333 p., Examines both historical and contemporary attempts by the people of Ouidah, Benin Republic in West Africa and in the Caribbean country of Haiti to confront and reconcile their relationship via the transatlantic slave trade. Oral and visual narrative have been central to this process as people represent, reflect and interpret a past that is fraught with gaps, silences and erasures. Proposes that the process of remembrance mirrors a traditional rites of passage whereby one lives as part of a community, dies to the past and then is reborn anew in the community. Both Ouidahans and Haitians now occupy a liminal space--an exilic space--in which they struggle to remember a past that was for many years repressed and suppressed.
239 p., Undertakes a critical task of "writing to" and "writing back to" Frantz Fanon on the issues of violence, masculinity, and nation-formation. The author deploys Brian Keith Axel's formulations of "national interruption" to position African diasporic women's novels--specifically Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory --as critical interruptions to Fanon's formulations.
