The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat 9781350123526, 9781350210653, 9781350123557, 9781350123540

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part I Literary Beginnings
Editors’ Introduction: A Literary Life and Legacy: Danticat's Writerly Inheritances
Chapter 1 “All Geography is Within Me”: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt
Chapter 2 Interview With Edwidge Danticat
Part II On Violence and Violated Bodies: Biopolitics in Danticat’s Texts
Chapter 3 Reconstructive Textual Surgery in Danticat’s .Krik? Krak! and the Dew Breaker
Chapter 4 “I Might Lose All My Life”: Brother, I’m Dying and (Black) Immigration Discourse in the Unitted States
Chapter 5 Alleys, Capillaries, Thorns: The Violated Terre-Natale of Ville Rose
Part III On Death and Dying: Necropolitics in Danticat’s Texts
Chapter 6 Losing Your (m)other: danticat’s Narratives Of Un/belonging And Un/dying (.simone A. james Alexander.)
Chapter 7 Lòt Bò Dlo: Producing Haitian Spaces of Death and Diaspora in Danticat’s the Dew Breaker
Chapter 8 Death and the Maiden: Writing Death in Danticat’s Fiction
Part IV Tifis Ak Fanm, Girls and Women
Chapter 9 “Somebody, Anybody Sing a Black Girl’s Song …”: Danticat and Haitian Girlhood
Chapter 10 The Good Daughter: Danticat’s Migrating Memories
Chapter 11 “I am the One Telling it”: Resilient Children, Familial Bonds, and Haitian Heritage in Danticat’s Picture Books
Part V Ecri Angaje: Political Writing: Danticat as Public Intellectual
Chapter 12 Haiti Faces Difficult Questions Ten Years after a Devastating Earthquake
Chapter 13 Create Dangerously: A Poetics of Writing as Memorial Art; the Text as Echo Chamber
Chapter 14 Haiti’s Past, Present, And Uncertain Future: Danticat's New Yorker Column as Platform for Public Intellectualism
Part VI Food, Haiti, and Haitian Culinary/literary Inheritances
Chapter 15 Edwidge Danticat’s Kitchen History
Chapter 16 “A People do not Throw Their Geniuses Away”: Danticat's "Kitchen Poet" Literary Antecedents
Chapter 17 Scattering And Gathering: Danticar, Food, and (the) 'Haitian Experience(s)
Part VII Theoretical Approaches
Chapter 18 Sea, Stone, Sky, and Cemetery: Vodou’s Divine Nature and Religious Archetypes in Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and After the Dance
Chapter 19 “So Much Had Fallen into the Sea”: An Ecocritical Approach to Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light
Chapter 20 “Aha!”: Danticat and Creolization
Chapter 21 Memory and rhe Possibilities of the Short Story Sequence in Krik? Krak!
Part VIII Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Transnational Hispaniola
Chapter 22 “Neither Strangers Nor Friends”: Transnational Hispaniola and the Uneven Inticacies of the Farming of Bones
Chapter 23 “Walk Too Far in Either Direction and People Speak a Different Language”: Navigation Hispaniola in Danticat's the Farming of Bones
Part IX Critical Sources
Bibliography of Writings by Edwidge Danticat
Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO EDWIDGE DANTICAT

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Available from Bloomsbury THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO OCTAVIA E. BUTLER Edited by Gregory Hampton and Kendra R. Parker THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO KATHERINE MANSFIELD Edited by Todd Martin Forthcoming from Bloomsbury THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO SYLVIA PLATH Edited by Anita Helle, Amanda Golden, and Maeve O’Brien THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO EDITH WHARTON Edited by Emily J. Orlando THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO J. M. COETZEE Edited by Andrew Van der Vlies and Lucy Graham

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO EDWIDGE DANTICAT

Edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Nadège T. Clitandre

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Jana Evans Braziel, Nadège T. Clitandre, and Contributors, 2021 Jana Evans Braziel, Nadège T. Clitandre, and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Namkwan Cho Cover image © Mark Dellas All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Braziel, Jana Evans, 1967– editor. | Clitandre, Nadège T., 1977– editor. Title: The Bloomsbury handbook to Edwidge Danticat / edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Nadège T. Clitandre. Other titles: Handbook to Edwidge Danticat Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: Bloomsbury handbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020040948 (print) | LCCN 2020040949 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350123526 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350123533 (epub) | ISBN 9781350123540 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Danticat, Edwidge, 1969–Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PS3554.A5815 Z55 2021 (print) | LCC PS3554.A5815 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040948 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040949 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-2352-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-2354-0 eBook: 978-1-3501-2353-3 Series: Bloomsbury Handbooks Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

I  Literary Beginnings

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Editors’ Introduction: A Literary Life and Legacy: Danticat’s Writerly Inheritances Jana Evans Braziel and Nadège T. Clitandre

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1 “All Geography Is within Me”: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt Edwidge Danticat

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2 Interview with Edwidge Danticat Nadège T. Clitandre

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II  On Violence and Violated Bodies: Biopolitics in Danticat’s Texts

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3 Reconstructive Textual Surgery in Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and The Dew Breaker Judith Misrahi-Barak

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4 “I Might Lose All My Life”: Brother, I’m Dying and (Black) Immigration Discourse in the United States Myriam J. A. Chancy

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5 Alleys, Capillaries, Thorns: The Violated Terre-Natale of Ville Rose Jana Evans Braziel

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III  On Death and Dying: Necropolitics in Danticat’s Texts

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6 Losing Your (M)Other: Danticat’s Narratives of Un/Belonging and Un/Dying Simone A. James Alexander 7

Lòt bò dlo: Producing Haitian Spaces of Death and Diaspora in Danticat’s The Dew Breaker Anne Brüske

8 Death and the Maiden: Writing Death in Danticat’s Fiction Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo

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121 145

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IV  TIFIS AK Fanm, Girls and Women

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9 “Somebody, Anybody Sing a Black Girl’s Song …”: Danticat and Haitian Girlhood Régine Michelle Jean-Charles

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10 The Good Daughter: Danticat’s Migrating Memories Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw 11 “I Am the One Telling It”: Resilient Children, Familial Bonds, and Haitian Heritage in Danticat’s Picture Books Cara Byrne

V  ECRI Angaje: Political Writing: Danticat as Public Intellectual 12 Haiti Faces Difficult Questions Ten Years after a Devastating Earthquake Edwidge Danticat

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13 Create Dangerously: A Poetics of Writing as Memorial Art; the Text as Echo Chamber Anja Bandau

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14 Haiti’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future: Danticat’s New Yorker Column as Platform for Public Intellectualism Megan Feifer and Maia Butler

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VI  Food, Haiti, and Haitian Culinary/Literary Inheritances

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15 Edwidge Danticat’s Kitchen History Valérie Loichot

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16 “A People Do Not Throw Their Geniuses Away”: Danticat’s “Kitchen Poet” Literary Antecedents Wilson C. Chen

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17 Scattering and Gathering: Danticat, Food, and (the) Haitian Experience(s) Robyn Cope

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VII  Theoretical Approaches

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18 Sea, Stone, Sky, and Cemetery: Vodou’s Divine Nature and Religious Archetypes in Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and After the Dance Kyrah Malika Daniels

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19 “So Much Had Fallen into the Sea”: An Ecocritical Approach to Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light Kristina S. Gibby

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20 “Aha!”: Danticat and Creolization Carine Mardorossian

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21 Memory and the Possibilities of the Short Story Sequence in Krik? Krak! W. Todd Martin

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VIII  Haiti, The Dominican Republic, and Transnational Hispaniola

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22 “Neither Strangers nor Friends”: Transnational Hispaniola and the Uneven Intimacies of The Farming of Bones John D. Ribó

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23 “Walk Too Far in Either Direction and People Speak a Different Language”: Navigating Hispaniola in Danticat’s The Farming of Bones Ramón Ant. Victoriano-Martínez

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IX  Critical Sources

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Bibliography of Writings by Edwidge Danticat 417 Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat 421 Notes on Contributors 441 Index449

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jana and Nadège would like to thank our friends, family, and colleagues for their vital contributions to this collection. Above all, we thank Edwidge Danticat for her input, ideas, creative collaboration, and, of course, for her beautiful words, her passion, her brilliance, and her morally grounded convictions as a writer. For the beautiful photograph of Edwidge and for permission to use it for the cover, we thank photographer Mark Dellas. For reprint permissions, we also thank Maya Solovej, Danticat’s agent; Mary Ellen McNeil, University of Virginia Press; Ginetta Candelario, Smith College and editor of Meridians; and Diane Grossé, Duke University Press. All of the following are reprinted with their gracious permissions: Clitandre, Nadège T. “Appendix: Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” Included in the monograph, Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Danticat, Edwidge. “ ‘All Geography Is within Me’: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt.” World Literature Today, 93, no. 1 (winter 2019): 59–65. Danticat, Edwidge. “Haiti Faces Difficult Questions Ten Years after a Devastating Earthquake.” The New Yorker (January 11, 2020), https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/haitifaces-difficult-questions-ten-years-after-a-devastating-earthquake. Loichot, Valérie. “Edwidge Danticat’s Kitchen History.” Meridians:  Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 5, no. 1 (2004): 92–116.

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PART I LITERARY BEGINNINGS

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EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: A LITERARY LIFE AND LEGACY: DANTICAT’S WRITERLY INHERITANCES

Jana Evans Braziel and Nadège T. Clitandre

Celebrated writer, passionate activist, literary voice, imaginative wordsmith, and heartfelt conscience of a generation who is an outspoken critic of racism, anti-immigrant politics, police brutality, sexual violence, military interventions, and hemispheric imperialism, Edwidge Danticat is a beloved writer who has an extensive literary oeuvre that moves across multiple genres (short story, novella, novel, memoir, travel narrative, essay, and hybrid, experimental forms). An award-winning author (Neustadt International Prize, Ford Fellowship, Pushcart Prize) and a MacArthur Fellow, Danticat is also an accomplished and well-known author; and her work merits comprehensive and transcontinental engagement. Edwidge Danticat is the most important Haitian-American writer today, and she was a pioneering voice among Haitian diasporic writers writing in English, rather than French or Créole. Born in Portau-Prince, Haiti, in 1969, Danticat was raised by an aunt in Belair, before migrating to the United States to join her parents in Brooklyn in 1981. She was twelve years old at the time. Like so many other Haitian diasporic writers, Danticat’s works stand in the shadows cast by Duvalierism, the regimes of François Duvalier (from 1957 to 1971) and Jean-Claude Duvalier (from 1971 to 1986), and post-Duvalier militarism and dictatorship in the nation. Danticat studied French literature at Barnard College, where she graduated with a BA in 1990, before studying creative writing at Brown University and earning the MFA degree in 1993. A prolific and beloved writer, Danticat’s works of fiction and nonfiction include Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak! (1996), a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones (1998); After the Dance (2002); Behind the Mountains (2002); The Dew Breaker (2004); Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490 (2005); Brother, I’m Dying (2007); Create Dangerously (2010); Eight Days: A Story of Haiti (2010); Tent Life: Haiti (2011); Claire of the Sea Light (2013); The Last Mapou (with Édouard Duval-Carrié) (2013); Mama’s Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation (2015); Untwine: A Novel (2015); The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (2017); My Mommy Medicine (2019); and Everything Inside (2019). Danticat has also edited four collections of short stories, poems, and essays: The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (2003); Haiti Noir (2010); Best American Essays 2011; and Haiti Noir 2 (2013). Edwidge Danticat is one of the most celebrated and beloved contemporary writers, yet, to date, there exists only one monograph (Clitandre’s Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (2018)), one edited collection, and one collection of interviews on Danticat even though she is arguably one of the most important writers of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Author of more than eighteen books—including six works of fiction, five works of nonfiction, seven young adult and children’s books, as well as scores of essays and

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articles—Edwidge Danticat is one of the most important contemporary writers: she is also one of the most celebrated and award-winning authors of our era, having won ten literary prizes and awards and having been nominee and finalist for many more. Among her distinctions include the high honor of MacArthur Fellow (2009), Ford Foundation Fellow (2017), and the Prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2018), and the Vilcek Prize for Literature (2020). Danticat has also edited four volumes of fiction and penned numerous prefaces and introductions to other books. Books addressing Danticat’s literary and historical importance include Martin Munro’s Edwidge Danticat:  A Reader’s Guide (2010), Nadège T.  Clitandre’s Edwidge Danticat:  The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (2018), Maxine Lavon Montgomery’s Conversations with Edwidge Danticat (2017), a collection of interviews with the author, and the volume Narrating History, Home, and Nation: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat, edited by Megan Feifer, Maia Butler, and Joanna Davis-McElligatt (forthcoming). All of these works mark the beginning of a serious, engaged scholarship on the fiction and nonfiction writings of Edwidge Danticat and augment hundreds of literary critical essays about her work. The Bloomsbury Companion to Edwidge Danticat builds on this literary reception and will be the only comprehensive volume on her writings that tackles the literary oeuvre in its entirety, cross-genre, and organized around myriad themes in her corpus. Providing an extensive and comprehensive overview to the fiction and nonfiction oeuvre of Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, the book deploys literary, cultural, historical, political, and social analyses to her literary corpus; and the book is organized around key themes and concepts in her body of work. Three key features of The Bloomsbury Companion to Edwidge Danticat include comparative and multidisciplinary analyses of Danticat’s literary oeuvre; an expansive engagement with multiple genres—short stories, essays, novels, memoirs, and young adult and children’s literatures—and the full corpus of her writing; and an encyclopedic and comprehensive companion to her literary corpus and its location within Haitian history, folklore, religion, and politics, as well as within circum-Caribbean, interAmerican, and hemispheric frames.

Structure of the Book In Part I, “Literary Beginnings,” we include (following this editors’ introduction) a nonfiction essay by Edwidge Danticat (“ ‘All Geography Is within Me’: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt”) and an interview with the author by Nadège T. Clitandre (first published in her 2018 monograph Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary). Discussing a wide range of issues and authors, Clitandre and Danticat address the literary influences on her own fiction, the political and philosophical problems confronted in her nonfiction, the importance of mentors and representation for women and girls, and myriad other ideas. In the nonfiction essay, “ ‘All Geography Is within Me’:  Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt,” Danticat explores the impact of literary imagination, geography, and the relations to life, death, survival, and experience in her homeland Haiti. Danticat also probes the literary influences of Zora Neale Hurston and others on her own literary imaginary, inherited genealogies, and imagined geographies. Part II is entitled “On Violence and Violated Bodies: Biopolitics in Danticat’s Texts.” The chapters included in this second section are by contributors Judith Misrahi-Barak, Myriam 4

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J. A Chancy, and Jana Evans Braziel. Judith Misrahi-Barak’s chapter, “Reconstructive Textual Surgery in Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and The Dew Breaker,” foregrounds literary poetics and body politics through the concept of biopolitics, a term first introduced by Michel Foucault and later elaborated by Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, Sibylle Fischer, and myriad other political theorists, philosophers, and cultural critics. Tying the concept of biopolitics and tortured, maimed, mutilated, fragmented bodies or body parts to Danticat’s textual forms, particularly the short story and short story cycle, Misrahi-Barak asserts that the author performs a “reconstructive textual surgery” that reconstitutes the body and the body politics, however injured and wounded. Beginning with a powerful anecdote and a cautionary tale about racial, ethnic, and immigrant presuppositions, Myriam J.  A. Chancy, in her chapter “ ‘I Might Lose All My Life’: Brother, I’m Dying and (Black) Immigration Discourse in the United States,” tackles the geopolitics and imaginary terrains of contemporary immigrant politics in the United States and in Canada. From this account, and drawing from and textually analyzing Danticat’s literary memoir, Brother, I’m Dying (2007), she stages a literary debate about contemporary immigrant politics and policies in North America, specifically the United States and Canada, foregrounding diasporic approaches that center on Haitian immigrant experiences in the two countries. Chancy importantly reminds readers that Black biopolitics in North America need to incorporate African and Caribbean diasporic experiences, and that not doing so demonstrates the devaluation of Black existence in the body politic. In the chapter, “Alleys, Capillaries, Thorns: The Violated Terre-Natale of Ville Rose,” Braziel explores the ville imaginé of Ville Rose in Danticat’s literary oeuvre as the historical ground of sexual violence in Haiti. Rereading all of Danticat’s literary texts for their treatments of sexual violence, maternal death, and dead babies, Braziel illustrates the ways in which these violences are foundational not only for understanding Haiti’s entangled histories of slavery, colonial domination, and rape but also for understanding the ways in which Danticat’s literary reimaginings of these histories create alternative spaces for women and children within that violated historical ground: by demonstrating the violences that transpired, the author points to women and children’s absences, or presences as violated terrains, and demonstrates that Haitian futures must unearth these violated terrains and create new spaces—not just imagined spaces but ones that are social and political and economic—for women and children as historical actors and political agents. Part III is entitled “On Death and Dying: Necropolitics in Danticat’s Texts” and includes chapters written by Simone A. James Alexander, Anne Brüske, and Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo. Simone A. James Alexander, in her chapter “Losing Your (M)Other: Danticat’s Narratives of Un/Belonging and Un/Dying,” foregrounds Danticat’s literary and philosophical engagements with death and dying:  in the chapter, Alexander adopts Danticat’s ideas of “living dyingly” (from The Art of Death) to conceptualize the spiritual and transcendent terrain of dying through the term “necro-transcendence.” For Alexander, necro-transcendence captures the processes of un/belonging and un/dying; and she analyzes death through this lens in several literary works by Danticat—Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Farming of Bones; The Art of Death; and Untwine—as well as draws parallels to literary treatments of death and dying in works by American literary authors, particularly Toni Morrison’s Sula and Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” Further developing the discussion of Danticat’s literary preoccupations with death and dying, Anne Brüske, in her chapter “Lòt bò dlo:  Producing Haitian Spaces of Death and 5

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Diaspora in Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, examines the ways in which death (as theme and trope) informs not only the content of Danticat’s texts but also the author’s “aesthetic form.” Brüske draws on Thomas Macho’s concept of “presence in absence” to do so; and she focuses her analyses of death and dying as aesthetics in The Dew Breaker, though she also surveys the “spaces” of death throughout myriad texts—The Farming of Bones; Create Dangerously; Claire of the Sea Light; and The Art of Death. Using Danticat’s Haitian Kreyòl phrase, “lòt bò dlo,” “the other side of the water,” Brüske explores the mythical spaces of death in diaspora, centering her reading through Vodou understandings of death and the spaces of death. Extending discussions of death and dying in Danticat’s oeuvre, Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo, in her chapter entitled “Death and the Maiden: Writing Death in Danticat’s Fiction,” delves into literary treatments of death as “exorcism” of the “fear of death,” as the author herself first introduces in The Art of Death. Probing this recurrent theme—death, dying—in several different literary texts (Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!; The Farming of Bones; The Dew Breaker; and Claire of the Sealight; as well as in The Art of Death), Nzengou-Tayo offers readers a “typology” of death in Danticat’s literary corpus as well as its role in narration and in the writer’s narrative forms. Nzengou-Tayo thus builds on what Brüske defines as the “aesthetics” of death in Danticat’s literature. Finally, and by focusing on processes of mourning, grief, and bereavement, Nzengou-Tayo, like Alexander, attends to the philosophical dimensions of death and dying in Danticat’s work. Part IV, entitled “Tifi ak Fanm, Girls and Women,” foregrounds the relationship of women and girls through feminist lenses and includes contributions by Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, and Cara Byrne. Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, in her chapter “ ‘Somebody, Anybody Sing a Black Girl’s Song …’: Danticat and Haitian Girlhood,” centers the lives and lived experiences of Black girls in Danticat’s literary texts. Foregrounding analyses of Breath, Eyes, Memory and Claire of the Sea Light, Jean-Charles examines the ways in which Danticat writes for and about tifi, girls in Haiti and in Haiti’s diaspora. Building on the interdisciplinary field of Black girlhood studies, Jean-Charles demonstrates how Black girls are too often rendered invisible culturally, historically, socially, and politically, and offers, through Danticat, a counter-narrative that places Black girls at the literary and imaginary center. In “The Good Daughter:  Danticat’s Migrating Memories,” Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw takes up the theme of tifi ak fanm, girls and women, through the figure of the daughter. By focusing on the “daughter” as a literary, philosophical, and historical trope (as do other French and francophone writers, notably Simone de Beauvoir in Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, translated into English as Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter), Walcott-Hackshaw offers literary critical readings of two short stories—“The Book of the Dead” and “Sunrise, Sunset”—and of The Art of Dying, the book of essays in which the writer/daughter philosophically meditates on the death and dying of her own mother. Throughout the chapter, Walcott-Hackshaw asks how daughters understand what is meant by being a good mother, a good daughter, and also how to lose a father—all experiences that must be meditated on and in relation to memory and migration, the memories of migration, and the migration of memories. Cara Byrne, in her chapter “ ‘I Am the One Telling It’: Resilient Children, Familial Bonds, and Haitian Heritage in Danticat’s Picture Books,” offers a comprehensive overview of Danticat’s contributions to children’s literature: Byrne, in the chapter, discusses all of Danticat’s children’s books—Eight Days; The Last Mapou; Mama’s Nightingale; and My Mommy Medicine—and illustrates the author’s important contributions to diversifying the range of books available to 6

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children that candidly talk about difficult topics—race, immigration, detention, and separation. The chapter thus adds nuance and depth to our understanding of Danticat’s literary oeuvre by foregrounding the writer as writer of children’s books. Byrne’s chapter thus beautifully concludes the section on tifi ak fanm. Part V, entitled “Ecri Angaje:  Political Writing:  Danticat as Public Intellectual,” includes contributions written by Edwidge Danticat, Anja Bandau, and by Maia Butler and Megan Feifer. The section opens with Danticat’s memorial essay marking the tenth anniversary of the 2010 earthquake. The essay, “Haiti Faces Difficult Questions Ten Years after a Devastating Earthquake,” first published in the New Yorker, asks readers to consider the progress (or lack of) in the decade since the devastating natural disaster in the country. Placing the earthquake in the ongoing struggles against grinding poverty, international interference, political corruption, and mobilized resistance, Danticat repeatedly and heuristically asks her readers, “What if …?” What if the earthquake had not killed over three hundred thousand Haitians; what if the international community had involved Haitians in the reconstruction process; what if the international funds had not been squandered? Centering on the idea of “memorial art” and the praxis of politically engaged writing in the face of disaster or mass destruction, Anja Bandau (in her chapter “Create Dangerously: A Poetics of Writing as Memorial Art; the Text as Echo Chamber”) analyzes Danticat’s nonfiction collection of essays: for Bandau, Danticat’s nonfiction form of “creating dangerously” (adopted from Albert Camus) must be understood as diasporic, written from a migratory position in relation to the homeland and the site of destruction or ruin. Bandau also theorizes, following Danticat herself and Clitandre (in Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary), the “echo chamber” as a politicized, literary site of polyphonic voices, testimonials that echo, reverberate, and reiterate the semiotic registers of trauma, including speechlessness or aphasia. Doing so, Bandau also importantly brings Danticat into echoing conversations with other Haitian writers, notably Yanick Lahens, Dany Laferrière, and Kettly Mars. Maia Butler and Megan Feifer, in their coauthored chapter “Haiti’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future:  Danticat’s New  Yorker Column as Platform for Public Intellectualism,” discuss Danticat’s role as a public intellectual and as a politically engaged nonfiction writer. In this role, Danticat regularly weighs in on critical, contemporary issues, particularly those impacting her homeland Haiti and Haiti’s diaspora in the United States, as well as contributing short stories and other fiction pieces in the New Yorker, one of the most influential literary and highly circulated cultural journals published in the country (the United States). For Butler and Feifer, Danticat manifests in these regular contributions the role of “engaged citizen,” a guiding and vital voice for her readers around salient issues impacting citizenship and the country, including race, race politics, immigration, presidential politics, mobilized resistances, and the minority perspectives and vibrant spaces of American literatures. Part VI is entitled “Food, Haiti, and Haitian Culinary/Literary Inheritance” and includes chapters by Valérie Loichot, Wilson C. Chen, and Robyn Cope. Reprinted from Meridians: Race, Feminism, Transnationalism, Valérie Loichot’s chapter “Edwidge Danticat’s Kitchen History” marks an important foray into the interdisciplinary spaces of food studies, literary culinary studies, and the importance of food and cooking to women’s writings in the francophone traditions, here Haitian. Focusing on the roles that food and cooking play in women’s lives, in Haitian heritage, and as a metaphor for writing, particularly in Danticat’s first short story collection Krik? Krak! and in her debut novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, Loichot argues that the 7

