Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Part I Introduction: The Consequences of Ex-Centricity
- Part II Shifty/Shifting Characters
- Part III Space-Time of the Spiral
- 4 Haiti Unbound?
- 5 Present-ing the Past
- 6 Haiti in the Whirl/World
- Part IV Showing vs. Telling
- Part V Conclusions: No Lack of Language
- Works Cited
- Index
5 - Present-ing the Past
from Part III - Space-Time of the Spiral
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Part I Introduction: The Consequences of Ex-Centricity
- Part II Shifty/Shifting Characters
- Part III Space-Time of the Spiral
- 4 Haiti Unbound?
- 5 Present-ing the Past
- 6 Haiti in the Whirl/World
- Part IV Showing vs. Telling
- Part V Conclusions: No Lack of Language
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Aube Tranquille and Le Peuple des terres mêlées
But who in this New World does not have a horror of the past, whether his ancestor was torturer or victim? Who, in the depth of conscience, is not silently screaming for pardon or for revenge? The pulse of New World history is the racing pulse beat of fear …
—Derek WalcottThe present of postcoloniality can be formulated as a moment of going beyond through a return to the present. Interstitiality can be understood as a temporal paradox in which looking to the future necessarily entails a return. The present, the past, and the future do not keep to their proper places, whether in continuum or rupture, but haunt each other, making for what Bhabha calls “the ‘unhomel’ condition of the modern world.”
—Jeannie SukUnfinished stories—unfinished business—are the very foundations upon which Jean-Claude Fignolé's Aube Tranquille is constructed. From the very beginning of the novel, we understand that this is a narrative in which time will not be keeping to its proper place. We realize within the first few phrases that this is a tale of haunting, of vengeful ghosts consumed by centuries-old grudges. We learn that the drama will play out in a series of specific, overlapping spaces and moments—at once conflated and opposed. In Aube Tranquille, Fignolé takes as his point of departure the (Bakhtinian) notion that time and space are not mere background but rather are shaped by the events that take place within them.
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- Information
- Haiti UnboundA Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, pp. 128 - 156Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010