A Reinvention of the “Contact Zone” and the Myth of “Caribbean-ness” in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and Grace Nichols’s Whole of a Morning Sky

Abstract

The essence of history, on the most part, is to provide discursive knots that either hold a people together or provide tissues of asymmetrical relations that separate them permanently. Hence, through the Postcolonial lens, this paper argues that Edwidge Danticat and Grace Nichols have used their historical novels: The Farming of Bones and Whole of a Morning Sky– the novels that not only take their setting and some events and characters from history, but make the historical events and issues crucial for the course of the narrative to (re)inscribed historical codes that harbour a constant shift in individuation among the colonized people. Their aim is to unearth certain salient relational frontiers – ones that have created a “...radically asymmetrical relations of power” in modern Caribbean nations. The reason for this, on the one hand, is to show “...the marks of a shifting boundaries that alienates the frontiers of the modern (Caribbean) nation”, and on the other, to show how these shifting boundaries have not only created what Bhabha calls the “Third Space” – the process of ‘splitting’ of national subject – but how this space has hindered the realization of Caribbean-nests. By using the Caribbean example, the paper concludes that history provides a lasting memory to the Third world nations and through it the slippage of categories, such as sexuality, class affiliation, territorial paranoia, or cultural difference can be understood and bridged for the advancement of the people.