Marvellous realism and female representation from the Caribbean diaspora

Abstract

This paper argues that David Chariandy’s Soucouyant and Edwidge Danticat’s “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” utilize marvellous realism as a literary technique when representing Caribbean folkloric elements from the diaspora. With this in mind, this article will begin by pointing out the differences between the terms magical realism and marvellous realism within the Latin American Boom writing of the 1950s. These two literary concepts should not be considered as being synonymous because of the different artistic motivations that condition these kinds of writing. As will be seen, in the two particular cases of the soucouyant and the lougarou, these magical elements serve to revise and rewrite the history of colonial and postcolonial women that were persecuted and discriminated against in their countries of origin due to gender and class prejudices. Thus, Chariandy and Danticat use the supernatural as an allegory for the haunting memories of a whole community. In these diasporic works, magic will vanish in favour of a rational explanation for those phenomena where a series of familial and historical traumas will manifest accordingly. The transformation of marginal women into supernatural figures assists the authors in reinterpreting and abating violence and trauma. Therefore, it is suggested that marvellous realism helps writers who have had similar experiences of diaspora to find a balance between two cultures and two different systems of belief: one based on faith and the other on rationalism.

Introduction

The research for this paper coincided with the terrible earthquakes that devastated Haiti in January, 2010. For several days, TV channels opened their evening news with live reports from Port-au-Prince to try to illustrate the horrible living conditions that the Haitians had to suffer. In one of those live connections with the capital city, a Spanish reporter commented that she was amazed when told that a group of women living in the improvized camps that were set up after most of the buildings collapsed took turns at night to guard their children. She said that this was because there was a belief − this is the word the reporter used − among the Haitians that there is a monster that comes at night to kidnap children. It is not difficult to identify the folkloric referent of this monster, which for the Haitians is not a monster but a person who magically flies at night to do harm especially to children. For those who took turns to guard their children, the existence of this figure was not a belief but a matter of fact. In Haiti, the existence of the lougarou, which is the name of this folkloric element, as well as the existence of the soucouyant in the rest of the Caribbean, is not a superstition but a reality that has always formed part of the cultural imagery of those peoples.

The Spanish reporter’s misinterpretation of this characteristic element of Caribbean folklore illustrates the core of this paper; that is to say, the conflictive encounter between two systems of belief: one based on faith and the other based on reason. To exemplify this dichotomy in literature, this paper will analyse the reinterpretation from the diaspora of the Caribbean myths of the soucouyant and the lougarou in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant (2007) and Edwidge Danticat’s “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” (1996). The historical and cultural frameworks for both texts are indicative of the amalgam of influences that can be found in a number of Commonwealth literary productions. Historically speaking, the contexts of the novel and the short story are marked by the military intervention on Caribbean islands − Trinidad and Haiti in these particular cases − during the twentieth century. Additionally and from a cultural standpoint, the diasporic status of Chariandy and Danticat, who belong to different contexts affected by migration to North America, will be manifested through the narrative technique employed by the authors in the texts. This technique implies a need to recognize particular episodes in history which transcend historical and geographical boundaries in order to emphasize the revisionary concern that typifies a number of contemporary works of literature written in English. In this specific case, the analysis of Soucouyant and “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” will be related to the female representation of folkloric figures to offer an explanation of why violence against women is illustrated in diasporic literature through the supernatural. To show this aspect of the Caribbean legacy from the diaspora, this paper will be divided into three sections before reaching a general conclusion. In the first, a dichotomy between the terms magical realism and marvellous realism will be pointed out to highlight the connection that might exist between the latter and contemporary literary production from the Caribbean diaspora. In the two sections that will follow this contextualization, the texts under study will be discussed and analysed so as to demonstrate that Caribbean diasporic writers favour a marvellous realist perspective of the supernatural. Finally and to conclude with this analysis, the previously mentioned dichotomy between two systems of belief will be taken up again to point out that the sceptical representation of magical female figures in these texts is very similar to the Spanish reporter’s misinterpretation where the supernatural was retold by means of rationality. Accordingly, marvellous realism will stand out as a narrative technique that reinterprets folkloric figures such as the soucouyant and the lougarou in order to offer an allegory for the haunting past that communal and familial history represents.

