledge her existence but ignore her humanity and individuality. Fictional works about the Salem Witch Trials, like Henry Peterson’s Dulcibel, a Tale of Old Salem (1891) or Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), likewise include Tituba while simultaneously making her a non-being, an invisible. In Peterson’s Dulcibel the narrator and characters speak about Tituba with unchecked bias and racism. After the afflicted

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children accuse Tituba of tormenting them, the narrator, eager to accept Tituba’s guilt, exclaims, “[W]ho else? [. . .] No doubt Tituba was guilty, if any one was.”10 The black woman from Barbados makes the perfect villain. In the single scene that Tituba speaks, she does so in broken English, further emphasizing her alterity: “Of course I’ve seen the debbil. The debbil came an’ said, ‘Serb me, Tituba.’ But I would not hurt the child’en.”11 Her response in form and content reaffirms her otherness and her guilt, if not guilty of hurting the children, then guilty of conversing with the Devil. Miller’s The Crucible endows Tituba with a bit more individuality, but her representation is still problematic. Tituba’s “slave sense” warns her that “as always, trouble in this house eventually lands on her back.”12 While he acknowledges the abusive and inhumane treatment of black slaves, Miller still denies Tituba her full humanity. Noting her “slave sense,” makes her more animal than human—like a horse who can sense danger or imminent bad weather. Unlike Peterson’s text, however, in which Tituba barely speaks for herself, in Miller’s play she has a more vocal role, though she also speaks in broken English. Tituba’s pidgin in both Peterson’s and Miller’s works may be accurate based on the dialect of a seventeenth-century slave from the Caribbean, yet it heightens her otherness. Condé’s Tituba, on the other hand, speaks with intelligent self-awareness. Unlike Peterson’s and Miller’s works, Condé’s novel fleshes out the missing pieces of Tituba’s history; New England is only a small part of the narrative. Condé imagines Tituba’s story to its completion, allowing her to transcend her marginal designation in the history of the Salem Witch Trials. She returns to Barbados after the trials and becomes involved in a failed slave revolt and is hanged, but death is only the beginning of her story: “Mon histoire véritable commence où celle-là finit et n’aura pas de fin.”13 Her real (“véritable”) story begins where the novel ends and will have no end (“et n’aura pas de fin”). As a spirit she continues to heal, comfort, and inspire her people to resist slavery and oppression: “Pas une révolte que je n’aie fait naître. Pas une insurrection. Pas une désobéissance (There is no revolt to which I have not given birth. Not one insurrection. Not one disobedience).”14 Condé’s Tituba is an agent who speaks for herself and transcends a limited identity as a victim of racism, slavery, and Puritan fanaticism. Condé emphasizes Tituba’s agency by reversing the power dynamics between herself as author and Tituba as character. According to Lillian Manzor-Coats, Condé destabilizes her own authorial position in order to establish the authority of Tituba’s voice.15 Elisabeth Mudimbé-Boyi makes a similar claim, explaining that Condé “becomes the simple listener of a narrating subject telling her own life story. The book is thus a fictional ‘autobiography’ from which the writer has completely disappeared, leaving Tituba to take preeminence and become simultaneously both the narrator



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and the narrated.”16 Condé’s “disappearance” from the text reinforces the weight of Tituba’s word. The novel’s epigraph establishes Tituba’s primacy and Condé’s secondary role as listener: “Tituba et moi, avons vécu en étroite intimité pendant un an. C’est au cours de nos interminables conversations qu’elle m’a dit ces choses qu’elle n’avait confiées á personne (Tituba and I, we have lived in close intimacy over the course of a year. It was during our endless conversations that she told me things which she had confided in no one else).” Epigraphs will often serve to assert the legitimacy of a text by referring “to a well-known figure or authority;” however, Condé’s epigraph “does not refer to a well-known author but rather to Tituba herself, thus granting her the status of an authority.”17 This epigraph also establishes a supernatural encounter between Condé and Tituba’s ghost, destabilizing the historical status quo and legitimizing the novel as an alternative to history. Tituba narrates the novel as a spirit, making Condé a spiritual medium. Like Ella, the Valdés narrator, and Lala, she is in the position of an ethnographer, privileged to be the audience of a valuable testimony that Tituba has not shared with anyone else (“choses qu’elle n’avait confiées á personne”). Condé writes of endless conversations (“interminables conversations”), yet the narrative does not include dialogue between Condé and Tituba. In this way the novel is more like a witness statement to counter the official court deposition, which Condé inserts in the narrative without introduction or explanation, creating, as many scholars have noted, a disjointed effect. Its placement is chronologically accurate within the narrative, but it disrupts the style and flow of Tituba’s first-person account and exceeds “the limits of the reader’s suspended disbelief.”18 Despite this disruption, it is a reminder of History’s limits. The deposition, as Caroline Rody points out, lacks “emotional authenticity” and “ironically, strikes a false, alien note in the narrative,” leading readers to value the emotional authenticity of Condé’s fictional account.19 The contrast between Tituba’s rich narration and the official court deposition highlights the need for a “recontextualization of History’s reading of her life.”20 Condé recontextualizes Tituba’s story in her novel with the invention of Tituba’s mother, Abena, and Tituba’s violent conception. As the novel’s first word, Abena’s name acts like an invocation, conjuring the image of a forgotten, nameless woman: “Abena, ma mère, un marin anglais la viola sur le pont du Christ the King, un jour de 16** alors que le navire faisait voile vers la Barbade. C’est de cette agression que je suis née (Abena, my mother, was raped by an English sailor on the deck of Christ the King, one day in 16** while the ship was sailing towards Barbados. From this aggression I was born).”21 Condé invents a time and place for Tituba’s conception on a ship whose religious name illustrates the depth of hypocrisy of the Atlantic slave trade, but does not include a specific date, leaving the year of Tituba’s

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conception open to various possibilities. Jennifer R. Thomas argues that the asterisks “function like place holders in math.”22 She elaborates, “When doing multiplication, the placement of zeros in certain positions helps maintain an order while working to find the answer. Her asterisks are by no means zeros in the sense of total absence; they represent instead the range of temporal possibility.”23 To take this idea further, the asterisks are, like ghosts, a presence that marks an absence that ought to be explored and understood. Although the asterisks denote uncertainty, they simultaneously point to a universal reality experienced by countless female slaves before, during, and after “16**.” The novel’s abrupt and violent beginning captures the bitter reality for female slaves specifically: to be victims and products of rape. Although this aspect of Tituba’s history is an “invention,” it points to a pervasive truth that has haunted Condé herself. In the essay “The Voyager In, the Voyager Out,” Condé narrates a burning memory (“le souvenir brûlant”), an impossible memory.24 She is plagued by a memory of the Middle Passage, a voyage “que je n’ai pas choisi de faire et que j’effectuai bien avant de naître (that I never chose to make and that I made long before I was born).”25 Like Beloved discussed in chapter one, Condé taps into the collective memory of her ancestors. In this essay, she explores the uncanny nature of trauma, which continues to haunt the present, by recounting her memory of being thrown into a ship (“on me jeta à fond de cale d’un navire”), bathed in her own urine and excrement (“je baignais dans mon urine et dans mes excréments”) before arriving in the New World.26 Condé’s impossible memory represents the experience of the countless African women whose stories and names we do not know. Likewise, Tituba also draws attention to the universal suffering of female African slaves, as well as their female descendants. By giving Tituba a specific, although invented, beginning, Condé reveals the horrific experiences of innumerable slave women, reminding us of Mignolo’s enactive knowledge and Ella’s assertion in Louisiana that even if Mammy’s stories did not happen to her personally, “it happened to someone’s granny, someone’s mother. Someone. Some baby was hurt.”27 Condé further stresses the power of enactive knowledge through spirits who transcend Hegelian historical rationalism. SPIRITS, TIME, AND KNOWLEDGE Although only hinted at in Victoire, the supernatural is at the core of Tituba. Not only is the text inspired by conversations between Condé and Tituba’s ghost, and narrated by her spirit, but the novel is full of spectral characters. Tituba regularly turns to the spirits of her mother; her adoptive father, Yao; and her mentor, Man Yaya, who plays the role of a foster parent for Tituba



