Suicide in Caribbean Women's Writing

Abstract

This dissertation focusses on the analysis of three characters from the novels Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat, In Another Place, Not Here by Dionne Brand and Unburnable by Marie-Elena John. These characters share common points: they are women born in the Caribbean – in Haiti for Danticat’s Martine, in Grenada for Brand’s Verlia and in Dominica for John’s Lillian – and for their own reasons, they have left their homeland to join the diaspora on the North American continent. This uprooting creates a rupture between these protagonists and their native culture, which they each try to repair in their own way, through internal struggles that will inexorably lead them to consider ending their lives. The aim of this dissertation is to determine whether these deaths can be considered as suicides.