Magical realism vs. marvellous realism

This article starts with the premise that there is a conceptual difference between the terms magical realism and marvellous realism that prevents us from interpreting them as synonyms. ¹ The confusion between these two concepts has certainly increased since the mid-twentieth century, creating a significant body of literary criticism. ² In 1949, Alejo Carpentier published a preface to his widely known novel El reino de este mundo. In it, he considered that the indigenous substrata of Latin America in general − and the Caribbean in particular − together with the European and African influence that arrived on the continent with colonization and the subsequent slave trade, created a mixture of historical and cultural factors. This blend favoured the marvellous dimension of those territories for the foreign eye. Thus, the author commented that this hybrid characteristic should be illustrated in literature in order to aesthetically elevate Latin American literary production and associate it with a particular narrative voice. Subsequently, a number of Latin American authors ³ in the following decades shared in their cultural fictions Carpentier’s ideal of employing a distinctive literary technique to represent their traditions, landscape and history. For these writers, the unusual was to be found in everyday reality and this daily experience was indeed extraordinary. ⁴ This potentiality of referents deeply influenced fiction writing to the extent that it became a point of inflection in Latin American literary production. Notwithstanding this, the creative process and the interests of each author were quite dissimilar; therefore the distinction between magical realism and marvellous realism started to be considered from a critical perspective.

According to Carpentier, the term marvellous or maravilloso directly addressed the influence that European rationalism had on Latin American folkloric imagery, where the narrator tried to give an empirical explanation for the fantastic elements that appeared in the text. ⁵ Consequently, the supernatural was not taken for granted. Contrary to magical realist texts, fantastic elements within the narration are naturalized by means of a sceptical interpretation where logic explains the unexplained. This is why in the previously mentioned El reino de este mundo, the narrator offers a switch in perspective when describing the death of Mackandal, the Maroon hero. In this episode, the author first focuses the narration on the slaves’ point of view where Mackandal magically flies away from his death on the fire after becoming a butterfly. However, following this description, the narrator moves on to describe the French colonizers’ view of the very same event in which he is burnt to death in the fire. By this switch in perspective, the supernatural vision of the slaves vanishes in order to provide for a more rationally accurate one where magic is reduced to superstition, at least for the Europeans.

As we will see, something similar happens in the texts under study in this paper, where the narrator will offer a perspective where magic will vanish in favour of an explanation for that supernatural event. While for Carpentier the maravilloso in literature was “to perceive and transcribe, in the best realist tradition, the unique and marvellous nature of reality which is already integral to the New World” (Heady, 2008: 34) through two opposing discourses, for Chariandy and Danticat this opposition is solved from the diaspora. Thus, the folkloric references of the cultural elements which will be the focus of this study − the soucouyant and the lougarou − are nothing but the result of a constant negotiation between different cultural codes, which need to be reinterpreted from the host countries by a new generation of writers. The representation of these codes is determined by the amalgamation of indigenous, European, African, and Asian influences, plus the cultural tensions and perceptions gained from the diaspora.

To set the ground for the present analysis, it could therefore be pointed out that magical realist texts and marvellous realist ones make use of fantastic elements as part of the narration. Despite this, the main difference is that while in a magical realist text this fantastic element is accepted and understood by the characters as being something from their everyday reality, in a marvellous realist one, this fantastic element is perceived with surprise and astonishment. It is marvellous because it is unfamiliar. Moreover, if magical realism, as Bhabha (1990) argues, characterizes the postcolonial novel, this paper draws attention to the fact that marvellous realism is the literary mode characteristic of a number of diasporic texts. This is due to the fact that marvellous realism does not only consecrate Latin American and/or Caribbean mestizaje (mixed races) and praise their baroque exuberance; marvellous realism as a literary technique in the case of the texts under study might also be an accurate description of the sense of detachment and defamiliarization that writers in the diaspora suffer from due to their transterritorialization. ⁶ As a matter of fact, writers of magical realism use folklore to “demonstrate, capture and celebrate ways of being and of seeing that are uncontaminated by European domination” (Cooper, 1998: 17); this might work for instance in the case of Latin American authors such as Gabriel García Márquez or Juan Rulfo, but it clearly becomes a conundrum in the case of diasporic writers. This is due to the fact that the physical and historical distance from the culture that they aim to represent in literature is a heavy burden, which in many cases they find impossible to carry. Therefore, it seems that a third literary mode is created, where the opposition between what is real and what is fantasy is counteracted in one way or another by offering an explanation for the supernatural.

