Refugee women and the work of care in Évelyne Trouillot’s Memory at Bay

Abstract

This article examines the idea of home in relation to care work performed by refugee women of the African Diaspora as portrayed in Évelyne Trouillot’s post-dictatorship novel Memory at Bay (2015) (published in French as La mémoire aux abois (2010). Memory at Bay depicts care work as the labor involved in attending to the needs of patients in a nursing facility on the outskirts of Paris. Through her work as a nurse’s aide in this facility, Marie-Ange confronts her mother’s memories of a traumatic past living under a dictatorship in Quisqueya (a fictionalization of the Duvalier regime in Haiti). Trouillot’s novel asks us to consider what it means for a female refugee to offer care work while still coming to terms with the traumatic past in her nation of origin.