Ian Bethell Bennett
Lecturer
University of Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico

“Empowering Selves: Diasporic wanderings – Danticat, Alexis and Alvarez”

Whoever thought that 200 years later we would be in this position? More people located in the metropole almost than are located at home. An imagination that stretches across a sea and up a Gulf that must re-articulate histories in order to learn from them and also so that they are not forgotten.

We must now come up with a theory that allows us to reconsider the past from a new place, not as Haitians or Dominicans, but as hyphenated selves no longer only at home in one place. But this theory must also not silence those writing in Kreyol or French from within the ‘First’ space. As inhabitants of the third space we possess a facility to see stories and write lives that the old-fashioned western anthropologist cannot approach nor can the non-migrant inhabitant in the ‘first’ space.

So much has happened in 200 years, yet nothing has changed.

This would be a rethinking of history as posited by male and female writers and the differences of being postmodern/postcolonial in the diaspora and in Haiti.