As The Crab Walks: Storytelling as Revolution in Narratives Forged by Migration and Dictatorship

Abstract

We find ourselves confronted today by many political and cultural questions that arise from migration. People are displaced from their homes for a wide array of reasons, be it financial need, environmental destruction, political instability, or war. Migrants are widely treated with intolerance and in many cases turned away from safety entirely. Stories that deal with migration, whether personal or observed, shed light on a growing crisis for which many of the world’s wealthier countries have not found a response that strikes a balance of economic viability and tolerance. As case studies, this paper will use two bodies of literary work to analyze reactions to power abuse and the effects of migration on individuals, families, and nations. One body of work is L’Énigme du retour, a memoir that Dany Laferrière wrote in exile after fleeing Haiti, which suffered the crushing oppression of the Duvalierist regimes from 1957 until 1986 (Trouillot 14). The second body of work is the poetry and sculpture of Cecilia Vicuña, a Chilean artist and activist who was similarly expelled from her country under Augusto’s Pinochet’s regime for her insistence on exhibiting art as political dissent. This paper particularly examines the role of water as a symbol of fluidity and passage in both bodies of work. It likewise looks to complicate the role of movement in storytelling, and to emphasize the importance of storytelling to fighting silence. These two bodies of work are examples of literature as a site of resistance: the stories they tell awaken an urgency for living, for empathy, and for revolution.