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With the critical and popular successes of Edwidge Danticat's literary texts, Haitian literatures in the United States have found a new Anglophone feminist voice that sings of memory and loss, motherland and migration, as well as liminal spaces between: the Atlantic Ocean for those crossing the sea or the detention centers at Guantânamo Bay for those intercepted at sea by U.S. Coast Guards and detained there. Danticat's literary texts rethink national boundaries, specifically Haiti's borders of nanchon (nation) and dyaspora (diaspora), and her narratives suggest transnational flows across the Atlantic and the Caribbean in which Haiti's dyaspora informs its nanchon. Danticat intimates that citizenship needs to be thought of as diasporic and transnational rather than merely as a national category of identification, and her literary texts also have significant parallels with theorizations by Carolle Charles1 and Myriam J. A. Chancy2 for a transnational Haitian feminist politics3 and poetics.4 In her migratory texts, Danticat explores the ambivalent diasporizations that annihilate definitive national belonging, noting how the parameters of the national persist and are refigured in the diasporic; like Charles and Chancy, Danticat suggests a transnational feminist politics to address the struggles of women in Haiti and in its dyaspora and to chart cross-national alliances between them.
In this article, I analyze Danticat's literary preoccupations with maternity (embodied, failed, and refused) in her story collection Krik? Krak! (1995) as emblematic of Ayiti (Haiti), nanchon, and dyaspora. The stories in Danticat's Krik? Krak! are interwoven narratives of suffering and violence but also of survival and endurance in Haiti and in its dyaspora, or "tenth department."5 I also analyze Danticat's feminist "poetics of relation"6 and her diasporic storytelling about Ayiti through the revolutionary figures of Défilée-la-Folle and Sor Rose in the stories "Nineteen Thirty-Seven" and "Between the Pool and the Gardenias."7 While Danticat's historical points of reference in Krik? Krak! traverse the boundaries of past and present from an African Créole origin evoked in the folkloric and legendary historical figures of Défilée and Sor Rose to present-day Haiti and her refugee migrations, I will focus more narrowly here on Danticat's transnational feminist re-visioning of Haiti's history through the figures of Sor Rose and Défilée.8 Danticat uses these heroic maternal figures from the colonial (Sor Rose) and revolutionary (Défilée) periods...