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Tales Of Possession And Dispossession

Narrative Economies Of Loss And Grief In Edwidge Danticat’s Claire Of The Sea Light (2013)
Elsa Charléty

Résumés

Cet article propose d’étudier la manière dont l’absence est représentée dans le roman d’Edwidge Danticat Claire of the Sea Light (2013) Dans ce roman polyphonique, les solitudes se croisent sans se rencontrer. Claire of the Sea Light dit dans un langage hybride, entre anglais et créole, le vide qui suit la perte et les moyens mis en place pour le combler. Dépossédés de ceux qui leur sont chers, les membres de la communauté de Ville Rose compensent l’absence en partageant les souvenirs des disparus. Leur souvenir est convoqué dans un espace discursif commun, où les individus se laissent posséder par les absents des autres dans le but de reprendre possession de leur propre travail de deuil. L’écriture d’Edwidge Danticat, dans sa négociation des rapports entre le collectif et l’individuel, construit un langage de l’échange autour du vide. De ce partage, émerge une esthétique polyphonique de l’absence qui permet de transformer la douleur individuelle en mémoire collective.

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This a story within a story — so slippery at the edges that one wanders when and where it started and whether it will end.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot

1Haiti is a land marked by absence and erasure. From the early days of the Revolution, its history as the first Republic of free blacks has been stifled in western popular discourse (Daut, Polyné, Sepinwall). To contain the threat represented by black nationalism, the colonial powers orchestrated the financial and political ostracization of the newly created nation alongside the systematic denigration of what it represented (Trouillot, Fisher). The Haitian Revolution thus became a non-event in Western history through what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls the “silencing of the past”: the erasure and exclusion of traces of the event in sources and archives (Trouillot 48). On the people who once embodied the ideal of absolute freedom was imposed a narrative that was not theirs: one of violent, rebellious slaves at the margins of Western modernity, “a tiny speck,” Nick Nesbitt says, “on the periphery of the Atlantic world” (Polyné 5).

2This silencing reminds us that history is never just about the recording of facts, but also the manner in which these facts are recorded through the production of historical narratives. To tell a story is to produce knowledge about oneself and others, to possess the means to shape both history and, just as importantly, “a framework in which to interpret the present” (Foucault 28). Haiti was dispossessed at birth of the power to tell its own story, something, Trouillot argues, that would be detrimental not only in the decades following the Revolution but also in the centuries to come: “Ostracized for the better part of the nineteenth century, the country deteriorated both economically and politically — in part as a result of its ostracism,” he observes, and “the silencing of the revolution was strengthened by the fate of Haiti itself” (Trouillot 98).

3As natural disasters, political upheavals, military occupations and other crises continued to strike the island, a sense of impending catastrophe became the new normal for many Haitians. There is always another disaster to come, reactivating the injustices of the past and generating new struggles in the present. “Deyè mòn gen mòn,” as the Haitian proverb goes: behind a mountain, there is always another mountain. As these hardships pile up, Michèle Montas-Dominique writes, individual voices become “muted” or drowned. “Sim pa rélé” — “if I don’t shout” in response — she continues, then silence and absence win (Farmer 272-273). Caught in the currents of history, the individual is torn between the difficulty of speaking when one has to fight for survival and the necessity of fighting back against the silence, one small story at a time.

4It is from this tension that the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat drew inspiration for her novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013). Having immigrated to the United States when she was twelve, Edwidge Danticat found herself away from country and kin when a devastating earthquake struck Haiti in 2010. In “Lòt Bò Dlo” (Farmer, 261-270), a short text she wrote in the immediate aftermath, Edwidge Danticat explains the paralyzing fear this distance caused. Being on the other side of the water — lòt bò dlo — left her feeling helpless and incapable of reaching out to those in need. It also caused her to question her role as a writer. “What will I say,” she asked, about the numerous lost lives whose stories will never be told? (Farmer, 264-267).

