[Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones] crafts its testimonial archive by privileging what Diana Taylor terms the “repertoire” in the production of subaltern historical archives. The “repertoire” includes a range of non-scriptural practices, varying from oral stories and gestures to dance, cooking, and ritual prayer (20). Distinct from this “so-called ephemeral repertoire” is the “archive of supposedly enduring materials,” which includes written documents, buildings, maps, archeological remains, literary texts, and so on (19). “Archival memory” has traditionally been privileged over the “embodied memory” of the repertoire in the hierarchy of knowledge, granted hegemonic epistemic value, and mythologized as unchanging (19–20). Yet, as Taylor’s lengthy study demonstrates and Danticat’s novel dramatizes, this Eurocentric model, which delegitimizes many other forms of knowledge production and recording, is not only colonialist but also inaccurate because “[e]mbodied and performed acts [do indeed] generate, record, and transmit knowledge” (21). In The Farming of Bones, the oral stories told by Haitian laborers and the bodies they use to express their testimonies provide accurate testament against the state’s repression and disappearances. I argue that the novel enacts the ways in which imaginative, oral, and embodied modes of communicating and recording collectively generate testimonial histories.
Jennifer Harford Vargas, “Novel Testimony: Alternative Archives in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones,” Callaloo 37.5 (2014), 1163. (via profkew).
