Black Skin as Site of Memory: Stories of Trauma from the Black Atlantic

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.