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Discourse 161), that is, defining the cultural identity of the geographical space in which they were born, which most of them left in their youths, and to which they never ceased to return throughout their lives. If Rhys re-creates history through intertextual experiments, Carpentier makes recourse to supernatural elements in order to reinvest it with a new kind of reality, and Condé brings history to life from official documents by making her protagonist use the power of magic and witchcraft.
In spite of their implied truth value, facts, statistics, and numbers cannot produce the same kind of affects as events reconstructed through artistic images can. By virtue of their general purposes, historical records usually encompass the entire picture of a chronotope and order events in as intelligible a manner as possible; consequently, they often read as depthless, demystified narratives. However, when it comes to human lives, “truth” can rarely be used in the singular because it can never be squeezed into clear, logical, and unambiguous statements. Carpentier, Rhys, and Condé break down the official truth on record into individual fictional dramas that bring characters and events closer to the readers’ feelings.
The artistic image of Carpentier’s language, for instance, is a linguistic hybrid (Bakhtin’s phrase): it belongs both to the linguistic consciousness of the author, whom I presume to be vicariously traumatized (based on biographic evidence), and to the linguistic consciousness of the represented victims, the actually traumatized and silenced slaves. The symbolic mediation in Carpentier’s text (the transfer between reality and the symbolic) takes place in two stages: first, Columbus’s letters and writings by different nineteenth-century authors transferred the reality of the actual chronotope (slavery) into different modes of representation; and second, Carpentier’s novel actually translates an already represented reality into artistic images. In this magical realist text, simulation results in an affective simulacrum, a reproduction with more color and depth to it than the original referent itself—thus, a simulacrum altogether different from Baudrillard’s shallow images that deny reality its “vital illusion” (its usually ambiguous signification). The stories of Macandal and Bouckman, the leaders of Haiti’s most important slave uprisings,