Abstract
This chapter reads Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem as an allegory of the racialisation that rewrites the Salem witch trials through the voice of a Caribbean-born slave. The accusation and labelling of ‘witches’, in this Guadeloupean view of Anglo-American slavery and racialisation, creates the difference it names as a metaphor for racial naming qua scapegoating. The torture Tituba undergoes as part of her trials also inscribes blackness onto her skin, and since the abolition of slavery, practices such as segregation, mass incarceration, racial profiling, and police murder have not only continued these processes but also reinforced them through repetitive acts of a forced collective memory of trauma at the site of black skin, racialised through this very process.
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Notes
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- 3.
On the relation between Fanon and Condé, see Waddell (2003, p. 154).
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On the postcolonial possibilities of Barthes’s notion, see Achille and Moudileno (2018).
- 7.
This expression repeats the title of a Billy Holiday song about lynching. When Tituba is finally hanged at the end of the novel after fomenting a slave rebellion in her native Barbados, she states, ‘Autour de moi, d’étranges arbres se hérissaient d’étranges fruits’ (p. 263). [‘All around me strange trees were bristling with strange fruit’ (p. 172).] See also Thomas (2006, p. 103).
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Compare with the passage in which Susanna Endicott instructs Tituba: ‘But you will leave the cooking to me. I cannot bear to have you niggers touching my food with the discolored, waxy palms of your hands’ (p. 21).
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Hayes, J. (2020). Black Skin as Site of Memory: Stories of Trauma from the Black Atlantic. In: Hubbell, A.L., Akagawa, N., Rojas-Lizana, S., Pohlman, A. (eds) Places of Traumatic Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_9
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