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Article published In:
When Dialogue Fails
Edited by Anja Müller-Wood
[Language and Dialogue 12:1] 2022
► pp. 72–90

Letters to nowhere

Failures of dialogue in Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” and Aleksandar Hemon’s “A Coin”

| American University of Sharjah

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.

Keywords: dialogue, letters, epistolarity, epistolary writing, epistolary fiction, epistolary literature, migrant literature, refugee literature
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Migrant letters as historical sources: Meaning in dialogue
  • 3.Migrant letters as literature: Meaning without dialogue
    • 3.1Breaking the epistolary pact in Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” and Aleksandar Hemon’s “A Coin”
    • 3.2Colluding with the reader of Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” and Aleksandar Hemon’s “A Coin”
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00112.tan
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