5At the time, she was editing a collection of Haitian short stories, Haiti Noir (2011), a project that almost came to a halt in the wake of the earthquake. Edwidge Danticat feared that the cataclysmic event had reshaped Haiti so much that the texts were now irrelevant (Danticat 2011, 15). She nonetheless resumed the editing process, including in the manuscript three short stories addressing the tragic event. One of them, “Claire of the Sea Light,” would be the blueprint for the novel to come. “Claire of the Sea Light,” which concerns the difficulties faced by a small rural community in the aftermath of a natural disaster, is similar to other short stories in the collection: dark and brutal, “Noir indeed” (Danticat 2011, 15). No one is spared from the devastating effects of loss, not even young Claire, a seven-year-old girl that kills herself by smashing her skull open on her mother’s grave. Two year later, Edwidge Danticat went back the manuscript to enlarge and transform it. The resulting novel, also called Claire of the Sea Light (2013), takes up the main elements of the short story, but in a more peaceful and less violent mode. As the story of Claire is retold, absence and loss come to bear a different significance.

6Written in a hybrid language between English and Haitian Creole, Claire of the Sea Light is a polyphonic text compiling the stories of the residents of the fictional coastal town of Ville Rose and their everyday struggles with absence in all its forms. The story opens on the day the titular Claire Limyè Lanmè disappears. Her father, a fisherman called Nozias, raised Claire on his own after his wife died in childbirth. In order to give Claire a decent life, he then convinced Madame Gaëlle, a wealthy widow whose only daughter died at a young age, to adopt her. On hearing of her father’s plan, Claire runs away: a disappearance that reopens past wounds as people from the town remember and discuss their last interactions with her. In talking about Claire’s absence, the characters reveal their own stories of loss, estrangement, and sorrow in an intricate network of enmeshed narratives. Dispossessed of their loved ones, the villagers try to fill the void through the sharing of tales: memories of the departed are conjured up in a communal discursive space where individuals allow themselves to be possessed by the loss of others in order to regain possession of their own pain and grief.

7Focusing on the narrative structure and linguistic fabric of Claire of the Sea Light, in this article I argue that absence gets configured in the aesthetic of the novel through the circulation of stories of loss and grief. I contend that the interwoven tales of the people of Ville Rose form a narrative economy in which memories, emotions and bonds are traded amongst people in order to cope with the void left by those who are gone. Through juxtaposing the novel with Edwidge Danticat’s other writings, as well as anthropological research on Haiti, I show how the text, while constantly negotiating the space between the collective and the individual, creates a language of exchange around the notion of absence. Through this exchange, a polyphonic aesthetic of absence emerges that transforms individual pain into a collective memory that can counter erasure and silencing.

Missing Bodies And The Cummulative Experience Of Grief

8Life, Edwidge Danticat writes, is never easy in Haiti: “There was always the risk of dying from hunger, an infectious disease, a natural disaster, or a crime” (Danticat 2011, 11). Ville Rose is no exception as loss permeates all aspects of daily life. Every character has experienced the loss of someone dear: Nozias, Claire’s father, has lost his wife in childbirth; Madame Gaëlle, the wealthy widow of a local tradesman, has lost her daughter Rose in a car accident; Josephine, a friend of Nozias, loses her husband Caleb at sea. Local gang violence and state corruption add to the causalities: people fall victim to crossfire and revenge killings, and like the esclaves marrons they flee to the mountains to avoid the violence of the authorities. The economy, too, creates absences. Through trying to “chèche lavi” (Danticat 2013, 9) — find a better life for themselves — those who migrate to the United States or other neighboring countries inadvertently drain Ville Rose of its vital force. They have gone “lot bò dlo” — crossed over a body of water — in both a literal and metaphorical sense, never to be seen again. As the population thins down to almost nothing, the remaining villagers have to not only grapple with the absence of their loved ones, but also battle against their own impending erasure.

9The fragility of life is built into the narrative structure of Claire of the Sea Light: as the plot progresses, the narration shifts from one character to another, regardless of their relevance to the main story arc. Death is one of the many forms that absence takes in the economy of the novel; an economy founded both on the sudden retrieval of bodies from the common space and the ebbing and flowing of stories in and out of narrative focus, each rendered equally small and insignificant as the swaying movements of the text wash away more and more bodies regardless of their social or narrative importance. Claire’s disappearance, for example, is quickly swept out of focus, replaced by the story of Madame Gaëlle’s husband Laurent Lavaud, who is murdered on the high street of Ville Rose for voicing his opposition to the local government. As his wife reflects on how empty her life is without him, the narrative abruptly shifts to the story of Bernard Dorien. When rumors of his relationship with the son of an influential local politician start spreading, Bernard is arrested by the police on false pretenses and dies mysteriously in prison. As the population dwindles, the text proliferates with more and more stories from the people who are left behind.

