Wounds Seen and Unseen: The Workings of Trauma in Raoul Peck’s Haitian Corner and Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker

Abstract

Drawing on literary scholar Lisa Woolfork’s theory of bodily epistemology, this article comparatively discusses Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s 1988 film Haitian Corner and Haitian American writer EdwidgeDanticat’s 2004 novel, The Dew Breaker as trauma fiction that deploys both the psyche and the body in explorations of trauma. The two works do so both through their characters and in the form that their narratives take, characterized as they are by an aesthetics of fragmentation that seems to “reproduce the ‘symptoms’ of disjunctive’ temporality and causality’ that characterize narratives of trauma.”