Even though it could be argued that the distinction between these concepts might be meaningless in contemporary writing, establishing a difference between magical realism and marvellous realism helps us to understand the historical and artistic factors that influence a number of contemporary Caribbean diasporic texts. In recent decades there has been a sense of responsibility from the perspective of postcolonial and diasporic writers about revising history and cultural legacy in their works. The folkloric referents in these texts will be as alien to the narrator as they were to Carpentier after he spent a long period of time in Europe and subsequently arrived in the Caribbean where he rediscovered the mestizo continent. This unfamiliarity also characterizes the Spanish reporter’s response when she discovered the series of beliefs that guided the everyday life of the Haitian locals.

The soucouyant and the marvellous realist representation of familial memory

Soucouyant is the first novel written by the Caribbean-Canadian author David Chariandy. In this text, marvellous realism illustrates postcolonial violence against women as well as representing issues of memory and history. Notwithstanding Chariandy’s position as a Canadian writer, his Caribbean cultural background is an important source of inspiration for his debut novel. Published in 2007, Soucouyant was nominated for a number of important Canadian literary prizes, including the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book of Canada and the Caribbean. Geographically speaking, there are two main locations in the text. On the one hand, the story is set in Toronto and revolves around Adele, who suffers from dementia, and her son who returns home to look after her. As the author acknowledges, dementia serves the purpose of exploring “the fragility and endurance of cultural memory, and, most particularly, the challenge of cultural memory for a second-generation immigrant” (Dobson and Chariandy, 2007: 813). On the other hand, the main plot that has to do with the figure of the soucouyant is set in Trinidad, Adele’s country of origin. Thus, the time of the narration coincides with Adele’s diasporic experience in Canada. It is during her frequent mental breakdowns in Toronto, when she starts to reveal a disturbing family history, that her son is able to reconstruct the few unconnected sketches that he is able to gather from what his mother says.

Additionally, the magical element which will be the focus of this section appears in the first pages of the novel when the protagonist’s mother tells her son that she saw a soucouyant. Mythographically speaking, a soucouyant appears to stand for:

[S]omething like a female vampire. She lives a reclusive but fairly ordinary life on the edge of town. She disguises herself by dressing up in the skin of an old woman, but at night she’ll shed her disguise and travel across the sky as a ball of fire. She’ll hunt out a victim and suck his blood as he sleeps, leaving him with little sign of her work except increasing fatigue, a certain paleness, and perhaps, if he were to look closely on his body, a tell-tale bruise or mark on his skin…In the morning, you’ll only have to look for an old woman in the village who appears to have been beaten. Bruises upon her. Clearly the one to blame…The suffering of a monster that deserves no pity at all. (Chariandy, 2007: 135) ⁷

However, is there really a soucouyant in the novel? Did the protagonist’s mother really see a soucouyant when she was living in Trinidad? Thanks to the previous description of this Caribbean folkloric element, the reader can relate this definition to different references regarding the protagonist’s familial history, specifically the incidents involving Adele’s own mother. For instance, it is almost unavoidable to link this description of a soucouyant with the depiction of the protagonist’s grandmother that is found just a few pages before, when Adele’s son remembers the journey he took with his mother to Trinidad, where he met his grandmother for the first time in his life. The portrayal of this woman is quite significant if we take into consideration the description quoted above:

She was a monster. Someone with a hide, red-clacked eyes, and blistered hands. Someone who would claw her stiffened thumb across her eyes and try to smile through the ruin of her mouth. Someone who knew very well the terror it could bring to a young boy like me, and who was careful not to brush too closely near, or bring her attention too forcefully towards me. That gesture of consideration somehow the most terrible thing of all. (116)

In this particular episode, the grandmother’s image as a monster marks the shift from a magical realist tone, in which Adele gives her supernatural version of her experience encountering a soucouyant, into a marvellous realist chronicle where the protagonist seems overwhelmed by the episodes of his family history and his Caribbean cultural legacy in relation to this female figure. Thus, Adele never questions the existence of this legendary element. The existence of soucouyants is part of her cultural imagery and therefore, she feels no need to give a rational explanation of that phenomenon. Contrary to this position, her son and the narrator − who could be considered to be the same person − are clearly certain to provide a more suitable elucidation according to Western cultural standards. This is the reason why the magical realist component of Soucouyant vanishes in order to offer an explanation for Adele’s experience, which will connect the folkloric character of the novel with the terrible family history that the text narrates.

