The Woman that Turned Into a Ball of Fire and Whipped Across the Sky at Night : Recreating History and Memory in the Diaspora

Abstract

This paper is focused on interpreting the way in which writers belonging to the Caribbean Diaspora use folklore to investigate concepts like ‘time’, ‘space’ and ‘history’ in their ancestors’ culture which nowadays appears foreign to a them due to the transterritorialisation that they suffer. David Chariandy’s Soucouyant (2007) –among others– will be carefully analysed as an example of novel that uses a folkloric female figure 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. The result of this study suggests that, as Chariandy (2006) indicates, this community has developed tactics to transform even the most traumatic diasporic experiences into instruments of research on, in Umberto Eco’s words, “a past that if it cannot be destroyed, at least it is necessary to revisit it without naivety.” (Villanueva and Viña-Liste 1991: 36).