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“[A] border that exists beyond maps”: Contextualizing State-Sponsored Violence in Contemporary Haitian American and Dominican American Literature

ABSTRACT:Although using different approaches, Dominican American authors Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario—as well as Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat—all wrote historically-grounded works of fiction predominately in English in the 1990s and 2000s, engaging with the legacy of Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, who was in power from 1930 to 1961. All four writers use the histories of Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the twentieth century—personal, embodied, traumatic histories—to both position readers as witnesses to racism, violence, and sexual exploitation and to comment on the nature of History more broadly. I use representations of the Haitian Massacre of 1937 as a test case essential for distinguishing the approaches and positionings of each novelist, in addition to exploring the relationship between these Caribbean diasporic novels, national belonging, and the tension between History with a capital h (or official written accounts of the past) vs. personal individualized histories. These writers attempt to recount the unrepresentable through the gaps and silences in their fictional accounts. Through the use of multiple voices, perspectives, and experiences to illustrate the negative impacts of dictatorships on communities, the writers demonstrate that even though these histories are unnarratable, they nevertheless open themselves up to attempts at representation. Thus, to differing extents, these novels can be seen as resisting and reversing the dictator’s official narrative, allowing a multiplicity of other voices, experiences, and stories to rise to the surface and challenging dictatorial limitations placed on national belonging.