10More often than not, the bodies of the departed are never found, as is the case with Caleb, a young fisherman taken by what is described in the opening paragraph as a “freak wave” (Danticat 2013, 3). This disappearance, mirrored almost immediately by that of Claire, reveals the network of loss that binds the characters together. When Caleb disappears at sea, Nozias (father to Claire and friend of Caleb) intuits immediately that his friend is gone: even without a tangible proof of death, he feels Caleb’s absence in his flesh, or more precisely in his bones:

He looked down the beach at Caleb’s shack, where Caleb’s wife Fifine — Josephine — had probably returned to bed after seeing him off. Nozias knew from his experience, and could sense in his bones, that both Caleb and the boat were gone. They might wash up in a day or two, or likely they never would (Danticat 2013, 3-4).

11Felt at the same time as it is known, loss becomes a feeling expressed somatically but not fully processed. Without the ocular proof that a corpse provides, the relatives and friends of Caleb cannot fully accept his death; hope remains as long as a body is not found. Josephine, Caleb’s wife, stands on the beach for the whole day after her husband’s disappearance. She stares at the sea in the hope of his body being found, but nothing happens. At the end of the day, the fishermen sit on the sand next to her, play cards and drink alcohol “just as they would at an official wake” (Danticat 2013, 28). The community gathers to perform a mock funeral but throughout the novel, Josephine is seen by other characters still waiting by the seashore for the body of her husband. Unable to find closure, her feeling of grief expands through the time and space of the text, sinking into both the individual and the communal body.

12The pain experienced by the characters comes and goes in waves, reflecting the movements of the Caribbean Sea which is not only a backdrop, but a force and a symbol of loss itself:

The sea was both hostile and docile, the ultimate trickster. It was as large as it was small, as long as you could claim a portion of it for yourself. (…) You could take as much as you want from it. But it too could take back (Danticat 2013, 199).

13This meditation on the sea’s ability to both give and take reflects the transient nature of loss in the novel. Because of its circulatory movement, pain is not something that settles: it can get hold of people at any moment and come back to haunt them. Those who have disappeared are nowhere to be found and, consequently, their absence is felt everywhere. When a body goes missing, what the people of Ville Rose lose is not just a life, but also the capacity to overcome grief. Life, accordingly, becomes somewhat akin to death; the present becomes a “phantom version” of the past (Danticat 2013, 82) that fades away and is replaced by memories more vivid than real life.

14The narrative economy of loss in Claire of the Sea Light is thus a fraught one: life, the sea, fate and other powerful forces take more than the local people can cope with. Absence is more than just the void left after someone is gone, more than a state or condition in which something is not present. It is an active force that propels the plot forward, shapes the personal trajectories of characters, and constantly threatens to overpower their means of recovery. In order to stop absence from eroding their drive to live, survivors of tragedy develop strategies to structure what little life they have left. These strategies — stories, folklore, tales — represent an imperfect but necessary means of regaining possession of one’s narrative in the face of absence.

Neither Dead Or Alive: Revenan, Duppy, Zonbi And Haitian Death Lore

15Because mourning cannot be completed in the absence of a body, the lost souls of Ville Rose seem never gone for good: they remain in villagers’ lives as traces or memories and materialize as supernatural creatures. Akin to Western narratives of haunting, Claire of the Sea Light sees the boundaries between the living and the departed as porous. However, the way the exchange between the two worlds takes place echoes not Western but Haitian death lore: the departed soul becomes not a “ghost” but a zonbi, a duppy or a revenan.

16As Edwige Danticat clarified in an interview, the mythology of Claire of the Sea Light is inspired by but not “faithful” to traditional Haitian beliefs. Instead, she writes about what she calls “fakelore”: a set of stories created by the community to protect its psyche, find comfort, and claw back some control over the overpowering forces of fate (Jones, 2014). Calling back to the work of anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, Edwidge Danticat notes that myths and lore are ever shifting in response to the needs of both the people who tell them and those who are listening.

