“Under this ocean / we hold hands”: An Archipelagic Ecocriti- cal Reading of Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light

In 2021, the UN inaugurated the decade of the ocean, foregrounding bodies of water as exemplary figures of the Anthropocene. Similarly, an oceanic turn can be witnessed in the humanities, which have acknowledged the essential need for a revision of the patriarchal and anthropocentrically oriented discourses around planetary waterscapes. Contemporary Caribbean women’s literature, with its environmentally focused works portraying the unique material and metaphorical space of the archipelago, has a vital contribution to make in the shift from a masculinist landlocked perspective to a gendered aqueous epistemology. Drawing from the transdisciplinary field of the Blue Humanities and using archipelagic ecocriticism as a methodological framework, in my talk I will examine the novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013), by the award-winning Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat, as an example of water-related narrative combining environmental concerns and feminist inquiries. First, the material dimension of water will be analyzed by unveiling the “hydro-logics” of the book as well as the different modalities through which the novel’s wet matter manifests itself as a participative and generative agent. Second, the figurative side of water will be investigated by considering the novel’s female characters as archipelagic beings. Like the islands of an archipelago, they are apparently divided by unbridgeable differences but fundamentally united in a common struggle for reciprocal sustenance, resistance, and survival. In conclusion, the archipelagic reading of Danticat’s work suggests an alternative to dominant imaginaries of water (and women) as an exchangeable and instrumentalizable resource. In fact, the aquatic realm is a storied space where the gendered structures of power and subordination can be challenged and powerful forms of connections can be established.