Adriana Umaña Hossman, PhD

As noted by Walter Mignolo, “the notion of homogeneous national cultures and consensual transmission of historical and literary traditions, as well as unadulterated ethnic communities, are in the process of profound revisions and redefinitions.”[1]  My dissertation project entitled Narratives of Death in Depestre, Condé, and Gamboa:  Writing as Ritual for Dwelling in Displacement traces the emergence and development of a transmodern conscience through the study of literary representations of death in works by three novelists from the Global South.  René Depestre (Haiti), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe), and Santiago Gamboa (Colombia) describe a world of migration and relationality that seeks to transcend tragic and accusatory discourses of postcoloniality.  In their narratives, death serves as a rich and positive metaphor for liminality and encounter, which challenges categories that do not account for the movement of people and ideas.  My work shows that these writers embrace death as catalyst for overturning essentialized concepts of identity, which in turn allows them to articulate the emergence of transnational, mobile and interconnected subjects in a dislocated world.  If we understand ritual as a focusing lens on ordinary life that allows for a greater significance to be perceived, and as a means of overcoming contradiction, then writing death represents a ritualized engagement with a world of migrations where national, religious and ethnic bonds have ceased to provide meaning.

Narratives of death in the postcolonial milieu have often been viewed in terms of their denunciation of colonialism, their desire to return to an imagined and mythical common past, their reparative impulse to reconstruct the world.    Critics have underscored their connection to collective memory, political engagement and literary theorization.  Still others have pointed to the revitalization these texts effect on arid national literary landscapes.  And yet these narratives of death are perhaps most interesting for their fundamental preoccupation with the quotidian, with the non-heroic dimension of characters and for their categorical refusal of genealogies.  A close reading of texts by Depestre, Condé, and Gamboa brings to the foreground characters whose survival depends on their capacity to live in the present, to mediate preposterous situations and to collaborate with equally disparate characters.  Indeed, it is only by renouncing heroism and its accompanying glory that they are granted an afterlife.

Situated both inside and outside their countries of origin, these writers elude customary national identification and pose unique challenges to those who seek to classify their works.  Born in Haiti, for instance, Depestre also lived in Cuba, Chile, and France.  Born in Guadeloupe, Condé has lived in France, Guinea, Ghana, and Senegal and now writes from the United States.  As to Gamboa, born in Colombia, he has successively lived in Spain, France, Italy and India.  Their writings thus cannot be contained by national categories and the texts my dissertation engages reveal an unequivocal distancing from these classifications.  René Depestre’s writing embodies a pivotal moment in the shift away from the violent revolt of négritude, and its affirmation of African roots, towards a more global, inclusive humanism.  A Rainbow for the Christian West (1967) represents his own version of négritude where poetized Haitian Vodou forces are the engine that transmutes the dead past in general and the crimes of a white Alabama judge in particular, into a new hope –a rainbow- for all humankind.  In similar fashion, the novel Hadriana in all my Dreams (1988) represents an exodus from the native land since the novel begins in Haiti and ends in Jamaica, displaying a symbolic opening into the Caribbean Sea that will stretch even further in his later writings.  Maryse Condé has forged new ground by situating many of her novels outside French speaking borders:  I Tituba Black Witch… (1986) takes place in 17^th century Salem, The Story of the Cannibal Woman (2003) in post apartheid South Africa and Les Belles Ténébreuses (2006) in contemporary Africa, France and the United States.  Although some of her novels do engage the problems of French Antillean identity, by literally straddling the world in most of her narratives, she explodes linguistic boundaries and gives life to the predicament of migrants.  Santiago Gamboa translates the dislocated experience of those living away from the land of their birth by creating nostalgic narratives that subsequently become celebratory accounts of travel.  While his early novels La Vida Feliz de un Joven Llamado Esteban (2000) and El Síndrome de Ulises (2005) convey longing with stories of Latin-American writer-narrators living in Europe and who must cope with underpaid jobs, poor housing, and rampant discrimination, his most recent work Hotel Pekín (2008) and Necrópolis (2009) revels in unfamiliar settings, strange encounters and heterogeneous antiheroes, and ceases altogether to recall notions of homeland.

Linguistic borders have long separated traditions sharing a common history and struggling with similar preoccupations.  By mobilizing an interdisciplinary approach that bridges the gap that currently exists between French Caribbean and Hispanic literary criticism, I address their undeniable hemispheric connection.  Although Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Colombia are rarely studied together, the fact that writers in the region deal in strikingly similar terms with questions of death, migration and identity calls for a larger terrain for comparison.  My work questions the schisms generated and perpetuated by current criticism and argues that we can no longer think within the framework of linguistic or national blocks, but must evolve critical approaches able to encompass the new reality of massive movements of people.  Not only do these writers translate in literary form what was noted by Walter Mignolo, but they also provide an aesthetic solution to this moment of radical questioning and change.  Theirs is a playful mapping of routes that have replaced essentialized notions of roots, an unabashed refusal of ideas of purity and origins.