Breaking Silences around Postcolonial Sexual Violence

The Urgent Activist Role of Contemporary Haitian American Women’s Fiction

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of a three fictional narratives within a literary trend whereby, since the 1990s and early twenty-first century, some contemporary Haitian American female authors have been writing about the consequences of rape culture within the Haitian/Haitian American community  in order to denounce and break the silences imposed on a form of gender-based violence overwhelmingly present in a  tradition where women’s bodies have always been regarded as territories of (post)colonial conquest. Through a comparative close reading of Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), Jaira Placide’s Fresh Girl (2002) and Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State (2014), the article aims to examine these novels’ dissolving of traditional taboos around rape by means of an explicit portrayal of the sexual violence suffered by their female protagonists at the hands of other Haitian (American) characters and the traumatic consequences resulting from such vicious acts. The article concludes by demonstrating that, in contrast to the Haitian novel that seems to have influenced these narratives in their extremely realistic representation of the rape scene and its aftermath—Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Amour, colère, folie (1968)—Danticat’s, Placide’s and Gay’s heroines are depicted as survivors capable of recuperating their bodies and subjectivity by sharing their traumatic stories with others, including the implied reader.