Performing Postmemory: Remembering the Parsley Massacre in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” and Song of the Water Saints

Abstract

Focusing on the Parsley Massacre—one of the major events that has helped to define the complex relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic—this paper analyzes two works that treat it: the short story “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” by the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat and the novel Song of the Water Saints by the Dominican-American writer Nelly Rosario. Although racial formation in the Dominican Republic and Haiti as well as ideological notions of national identity in Hispaniola inform this reading, the framework at hand invokes primarily a combination of collective postmemory and performativity. Collective postmemory serves as a way of approaching fictional renderings of the Parsley Massacre because the texts in question attempt to make the reader aware of this historical event as well as contribute to knowledge and identity in the diaspora(s) of Hispaniola. Performativity serves as a lens for bodily instantiations of identity in these texts. I demonstrate how female protagonists in these texts (mis)perform identities—marked by ideology—that are linked to postmemory. This paper, then, ultimately examines how these texts serve as cultural tools that perform postmemory and allow for the potential evolution of harmful aspects of past national identity through diasporic consciousness.