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Letters to nowhere
Failures of dialogue in Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” and Aleksandar Hemon’s “A Coin”
- Source: Language and Dialogue, Volume 12, Issue 1, Mar 2022, p. 72 - 90
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- 20 Apr 2021
- 10 Oct 2021
- 07 Mar 2022
Abstract
Abstract
In her study of epistolarity and world literature, Bower (2017) 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.