17In studies conducted by anthropologists, ethnographers, and theologians on the death lore of former Caribbean slave colonies, the boundary between life and death is understood differently from Western traditions (Métraux, Dayan, Deren). While European-centered theology and philosophy draws a strict line between living consciousness and dead matter, this “alternative ontology,” inherited from the West African religion of former plantation slaves, sees the living as heterogeneously composed of all their ancestors. Drawn from all forms of living matter, humans, like other living beings, host more than one soul within their bodies. One of those souls, called gro bon anj in Haitian Creole, is a good soul planted by a loa, or god. The others, called ti bon zanj are earthly, secular spirits that wander away from the body in moments of unconsciousness. While not inherently evil, they are nonetheless bound to earthly matters and command human personalities. As a consequence, they are more likely to be “the target of sorcery and may be stolen” (Ackermann and Gauthier 469). When this happens, the souls can be trapped away from their carnal envelopes, creating what is understood in Caribbean lore as a zonbi: a body, dead or alive, deprived of will, memory and consciousness, made to obey the orders of the person who holds their ti bon zanj away from him.

18These wandering souls appear to the living as shadows and take possession of material things like trees, food and small animals in order to play tricks on people. If the souls wander for too long, and the body they are tied to is unconscious, far away or dead, they can get lost. Lost souls will eventually possess the bodies of animals, children or fully-grown adults, becoming a duppy. Unlike the zonbi that is made to obey the human keeping his soul bottled, the duppy are mischievous and ill-intentioned creatures that will trick other humans into thinking they are real. They can, however, be stopped through various spells and preventive measures (Leach 211). As pointed out by American folklorist MacEdward Leach in his ethnographic study of Caribbean folklore, the duppy “is never a ghost in the European sense as something white floating around or as something that goes bump in the night,” it inhabits the flesh of a living creature or takes the physical shape of the human body it used to belong to (Leach 207). The duppy acts and talks in ways similar to the absent person but is only a fragment of what makes that person complete, one of the numerous souls that humans are made of.

19Both zonbi and duppy are easy metaphors for the emptiness and lack of purpose experienced by those who survive deep loss. The literal possession of the victim’s body articulates the symbolic dispossession of these people as well as their vulnerability in the face of grief. When Madame Gaëlle reflects on the void left by her husband and her daughter, she compares herself to a zonbi. Usually of a pragmatic nature that refuses to indulge in local superstitions, she wonders whether “she was a shell, just as she had been when she was pregnant with her daughter, just as she had been during those early days after her husband died” (Danticat 2013, 148). Many years of accumulated sadness have emptied Madame Gaëlle of her drive and the void created by absence cannot be filled with anything other than a story she tells herself; a tale she barely believes in but needs nonetheless.

20Other members of Ville Rose develop an intricate set of rituals to prevent a soul from being lost and becoming a zonbi or a duppy. Claire’s mother, who used to work for the undertaker, describes such practices as being common, albeit secret. She would tell Nozias about families who buried the dead in secret places ahead of funeral services and filled the empty coffins with cement, all out of fear that the departed might be snatched away and turned into zonbis. She would also tell him stories of people taking away the shoes from dead bodies so that they are not weighed down in the afterlife and can be freed from their carnal ties (Danticat 2013, 207). All these rituals are performed secretly, kept from the public by the benevolent eye of the undertaker and Claire’s mother, with her husband Nozias as her only confidant.

21It is never made clear whether these folk creatures actually exist in the world of Ville Rose: they could be pure superstition on the part of the villagers or part of the literary tradition of magic realism common to Southern American and Caribbean literature (Carpentier, Alexis, Glissant). They remain ambiguous and hybrid, somewhere between the folk belief and the operative concept, between the ephemeral phantoms familiar to a Western audience and the incarnated ghosts of Afro-Caribbean culture. They also remain, however, creatures that can be mastered by human powers: with the right words and the right gestures, a living human can get rid of a zonbi, or a duppy and go back to their everyday life. In showing the risk of not performing funerals the right way, the lore provides structure for the process of mourning within the community: a story, in other words, to live by.

22The revenan, another type of Haitian ghost, undermines the meaning of absence on a deeper level. It is portrayed in Claire of the Sea Light as a source of deep fear for the community of Ville Rose; something far more unsettling than the easily dispatched duppy or zonbi. It is the product of a supernatural trade that led a spirit to bargain its way back to earth, and returns to life as a newborn baby on the condition that someone else dies at the moment of its birth.

