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and of Henri Christophe, post-independence Haiti’s first black ruler, are told from the point of view of the protagonist, Ti Noël. In spite of Macandal’s and Ti Noël’s metamorphoses into birds, insects, and other natural elements—alternatively symbolizing either an escape from or an expansion of their human condition—Haiti will continue to be plagued by violence, pain, and suffering, with no end in sight. If Carpentier’s artistic chronotope seems to perpetuate historical trauma, it is also a way of working through it.
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys’s intertextual supplementation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847), is a challenging portrayal of post-slavery Jamaica, viewed through the eyes of the main character, Antoinette, a descendant of the Creole slaveholder class. Historical trauma in Rhys’s novel is experienced as individual loss, affecting the hybrid identities of Antoinette and her mother, Mrs. Cosway; and as cultural loss, resulting from the identity erasures of both an uprooted race (the African slaves) and a newly disenfranchised social group (the Jamaican white creoles). The relationship between Antoinette and her English husband (ironically, “bought” for her and paid for with her own dowry) fails tragically because of an unavoidable culture clash: the young Jamaican Creole’s personality is not only imbued with the mystery and magic of the islands but also marred by individual and historical trauma (she avoids talking about the insanity running in her family or about the atrocities of slavery, fearing that, if mentioned, they might become true). Her husband, on the other hand, a literary alter ego of Rochester, Brontë’s male protagonist, rejects any adaptation to Antoinette’s culture, and implicitly any understanding of her character, because he is apparently too afraid to cope with the strangeness of her environment and its mysterious, untold history. Like Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World, Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is an expression of the traumatic imagination, a traumatic narrative that may be viewed either as Rhys’s way of working through the trauma of a cultural displacement in childhood or as an expression of acting out a trauma of loss from which she failed to distance herself. In reality, the difference between these two fundamental modes of dealing with trauma is not so marked: sometimes