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after her parents die. Before Man Yaya’s own death, she initiates Tituba into a higher sphere of knowledge: “Man Yaya m’initia à une connaissance plus haute.”28 Just as Mammy and Lowly introduce Ella to a different kind of knowing in Louisiana, Man Yaya instructs Tituba on the medicinal use of herbs and plants and teaches her to commune with the dead, who “ne meurent que s’ils meurent dans nos cœurs. Ils vivent si nous les chérissons, si nous honorons leur mémoire (do not die unless they die in our hearts. They live if we cherish them, if we honor their memory).”29 The spirits guide and comfort Tituba. Abena’s spirit, for example, warns that if she chooses to marry John Indian, Tituba will be taken away from Barbados (“Voila que tu vas être entraînée de l’autre côté de l’eau”).30 Tituba does not listen, and her mother’s warning becomes a reality. Tituba is spirited to the other side of the “water” where she does not have easy access to the spirits of her ancestors. Although her connection to the spirits is weak in New England, they are able to give Tituba some comfort, which sharply contrasts the Puritans’ dark obsession with witchcraft and the Devil. Her mother’s spirit gives her emotional support through her warmth (“chaleur”) and tenderness (“la tendresse”), and Man Yaya’s gives her hope for the future with a promise that nothing would destroy her (“rien ne parviendrait à me détruire”).31 She will survive the Salem Witch Trials. As spirits, Abena and Man Yaya have prophetic vision because they exist “outside of time.”32 For these spirits the past, present, and future collapse, reminding us of the supernatural figures that disrupt a linear temporality analyzed in previous chapters. It is not until Tituba’s own death that she experiences this knowledge for herself: “Je comprends le passé. Je lis le présent. Je connais l’avenir (I understand the past. I read the present. I know the future).”33 Tituba learns that total, complete knowledge is only found in the afterlife (“seule la mort apporte la connaissance suprême [only death brings supreme knowledge]”) outside of material and temporal reality. And it is cause for joy: “à présent je suis heureuse.”34 RESCUED FROM THE ABYSS OF HISTORY Only as a spirit does Tituba realize her true power and impact, which, when alive, she doubted. In Salem she was plagued by “un sentiment violent, douloureux, insupportable (a violent, painful, insupportable feeling)” that she “disparaissais complètement (would disappear completely)” from History.35 She assumes that her name would be a “comparse sans intérêt (side note without interest)” within the court records.36 This condemnation to an historical abyss is a fate more cruel than death (“Plus cruelle que la mort”).37 She laments the “future injustice” of “aucune biographie

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attentionnée et inspirée recréant ma vie (not one attentive or inspired biography to recreate my life).”38 She realizes that History favors men, a reality that is reinforced after she returns to Barbados and is again caught up in turbulent events when she joins the leader of a slave revolt, Christopher. He enlists Tituba to cast spells on the white men’s bullets despite her insistence that she is not a “witch.” Christopher does not recognize Tituba as an individual. He only views her as a resource to exploit; her worth is measured by what she can contribute to the common cause. As Kaiama Glover argues, the dynamic between Christopher and Tituba illustrates the stereotypical representation of women in Caribbean fiction. It seems as if Tituba is fated to fall into the usual category of “auxiliary” and muse, a “romantic partner to a politically awakened man.”39 Condé’s Tituba, however, resists this marginalization. She expects to have a place in her people’s history. When Christopher boasts that the islanders already sing songs about him, ensuring his immortality, Tituba asks him, “Et moi, y a-t-il un chant pour moi? Un chant pour Tituba? (And me, is there a song for me? A song for Tituba?).”40 He responds: “Non, il n’y en a pas (No, there is not),” reinforcing the existential dread she faced in Salem.41 However, after death she learns that her people did compose songs about her. She is not erased from their history. She lives on through the oral tradition of song, reminding us of Brodber’s Louisiana and orality’s potential to undermine the exclusionary, monologic official narrative. Tituba privileges this rich oral tradition above the literary tradition of the West and its prejudiced impulses: “Je n’appartiens pas à la civilisation du Livre et de la Haine (I do not belong to the civilization of the Book [Bible] and Hatred).”42 In many ways, Tituba is a critique of the archive. According to Tituba, there is no need for records: “sans nul besoin de graphies.”43 Tituba’s song is a powerful contrast to the court deposition that lacks emotional authenticity and the historical records that gloss over Tituba’s story. It is a cultural link between Tituba’s spirit, her people, and their African and indigenous roots and becomes a vital part of Barbadian culture. Because of her song her memory will survive in the people’s hearts and minds (“Dans leurs cœurs et dans leurs têtes.”).44 Tituba declares: “Elle existe, la chanson de Tituba! Je l’entends d’un bout à l’autre de l’île [. . .]. A tout instant, je l’entends (The song of Tituba exists! I hear it from one end of the island to the other [. . .]. At every instant I hear it).”45 Tituba’s rhetoric covers space (“d’un bout à l’autre de l’île”) and time (“A tout instant”), affirming—against all the odds—the triumph of her story. It is tempting to see Tituba as preparation for Condé to serve as a medium for her grandmother Victoire, whose personal history was also defined by lack. Both Tituba and Victoire assert the value of a black Caribbean woman’s individual story. However, unlike Tituba, whose role in the notorious Salem Witch Trials makes her a “historical figure,” Condé’s grandmother, played



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no part in a “significant” historical event. Yet, Condé’s Victoire, by its very existence, asserts that Victoire Élodie Quidal is no less worthy of History. In an interview with Ann Scarboro, Condé explains her desire to write about Tituba, who was “unjustly treated by history,” leading Condé to feel “the need to give her a reality that was denied to her because of her color and her gender.”46 Condé’s desire to recover Tituba’s reality could easily be applied to Victoire, whose reality was also denied to her because of her color, her gender, and socio-economic status. Though there are many key elements from Tituba that Condé will revisit in Victoire, including a female spirit to inspire the narrator-author, there are important differences that demand closer attention. In the following sections I will interrogate the role of silence (a marked departure from the orality in Tituba), imagination, and women’s creativity (in both food and writing) in Condé’s (auto)biographical novel. VICTOIRE: FLAVORS AND WORDS Victoire is a personal and collective triumph as Condé gives a voice to her silenced, marginalized grandmother, while also gesturing to the countless number of (Caribbean) women who have been forgotten or erased from History. In Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer, Contes vrais de mon enfance [Tales from the Heart: True Stories from My Childhood] (1999), a collection of “true” stories from the author’s childhood published seven years before Victoire, Condé paints a vivid portrait of her maternal grandmother who died before the author was born. She was “fragilisée par une vie d’exclusion et de tête baissée (weakened by a life of exclusion and subservience).”47 She did not own anything (“n’avait jamais rien eu à elle”), not even a grave (“Même pas une tombe”).48 Even in death, Victoire’s individuality was not recognized; she remained under the shadow of her employers: “Elle dormait son sommeil d’éternité dans le caveau de ses derniers employeurs (She slept the sleep of eternity in the vault of her last employers).”49 These descriptions align with Condé’s fictive account in many ways save for one key difference. In Le Cœur, Condé does not use her grandmother’s first-given name, Victoire, but rather her second name, Élodie, implicitly the name by which Condé’s grandmother was known. In Victoire, however, Condé only refers to her grandmother by her first name, French for “victory,” a name that filled Condé’s narrator with “admiration.”50 The creative choice to refer to her grandmother by her first name in Victoire may seem like an insignificant detail, but it is at the heart of Condé’s objective to reclaim her grandmother’s legacy, to elevate her importance in the face of historical obscurity. This is a herculean task, however, considering the lack of information about her grandmother’s life

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and her parents’ aversion to discussing family history. At the outset of her narrative, Condé clarifies that her mother, Jeanne, did not often talk about Victoire, further consigning Condé’s grandmother to an “imaginary” sphere outside of historical reality. When as a child she attempted to question Jeanne about the unknown grandmother, Jeanne gave few details and terminated the conversation before her daughter could piece together Victoire’s life story. This particular conversation was never resumed. However, it instilled in the young Condé an acute need to uncover her grandmother’s past.51 A photograph is the only evidence of her grandmother’s existence and although there is some comfort in the material tangibility of this single photograph, it does not provide much information. Rather, it further underscores Victoire’s obscurity (“Son image est malaise, difficile à cerner [Her image is unsettling, difficult to discern].”) and reinforces Victoire’s paradoxical haunting absence in Condé’s childhood.52 Victoire’s uncanny photograph troubles her grandchildren’s perception of her. Condé’s narrator asserts, “sa vue me causait un certain malaise (the sight of her made me feel uneasy).”53 She had a strange color (“l’étrange couleur”), which the narrator describes as a “blancheur australienne (Australian whiteness).”54 For Condé and her siblings Victoire was a ghost—an imaginary spirit that haunted their childhood: “Pour nous tous, cette grand-mère à l’étrange couleur, fut à moitié imaginaire. Un esprit. Un fantôme (For all of us, this grandmother with a strange color, was half imaginary. A spirit. A phantom).”55 As a child, Condé cannot relate to a grandmother who is lost to the past, “Couché dans la nuit du temps longtemps (Sleeping in a night of time long ago).”56 Condé’s imaginative task as an author is to re-create a more complete image of her grandmother’s story so that she becomes more than a mere “photo énigmatique posée sur le dessus d’un meuble (enigmatic photo placed on top of a piece of furniture).”57 Victoire continues to haunt Condé as an adult, frequently appearing during the night in the corner of her granddaughter’s bedroom: “Parfois, je me réveillais la nuit et la voyais assise dans un coin de la chambre, semblable à un reproche (Sometimes, I would wake up in the night and see her sitting in a corner of the room, like a reproach).”58 Her grandmother’s ghost silently chides Condé for traveling the world in search of herself instead of fulfilling her childhood resolution to research Victoire’s life. Condé has been searching for herself in all the wrong places; she must come back, so to speak, to her island and return to the project of discovering her grandmother’s story—a task she had been putting off for years. This voyage intérieur is the only worthwhile journey, “l’unique voyage qui compte (the only journey that counts).”59 Although Condé never knew her grandmother, the idea of Victoire and her nighttime visitations pull Condé back to her island and back to her Guadeloupean identity. Victoire’s ghost is a silent apparition (in contrast to those vocal spirits in Louisiana, Te di la vida entera, Caramelo, and Tituba),