23This belief, inherited from the Voodoo tradition, generates anxiety among the villagers, especially the older women. They firmly believe that Claire, whose mother died while giving birth to her, is one of these mythical and dangerous creatures and that she needs to be watched closely. Their eagerness to keep Claire under scrutiny comes from fear that the world of the living and the dead might suddenly overlap in a way that escapes their control. Unlike the zonbi or the duppy, the revenan is not the product of the movements of souls within and without bodies and does not “mount” or take possession of a preexisting body. Rather, it is a spirit, made of flesh and bones, which takes the place of another being on this planet. It achieves this only by fighting its way to earth at the expense of its mother’s life:

To most, Claire Limyè Lamè was a revenan, a child who had entered the world just as her mother was leaving it. And if these types of children are not closely watched, they can easily follow their mother into the other world. The only way to save them is to immediately severe them from the place where they were born. Otherwise they will spend too much time chasing a shadow they will never reach (Danticat 2013, 16).

24The common sense of the people, ready to accept the death of a child at birth, or of both mother and child, refuses to accept that only the child should survive. Instead, the surviving child is believed to have powers inherited from its tragic birth, including an unusual attraction to the underworld, and a desire from revenan children to “follow their mother” there.

25The revenan is accordingly not like a ghost or a duppy, who are merely traces of the former presence of the departed. It is a presence that signifies the absence of what is gone. Someone is replaced by a sign of their absence; a sign embodied in a child that will grow to be a constant reminder to the community that, in spite of the comforting lore that sees life and death as porous categories, they will always, like the revenan children, be “chasing a shadow they will never reach.” The revenan thus reflects the anxiety within the community of Ville Rose at actually having to process grief and accept that absence and death leave a void that cannot be filled.

26Even the revenan, however, is ultimately comforting in that it still provides some form of contact with those who have departed. In an attempt to reassure Claire that she is not inherently a threat to the community, however, Madame Gaëlle states the harsh reality of what absence means: “That revenan talk is superstition,” she claims, “Nobody returns. That’s not real. You’re gone. You’re gone. Back in God’s hand and no one to pull you back” (Danticat 162). In doing so, she goes against the comfortable narrative that the zonbi, the duppy and even the revenan, with all its fearfulness, ultimately provide to the community. She thwarts the ongoing exchange between life and death, between absence and presence, which these folktales allow. Her words point to something that offers no consolation: the fact that, however rich or poor, the people of Ville Rose end up destitute through loss. Absence spares no one and exhausts the drive to live; people become, as one character mentions, “the real ghosts” of the story:

People who had lost siblings, parents, children and friends. These were the real ghosts, he would say, the phantom limbs, phantom minds, phantom loves that haunted them because they were used, then abandoned, because they were out of choices, because they were poor (Danticat 2013, 83).

27Folklore, or “fakelore,” fills the void — the silence — with stories, but raises as many questions as it provides answers. While it does manage to give structure and social significance to individual experiences of loss, it does not allow people to fully heal from their wounds. Overcome by grief, pain and melancholia, the people of Ville Rose who are incapable of processing absence prevent the natural economy of life and death in the village: while the boundaries between the two are usually believed flexible enough for some trade to occur, the melancholic mourners strike a perverse bargain. Focused on their individual pain, they withdraw themselves from the community, taking with them the precious memories of their loved ones. The community is thus deprived of both a body and a soul and offered no compensation for the empty space. Other people hide from each other to perform their own rituals, fear the judgment of others, and grow suspicious of each other. Even animals and children can come to be a threat, a sign from the undead. Far from bringing the community together, tales of possessed bodies and the undead fragment it even more. Solace comes from another kind of tales: those who come from love rather than fear and that, through being passed on and shared among the community, alleviate the pain of loss.

Di Mwen: The Healing Virtues Of Storytelling

28In his essay on trauma and its mechanisms, Sandor Ferenczi, an early disciple of Sigmund Freud, discusses the effect of pain on individuals. He argues that pain is linked to a previous trauma that fragments the sense of self, isolating the individual in their pain. Following Freud’s analysis of melancholia as incapacity to cope with deep loss, Ferenzci observes that when pain is greater than one’s capacity to absorb it, one’s sense of wholeness is shattered into fragments:

Should the quality and quantity of suffering exceed the person’s power of comprehension, then one capitulates; one endures no longer; it is no longer worthwhile to combine these painful things into a unit, and one is split into pieces. I do not suffer anymore; indeed, I cease to exist, at least as complete ego. The individual components parts can suffer each by itself (Ferenczi 210).

