Resumen de "My Body is History": Embodying the Past, Present, and Future in Dionne Brand's Sans Souci and Other Stories
In A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne Brand suggests that to live in a black body is to embody a history of both oppression and liberation. It is not, therefore, surprising that Brand’s characters in Sans Souci and Other Stories often “experience” the past through the body, while the future is often evoked as a transformation of the body in either imaginative or spiritual terms. Rather than separate mind and body, Brand’s stories suggest that they are inextricably linked and that the body plays a fundamental and productive role in the psychological processes through which her characters confront history and the dynamic between past and present experiences. This paper demonstrates how characters’ bodies in Sans Souci play a major role in the “working through” of memories. By exploring the ways in which history, present, and future collapse not only in temporal space, but specifically on and around the body, Mullins illumintes how Brand's black female characters both revile and revere their bodies as symbols of history so that they become ultimately empowered in the face of oppresssion