For instance, when the narrator gets involved with Adele’s mixed-up memories, he transmits one of the main hints that the readers find in the text to identify the physical referent of the soucouyant:

One day, Adele’s mother comes home in a bad way. She had made no money this night, and her dress is torn. One eye is badly blackened and the parts of her mouth either swollen or burst. It’s worse than ever before, but Adele knows not to ask. (185)

Little by little and through a fragmented narration, the real story behind the figure of the soucouyant is revealed to the reader. Adele discovered that her mother worked as a prostitute for the American soldiers who were living in the military base near their house. That is why her mother usually appeared with her body covered with bruises when she arrived home. When Adele realized the kinds of things that her mother had to do in order to maintain them, she repudiated her, shouting “ ‘You disgusting’, she tells her. ‘You a whore’… ‘You not my mother. You horror. All horror!’ ” (189; emphasis in original). Soon after, the narration reaches its peak in the scene where Adele remembers the moment as a five-year-old child that she had always connected with memories: her encounter with a soucouyant. One night, she saw a dress wandering across the military base with nobody wearing it; at the moment when the dress was set on fire, her mother appeared inside it. The most tragic realization behind this episode is that the text suggests that Adele knew that the shadow underneath the dress was her very own mother. What the text also implies is that it was actually the girl who ignited the piece of cloth. Moreover, this climactic point in the novel indicates that Adele’s mother became a ball of fire: that is, she became a soucouyant:

No explosion or bloom of fire as when something eventful happens in a wartime movie. There is only a thin creeping of a flame in the light of noon, and inside this, visible now for the first time to Adele’s eyes, a human form. The woman looks at her belly and arms, watching a miraculous aura grow upon her, smelling the work of something like a hot-comb. She senses more now, and begins to beat at her body, fanning the flames and transferring them about herself. Adele herself feels a pain assaulting her, a sheet of pain on her back and shoulders. A hat of orange light. A halo. She sees her mother in a dress of fire, and she turns toward her, turns to help and undo it all, her mother’s arms outstretched too, but she trips and falls heavily against a loose pile of cinder blocks. A numbness and slipperiness at her chin. An inability to open her eyes. (193)

Therefore, in Soucouyant the soucouyant is not a supernatural figure that might challenge rationalism but a woman who was tortured and burnt almost to death. The existence of this folkloric element prevails as far as the evocation of what a five-year-old child saw: from this point of view it is not challenged. Thus, it appears that, as in Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo, there are two versions of the same story in the text. In this case, the text offers a switch in perspective from a child’s faith-based contemplation of a soucouyant to a rational explanation after Adele’s son puts together all the clues given by his mother. Adele’s chronicle does not question the existence of the soucouyant and does not, under any circumstance, try to look for a rational explanation of that encounter. On the contrary, Adele’s son, who does not belong to Adele’s Caribbean cultural context and is not familiar with its imagery, is, therefore, not able to assume the existence of a soucouyant, and offers instead a rational explanation of the phenomenon.

Accordingly, linking all the hints that are left throughout the text, the probable resolution which the novel provides to a supernatural event is that the soucouyant that Adele insists on having met in Trinidad when she was a child was her own mother. If a soucouyant “lives a reclusive but fairly ordinary life on the edge of town” (135), Adele’s mother was “among the last of the people displaced from the estates to the north for the base’s security perimeter” (181); if a soucouyant “disguises herself by dressing up in the skin of an old woman” (135), Adele “arrived in Carenage with her mother, the old woman” (181); if a soucouyant will “shed her disguise” (135) at night, Adele’s mother “starts wearing her best dress inside the house” (185); if a soucouyant “travel[s] across the sky as a ball of fire” (135), Adele “sees her mother in a dress of fire” (193); if a soucouyant appears the next morning as “an old woman in the village who appears to have been beaten. Bruises upon her” (135), Adele “draws attention to bruises that appear upon her mother after certain nights, dark blossoms upon her neck or upper arms or between her thighs” (184); finally, if a soucouyant is “a monster that deserves no pity at all” (135), Adele’s mother “was a monster” (116).