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yet her haunting presence is just as effective in motivating Condé to mediate her history and reclaim her unique story. The recuperation of her grandmother’s history is not only in service to Victoire’s memory, but also in service to Condé’s personal growth Freedom, according to Condé, is to “know one’s past, to dominate it, to know it in its reality without making of it an object of backwards-looking veneration.”60 Just as the burden of the past kept Beloved’s Sethe in figurative bondage, Condé’s lack of knowledge of the past keeps her from being truly “free.” The only solution available to her is fiction. Condé plays with (and within) the gaps and empty spaces to confront History and make sense of the past. Condé makes the elusive and ethereal concrete, ultimately establishing a link between herself and her lost grandmother. In this procces she claims her own creative authority as a writer. HAUNTING SILENCE Whereas Tituba’s spirit invokes the oral tradition of the Caribbean, Victoire’s ghost is strikingly silent. Her silence stresses the need for Condé to unearth Victoire’s story, figuratively recovering her grandmother’s voice, a voice that she never learned to use effectively when alive. Victoire could not read or write, nor could she speak “proper” French, only Creole, further accentuating her inferiority, even in the eyes of her daughter, Jeanne: “À quoi servait cette grand-mère créolophone et illettrée (What was the use of this Creole speaking and illiterate grandmother)?”61 Victoire rarely speaks in the novel, like the protagonist of Condé’s first novel Hérémakhonon whose silence Condé explains was intended to stress her alienation: “Afin de traduire son aliénation et sa confusion intérieure, j’avais éliminé toute énonciation verbale de sa part (In order to express her alienation and internal confusion, I had eliminated any verbal utterance on her part).”62 Similarly, Victoire’s silence in Condé’s 2006 novel underscores the silence that will surround her legacy after her death and, by extension, reflects the way that many Caribbean family histories have been repressed. This legacy of silence traces back to the Atlantic slave trade, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and plantation life. As Glissant explains in Poétique de la Relation [Poetics of Relation] the system of plantation slavery suppressed the slaves’ oral culture and by extension their history, deconstructing their sense of community.63 This cultural repression created a sense of amnesia for the Caribbean descendants of African slaves. It is impossible to understand one’s current situation when ignorant of the past. As Patrick Chamoiseau writes in Chronique des sept misères [Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows] (1986), it is difficult to locate the source of suffering when each man is a “scab on a wound”

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that is their memory: “Dans cette vie où chaque homme est la croûte d’une blessure, comme il est difficile de reconnaître les sèves du désarroi (In this life where each man is the scab on a wound, how hard it is to recognize the secret sources of sorrow).”64 Maeve McCusker’s interpretation of “les sèves” (literally “sap”) as “vital source” reinforces how, although it may be painful to remember the past, it is necessary.65 Condé’s ignorance of her family history is a kind of wound she seeks to heal. Re-creating her family history, confronting her silenced past, is a way to cure her own amnesia. As a theme, silence also sets Victoire apart from the novels by Brodber, Valdés, and Cisneros which invoke oral traditions to subvert hegemonic dominant historical discourse. Orality is also an important element in Tituba. Mudimbé-Boyi, citing the novel as an oral performance, explains that Condé’s role as the listener is set up by careful “textual strategies”: “The presence of the author of the book as an interlocutor is maintained not by a dialogic inclusive ‘you’ within the narrative, but rather by the oral mode involved in the narration.”66 This oral mode is sustained by “rhetorical questions” posed by Tituba that acknowledge “the writer’s presence on the scene.”67 Thus, Mudimbé-Boyi concludes, “The textual strategies used by Condé in shaping the narrative as an oral performance insert Tituba into the traditional cultural context of orality.”68 Although Condé emphasizes an oral tradition in Tituba, she does the opposite in Victoire. Orality’s absence in Victoire is just as worthy of exploration as its presence in Louisiana, Te di la vida entera, and Caramelo. Victoire experiences terrible losses throughout her life yet she never speaks about these events. Her mother died in childbirth and she was adopted by her grandmother who treated her well; however, when this grandmother died, Victoire lost the one connection that really mattered to her and became selectively mute, “murée dans le silence (walled within silence).”69 Silence is her response to loss and tragedy, which will become her “manière habituelle (custom).”70 Even her death is described in terms of silence: “Victoire glissa sans doute dans l’au-delà sans mot dire, sans rien révéler d’elle-même, comme elle avait vécu sa vie (Victoire without a doubt slipped into the afterlife without saying a word, without revealing anything about herself, as she had lived her life).”71 Although she is the title character, Victoire often seems like a secondary one, constantly in the background, already a ghost. Her selective muteness and dissociative behavior (she would often stare vacantly into space) alienates Victoire from her community. To the villagers, she is inhuman, a supernatural figure: “Elle était un mort vivant, un zombie (She was one of the living dead, a zombie).”72 By linking her grandmother with the zombie, a key figure in the Caribbean gothic genre, Condé not only highlights her grandmother’s difference but also connects her to the island’s colonial past. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert explains that the zombie reflects the



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traumatic history of colonization and slavery.73 It represents the dehumanization of Caribbean slaves who were stripped of their agency and voice, recalling “the disassociation of man from his will, his reduction to a beast of burden at the will of a master.”74 Condé’s allusion to zombification implicitly connects her grandmother to slavery. Although Victoire was born after the abolition of slavery, her work as a house servant and her silence (which Condé equates to being internally shackled [“entravée intérieurement”]) marks her as a kind of slave.75 As discussed in my analysis of Morrison’s Beloved in chapter one, “abolition is not emancipation.”76 Victoire is not technically a slave, but she is not necessarily “free.” Whereas Condé asserts Tituba’s autonomy and subjective voice, she chooses not to do so for her own grandmother. In fact, she uses strategies opposite to those she implements in Tituba, whose first-person narration emphasizes Tituba’s subjectivity and individuality (Condé the author disappears from the text). Victoire’s third-person narration, however, consistently reminds readers of Condé’s authorial presence. Whereas Condé claims to have had endless conversations with Tituba’s spirit over the period of a year, her grandmother’s ghost never speaks to her. It is her look that directs Condé to write her story—it is a look of reproach (“reproche”), and Condé translates that look into speech: “semblait-elle me dire (she seemed to tell me).”77 Furthermore, Victoire lacks Tituba’s self-awareness. Tituba is hyperconscious of the historical record and her effacement from it, whereas Victoire cannot worry about her place in history because she does not have a firm place in the present. These substantial differences between Tituba and Victoire suggest Condé’s personal struggle with history and the legacies of colonialism and slavery. Throughout the novel, Condé’s narrator frequently laments the lack of oral history within her familial legacy. As Condé explains in Le Cœur, her mother avoided discussing uncomfortable subjects with her: “ma mère ne parlait jamais de rien (my mother never told me anything).”78 In the opening chapter of Victoire, Condé contemplates how different her life (and sense of self) would have been “si j’avais sauté sur les genoux d’une grand-mère replète et rieuse (if I had been bounced on the knee of a plump and joyful grandmother.)”79 She imagines an alternate version of her maternal grandmother as a storyteller, “me soufflant à l’oreille un mythe doucereux du passé (whispering in my ear a sweet myth of the past),” and considers how a matrilineal succession of oral culture would have positively affected her Guadeloupean identity and development as an author.80 But Condé never knew her grandmother and Victoire was not a storyteller. Condé will need to be the storyteller that her grandmother was not. It is this creative act that will redeem her grandmother from the abyss of history.

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IMAGINATION Condé’s project is a poetics of history; it is not contingent on reason or the Western ideal of historical “truth.” By blending fiction with fact, Condé, like Brodber, Valdés, and Cisneros, writes against the phallogocentrism that depends on logic, linearity, and absolute History. Like the novels discussed in previous chapters, the tension between truth and fiction is palpable, and like Cisneros specifically, Condé plays with this tension, as apparent in the full title of her novel: Victoire, les saveurs et les mots: récit. Although it presents a family history and is to a certain extent (auto)biographical in its scope, imbedded within its title is a key term that troubles the boundary between fiction and truth, story and history: récit. The French term for “story” illustrates the creative license Condé takes in chronicling her family history. In Jenny Odintz’s words, the inclusion of récit “insists on the acknowledgement of the role of fiction and imagination in the text.”81 In the novel’s dedication Condé calls the work a “reconstitution,” a term that alludes to her creative process and its inevitable limitations: “je ne garantis certainement pas l’impartialité, ni même l’exactitude (I certainly cannot guarantee impartiality or even accuracy).”82 Condé reflects on her inventive mode of writing history and consciously weaves this into her storytelling. In a preliminary page, she highlights the tension between truth and fiction that will dominate her text, citing Bernard Pingaud’s essay Les anneaux du manège: écriture et littérature: “Il devient indifférent que je me souvienne ou que j’invente, que j’emprunte ou que j’imagine (It is inconsequential whether I remember or I invent, whether I borrow or I imagine).” Memory and invention, according to Nesbitt, are not so dissimilar. Memory, he posits, is a “representational construction of the past in the present and thus to some degree an inherently aesthetic process.”83 Condé questions the absolutism of official history through her own imaginative construction, and, like Pingaud, asks whether it matters if she remembers, invents, borrows, or imagines. Through Pingaud, Condé advises readers to expect tension between memory, invention, and history. Like Cisneros, Condé acknowledges the flexibility of her story’s “truth” when, after unable to cite any specific sources to verify a certain event in her grandmother’s life, she states, “Rêvons (Let us dream).”84 This imperative statement leads us to question, what is the harm in imagining a past when the seemingly necessary facts are lacking? By revisiting and revising her family’s past, Condé not only recovers her grandmother’s story, but also learns, like Lala, how to negotiate her own place within the tapestry of her family history. In many ways, however, the narrator’s task in Condé’s novel is more difficult than Lala’s. Lala knows her lineage, and her talent as a storyteller is a direct product of the Reyes family legacy as reboceros. Condé’s lineage