29In Claire of the Sea Light, characters are always on the verge of fragmentation. Pain and unprocessed grief isolate members of the community, and this is reflected in the structure of the narrative. The book is fragmented into sections, each one built around the point of view of one character. Through the fragmented structure of the text, points of view overlap but do not form parts of a larger whole. At Caleb’s wake, for example, characters share a common moment without interacting with each other, divided as they are by individual pain. The ceremony takes place on the night of Caleb’s disappearance, and as the community of fishermen gathers by the seashore to pay homage, Nozias, whose heart is burdened by the loss of his friend, knows his daughter Claire is dancing with other little girls. His gaze is nonetheless focused on Josephine and her church companions who are there to lead the ceremony with chants and prayers. Later on, Madame Gaëlle walks by the beach. It is the anniversary of her daughter’s passing and she is lost in her thoughts. She nonetheless notices Claire dancing on the beach. As Nozias approaches, they start a conversation that will eventually lead them to walk away both from Claire and the ceremony. In that brief moment Claire runs away, having understood the nature of the trade between her father and the wealthy lady. When Madame Gaëlle and Nozias come back to the seashore, the girl is nowhere to be found, and they abandon the mourners to search for her.

30As this unfolds in parallel to the funeral ceremony, another tragedy occurs, unnoticed by Josephine, her church people, Nozias or Madame Gaëlle. Max Ardin Jr. arrives on the beach after a long day of erring. Burdened by the loss of his lover, Bernard Dorien, and the crushing the weight of family obligations, he watches the ceremony sadly. When Claire disappears, he witnesses the whole thing from a distance, unable to relate to or take part in the search. Claire is nothing more to him than “a missing girl,” Nozias “a fisherman” and Madame Gaëlle “his parents’ old friend” (Danticat 2013, 118-119). The search party breaks apart, the ceremony stops, and everybody eventually leaves. This is the moment Max Ardin Jr. chooses to plunge into the sea and be taken by the waves, another body that will never be found. In literal darkness and silence, the death of Max Ardin Jr. is obscured by the two other tragedies happening on that day, relegated to the background of other catastrophes.

31In spite of all the alienation, however, something greater than individual loss manages, in the end, to connect the people of Ville Rose. A parallel economy ties the community together in a way that supersedes the tragic logic of alienation generated by loss and the impervious nature of grief. This economy is based on the communal sharing of pain and giving of care, and sustains the cohesion of the village as an organic entity. As Leslie Desmangles explains in his study of Voodoo and Roman Catholicism in Haiti, community plays a key role in the construction of individual identities. “The individual self,” he insists, “has no independent existence which gives it the power to enter into relationship with other selves. Only through living intercourse with others can it become a self at all” (Desmangles 64). Every human being is but a piece in the fabric of the world and exists by acknowledging their place in the order of things.

32In Ville Rose, an individual cannot exist outside of the community, and although some try, no one is ever allowed to be “the sole owner of their tragedy” (Danticat 2013, 16). The community will dispossess the mourners of the ownership of their own grief, but in doing so they free them from holding on to it for too long. The grieving person is stripped of the idea that the “self” is a homogeneous self-contained entity and has to understand it as part of a network of heterogeneous relationships, of “dynamic confluences of bodies, forces and events, none of them wholly our own, non-reducible to ‘us’” (Taylor, 149). Fueled by the influence of obeah beliefs and voodoo practices which insist on the transient and vulnerable nature of our existences (Paton and Forde), the villagers put into place a coping mechanism that relies on interconnectivity and mutual reliance. Being forced to always share one’s pain with other people means learning to put one’s self aside and write one’s story into the narratives of others. Feelings of loss and grief are thus passed on from one person to another, creating what could be called an “economy of affects” that is based not on the trading, but the sharing of pain at a communal level.

33The community accordingly takes on the work of healing that could not occur on an individual level. The villagers learn not only from their own suffering, but also from the suffering of others. As Claire’s father explains, pain serves a mimetic function: “It took watching another child die in her mother’s arms,” he says, “to remind him once again how much he’d miss his daughter if he’d give her away for good” (Danticat 2013, 16). From dispossession and loss, solace and comfort emerge, but loss only produces gain when the experience of it is shared within the community, producing a common memory.