Adele’s mother was the soucouyant she saw, a prostitute who suffered the violence of the soldiers and the nonchalance of a neighbourhood that did nothing to help her when she was abandoned by her husband. Familial and social oblivion led her into prostitution as that was the only way of surviving once she was evicted from her home by the North American military base that was established in the area where she had lived all her life. The daughter’s transformation of the previously mentioned event in the military base into a supernatural element might be the result of a process of familial and social ostracism through which Adele and the whole society dehumanize this woman under the form of a soucouyant as a sign of repudiation. Hence, it appears that Adele’s process of mythification of her mother’s suffering into a supernatural figure follows Caruth’s conceptualization of trauma as a haunting memory (Whitehead, 2004: 5). That is exactly what happens in the novel after Adele transforms her mother into a soucouyant: the elder will haunt her daughter and grandson in the figure of a soucouyant until this traumatic episode is admitted and resolved. Thus, the consequence of imposed silences is the fragmentation of memory from one generation to the next. Physical distance from the country of origin causes suffering within a diasporic community and this gives rise to psychological crises when trauma is latent. This might well be due to the fact that, as Chow (1993) suggests, there is a strong connection between the image of the homeland and different processes of mystification. In the case of Soucouyant, this practice might work as a metaphor for social marginalization and physical violence imposed in a (post)colonial context. Certainly, the figure of the soucouyant has been aligned with the forces of evil but, according to Anatol (2000), it has also been used to socialize women according to patriarchal dictates. Hence, diasporic writers in cases like this use a marvellous realist technique as a tool to come to terms with the past of their community in order to reconcile themselves with a history that in many cases haunts them. In fact, Chariandy himself admitted that his intention with this novel was to deal with “a cultural legacy that seemed, at least on the surface, to be attached to a very different space − the Caribbean in this case − a legacy that seemed, at times, to be remote, otherworldly, and spectral, and yet hauntingly present at the same time” (Dobson and Chariandy, 2007: 811). Forced historical and familial silences, then, are used to try to eradicate certain traumatic experiences that marked a forced exile. This is probably the reason why Soucouyant could be considered as being an important text that reinterprets “wilful forgetting” of “the histories of colonial, neo-colonial and global oppression of racialized working class migrants and their children” (Martín-Lucas, 2012: 79).

Moreover, according to Boyce Davies (1994), Caribbean folklore has a tendency to depict female elements as demonic or foolish. The negative connotation of the soucouyant is unquestionable, but in the case of Chariandy’s novel, this figure allows the narrator to come to terms with the haunting dimension of memories. For Adele, it is her familial memory which haunts her from the diaspora but in the case of the narrator, it is his cultural memory that troubles him. In this case, therefore, fantasy, in the folkloric form of the soucouyant, helped a little child to hide the fact that her mother was a victim of serious violence; it explained the constant bruises and contusions that she saw on her mother’s body in the mornings after suffering violent assaults; and it also served to soften the traumatic experience of seeing her own mother being almost burnt to death. Hence, the child’s traumatic experience of seeing her own mother turning into a ball of fire was so extreme and shocking that the strategy to manage that trauma and the child’s guilt was to turn her mother’s suffering into the figure of a soucouyant.

The lougarou and the marvellous realist reinterpretation of historical memory

This section will discuss the Haitian myth of the lougarou which, as previously examined with the soucouyant, is connected with violence suffered by women. For this purpose, one of the short stories by the Haitian-born author Edwidge Danticat will be analysed in order to consider the historical reinterpretation from the diaspora of this Caribbean mythical figure. Being a first − also referred to as a 1.5 − generation immigrant writer, Danticat migrated from Port-au-Prince to New York during her early teens to join her parents who had previously moved to settle in the United States. Danticat is now one of the most significant authors of Caribbean origin. She has published fiction, travel books, and literary criticism in which the primary nexus of her background as a Caribbean immigrant writer manifests itself in her examination of culture and identity issues both in her home and host countries. Her writing, and in particular Krik? Krak! (1996), the collection of short stories that includes “Nineteen Thirty-Seven”, is clearly marked by an ambivalent fascination with revisiting Haiti from a historical and cultural perspective, which confirmed her as a National Book Award Finalist in 1995. Krik? Krak! is a collection of nine short stories plus an epilogue, in which there are two cases in which two women are identified as lougarous and as a consequence suffer the punishment that society establishes for those cases. In “Between the Pool and the Gardenias” a woman is accused of being a lougarou who “eat[s] little children who haven’t even had time to earn their souls” (Danticat, 1996: 19) after keeping a stillborn infant and burying it in the garden when it started to decompose. ⁸ But the short story that is more significant to include in this section devoted to the marvellous representation of Caribbean folkloric female figures is “Nineteen Thirty-Seven”.

