[Michel-Rolph] Trouillot has observed of history that “what matters most are the processes and condi-tions of production of narratives,” and examining these processes and conditions reveals “the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others” (25). When institutionalized through hegemonic sites of power such as legal and religious apparatuses, testimony, along with its claims on history and memory, can be purged of its critical epistemic and its reparative potential, not to mention its creative and poetic power. As such, the making and maintenance of alternative archives is necessary to offset the power imbalances in traditional histories. The Farming of Bones grants epistemic authority to oral narratives as well as imaginative narrative modes, which coalesce with corporeal testimony to form The Farming of Bones’s novelistic archive.
Jennifer Harford Vargas, “Novel Testimony: Alternative Archives in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones,” Callaloo 37.5 (2014), 1173. (via profkew).