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diasporic kitchen is a feminist space of memory, remembrance, legacy, heritage, and creation in words and in food. Loichot’s original essay (published in 2006) appears here with a new “Epilogue: Kitchen History, Twenty or So Years Later …” Further developing this critical, culinary line of inquiry, Wilson C. Chen (in his chapter “ ‘A People Do Not Throw Their Geniuses Away’: Danticat’s ‘Kitchen Poet’ Literary Antecedents”) opens by responding to Alice Walker’s call from “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” for literary excavation of lost, maternal genealogies. Quoting Walker’s essay in his title (“A People Do Not Throw Their Geniuses Away”), Chen further probes the importances of food, culinary traditions, cooking, and kitchens in Danticat’s literature and also seeks out her “kitchen poet” literary antecedents, primarily (in Chen’s reading) Zora Neale Hurston, Paule Marshall, and Walker. Chen particularly attends to the literary influence of Marshall and her essay “From the Poets in the Kitchen.” Robyn Cope, in her chapter “Scattering and Gathering: Danticat, Food, and (the) Haitian Experience(s),” also probes the interdisciplinary and diasporic spaces of food, cooking, and culinary metaphors for immigration and memory. Building on the praxes of “scattering” and “gathering,” which emulate diasporic separation and transnational closing of distance, Cope examines the generational and geographic divides that Danticat writes across. Drawing parallels to Jacques Stéphen Alexis, Cope also underscores the ways that Danticat’s “scattering” and “gathering” through food and culinary traditions also intersections with the Haitian literary tradition of “marvelous realism.” Part VII is entitled “Theoretical Approaches” and includes chapters by Kyrah Malika Daniels, Kristina Gibby, Carine Mardorossian, and W. Todd Martin. Kyrah Malika Daniels, in her chapter entitled “Sea, Stone, Sky, and Cemetery: Vodou’s Divine Nature and Religious Archetypes in Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and After the Dance,” explores the role that Vodou spiritualism, ritual, and folklore play in the writer’s literary imagination and moral compass. Analyzing the short stories in Krik? Krak! alongside the nonfiction travel narrative After the Dance, which is about Kanaval (Carnival) in Jacmel, Daniels offers a brilliant and compelling analysis of Vodou as integral to the moral and spiritual fabric of Danticat’s literary imagination. Daniels also incorporates insights from an interview with the author to further underscore the essential importance of Vodou not only for Danticat but also for Haitians in the country and in diaspora. In “ ‘So Much Had Fallen into the Sea’: An Ecocritical Approach to Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light,” Kristina Gibby reads Danticat’s most recent novels through environmental lenses. Proceeding from ecocriticism and environmental humanities approaches for analyzing literary texts, Gibby contextualizes Danticat’s fiction within the interdisciplinary field of Caribbean environmentalism. Asserting the importance of environmental approaches to Haiti, Haitian, and Haitian diasporic literatures, Gibby places Danticat’s novel alongside literary texts by other Caribbean writers (Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Édouard Glissant) who delve into the environmental terrains of the archipelago. Carine Mardorossian, in her chapter “ ‘Aha!’: Danticat and Creolization,” positions Danticat as a writer who presumes her location as one of creolization, hybridity, and diaspora—and writes from this politics/poetics of location and relation. Whereas an earlier generation of Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic writers felt the need to defend this positionality, Danticat, like an entire younger generation of writers and artists, begin from this mixed point of departure and thereby create relationally and transnationally across previously held national divides. 8

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Introduction

Doing so allows for greater influence and impact in multiple points of departure, location, and myriad arrivals, as well as liminal spaces in between. In a similar theoretical vein, W. Todd Martin addresses cultural inheritance, fragmentation, memory, and remembrance as creolized praxis in and through the short story form in his chapter “Memory and the Possibilities of the Short Story Sequence in Krik? Krak!” For Martin, as for Misrahi-Barak and Mardorrosian, the short story form and the story cycle manifest fiction written at diasporic distance: a process of recreating through memory, language, and shards of sutured meaning; and the short story, in its recurrent characters and narrative fragments, works to recreate and suffuse with meaning what has been lost. Part VIII is entitled “Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Transnational Hispaniola” and includes chapters by John D.  Ribó and Ramon Ant. Victoriano-Martinez. John D.  Ribó, in “ ‘Neither Strangers nor Friends’:  Transnational Hispaniola and the Uneven Intimacies of The Farming of Bones,” examines the histories of racism, racial violence, and linguistic divides between the Dominican Republic and Haiti and analyzes Danticat’s 1998 novel as a writerly intervention in the vexed relations and borders between the two countries. From this analytical and critical point of departure, Ribó returns to the border wars between the two countries through the recent points of cultural, historical, and political collaboration through the Transnational Hispaniola collective and movement. Transnational and diasporic activists and scholars, operating from a position of shared Afro-Latinidad and Latinx studies, have assiduously labored to heal the trauma and historical wounds. While some Haitian American cultural critics, notably Ayana Legros, declare and champion a Latina identity, others, saliently, Nathalie Cerin, refuse such identity claims, preferring to remain resolutely Haïtienne. Foregrounding the debate between Legros and Cerin, Ribó argues for a similar tension manifest in the novel The Farming of Bones between Valencia and Amabelle. In the end, due to Valencia’s refusal to be historically accountable for the violence, the Haitian massacre, Amabelle refuses intimacy and affiliation with her. As Ribó concludes, Dominicans must step forward, accept historical complicity, and acknowledge past and present violences before healing between the two countries can occur. The Transnational Hispaniola is one effort toward that healing. Ramon Ant. Victoriano-Martinez, in the chapter “ ‘Walk Too Far in Either Direction and People Speak a Different Language’:  Navigating Hispaniola in Danticat’s The Farming of Bones,” places ongoing racial tensions and border divides between the Dominican Republic and Haiti in the context of earlier historical violences, including the 1937 “Parsley” Massacre. Placing Danticat’s violence in conversation with other political, literary, and legal writings in the Dominican Republic, Victoriano-Martinez traces the long history of legislative, material, and civic violence against Haitians living in the DR. Part IX, “Critical Sources,” concludes the volume and includes a bibliography of writings by Edwidge Danticat, a bibliography of literary criticism on Danticat, and the biographical notes for all contributors, including the author and the editors.

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CHAPTER 1 “ALL GEOGRAPHY IS WITHIN ME”: WRITING BEGINNINGS, LIFE, DEATH, FREEDOM, AND SALT

Edwidge Danticat

1 This past June I was in Haiti in part for the opening of a library in a southern town called Fonddes-Blancs. Fond-des-Blancs, which literally means “The Fountain of the Whites,” is mostly known for being home to a large number of people of Polish lineage, the descendants of soldiers from a Polish regiment that switched alliances from the French armies they were fighting alongside in nineteenth-century Haiti to join the Haitians in their battle for independence from France in 1804. The mutinous Polish soldiers who ended up settling in Fond-des-Blancs were the only whites and foreigners who were granted Haitian citizenship after Haiti became the first black republic in the Western hemisphere in 1804. The library we were there to celebrate had been started by a nonprofit called Haiti Projects, which was run by an acquaintance of mine whose mother is American and whose father is Haitian. The opening-week program included writing workshops and conversations with writers. I  took part in a conversation and writing workshop with the Haitian novelist and short-story writer Kettly Mars. Our moderator, a Haiti-based educator named Jean-Marie Théodat, asked each of us to read both the beginning and the end of one of our short stories, then explain to the group of twenty-five or so eager teenagers why we had chosen to begin and end that story the way we had. If you have ever spoken to a group of teenagers, you know how intimidating it already is to explain anything to them, but this was a bit extra intimidating for me. It is much easier to explain or elaborate on an ending than a beginning. For endings, you can always say that it ended this way because it had begun that way. Or it ended that way because something popped up in the middle that led me there. Beginnings have a much bigger burden and are often less clear. In the beginning was the Word, the Good Book tells us. And perhaps the Word—or the Words—was, were … Once Upon a Time, Il était une fois or Te gèn yon fwa or Krik? Krak!

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I feel the same dilemma right now while trying to trace the geography, or cartography, both internal and external, that has brought me from my own beginnings to this moment. Once upon a time, a little girl was born in Haiti during the middle part of a dynastic thirtyyear dictatorship. Her parents were poor, though maybe not as poor as others. My parents didn’t get very far in school because their parents could not afford it. My mother was a seamstress. My father, a shoe salesman and a tailor. When I was two years old, my father left Haiti and moved to the United States to look for work. Two years later, my mother joined him and left me and my younger brother, Bob, in the care of my aunt and uncle in Port-au-Prince. One of my earliest childhood memories is of being torn away from my mother. On the day my mother left, I wrapped my arms around her legs before she headed for the plane. She leaned down and tearfully unballed my fists so that my uncle could peel me off her. As my brother dropped to the floor, bawling, my mother hurried away, her tear-soaked face buried in her hands. She couldn’t bear to look back. If my life were the short story I  was asked to explain the beginning of in that writing workshop with the teenagers in Fond-des-Blancs, this might have been my chosen beginning, the most dramatic one I can remember. After all, as the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus wrote, a person’s art is “nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” Since I  was too young to remember my father leaving Haiti for the United States, my mother’s departure was one of the first images in whose presence both my heart and my art first opened, an art and a heart that suddenly expanded beyond geographical confines and also made me realize that one can love from both near and far. In Haitian Creole when someone is said to be “lòt bò dlo,” on the other side of the water, it can either mean that they’ve traveled abroad or that they have died. My parents were already lòt bò dlo, on the other side of the waters from me, before I fully even knew what that meant. My desire to make sense of this separation, this lòt bò dlo-ness, is one of the things that brought me to the internal geography of words and how they can bridge distances. One way I  used to communicate with my parents was through letters. We spoke on the phone once a week while sitting in a telephone booth, where we had a standing appointment every Sunday afternoon, but we also communicated through cassettes that we sent back and forth with people who were traveling between New York and Port-au-Prince. We wrote letters too. Every month my father would send us a half-page letter composed in stilted French to offer news of his and my mother’s health as well as details on how to spend the money he and my mother wired for my and my brother’s food, lodging, and school expenses. When my parents’ letters and cassettes found their way to me from Brooklyn to Port-auPrince, I again realized how words—both written and spoken—can transcend geography and time. My mother could tell me stories—once upon a time—in my mind. And I knew, because she later told me this, that she was imagining every day of my life, then would dream of whatever indispensable thing she thought I needed to know, things she believed that only she could tell me. The way she imagined my life in her absence was sometimes better and sometimes worse than what was actually happening to me at ages four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven and twelve, but we were constantly alive in each other’s imagination. And because my mother did not write letters and because I did not ever want to forget the things I wished my mother were telling me, the stories I wish she were telling me, I tried to write them down in a small 12

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notebook I  made from folded sheets of paper bound together by thread. In that notebook, I also sketched a series of stick figures, which were so closely drawn that they almost bumped each other off the page. But mostly I wrote stories, which I later found myself elaborating on. Stories like one of the first prose poems I would write years later and call “Legends.” “Legends” is about a desire, a hunger, I had developed both in my parents’ absence and, much later, to tell stories. “Legends” is about a little girl who is dreaming of telling her immigrant mother a story. It’s also about a mother who works in a sweatshop in the United States while dreaming of telling stories to her daughter back home in Haiti. Once, upon an endless night, I dreamed of telling you a story, Of pleating you a tale out of my breath And carving it into your flesh with my hair. I imagined that my parents wanted to tell me stories because they were worried that I would forget not just them but the geographies within both me and them. I imagined they wanted to tell me what in Creole we call lejann, stories about night women, women with wings of flames who want to draw you out of your bed. Stories about three-legged horses rising at full speed to either snatch or rescue children who had lost their way. I also imagined that they wanted to tell me what it was like to work in a sweatshop where they might or might not pay you at the end of the week because you’re undocumented. Or how the immigration police might come and raid your workplace at anytime and take you to a detention center to await your deportation. I imagined that they wanted me to know even before I stepped foot in the United States that the streets were not littered with gold. Once, while cradling someone else’s child in my arms, Standing at a kitchen stove, Stirring a soup for the child’s hunger, I dreamed of telling you a story. A story that rains with salt. I am telling you to open your mouth, And catch as much of the salt as you can. The salt sizzles on your tongue. And suddenly you understand That this story is all I know, And that this story is all I have. I often tell people about this salt by way of a question I am asked quite often. Who taught you to write? I always say that my best writing teachers were the storytellers of my childhood, who were not readers at all—and some not even literate—but who carried stories like treasures inside of them. In my mother’s absence, my aunts and grandmothers told me stories. They told me stories in the evenings in the countryside, or when the lights went out in the city, or while 13

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they were doing my hair, or while I was doing their hair. This too is another possible beginning. These stories that were told to me in such intimacy by women like the ones the great writer Paule Marshall called kitchen poets. The kitchen poets in my life are also the poto mitan, the middle pillars of my beginning as a writer, because they taught me that no story is mine alone, that a story lives and breathes and grows only when it is shared.

2 I moved to the United States in 1981 at age twelve to join my parents soon after cases of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) were first discovered in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control named four groups at “high risk” for the disease: intravenous drug users, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and Haitians. Haitians were the only ones solely identified by nationality, in part because of twenty or so Haitian patients who’d shown up at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Suddenly, every Haitian was suspected of having AIDS. At the public junior high school where my parents enrolled me, some of the non-Haitian students would regularly shove and hit me and the other Haitian kids, telling us that we had dirty blood. My English as a Second Language class was excluded from a school trip to the Statue of Liberty out of fear that our sharing a school bus with the other kids might prove dangerous to them. But I  also had a wonderful teacher at this junior high school, a Haitian exile named Raymond Dusseck. Mr. Dusseck was part of my beginning in the United States. Mr. Dusseck built science, math, and ESL lessons around games and songs to help us begin speaking in our new tongue. He taught us English songs that were full of stories, starting with the African American national anthem. I remember being enchanted by James Weldon Johnson’s beautiful lyrics: Lift every voice and sing, Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty … Let us march on till victory is won. I was eventually mainstreamed from ESL to a regular English class, where my English teacher, an African American woman named Mrs. Wright, asked me to write an essay about my first Thanksgiving. I wrote that I was looking forward to eating the “golden” turkey, which I thought was rather original. Later I would be horrified by my cliché, but she told me I had a great writing voice. Lift every voice, indeed. In high school, I had a history teacher named Mr. Casey who taught an elective black history class during our lunch period. I wrote an essay for that class about wanting to be a writer, and Mr. Casey loaned me a book called Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, which was edited by the African American poet, writer, and dramatist Mari Evans. It was in that book that I discovered, among others, Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Gayl Jones, Sonia Sanchez, Gloria Naylor, Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston, who would become some of the great literary loves of my life.

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They were not only part of my new beginning as a writer, but they, along with the great Haitian writers I  began reading in New  York, writers like Marie Vieux Chauvet, Jacques Roumain, Jacques Stephen Alexis, J. J. Dominique, Ida Faubert, and Dany Laferrière, gave me a place to stand. “Give me a place to stand,” the Greek mathematician Archimedes is believed to have said, “and I will move the earth.” But how can we move the earth when all seems to be against it? I asked myself then and ask myself that now. Can words, language change some of the worst conditions we face, especially in situations that seem insurmountable? The day that Donald Trump was sworn in as president of the United States, I went to hear the Alabama-based poet Ashley M. Jones read from her book Magic City Gospel at my local bookstore in Miami, a city that is home to one of the largest foreign-born populations in the United States. In his inaugural speech, Trump had repeatedly invoked “the people” and said, “And this, the United States of America, is your country,” but it was hard to believe that he meant to include my black and brown neighbors, friends, and family, many of whom came to America as immigrants. Trump’s speech was dark, rancorous. Political language, like poetry, is rarely uttered without intention. Afterward, I wanted to fall into a poet’s carefully crafted, insightful, and at times elegiac words. At the bookstore, I listened as Ashley M. Jones read a poem called “In the beginning there was sound”: After I was born, I cried for three months straight … Alive, I said. Pain, I said. Later that same week, some writer friends and I, along with dozens of others, rallied in front of Miami International Airport to protest Trump’s executive order barring all refugees, particularly those from seven predominantly Muslim countries. At the airport rally, we carried signs, like mine, that said “No Human Being Is Illegal.” A woman held one that read “Immigrants Are America’s Ghostwriters.” Another woman had simply scribbled on a piece of cardboard the word “No.” Throughout the rally, my thoughts kept returning to the late Gwendolyn Brooks and some lines from her ode to the singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson: we are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond. Once again, I was seeking a new beginning in words.

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How far do we have to go through to provoke new beginnings? Does it take the image of children in cages, cell-phone videos of policemen and women shooting black men, women, and children in the back? What does the artist do to move the world? I want to say we can begin by bearing witness. Not everyone is comfortable with the term witness. But no matter what term we use, it means, to me, being as Henry James said, “one of those on whom nothing is lost.” James Baldwin had the following exchange with the writer Julius Lester in a 1984 New York Times interview: “Witness is a word I’ve heard you use often to describe yourself. What are you witness to?” Lester asked. Baldwin answering in the simplest terms said, “Witness to whence I  came, where I  am. Witness to what I’ve seen and the possibilities that I think I see.” Witness is not just where I began but also where I want to end up as a writer. This is the kind of writer I would like to be. Sometimes we cannot fully move the world, but it can move us with its vastness, its expanse, its limitlessness, its geography or geographies, its beginnings and endings, its injustices, and lòt bò dlo-ness. A few weeks ago, a friend I was talking to about this week told me that I should talk about love. I  started considering all the things I  could possibly have to say about love, but then I realized that, without sounding too lofty here, that every word I put down on paper is in some way an act of love. And I’m sure that I am not the only writer for whom this is true. I also started thinking about what James Baldwin wrote about love in The Fire Next Time. In that book, he talks to us about the geography of love that is potentially within us all. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within,” Baldwin wrote. “I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” Yes, that kind of love is also part of my beginning. So along with this particular kind of love, I decided instead to also talk about the geographies within me, starting with my beginnings.

3 After Zora Neale Huston’s mother, Lucy, died and she was forced to leave her home and travel to places previously unknown to her, she wrote in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, that she realized that she was suddenly forced into “the beginning of things” and that “all that geography was within me. It only needed time to reveal it.” All that geography was within me. It only needed time to reveal it. I love this line so much that sometimes I misquote it as “All geography is within me. It only needs to reveal itself.” When, after graduating from high school in Brooklyn, I  had yet another beginning and became a student at Zora Neale Hurston’s alma mater, Barnard College, I felt as though her ghost was shadowing me. This new and unexpected geography—Barnard and Zora—was now within me too, along with all the others from my past and the possibility of other geographies in the future. Like reading and writing, this type of geography can take you away and bring

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you back, internally and spiritually, back to the source, back to the ground from which you had been wrestled away. Zora’s ghost was also shadowing me in the car in March 2014 after my mother had been told by her doctor that she had terminal ovarian cancer. At a red light, where I stopped for too long, my mother spoke up for the first time since we’d heard the news and warned, “Don’t suddenly become a zombie.” My mother was telling me not to lose my good sense, to keep my head on my shoulders, but it popped up in my mind that a motherless Zora had gone to Haiti to study zombies. When we got home from the doctor’s that day, my mother made us each a small cup of coffee that she sprinkled with salt. According to Haitian folklore, one way zombies can be liberated from their living death is by eating salt. People who suddenly receive terrible news are also given salt, in coffee for example, to help ward off the sezisman, the shock so that we are able to pick ourselves up and keep moving. This salt is for me the source of all forceful beginnings and the source of all freedom. We are here because in some way we were given the salt. For some of us that salt is words. For others, it is paint. For others, it is music. For others, it is God. For some it is simply the ability to survive. When I first came to this country, I remember being shocked that salt was powdery white. In my household in Haiti, we would often buy rock salt in the market, and it often looked like little crystals or small pebbles, which were unevenly shaped and had dark streaks either on the surface or inside. You always had to wash the crystals before putting them in food, and even after you washed them they looked more gray than white. This is the salt I imagined those seeking their liberation wanting to be fed. This type of salt shows up in another part of “Legends”: And what was that Sleeping Beauty, If not a zombie? And what was it that gave her freedom From the sleeping sickness, If not the taste of salt on the prince’s lips? Let no one tell you that it was the man’s breath itself. Everyone knows—or Manman knows—that it was the salt. It is always the salt that wakes the dead. And brings the children home. This home for me is first and foremost the page. And the page is both full of death and free of it. Full of death because a trail of bodies from the Middle Passage lies behind me in the sea that made the first kind of salt I ever knew. “The sea is salt,” Zora Neale Hurston wrote. “The sea is History,” Derek Walcott wrote. The sea has been part of both our beginnings and our endings.

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The story whose beginning I chose to explain to the teenagers at the library in Fond-desBlancs is from my 1995 short-story collection Krik? Krak! and is called “Children of the Sea.” It is about a group of Haitian refugees who are trying to reach the United States by boat, like so many refugees and migrants have been trying to reach so many shores, lately including European shores. I began the story the way I did, I told them, with lines borrowed from a Haitian proverb: “Dèyè mòn gen mòn.” Behind the mountains are more mountains. The story begins with “They say behind the mountains are more mountains. Now I know it’s true.” I began it this way because that story had reminded me that some people’s potential new beginnings can also lead to their end. Writing that story had reinforced for me the idea that the page—my writing home—has to also be free from death because creating anything, be it words, images, song, and dance, means that we believe in immortality, that we believe we can survive, even on the other side of the waters, even lòt bò dlo. You never know a person until you’ve eaten salt together, Toni Cade Bambara writes in The Salt Eaters. And this week we have all had the privilege of eating salt together, by yes, breaking bread together, but also with the words we have spoken, the songs we have sung, the ways that we have moved our bodies through these dances that have come to us, through both ancestral memory and more recently acquired knowledge. And for this I do not have enough words to say thank you. So, I will offer my gratitude in the voices of those who came before me, with all my honor and respect (Onè, Respè). Mèsi anpil, anpil. Thank you. October 11, 2018 Norman, Oklahoma

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CHAPTER 2 INTERVIEW WITH EDWIDGE DANTICAT

Nadège T. Clitandre

Nadège T. Clitandre (NTC): Edwidge, thank you for taking the time to do this interview with me. I can’t believe it has been almost twenty years since we first met. I was working on my master’s thesis on Breath, Eyes, Memory at the University of Chicago at the time. I believe you were in town for a reading. Of course I went and took the liberty of giving you a draft of my paper, which you generously read. I still have the card you sent after reading it. You probably don’t remember that, but I was starstruck and so impressed by your graciousness and openness. I still am. Edwidge Danticat (ED): I do remember. I also remember when you were kind enough to host Junot Díaz and me at Berkeley. This does feel like a full circle moment after close to a quarter of a century now. I’m not sure there are that many people who have been reading me for such a long period of time. I thank you for your interest and I thank you for remaining interested. NTC: I thank you for your oeuvre, Edwidge. It has been a pleasure reading your work. I want to begin with your first book. When Breath, Eyes, Memory was published, I was in my last year of high school. I don’t remember when I read the book exactly, but it must have been while I was a freshman in college. However, I do remember the impact. I remember recognizing myself and my own experience of migration for the first time in a way I hadn’t with any other text I had read prior to yours. And like you I was an avid reader. In a 1998 interview, you said that you write for the person you were at fifteen, for the girl looking for an image of herself. There is a whole generation who appreciates this novel because you gave us just that. Of course I am speaking broadly about your articulation of the experience of migration and description of the Haitian community in the United States. You have written a few young adult books since your first novel, including Untwine, which was published in 2015. But I want to know if in all your work you still write for that person, that fifteen-year-old girl looking for an image of herself. ED: Absolutely. I’ve never stopped writing for that girl. When I came to the United States at age twelve, I initially could not read any of the English-language books at the library. So I read all the Haitian literature that was available at the Brooklyn Public Library branches near me. Actually, that’s when I read your dad’s, Pierre Clitandre’s, incredible novel Cathédrale du mois d’août. I also read Marie Vieux Chauvet at that time, Jacques Roumain, Jacques Stephen Alexis, J. J. Dominique, Dany Laferrière. I read these books to go home, to return to Haiti in my imagination. They opened a whole new world to me since I had not been taught Haitian literature when I was in school in Haiti. I had been to the certificat exam early—at age ten—so I was kind of an advanced reader for my age, and though I had been given excerpts of Voltaire and