First of all, it is important to emphasize the fact that a lougarou is usually incorrectly considered to be the Haitian version of a werewolf. This direct correlation of a Haitian mythical element with a Western one implies a high Eurocentric view due to the literary translation from one culture to another in order to find an equivalent referent in European imagery. But a lougarou is not a werewolf; it is actually closer to a soucouyant considering that a lougarou can also fly at night while on fire. The main difference is that, at least for the Haitians, a lougarou is a person who transforms into a bird − usually a turkey − or removes its skin, with the sole purpose of threatening children. A lougarou does not eat children but saps their strength until they die. In an inspiring article on the folkloric implications of the myth of the soucouyant in the Caribbean, Anatol (2000) analyses Danticat’s short story as if the lougarou and the soucouyant were the same figure when revising notions of the “evil woman” in the Haitian community to “combat discourses that undermine women’s sense of independence and power” (46-47). Therefore, it seems that the mythological origins of the lougarou and the soucouyant might be close if we consider that these creatures coexist in a specific territory – the Caribbean - and if we take into account their similarities – they are both winged, suctorial by nature and both exhibit fire characteristics.

In the particular case of “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” the narrator’s mother is in jail accused of being a lougarou. Still, there seems to be some confusion in this short story around the corporeal representation of the supernatural figure. This depiction definitely appears to have some aspects reminiscent of a soucouyant as the narrator says that her mother “was accused of having wings of flame” (1996: 35). ⁹ What is more, according to the guards that watch the narrator’s mother in prison, the woman’s wrinkles are the evidence that “resulted from her taking off her skin at night and then putting it back on in a hurry, before sunrise” (36). This is why she was sentenced to be in jail for life and once she dies, “her remains were to be burnt in the prison yard, to prevent her spirit from wandering into any young innocent bodies” (36).

Moreover, physical punishment is also inflicted on lougarou women in prison, who seem to be extremely numerous. Cold water is thrown on them to prevent them from growing wings made of flame and “fly[ing] away in the middle of the night [to] slip into the slumber of innocent children and steal their breath” (37-38). This implies that the real existence of lougarous in Haiti is simply a matter of fact for the locals. From this perspective, the first part of this short story has a clear magical realist dimension where the presence of this supernatural figure is not questioned. Moreover, very little proof is needed to accuse someone of being one. As the text explains, rumours usually work as the definitive evidence needed to label someone as being a lougarou. In this case, these rumours could also be considered as carriers of prejudices against marginal women:

They were said to have been seen at night rising from the ground like birds on fire. A loved one, a friend, or a neighbor had accused them of causing the death of a child. A few other people agreeing with these stories was all that was needed to have them arrested. And sometimes even killed. (38)

However, as in Soucouyant, Danticat’s female representation of the myth is directly connected with memory and history. In this case, the rational explanation for the protagonist’s mother being a lougarou is provided by the daughter, who reconstructs her mother’s traumatic experience in the Massacre River. This way, the supernatural works once again as an allegory for the thousands of Haitians who had to escape from the Dominican Republic when in 1937 (note the significance of the title of this short story and this historical date) General Trujillo ordered the indiscriminate massacre of an estimated 20,000 Haitians who lived on the Dominican side of Hispaniola. This historical episode is metaphorically described by the narrator where she immediately links her mother’s escape with her idealization as a mythical character:

[I]n the year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at the moment looked as though it were in flames. (49)

The narrator’s rational account of why her mother could be considered to be a lougarou is − as in the case of Soucouyant − directly connected with a traumatic episode in his mother’s life in which she had to escape from one of the most terrible episodes in Haitian history. The fact that the protagonist discovers the reason for his mother’s trauma represents a sense of poetic justice, because the violence and injustices that these women suffered are brought to the present and exposed to be judged by readers. Once again, the transformation from a magical realist view of a supernatural figure into a marvellous realist one takes place after solving the tensions between what is real and what is fantasy in the text. The two opposed versions found in the text, where the protagonist’s mother is considered to be a lougarou by the locals and her personal explanation of this event is offered at the end of the short story, implies the reinterpretation of this folkloric figure in rational terms.

