“Strange Encounters: Ghosts, Hauntings, and Cities of the Dead in Mayra Santos Febres’ Boat People”

• In Event: Imagining the Spaces and Faces of the Nation: History, Migration, and Diaspora in/beyond Hispaniola

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the Caribbean as it is constructed in Mayra Santos Febres’ Boat People. Specifically, I analyze the figure of the “city of the dead” invoked by the displaced Haitian subject who is confronted with the ghosts of migrants that have left the Dominican Republic and Haiti in search of another place. During the 1970s and 1980s, Haitians became associated with the image of the helpless refugee and were frequently referred to as “boat people.” Haitians who were fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship were oftentimes not granted political asylum, and filled up refugee camps. These refugees also became stigmatized as AIDS carriers as well as carries of other pathogens. By invoking the haunting figure of the deceased refugee, Santos-Febres sheds light on a discourse of both exoticization and victimization that has been associated with Haitians in the Caribbean. Thus, haunting in the text registers often hidden social violences whose residue manifests itself in the present. In this way, I demonstrate how the engagement with the ghostly presence of lost migrants is not only a way of contesting exclusionary politics, but also a means of articulating the hidden realities of dispossession and dehumanization that Haitian migrants face. This confrontation with the ghostly presence requires (or produces) a change in the way we know and make knowledge. The ghost becomes not simply a dead or missing person, nor a literary artifice that communicates the aesthetic of a magical reality, but a social/political figure that demands we hear its story.

Author

• Joshua R Deckman, Pennsylvania State University