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is largely obscure: “mes parents surgissent, à l’instar de tant d’autres, d’une espèce de brouillard (my parents emerged, like so many others, from a kind of fog).”85 According to Nesbitt, this lack of knowledge (of lineage and of history) is a problem specific to slavery and to the Caribbean. Echoing Glissant, Nesbitt explains that the dehumanizing effects of the Middle Passage, plantation slavery, and colonialism disrupted slaves’ capacity for memory and communal history, driving “memory underground.”86 Condé’s family embodies this historical rupture; her parents’ silence regarding slavery further complicates Condé’s ability to make sense of this past: “personne dans ma famille ne m’instruisit ni de la Trait, de ces voyages initiatiques qui fondèrent notre destinée d’Antilles, ni de l’esclavage. Je dus négocier sans aide le poids de ce terrible passé (no one in my family instructed me about the slave trade, of those initial voyages that founded our Antillean destiny. I had to negotiate the weight of this terrible past on my own).”87 Condé was introduced to slavery, she explains in Le Cœur, as a young child while playing with her friend Anne-Marie, a white girl who hit and abused her. When Condé eventually resisted and told Anne-Marie to stop, the girl gave Condé her first “history lesson”: “Je dois te donner des coups parce que tu es une négresse (I have to hit you because you are a negro).”88 Confused by this response, Condé asked her parents what it meant. Her mother dismissed her question, yet seemed embarrassed, obviously keeping something from her daughter. Condé’s father, on the other hand, almost gave her an answer when he told her, “On nous donnait des coups dans le temps (They used to beat us long ago).”89 This experience taught Condé at a young age not to ask certain questions because of a painful, shameful secret (“secret douloureux, secret honteux”) hidden deep in her past (“caché au fond de mon passé”); it was best to bury this secret like her parents had done (“Il valait mieux l’enfouir au fin fond de ma mémoire comme mon père et ma mère”).90 Condé implicitly learns to own this shame and pain as it becomes a part of her past “mon passé” and her memory “ma mémoire.” This is her introduction to collective memory and cultural trauma—the scab on the wound that is history. Unlike her parents who hid behind, to borrow from McCusker, a “protective layer of oblivion,”91 Condé realizes that refusing to acknowledge the past is to deny her ancestors and their specific and unique stories. The episode with Anne-Marie affirms the uncanny return of traumatic events. After she resists the abuse, the girl disappears from town and Condé never sees her again, leading Condé to wonder whether this meeting was not supernatural (“je me demande si cette rencontre ne fut pas surnaturelle”)—an example of slavery’s uncanny legacy. It is impossible to escape: “Puisque tant de vieilles haines, de vieilles peurs jamais liquidées demeurent ensevelies dans la terre de nos pays, je me demande si Anne-Marie et moi, nous n’avons pas été, l’espace de nos prétendus jeux, les réincarnations miniatures d’une

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maîtresse et de son esclave souffre-douleur (Since so many old hatreds and fears that were never resolved remain buried in the earth of our country, I wonder if Anne-Marie and I within the space of our so-called games, had not been miniature reincarnations of a mistress and her slave scapegoat).”92 In other words, she and Anne-Marie were compelled to reenact the master-slave relationship because of the haunted landscape, blighted by the history of slavery. Although as a child Condé was completely ignorant of slavery, its memory haunted her in the form of a white little girl. As an adult, Condé seeks to unearth the secret shame of history. In many ways, writing Victoire roots out this shame from the depths of Condé’s memory, despite the murky fog that obscures her past. When faced with a lack of official documentation about her grandmother’s life Condé will rely on imagination to construct Victoire’s identity: “Imaginons, c’est tout ce qui nous reste (We imagine, that is all that remains for us).”93 Whereas the female spirits in the texts by Brodber, Valdés, and Cisneros work as witnesses and storytellers, Condé’s narrator has to invent her grandmother’s story and must step into the role of storyteller to rescue Victoire from fading into oblivion— “revendiquer l’héritage de cette femme qui apparemment n’en laissa pas (to claim the legacy of this woman who apparently did not leave any).”94 WOMEN’S CREATIVITY: COOKING AND STORYTELLING Despite Condé’s emphasis on invention and imagination, she does claim one official source: a collection of her grandmother’s recipes, which was supposedly published in L’Écho pointois. Food, like music in Te di la vida entera and Caramelo, functions as an important affective connection between Condé and her grandmother, specifically as Condé seeks to establish a link between her creative identity as a writer and her grandmother’s equally creative identity as a cook, underscored by the novel’s full title, Victoire, les saveurs et les mots. Unlike Moi, Tituba sorcière . . . Noire de Salem, with the title’s emphatic pronoun moi and descriptors specific to Tituba (black witch of Salem), Victoire’s title invokes a comparison between her grandmother as a cook (“les saveurs” [flavors]) and Condé as an author (“les mots” [words]). Victoire may lack the emphasis on the individual which is dominant throughout Tituba, but it stresses a personal and profound matriarchal link between Condé and her grandmother. Throughout Victoire, Condé’s narrator stresses the parallel she sees between her grandmother’s craft and her own. Victoire’s culinary talent leads her to a mode of self-expression similar to writing. Although she was merely a cook for a white family in an upstairs-downstairs house, Victoire



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discovered her place in the world via “le temple de sa cuisine (the temple of her kitchen).”95 Cooking freed her from the chains of silence and obscurity: “Quand elle inventait des assaisonnements, ou mariait des goûts, sa personnalité se libérait, s’épanouissait.”96 For Victoire, cooking is an art. In the temple of her kitchen she transcends language and eases the pain of her illegitimacy, illiteracy, and low social status: “elle dominait le monde. Pour un temps, elle devenait Dieu. Là aussi, comme un écrivain (she dominated the world. For a time, she became God. Again, just like a writer).”97 Not only does Condé compare her grandmother to a writer, but she compares her to God. This divine association is repeated throughout the novel and is especially potent in the final chapter when Condé imagines the last meal Victoire cooked for her family and her employers, which the author refers to as the “Ultima Cena,” using the original Italian title of da Vinci’s famous depiction of Christ’s final meal with His disciples. In Condé’s recreation of this event, Victoire occupies the space reserved for Christ; she is the central figure: “Ce pourrait être le sujet d’un tableau dont le personnage central serait Victoire, entourée des êtres qui lui avaient été chers tout au long de sa vie (This could be the subject of a painting whose central character would be Victoire, surrounded by those who had been dear to her throughout her life).”98 This last supper is not a part of the archive, but Condé attempts to show its value as if it were. Condé proposes that her illiterate grandmother’s “Ultima Cena” is like a written document, specifically Victoire’s last will and testament (“À sa manière, elle rédigeait son testament [In her own way, she was writing her will]”).99 But this meal (its preparation and service) is more of a performance. The culinary skill and knowledge embodied by Victoire reminds us of what Diana Taylor calls the repertoire and Cisneros’s articulation of the rebozo as an alternative female production of historical record (discussed in chapter three). Like Soledad and Lala who have been cut off from maternal knowledge, Condé must conjure it from her imagination. Condé’s project imaginatively repairs the broken links in the matriarchal succession of knowledge between herself and her grandmother by invoking the god-like power of creativity, whether with words or with flavors. It might have been tempting to write Victoire’s character differently, to fictionalize her as a rousing storyteller in the oral tradition, but that would have further erased her. Words were not her power. That is Tituba’s legacy. Victoire’s may be silent, but it is no less worthy of remembrance. Condé’s imaginative reconstitution of her grandmother’s history is not necessarily a direct challenge to the dominant historical discourse in the manner of Brodber’s Louisiana. However, it does provide a necessary alternative to hegemonic historiography in the same way that Condé’s fictionalized account of Tituba’s personal history broadens historical consciousness. Victoire’s ghost is an invitation, not only to write, but also to (re)discover the women History forgot.