As Warnes comments, magical realism − and by extension marvellous realism − could be “a response to the ‘othering’ that accompanies Western colonisation” (2009: 152), perpetuated in this case by a period of military occupation of postcolonial nations. Fantasy and folklore, thus, assist the locals to escape from the violence suffered and to narrativize it in a more idealistic manner. Consequently, history and familial past are brought to the present by diasporic authors at the same time as they recall the folklore and culture of their country of origin. The reason for this, Sangari stresses, is that:

Marvellous realism answers an emergent society’s need for renewed self-description, and radical assessment, displaces the established categories through which the West had constructed other cultures either in its own image or as alterity, questions the western capitalist myth of modernization and progress, and asserts without nostalgia an indigenous preindustrial realm of possibility. (1987: 162)

The folkloric elements that marvellous realist writers utilize are similar to the techniques used by the magical realist authors in the sense that they serve to not only repudiate the dominant culture which had been imposed through violence during colonization but also to illustrate that violence was favoured after colonization by the prolonging of the interventionism of foreign policies. As Martín-Lucas points out in relation to Chariandy’s text, the emphasis on representing physical violence on the (post)colonial body could be directly connected with “Morrison’s view of emotional memory, based on ‘what the nerves and the skin remember’ or, in the Canadian context, to Dionne Brand’s use of the Black body as a reminder of historical and contemporary oppressions” (2012: 75). Additionally, marvellous realism, as the texts under study suggest, serves to soften the atrocious violence that Caribbean marginal communities were victims of and to transform a series of traumatic experiences into a narrative mechanism to abate and alleviate the suffering of women − in these cases − by transforming them into mythical characters.

Marvellous realism and diasporic fiction

For Chariandy, in his novel, the soucouyant acts as a symbol of “how the elsewhere past of the Caribbean quite literally haunt[s] or shadow[s] the lives of those who were born elsewhere” (2011: 112). As Alonso Gallo suggests in her work about immigrants living in the USA, many diasporic writers who employ a marvellous realist style seem to have a clear interest in digging into the history of their countries of origin. In this instance, literature, folklore, history, and cultural legacy are, therefore, concepts used to come to terms with a traumatic past and to conciliate the writers’ haunting past with the cultural tensions suffered in their “host” countries (2003: 22). Thus, a distinctive and mythical space is created. Indeed, as Bhabha proposes, historical reinterpretation “destroys the constant principles of the national culture that attempt to hark back to a ‘true’ national past, which is often represented in the reified forms of realism and stereotype” (1990: 303). Hence, many postcolonial writers use the irreverent element of the supernatural that denotes a series of metaphorical meanings that is only within reach of those who share the same cultural code. This is so since, as Warnes notes, magic “naturalises the supernatural, integrating fantastic or mythical features smoothly into the otherwise realist momentum of the narrative” (2009: 151). Likewise, diasporic authors utilize folkloric elements in the text to try to find the balance between two cultures; they represent two ways to experience human existence: one based on faith, the other on rational apprehension.

In Chariandy’s Soucouyant and in Danticat’s “Nineteenth Thirty-Seven”, the figures of the soucouyant and the lougarou are cultural elements that haunt the protagonists in order that their stories survive. Otherwise, the violence suffered by the characters would fall into oblivion with the death of the last person in the family saga who knows the true story of their past. Accordingly, marvellous realism in diasporic writing might serve three main purposes. First, it offers two different perspectives thanks to its hybrid content in which the dominant culture is challenged by the fantastic dimension proffered by the faith-based system. Second, it assists disenfranchised communities in filling the historical gaps left by official accounts or by those same communities where forgetting is a way of survival. Finally, these two opposing discourses are neutralized by the narrator’s sceptical perspective that will offer, as has been shown in this paper, a rational explanation for supernatural phenomena. It seems, then, that the rational explanation overcomes belief. Therefore, the dominant cultural model seems to prevail although deeply influenced by the latent potentiality of a different transcultural code, which has as a result an interesting narrative effect.

If scepticism and rationalism are two of the main elements that characterize marvellous realist literature, it seems clear that this technique serves as a tool to narrate the traumatic experiences of a community. History is revisited and reinterpreted in literature by using marvellous realist narrative strategies in order to give form to a specific mode of written description of past events that will form part of a cultural and political movement of a community in the diaspora. This makes visible their history and their position in their host country. Therefore, it appears that these authors employ Caribbean folkloric elements in order to be closer to the traditional culture of an area, since the new generations of those immigrants have reinterpreted a singular culture and folklore in foreign terms. The new generation of Caribbean writers in the diaspora who use marvellous realism appear to regard their culture of origin with the eye of an outsider. They “marvel” when approaching the Caribbean, as did the Spanish reporter when she first arrived in Haiti and entered into contact with a local system of belief which astonished her.