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Zola and a few other French writers to read—and certainly LaFontaine to recite—I don’t remember being taught any Haitian literature. Maybe it was a failure of the school I went to—I’m not sure. But it was wonderful to read books that were set in Haiti and see that whole range of possibilities and that whole range of experiences, from urban to rural, from poor to rich characters. It also taught me a lot about how stories that I was somehow already familiar with, stories set during the American occupation or during the dictatorship, for example, could be told and retold from different perspectives and points of view. After I exhausted the stockpile of Haitian and French literature books at the library, as soon as I learned to read English—even with a dictionary—I began reading every single book there was with a little girl on the cover. Or anything resembling “girl” in the title. That’s how I found Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Rosa Guy’s The Friends, Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and many others. I was looking for myself in those books. Later that search would extend to books like Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior and Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Part of me still reads like that fifteen-year-old girl, and no matter what the genre, I’m still writing for that fifteen-year-old girl who was so desperate to find herself, or some version of herself, and her life in print. I think the fact that I sought and found those narratives also made it seem possible for me to tell my own story and eventually become a writer. It moves me so much when people say that my book has done something similar for them. Lately I’ve been running into grown women who got in trouble a lot when they were young. Some were in the system. Some were in foster care after reporting their parents for disciplining them the way they would have been disciplined in Haiti, notably the rigwaz or marinèt. And these young women told me that they took Breath, Eyes, Memory with them from home to home or juvenile place to juvenile place, because some teacher or wellmeaning adult had given it to them. They found solace, and some even found a voice in it. Every time I hear something like this, I want to cry. NTC: Thanks for sharing this story. It is just one example of the positive impact of BEM on young women who read it. I remember reading somewhere that you received hate mail after the publication of BEM for “outing” the custom of testing a girl’s virginity, which Martine, the mother of the protagonist, Sophie, gives to her daughter. So many immigrant writers are heavily critiqued for “airing dirty laundry.” And some face death threats because of what they write. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his book Satanic Verses, for example, has never been officially lifted, and recently there was a new bounty for his death. BEM was your first book and you were young. How did you feel at the time? Did that experience influence your writing in any way? What you wrote and how you wrote it? How do you now deal with writing about matters that may be sensitive to the Haitian community? I wonder: Did anything like that come up when you wrote/published The Dew Breaker or any of your other work? ED: Luckily there was no fatwa, but there was some backlash. I think part of the reason some people reacted so negatively to the portrayal of the mother’s testing the girl’s virginity is how writers of colors are read in general. It was clear, in my mind, that though this was something that happened to some people in Haiti as elsewhere—I’ve met women from the Middle East and parts of Asia that this has happened to—it 20

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was clear to me that I was writing fiction, and I believed that people would read it that way. But they read it as anthropology, and when I was interviewed, that’s all the interviewers wanted to talk about. I never even saw it as “dirty laundry” on the community. I saw it as something that happens in this family, and that’s obviously not a good thing to have happened because it hurts the family. But it was read as my saying that this happens in all Haitian families and some people got very mad at me for “telling lies” in my fiction. I felt really besieged at the time and somewhat ashamed of myself. I did not want to be one more person contributing to a “negative” image of Haiti, so the fact that my book was seen in that light by some made me sad. When the book was picked for Oprah’s book club in 1998, I wrote an afterword to explain. Some scholars then told me that I had “defaced” the text, but that’s how embarrassed I was that I had somehow further tarnished the image of Haitians. I wouldn’t say it affected my writing too much, though. Usually by the time I publish something, I try to have something else finished or far along so that no matter what the reaction to the newly published thing, I can still find the courage to go on. That advice was given to me by my first editor, Laura Hruska at Soho Press, and I still try to keep it up today. So by the time Breath, Eyes, Memory was out and being discussed I had already finished writing Krik? Krak!, my story collection. I did go back and reread it with the “controversy” in mind, and though I tried to be less general about certain things, I did not really change much else. This is the way I’ve gone forward from that time; I try to be sensitive, but I am writing my own truth or my characters’ truth. I know that’s not going to make everyone jump for joy. There are always going to be people who think you’re getting it wrong. I do my best, but I can’t not say certain things because they make us look bad. Otherwise, I’m really lying and it’s not worth it at all. I might as well pack it all up and go home. Every book I’ve had since has had some unexpected reaction, but not as much. There are always countrymen and—women of mine who want me to stop writing about poor people and show the beaches—even though Claire of the Sea Light is set on a beach, but the people on the beach are poor, so that doesn’t count. The Farming of Bones, some thought I was too easy on the Dominicans. For The Dew Breaker, some told me to forget about the dictatorship already and come to the present. Again, you can never please everyone. NTC: The afterword to BEM is powerful. I would like to ask about the theme of separation in the novel. You and I have similar experiences of separation from family. My father was exiled during the Duvalier dictatorship when I was three years old, and my mother followed him to Brooklyn, New York, when I was five years old. We, my older brother, younger sister, and I, were left with our paternal grandfather, but he disappeared shortly after, never to be found again. My maternal grandmother had to step in and take charge of us. One of the most fascinating things about BEM is the way you highlight the consequence of migration in terms of familial separation and its affective dimensions. Families get separated for all kinds of reason. In your opinion, is there something particular about separation through migration? ED: I’m glad you liked the afterword. In terms of writing about the dictatorship, your grandfather’s story and the stories of others who disappeared during the dictatorship is why we can’t move on from the dictatorship. It haunts us inside our families. It’s hard in those cases to just say, “Let bygones be bygones.” This is what I always tell 21

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the people who want me to move on from it as a subject. Looking at current cases of migration, cases where children are in detention centers in Miami, for example, children who were put on a boat in hopes of having them be reunited with a parent. Or the cases we see in the news of people packing boats to cross the Mediterranean with their babies in their arms or people stranded in refugee camps or in “jungles” across Europe. When I look back now, my case feels relatively mild. I think now that my parents made the right choice to leave me behind when they first moved here. When I did join my parents in Brooklyn at age twelve, I realized that it was a very hard life. I don’t know what it would have been like for me and my brother sooner. Even at age twelve, I had to become a substitute mother for my younger brothers. We almost died in an apartment fire during that time. So my parents made a very difficult choice that I think now was the right one. But familial separation through migration definitely alters the family dynamic. In some families, it creates a hierarchy between the US-born, often younger, children—the ti ameriken—the little Americans and the Haitian-born children. I know some siblings for whom that chasm has never healed because they felt less loved because they were left behind. I know some who were never able to feel close again to their parents. One of the things that are not really discussed in public debates of emigration is how much emigrants sacrifice emotionally for the opportunities they are seeking. Fiction does that best, I think, because you can go very deeply into someone’s heart to explore those kinds of tears and scars. NTC: Yes, this is why I love teaching novels and examining the issue of migration through literature. I am fascinated by the impact of migration on individual lives, and fiction has a way of delving “deeply,” as you say, into the affective dimensions of migration. Our family also has an apartment fire story in Brooklyn that nearly killed us during the early years of our migration experience. I left Haiti when I was seven years old. My older brother, like you, was twelve years old. He has vivid memories of Haiti. But I only remember feelings—mostly an overwhelming sense of being loved by my grandfather. Do you think there is a correlation between the way we remember Haiti and the way we reconnect to it? Not all individuals and writers stay connected to the homeland. What do you think makes you stay connected to Haiti, not only in terms of imaginary returns, but also physical returns? ED: My brother, I think, is a lot like you. He was ten when we arrived. Those two years made a big difference for us. I also was a kind of ti granmoun, a little old woman. I was always scared and nervous. I observed a lot. I had to take a lot of mental notes, etc., about different situations, get the lay of the land, if you will, to keep myself safe. So I was very observant. Not much was lost on me. I find too that the older child has to be more observant, more vigilant, to keep the younger one safe, or to make the younger one feel safe. So you tend to be more mature in that way. You replace, for your younger sibling, the parent who is not there. Like you, my younger brother remembers a lot of sensations and some very vivid moments. I feel as though I remember everything. Even though that is probably not true. It might also have to do with the work I do. The writing forces you to pull things from deep inside your subconscious, so there is that as well. I think based on what we remember we might either want to connect or not. Some people need to let go for their sanity. 22

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I can’t let go, because I think I’m trying to understand. I’m trying to make sense of things. I find myself confused sometimes about the present moment, but I am always trying to understand. If I feel like I know what’s going on too well, then I don’t write about something well. I stay connected to Haiti first because I love the country. And sometimes when you say that people will say, “Well, then, go live there,” and my love feels reduced. But every word I write is to pay homage to that love and to try to understand it, and Haiti as much as I can manage. NTC: Your love for Haiti shows in all your work. And it’s not blind love; it’s the kind of love that fully accepts all the good and the bad. That kind of love is too powerful to be reduced. Another fascinating aspect of BEM is your subversion of Western myths of displacement and privileging of African diasporic mythology. Were you conscious of that at the time? Did you read a lot of Greek mythology as a child and when you came to the United States? African mythology? As I am asking the question, I can’t help but think of your primal connection to storytelling. Myths are, after all, collective stories that get passed down and retold. ED: I started reading Greek myths like most kids, in middle school. There’s one particular Greek mythology book that I think many middle schoolers get. When I read about those Greek gods and goddesses, it struck me how some could be Haitian lwas. The place of mortals between smaller deities and God—Gran mèt la—is fascinating to me and sometimes a lot of the ways we fail or celebrate ourselves and each other seems to me connected to the sense that there’s a hierarchy and we’re somewhere between the absolutely divine and plant life. I think most belief systems involve trying to find exactly where we belong in that scheme. I love the way African mythology and many Haitian folktales try to explain how some things in the world came to be. That originbased storytelling is very fascinating to me. It’s somewhat comforting in migration as well to have collective stories that are passed on even though we are no longer living in the place the stories originated from. It says you weren’t always here. This is where you came from. This is how we think our peoples came into existence. It gives, in my view, every story a presumed beginning, as we eventually try to figure out the middle and ending. NTC: After all, the collective stories are sometimes the only things we can take with us in the journey to another country. But there are those who do not have stories to pass on and go searching for them elsewhere. Your books are full of stories, replete with voices that help us understand our complex history and culture and the challenges we face as Haitian immigrants. In my reading of your work, there are indeed many voices, but you have elsewhere talked about a primal voice. Is that the voice of Grandmè Melina, who was with you in Bel Air? Grandmè Ifé, the character in BEM, represents that voice. What does that primal voice sound like to you in your mind? Does it evoke a specific feeling or memory? Has it evolved over the years? When do you hear it the most now? ED: That voice has definitely evolved as I have gotten older. Initially, I realize now, it’s a voice I was missing. It was my mother’s voice, which was there the first four years of my life, then was gone the next eight, until I was twelve. As I listened to my aunt and grandmothers tell stories when I was a child, I would imagine what it was like for my mother to tell me those stories. Initially, when I began writing my first short stories, as well as Breath, Eyes, Memory, they were things in the stories and in the novel that 23

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I had no idea I knew. The older people in my family would ask how I knew them and I could not answer. I must have absorbed them sometime in very early childhood, an age before I even had conscious memory, but I used to think of these stories as my mother’s stories. I even wrote that in the acknowledgments page to The Farming of Bones. Later my mother resisted that. She suffered a bit too from the Breath, Eyes, Memory backlash, since people from her church and other friends of hers believed I was writing about her, that she was Martine, the mother in the book. So she would tell me not to write about her. This was a good thing in the end because I had to now assume full responsibility for what I was writing. I think this happened around the time after The Farming of Bones was published. She kind of rejected the mantle I gave her. She refused to be my shield, the person to whom I gave credit because I felt I had no right to certain stories. So I had to now step out and say these stories are mine. This voice is mine. And because these stories are mine, some of them have to be new stories. That’s when I went to Jacmel to write a narrative of carnival called After the Dance. Then I started writing The Dew Breaker, which was a view from the present on the aftermath of the Duvalier dictatorship and what it’s like for a family living in its shadow as both victim and perpetrator in Brooklyn. That was really a stepping out on my own kind of story, and the primal voice at that point became my own. Writers often talk about when they found their voice. This is when I found my voice. NTC: Speaking of primal voices, the end of BEM, the moment when Sophie is beating the cane stalk, is like a primal scream, one that acknowledges histories and consequences of slavery and colonialism and connects to your own family genealogy of resistance. Although you published the book at the age of twenty-five, which is still quite young, you started writing it at eighteen. Your collection of short stories, Krik? Krak!, also evokes these histories and memories of the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath. Where do you think your consciousness of historical trauma comes from? How has that consciousness developed over the years? ED: This is a bit of what I was saying before. I don’t think I was intellectually aware of what I was doing back then. I didn’t consciously set out to write those things. I think they were a part of me that maybe if I didn’t write I might never have expressed openly but would have felt somewhat, maybe in the way I carry myself or something like that. I really think I was born with all of this somewhere in me; then it was tapped into with the writing. Maybe it’s like being a natural dancer—and I’ve seen a few in my time— your body just knows it. Or maybe it was spoken of around me when I could barely speak. I remember when I was in high school being shocked when learning about certain things—like the Middle Passage for example—I felt like I already knew about it somehow but could not pin it down. Maybe it was in the stories I was told in my childhood, but I couldn’t pin it down to any particular story I could recite to someone. I don’t want to make it sound too mysterious. Of course I read a lot as a young person, but I think there were kernels of knowledge in me that somehow felt unacquired. Maybe that’s what creativity is overall, the ability to capture something out of the air that you do not quite understand. NTC: There is knowledge that one acquires and knowledge that one inherits. Sometimes what we capture creatively is also ancestral memory. But since we are on the subject of history, let’s transition to your second novel, The Farming of Bones. I love this novel for 24

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so many reasons, and I learned a lot about relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic because of it. I don’t recall having any knowledge of the Haitian massacre at the border until I started reading the book. Elsewhere, you have talked about your visit to the Massacre River as the inspiration behind this book. I love the interview you did with Eleanor Wachtel, where you discuss how struck you were by the “ordinariness of life” at the border there. Since you have published this book, have you thought about the complexities of life at the border of other places? In your travels, have you been to other places where you were struck by the lack of memory, the lack of event in the physical environment, places where there are no markers to commemorate an event? ED: Of course, borders are more complex than ever these days. Not just because of the Trump era, where if you live in America you’re always hearing about walls being built and immigration being curtailed, etc., but because the things that drive people to borders, conflicts, environmental problems, are more and more visible to us because of all the ways people now have to record and communicate. Before I started writing the book, I decided I had to step foot in the river. I had read two Haitian novels touching on this subject, Compère Général Soleil by Jacques Stéphen Alexis and René Philoctète’s Le people des terres mélées, and I felt like they’d helped me to go there in my imagination, but I wanted to put my hand in the water, feel the sand underneath the water. Of course you build up a huge thing in your mind where you think you’re going to a memorial site because such a bloody thing happened there. But as with many such sites in Haiti, they are also utilitarian and functional spaces. People need the water to drink and wash their bodies and their clothes and for their animals to drink. It remains a border crossing. People naturally use the river the way it is meant to be used, the way it has been used both before and after the massacre. The trauma was a mere interruption because if you make the river entirely a memorial, you’re cutting off a useful resource. People can’t just come and look at it and take pictures with it when they need to use it in their daily life. It reminds you too of the luxury of being able to have such memorials. We come from a place where trauma is piled upon trauma and, as a friend of mine once said, if we turned every place of trauma in Haiti into an official memorial, there would be no places left for people to actually live their lives. But I was still expecting a plaque, something that I later found out, when I asked an area official about putting one somewhere, would take government action. No government we’ve had so far has seemed interested. Maybe the president will go and lay a wreath this year on the eightieth anniversary of the massacre. In the case of lack of markers, you have no choice but to see the life carrying on as its own kind of memorial. The living and their bodies become the memorial. One of the characters in the book says nature has no memory. It has no choice but to move on. We are its memory. NTC: In the novel, your characters are divided not just by the physical border that separates the two countries that share one island but also by deeply entrenched social borders. I believe in a 2007 interview with Nancy Raquel Mirabal, you talked about the ways in which globalization brings us closer together and offers opportunities for exchange and exposure. I think you framed it in the context of villages coming closer together and acknowledged this as a positive aspect of globalization. In the era of globalization, 25

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do you think these borders are being dismantled or reinforced? What about the negative aspect? I am glad you brought up the Trump era. I can’t help but think of our current president’s desire to build a great wall between Mexico and California. I am also thinking of the lack of security in Port-au-Prince that has led to the construction of fences and walls to secure individual homes and properties. This has created a whole new relationship with neighbors. In our current (global) state of affairs, what do you think of this desire to reinforce both physical and social borders? ED: I think I was asked to think of a positive aspect of globalization, and this was one I could think of. Rather than borders falling away now, we see more coming up and the poorest of the poor being locked on the other side. That’s of course the negative impact. That money, as the late Éduardo Galeano has written, can cross borders, and human beings cannot. Nativists often cite the saying “Good fences make good neighbors.” It is said in the Dominican Republic and it is said here. In the Trump era, countries that hate immigrants and want to push them out use Trump’s vitriol against immigrants to empower themselves to do it. In today’s Dominican Republic, for example, expulsions are happening more and more and in more brutal ways because they believe that if Trump can do it the way he’s doing in America by scapegoating so-called bad hombres, then they can do it too. So the legacy to the massacre is that it’s still with us and more than ever it’s a cautionary tale on what can happen when you scapegoat immigrants and the children and grandchildren of immigrants. So we certainly seem to be moving toward more insularity, but as Trump’s evolving immigration policy is showing, that wall is not between the United States and Canada. It is between the United States and Mexico. The United States is closing itself off against poor brown and black people. As was announced today, skilled white people who already speak English are always going to be welcomed to come and stay. NTC: This reminds me of Randolph Bourne’s 1916 article, “Transnational America.” In the essay he critiques the idea of Americanization at the time as “Anglo-Saxonization.” Under this proposed Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment Act endorsed by the president, people like you and me would not be here, Edwidge. The United States would not be able to claim you as one of its great contemporary writers. We are indeed moving away from the definition of American that includes the promotion of freedom and democracy at home and abroad. As we speak, the State Department is considering eliminating the promotion of democracy from its mission statement. This is all madness to me. Certainly anathema to your work, which promotes heterogeneity and multiplicity and exposes both the dignity and contributions of poor immigrants who have to overcome insurmountable challenges and sacrifice so much to live the “American dream.” With this bill, the Trump administration is also officially demonizing low-wage workers who are fundamental to our nation’s service economy. In BEM you had such clarity about the transnational contours of the Haitian community in New York. It makes us think about the issue of assimilation that Bourne found problematic in 1916. It is interesting that we are returning to this version of Americanization a century later. In Farming, one of the major themes you tackle is nationalism. You have mentioned elsewhere the idea of “imagi-nation” as a different way of thinking about nation. The novel is critical of the discourse of nationalism. In fact all of your work engages in some way with the pitfalls 26

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of the language of nationalism and the way it creates fixed identities and archetypes that leave no room for the nuances you are so committed to exploring. How has Haitian nationalism been influenced by migration? In your mind, is there a distinction between nation building and nationalism? In other words, can we build a nation without the discourse of nationalism? Is there another language for nation building? ED: Haitian immigrants face nationalism in such brutal ways in many of the places we go. In the United States, we face it as part of a block of immigrants, particularly black and brown immigrants, but in the Caribbean, nationalists often aim their rage directly at Haitians. We must be precise and say poor Haitians. The way immigration policies are shaped in the Dominican Republic or in the Bahamas, for example, you get a sense that their immigration policies are only for Haitians. So you can’t help but feel the hypervulnerability of Haitian migrants to nationalistic language and sometimes even violence in our own region, even as their labor is being exploited. Are we ourselves nationalistic? We have national pride, certainly. We have great pride in our history. But it seems to me that anyone can come and go in Haiti. Some are very sensitive to issues of sovereignty, but a lot of outsiders of different stripes get away with doing a lot in Haiti. Look how long the United Nations forces were there. Even after all the raping they did of both men and women, boys and girls and introducing of cholera, nothing’s happened to them. They refuse to take responsibility. How can you build a nation in situations like that? How can you build a nation when you were straddled with a massive debt form the start of that nationhood? I think Haitians would probably use the language and method of the lakou for nation building, if we were interfered with less, if we were allowed. In many rural areas, there is very little presence of a state to speak of. Yet people take care of each other in a family-based lakou system. Maybe our internal nation building would look like a lakou. I am not an expert, but this seems to me one possible way it could be done. NTC: And all of these issues have intensified after the earthquake. I have been following the cases of sexual abuse by UN soldiers. As for the cholera, it took the UN six years to make an official apology for its role in the cholera outbreak. It’s all quite appalling. The plight of Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic is also terrible. Since we are now discussing Farming and regional discrimination against Haitians, let’s talk a little bit about Haitian-Dominican relations. A lot has happened to the Haitian community in the Dominican Republic since you published The Farming of Bones. Can you give me your own assessment of the current plight of Haitians in the Dominican Republic? Have you been back to the border? ED: I have not been to the border in a few months, but I know people who have been and they see a lot of the same people there. They are people who cannot return to the Dominican Republic and have no one in Haiti, so they live in dusty stretches on the border in a terrible situation. Sadly, I don’t think it will get better for Dominicans of Haitian descent or Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic anytime soon. We recently found out that even people who were granted citizenship in the Dominican Republic under a new law that was meant to modify the way Dominicans of Haitian descent were rendered stateless after the constitutional decision in 2013 have a limited kind of citizenship. Some had had their birth certificates modified to make them foreigners. And as we have seen in the past, their birth certificate can be pulled at 27

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any time and be declared fraudulent because they have a Haitian-sounding name. It’s a very bad situation and one that I fear in this age of global xenophobia will only get worse. NTC: There is indeed a lot to be anxious about when it comes to immigration policies under the Trump administration and in the international arena. The chaos and constant leadership changes in the White House make it hard for people to really follow the issues. Let’s move on and talk a little bit about your relationship with the Haitian Dominican writer Junot Díaz, which has really blossomed over the years. I am glad you mentioned the conference a group of us organized as graduate students that brought the two of you to campus. I was responsible for your visit. We were so proud of that conference but also quite nervous. We were also very naïve and made a few mistakes along the way. I think we overworked the two of you, for example. I hope you both have forgiven us for that. Can you talk about the work you two do together to improve relations between Haitians and Dominicans? I know you have done a lot of activist work to shape immigration policies toward Haitians. Can you talk a little bit about your involvement with organizations dealing with the question of immigration and the plight of stateless people? ED: I don’t remember being overworked. I think of it as a rather positive experience. With every writer friend, your private relationship is somewhat different from when you’re put in front of a bunch of people to have a conversation. What he and I have both done, both together and alone, over the years is try to support organizations that are doing this very important work on both sides of the island and in the United States. The thing is, he and I both know some real activists. We know people who put their bodies and their safety and their peace of mind on the line every day for this cause, so I’m always hesitant to call myself an activist in light of people I know who are doing the real work. I believe I can speak for both of us when I say we try to support the people who are doing the work in whatever way we can, whenever we can, with our presence and with our voice, because essentially we are not merely talking about the ideological. This is a situation where people’s lives are in danger, where they are losing everything, so it’s not an intellectual exercise. NTC: We can never lose sight of actual bodies in the line of fire. But as you suggest in Create Dangerously on the relationship between the text and the world, and as I try to teach my students, the ideological informs the praxis and vice versa. You often cite a wonderful quote by Toni Cade Bambara: “Writing is how I participate in the struggle.” But you have engaged in a lot of “activism” that takes you out of the “writing space” over the years. I believe that the writing informs your activism, but does the activism inform your writing in any way? ED: I love that quote and I love her. I should say writing is one of the ways I participate in the struggle. That was also true for her. There are so many ways now and there is so much need, from working with kids to filling out immigration forms to being a translator to being what James Baldwin called a witness. Though I try not to be too preachy in the fiction writing, what I write even in that space is informed by what is happening in the world. I can’t forget, for example, that the Haitian characters I write today have the specter of a very anti-immigrant America hanging over their heads. So even when that is not openly in my writing, it is there. 28

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NTC: It is indeed there. Political oppression is the backdrop of many of your novels. It is also very present in your op-ed pieces, where you speak directly about these issues and push for social change. There are different forms of activism, and your op-ed pieces are in my opinion activist work. I remember reading something you wrote where you mentioned visiting Haitian detainees at the Brooklyn navy yard when you first arrived in the United States. That in itself is an early form of activism, guided by your father. Did the stories you heard during those visits ever find their way into your writing over the years? I am thinking of Krik? Krak! as an early example, maybe? Do you still think of these stories in the work you do with various organizations? Do they resurface in your later writing? ED: Absolutely. Frankly, I am still in awe at these visits and that my parents, who considered themselves very apolitical, used to even do that. Those visits were extremely eye opening for me. The essential message of these visits from my parents was that these are our people. They are us. They are family. I have never forgotten that. Later, when I was at Brown University, I used to spend time with families who came by boat in the 1990s. The stories I heard them tell and translated for them inspired “Children of the Sea,” the first story in Krik? Krak! My parents also went with my brothers and me to the big march against the US Food and Drug Administration blood ban for Haitians. They went to marches with us when Abner Louima was brutally assaulted, because my parents were friends with his parents. My brothers and I also went to marches when Yusef Hawkins was killed, and they encouraged us to go to those. I think the biggest lesson I learned from my parents in terms of what they did is that you don’t have to be holding a bull horn. You don’t have to be up front to be present, as long as you’re doing what you can. NTC: My family and I were also at that march across the Brooklyn Bridge. We were living in Flatbush at that time and it felt like every Haitian we knew was at that march. That was indeed an experience. How does it feel to know that a number of people who make up your audience have learned about Haitian culture and history by reading your books? Does this knowledge affect your writing in any way? Does this responsibility empower you or create anxiety? ED: They say the Brooklyn Bridge shook that day, and I believe it. What an incredibly unifying day that was. As we discussed with Breath, Eyes, Memory, people learning about Haiti from me can be a double-edged sword. I often meet people who say, “I went to Haiti because of you.” “Great,” I say, “as long as I encourage you to learn more.” I don’t want people to take my version of things as the only one. That would make me anxious. That’s why I’ve edited anthologies, etc.: I want people to go beyond me, to explore further, to read more. I hope to at least encourage that. NTC: Speaking of anthologies, in The Butterfly’s Way, one of your main objectives as editor of the anthology, I believe, was to show the complexity and diversity of the Haitian diaspora. You have also talked about the idea of diaspora as a lens through which one can explore gray places, blank spaces, the spaces in between. How do you define the Haitian diaspora today? Do you find that there are new patterns emerging that may change the contours of the diaspora in the United States, for example? A lot has changed in the United States in the past fifteen years.