34This comes about through the telling and passing on of stories about the departed, creating an oral space where grief is processed and life can keep going. On the town radio show called “Di Mwen,” or “Tell Me” in Haitian Creole, stories are broadcast in order to turn grief into memories of a peaceful nature. Words, most of all spoken words, can bring back the dead on our own terms. Instead of being assailed by painful recollections, ghosts, and other possessed and possessing creatures, the storyteller passes on a positive memory about someone that is gone, thus starting their own process of healing.

35Claire, for example, who has been absent from most the narrative, comes back to the village after she has a heartfelt discussion with Madame Gaëlle, who knew Claire’s mother well.

Tell me more, she wanted to say. Please tell me much more. Open that invisible box with the invisible mother and let me see what is inside. Claire wanted Madame Gaëlle to keep talking about her mother. But Madame Gaëlle stopped talking. Instead Madame Gaëlle smiled. Then as though this were a revelation to herself, Madame Gaëlle said: “your mother was my friend.” (Danticat 2013, 225)

36The gaping hole in Claire’s life that is her mother is suddenly filled: she is fleshed out by Madam Gaëlle’s story into something of a memory, what Claire later calls “an invisible piece of her” (Danticat 2013, 224). Once Madame Gaëlle has told her that she was a friend of her mother and knew her well, Claire has a revelation that, in turn, reflects back on Madame Gaëlle. From the conjoined narrative of Claire’s mother, a shared experience emerges between the two women, one through which the memory of a loved one lives on for both the teller and the listener.

37Names play a huge role in building such common memories of the absent: they are shared, uttered and conjured up by members of the community regardless of their relation to the person who bore it in the first place. The functions of names accordingly change over the course of time, and they end up signifying many other things. The name “Rose” for example, represents many layers of narratives within the text: it is the name of the patron saint of the city (Saint Rose de Lima), who in turn gave her name to the village (Ville Rose); it is also the baptism name taken by a remote ancestor of Madame Gaëlle (Sò Rose) and that of Madame Gaëlle’s daughter who died in a car accident (Rose). As the story goes along, the reader comes to realize, through the many-fragmented points of view, that “Rose” is actually more than just a name. It is loaded with memories of people, things and deities, and through its many variations ensures the passing on of a communal memory (that of the city, its history and the families that made it), not to mention the continuity of life itself: one rose dies while another is born to replace it. Names are never really attached to anyone or anything in particular, just like souls are not fully attached to a body, and the dead are never fully dead. Speaking them out loud and reattributing them to different beings and creatures is a crucial part of embracing this circulatory economy of life where, as Maya Deren points out, “the energy of matter is common to all living matter” (Deren 25).

Conclusion

38In the short story “Claire of the Sea Light,” Claire does not make it back to Ville Rose. Her father — called Gaspard in this version — finds her dead by her mother’s grave. Overcome by grief, she had repeatedly pounded her head on the grave until she cracked her skull open and bled to death. The story ends on a heartbreaking description of Claire’s body, limp and lifeless, drowned in a pool of blood (Danticat 2011, 138). When Edwidge Danticat wrote this version, the wounds of the 2010 earthquake were still fresh: “As I am writing these words,” she explained, “survivors remain huddled by the thousands in displacement camps, most shielding themselves from intermittent rain with nothing but wooden posts and bedsheets” (Danticat 2011, 11). The bone-chilling scene with which “Claire of the Sea Light” ends can easily be seen as an immediate reaction to the horrors of catastrophe, the child’s bleeding body an echo of the numerous losses the Haitian community had to face once again.

39In Create Dangerously (2010), a bibliographical literary manifesto, Edwige Danticat borrowed from Albert Camus to explain that the writer, but more specifically the immigrant writer, has no other choice but to “create dangerously”: “Though we may not be creating as dangerously as our forebears,” she notes, and “though exile does not threaten us into perpetual silence, still, while we are at work bodies are littering the streets somewhere” (Danticat 2010, 18). For that reason, the immigrant writer has the duty to create as though each line and each word was standing in for a life. As they stand on the other side of the water, their role is to bravely move forward when these others cannot. From the relative comfort of their foreign home, the diasporic writer must “embrace the public and private terrors” that threaten to silence weaker voices (Danticat 2010, 148). A story needs to be written.

