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Must The Subaltern Speak

Abstract / Excerpt

These reflections focus on a series of texts written in and about Haiti and circulated throughout the literary and cyber spaces of the global so-called First World. The first text is a November 2010 letter written by a Haitian woman who survived a brutal gang rape in one of the twenty-two IDP camps set up for earthquake victims in Port-au-Prince… It was in Danticat’s essay that I first read the sobering words of K’s letter. Whereas the signatories took issue with what they argued was the American reporter’s sensationalist and decontextualized portrayal of Haiti as ‘a heart-of-darkness dystopia,’ Danticat foregrounded issues of witnessing and consent.” This is a shortened version of her article “‘You Have Said Things You Should Not Have Said’: Trauma, Healing, and Treacherous Self-Telling in Stories of Haitian Women,” first published in Francosphères 4, no. 1 (August 2015): 71–83.)

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Citation “I’d recommend this as a reading in so many contexts: In creative writing workshops, in literature seminars, in a methodology course in the social sciences, in any context where the reader is thinking about the ethics of researching and creating across social and political difference--or more specifically about the ‘obstacles to a meaningful and respectful integration of certain, often women’s, postcolonial bodies into a global citizenry that is hierarchized.’ Glover articulates how Danticat is able to tell stories across categories of boundedness and freedom by insisting that ‘the Haitian woman’s body and mind must be tended to in their individuality, and that Black women must be allowed safe spaces within which to bear witness to their own experiences and to tell their own stories, should they decide to do so.’

“I'd love to ask students to read this before we met to talk about archival research methodology. As we discussed western formulations of the archive, reading across the archival grain in the records of predominantly white institutions such as Barnard, and the power in the refusal of the archival gaze, Glover’s readings of Danticat’s work could ground a discussion of ‘the possibility that freedom–though perhaps most often seized through self-narrating declarations–may also very well sound like silence. The question becomes, then, how best to navigate representation so as to avoid the “theft” of voice while remaining committed to voicing the unspeakable.’” - Martha Tenney, Director of Barnard Library Archives & Special Collections

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