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ED: The Haitian diaspora today, in my view, is very big and complex. You now have a lot of Haitian-born millennials who are adding another very important layer to the conversation. Some of them are in media, and what is highlighted about them is not even that they’re Haitian. They’re just out there excelling and doing their thing. Sadly, we also have a lot of problems in the poor communities within the diaspora. In Miami, for example, we have a lot of young Haitians in prisons and new arrivals in detention centers. The parents of some school-age children are older and are rather perplexed by what’s happening with their children. So while some of us are doing really well, we have a lot of children in our communities being left behind. NTC: I would like to ask a few more questions about diaspora and identity, Edwidge. What do you think the literature of the diaspora offers to contemporary Haitian literature in Haiti in terms of themes and aesthetics? Did you get a lot of feedback on the book from writers living in Haiti? ED: I think since we have so much migration out of Haiti, dyaspora writing can offer a lot of insight to Haitians in Haiti on what it’s like to live outside of Haiti. Our work can show both the difficulties and advantages of that life from up close. Perhaps readers in Haiti can learn as much about our realities as we can learn about theirs. Tangentially, I’ll tell you something funny. A year ago, I was speaking to some kids in Martissant, a poor neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, and they asked me why Haitian writers can’t write some science fiction or something. “Why always politics?” they asked. And they were talking about writers who live in and outside of Haiti. But in terms of other feedback, earlier feedback, when I was first published, I felt some tensions between the literatures of the diasporas and the work being published in Haiti. And it wasn’t just the Anglophone diaspora. What people seemed to be saying, some to my face and some not, was that there were better writers in Haiti, but mediocre writers were being published and marketed abroad. I still hear that. Someone once sent me a link to a public forum where scholars were debating whether enough had been written about me and it was time to move on to others. I’d be the first person to say move on to others. My own literary education began with Haitian writers. I think I have tried to promote Haitian writers. I just don’t like the false dichotomies that in order to praise one group of writers we have to trash others. This part has gotten a lot better, but when I just started writing, I would go to conferences and would sit in the audience and listen to people debate whether I was a Haitian writer or not, whether I had any talent or not, or was some creation of the blans, because of course the blan so desperately needed a Haitian writer that they had to create me. At the same time, I was reading criticism of my work by white people who said that the American literary establishment was pandering to people like me and giving us prizes because of multiculturalism. So at some point, I just had to stop traveling so much and really just concentrate on my work and my personal life. Otherwise I would have lost all desire to go on. I was just tired of defending my right (my write) to exist. I just have to let the work do it, make its own way without me. Again, most writers I have personal relationships and friendships with, we don’t talk too much about work. That tends to be across nationalities, Haitian or not. I am not seeking that from them, and they are not seeking that from me. But one thing I notice with writers with similar immigrant backgrounds: they’ve faced a similar kind of situation. One of Julia Alvarez’s 30

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wonderful essays in her book Something to Declare—the essay is called “Doña Aída, with Your Permission”—speaks perfectly about being in that place initially where you might be rejected by both sides. NTC: How do you engage with non-Haitian writers who write about the diasporic experience in the contemporary moment and the immigrant experience in the United States? What do you learn from these writers that may be different from your experience? Or do you find more similarities than distinctions? Here I am thinking about your other edited volumes, such as The Beacon Best of 2000, and The Best American Essays of 2011. ED: I learn a lot from them. And as I mention above, they make me realize that I’m not alone. I often have the experience of saying to a reader from the home country of a writer I love how much I love that writer, only to get a tirade from that reader about how much the writer gets wrong. Even that makes me feel less alone. Things that I think are unique to my experience these writers also face. The way we’re talked about in this country is also similar. I remember when Jhumpa Lahiri did a “By the Book” column in the New York Times in 2013, and she said that there’s no such thing as immigrant fiction. “What do we call the rest?” she said. “Native fiction? Puritan fiction?” “All American writing is immigrant writing,” she said. I found that very empowering. So it’s wonderful to know that there are other “dyasporic” writers of different ethnicities on this journey as well. These anthologies certainly brought us together under a different tent than I’m used to being put in. If you say “Best American,” then based on your choices, you broaden the definition of even what it means to be American. NTC: Over the years, you have talked a great deal about being both insider and outsider. I find that the concept of duality and notions of the double are prominent in your work but are used to blurring a number of binaries, including the binary between who is insider and who is outsider. I also think this complicates the divide between the homeland and the host country, between the nation and its diaspora. What do you think? ED: I think I have multiple identities in which I fold myself. I am Haitian. I am black. I am a woman. I am Caribbean. I am a black woman Caribbean writer. I think I hold on to multiplicities. When I was first published in the period that I was talking about, people used to talk a lot about authenticity. I often felt very inauthentic because I was writing about Haiti in English, so I would say I am the least authentic writer ever, just to free myself from the burden of it. But in the inauthenticity I was claiming, I always saw a kind of welcomed multiplicity. NTC: You have traveled to Haiti a lot since the publication of your first book. And you made the move to Miami from Brooklyn sometime before Dew Breaker was published, I believe. Haiti is no longer just a memory, and you no longer have to read books to go back home. What is the role of nostalgia in your work? Does living in Miami make a difference? Can you talk about your first return and what that felt like? As I ask this question, I am reminded of the fact that you were a part of my own first return experience to Haiti in 2000 through the UMass summer study abroad program with Professor Marc Prou. I think we first saw you riding on a horse in Montrouis, where we were staying. It felt so surreal. But back to my question. Do you find that your 31

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relationship with Haiti shifts and evolves with every return, or do you feel like you have a more stable relationship with Haiti? “Stable” may not be the right word here. ED: I first returned to Haiti in my twenties after leaving at age twelve. I describe it a bit in my memoir, Brother, I’m Dying. There were things that, of course, became foreign to me. And others that seemed to have not changed at all. People were my compass. My loved ones were my anchors. People often read my work as nostalgic, but it is always so present for me in the moment of writing that I never think of it as nostalgic. Now that so much time has gone by—Breath, Eyes, Memory is almost twenty-five years old—it might read like nostalgia. I have just written some stories set in Miami; I could not do that before. I was not used to writing about the present of a place I was living in. Miami is closer physically to Haiti. There are a lot of Haitians here, but it’s a community I had to learn as well, both the physical landscape and the people of Miami. I remember that experience of seeing you in Haiti. I think I later fell off that horse. Symbolic, uh? I didn’t realize it was your first time. I think I put you in your dad’s novel, and before we knew each other, I felt like you had always lived there. My returns to Haiti are now different because many of the people who knew me there when I was a child have died. A whole upper layer of my family there is gone. Most of the people who’ve known me my whole life are dead. And some of the physical places I used to return to were either destroyed in the 2010 earthquake or are inhabited by other people. So now when I go to Haiti, the familial place is often my mother-inlaw’s place in the country. So that return is sowing seeds for my daughters as well as creating new connections for me. Sometimes I go with friends who work there, and I go and see their projects, and that’s another kind of visit, but I am often in the same familial plane as my daughters now. I am seeing their father’s past, and when I walk through the places where I grew up, I don’t have as many relatives to point to as I used to have in the past. NTC: Speaking of the past, in 2004–2005 a lot happened. Nina Rastogi calls the year your “annus horribilis,” wherein you experienced the death of your uncle in November 2004, the birth of your daughter four months later in 2005, followed by the death of your father in 2005 after suffering from a painful lung disease that left him bedridden for nine months. Your 2007 memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, is a way of working through these life-changing moments. I would like to talk briefly about Brother, I’m Dying. My father confessed to me that when I was born, he was full of anxiety and afraid that he would pass that on to me. He was only twenty-three years old at the time and was already deeply involved in politics during the Duvalier regime. I do remember myself feeling a burden beyond myself, beyond my own childhood comprehension. I thought of this when reading your memoir. I also thought about the workings of ancestral memory, memory that gets passed down from one generation to another quite naturally. What do you think about this idea of inheriting a parent’s pain and fears? ED:  Annus horribilis indeed. I had the same feeling as your father when my oldest daughter was born, especially since she was born in the middle of so much upheaval in my family. She gets her name, Mira, from my father’s nickname. She was born a month before he died, a few months after my uncle who raised me died. So I really was worried that she would be “damaged” by all the anxiety I had while pregnant with her. I know someone who was in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, 32

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while she was six months pregnant and escaped, and people attribute her daughter’s nervous ways to that. It’s possible that the adrenaline in the mother’s body might have affected the fetus—I don’t know. But I was very worried that all my mourning and all the shock of my losses during my “annus horribilis” were going to affect my daughter, because I do believe that you can inherit a parent’s pain, not necessarily by osmosis but by observation. Children are very perceptive, so they can experience that pain for you and from you. NTC: You testified before House Judiciary Committee at a congressional hearing on detention centers in the fall of 2007, I believe. I am curious: Did the committee read your book Brother, I’m Dying? What was that experience like? Did it provide a whole new context for understanding immigration policies here in the United States? After that experience, do you believe that your work can influence policies toward Haitian immigrants? ED: I don’t think they read the book, but I am always hoping that immigration officers will be made to read it as part of their training. At least that’s my hope. It was a surreal experience. I hoped that my uncle’s story would prevent other tragedies like that from happening, and this felt like a step in that direction, though soon after we got a Republican Congress, which tried to eliminate the few gains that had been made. I wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post at that time and it was put into the record at another congressional hearing. NTC: You have written over ten books since your first publication in 1994, and I am not even counting the books you have written for children. Which of these books challenged you the most personally? And why? As for the children’s books, what is it like to write specifically for a child? ED: I find the nonfiction most challenging. The older I get, the harder it is to talk about my personal stuff. Camus wrote that the writer is in the amphitheater. These days the amphitheater feels a lot bigger. One also feels more vulnerable because people’s loyalties are so precarious. They can be cursing a writer today that they loved yesterday because she said the “wrong” thing in the wrong way. I love writing the work for children because my children can read them. I feel like I am closer to writing for my daughters’ fifteen-year-old selves. NTC:   Claire of the Sea Light, which was published in 2013, was, I believe, the first work of fiction you wrote since becoming a mother. You just mentioned your two girls, Mira and Leila. How old are they now? It is interesting that you are returning to the theme of parental separation that grounded your first book. How has your idea of motherhood changed with the birth of your girls? Does being a mother influence the kind of stories you choose to write now? Did your relationship with your own mother change after the birth of your first child? ED: Mira is twelve and Leila is eight. I didn’t realize until a friend pointed it out to me that I was revisiting the theme of parent-child separation now from the point of view of a mother rather than a daughter. That friend, who knows me very well, thought that Claire of the Sea Light was my way of reprocessing that material from this new perspective of being a mother. Now that I am a mother, I feel like I am able to write more nuanced mothers. That comes partly from the double perspective of having been

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both daughter and mother. Just like it’s easier for me now to understand some of my mother’s choices throughout my life. NTC: Claire is about a father’s wrenching decision to give his seven-year-old daughter away so that she could have a better life. So you are also able to write more nuanced fathers. This novel was also your first publication since the earthquake in 2010, although you started working on it in 2005. The book is as much a reflection on motherhood as it is about a small seaside town. You have disclosed somewhere that half of the book was published before the earthquake, while the other half was published afterward. Did the earthquake have an impact on the direction of the book in any way? Did you feel an urge to preserve a particular image of small-town living because of the disaster that destroyed specific communities? ED: The book is set right before the earthquake. The townspeople don’t realize what is going to happen. That part came into the story right after the earthquake. It seemed to me strange to write a book that had no presence at all—or in this case no prescience—of the earthquake. I was not ready to write a book about the earthquake, but I wanted to implant some signs in the book, and in the place, that one might be coming. It was strange to me to reread The Farming of Bones after the earthquake and see mentions of tremors in that book. I must have discovered that in the research. This made me realize that in some ways earthquakes have always been a part of our dormant reality. NTC: You seem to have a profound relationship with death. You learned about it early on through your uncle, who presided over funerals as a minister. You also have had a number of experiences with death in the past thirteen years, the most recent being the death of your mother in 2014 from ovarian cancer. You just mentioned that you have a better understanding of the choices your mother made. Can you talk about your new book, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, which focuses on your mother’s story and your own grieving process? Do you think a little differently about what it means to be a woman and a mother after her death? I was initially struck by the subtitle. What do you mean when you say “final story”? ED:  The Art of Death is part of a series by Graywolf Press where writers discuss craft issues. I was really glad to have that framework to work with. I am writing about my mother but also what it’s like to write about death and grief. For some reason death has always fascinated me. I think part of it has to do with my uncle having been a minister who presided over many funerals that I attended when I was young. In the book I talk about a lot of literature about dying, some of which is written by dying writers. Thus the subtitle. Of course when you lose a parent, every moment you spent together is revised through that lens. I’m glad I don’t have much regret about what I said or didn’t say to my mother. Just like with my father, there was some time between her diagnosis and her death for me to speak to her and resolve many things. NTC: I am glad you had the time, those precious moments with both your parents before their passing. My condolences to you for these losses. ED: Thank you. I realize that this is a privilege not everyone has. It’s made grieving a bit less complicated for me. NTC: You often cite another great writer, Ralph Ellison: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” It makes me think of your investment in 34

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magnifying voices of marginalized individuals who are not heard, who cannot speak of themselves, or who are often silenced when they do speak. I would like to end with a couple of questions on the relationship between voice and silence, which I think is a prominent theme in all your work. Are you aware of how much that dominates your writing? ED: I wasn’t really aware of it until someone pointed it out. I think it was after Brother, I’m Dying came out and someone made the connection between my uncle having had cancer surgery to remove his larynx and the fact that I used to speak for him and my work as a writer. That felt like a revelation to me. Then I could see it clearly. I realize now that this is why that Ellison quote speaks so powerfully to me. It’s not saying with all certainly that I speak for you, but it says, Who knows? I think this is why I write. You never know. The thing I am writing about might also ring true for someone else. NTC: You know, I did think of your uncle’s surgery when I read that quote by Ralph Ellison. I think becoming your uncle’s voice when he literally lost his after the removal of his larynx is critical to understanding your relationship with voice and silence. You touch on this experience again in the story “Water Child” through the character Nadine, the Haitian American nurse who works with patients who have lost their voice as a result of total laryngectomies. Voice, and lack thereof, is indeed a dominant theme in your work. Every time I think of you and read your work, the phrase that comes up is “daughter of a voice.” There is always a spiritual aspect to this voice in my mind. In rabbinic literature the term bat kol means daughter of a divine voice, and that voice is often described as a small but powerful echo. In my analysis of your oeuvre, I talk about the significance of the echo as recall and repetition of voices that get amplified to be heard. Do you see a relationship between spirituality and voice? How do these small voices come to you? ED: Of course, voice is very spiritual. When one creates, one becomes a kind of vessel. That’s why you often hear artists say that they’re unsure where the work comes from. Writers might say that the character takes over. There’s something very deeply spiritual, even mystical, about an act of creation, of putting out in the world something that was not there before. Voices come to me in dreams. Sometimes they come to me while I’m reading. Sometimes they are actual voices I happen to overhear speaking and appropriate for my work. NTC: In Create Dangerously you write, “Maybe that was my purpose, then, as an immigrant and a writer, to be an echo chamber, gathering and then replaying voices from both the distant and the local devastation.” I was so struck by that statement that I framed my book about your works on this notion of the echo chamber and its relationship to voice. Did you know you were evoking Marguerite Duras and Roland Barthes? You do cite Barthes in Create Dangerously. Were you conscious of how the phrase was being used by writers before you? ED: These are of course questions that many writers wrestle with, so I’m not surprised that they’ve been brought up before. In terms of evocation, I’d say Barthes more than Duras. Though Duras’s writing is extremely evocative. She is a kind of distant model. I think Barthes’s notion of the death of the author is certainly one that’s intrigued me. Especially in this most recent book, The Art of Death, where he’s not as much cited as felt. 35

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NTC: As in Create Dangerously, you make reference, albeit more subtly, to a lot of books in The Dew Breaker. In my analysis of this book, I explore the significance of intertextuality and argue that it is a particular kind of echo. Of course Barthes is one of the major theorists of intertextuality who stresses the role of the reader. Is it a conscious effort on your part to expose your audience to other books and writers that have come before you? That have influenced your work? I learned so much about how you write and your “source texts” by reading these two books. ED: A lot of my wok is “in conversation” with other Haitian books. The Farming of Bones is in conversation with Compère Général Soleil by Jacques Stéphen Alexis and René Philoctète’s Le peuple des terres mélées. The Dew Breaker is in conversation with Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew). The stories in The Dew Breaker are what happens when we stop being masters of the dew, as Roumain seemed to be encouraging us to be. We then destroy everything as the shoukèt laroze, or the “dew breakers” did. I discuss more of my recent source texts in The Art of Death. NTC: This book is a testimony to what an avid reader you are. I have added a few more books on my reading list after reading The Art of Death. In this most recent book, which was published less than a month ago, you mention long-time influential writers like Albert Camus, Zora Neal Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Gabriel García Márquez, who passed away in 2014. Without giving away any spoilers, you open up in your most recent book in ways you would not have if your parents were alive. It is interesting you say that you feel more hesitant to share personal stuff the older you get. Having read The Art of Death, I do feel you are being vulnerable in ways you had not with your other nonfictional books. Are you in a place in your life where you can tell stories you were perhaps not ready to tell before? ED: I have a writer friend who always says that there are things that she could not write until her mother died. I certainly write things in The Art of Death that I would not have written if my parents were still alive. This felt very liberating to me to write. Even more so because I could write it without hurting them. Still I find myself being happy when I read reviews of the book and no one mentions it. It’s something I’m still processing. Yet it is the only thing that I feel I could not have written when my parents were still alive. Everything else was fair game. Maybe that’s why I’m more reluctant to reveal after this. It feels like I have no more secrets. NTC: I want to return to the echo. When people evoke the term today, they are speaking of like-minded folks, a homogenous community. Your echo chamber is a heterogeneous community, the space of inclusion and expansion, of myriad and diverse voices. How do you define the echo chamber? Is it the writer’s memory? Is it the experience, or space, of diaspora? Is the echo chamber a new way of writing new realities outside the homeland? Is there new knowledge in the echo chamber? ED: It’s very hard to separate it from something negative these days, especially in this age of alternative facts, and people in power always want to hear what they want to hear. I think if a writer were to say that they’re in an echo chamber now it would be hard to separate it from all of that. What I could go back to is that Greek myth and the echo there. That always reminds me of being in the mountains o Léogâne as a child and shouting out a name and hearing that name repeated back to me in dozens of voices 36

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that I was never fully sure were mine. I think that’s what I think of as a positive when I hear the words echo chamber. NTC: That’s exactly the image that comes to my mind when I think of you and this idea of the echo chamber: you in the mountains of Léogâne as a child. One last question, Edwidge. You will be turning fifty soon! That is a milestone birthday, and you have accomplished so much already. I am sure there is a lot more to come. Any new projects in the pipeline? Do you have an idea of how you will celebrate? ED: I will be fifty in a year and a half. After witnessing so much death up close, of both my parents and close friends, I feel vulnerable in a way I did not in the past. Frankly, my big plan is to try to stick around and see my daughters grow up, to watch them become young women, then see them launch into their own lives. That more than anything is what I would love to be granted, Si Dye vle, God willing. In the meantime, I want to continue writing, maybe try different forms of writing. I have a book of short stories coming out in a while, probably in my fiftieth year. That will be the celebration, writing-wise. When I’m fifty, I will be eternally grateful that I would have had a twenty-five-year career and journey as a writer, something I never would have thought possible as a little girl. I’ll be grateful that I’m still writing, and that I still want to write. That’s a great blessing. NTC: Sounds like a wise plan for a wise woman. Would you mind describing briefly this new book of short stories? ED: They’re right longish stories dealing with friendship, family, romance. All eight (love) stories are about people searching for a once-in-a-lifetime love they may or never find. NTC:  I hope that in between all this writing there will be dancing. ED:  Yes, there is always dancing. Though not always in public. NTC: Thank you, Edwidge, for your time. It really has been an honor to get to know Haiti through your writing. ED:  Thank you. Mèsi anpil.

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PART II ON VIOLENCE AND VIOLATED BODIES: BIOPOLITICS IN DANTICAT’S TEXTS

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CHAPTER 3 RECONSTRUCTIVE TEXTUAL SURGERY IN DANTICAT’S KRIK? KRAK! AND THE DEW BREAKER

Judith Misrahi-Barak

More than twenty-five years elapsed between the publication of “Children of the Sea” and “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” in the short story collection Krik? Krak! (1991) and that of “Without Inspection” in Everything Inside (2019). Célianne, gang raped by the Tontons Macoutes, tries to disfigure herself by inflicting razor cuts to her face. Once she discovers she is pregnant, she flees Haiti, hoping to obtain refugee status in the United States. She becomes one of the “Children of the Sea,” just like the young man who is the narrator of the story. In “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” an unnamed woman, whose female body is vividly described in the story, is the narrator’s mother who survived the 1937 “Parsley” Massacre on the Haitian–Dominican border. A  survivor once but not twice, she remains unnamed in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” but can be identified as Défilé by the reader in another story in the collection. She was also persecuted, then jailed, by the Tontons Macoutes many years later. The male body that is falling into a cement chute in the story “Without Inspection,” is that of Arnold, a Haitian refugee who entered the United States “Without Inspection,” as the title suggests, and thus condemned to remaining undocumented. It takes him “six and a half seconds to fall five hundred feet.” Whether it is Célianne’s on a refugee boat, Défilé’s in a prison yard, or Arnold’s on a construction site, the bodies are used and abused, commodified, separated on either side of the Atlantic Ocean and pulled apart, transformed, tortured and scarred, denied their freedom, or made absent to themselves. The very process of leaving and arriving, of leaving and never arriving, of forever migrating, of always remembering and already forgetting inscribes itself in the body of the characters and in the reader’s relation to them. In the first two short stories, both Célianne and Défilé are seen through the eyes of either the male narrator of “Children of the Sea” or those of the female narrator of “Nineteen Thirty-Seven.” Neither speaks for themselves; neither can be granted their own voice. In the third one, voice and perspective are disjointed. The reader sees through the character-focalizer eyes of Arnold, one of the Haitian “boat people” who has landed in the United States without meeting with an immigration officer upon arrival, but Arnold’s voice is not to be heard directly; the narrative remains locked in the third person. Bodies haunt Edwidge Danticat’s short stories and inhabit all their cracks; they bear the marks of the traumatic Haitian past and those of the traumatic American present, one reverberating the other. They become a historically scripted text, a site of oppression, dispossession, and violation, left as an open wound, floating in limbo spaces, drowning or attempting to fly, erased and washed away, assaulted by crises of epilepsy, maimed by laryngectomies, plagued by phantom limb pain, shattered by nightmares. Bodies often appear in Danticat’s narratives as what one—the master, the powerful, the sovereign, the dictator, or any other oppressor—has

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power upon, not what creates its own agency or has power over anything, or anyone. Excluded from the nation-state, stripped of their political rights, of any form of citizenship, they are often reduced to what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” (Homo Sacer), life as it takes shape in the natural cycle (zôè) and not as it is organized in the political context of a human group (bios). Danticat animates the tension between the bodies that have power and the ones that do not. Through their very suffering and destitution, Célianne, Défilé, and Arnold epitomize the power over life that shackles the power of life. Yet, Célianne and Défilé, if not Arnold, have a lingering presence in the short stories they dwell in. They are mentioned here and there; they keep reappearing. If they are to be interpreted only as suffering and obliterated bodies, why are they made to bob up about the text, as if refusing to go down once and for all? What is it about those bodies that is shown as still resisting, and always already resisting? They are not the only ones either who are lost and found. A whole host of characters echo each other, reverberate, call, and respond to one another. Such reflections seem to be facilitated by the very format of the short stories, those shards of fiction that assemble and reflect, absorb the obscurity, and bounce the light back. How is the reader to understand the sophisticated complexity of the tension between what the text says at its surface and what it does underneath? This chapter thus seeks to determine what exactly happens in the short stories and between them that breathes new life into what has been ravaged, forging a new space of living that allows Haitian voices to recompose themselves and come together, converting the interdictions they have suffered into what April Shemak calls “inter-diction.”1 The corpus I address here includes Krik? Krak! (1991) and The Dew Breaker (2004), two collections that bring together short stories that take place in Haiti and/or in the United States, or in-between, with brief references to the novel The Farming of Bones (1998) and to the short story “Without Inspection” published first in the New Yorker (2018). Using the framework of biopolitics, and particularly Foucault’s “docile bodies” and what he calls the “disciplines” (“Les Corps dociles,” Surveiller et punir, 1975), this chapter explores the traction between the violence that is described in Danticat’s short stories and the dynamics of the text whose very elasticity opposes and contradicts the destructive forces it denounces. While it first posits the centrality of the traumatized and tortured body in Danticat’s short stories, it eventually examines how that body is simultaneously dismantled, reassembled, and reconstructed as a textual body. The narrative of abuse and violence, pain and death, within or without the frame of the migrating experience, authorizes the reconstruction of the self in between the cracks of the text, thus bringing about the possibility of a reembodied self. Going against the endless repetition of the cycle of violence, the feeling of homelessness, insecurity, shame, and alienation, the interstices between the stories and the collections generate what could be called a habitable space, the process of connecting the shining of a torch to the process of becoming.