40“Claire of the Sea Light,” in its short version, was Edwige Danticat’s first, dangerous step away from silence: the equivalent of a shout, a scream that breaks the silence. But within this story lay another one. “Claire of the Sea Light” the short story became Claire of the Sea Light the novel, a text where the narration is given enough time to carry out its work of healing. Claire eventually comes back to her father after a brief escape in the mountains, comes to understand the reasons behind his actions, and to see Madame Gaëlle as a positive female figure in her life. Madame Gäelle, on her part, reconnects with the people of Ville Rose and comes to terms with some of her pain. Her conversation with Claire makes her realize that memories from the past can also be a source of joy when shared with someone else. In sharing the story of Claire’s mother to the young girl, she allows herself to let go of her grief. She learns, alongside other secondary characters, that pain can be fragmented and scattered across the community so that its burden weighs less on one person. As stories get told and retold, the pain lessens and eventually fades away, maybe to one day disappear.

41Individual beings are never sole possessors of their tragedy, and as a consequence never sole possessor of their narratives. Stories are shared, repeated, amplified and modified within the community, regardless of personal attachments to them. This is not only a way to build a common memory but also to ensure the continuity of life: one person departs and immediately their story is incorporated into the global narrative of the village, ready to be possessed by any living being in the community. Life is thus a cycle in which death is only a step. Madame Gaëlle observes when watching frogs dying in her garden, “A normal cycle was occurring, young was replacing old, life replacing death, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly. Just as it was for everything else” (Danticat 2013, 41). As a consequence, there is no end to the continuous cycle of life and death, as well as no end to the cycle of possession and dispossession of people, or the cycle of pain and grief that loss creates. The only certainty is that voiced out by Claire that she owns no baggage, meaning no heavy load to carry, no attachment to material things, when she eventually has to disappear from this earth for good. Following the spiritual tradition which the Haitian community has inherited from both West African religions and Catholicism, Claire is a character that understands how everything is in the end transitory and will eventually pass, that “the ending is for man the beginning: the condition of his first consciousness of self as living” (Deren 25).

42Stories of pain and suffering, of loss and death are told in attempts to heal. To tell someone, or to urge someone to tell a story — Di Mwen — is what allows for the transformation of pain into something else. The dead are dead and it is an illusion to think that the feeling of loss will ever go away; no story will ever have the power to erase the absence of a loved one. But, in the economy of emotions that circulate throughout the novel, the telling of stories can have the power to trade a story that hurts for a story that heals. What stories and their telling allow is the proof that selves fragmented by loss never suffer in complete isolation. The telling and retelling of stories of those who are gone is not a way to suffer less, but to suffer better.

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Elsa Charléty, « Tales Of Possession And Dispossession »Sillages critiques [En ligne], 25 | 2018, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2018, consulté le 10 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/7518 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.7518

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Auteur

Elsa Charléty

Lettres Sorbonne Université (VALE EA 4085)
Elsa Charléty est doctorante au département d’Etudes Anglophones de Sorbonne Université et Ph.D student au département de Littérature Comparée de Brown University (USA). Elle prépare actuellement sous la direction de Marc Amfreville une thèse sur les figures de spectres dans la littérature gothique du Sud des Etats-Unis. Ses centres de recherches portent sur la représentation des corps et des voix dans la littérature américaine et caribéenne, ainsi que la question de l’écriture du trauma, de la mémoire et de la perte. Elle a récemment consacré un chapitre aux nouvelles de William Faulkner pour l’ouvrage collectif Undead Souths: The Gothic And Beyond In Southern Literature And Culture, Paris : Presses de Lettres Sorbonne Université, 2015.
Elsa Charléty is a Ph.D student in the département d’Etudes Anglophone at Sorbonne Université and the Comparative Literature department at Brown University. She is currently writing a thesis on spectral figures in gothic American Southern literature. Her research focuses on the representation of voices and bodies in American and Caribbean literatures, as well as on the writing of trauma, memory and loss. She recently wrote a chapter on William Faulkner’s short-stories for a collective volume entitled Undead Souths: The Gothic And Beyond In Southern Literature And Culture, Paris : Presses de Lettres Sorbonne Université, 2015.

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