Resumen de Truly Confronting the Past: The Recovery of History and Identity in Afro-Caribbean Literature
Silvia del Pilar Castro Borrego
Contemporary Afro-Caribbean women's writings are reclaiming and reconstructing narratives that authenticate black women's histories, helping to counteract oppressive strategies working to suppress their voice and identity. This essay will show how Paule Marshall's 1983 novel Praisesong for the Widow, representing the tradition of black women writers of Anglophone expression, and the second, Maryse Conde's 1986 novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, representing black women writer's Francophone expression, are confronting the need to construct alternative histories to those of the dominant culture in order to combat the appropriation and oppression of marginalized cultures. The (her)stories of these novels become an inner vision, a cognitive reclamation of a profound, large, and old spiritual history. These are recursive narratives, they recover history and then displace it in order to account for the character's own displacement and as a tool for constructing identity within the dialectic and dynamic consciousness of wholeness. Presenting myth as counterpart of history and fiction as a counterfactual history, Marshall and Conde subvert the power of historical discourse through their narratives. These texts interrogate the canon, contribute to an existing literary tradition in Afro-Caribbean women's literature, and offer a distinctive female voice.