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NOTES 1. Maryse Condé, Victoire, les saveurs et les mots (Paris: Mercure de France, 2006), 13. 2. Nick Nesbitt, Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 14. 3. Ann Armstrong Scarboro, afterword to I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, by Maryse Condé, trans. Richard Philcox (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 200–201. 4. Veta Smith Tucker, “Purloined Identity: The Racial Metamorphosis of Tituba of Salem Village,” Journal of Black Studies 30, no. 4 (2000): 624. 5. Despite this absence from the archive, Tituba does appear in various fictional accounts of the Salem Witch Trials including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Giles Corey of the Salem Farms (1868), Henry Peterson’s Dulcibel, a Tale of Old Salem (1891), William Carlos Williams’s Tituba’s Children (1950), Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), and Ann Petry’s Tituba of Salem Village (1964). 6. Zubeda Jalalzai, “Historical Fiction and Maryse Condé’s ‘I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem,’” African American Review 43, no. 2/3 (2009): 415. 7. Maryse Condé, Moi, Tituba sorcière . . . Noire de Salem (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986), 47. 8. Condé, Tituba, 44. 9. Condé, Tituba, 44. 10. Henry Peterson, Dulcibel, A Tale of Old Salem (Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1907), 22. 11. Peterson, Dulcibel, 51. 12. Arthur Miller, The Crucible, ed. Gerald Weales (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 8. 13. Condé, Tituba, 267. 14. Condé, Tituba, 268. 15. Lillian Manzor-Coats, “Of Witches and Other Things: Maryse Condé’s Challenges to Feminist Discourse,” World Literature Today 67, no. 4 (1993): 737. 16. Elisabeth Mudimbé-Boyi, “Giving a Voice to Tituba: The Death of the Author?” World Literature Today 67, no. 4 (1993): 752 17. Mudimbé-Boyi, “Giving,” 753. 18. Michelle Smith, “Reading in Circles: Sexuality and/as History in ‘I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem,’” Callaloo 18, no. 3 (1995): 602. 19. Caroline Rody, The Daughter’s Return: African-American and Caribbean Women’s Fictions of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 197. 20. Smith, “Reading,” 602. 21. Condé, Tituba, 13. 22. Jennifer R. Thomas, “Talking the Cross-Talk of Histories in Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem,” in Emerging Perspectives on Maryse Condé: A Writer of Her Own, eds. Sarah Barbour and Gerise Herndon (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2006), 95. 23. Thomas, “Talking,” 95.



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24. Maryse Condé, “The Voyager In, the Voyager Out,” in Guadeloupe: temps incertains, eds. Marie Abraham and Daniel Maragnès (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2001), 251. 25. Condé, “Voyager,” 251. 26. Condé, “Voyager,” 251. 27. Brodber, Louisiana, 139. 28. Condé, Tituba, 23. 29. Condé, Tituba, 23. 30. Condé, Tituba, 31. 31. Condé, Tituba, 133. 32. Nicole Simek, Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of Interpretation (Amsterdam: Éditions Rodopi B.V., 2008), 50. 33. Condé, Tituba, 271. 34. Condé, Tituba, 231, 271. 35. Condé, Tituba, 173. 36. Condé, Tituba, 173. 37. Condé, Tituba, 173. 38. Condé, Tituba, 173. 39. Kaiama Glover, “Confronting the Communal: Maryse Condé’s Challenge to New World Orders in Moi, Tituba,” French Forum 37, no. 3 (2012): 182. 40. Condé, Tituba, 236. 41. Condé, Tituba, 236. 42. Condé, Tituba, 268–269. When capitalized, Livre (the general term for “book”) may refer to the Bible. By using this term rather than “la Bible,” Condé triangulates religion, the written record, and prejudice in the West. 43. Condé, Tituba, 269. 44. Condé, Tituba, 269. 45. Condé, Tituba, 267. 46. Scarboro, afterword, 204. 47. Maryse Condé, Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer, Contes vrais de mon enfance (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1999), 67. 48. Condé, Le Cœur, 68. 49. Condé, Le Cœur, 68. 50. Condé, Victoire, 14. 51. Condé, Victoire, 16. 52. Condé, Victoire, 16. 53. Condé, Victoire, 13. 54. Condé, Victoire, 13. 55. Condé, Victoire, 209. 56. Condé, Victoire, 209. 57. Condé, Victoire, 209. 58. Condé, Victoire, 16. 59. Condé, Victoire, 16. 60. Nesbitt, Voicing, 201. 61. Condé, Victoire, 242.

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62. Maryse Condé, “Mode d’emploi: Comment devenir une écrivaine que l’on dit antillaise,” Nouvelles Études Francophones 22, no. 1 (2007): 48. 63. Glissant, Poétique, 17. 64. Patrick Chamoiseau, Chronique des sept misères (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 123. Patrick Chamoiseau, Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows, trans. Linda Coverdale (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 101. 65. Maeve McCusker, Patrick Chamoiseau: Recovering Memory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 40. 66. Mudimbé-Boyi, “Giving,” 753. 67. Mudimbé-Boyi, “Giving,” 753. 68. Mudimbé-Boyi, “Giving,” 753. 69. Condé, Victoire, 166. 70. Condé, Victoire, 178. 71. Condé, Victoire, 254. 72. Condé, Victoire, 27. 73. Paravisini-Gebert, “Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic,” 239. 74. Paravisini-Gebert, “Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic,” 239. 75. Condé, Victoire, 71. 76. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 162. 77. Condé, Victoire, 16 (emphasis added). 78. Condé, Le Cœur, 94. 79. Condé, Victoire, 17. 80. Condé, Victoire, 17. 81. Jenny Odintz, “Tracing the Matrilineal Past: Alternative Genealogy and the Imagination in Maryse Condé’s Victoire, les saveurs et les mots,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 17, no. 2 (2014): 240. 82. Condé, Victoire, 17. 83. Nesbitt, Voicing, 4. 84. Condé, Victoire, 95. 85. Condé, Victoire, 15. 86. Nesbitt, Voicing, 3. 87. Condé, Victoire, 117. 88. Condé, Le Cœur, 42. 89. Condé, Le Cœur, 44. 90. Condé, Le Cœur, 44. 91. McCusker, Patrick Chamoiseau, 40. 92. Condé, Le Cœur, 44 (emphasis added). 93. Condé, Victoire, 129. 94. Condé, Victoire, 85. 95. Condé, Victoire, 85. 96. Condé, Victoire, 100–101. 97. Condé, Victoire, 100–101. 98. Condé, Victoire, 247. 99. Condé, Victoire, 247.

Conclusion

In her short story “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” Sandra Cisneros suggests that women can claim freedom and power by locating themselves within a spiritual and matriarchal network. A series of vignettes in the form of petitions and notes of gratitude addressed to Catholic saints, “Little Miracles” ends with Rosario (Chayo) De Leon’s message to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Like the previous notes of thanks and appeal, Chayo’s offering reveals deeply personal pains and hopes; she discloses the unique frustrations of a young Mexican American woman struggling against the limits imposed upon her by her family, her culture, and the Church. Chayo longs to live independently as an artist despite the cultural pressure to become a wife and mother. She resents the expectation to emulate her mother and grandmother, models of the passive womanhood embodied in the Virgin of Guadalupe. Disgusted by her weakness, Chayo refused to allow the Virgin into her heart or her house. She explains, “Couldn’t look at you without blaming you for all the pain my mother and her mother and all our mothers’ mothers have put up with in the name of God.”1 Almost miraculously (Chayo does not know “how it all fell into place”), her resentment disappears when she realizes that the Virgin (the Divine Feminine) is not limited to the ideal of femininity ascribed to her by the Church.2 The Virgin, Chayo discerns, is also the Aztec goddess Tonantzín: “No longer Mary the mild, but our mother Tonantzín.”3 Chayo looks beyond the rigid patriarchal characterization of the Virgin to recognize her many iterations across time and space—not just as Aztec goddesses of life and death (“Teteoinnan, Toci, Xochiquetzal, Tlazolteotl, Coatlicue, Chalchiuhtlicue, Coyolxauhqui, Huixtocihautl,” and more), but also her Spanish and English incarnations of solitude, succor, and sorrow (“Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, Nuestra Señora del Perpetuo Socorro, Nuestra Señora de San Juan de los Lagos, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Our Lady of the Rosary, Our Lady of Sorrows”).4 The epiphany of female multiplicity unburdens Chayo of bitterness and guilt: “I wasn’t ashamed, then, to be my mother’s daughter, my grandmother’s granddaughter, my ancestor’s child.”5 Whereas resentment and judgment had isolated her, Chayo’s acceptance of all aspects of femininity simultaneously 95

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liberates her and securely enfolds her within a matriarchal network outside of the constraints of linear time. Cisneros links womanhood, fertility, and cyclical time through the repeated image of the snake. To accompany her note, Chayo leaves the Virgin an offering of thanks in the form of a braid of her hair: “Something shed like a snakeskin.”6 Cutting off all her hair, which had not been touched since she was born, is not only an act of rebellion against traditional Western beauty standards but also indicates a rebirth: “My head as light as if I’d raised it from water.”7 Like the shedding of snakeskin, emerging from water evokes the cyclical process of life, death, and rebirth of ancient fertility goddesses, women who seemed antithetical to Chayo’s initial myopic understanding of the Virgin: “I wanted you bare-breasted, snakes in your hands. I wanted you leaping and somersaulting the backs of bulls.”8 This prehistoric allusion to the Minoan Snake Goddess figurine and bull-leaping fresco from Knossos reflects Chayo’s deep yearning for an ancient, primal version of femininity to challenge the stifling Western codes of conduct for women and goddesses. Cisneros comes full circle with the image of the snake when she identifies the Virgin of Guadalupe with the Aztec goddesses Coatlaxopeuh, whose name Cisneros translates as “She Who Has Dominion over Serpents,” and Coatlicue, named for the skirt of serpents she wears.9 Through the repeated image of the snake, Chayo obliterates the limiting nature of linear time and Western expectations of women. She declares, “I’m a snake swallowing its tail. I’m my history and my future. All my ancestors’ ancestors inside my own belly. All my futures and all my pasts.”10 The infinite circle Chayo invokes via the snake challenges linear time, which—to return to Draper and Breton’s claim cited in the introduction— divides and isolates us. It restricts our ability to assume our place within a network, limiting the formation of our identities in relation to others. Like the snake swallowing its tail, Chayo dismantles the rules of linear time; there is neither past nor present: “I’m my history and my future.” Whereas linear time divides, cyclical time unifies; Chayo becomes one with the women who have proceeded her: “All my ancestors’ ancestors inside my own belly. All my futures and all my pasts.” This temporal collapse unravels the rigid and divisive classification of women. Chayo breaks through the constraints of dichotomous thinking; she no longer regards the long-suffering Virgin (and her mother and grandmother who suffer long) as weak. She considers that “maybe there is power in my mother’s patience, strength in my grandmother’s endurance. Because those who suffer have a special power, don’t they? The power of understanding someone else’s pain. And understanding is the beginning of healing.”11 Chayo now understands that to transcend genealogical isolation she must accept the complexity and opacity (to borrow

