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The critic suggests that “we consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative,” and calls the “interaction of different historical memories” multidirectional memory (Multidirectional Memory 3). Rothberg’s argument rests on the widespread scholarly use of Holocaust memory as a steppingstone toward analyses of other previous or later histories of violence through borrowing and cross-referencing, and on the willful overuse and overemphasis of its uniqueness: “The emergence of Holocaust memory on a global scale has contributed to the articulation of other histories—some of them predating the Nazi genocide, such as slavery, and others taking place later, such as the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) or the genocide in Bosnia during the 1990s” (Multidirectional Memory 6). On an individual level, memory cross-referencing can also create screen memories (or Deckerrinerungen, Freud’s original term), that is, a more recent memory can replace an older memory, usually a more painful one. Conversely, in the case of several authors that I discuss here (Jean Rhys, Maryse Condé, Günter Grass, and Tim O’Brien), representing historical trauma (vicariously experienced in the first two cases and directly in the other two) constitutes a means of both covering up and working through a personal trauma of one kind or another.
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I have chosen three Caribbean novels as case studies for the effectiveness of magical realist imagery in evoking the shock chronotope of slavery: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. To the characters and narrators of these texts, the tragic inaccessibility of both motherland and adoptive country leaves them with no other possibility of expression than the magical language of imagination. As the recently departed Édouard Glissant wrote, “Slavery is a struggle with no witnesses,” so that a “real” communication of its horrors will most likely never take place. For more than half a century now, Caribbean writers have been “writing their world into existence” (Caribbean