April Shemak, Asylum Speakers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 46–7.

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Biopolitics 1: The Tortured Body, the Body in Servitude “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” does not take place in 1937. But the shadows of the “Parsley” Massacre hover over it ominously. The female narrator was born during the massacre of October 1937 planned by Generalissimo Trujillo to extirpate the Haitian presence in the Dominican Republic:  “My mother had escaped El Generalissimo’s soldiers, leaving her own mother behind. From the Haitian side of the river, she could still see the soldiers chopping up her mother’s body and throwing it into the river along with many others.”2 The young woman visits her mother who was jailed many years later by the Tontons Macoutes, along with other women, the purpose of such arbitrary incarceration being to terrorize the people, and break them. The short story, the second in the collection Krik? Krak!, contains the seeds of the novel The Farming of Bones to be published seven years later.3 The arrest of the narrator’s mother, whose name is, as the reader is told eventually in “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” Défilé, happens one morning, a short while after the two women have arrived in Port-au-Prince. As they are “new to the city,” they are more vulnerable and easily fall prey to the fear and anger of the population as it has been stirred up by the manipulations of Duvalier and his Tontons Macoutes: One morning, when I  woke up, Manman was gone. There was the sound of a crowd outside. When I rushed out I saw a group of people taking my mother away. Her face was bleeding from the pounding blows of rocks and sticks and the fists of strangers. She was being pulled along by two policemen, each tugging at one of her arms as she dragged her feet. The woman we had been staying with carried her dead son by the legs. The policemen made no efforts to stop the mob that was beating my mother. “Lougarou, witch, criminal!” they shouted.4 This moment of kidnapping happens earlier chronologically; but whether the body is already locked up in jail or still outside, it is never free and only exists as dismembered body parts: Défilé’s “bleeding” face, “the fists of strangers” that are as many “rocks and sticks,” her arms that are “tugg[ed]” at, her feet that are “dragged.” Once in the jail the dehumanization process materializes in ever more horrifying ways as the women are made to lose their humanity and femininity: “she was like a snake, someone with no bones left in her body”; their shaved heads “make them look like crows, like men.”5 Beyond the short story the reader also hears the proleptic echoes of the description of the massacre in The Farming of Bones and the parallel that is made by Danticat between the violence perpetrated under Trujillo’s dictatorship and that under the Duvaliers’:6

Edwidge Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” in Krik? Krak! (New York: Soho Press, [1991] 1995), 40. I explore The Farming of Bones in two earlier articles. The first one focuses on trauma and translation: “Exploring Trauma through the Memory of Text:  Edwidge Danticat Listens to Jacques Stephen Alexis, Rita Dove and René Philoctète,” Journal of Haitian Studies 19, no. 1 (2013): 163–83. The other one adopts the frame of biopolitics: “Biopolitics and Translation:  Edwidge Danticat’s Many Tongues,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 17, no.  3 and 4 (2014): 349–71. http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-issue,id=2781/. 4 Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 39. 5 Ibid. 6 François Duvalier (“Papa Doc,” 1957–71) was succeeded by his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier (“Baby Doc,” 1971–86). 2 3

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Yves and I were shoved down onto our knees. Our jaws were pried open and parsley stuffed into our mouths. . . . I coughed and sprayed the chewed parsley on the ground, feeling a foot pound on the middle of my back. Someone threw a fist-sized rock, which bruised my lip and left cheek. My face hit the ground. Another rock was thrown at Yves. The faces in the crowd were streaming in and out of my vision. A sharp blow to my side nearly stopped my breath. The pain was like a stab from a knife or an ice pick, but when I reached down there was no blood. Rolling myself into a ball, I tried to get away from the worst of the kicking horde. I screamed, thinking I was going to die. My screams slowed them a bit. But after a while I had less and less strength with which to make a sound. My ears were ringing; I tried to cover my head with my hands. My whole body was numbing; I sensed the vibration of the blows, but no longer the pain. My mouth filled with blood.7 The description of Amabelle’s and Yves’s bodies harks back to that of Défilé in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven.” The bodies are reduced to knees, jaws, feet, lips, and cheeks, to the parts that are thrashed. The face that is hit seems almost detached from the body it belongs to. “The pounding blows of rocks and sticks and the fists of strangers” that had left Défilé reeling in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” find their extension in The Farming of Bones in the visualization of the “fist-sized rock” thrown at Amabelle. Reduced to the ears, the head, the hand, or the mouth, the adjective “whole” is made null and void as it is paired with the “numbing” of that same “whole body,” one that can only “sense the vibration of the blows” but is not alive enough to feel “the pain.” Both descriptions in the short story and in the novel also anticipate “Without Inspection” and Arnold’s “free fall.” His body is “slammed into the cement mixer” and “tossed inside a dark blender full of grout” (two verbs that are not generally used for a human being), ultimately reduced to a mouth and a nose “trying to inhale.”8 If The Farming of Bones focuses directly on the Parsley Massacre and the twenty years following it while “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” pivots on the “post-memory” generation after the massacre,9 both texts echo each other and pulsate together. “Without Inspection” stages the immigrant’s body, not as it is expelled from the host country or as it is unable to dwell in its own country but as it cannot be accepted in the host country. All three texts underline the centrality of the tormented body in Danticat’s writing. Whether it is persecuted and victimized in the home country, or persecuted and victimized for being what Shemak calls “peripheral migrants,”10 or hovering in an undocumented, indeterminate space between countries, the body is always traumatized, exploited; it always bears the marks

Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones (London: Abacus, 1998), 193–4. Edwidge Danticat, “Without Inspection,” in Everything Inside (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), e-book (94 percent, location 2450 of 2607). 9 I am using Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” as one that 7 8

characterizes the experience of those who . . . have grown up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the powerful stories of the previous generation shaped by monumental traumatic events that resist understanding and integration. It describes as well the relationship of the second generation to the experiences of the first—their curiosity and desire, as well as their ambivalences about wanting to own their parents’ knowledge. (Hirsch 2001: 12) Shemak, Asylum Speakers, 165.

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of the suffering it has gone through, forever remaining a ghostly presence. Be they maids, cane cutters, or illegal construction workers as seen in the three examples above, Haitian bodies are often shown as they are employed to fill poorly paid or dangerous jobs nobody else wants, not the Dominicans, not the North Americans. The protagonists of The Farming of Bones are the direct heirs of the field slaves: they are “corporeally marked.”11 The name of one of the characters in The Farming of Bones, Kongo, is a testimony to his African origin and his “map of scars on his muscular back”12 to the number of years he has been working in the cane fields, not a slave stricto sensu but definitely in servitude. Sebastian’s body, loved by Amabelle, is stigmatized by the cane: “the cane stalks have ripped apart most of the skin on his shiny black face, leaving him with crisscrossed trails of furrowed scars” and his “palms have lost their lifelines to the machetes that cut the cane.”13 The women’s bodies are also damaged by their work in the fields as much as by the massacre: “Among the oldest women one was missing an ear. Two had lost fingers. One had her right cheekbone cracked in half, the result of a runaway machete in the fields.”14 The machete symbolically connects the fieldwork during slavery, the cane cutting work that Haitians do in the Dominican Republic to earn a meager living, and the Parsley Massacre. It is the object that sustains life and the one that strikes it out. If Kongo and Sebastian recall the field slaves, Amabelle summons up the domestic slave, tied to the master’s house. Before the massacre, even though her body is not scarred, Sebastian remarks as he undresses her how it is identified with her position as a domestic servant: “ ‘Your clothes cover more than your skin,’ he says. ‘You become this uniform they make for you. Now you are only you, just the flesh.’ ”15 Défilé, Amabelle, and Arnold, and now Sebastian and Kongo, introduce the reader to the myriad ways Danticat writes Haitian bodies as the “visual and palpable testaments to their oppression” and how they are “the material reminders, historical markers in a sense, of [the] attempt to obliterate them.”16 And when they are not the “material reminders” of historical violence or state control, the bodies are still fantasized as potentially falling under blows. The rocks and sticks and fists that Défilé and Amabelle had fallen under in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” or in The Farming of Bones are also summoned back in such a story as “Night Talkers” (in The Dew Breaker). Dany comes back to Haiti to visit his Aunt Estina, whom he has not seen since he settled in New York ten years before, after the fire that caused his parents’ death and his aunt’s blindness. He comes back to Haiti of his own accord in the hope to tell his aunt that, in New York, he saw the man responsible for the fire. But the story also stages another young man who was deported back to Haiti after he killed his violent father and served a prison sentence in the United States: “Claude was probably in his late teens, too young, it seemed, to have been expatriated twice, from both his native country and his adopted land.”17 More American than Haitian, Claude imagines people will throw stones at him upon his forced return:

Ibid. Danticat, Farming of Bones, 62. 13 Ibid., 1. 14 Ibid., 61. 15 Ibid., 2. 16 Shemak, Asylum Speakers, 167. A substantial part of April Shemak’s third chapter in Asylum Speakers focuses on The Farming of Bones (157–76) and is extremely enlightening. Her first chapter on refugee narratives also includes illuminating pages on “Children of the Sea” (72–7). 17 Edwidge Danticat, “Night Talkers,” in The Dew Breaker (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 100. 11 12

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“When I first got here,” he continued, “I thought I’d get stoned. I mean, I thought people would throw rocks at me, man. Not the other kind of stones. I  mean, coming out of New York, then being in prison in Port for three months because I had no place to go, then finally my moms, who didn’t speak to me for the whole time I was locked up, came to Port and hooked me up with some family up here.”18 Claude is forced back to a native land that he has left and does not know anymore. He knows it so little that he is obsessed with the possibility of his own destruction at the hands of his (former) fellow citizens. In “Monkey Tails,” set between February 7, 1986, and February 7, 2004, after the destitution of Baby Doc, Rosie is another instance of the commodified bodies that are ensconced in the stories. Contrary to Claude, who features in the dialogue and is listened to by Dany and the reader, Rosie’s voice is never heard. A restavèk, she is remembered by Michel, the 30-year-old narrator whose wife is expecting and who recollects the time when he was 12 and in love with Rosie, “a distant cousin [his] mother had summoned from the provinces to do such things as cook and wash and sweep under the beds, when she’d promised Rosie’s poor peasant parents that she’d be sending her to school.”19 If Rosie belongs to that “crowd of maids, menservants, and indentured children, restavèks,” Michel is also one of them, called upon by Monsieur Christophe who is in need of “more hands” to work at his water station.20 Michel, the “outside” child of Monsieur Christophe, still finds it painful, thirty years later, to “be reminded that [he] had a father who lived and worked so close to [him] and still didn’t call [him] his son.”21 More than forty years after the publication of Surveiller et punir (1975), Foucault’s masterful analyses of the disciplinary processes at work in societies that exert control over people’s bodies to coerce them remain highly pertinent and enlightening.22 The measures that had become, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what he terms the “disciplines,” force individuals into a relation of subjection to the central authority. In the chapter entitled “Les corps dociles” (“Docile bodies”), Foucault emphasizes the different practices that allow the state or the institutional authority to manage the population through the control of their bodies. Through these “disciplines,” a relation of “docilité-utilité” (docility-utility) is implemented.23 Whether it is through the direct appropriation of the body as a commodity (slavery) or a relation of constant domination (domesticity) or submission (vassalage), bodies will bear the marks of this control and coercion. But the “disciplines,” in Foucault’s conception, are different from slavery, domesticity, or vassalage in that they aim to obtain the same effects with less obvious violence. In The Farming of Bones and the short stories I have mentioned so far, economic exploitation as well as political and ethnic domination is what constitutes the complex web of domination, appropriation, submission, and vassalage in which the characters are enmeshed, caught up

Ibid., 101. Edwidge Danticat, “Monkey Tails,” in The Dew Breaker (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 142. 20 Ibid., 145, 146. 21 Ibid., 159. 22 This aspect is also examined in Judith Misrahi-Barak, “Biopolitics and Translation:  Edwidge Danticat’s Many Tongues,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 17, nos.  3 and 4 (2014):  349–71. Available online at the following URL address: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-issue,id=2781/. 23 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), “Les corps dociles,” 161. 18 19

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as they are in a Foucauldian “microphysique du pouvoir” (microphysics of power). Whether these bodies are actually stoned, finally obliterated, eventually erased, or not, these protagonists encapsulate the ways the Haitian body is subjugated and controlled by an authoritarian power, in the context of slavery or dictatorship, state control, or simply through the persistence of internalized oppression and economic exploitation. Many short stories feature the physical and psychological brutality the individual is subjected to in what can be called “a world overcoded by highly policed borders and limitations.”24 Sometimes the symbolization of the space the body is physically restricted to is enough to connote this power held over the body and its ability to sustain itself and live on. The individual is constrained to a space they have been coerced into, that gradually shrinks and closes in upon them. A few instances will have to suffice. “Children of the Sea” takes place after the 1991 military coup that forced Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of power and pushed thousands of Haitians onto small boats, in the hope they would reach the US coast. The young man, who was involved in a dissident radio program, flees Haiti to save his life from the Tontons Macoutes, hoping to obtain refugee status in the United States. The young woman remains in Haiti but loses her freedom of movement when she is internally displaced with her family as they flee the capital. The story is composed of the letters they write to each other.25 It provides the first image in the collection of the persecution individuals endure, of the tightness of the space they are reduced to, of its compression into near-nothingness: “I don’t know how long we’ll be at sea. There are thirty-six other deserting souls on this little boat with me.”26 No space is tinier than a raft indeed, where not even the bare necessities of life are available and life itself hangs in the balance: I can’t tell exactly how far we are from [America]. We might be barely out of our own shores. There are no borderlines on the sea. The whole thing looks like one. I cannot even tell if we are about to drop off the face of the earth. Maybe the world is flat and we are going to find out, like the navigators of old . . . When I do manage to sleep, I dream that the winds come of the sky and claim us for the sea. We go under and no one hears from us again.27 The refugee raft is the very symbol of precarious space, of a space that cannot be documented, a speck lost in the immensity of the sky and sea, a straw that can be carried off in the wind, annihilating the lives it carries on board. In “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” the journey Défilé’s daughter makes to visit her mother in prison takes her from Ville Rose to Port-au-Prince. It starts in the open air, on “the roads to the city [that] were covered with sharp pebbles only half buried in the thick dust”28 that take

Nick Nesbitt, “Diasporic Politics: Danticat’s Short Works,” in Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, ed. Martin Munro (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 79. 25 It is interesting some critics like Nick Nesbitt speak of “diary entries” while others like April Shemak speak of “letters.” It is certainly up to the readers to reach their own interpretations of these pages written in different typesets depending on which protagonist is speaking. Whether we read them as diary entries or letters, they are never read in the diegesis by the protagonist they are addressed to—only by the reader. 26 Edwidge Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” in Krik? Krak! (New York: Soho Press, 1995), 3. 27 Ibid., 6. 28 Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 33. 24

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her to the fort. After reaching the “yellow prison building . . . as large and strong as in the days when it was used by the American marines who had built it,”29 the space seems to contract, it grows smaller and smaller as the narrator arrives at the prison yard, and then at the cell in which the women have been locked. The narrator’s mother’s body has also shrunk, as if to fit into the restricted space she has been shoved into: “My mother has grown even thinner since the last time I had seen her.”30 Her body functions have also been reduced to the minimum, her body has shrunk, and her clothes have become too large: I held out the fried pork and plantains to her. She uncovered the food and took a peek before grimacing, as though the sight of the meat nauseated her. Still she took it and put it in a deep pocket in a very loose fitting white dress that she had made herself from the cloth that I had brought her on my last visit. . . . Manman pulled the meat and plantains out of her pocket and started eating a piece to fill the silence. Her normal ration of food in the prison was bread and water, which is why she was losing weight so rapidly. “Sometimes the food you bring me, it lasts for months at a time,” she said. “I chew it and swallow my saliva, then I put it away and then chew it again. It lasts a very long time this way.”31 Eating does not fill the stomach, it fills “the silence.” Food does not nourish the body: it is to be placed in pockets and sucked upon eventually. Défilé reminds the reader of Célianne in “Children of the Sea.” The space of the boat is fused with Célianne’s body, just as the prison yard and the cell were fused with Défilé’s shrinking body, gradually erased out of existence. The boat is leaking, and so is Célianne’s body: “Some water starting coming into the boat in the spot where [Célianne] was sleeping. There is a crack at the bottom of the boat that looks as though, if it gets any bigger, it will split the boat in two. The captain cleared us aside and used some tar to clog up the hole.”32 The boat is leaking, water is getting in. When Célianne’s waters have broken, she is leaking as well and her body will “split . . . in two,” like the boat. In the extract that featured at the beginning of this chapter, the hole in the boat and the hole out of which the baby will be born almost become one. Shemak writes about this “paralleling of birth and the leaky boat” to underline how “the boundaries of the boat and of the woman are crossed simultaneously so that the sea is configured as a kind of womb that is at once nurturing and deadly.”33 She also reminds the reader of Glissant’s description of the slave ship as “both a generative and banishing space”:34 “This boat is a womb, a womb abyss . . . This boat is your womb, a matrix, and yet it expels you.”35 The boat at sea is always already a reference to the Ibid., 35. Ibid., 36. 31 Ibid., 36, 38. 32 Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” 10. 33 Shemak, Asylum Speakers, 75. 34 Ibid. 35 This passage from The Poetics of Relation is quoted by Shemak, 75, in the first very illuminating chapter of Asylum Speakers on refugee narratives. The original text from Poétique de la Relation is “Cette barque est une matrice, le gouffre-matrice. . . . Cette barque est ta matrice, un moule, qui t’expulse pourtant.” Edouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 18. 29 30

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Middle Passage, where the commodified and tortured body could end up at the bottom of the ocean and become “food for fish”36 or “food for sharks.”37 The abused bodies of Défilé and Célianne, constrained in spaces that compress and oppress them, summon a third instance, the eponymous short story in The Dew Breaker. “The Dew Breaker” closes the collection and ties in with the first story in the collection, “The Book of the Dead.” I will return to this interstory connection but for the moment, I want to complete my analysis of how Danticat’s text emphasizes the Haitian body through the space it is granted or, rather, deprived. The last story of the collection is organized in different sections, all of them combining the third-person narrative voice and an internal focalization. Three protagonists are pitted against each other: the torturer, whom the reader realizes is the father of Ka, the young female narrator of the first story of the collection, “The Book of the Dead”; the preacher who is tortured and killed in Fort Dimanche by the torturer but manages to wound and scar him for life; and Anne, the preacher’s epileptic sister who believes in the redeeming power of love and becomes the wife of the torturer, and Ka’s mother, to whom I also return later. The reader understands from one of the torturer’s sections that his family had lost all their land soon after François Duvalier took power in 1957 and that his life from then on revolved around retribution and retaliation: “He had joined the Miliciens, the Volunteers for National Security, at nineteen,”38 after his father had gone mad and his mother had left. As his power over people grows, so does his body: “I volunteered to protect national security. Unfortunately, or fortunately as you like, this includes your own.” With these words, restaurants fed him an enormous amount of food, which he ate eagerly several times a day because he enjoyed watching his body grow wider and meatier just as his sense of power did.39 The sense of power is constructed through the amount of place that the body takes, or cannot take. When the preacher is kidnapped from his church in Bel-air, L’Eglise Baptiste des Anges, and shoved into the truck that takes him away, A group of Miliciens piled on top of him. He raised his feet close to his chest as they shoved him from side to side, pounding rifle butts on random parts of his body. His face was now pressed against the metal undulations of the truck bed, boot soles and heels raining down on him, cigarette butts being put out in his hair, which sizzled and popped like tiny grains of rock salt in an open fire. He was hit with jolts of shock from what felt like portable electric devices pressed against the heels of his now bare feet.40 The scene is a painful reminder of the massacre scene in The Farming of Bones and of the prison scene in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven.” The itemization of the body parts enhances the dehumanization and amplifies the impossible translation of the pain for the reader. When David Dabydeen, Turner: New and Selected Poems (London: Cape, 1994), 1. Fred D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 4. 38 Edwidge Danticat, “The Book of the Dead,” in The Dew Breaker (New York: Knopf), 191. 39 Ibid., 196. 40 Ibid., 211–12. 36 37

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blindfolded, the preacher loses all notion of space and time, like the young man on the refugee raft earlier on: “He lost track of his own movements, his body cringing at every strike. . . . A shot was fired somewhere.”41 He is dragged out of the truck and pushed onto the concrete of the curb and again, the body is gradually taken apart: With each yank forward, a little bit of him was bruised, peeled away. He felt as though he was shedding skin, shedding voice, shedding sight, shedding everything he’d tried so hard to make himself into, a well-dressed man, a well-spoken man, a well-read man. He was leaving all that behind now with bits of his flesh in the ground, morsel by morsel being scrapped off by pebbles, rocks, tiny bottle shards, and crack in the concrete.42 Yet, there is something in the focus of the text that goes against this splitting apart. The internal focalization through the preacher battles against the third-person narrative voice that deprives the reader of the preacher’s direct, albeit mediated, voice. The traction between what the text shows and what it says grants it a paradoxical power, precisely that power that is being snatched away from the brutalized man. It is a productive tension located at the heart of the narrative. Still blindfolded, the preacher is then pushed into the restricted space of the cell and is eventually taken to the interrogation room. The “death chamber” is in fact a “nine-by-twelve foot mustard-colored prison office.”43 The chair the preacher is made to sit on “was much lower than the fat man’s desk, and it was obvious that the height and size of the chair were meant to make the preacher feel smaller than the fat man, who was a whole lot larger than most people anyway.”44 The small size of the room is meant to make the preacher feel oppressed, dominated, threatened. It feels “as though it had been suddenly sealed shut.”45 As the fat man “leans in,” “mov[es] closer,” and “grow[s]‌wider,” the chair the preacher is sitting on “squeak[s] underneath him and crashe[s], breaking the wooden legs into several pieces and dropping him on the floor.”46 The displacement of the anticipated breaking of the preacher’s legs to the breaking of the “wooden legs” of the chair provides enough time and space for the preacher to grab one of the chair’s broken pieces and aim at his torturer: He grabbed the piece of wood and aimed. He wanted to strike the fat man’s eyes, but instead the spiked stub ended up in the fat man’s right cheek and sank in an inch or so. The fat man’s shock worked in his favor, for it allowed him a few seconds to slide the piece of wood down the fat man’s face, tearing the skin down to his jawline.47 The reader remembers the scar on the cheek of Ka’s father in the first story of the collection, “The Book of the Dead.” Even if the father had already revealed he wasn’t the victim, as his daughter had believed all along her childhood, but the torturer, the revelation of the how of the scar is finally made in the last pages, once the imposition of brutal and callous force has

Ibid. Ibid., 213. 43 Ibid., 222, 223. 44 Ibid., 223. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 224, 225. 47 Ibid., 226. 41 42

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been displayed through the construction of the complex relationship of the body and the space it finds itself in. The “death chamber” of “The Dew Breaker” prolongs the prison yard of “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” and the refugee raft of “Children of the Sea.” It also proleptically announces the cement mixer of “Without Inspection.” The abused and suffering body populates the stories of Krik? Krak! and The Dew Breaker. It is often reduced to a festering wound, a corpse, a scar. Or the image thereof. Only a few examples can be taken here. In the short story “Night Women” (1991), the female narrator’s first-person internal monologue revolves around her son as he sleeps while men come to her at night for sex. No scene of violence, no abduction, no body that appears to be visibly tortured or abused. Yet, the way the son is described as he slaps the mosquitoes that disturb his sleep is striking:  “He always slaps the mosquitoes dead on his face without even waking. In the morning, he will have tiny blood spots on his forehead, as though he had spent the whole night kissing a woman with wide-open flesh wounds on her face.”48 Even in a story that is apparently devoid of any intended physical violence, the “wide-open flesh wound” still stamps its mark: the body in Danticat’s narratives is never anodyne or unblemished; it always bears the mark of a trauma, one that is remembered, or one that is envisaged. The live body can always unexpectedly turn into a dead body. In “The Missing Peace,” a 14-year-old Haitian girl, named Lamort (death) after her mother who died in childbirth, is guiding an American academic on the traces of her own mother who was killed years before. As Lamort takes Emilie Gallant to the mass burial site, they bump into soldiers who are getting rid of a body freshly murdered: Two other soldiers passed us on their way to the field. They were dragging the bloodsoaked body of a bearded man with an old election slogan written on a T-shirt across his chest: ALONE WE ARE WEAK. TOGETHER WE ARE A FLOOD. The guards were carrying him, feet first, like a breech birth.49 In fact, the precise date is not given but, as Nick Nesbitt explains, the reader can recognize the context of the coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide since the slogan on the T-shirt is that of Aristide’s Lavalas party, recalling “the brutal aggression FRAPH members visited upon anyone openly calling for Aristide’s return after 1991.”50 The bodies of the past that Lamort and Emilie are looking for are replaced by the bodies of the present, always quick to materialize. Sometimes the body stops short of dying, one wonders how, but it goes on ailing and wailing, in silence or aloud. In “The Bridal Seamstress,” Aline Cajuste is an intern preparing an interview with Beatrice Saint Fort, a famous seamstress who makes wedding dresses for Haitian girls in Queens, New York, and is about to retire. Toward the end of the interview, Beatrice exposes the scarred soles of her feet and reveals how the Haitian prison guard (who now lives in the same neighborhood as she) had inflicted it to her: Beatrice removed her open-toed sandals and raised her feet so Aline could see the soles of her feet. They were thin and sheer like an albino baby’s skin.

