carmen maria machado's in the dream house

Both Hartman and Machado use narrative to demand witness where agency has been barred. Taking direction from Hartman’s commitment to reenvisioning overlooked lives, Machado delves into narratives around queer abuse starting with her own, thus building scholarship around stories deemed impossible. That’s a long way of saying that the stories we tell or the songs we sing or the wealth of immaterial resources are all that we can count on.

I observe that narrative may be the only available form of redress for the monumental crime that was the transatlantic slave trade and the terror of enslavement and racism. Machado begins her book, a robust yet personal critique of the archive and its inadequacies, by citing her primary source - Saidiya Hartman’s heralded essay “Venus in Two Acts.” Machado quotes Hartman’s strategy of “riting history ‘with and against the archive,’ ‘imagining what cannot be verified.’” In an interview with The Creative Independent, Hartman says of “Venus in Two Acts”: Pointing to the historic erasure of queer trauma, Machado slices a former romance into a series of vignettes that range from the idyllic to the erotic to the steadily chilling, documenting the escalation of psychological violence between herself and former partner, referred to as “the woman from the Dream House.”īeyond harrowing descriptions of emotional manipulation, written in the same visceral style that put Machado on the map as one of the most gripping literary voices of our time, Machado’s greatest grievance is with the social, legal, and political systems that authorize queer maltreatment through the erasure of Otherness. HOW DO YOU FIND agency in a world that denies your existence? Carmen Maria Machado charges at this question in her new memoir, In the Dream House, a kaleidoscopic account of queer abuse.

Carmen maria machado's in the dream house