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Glissant’s term) of others’ stories. Chayo is no longer isolated by linear time or patriarchal (Church) culture. Although not explicitly stated, “Little Miracles” alludes to the healing power of narratives. The vignettes themselves are an invitation, an opportunity to understand someone else’s pain. In this book I have made the argument that fictional stories can be effective healing narratives, especially in the context of ruptured history and obfuscated family memory. For as Condé writes in Victoire, we must dream, we must imagine when we do not have access to the facts. By imagining, we willingly face the plaguing amnesia of traumatic history. In similar ways Louisiana, Te di la vida entera, Caramelo, and Victoire make an argument for the value of fiction in recovering the female voice and experience. Fiction has the power to conjure forgotten histories, enlarging our understanding of the past by enacting events that may not be “true” in a denotative sense yet represent a transcendent truth covering a broad range of experience, like Menchú’s testimonio, Mammy’s oral history, or Tituba’s origins. Written (official) history, on the other hand, marks a definitive break between past and present. As Michel de Certeau asserts in L’écriture de l’histoire [The Writing of History], “L’écriture ne parle de passé que pour l’enterrer. Elle est un tombeau en ce double sens que, par le même texte, elle honore et elle élimine (Writing speaks of the past only to bury it. Writing is a tomb in the double sense that, in the same text, it honors and it eliminates).”12 Though written texts, the novels by my select authors, however, do the opposite. Via the figure of the ghost, they revive the past, imaginatively blurring the line between dead and living, past and present. These novels, as discussed in chapter one, follow a rich tradition of fiction in the Americas that features the ghostly figure to exorcise the various histories and traumas that haunt the region. Louisiana establishes the importance of orality and spiritual epistemology, which are also important themes in the novels by Valdés and Cisneros, especially the way in which the spiritual epistemology of Louisiana values emotion over reason. We see this developed further in Te di la vida entera and Caramelo as the spirits inspire a “transformative recognition,” a return to knowledge, through nostalgia and affect.13 Condé’s Victoire, on the other hand, explores the theme of silence. Victoire’s ghost does not impart any transformative knowledge directly. Rather, the silence surrounding Victoire inspires Condé’s narrator to explore the value of her poor, illiterate grandmother’s life. Although these four novels have distinct differences, in each text the figure of the ghost inspires an interrogation into the past to redeem silenced voices and histories. In this conclusion, I would like to expand upon the implication of the ghost’s potential to heal generational trauma by restoring fractured relationships between women—like Chayo, who finds reconciliation not only with the Divine Feminine but also with her mother, grandmother, and all her ancestors.

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The resolution of Chayo’s story takes on additional meaning when we consider the profound neurobiological patterns within matrilineal descent. In a 2016 study, neuroscientists established the emotional impact of matrilineal relationships, positing a “female-specific neurobiological transmission pattern in the corticolimbic circuitry,” which regulates emotion.14 In other words, mothers and daughters have a unique neurobiological association “significantly greater than mother–son, father–daughter, and father–son associations.”15 Women inherent from their mothers and grandmothers neurocircuitry that affects how they process emotion. The implications of this research relate to my own claims about the meaningful recuperation of matrilineal memory. Female familial relationships are unique, special, and deeply connected to one’s emotional well-being. Psychology further explores these implications, recognizing “the mother–daughter bond as lifelong, intimate, and developmentally important.”16 According to Marilyn Charles et al., mother-daughter relationships “tend to be more intense and less differentiated than other parent-child dyads.”17 These researchers also assert that mother-daughter conflicts “not adequately worked through appear to be passed along through the generations [. . .], perpetuating the transmission of trauma and traumatic themes from one generation to the next.”18 Considering the intensity of these relationships, and the inherited corticolimbic circuitry, such unresolved conflict could have devastating effects. Moreover, women have differing perceptions of their matrilineal relationships influenced by, in the words of Kathryn E. Bojczyk et al., “[g]enerational, role, chronological age, and historical differences.”19 These multifaceted complications could potentially create a labyrinth of pain and misunderstanding that seems near impossible to navigate. In “Little Miracles,” the collapse of linear time is the key; it allows Chayo to perceive her relationships from the same vantage point as her mother and grandmother. With this new perspective she can let go of her assumptions, judgment, and myopic bias. Whereas Chayo imagines the collapse of linear time by invoking the Divine Feminine across time and space, the spirits in my select novels—by their spectral nature—dissolve the boundaries of linear time. Existing within an in-between, liminal space they serve as bridges not only between the material and the immaterial, the living and the dead, but also between the past and the present. The spirits inspire the female narrators to write—not to bury the past (to cite Certeau’s critique of history writing), but to attend to its wounds. The novels reflect Laurie Vickroy’s definition of trauma fiction in that they “offer us alternatives to often depersonalized or institutionalized historiographies.”20 They confront trauma’s “impossible history;” impossible because the traumatized feel that they never possess it; it possesses them.21 We cannot possess what we cannot see. As Charles et al. explain about unresolved

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trauma, “That which has not been worked through often becomes a blind spot.”22 Returning to my initial claim in the introduction, the uncanny return of the ghost calls our attention to absence, to blind spots, which—under the right conditions—leads to resolution. The spirits in all four novels break unhealthy generational patterns by renewing relationships between mothers and daughters as well as grandmothers and granddaughters. In Louisiana, Mammy and Lowly act as maternal surrogates in two ways: first, by initiating Ella as a spirit medium and giving her a new name and second, by nurturing Ella in ways her own mother would not. In short, Ella’s mother was an obstacle in her healing journey. She perpetuated cultural trauma by keeping Ella ignorant of her Jamaican roots, family, and history. The spirits, however, inspire Ella’s reconciliation with these missing parts of herself, beginning with the retrieval of a repressed memory of her grandmother combing, oiling, and braiding Ella’s hair as a baby, a practice that connected them to their African heritage. As an adult in the United States, Ella would ritualistically straighten her hair with a stovetop hot comb, imitating Eurocentric beauty standards, a clear sign of her cultural rootlessness, or—in Lowly’s words—her “neutered” ancestry.23 The recovery of this early memory signals the recovery of her African heritage and is the first step to Ella’s reconstruction of her true self (which her mother had purposefully repressed), leading her to self-discovery and a spiritual calling that will heal others. Although the rift between Ella and her parents—they essentially erased her from her family and the historical record—was a constant source of profound pain till the end of her life, Ella’s relationships with maternal figures (Mammy, Lowly, and her grandmother) provided her with the tools to heal from the cultural trauma her parents refused to address. Te di la vida entera differs from Louisiana in that the main narrator-author (the Valdés persona) does not have a personal relationship with either Cuca or her daughter, María Regla, though she has been chosen by María Regla’s spirit to record Cuca’s story. Like Louisiana, however, Te di la vida entera traces reconciliation between female relatives, specifically between a mother and daughter. When she was alive, María Regla was constantly at odds with her mother. Whereas Cuca cursed the Cuban Revolution as the source of her emotional and material suffering, María Regla, born in 1959, considered herself a child of the Revolution and could not relate to her mother’s longing for a pre-Revolution Cuba. Only after death, when reunited with her mother in the atemporal space of Valdés’s novel, does María Regla appreciate Cuca’s story. Her urgent desire to find a living author to write her mother’s story is evidence of María Regla’s full acceptance of Cuca. Thus, the novel itself becomes an act of reconciliation. The final scene between mother and daughter is an unexpected resolution to a troubling and hopeless narrative. There is no romantic or political resolution for Cuca or Cuba, but the new