Edwidge Danticat, “Night Women,” in Krik? Krak! (New York: Soho Press, [1991] 1995), 84. Edwidge Danticat, “The Missing Peace,” in Krik? Krak! (New York: Soho Press, [1991] 1995), 117. 50 Nesbitt, “Diasporic Politics,” 79. 48 49

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“He asked me to go dancing with him one night,” Beatrice said, putting her feet back in her sandals. “I had a boyfriend so I said no. That’s why he arrested me. He tied me to some type of rack in the prison and whipped the bottom of my feet until they bled. Then he made me walk home, barefoot. On tar road. In the hot sun. At high noon. This man, wherever I rent or buy a house in this city, I find him, living on my street.51 Diaspora certainly offers refuge, an area protected from the persecution one was subjected to. Yet, as Brinda Mehta astutely analyzes, “it offers simultaneous asylum to economic and politically disenfranchised Haitian immigrants in America and the political henchmen responsible for persecuting them with impunity in Haiti.”52 While “dyaspora” is at the same time a space of protection and vulnerability, the body is this space where the memory of the past is inscribed in the present, encased in the scar that is scripted into the soles of our feet. Always more damaged bodies invade the narrative, the ones produced by dictatorships, or by the sca(r)ring effects of destitution or migration. Repeated miscarriages and everyday abuse affect the female narrator of “Between the Pool and the Gardenias” so deeply that she adopts the corpse of a baby abandoned in the street, and looks after her as if she was still alive and her daughter. The reader is reminded of Célianne’s still-born baby but unlike the baby of “Children of the Sea” who is slipped into a liquid grave and immediately followed by her mother, the reader is made to watch little Rose’s decomposition until the moment when even her deranged but loving adoptive mother cannot bear the smells and sights of putrefaction: “I once had an uncle who bought pigs’ intestines in Ville Rose to sell at the market in the city. Rose began to smell like the intestines after they hadn’t sold for a few days.” A hole is dug among the gardenias. Not in the sea this time, in the earth. If Lamort finally adopts her mother’s name, Marie-Magdalène, and goes back to life in “The Missing Peace,” Rose will never travel to the city she is named after, nor will she ever smell (of) the flower her name evokes; however, like the body when it has to fight an infection, the narrative of trauma, of pain and death, produces its own antibodies. There is no “microphysics of power” without a microphysics of life, no power over life that does not come up against the power of life.

Biopolitics 2: Body and Text, Reconstructed As has been shown above, the Haitian body in Danticat’s short stories is often displayed as it is in the grip of an authoritarian power, disciplined and subjugated, violated and broken. Scars are the reminders of such violence, of what remains scripted in the body itself, impossible to erase. The soles of her feet that Beatrice shows Aline in “The Bridal Seamstress,” “thin and sheer like an albino baby’s skin,” are one such reminder of a past Beatrice has carried with her to the not-so-safe diaspora.53 The “blunt, rope-like scar that runs from [Ka’s] father right cheek down to the corner of his mouth” is “the only visible reminder of the year he spent in prison in Haiti.”54 But the scar is not the only way the body makes the traces of a painful past perceptible, or expresses the impossibility to live or even survive. Danticat’s stories are replete Edwidge Danticat, “The Bridal Seamstress,” in The Dew Breaker (New York: Knopf), 131–2. Brinda Mehta, Notions of Identity, Diaspora, and Gender in Caribbean Women’s Writing (New  York:  Palgrave, 2009), 66. 53 Danticat, “Bridal Seamstress,” 131. 54 Danticat, “Book of the Dead,” 5. 51 52

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with physical affections and wounds that are as many visible signs of suffering—appendicitis, blindness, and sleep talking in “Night Talkers”; laryngectomies in “Water Child,” reminding us of Joseph Dantica, Danticat’s own uncle in Brother, I’m Dying; muteness in “Nineteen ThirtySeven” and in “Seven”; phantom pain in “Caroline’s Wedding”; epilepsy in “The Dew Breaker.” These are only a few instances of the impossibility to move away from the causes of trauma. Yet, while the body evidences its suffering, and the Dew Breaker’s and Beatrice’s scars in The Dew Breaker are residual in the text and irradiate the other stories, it also demonstrates itself as still alive and fighting. Such affections and traumas that are made manifest by the body are, if one follows the definition of the word “manifest,” “clearly revealed to the eye, mind, or judgement.”55 The multiple Latin and French etymology of the adjective reminds us that something is defined as manifest when it can be touched by the hand (manus), when it becomes palpable. The transitive verb manifest refers to the action of “making evident to the eye or to the understanding, to show plainly, to disclose, to reveal” but also “to prove or attest.” When they display and reveal the affections and traumas, Danticat’s narrative can thus easily become a manifest, “a public declaration, an open statement, a manifesto.” It shows not only how the body has suffered and been traumatized but also how it clings to life and puts up a fight—a manifest in all meanings of the word, particularly as far as the phantom limb pain in “Caroline’s Wedding” and epilepsy in “The Dew Breaker” are concerned as is going to be shown now. Gracina, the first-person narrator of “Caroline’s Wedding” and Caroline’s sister, has just obtained her naturalization certificate and the whole story revolves around the accommodation of the change in the situation of the two young women and their position in the family. Gracina is becoming an American citizen and Caroline is getting married:  it is thus a narrative of arrival and departure. As the elder daughter, Gracina used to be called the “ ‘misery baby,’ the offspring of [her] parents’ lean years . . . when they were living in a shantytown in Portau-Prince and had nothing.”56 Caroline, the younger daughter, the “New York child, the child who has never known Haiti,”57 leaves home as a newly married woman. Eric is looked down upon by Caroline’s mother not only because he has a learning disability that affects his speech so much that she calls him “a retard” but also because he is a Bahamian, and so, a fiancé from “outside.”58 In the mother’s eyes his major disability is that he is not Haitian. Gracina has finally arrived; she can finally stop feeling like “unclaimed property” and can settle down as an American citizen, albeit as “an indentured servant who has finally been allowed to join the family.”59 Caroline, on the other hand, is ready to depart. Yet, additionally to everything that has been passed on to her (a few objects, stories, her parents’ memories, and her memories of her parents, their silences too), something in Caroline’s body will always keep her attached to Haiti even though she has never been there: Caroline had been born without her left forearm. The round end of her stub felt like a stuffed dumpling as I squeezed it hello. After my mother was arrested in the sweatshop

Oxford English Dictionary online. Edwidge Danticat, “Caroline’s Wedding,” in Krik? Krak! (New York: Soho Press, [1991] 1995), 189. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 183, 194, 161. 59 Ibid., 158, 214. 55 56

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immigration raid, a prison doctor had given her a shot of a drug to keep her calm overnight. That shot, my mother believed, caused Caroline’s condition. Caroline was lucky to have come out missing only one forearm. She might not have been born at all.60 When Caroline is making the wedding preparations, she buys herself “a wedding present, . . . a robotic arm with two shoulder straps that controlled the motion of the plastic fingers”; she explains to her mother that she was having this “shooting pain in [her] stub,” and it felt as if her arm was hurting. The doctor thought the prosthesis would help with her “phantom limb pain . . ., a kind of pain that people feel after they’ve had their arms or legs amputated.”61 Her mother reminds her that her arm “was not cut off ” from her.62 And when Caroline justifies the pain in her missing limb with the recent pressures she has been submitted to, her mother snaps back:  “In that case, we all have phantom pain.”63 The mother was a direct victim of violent migration, and her daughter’s body has been affected. Just like the scar that marks the body permanently, or the “port-wine mark shaped like Manhattan island” that shows on the back of Caroline’s mother’s neck, the disabled body in Danticat’s short stories is the stigma that retains the past in the present.64 It is the mark that keeps the past migration alive in the present, providing palpable, manifest evidence. In Mehta’s words, “The past occupies a living present in a traumatic continuum.”65 Yet, Caroline’s body has adjusted to her mother’s trauma, by carrying the trace of the shot her mother received, physically integrating it in order to survive it, almost flaunting it. Caroline has transformed a space of death into “a space of transformation.”66 Caroline’s and Beatrice’s bodies make their histories manifest, and by doing so, they relocate themselves in a present that does not aim at abolishing the past, only at making it habitable in the present. Anne, the preacher’s sister who has married his torturer in “The Dew Breaker,” has a strange way of inhabiting the present time and space. The epileptic crises that rack Anne’s body manifest her inability to speak while at the same time give her body a way of expressing itself: Even though it was pitch-black, she felt a slight pinch in both her eyes, another curtain of darkness settling in, further deepening the obscurity around her. Her face was growing progressively warmer, as though the candle she now so longed to light had already been ignited beneath the skin on her cheekbones. A high-pitched sound was ringing in her ears, like a monotonic flute, just as her nose was being bombarded with the sweet, lingering smell of frangipanis in bloom. Anticipating the convulsions to follow, she lowered herself to the ground and lay on her back, spreading her arms and legs apart. She imagined observing herself from somewhere high above, perhaps perched from the ceiling, watching herself on the cool cement floor, looking like a butterfly whose wings had been fractured, forcing it to set down and slowly die. Her breathing was shallow,

Ibid., 159 Ibid., 198, 198–9. 62 Ibid., 199. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., 166. 65 Mehta, Notions of Identity, 71. 66 Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism:  A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1987), 4. Quoted by Mehta, Notions of Identity, 76. 60 61

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the pauses growing longer between each cycle. Her body stiffened and the inside of her mouth felt crowded, her tongue swelling and spreading out over her teeth, filling them with the briny taste of dirty seawater. Fragmented moments from her life were filing past her, event after event streaming by at high speed on the giant puppet screen she now imagined her mind to be: her younger brother’s drowning, her stepbrother’s departure from their seaside village, perhaps to avoid the waters that had taken her brother’s life, their respective parents’ death from either chagrin or hunger or both, her recent move to the city to join her older brother, his inability to stop speaking about his wife’s death, which, it seemed, was not so unlike this death she was sure she was experiencing.67 Contrary to the limbo space of Haitian migration examined by Shemak in Asylum Speakers, in which individuals keep hovering between countries and borders, at sea, departing but never arriving, the limbo space that emerges through Anne’s epileptic fits creates a time and space where the body belongs only to itself, creating a time and space to be found nowhere else but then and there. The fit heightens the sensations; all the senses of sight (“obscurity”), sound (“high-pitched sound”), smell (“frangipanis”), taste (“briny taste of dirty seawater”), and touch (“tongue swelling,” “cool cement floor”) are more alert than usual. Anne is able to experience her body having a fit and to watch the fit as if it was happening to someone else (“imagined observing herself from somewhere high above,” “watching herself ”). The shallow breathing combined with the stiffening of her body makes the experience almost sexual, comparable to a petite mort—the world outside is annihilated and her body opens up to those “fragmented moments from her life . . . filing past her.”68 The choice of verbs (feel, deepen, grow, long, ring, spread, imagine, experience, etc.) underlines the “seizure” as more empowering than inhibiting.69 Her body becomes hypersensitive, hyper-located, yet totally fluid and porous to the outside world, liberated from external, imposed or self-imposed, constraints and limitations. As Mehta astutely analyzes, Anne’s body becomes this “scripted text in which involuntary remembering . . . gives voice to unarticulated experiences,” while this type of language “inscribes its physicality on the body in the form of Anne’s epileptic fits as an uncensored speaking-in-multiple tongues. Consequently, epilepsy as a narrative trope becomes memory’s performative language,” or what Mehta calls “memoryspeak,” transcending the materiality of the body.70 Other bodies in the short stories speak, Dany and his blind aunt, Estina, for instance, in “Night Talkers”: In the dark, listening to his aunt conduct entire conversations in her sleep, he realized that aside from blood, she and he shared nocturnal habits. They were both palannits, night talkers, people who wet their beds, not with urine but with words. He too spoke his dreams aloud in the night, to the point of sometimes jolting himself awake with the sound of his own voice. Usually he could remember only the very last words he spoke,

Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 215. Ibid. 69 Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 221. 70 Mehta, Notions of Identity, 79, 80. 67 68

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but remained with a lingering sensation that he had been talking, laughing, and at times crying all night long.71 After Estina’s sudden death in her sleep, Dany wants to “keep Claude speaking, which wouldn’t be so hard, since Claude was already one of them, a member of their tribe, . . . one of those who spoke their nightmares out loud . . . to himself as well as to others.”72 What Judith Butler calls the “traumatic residue” is on its way to being purged through such involuntary remembering, involuntary speaking, and crying—not a redemption, not a purification either, just an attempted purgation.73 Through epilepsy or night talking, the body is moving out of normative codes of behavior, of feeling and experiencing. By making the suffering visible and audible, it revisits the ways past and present can cohabit. From a site of dispossession and violation, the body becomes one of repossession and reclaiming. There are many other ways the body can “muster up enough heat” to try and organize its resistance against what is being done to it and empower itself.74 Quite a few stories foreground the most basic and essential ways one can sustain and protect oneself. Ingesting food is quite obviously one of them, even if it is sometimes the lack thereof that dominates, or if certain foods can also kill depending on the ways they are consumed or administered—Célianne in “Children of the Sea” is hardly ever seen as eating, Défilé in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” sucks on the same morsels of fried pork and plantain for days on end, and the memory of parsley haunts the short story without a single mention of the cleansing herb that was force-fed to Haitians on the border. In “Without Inspection,” the newly arrived and starving Arnold has been looking forward to eating breakfast burritos, but they make him sick and he has to throw up. The narrator of “Between the Pool and the Gardenias” goes to the market and cooks for her employees in Pétion-Ville but is unable to feed and sustain the baby she considers as hers, Rose. Food is available to everyone, except to the loved ones they would like to share it with most. The sharing of food is one of the crucial elements that connect and hold the characters together as well as the text. In the “The Missing Peace,” Emilie establishes a connection with Lamort the first time they meet by offering some lemonade and butter cookies, both following circuitous routes. Butter cookies had already been mentioned in the preceding short story, “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” but only in passing: it was the epitome of food children were lucky to have, when they could get them at all. In the “The Missing Peace,” the lemonade was made by Lamort’s grandmother for the paying guests she is hosting:  it goes outside family and comes back to family, encompassing insiders and outsiders within the same loop. Moreover, Lamort believes the cookies are American, until Emilie tells her they are French. Le Petit Ecolier biscuits are indeed quintessentially French; it doesn’t need any context to connote happy childhoods, afternoons of goûters and after-school activities in comfortable homes, in sharp contrast with the situation Lamort and Emilie find themselves in. Lamort eats one biscuit after another, until the box is empty, thus taking the American woman and herself, a Haitian girl, on a detour through the former French colonizing power, and drawing an imaginary line between America, France, and Haiti.

Danticat, “Night Talkers,” 98–9. Ibid., 120. 73 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 38. 74 Edwige Danticat, Krik? Krak! (New York: Vintage, 1996), 37. 71 72

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Besides its nutritional properties, food also has healing and connecting properties:  it sustains the body and the mind; it builds bridges. It is connected to living and surviving, just as much as to dying and departing. In Valérie Loichot’s formulation, “food represents both a tool of survival and thriving in the world, as well as a constant torment.”75 This ambiguity, mostly to be found in the short stories set in a diasporic context, certainly shapes the protagonists’ psyche and drives the narrative. Yet, how torment builds resilience is what Danticat’s text seeks. As most diasporic people, Haitians migrating to the United States have always relied on the culinary to organize their own survival, or as Loichot puts it, “Haitians migrating to the United States constitute the privileged example of culinary survival in exile.”76 “Caroline’s Wedding” provides another example of such “culinary survival” through the strong focus on food in general and “bone soup” in particular, cooked by the girls’ mother whenever there is something to celebrate, ills to cure, or comfort to give. Food traditions, ingesting and digesting, and culinary practices bond the individual who has left the history and routes of their native land and their native community to the history and routes of the new community they are joining. Elisa Sobo’s concept of “body-in-relation,” used by Loichot, is in sharp contrast with the “autonomous, individual, and independent”77 body that tends to be more Western. Food is what straps the individual to the group, “bodies to the earth,”78 the present to the past. Eating, cooking, and sharing food is always one of the ways two people or a community can share togetherness, past or present. Food passes through the body and connects it to the earth and to the other; it “mend(s) disjointed communities and restore(s) the link to their original land.”79 In that respect, “Without Inspection” interestingly pulls together the image of the restaurant in Little Haiti in Miami and that of the food truck. The former is run by Darline, the rescuer of Arnold when he has almost drowned but falls out of the raft onto the beach (a reminder of “Ambiance Créole, the sole Haitian restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan,” run by Rézia, a former restavèk in “The Funeral Singer”). The latter, run by the Lopez brothers, is the symbol of the Cubans’ success story. The Haitian restaurant provides another Little Haiti at the heart of Little Haiti; it is a tentatively secure place where Haitian-Americans and undocumented Haitians can find “cornmeal with red beans,” “stewed codfish,” and “boiling plantains.”80 The food truck is on the move, it easily inserts itself in the social fabric provisionally, here or there, and people can grab “a guava pastry and a cup of coffee”81 as they rush to where they have to be. In many ways, food is only one of the many connectors in the short stories, all of them associated with the body’s resilience and its capacity to take the individual beyond trauma. Other forms of orality such as songs, storytelling, or voices on the radio fulfill the same connecting function in Danticat’s stories, as immaterial as food can be material, but as essential and vital. Voice is the other connecting trope of intergenerational and transnational transmission. Much Valérie Loichot’s chapter “Kitchen Narrative—Food and Exile in Edwidge Danticat and Gisèle Pineau,” in The Tropics Bite Back—Culinary Coups in the Caribbean (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2013), is a wonderful analysis of the processes that link food, narrative, and diasporic migration. Loichot, “Kitchen Narrative,” 64. See also Loichot’s chapter in this volume. 76 Loichot, “Kitchen Narrative,” 63. 77 Elisa Sobo, “The Sweetness of Fat, Health, Procreation and Sociability in Rural Jamaica,” in Food and Culture, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 1997, 257); quoted by Loichot, “Kitchen Narrative,” 77. 78 Loichot, “Kitchen Narrative,” 77. 79 Ibid., 64. 80 Danticat, “Without Inspection,” 96 percent, location 2508 of 2607. 81 Ibid., 90 percent, location 2357 of 2607. 75

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has been said about the ways Danticat connects Haitian voices in Haiti and in the dyaspora.82 For now, I  simply want to briefly point out again a few echoes the reverberation of which creates a dynamic effect in the stories and between them. Danticat uses many ways to push orality to the foreground—the connection between storyteller, storytelling, and audience features in the very title of the first collection of stories, as well as in “Children of the Sea” where the refugees tell each other stories to pass the time: “We spent most of yesterday telling stories. Someone says, Krik? You answer, Krak! And they say, I  have many stories I  could tell you, and then they go on and tell these stories to you, but mostly to themselves.”83 The second-person narration in the epilogue of Krik? Krak!, “Women Like Us,” also facilitates immediate contact with the addressee/narratee. It is significant that “The Funeral Singer” is one of the stories in the Dew Breaker that resonates most with songs and oral text. The song Beloved Haiti that is mentioned in “Children of the Sea” is actually sung in “Caroline’s Wedding,” at Célianne’s funeral, bringing the wheel full circle. One-sided monologues rustle with the imagined voice of the interlocutor, albeit absent, in “Children of the Sea” or “New York Day Women,” until the monologue morphs into the desired dialogue. Little Guy in “A Wall of Fire Rising” has to work on his voice for the play his is acting in, bringing the voices of the forefathers of the Haitian Revolution closer to the present. Voice is used to connect the living together, the dead and the living, the almost dead and the still alive, the ones who are here and the ones who are there, in flesh and blood materiality or memorial immateriality. The radio and the recorded voice also populate a variety of scenes in Haiti or in the diaspora: working for an underground radio is what forces the male narrator of “Children of the Sea” to flee Haiti; the female protagonist in “Seven” tries to fill the seven-year separation that epitomizes the severance of migration with listening to the Haitian radio and writing letters home; in “Monkey Tails,” Michel records his own voice for his son as he reminisces about his childhood as he is on the eve of becoming a father himself; Nadine in “Water Child” has not spoken to her parents on the phone for years but records their voices on the cassettes of the answering machine, while she works with the patients who have gone through laryngectomies. Beyond the powerful associations of voice and silence, other clusters of images forge the cohesion of the narrative and their echoes reverberate from one story to another, from one collection to another. Butterflies flutter across “Children of the Sea,” “Night Women,” “The Missing Peace,” “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” “a symbol of both continuing life and transformation.”84 The sky and stars shine through “Children of the Sea,” “A Wall of Fire,” “Night Women,” and “Seeing Things Simply.” Dreams haunt “Children of the Sea,” “Caroline’s Wedding,” and “The Missing Peace,” and so do ghosts in “Caroline’s Wedding” and “Night Women.” Death and decay are persistent motifs.85 As has been understood by now, such a dynamic takes its energy from the format of the short story cycle, or sequence, defined by Forrest Ingram as “a set of stories linked to each other I had focused on those issues of orality and silence in “ ‘My mouth is the keeper of both speech and silence . . .,’ or The Vocalisation of Silence in Caribbean Short-Stories by Edwidge Danticat,” Journal of the Short Story in English, Angers 47 (2006): 155–66. There are many other articles on the topic. See the volume’s final bibliography. 83 Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” 14. 84 Davis, “Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwige Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” Melus 26, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 70. 85 See the chapters by Jana Evans Braziel and Anne Brüske in this volume. 82

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in such a way as to maintain a balance between the individuality of each of the stories and the necessities of the larger unit.”86 After connecting the short story cycle to the oral tradition of narrative,87 Davis also adds that it asserts “the individuality and independence of each of the component parts while creating a necessary interdependence that emphasizes the wholeness and unity of the work. Consistency of theme and an evolution from one story to the next are among the classic requirements of the form.”88 Form is thus used to insist on what is at stake in the collection, that is, what brings the individual and their community together, or tears them apart. Danticat brilliantly merges theme and technique in that respect. Ultimately, it is the Haitian body itself that is endlessly composed, taken to pieces, and recomposed. Both collections, as has already been shown in several instances, bring together a network of characters, echoes, reminiscences, and intertextual allusions that have to be deciphered by the reader. “Between the Pool and the Gardenias” is one of the most harrowing stories of Krik? Krak! Yet, it is the story that reveals the intergenerational connections between the daughters, the mothers, and the grandmothers in the volume. The narrator calls out the names she had thought of giving the child she would have liked to have had but that never managed to stay in her womb long enough to become a baby: “I called out the names I wanted to give them: Eveline, Josephine, Jacqueline, Hermine, Marie Magdalène, Célianne. I could give her all the clothes I had sewn.”89 These are names of some of the characters encountered in the short stories of the collection. The narrator’s own mother introduces her daughter to the other women in the family, those very same ones the reader has already encountered: Mama had to introduce me to them, because they had all died before I was born. There was my great grandmother Eveline who was killed by Dominican soldiers at the Massacre River. My grandmother Défilé who died with a bald head in a prison, because God had given her wings. My godmother Lili who killed herself in old age because her husband had jumped out of a flying balloon and her grown son left her to go to Miami.90 The reader recognizes Eveline, Josephine, and Défilé from “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” Hermine from “Caroline’s Wedding,” Marie Magdalène from “The Missing Peace,” Célianne from “Children of the Sea,” and Lili from “A Wall of Fire Rising.” “Between the Pool and the Gardenias” brings us back to the stories (the prison yard and the Parsley Massacre) and beyond them (we hadn’t known about Lili’s suicide or Little Guy emigrating to Miami after Guy’s death). It creates a subterranean bond. In the last story of Krik? Krak!, Gracina, Caroline, and their mother attend a funeral service, which the reader understands is for the pregnant girl, Célianne, who was on the boat trying to

