ENGENDERING THE NATIONAL HISTORY OF HAITI IN EDWIDGE DANTICAT’S KRIK? KRAK!

Abstract

The concept of the nation and nationalism is the most significant development of Modernity. The ideas of nation and nationalism have been also adopted by different oppressed minority groups and by many postcolonial countries that reproduce Western knowledge of the nation-state with its institutions and its strategies of nationalizing the identity. The Caribbean countries are no exception to this rule, in the words of Boyce Davies, “nationalism was a ‘trap’ within which the growing independence movements in the Caribbean were interpellated,” even though in the West Indies, with its multiple peoples and languages and its long history of dissemination of cultures, a homogeneous model of national identity was hard to envisage. The aim of this paper is to explore how the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, who is a part of the Haitian diaspora in the United States, takes issue with the Haitian versions of Modernity and nationalism.