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understanding between Cuca and María Regla eclipses all; past trauma is swallowed up in the joy of their reunion. Caramelo traces a similar process between Soledad and Lala, who—like María Regla and Cuca—struggled to relate with each other when Soledad was alive. Although initially annoyed by her grandmother’s haunting spirit, Lala’s perception of “the Awful Grandmother” shifts when Soledad’s spirit exclaims, “It’s you, Celaya, who’s haunting me. I can’t bear it. Why do you insist on repeating my life?”24 This surprising declaration encourages Lala to reevaluate her assumptions about her grandmother, leading her to want to know all of Soledad’s story. Together grandmother and granddaughter forge a new relationship by collaborating on Soledad’s personal history. This creative and emotional endeavor is mutually rewarding. Soledad’s spirit finally finds peace by sharing her side of the story, to explain how she became so “awful.” Throughout this process, she confronts the traumas of her past and the role she played in causing others pain. It is also an opportunity for her to pass on the Reyes family legacy of weaving (i.e., storytelling) which she failed to share with Lala while living. The unresolved business of her life had kept her in spiritual limbo, but through Lala she finds release. By recording her grandmother’s story, Lala develops understanding and compassion for Soledad beyond her narrow and judgmental assumptions, ultimately realizing that she has more in common with Soledad than her own mother. Lala embraces this epiphany when she declares toward the end of the novel, “I am the Awful Grandmother.”25 Through this identification with Soledad, Lala concedes that her grandmother is not as awful as Lala had previously judged. This insight also fortifies Lala to face her future with confidence and self-acceptance. Although Victoire chiefly focuses on Condé’s creative identification with her unknown grandmother, the novel also interrogates Victoire’s strained relationship with her daughter (Condé’s mother), Jeanne. A necessary part of recovering her grandmother’s story involves an exploration of Condé’s own mother’s resentment toward Victoire. In the autobiographical Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer [Tales from the Heart], Condé recounts that her mother would chastise her for spending too much time in the kitchen with their cook. Jeanne warned the young Condé that her interest in the kitchen would lead her nowhere: “Tu ne feras jamais rien de bon. Les filles intelligentes ne passent pas leur temps dans la cuisine (You will never do anything good. Intelligent girls do not pass their time in the kitchen).”26 Condé interprets this censure as a projection of Jeanne’s acute disappointment in her mother’s low status as a cook. However, Condé explains that this criticism was Jeanne’s way of expressing regret for the emotional divide between Victoire and herself: “[C]’était sa manière à elle de deplorer la distance qui, au fil des années, s’était creusée entre sa servant de mère et elle (It was her way of mourning the distance that, over the years, had widened between her servant mother and

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herself).”27 Condé closes this distance that her mother could not overcome by asserting a creative connection between herself as an educated professional author and her grandmother as a servant-cook. Whereas Jeanne saw the kitchen as an inferior space, Condé elevates it to a “temple” of Victoire’s creativity.28 Although Victoire and Jeanne do not share a scene of unification in Victoire, like Cuca and María Regla or Soledad and Lala, Condé imagines their motives and intentions and untangles the knot of their misunderstandings, revealing the unspoken love between them. In the creative space of the novel, Condé captures Jeanne’s deep love for Victoire when she describes Jeanne’s grief at her mother’s death as without limits: “La douleur de Jeanne fut sans limites.”29 Like Chayo, these women find peace and belonging by accepting the stories of their female ancestors, reclaiming both their roots and their branches as they transcend the limits of linear time. In the case of Louisiana, Te di la vida entera, Caramelo, and Victoire female spirits initiate this healing process. Although often employed in fiction to invoke fear and suspense, as my select novels demonstrate, the ghost can also serve an unexpected, restorative role through what Annette Trefzer terms “‘healthy’ haunting.”30 I have demonstrated how female ghosts reclaim marginalized voices and histories while inspiring the production of alternatives to History. These ghost (hi)stories not only counter the hegemonic, dominant discourse (through orality, spirit possession, and cyclical temporality) but also explore the complicated dynamics of female kinship to heal generational and cultural trauma. The restoration of these female relationships is deeply connected to storytelling. Listening to and writing their mothers’ and grandmothers’ stories lead to reciprocal healing for both the female characters and their ancestors. These women overcome trauma, misunderstanding, and pain by collaboratively participating in a creative and productive process. These novels echo Mexican author Octavio Paz’s claim that humanity’s greatness consists in our ability to make beautiful, enduring works of art out of the nightmare of history: “la grandeza del hombre consiste en hacer obras hermosas y durables con la sustancia real de esa pesadilla.”31 My select authors, to continue in Paz’s language, “transfigur[an] la pesadilla en visión, liberarnos, así sea por un instante, de la realidad disforme por medio de la creación (transform the nightmare into a vision, liberating us, even if for a moment, from this corrupted reality by means of creation).”32 These authors alchemize historical trauma into something beautiful and hopeful. Through the figure of the ghost, they imaginatively return to the past, collapsing the boundaries of space and time to restore what was lost, forgotten, and broken.

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NOTES 1. Sandra Cisneros, “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (New York: Vintage, 1991), 127. 2. Cisneros, “Little Miracles,” 128. 3. Cisneros, “Little Miracles,” 128. 4. Cisneros, “Little Miracles,” 128. 5. Cisneros, “Little Miracles,” 128. 6. Cisneros, “Little Miracles,” 125. 7. Cisneros, “Little Miracles,” 125. 8. Cisneros, “Little Miracles,” 127. 9. Cisneros, “Little Miracles,” 128. 10. Cisneros, “Little Miracles,” 126. 11. Cisneros, “Little Miracles,” 128. 12. Certeau, L’écriture, 199. 13. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8. 14. Bun Yamagata, Kou Murayama, Jessica M. Black, Roeland Hancock, Masaru Mimura, Tony T. Yang, Allan L. Reiss, and Fumiko Hoeft, “Female-Specific Intergenerational Transmission Patterns of the Human Corticolimbic Circuitry,” The Journal of Neuroscience 36, no. 4 (January 2016): 1255. 15. Yamagata et al., “Female-Specific,” 1254. 16. Kathryn E. Bojczyk, Tara J. Lehan, Lenore M. McWey, Gail F. Melson, and Debra R. Kaufman, “Mothers’ and Their Adult Daughters’ Perceptions of Their Relationship,” Journal of Family Issues 32, no. 4 (April 2011): 453. 17. Marilyn Charles, Susan J. Frank, Stacy Jacobson, and Gail Grossman. “Repetition of the Remembered Past: Patterns of Separation-Individuation in Two Generations of Mothers and Daughters.” Psychoanalytic Psychology 18 (2001): 706. 18. Charles et al., “Repetition,” 706. 19. Bojczyk et al., “Perceptions,” 453. 20. Laurie Vickroy, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 4. 21. Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 1. 22. Charles et al., “Repetition,” 706. 23. Brodber, Louisiana, 26. 24. Cisneros, Caramelo, 406. 25. Cisneros, Caramelo, 424. 26. Condé, Le Cœur, 69. 27. Condé, Le Cœur, 69. 28. Condé, Victoire, 85. 29. Condé, Victoire, 254. 30. Annette Trefzer, “The Indigenous Uncanny: Spectral Genealogies in LeAnne Howe’s Fiction,” in Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture, eds. Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 201.

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31. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959), 82. 32. Paz, Laberinto, 82. Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash translate “de la realidad disforme” as “from the shapeless horror of reality.” Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, trans. Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 104.

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Index

Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 11, 18–19, 23, 30 African diaspora, religious practices within, 9; in Louisiana, 43, 44 Afro-Cuban religious traditions, 54 Allende, Isabel, 11, 23, 28–30 Allende, Salvador, 28 Almanac of the Dead (Silko), 11, 18, 21–22, 30 alternative history, 34; fiction as, 35; Louisiana as, 39, 46, 52; novels as, 79; Victoire as, 91 Alumbaugh, Heather, 62 “Antillean Amnesia,” 76 archive, Tituba critiquing, 76, 82; Caramelo resisting, 65, 68 Aristotle, 30 Aura (Fuentes), 11, 23, 27, 28, 30 Beloved (Morrison), 11, 18–21, 26–27, 30, 80, 85 bolero (musical genre), 57–59 Boym, Svetlana, 52, 59, 68, 70 Brodber, Erna, 1, 3, 9–11, 17. See also Louisiana Caramelo: or Puro Cuento (Cisneros), 1, 12, 51, 61–68, 70, 100 the Caribbean, 3, 6, 8, 23, 44–45

Caribbean literature, ghosts in, 23–27 Carpentier, Alejo, 8 Casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits) (Allende, I.), 23, 28–30 Castro, Anne Margaret, 8 Castro, Fidel, 55 Certeau, Michel de, 6, 97 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 6, 85–86 Chronique des sept misères (Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows) (Chamoiseau), 85–86 Cisneros, Sandra, 1, 17, 51, 64, 95–96 Le Coeur à rire et à pleurer (Tales from the Heart) (Condé), 83, 87, 100 Cohn, Deborah, 3 colonial epistemology, 4–7 colonialism, spirit possession resisting, 33 colonization, epistemological, 5 community, folklore creating, 41–42 Condé, Maryse, 1, 17, 78, 86; grandmother inspiring, 12, 75, 90–91; Tituba, conversing with, 75; oral history lacked by, 87; as spiritual medium, 79; Le Coeur à rire et à pleurer by, 83, 87, 100; “The Voyager In, the Voyager Out” by, 80. See also Moi, Tituba Sorcière . . . Noire de Salem; Victoire 113

114

Index

cooking, storytelling and, 90–91 The Crucible (Miller), 77–78 Cuba, 55, 61 Cuban Revolution, 55, 61 cyclical time, 2, 7–8, 28, 30, 60, 65, 70, 96, 101 The Darker Side of the Renaissance (Mignolo), 5 Dash, Michael, 4 Day of the Dead (Día de los muertos), 62 death, 24–25, 29, 34, 46 Día de los muertos. See Day of the Dead L’écriture de l’histoire (The Writing of History) (Certeau), 6, 97 endnotes, of Caramelo, 67–68 epistemological colonization, 5 epistemologies: colonial, 4–7; spiritual, 37–39; subaltern, 6; Western, 40, 46 ethnographers, 57, 63, 66, 79 fact, fiction blended with, 33, 34, 35, 56, 64, 88–90 family history, 9–10, 67; Allende, I. recovering, 28; slavery disrupting, 3; accessed through spirits, 10–11 Faulkner, William, 3, 11, 18, 30 Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), 35–36 female: ghosts, 1, 7, 13; perspective of history, 51–52, 67; slaves, rape impacting, 80; spirits, healing initiated by, 101 feminine temporality, 28. See also cyclical time Fernández Olmos, Margarite, 9 fiction: as alternative history, 35; fact blended with, 33, 34, 35, 56, 64, 88–90; Tituba portrayed in, 92n5; trauma, 98; truth in tension with, 33, 34, 35, 56, 64, 88–90 folk culture, orality and, 41–46 Foucault, Michel, 41

