The Place of the Insistence: an Approach to the Allograph Prefaces of Edwidge Danticat

Abstract

In the following essay, I address a dimension of the Edwidge Danticat's work that has not been studied systematically: the configuration of her allograph prefaces. I am interested in approaching the introductions of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Haiti Noir, Haiti Noir 2, understanding them as spaces of repetition. And, in this regard, I defend two central hypotheses: 1) through the prefaces, Danticat repeats an important topic that is visible in her first narrative works. I refer to the manifestations of precarious or vulnerable life in Haiti, that is to say, the ways in which a human being is exposed to others, under the forces of oppression or affect (Butler, 2006, 2010). From a critical position, the writer examines practices of physical violence, and questions discourses that reduce symbolically to social subjects (Didi-Huberman, 2014); 2) in relation to this, the author repeats narrative procedures that move between one book and the other, one preface and the other, and inside the preface: the use of first person narrator, grammatical and lexical elections, writing scenes, information exposure schemes, quotes, paraphrase and polysemy.