“Making Generative Oddkin”: Female Bodies as a Site of Connectivity in Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light

Abstract

Today as in colonial times, the Caribbean bears the brunt of so-called Global North nations’ consumption of the planet and of archipelagic resources and ecosystems, global warming currently hitting ‘the West’ less hard than the Caribbean (Paravisini-Gebert 278). Located in the Caribbean, Haiti is precisely one of the erstwhile colonies in the so-called Global South that have frequently made headlines in recent years for the natural disasters they were shaken by (Danticat “Haiti”). Donna haraway's rally cry cry to “mak[e] generative oddkin” (3)demands interspecies solidarity as a way to respond to planetary precarity. This paper zooms in on connectivity as ecological solidarity in Edwidge Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light. Bringing together central ideas from the fields of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism and material feminism, I explore how the novel portrays and opens up soldairy relations across species and which capacities it attributes to the female body as an agent of kinship-making, involved in making generative oddkin.