Elvira Pulitano

Landscape, Memory and Survival in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat by Elvira Pulitano is an essay written to explore Edwidge Danticat’s writing. The purpose of Pulitano’s essay is to try and persuade other writers to represent the lands and the ocean differently in Francophone writing. As her thesis, the author argues that Danticat uses physical, cultural and linguistic borders with the Caribbean Sea and that her writing “participates in the revisionist process of remapping European discourse on Caribbean island (hetero)topology and writing” (Danticat, pg. 2-3, ). In order to support and prove her argument Pulitano uses Danticat’s short story The Farming of Bones, along with other of Danticat’s writings that focus on the 1937 massacre. In these stories the author points out the physical border as the sea; the sea cannot be part of nor be apart from the Haitian landscape, which is filled with the suffrage of the many faceless people. The linguistic borders that come up in these stories is that that distinguished them as Spanish speakers and French speakers by the simple pronunciation of “perejil” that if mispronounced would lead to their death. Pulitano then interprets the cleansing ritual as a cultural border, which to the Haitians is a way of hope. I believe that the author makes a good point in wanting to make these borders important to the meaning toward Danticat’s writing. This, will make it easier to interpret and understand each of Danticat’s stories in the future.