Kerstin Kloster

• Women in Caribbean culture traditionally occupy the role of guardians of collective memory, as tellers of stories, legends and myths. Through oral tradition, they transfer the cultural and family knowledge from one generation of women to the next. We will offer an analysis of oral transmission as a way of preserving a memory of women in Le livre d’Emma (2001) by the Québec author of Haitian origin, Marie-Célie Agnant. We will primarily analyze the transformation of communicative memory into cultural memory, following the distinction by JanWomen in Caribbean culture traditionally occupy the role of guardians of collective memory, as tellers of stories, legends and myths. Through oral tradition, they transfer the cultural and family knowledge from one generation of women to the next. We will offer an analysis of oral transmission as a way of preserving a memory of women in Le livre d’Emma (2001) by the Québec author of Haitian origin, Marie-Célie Agnant. We will primarily analyze the transformation of communicative memory into cultural memory, following the distinction by Jan Assmann. We will interpret the oral transfer as a possibility to stabilize, to legitimize female memory and to inscribe it into the female body.…