Fuentes, Carlos, 11, 23, 27–28, 30 FWP. See Federal Writers’ Project García Márquez, Gabriel, 3 Garner, Margaret, 19, 21 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 43 genealogical isolation, 9–11, 97 ghosts, 2, 37, 41, 51, 85; in Caribbean literature, 23; female, 1, 7, 13; historical narrative destabilized by, 59; in Latin American literature, 23; linear temporality subverted by, 7–8; literary, 4; official history challenged by, 4; oral literature invoked by, 7; trauma revealed by, 1; in U.S. literature, 17–23; as witnesses, 52 Glissant, Édouard, 6, 20, 45, 76, 85, 89, 97 Glover, Kaiama, 82 Goddu, Teresa, 1, 2 Gordon, Avery, 20, 51, 70 gothic tradition, in literature, 1, 2–3, 8, 17, 18, 35, 86 grandmother, 29, 47n33, 62, 66, 83–84, 100; Condé inspired by, 12, 75, 90–91; memory of, 39; zombie linked with, 86–87 Gubar, Susan, 7 Hagood, Taylor, 2, 17 Havana, Cuba, 61 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4, 45 Hegelian history, colonial epistemology and, 4–7 Higonnet, Margaret, 7 Hirsch, Marianne, 1 historical archive, women of color and, 7–9 historical narrative, ghosts destabilizing, 4, 59 history: African American, 37; myopic, 77–80; oral, 34, 87; power structures framing, 33; of slavery, 25–26; of the South, 18; story contrasted with, 6, 34. See also alternative history;

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Index

family history; Hegelian history; official history “History as Social Death” (Brodber), 9 Hurston, Zora Neale, 35–36 An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (Torres-Saillant), 5 “The Intergenerational Self” (Fivush, Bohanek, and Duke), 10 Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (Brodber), 10 Jardín (Loynaz), 11, 23, 25–27, 30 jazz, 43–44 jazz funerals, in New Orleans, 46 John the Revelator, 40–41 Just Below South (Adams, Bibler, and Accilien), 3, 44 Kristeva, Julia, 7, 8, 60 Ladd, Barbara, 7 Latin American literature, ghosts in, 23–30 lineage, slavery obscuring, 9, 10, 88–89 linear time, 96; jazz destabilizing, 43–44; matriarchal lineage not conforming to, 2; spirits destabilizing, 98–99 literature: Caribbean, 23; gothic tradition in, 1, 8, 17–18, 35, 86; Latin American, 23; oral, 7; testimonial, 64–68; U.S., 17–23 “Little Miracles, Kept Promises” (Cisneros), 95, 97 Local Histories/Global Designs (Mignolo), 5 Look Away! (Cohn and Smith), 3, 44 Louisiana (Brodber), 1, 3, 33, 63, 99; as alternative history, 39, 46, 52; birth in, 34; spirit possession analyzed in, 11 Louisiana (U.S. state), 44–46 Loynaz, Dulce María, 11; Jardín by, 23, 30; memory emphasized by, 23–24;

Middle Passage evoked by, 25; the past emphasized by, 26 Mather, Cotton, 2 matriarchal lineage, linear time not conformed to by, 2 matrilineal descent, neurobiological patterns within, 98 McCusker, Maeve, 86, 89 “Me and My Head-Hurting Fiction” (Brodber), 3 Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú (I, Rigoberta Menchú) (Menchú), 5 memory: absence of historical, 76; faulty, 23–24; haunting nature of, 20, 59; Loynaz emphasizing, 23–24; repressed, 39; of slavery, 21 Menchú, Rigoberta, 5 Mexican Revolution, female perspective of, 67 Mexico, 61–62 Middle Passage, 20, 25, 80 Mignolo, Walter, 5 Miller, Arthur, 77–78 Moi, Tituba Sorcière . . . Noire de Salem (I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem) (Condé), 12, 75; archive critiqued by, 82; orality in, 86; Victoire contrasted with, 82–83, 87 Morrison, Toni, 11, 18–21, 26–27, 30, 80, 85 mothers, 95, 98–99, 100 music, 57–59, 68–70 Nesbitt, Nick, 76, 88–89 New Orleans, Louisiana, 44, 46 nostalgia: bolero activating, 58; music and, 57–61, 68–70; reflective compared with restorative, 52–53; Special Period reflecting, 57–58 official history: ghosts challenging, 4; as phallogocentric, 13n4; the supernatural destabilizing, 17

116

Index

orality, 52; folk culture and, 41; the past and, 34, 70, 87; subversive, 40–41; testimonial literature and, 64–68; in Tituba, 86; Victoire without, 86; Western epistemologies subverted by, 40; written text in tension with, 40 oral literature, ghosts invoking, 7 oral traditions, 54–55, 64, 82 Otero, Solimar, 9, 54 Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, 8, 9, 86–87 the past, 42, 55; female perspective reconsidering, 51–52; Loynaz emphasizing, 26; music reinhabiting, 57; orality and, 70; the present linked with, 59 Patterson, Orlando, 9 Paz, Octavio, 101 Pérez, Louis A., Jr., 55 Pinochet, Augusto, 28–29 Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of Relation) (Glissant), 85 possession, spirit. See spirit possession puro cuento (phrase), 64 Quidal, Victoire Élodie, 12, 83 Quiroga, José, 58 rape, female slaves impacted by, 80 rebozo (garment), 64–66, 69, 70 religious practices, within African diaspora, 9 rememory, 20 rhizome, root juxtaposed with, 45 Roberts, June, 33 Salem Witch Trials, 76–78, 92n5 “Sammy Dead” (folk song), 42–43 Sharpe, Jenny, 36, 39 silence, slavery and, 85–86 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 11, 18, 21–22, 30 slavery, 9, 20, 36, 77; family history disrupted by, 3; history of, 25–26; lineage obscured by, 88–89; memory of, 21; silence and, 85–86; the

South haunted by, 19; trauma of, 19; uncanny legacy of, 89 Slavery and Social Death (Patterson), 9 Southern Gothic literature, 17–18 Special Period, in Cuba, 55–58 spirit medium, 9, 34, 38–39, 40, 41, 45, 59, 63, 79, 99 spirit possession: colonialism resisted through, 33; Louisiana analyzing, 11; oral tradition linked to, 54–55 spirits: accessing family history, 10–11; female, 101; linear temporality disrupted by, 81; linear time impacted by, 98–99; time and knowledge and, 80–81; as witnesses, 54–55. See also ghosts spiritual epistemologies, 37–39 spiritual knowledge, as performative, 38–39 story (récit), history contrasted with, 6, 34 storytelling, 64–65, 90–91 the supernatural, official history destabilized by, 17 Taylor, Diana, 37, 40, 65 Te di la vida entera (I Gave You All I Had) (Valdés), 12, 51, 53–54, 63, 70, 99 le temps des femmes. See women’s time testimonialista. See witness testimonial literature, 56, 64–68 Texaco (Chamoiseau), 6 Texas Rangers, Mexicans expelled by, 67 time. See cyclical time; history; linear time; the past Tituba, 76–78; Condé conversing with, 75; fiction portraying, 92n5; historical abyss faced by, 81–82 Toland-Dix, Shirley, 33, 37–38, 44 Tonantzín (goddess), 95 Torres-Saillant, Silvio, 5

Index

traditions: Afro-Cuban religious, 54; folk, 45; gothic, 17; oral, 54–55, 64, 82 trauma: generational, 97–98; ghosts revealing, 1; Casa de los espíritus addressing, 28; national, 28, 30; of slavery, 19; uncanny return of, 89 trauma fiction, 98 Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture (Edwards and Guardini Vasconcelos), 2 Undead Souths (Anderson, Hagood, and Cross Turner), 2, 17 United States (U.S.), 17–23, 44–45 Universal History, by Hegel, 4, 45 U.S. See United States U.S. literature, ghosts in, 17–23 Valdés, Zoé, 12, 51, 53–59, 61, 63, 68, 99 Vickroy, Laurie, 98

117

Victoire (Condé), 1, 12, 75, 83–85, 88, 90; as alternative history, 91; without orality, 86; Tituba contrasted with, 82–83, 87 Virgin of Guadalupe, 95 “The Voyager In, the Voyager Out” (Condé), 80 Walcott, Derek, 25 Walker, Malik J. M., 46 weaving, storytelling conflated with, 64–65 Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, 4 Western epistemologies, 40, 46 witness (testimonialista), 52, 55–57 women’s time (le temps des femmes), 60, 65 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 33, 35–36 Yúdice, George, 66 zombie, in Victoire, 86–87

About the Author

Kristina S. Gibby is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at Utah Valley University. She teaches introductory humanities courses, world literature, Latin American humanities, and Caribbean literature. Her interests include time, memory, history, nature, modern art, and Hemispheric American studies, specifically contemporary female authors from the Caribbean and the United States. She has published articles and book chapters on Carson McCullers, Sandra Cisneros, Zoé Valdés, Maryse Condé, and Edwidge Danticat.

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