Trauma Lost in Translation: Teaching Gisèle Pineau’s L’espérance-macadam / Macadam Dreams
Callaloo, 2014
Gisèle Pineau's novel L'espérance-macadam / Macadam Dreams is a work of trauma fic- tion that chases and charts the gaping chasm between experience and event in the wake of repressed sexual violence. This relationship between experience and event lies at the core of the conceptualization of trauma and reflects the intersection of knowing and not knowing mentioned in the epigraph of this essay. Contemporary trauma theory has routinely identified its representation as a fraught act of translation unto itself.1 Caribbean literature has long been preoccupied with representing traumatic events whether in the violence of the Atlantic slave trade, slavery and colonialism, or patterns of political and familial violence. When we consider the inexpressibility and incommunicability of pain often explored in these contexts, to express the psychic trauma that results from physical violation complicates the process of narrative creation. At the same time, as Toni Morrison has eloquently argued, speaking the unspoken adds depth and power to these literatures of trauma. As Laura DiPrete explains, "the literature of trauma, bearing witness to the voice, the remembered and the forgotten, the known and the unknown . . . is frequently a double telling"
Rethinking paradox: Performing the politics of gender, race, and belonging in Léonora Miano's ‘Ecrits pour la parole’
Journal of Romance Studies, 2014
This article argues that Léonora Miano’s play Ecrits pour la parole (2012) moves beyond the concept of paradox that has characterized critical work on Black France. Instead, Miano focuses on duality, responding to and rejecting anti-Black racism in specifically gendered ways evident in her combination of feminist and human rights discourses. The play enters into these discourses through the use of the monologue in particular. Form becomes one of the primary ways through which Miano renders the multiplicity of Black women’s subjectivities as well as the vicissitudes of the paradox that lies at the core of Black French identity. By engaging the universal humanist ideal/ideology and exposing it as a fiction at work in the lives of Black women, Miano not only critiques the idea of belonging in the French context, but also posits alternative frames through which to understand the ubiquitous paradox of Black France.