Article published In: When Dialogue Fails
Edited by Anja Müller-Wood
[Language and Dialogue 12:1] 2022
► pp. 72–90
Letters to nowhere
Failures of dialogue in Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” and Aleksandar Hemon’s “A Coin”
Published online: 7 March 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00112.tan
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00112.tan
Abstract
In her study of epistolarity and world literature, Bower, Rachel. 2017. Epistolarity
and World Literature, 1980–2010. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
observes that letters “travel easily” and so are an obvious form for writing about migration and transnational dialogue. From
another perspective, however, the epistolary may contain an empty promise: letters, after all, are sometimes waylaid or mislaid,
unsent or undeliverable. This paper investigates the epistle and epistolary conventions in two short stories by US migrant
writers – Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” (1993) and Aleksandar Hemon’s “A Coin” (1997) – in which dialogue across
national borders is made impossible under extreme political circumstances. I argue that Danticat and Hemon undermine the dialogic
writing that is a basic generic epistolary convention to caution against ignoring asymmetries of power in situations of forced
migration.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Migrant letters as historical sources: Meaning in dialogue
- 3.Migrant letters as literature: Meaning without dialogue
- 3.1Breaking the epistolary pact in Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” and Aleksandar Hemon’s “A Coin”
- 3.2Colluding with the reader of Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” and Aleksandar Hemon’s “A Coin”
- 4.Conclusion
- Notes
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