Forrest L. Ingram, Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 15. 87 “The short story cycle looks back to oral traditions of narrative while embodying signs of modernity. One of its most salient features is its attempt to emulate the act of storytelling, the effort of a speaker to establish solidarity with an implied audience by recounting a series of tales linked by their content or by the conditions in which they are related.” (Davis 2001: 66) 88 Davis, “Oral Narrative,” 66. 89 Edwidge Danticat, “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” in Krik? Krak! (New York: Soho Press, [1991] 1995), 92. 90 Ibid., 94. 86

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reach the American shore in the first story “Children of the Sea”: “We make a special call today for a young woman whose name we don’t know, . . . a young woman who was pregnant when she took a boat from Haiti and then later gave birth to her child on that boat.”91 Célianne will not be completely shrouded in silence since there is still an echo of her in the last story. Such interweaving and echoing also structures The Dew Breaker, in which the rarely seen former torturer is in fact the main protagonist, refracted in the consciousness of his wife Anne and daughter Ka, in the nightmares of his neighbors and former victims, lurking from one story to another. In “Night Talkers” Dany’s parents were killed by that same man who camouflages as a barber in New York. In “The Bridal Seamstress,” Beatrice is one of his former victims: “ ‘We called them choukèt laroze,’ Beatrice said . . . They’d break into your house. Mostly it was at night. But often they’d also come before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves, and they’d take you away. He was one of them, the guard.”92 The last story in the collection, “The Dew Breaker,” gathers all the threads, and gives all the missing clues—how the abduction of the preacher turned sour, how the torturer got his scar, how he had to flee the country, how he became a barber, how he keeps intruding in other characters’ lives. Following up on the hypothesis that I first formulated in the introduction, this chapter has examined the centrality of the traumatized body in Danticat’s narrative while highlighting how the dynamics of the text contradicts the violence it opposes. In addition to the different ways the body thematically redesigns itself (the scar, the phantom limb pain, epilepsy), it is also reassembled in the very construction of the text. The oft-commented upon “braiding” of the hair that is at the heart of the epilogue at the end of Krik? Krak! presides over the two short story collections. The choice of the short story cycle, or sequence, over a mere collection of short stories, has important implications. In the context of migration that brings about a painful severance and sometimes death, the enhanced relatedness between the individual component(s) and the whole is highly symbolic of a revised, renewed, and revitalized connection process. After speaking of “a world overcoded by highly policed borders and limitations,” a quote cited earlier in this chapter, Nesbitt insists on the “formal concatenations of the short story cycle” as instantiating “a world without borders in the very process of representing their terrifying effects.”93 The text does something that is different from what it says:  it describes horror, division, and alienation while implementing fluidity, diversity, and cohesion. The text does not limit itself to describing the damaged bodies and the martyred communities, the traction between the power over life and the power of life. It links up, invokes, and balances; it brings together what has been dismantled—an operation of reconstructive surgery.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue. Paris: Seuil, 1997. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Dabydeen, David. Turner: New and Selected Poems. London: Cape, 1994. D’Aguiar, Fred. Feeding the Ghosts. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997. Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! New York: Vintage, 1996. Danticat, “Caroline’s Wedding,” 167. Danticat, “The Bridal Seamstress,” 131. 93 Nesbitt, “Diasporic Politics,” 79. 91 92

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Reconstructive Textual Surgery Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. London: Abacus, 1998. Danticat, Edwidge. The Dew Breaker. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2004. Danticat, Edwidge. Everything Inside. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. Davis, Rocio G. “Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” Melus 26, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 65–81. Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison System. New York: Vintage, 1995. Glissant, Édouard. Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Glissant, Édouard. The Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory.” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 5–37. Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Loichot, Valérie. The Tropics Bite Back—Culinary Coups in the Caribbean. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Mehta, Brinda. Notions of Identity, Diaspora, and Gender in Caribbean Women’s Writing. New York:  Palgrave, 2009. Michel, Claudine, ed. The Journal of Haitian Studies, Special Issue on Edwidge Danticat 7, no. 2 (2001). Misrahi-Barak, Judith. “ ‘My Mouth Is the Keeper of Both Speech and Silence . . .,’ or The Vocalisation of Silence in Caribbean Short-Stories by Edwidge Danticat.” Journal of the Short Story in English, Angers 47 (2006): 155–66. Misrahi-Barak, Judith. “Exploring Trauma through the Memory of Text: Edwidge Danticat Listens to Jacques Stephen Alexis, Rita Dove and René Philoctète.” Journal of Haitian Studies 19, no. 1 (2013): 163–83. Misrahi-Barak, Judith. “Biopolitics and Translation: Edwidge Danticat’s Many Tongues.” International Journal of Francophone Studies 17, nos. 3 and 4 (2014): 349–71. http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/ journals/view-issue,id=2781/. Munro, Martin, ed. Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Nesbitt, Nick. “Diasporic Politics: Danticat’s Short Works.” In Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, edited by Martin Munro, 73–85. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Shemak, April. Asylum Speakers. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011.

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CHAPTER 4 “I MIGHT LOSE ALL MY LIFE”: BROTHER, I’M DYING AND (BLACK) IMMIGRATION DISCOURSE IN THE UNITED STATES

Myriam J. A. Chancy

Crossing Borders On Christmas Eve, 2016, two men of Ghanaian origin walked for seven hours from Minnesota to Emerson, Manitoba, a city that has become a port of entry for many fearing deportation from the United States, seeking refuge elsewhere. Both men had fled Ghana at separate times, one fleeing persecution for his sexual identity, and the other, political persecution; they met in Minneapolis and made a plan to cross into Canada from there.1 They did so in −57°F weather; a Good Samaritan helped them to shelter. One of the two men, Seidu Mohammed, lost a toe to frostbite, while the other, Razk Iyal, lost seven fingers in the ordeal. Six months later, both men were granted asylum in Canada and, when interviewed, say that they would do the crossing again. Iyal, for one, relays, “I’m happy because if I go back to Ghana, I might lose all my life. But here I am, I just lost my fingers, but I’m still part of the society. I can do a lot of things that the people who have the fingers can do.”2 The story of these two men, of desperation, movement across the globe, countries, and borders, is not unusual. What is unusual, for the conversation on immigration in the United States today, is that both men are of African descent and that they represent a growing difficulty, alongside migrants of Latin and South American descent, to find refuge in the United States. Stories such as theirs are also absent from the mainstream discourse around immigration despite the efforts of many activists in the last decades to fight for the rights of immigrants and refugees, regardless of their points of origin. I start with this anecdote because the struggle of these two African men to remain in the United States is increasingly common for refugees hailing from African or Caribbean countries and is part of a subterranean conversation of the Black Lives Matter movement, articulated increasingly by one of its cofounders, Opal Tometi, who currently serves as the executive director for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, founded in 2006 in response to anti-immigrant bills then being passed by the US Congress.3 Herself of Nigerian origin but born in the United States, Tometi’s involvement in the struggle for immigration justice on behalf of African immigrants and refugees began in the context of being part of an expatriate community that helped those coming into Arizona from nations of West Africa adapt to their

Austin Grabish, “Frostbitten Refugee Will Lose Fingers, Toe after 7-Hour Trek to Cross U.S.-Canada Border,” https:// www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/refugees-frostbite-manitoba-1.3930146 (accessed December 13, 2018). 2 Austin Grabish, “Refugee Who Lost His Fingers to Frostbite Wins Bid to Stay in Canada,” https://www.cbc.ca/news/ canada/manitoba/razak-iyal-wins-case-1.4159193 (accessed December 13, 2018). 3 For more information on the organization, please see https://baji.org. 1

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new country, including obtaining proper legal representation and assistance to properly file and adjust their status in the United States. The anecdote with which I begin this essay is thus extremely poignant for me for two reasons—first, the two men found refuge in the province of Manitoba, where myself and my (Haitian) family found a home of sorts as legal immigrants in the early 1970s with no formal barriers in our paths except for social ones of difference in language and culture. I  know from experience that these two men will be able to thrive there, despite Canada’s own struggles with race and immigration rights. Second, it strikes me as poignant that the symbol of hope is figured by a loss of limb, or digits, that, for Iyal, seems to him a small price to pay for the right to life. There is nothing in the discourse of these men, in contrast to that of anti-immigration lobbyists that decry the “stealing” of jobs or increased criminality, that suggest a desire for anything more than the right to life itself, free from the encumbrance of war or violent death for political or ideological reasons. The right to live freely is all that is sought. These men knew that if they crossed the border into Manitoba, there would be a welcoming committee in the small town of Morden, which has for some years been taking in border walkers and assisting refugees to access the legal system without fear of detention or of further persecution. This is perhaps so because the town is very small, with no reason to fear those who arrive destroyed by the elements, their humanity laid bare, their vulnerability clear, and unforgiving of lack of empathy. For some, however, there will be no such welcoming community, no welcome, only barriers to accessing the legal apparatus, especially for those seeking political asylum when coming from countries suffering also from grave economic distress. It is also clear that though stories like these are common place in Canada, to which hundreds of Haitians fled at the beginning of the current US administration (2017), fearing the loss of their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) visas,4 crossing the border into Quebec and filling the Montreal stadium where temporary shelter was set up by officials, they do not make headlines in the United States where immigration remains a Latin American or “south of the border issue.” Yet, just two years prior to the founding of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration by Tometi and her associates, in 2004, Joseph Dantica,5 writer Edwidge Danticat’s paternal uncle, fled gangs in Port-au-Prince who had turned his church into a battleground in their warfare, implicating him by proxy and making him a target for retaliation. As a result, Dantica and his adult son, Max, made their way to Miami to seek refuge in the United States. Instead of finding refuge, both were detained by US customs and Dantica senior died in custody within days of arrival because of a bureaucratic error (he had a valid visa but claimed the need for asylum, which resulted in his automatic detention under new Homeland Security laws instituted at the time). Though Joseph Dantica’s death made headlines because of his connection to his niece, Haitian writer, Danticat, his story was not so unusual in that it echoed the fates of thousands of Haitians since the 1980s who have been forcibly repatriated, deported, or otherwise denied refugee status in the United States as anti-immigration policies have been increasingly racialized and even designed exclusively to contend with particular ethnic groups and nationalities. Danticat published her memoir in 2007 telling the story of her fathers (her detained uncle and

For more information on the recent history of TPS status for Haitian immigrants, please see https://www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2019/11/27/immigrants-temporary-protected-status-in-us/ (accessed September 24, 2020). 5 Danticat explains that the family name was changed by border patrol when her parents immigrated to the United States. 4

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her biological father) and, through it, unveiled the ways in which the US immigration system actively engages in a simultaneously anti-immigrant and anti-Black politic. This paper seeks, then, to utilize Danticat’s memoir as a means to unpack current immigration policies from a distinctly African Diasporic lens, focusing on the Haitian immigrant experience of the last decades as a focal point by which to better understand how Black immigrant rights figure in the (de)valuing of Black life in contemporary discourses of migration and citizenship in the United States. I propose to do so in three important ways: (1) by underscoring, as do the refugees cited above, the role of corporeality in measuring or understanding measures of freedom, utilizing Jasbir Puar’s concept of “debility”; (2)  gender malleability, as invoked by Danticat in her memoir, such that shifts in how we understand and empathize with the (male) refugee might occasion concurrent shifts in immigration law with regard to Caribbean and African descended refugees/immigrants; and (3) modes of storytelling that highlight the life/death plight of refugees in order to create a store of empathy that may result in advocacy for shifts in immigration policy. I seek to highlight not only how Danticat utilizes folk tales to instruct her readers but also how she utilizes the genre of the memoir to create empathy while also serving as a mode of testimony, which readers cannot easily undermine in order to understand her uncle’s plight and that of many others like him detained in US Homeland Security. Although published over ten years ago, the memoir provides a mirror to the present day; as such, it can serve as an important document signaling to readers the ways in which immigration rights for Black persons are curtailed and how we might want to engage the legal system to ensure better future outcomes for refugees from Haiti and other parts of the African Diaspora.

Precarious Corporeality as a Measure of Freedom In the anecdote with which I began this essay, a refugee compares the loss of digits as a fair trade for regaining his freedom in exile. Return to the home country is a risk he is unwilling to take as he might lose “all his life.” For refugees from war-torn countries that also suffer from economic deprivation due to long-standing colonial and postcolonial practices, it has become increasingly difficult to make their case on the basis of “fear for their lives”—this is a particularly acute problem for refugees of African descent whose lives are already understood as expendable by host countries, and whose countries of origin are often regarded as failed states rather than colonized ones, rendering their claims, often made upon appeal to former colonial powers, inconceivable to those who receive them, whether at the borders themselves or in courts of law. In Brother, I’m Dying, corporeal loss seems to stand in materially and metaphorically for the cost of saving one’s life. As other critics have noted, Dantica’s “voice box”—the loss of his trachea to throat cancer—seems to operate in the memoir as a metaphor for his loss of voice, the inability to speak for oneself. Once in custody, as Dantica falls ill and begins to vomit during his intake interview, his voice box becomes inoperable: he can no longer make himself understood. As April Shemak writes in her Asylum Speakers, With the loss of his voice, his body becomes material testimony a physical response to the poor medical care during his incarceration that authorities, despite the physical evidence refute … that the seizure took place during the asylum interview indicates that 65

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the interview is the ultimate space of interdiction, which would have decided Joseph’s future in relation to the United States, because it becomes the space where his speech halts and his body breaks down.6 Shemak’s observation that the interview “is the ultimate space of interdiction” indicates that the debility caused by Dantica’s detention and its worsening during the interview is an extension of the state’s refusal to accept his claims. I use the term “debility” here deliberately to invoke Jasbir Puar’s term in her The Right to Maim, in which she mobilizes the term “as a needed disruption … of the category of disability … noting that while some bodies may not be recognized as or identify as disabled, they may well be debilitated, in part by being foreclosed access to legibility and resources as disabled.”7 In mobilizing disability rights as a “capacitating frame that recognizes some disabilities at the expense of other disabilities,” and in recognizing that “four-fifths of the world’s people with disabilities are located in what was once hailed as the ‘global south’,” Puar sets out to highlight what the discourse of “disability as difference” does not: “addressing how much debilitation is caused by global injustice and the war machines of colonialism, occupation, and U.S. imperialism.” Ultimately, Puar states that she is not creating “debility” as another receptable for identity categorization but asking us to recognize how it operates as a means of “massification” whereby large subsets of populations are debilitated and often, in the process, disabled, for others’ political and material gains. Dantica, then, born during the US Occupation and haunted into adulthood by childhood scenes of Haitian bodies violated by the US military, subject to a cancer at a relatively young age that one has to assume is the result of environmental degradation that renders him disabled but not unable, dies, in the end, at the hands of the same military powers that haunted his childhood. Danticat indicates that a relationship should be drawn between these distinct phases in her uncle’s life when she recounts one of his childhood memories in the middle of the narrative of his detention and death. Interrupting the narrative, Danticat tells the following story of her uncle walking to his neighborhood marketplace as a child where he comes upon “a group of young white men in dark high boots and khakis.” The men are engaged in a game, kicking something between their feet, while onlookers, “the larger crowd of vendors and shoppers,” significantly watch “with hands cradling their heads in shock.”8 Danticat then reveals what her uncle saw: They kept kicking the thing on the ground as though it were a soccer ball, bouncing it to one another with the rounded tips of their boots. Taking small careful steps to remain the same distance away as the other bystanders, my uncle finally saw what it was: a man’s head. The head was full of black peppercorn hair. Blood was dripping out of the severed neck, forming dusty dark red bubbles in the dirt. Suddenly my uncle realized why Granpè Nozial and Granmè Lorvana wanted him to stay home. Then, as now, the world outside Beauséjour was treacherous.9 April Shemak, Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 2. 7 Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), xv. 8 Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (New York: Knopf, 2007), 246. 9 Ibid., 247. 6

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In this small scene, Danticat has painted a dissonant worldview whereby the soldiers laugh and play while making sport of a disembodied head (literally playing a mock game of soccer with it), while the onlookers hold on to their heads in sheer disbelief and terror. One could read the scene here not only as of one terror but also as a somatic association of the spectators with the deceased, an understanding that the head on the ground could as well be their own. In reading the scene, readers are positioned to sympathize with the spectators and to experience, if not empathy, sympathy for the plight of the child-uncle and his community. In this fashion, Danticat’s conflation of distinct moments in time in one person’s life becomes a means by which these seemingly remote occurrences are intertwined inextricably one from the other, and, when examined in juxtaposition, reveal a pattern of power difference realized through material, not just economic, but somatic debility, to Puar’s point, which has both psychological and physical dimensions, the object of which is to keep a population trapped in a cycle of domination from which it cannot imagine escape.10 Danticat’s uncle watches the scene and absorbs its attendant violence. In this way, he ingests the debility the power dynamic is meant to impose on those watching, those rendered powerless and voiceless in the process of their witnessing. It is therefore tragic that he is then unable to tell his own story, whether to homeland security or later, given that he does not survive the interview process. This aspect of the story Danticat has to tell, on behalf of her uncle (the conflation of the military occupation with the death in custody), then, becomes emblematic of the “massification” of which Puar speaks; it could be the story of any one of the onlookers; it just happens to be told through Danticat, as the voice of her uncle. In the very next scene, after the family has recovered her uncle’s corpse, Danticat reveals that the cause of death on the certificate is revealed to have been “acute and chronic pancreatitis, which it turns out he’d never shown any symptoms of before he became ill at Krome.”11 The cause of death in this instance underscores Puar’s hinging of debility with disability as often silent, unseen, and chronic, a symptom of a slow, lingering death process inflicted by actors of the state over an array of populations who then are forced to live with the debility for decades, if not generations, as is the case here, sometimes without knowledge of it or without it being acknowledged were it evident. In this instance, then, though Joseph Dantica is unable to speak his story, and he appears to lose voice, the true cause of death is something hidden, pernicious, already working through his body. The juxtaposition of the Occupation scenes with those of his detention suggests their inextricability. So Danticat is forced to wonder: “When did he realize he was dying? Was he afraid? Did he think it ironic that he would soon be the dead prisoner of the same government that had been occupying his country when he was born? In essence he was entering and exiting the world under the same flag. Never really sovereign, as his father had dreamed, never really free.” The family is forced to bury him in the United States, a final blow to that freedom: “What would he think of being buried here? Would he forever, proverbially, turn in his grave?”12 Though I agree, in part, with both Shemak and Clitandre, when each suggests, in their own way, that Danticat’s memoir

Roseanna L. Dufault argues in “Edwidge Danticat’s Pursuit of Justice in Brother, I’m Dying” (Journal of Haitian Studies 16, no. 1 (2010)), that the author engages in multiple acts of “doubling,” including “doubling her memoir with political commentary” (95). 11 Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying, 247. 12 Ibid., 250. 10

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acts as a “relational double”13 or as a “testimonial narrative,” occupying the place of Joseph Dantica’s “halted” speech, to paraphrase here Shemak,14 if we contemplate deeply Puar’s notion of debility and Danticat’s deliberate juxtapositions in the section in which she recounts his final moments and cause of death, it appears that sustained debility, over time, is more significant than the disability represented by the voice box. The rest of the memoir presents Joseph’s voice box as a heroic feature of the man. Yet, his (ongoing) suffering corporeality, as it is described under the pressures of occupation, dictatorship, and increased volatility post-dictatorship, suggests, as do the first-person narratives of refugees (recounted briefly in my opening), that, while disability can be lived with, debility, when weaponized by the state, cannot. As Shemak and others observe, the customs official deem that Dantica is “faking,” even though he has a known disability and his trachea is blocked with sick. The issue here is not just that the personnel should have provided “accommodations” but that their power relation to Dantica, and to all whom he comes to represent, is related to his debility as a question of power’s trace upon his body, which ultimately produces his death. If we return to the instance of Dantica’s death, as reconstructed by Danticat in her memoir, the relationship between debility and legal rights is made salient. Danticat writes, recomposing, The records indicate that my uncle appeared to be having a seizure. His body stiffened. His legs jerked forward. His chair slipped back, pounding the back of his head into the wall. He began to vomit. Vomit shot out of his mouth, his nose, as well as the tracheotomy hole in his neck. The vomit was spread all over his face, from his forehead to his chin, down the front of his dark blue Krome-issued overalls. There was also vomit on his thighs, where a large wet stain showed he had also urinated on himself. She continues, When he stopped vomiting, my uncle’s body grew rigid and cold, his arms falling limply at his side. Officer Castro called out to the guards keeping watch over the other detainees outside her office and asked them to call the medical unit. A guard radioed for help but said that Krome was in lockdown and that it might take some time for help to arrive.15 Fifteen minutes go by after the onset of Dantica’s vomiting, after having had his medicines confiscated upon arrival at Krome. Dantica’s lawyer, John Pratt, then “asked if [Danticat’s] uncle could be granted humanitarian parole given his age and condition.”16 The interaction that follows this request best illustrates the process of Dantica’s dehumanization, the very quick way in which his humanity is stripped and replaced with an anonymous identity, not even of refugee, but of detainee and prisoner. His body also becomes a stand-in for all similarly detained and dehumanized people seeking refugee status at the border. Danticat relates the scene as follows:

Nadège Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (Miami: University of Florida Press, 2018), 169. Shemak, Asylum Speakers, 3, 2. 15 Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying, 232. 16 Ibid., 233. 13 14

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“I think he’s faking,” the medic said, cutting Pratt off. To prove his point, the medic grabbed my uncle’s head and moved it up and down. It was rigid rather than limp, he said. Besides, uncle would open his eyes now and then and seemed to be looking at him. “You can’t fake vomit,” Pratt shot back. “This man is very sick and his medication shouldn’t have been taken away from him.” The medications were indeed taken away, replied the medic, in accordance with the facility’s regulations, and others were substituted for them. The medic and the nurse then moved my uncle from the asylum office to a wheelchair in the hallway.17 Minutes later, the medic repeats, “He’s faking … He keeps looking at me.”18 Strangely, the medic projects onto the sick man an agency he no longer holds, either physically or juridically. Joseph Dantica is, in this situation, no more able to hold his head up, or gaze at the medic, than he is able stand up for his rights. Refused medical assistance even while obviously in need of care, he is relegated to the hallways of the detention center as if it were not enough to already be detained but that his liminality be further underscored by allowing him no respite from either condition. Joseph is eventually taken to the clinic, unresponsive, and Pratt reports to the writer, “Your uncle became ill during the credible fear interview.”19 The irony of the statement is one we should pause to observe and absorb: Joseph falls ill because his medicines are taken away but is also placed under a stress that adds itself to that of having fled his Port-au-Prince home fearing for his life. Entering the United States with the hope of being welcomed and sheltered, his rights are suspended and he is treated inhumanely from the moment he arrives because of an error in nomenclature (requesting asylum rather than showing a visa) and an error in processing (had border patrol checked their system, they would have found that Joseph had a valid visa to enter the United States). He becomes a nonperson, one of many that the United States discards, but worse even, he becomes criminalized for requesting asylum. His body and state of mind thus accrue “credible fear” not only of returning to Port-au-Prince but of the country and society in which he requests shelter. His illness thus converges during the moment at which he is meant to be able to state his case; the conditions under which he is meant to do so, however, prevent this exposure. These conditions are those elements of the state apparatus that compound a debility already underway in Haiti, namely, the border patrol, the detention center, the facility regulations, the credible fear interview (homeland security processing), the medic and Krome medical unit, and the ensuing processing at a nearby hospital where he is registered as a detainee of the State Department. Brought to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Florida in shackles and kept under watch by an immigration guard, Joseph Dantica dies approximately forty-eight hours later with the hospital disavowing responsibility for the death and telling Danticat, who calls to inquire for confirmation of the death, “Call Krome.”20 Although Danticat tells the story of her uncle’s death

Ibid. Ibid., 234. 19 Ibid., 236. 20 Ibid., 241. 17 18

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in detention as the story of one individual’s in such a situation, it is meant to be read as the story of many. As Danticat has said of her representations elsewhere, “Haitian immigrants face nationalism in brutal ways.”21 Joseph Dantica’s story is illustrative of the way in which nationalism’s brutality has a material effect and stands for the story of many other Haitian and other Black immigrants to the United States because, as Danticat says, “the Haitian characters I write today have the specter of a very anti-immigrant America hanging over their heads.”22 Though Joseph Dantica is not a character but a very real human being, the narrativization of his story in Danticat’s memoir makes him one of the many characters she depicts in her varied works in an effort to make Haitian lives legible to non-Haitian readers, to have her narratives move readers out from complacency into a realization of the ways in which the State that acts in their name in immigration cases also acts against others, also in their name. In order for immigration policy to change, we must be aware of how policies are enacted on very real bodies. This story is just one among many that allows us to better understand what is at stake in not knowing or understanding how immigration policy affects Haitians in particular and other Black immigrants more largely. If, as Puar contends, Euro-American rights discourse frames centralize “individuals extracted from populations, [operating] through forms of capacitation in relation to that which it must sublimate: the material conditions of deliberate population debilitation,” then Danticat’s memoir serves to highlight individuals of one population in order to show how it is routinely debilitated and to bring to light the mechanisms of this incapacitation. At the same time, the appeal to collectivity is neither unilateral nor universal; it is not one that suggests that all Haitians or that all Black immigrants suffer the same fate, but nuances the understanding of those parts of the immigrant population originating from the Global South that undergo continuous erosion and precarity in global politics. Again, Puar’s concept of debility becomes instructive here when she argues that “the biopolitics of debilitation … shifts from positing disability as a collective experience (of aging, of inevitable frailty and illness) to nuancing that observation through attention to populations and their differential and uneven precarity,” and, further, “that debilitation is a tactical practice deployed in order to create and precaritize populations and maintain them as such.”23 This is not to say that the medic, the nurse, or the particular border guard who sent Joseph Dantica into detention or failed to take his symptoms seriously in Krome or in the hospital are in and of themselves so powerful but that they are given the ideological and immediate tools by which to practice the State’s work to precaritize and maintain that precarity in the targeted population. What Danticat, as memoirist, asks us to do as readers is to become better acquainted with the means by which the State disseminates its intent and its power. Doing so better equips us to understand “the precarity of populations” of which Puar writes and to understand our role in the maintenance of that precarity. Yet, the situation for Haitian immigrants into the United States, despite Danticat testifying in the fall of 2007 at a House Judiciary Committee for a congressional hearing on US detention centers and her book being included as part of the training for immigration officers in Florida,24 is largely unchanged.

Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat, 188. Ibid., 191. 23 Puar, Right to Maim, 72, 73. 24 Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat, 197. 21 22

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For Haitians seeking refuge in the United States, the road (often not a road but a body of water or a plane), historically, has been perilous. To understand what is at stake for Haitians seeking refuge in the United States specifically, we must grasp the history of migration from Haiti to the United States. For one thing, mass movement from Haiti to the United States is a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. The first “refugees” one finds in the literature hailing from Saint-Domingue were not economic migrants but wealthy landowners (usually French) dispossessed of their land by primarily Black revolutionaries seeking to abolish slavery and establish a free nation. White slaveowners unwilling to grant the wishes of the revolutionaries fled with enslaved populations, a number of which landed in Louisiana (as well as Cuba and other neighboring entities) where they were made examples of to plantation communities who, following in the phenomenon of the revolution, attempted to free themselves of their chains.25 Between the early 1800s and the early 1900s, most migration from Haiti took place to neighboring Caribbean states, more often with Haitians returning to Haiti after brief periods of study or work outside (in the building of the Panama Canal, in the working of cane fields in the DR, or with courses of study for the middle classes to the most elite in France and French Canada). The US Occupation of 1915–34 redirects some of the migration patterns because of a forced relationship of domination for both trade and diplomacy. Still, even up to this point, most Haitian nationals sought to migrate to French-speaking countries for continued education and work opportunities. The US Occupation and the Duvalier regime changed this pattern as both periods sank the country into unparalleled levels of militarization, subjecting their populations to high levels of violence and terrorism. Ignoring their role in the rise of Duvalier, John F. Kennedy’s administration, for one, invited Haitian emigrants and the 1965 Immigration Act allowed Haitians to sponsor family members into the United States; at this time, Haitian immigrants, who were perceived as educated and middle class, were welcome. As the Duvalier régime ratcheted up its violent upheaval of the country in the 1970s, it sank the country in further economic poverty as Haiti’s economic place in the world economy became one of supplying a cheap labor source in the Western Hemisphere, and threatened the entire population with a secret militia that considered everyone and anyone a threat to the Duvaliers such that violence was generalized and often random so as to establish the rulers’ supremacy (this is to say that one did not need to be a political target in order to be made one), more Haitians sought to leave Haiti for political reasons. By the 1970s, then, the first Haitian “boat people” begin to reach US shores, transforming both the idea and the visual imagery associated with Haitian migrants from middle to upper class, schooled highly skilled immigrants to one of an impoverished, poorly skilled underclass reaching the United States through unofficial, thus illegal channels. The combination of being underskilled and poor appeared to negate the latter Haitians’ claims to refugee status as they were perceived to be economic refugees seeking a “better” life in the United States, presumably to gain access to services rather than in order to

There is, to date, a long-standing misunderstanding as to who the “Haitians” were who came to Louisiana during this period; those who were of African descent came in chains while those who were white were landowners, therefore making the movement of African-descended Santo-Dominguans not a choice but an unbroken chain of continued forced labor and exploitation. I would argue that this sets a precedent in how Haitians are treated and regarded more than two hundred years later in attempting to find refuge in a country that absorbed their ancestors not as migrants but as chattel. 25

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save their lives and that of their family members.26 The impoverished population of Haiti (its non-elite, non-middle-class population), as such, fits well into Puar’s description of populations “that are not roped into an economy of rehabilitative objects of care” and thus “are sites of profit precisely for their availability for injury, their inability to labor, their exclusion from adequate health care, and their ideological production as lazy, criminal, and burdensome”27— all the markers that are appended to Joseph Dantica as he is wheeled into the corridor of a detention center to await his fate: untimely death. The precarity of populations held hostage to their poverty through debility and further criminalized to prevent their border crossing and mobility is one way in which Danticat’s memoir serves to illustrate how immigration discourse in the United States serves to curtail the rights of Black immigrants and refugees into the country, especially when they have been demonized, as have Haitians.

Morphology, Survival, and the Black (Male) Refugee as (M)other Beyond representing the corporeality of the refugee, as a body at once and always operating not only under the threat of debility but rendered disabled or a dead thing over time, the memoir attempts to reassemble the figure of the Black and male refugee from one of dispensability, isolation, and threat to one associated with kinship, collectivity, and refuge, often through processes of feminization. In this way, one could argue that the temporality of the memoir, its attempt to reconstruct the life of a deceased refugee, is an act or reassemblage such that the debilitated body is given new life, not a material life but a narrative, a story from which to act, or from which readers can act on behalf of the body the State has rendered not only a noncitizen but less than human, ineffective, and so voiceless. That voicelessness can be understood as a feminization of the subject. By giving her uncle back his voice through the narrative, Danticat “rehabilitates” Joseph Dantica, and others like him, creating a space through which his story becomes emblematic of that of many others whose lives will suffer similar injustice but also one in which the self for which he was not recognized legally and humanistically is given a container in which to persist, free of suffering, fully recognized for what that life was able to create against all odds and against stereotypes imposed by the State apparatus (and undergirded ideologically in the State’s representation of the refugee and its stance toward him or her, whether at the border or in the detention center). The story of Joseph Dantica’s radical laryn‑gectomy comes very early in the memoir and is positioned as a kind of “creation story” by which we learn who Joseph Dantica was, in some way, “born” to be. By this time, he has succeeded in evading being conscripted to build structures and dig ditches for the US military under US Occupation, adopted a Cuban friend’s abandoned newborn (Marie-Micheline, who will figure prominently in the story we are told of Joseph Dantica’s heroic deeds), supported the candidacy of Fignolé (defeated, of course, by Duvalier), and rechanneled his energies from politics to the pulpit, building his own church For a timeline of Haitian immigration in the United States from which some of the above information was gleaned, please see http://www.inmotionaame.org/print.cfm;jsessionid=f830957371569607157137?migration=12&bhcp=1 (accessed April 3, 2019); for information on how Haitians are treated differently from other Caribbean immigrants, especially with respect to immigration from Cuba, please see http://www.coha.org/disparities-in-u-s-immigrationpolicy-toward-haiti-and-cuba-a-legacy-to-be-continued (accessed April 3, 2019). 27 Puar, Right to Maim, 78. 26

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for a Baptist congregation in the belief that the former “offered the promise of a peaceful and stable life.”28 We find out that, from that pulpit, Dantica preached primarily about love: “God’s love, the love we should have for one another. He knew all the verses for love.”29 One day, that voice fails him and it is discovered that he has a malignant tumor. Contemplating the news in an ill-equipped Haitian hospital, Danticat recounts what he might have told her about this moment at a later date: My uncle was staring at the ceiling and wondering whether the doctors with their “biopsy” had done him more harm than good when he heard the announcer’s voice. It reminded him how important voices were. If you had one, you could use it to reach out to your loved ones, no matter how far away. Technological advances could help—the telephone, the radio, microphones, megaphones, amplifiers. But if you had no voice at all, he thought, you were simply left out of the constant hum of the world, the echo of conversations, the shouts and whispers of everyday life.30 Ultimately, Joseph is not left voiceless. Surgery in the United States, enabled by the presence of Danticat’s father there, removes the malignancy and provides him with the technology to speak: a voice box. Prior to this time, others “interpret him.”31 This process can also be read as a feminization from which Joseph needs to be lifted or released. Interestingly, that agency, or release, is provided through a woman, Danticat herself. When Joseph receives the voice box, he and his brother marvel at the technology rendering it possible for him to have a voice. Not completely understanding the mechanism, Joseph says to Mira, Danticat’s father, “It must be a miracle … [w]‌hat else can it be?” Then, by way of explanation, that “[science] is God’s way of shielding miracles.”32 His brother tells him that he sounds like a robot, to which Joseph answers, almost philosophically, that he is grateful for his double-voicing, a ventriloquism that he, at least, can control, rather than be subject to the vagaries of other’s (mis)interpretation. “To my ear,” he says, “it sounds like two voices, my own voice inside my head and the one you hear. I  know that voice is going to sound strange to people … [b]ut it’s better than not speaking at all.”33 The irony, of course, is that the narrative itself is an interpretation, or reconstruction of the important passages of Joseph’s life, penned by his niece. Nonetheless, the retelling of this moment transmits to the reader the ways in which Danticat, as author, attempts to be transparent in the retelling, and to provide Joseph, like the technology of the voice box, an agency all his own. Rather than think of the voice box as an impediment or a simulacra, we might think of it more as a lived reflection of Homi Bhabha’s “double-time” of the people of any given nation, whereby Bhabha declares that “the people” are both the “subjects” of “nationalist pedagogy” predicated upon a historical presence or reality that forms the nation and “objects” of “a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary process of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living

Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying, 36, 30, 33. Ibid., 35. 30 Ibid., 39. 31 Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying, 64; my emphasis. 32 Ibid., 131. 33 Ibid., 132. 28 29

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principles of the people as contemporaneity.”34 In my analysis here, I suggest that we extend Bhabha’s concept beyond the confines of the nation-state to include histories that imbricate the history of one nation with another’s. As such, then, the process of Joseph’s restitution to wholeness through the voice box could be seen as reflecting the “double-time” of the Haitian people if the nation is here understood as elastic and exceeding geopolitical borders, an excess that seeps into US refugee and landed immigrant statutes. In this sense, the double-time of the Haitian people is reflected in the history between Haiti and the United States: he is the object of the nation in which he holds citizenship as a currency but the subject of the discourse of the nation to which he must travel for medical intervention. In one, citizenship carries limited rights (Haiti) and in the other (the United States) Haitian identification means that rights of citizenship can be accessed only by rules of exception, as in the case of the medical care he receives, when his radical laryngectomy, costing US$30,000, is “negotiated down and paid for by his American missionary friends,” through a neocolonial, capitalist exchange. His movements for care, hinged upon mercantile exchanges imbedded in preexisting relations of coloniality (the missions), however laudable their intent, enact what Bhabha terms the iteration of national life “as a reproductive process.”35 More ironic, then, is the fact that that Joseph’s movements from and between Haiti and the United States are caused by a loss of voice occasioned by the debilitating violence of colonial underdevelopment (to allude to Walter Rodney), which has, indirectly, caused the cancer that literally eats away at his throat such that it impairs his ability to speak, to have agency. The restoration of his voice through a prosthesis, aided by the missionaries and by US intervention, allows him to speak, thus to iterate, and reiterate his agency, albeit, always through an act of ventriloquism, which must go through the apparatus of the United States in order to find legibility. One could, then, say, that Haitian identity today has come to be reduced to this refraction of having to travel through the territory of the United States for its enunciation, a displacement that bespeaks not only globality but also intervention and disruption that deform rather than reform the nation, returning to “the people” a distorted image of themselves, a “cyborg,” which is, as Joseph says, “better than not speaking at all.”36 Danticat’s emphasis in the memoir on Joseph’s tribulations regarding his throat cancer, loss of voice, and its restitution creates in the reader a sense of sympathy for the man’s plight; it also shapes Joseph’s narrative as a hero’s story, as one who has overcome a great deal of personal pain prior to his even becoming subject to detention at the hands of the US Homeland Security. This aspect of his history can be read allegorically as the story of the Haitian nation qua people, but it is also meant to individualize Joseph to endear him to an American readership neither used to making of Black men heroes nor used to seeing Black men as vulnerable, in pain, or needing of assistance. In this sense, Joseph is humanized for an otherwise hostile audience that may not seek to identify with his plight or that of others like him. The multiple levels of ventriloquism Danticat engages in layering her story (two brothers whose process of dying overlaps; her own retelling of both men’s stories, particularly Joseph’s, in her own voice in order for his story to be told; the story of US interventionism told through family separations, etc.) encourages readers to want to carry the story forward, to change the Homi K. Bhabha, Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 208–9. Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying, 42, 209. 36 Ibid., 132. 34 35

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narrative, as Danticat does so eloquently through the memoir itself. Yet, an underexamined aspect of Joseph’s story is worth further investigation: the ways in which she depicts Joseph as an unlikely hero, one who transgresses gendered and racial conventions in order to protect and save those he loves. In doing so, Danticat upsets stereotypes associated with Black male masculinity, particularly in the United States, and creates another characterization that is meant to both humanize Joseph and, more expansively, shift the discourse around Black male migrants/refugees. The other manner in which Danticat shifts this discourse is around the issue of masculinity itself through the transformation of her uncle into an unlikely, feminized hero. In the memoir, Joseph is shown to transgress gender boundaries to protect his children and to survive himself. Joseph will ultimately escape the siege at his church in Bel-Air when it is invaded by rival gangs by cross-dressing, wearing a wig and a muumuu over his clothes. It is this masquerade that allows him to flee undetected and to ultimately make it out of the country but it is his rescue of Marie-Micheline that is perhaps more remarkable. In the latter case, I suggest that Danticat’s objective in the retelling of these transgressions is not so much about troubling gender per se, but to trouble the ways in which Americans commonly view Black immigrants and Black men more generally. By challenging the notion that Black males are less likely to parent, to protect, and to provide refuge for themselves and their families, Danticat’s memoir also challenges policy indirectly built on these notions. One could argue that Joseph’s untimely death in custody, that is, the assessment that he is “faking” his illness when his symptoms are in fact proof of deeper debility, hinges on the notion that Black people generally “make up” their illnesses, are immune to pain, or are, frankly, untrustworthy (i.e., “lying” even as the body itself tells the truth of its condition). These stories position Joseph as a heroic figure at the same time as they humanize him in contexts that normally divest Black males and Haitians of their humanity. This is made most evident in the scene in which Joseph risks all to track down his adopted daughter, Marie-Micheline, who has been married to an abusive man, Pressoir, after a neighbor’s son refuses to acknowledge that he is the father of the child. Pressoir, as it turns out, is a Tonton Macoute, and once he is found out, takes Marie-Micheline and the child far away. Joseph tracks them down to a mountainous area of Léogâne. Joseph makes the perilous journey “on a borrowed mule at high noon,” the image both reflecting the means of a common man and a spirit of conquest and heroism. When he finds Marie Micheline, beaten and broken, he convinces her to leave with the child and return home with him. The image of Joseph’s thoughts at this moment invokes his paternal, protective nature: “He wrapped her body in his arms, thinking that she felt the same to him now as when her father had placed her in his arms as a baby, trusting he would look after her, that he would always keep her from harm.”37 His journey and return home with the two successful, Marie Micheline then inverts the paradigm of fatherhood by suggesting that Joseph is not only her father but her mother as well when she says to him, in thanks, “Papa, even though men cannot give birth, you just gave birth tonight. To me.”38 In this way, Danticat humanizes Joseph by endowing him with a heroic deed, as he

Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying, 85. Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying, 86. Justine Dymond makes brief mention to the portrayal of Joseph as a maternal figure in the larger context of an analysis of “disobedient motherhood” in her essay, “An Immigrant Mother’s ‘Revolt against Silence’ in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying,” in Birthing New Lives Abroad, ed. Shultes and Vallianatos (Ontario: Demeter Press, 2016). 37 38

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saves his adopted daughter from the clutches of a dangerous man, a member of Duvalier’s secret militia, no less. She then constructs him as both father and mother beyond kinship ties. Throughout the memoir, motherhood (Danticat’s impending motherhood in particular) and fatherhood are entwined but if, in the greater construction of the book, this is done to show that death and birth are intertwined, motherhood is privileged as the source of life. By marking Joseph as feminized and as “mother” in the ways I have analyzed here, she endows him with this force as well, at the same time as his body is riddled with the debility that will ultimately cause his death. In so doing, Joseph becomes a hero whom readers should want to champion and his untimely death can only be read as unfair and unjust. Though just one story among many, it serves to have us question what other life stories immigrant and refugee (Black) men might carry, and the lives connected to their own as “othermothers” (to cite Patricia Hill Collins),39 as receptacles of safety and refuge.

Agency and Storytelling: Grandmother’s Voice As I have shown, before his detention by Homeland Security, Joseph Dantica learns to persist in spite of debility and disability, making use of his body in complex ways, including transgressions of gender norms, in order to ensure his own survival and that of family members. But there is one other way in which Danticat shifts the discourse surrounding Black male bodies in her memoir. Hand in hand with depicting Joseph’s loss of voice, the memoir identifies listening as another powerful source of agency that sustains Haitian immigrants in their journeys, both within Haiti and in their forced migrations out of Haiti to subsist elsewhere. The power of listening is encapsulated in the acts of storytelling that Danticat relays in the memoir, especially through the folktales told by Granmè Melina, recounted at different junctures of the text. Each of these, carefully chosen, serve to illustrate powerful moral tales and lessons from which sustenance is to be drawn. They also indicate that Haitian frames of reference are tied to epistemes located in an elsewhere not readily tied to land or to nation but, rather, to a gnosis handed down from generation to generation as the vital link between identity, history, and the future—the only thing, in the absence of certitude as to one’s rights of citizenship and belonging, that remains inviolable. The most important of these stories are conveyed directly to the author, who recounts them to the reader. This is fitting since proverbs, moral tales, and Haitian parables are to be found throughout Danticat’s work. As she says of her own fascination with myths and folktales, as related to Haitian epistemes, relating these to migration as a source of comfort and anchoring while in transit or movement from one landscape to another, I love the way African mythology and many Haitian folktales try to explain how some things in the world came to be. That origin-based storytelling is very fascinating to me. It’s somewhat comforting in migration as well to have collective stories that are passed on even though we are no longer living in the place the stories originated from. It says you weren’t always here. This is where you came from. This is how we think our peoples came Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought:  Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1999). 39

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into existence. It gives, in my view, every story a presumed beginning, as we eventually try to figure out the middle and ending.40 Although presumably speaking of creation stories, Danticat’s oral tales, as recounted in Brother, I’m Dying, focus primarily on the cycle of life and death. Returning to Haiti, in 1994, at age 25, Danticat reencounters Granmè Melina. Granmè tells her a story “to keep death away,” a story she stopped telling when she was ready to die herself.41 The story is about Father God and the Angel of death walking through a Haitian neighborhood; at some point, the two quarrel about whom the people like better while also telling each other whom they saved or whom they took away. They test their theory asking a woman for a glass of water. Father God goes first, not identifying who they are, and the woman refuses him the water, saying she has none to spare. Offended, Father God says that if she knew who he was, she would change her mind but the woman categorically responds, “The one I’d give my water to right now is the Angel of Death.” She explains the reason: “Because … the Angel of Death doesn’t play favorites. He takes us all, lame and stout, young and old, rich and poor, ugly and beautiful. You, however, give some people peace and put some of us in war zones … You make some powerful and others defenseless.”42 As a result of her explanation, Father God goes away in shame, while Father Death takes all the water the woman has to offer and leaves her in peace, to live a long life. The point of this story is not only to indicate that death is merciful and spares no one but also contests the notion of a “chosen” people. On a global scale, it contests the notion that the “wretched of the earth” are so because of something they have done to themselves or that they are not the equal of those who hold more wealth globally. Death is visited upon us equally: the only certainty in life is death. Later on in the narrative, Danticat recounts another of Granmè Melina’s stories, one in which a man finds himself in a foreign land, “where he knew no one and no one knew him.” The man questions where he is and a voice answers cryptically, “You’re where you are.”43 Upset, the man threatens anger; the voice answers that no one cares about his anger. In short, he has no agency and no emotion will convince anyone. The man inquires once again as to his whereabouts and the voice finally answers, “You are in hell.” The man does not understand and asks for a definition of hell, to which the voice replies, “Hell … is whatever your fear most.”44 This story precedes the story told of the gangs descending upon Joseph Dantica’s church and his cloaked departure from Haiti. By the end of the chapter, a gang member will have threatened to burn Joseph alive if he returns, but the opening parable of the man in a foreign land suggests two things: that the homeland is becoming foreign, unrecognizable beneath the violence that threatens the peaceful and law-abiding citizens like Joseph and his family but that his worse fears are yet to come, what he cannot yet imagine, detention in a truly foreign land, in Krome, in the United States. What both these stories, and others, convey is that the knowledge with which to navigate the world is already contained within them. Danticat returns to these stories as she pieces together

Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat, 183. Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying, 143. 42 Ibid., 144. 43 Ibid., 181. 44 Ibid., 182. 40 41

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the fragments of her uncle’s and family’s life as if the stories themselves will reveal how to interpret the unfathomable. At the same time as the memoir aids readers in understanding the irregularities facing Haitian immigrants to the United States, such incursions into storytelling spaces, stories passed down through the generations and voiced by an elderly woman, a grandmother, suggests that there are some things that cannot be escaped:  one’s worse fears (hell) and death itself. What can be changed, which is the purpose of the larger narrative in which these oral tales appear, is how the unjust is navigated and the unchangeable negotiated. Death comes to everyone but not everyone dies because of the withholding of their rights at the hands of others enforcing the laws of a foreign power; one’s worse fears, in certain contexts, may not be real (like fearing an imaginary “other”) but, in contexts such as that explored in the memoir, can be beyond the imaginable—young men turning on the elders and innocent in their community; a foreign land becoming a hell one could never have imagined, the site of death itself. Significantly, these tales are handed down from grandmothers to (other) mothers, female and male.

Conclusion Not long ago, I attended a reading by an author touted to be “the most famous” illegal alien residing in the United States. A journalist, said author had managed not to get deported to the Philippines, despite being paperless. A book later, recounting his story and that of his family’s, he has become famous for being able to tell his story without being detained, arrested, or deported in Trump’s America. After the talk, I stood in line to have my book signed, along with other students, faculty, and members of the public at my college. When I arrived at the table, “the most famous illegal alien” in the United States looked up at me, saw my face, and made an assumption that I had not been ready for: “You see this name,” he said, pointing to Michelle Alexander’s blurb on the back cover, “She’s African American and we’ve come together to connect the industrial prison complex with the broken immigration system.” Assuming that because I am Black, I was African American, the author never waited for me to speak. He assumed that a Black audience member could not be an immigrant, even though his talk was on immigration issues. A person is Black, therefore they belong to the United States, and their history must be one only of slavery and broken prisons. Never mind that the US judicial system is broken not only for African Americans but also for Latinx, Asians, and working, white poor. Never mind that the broken immigration system that stereotypes illegal aliens as only “Mexican” or coming from Latin America, against which the author rails, is glutted with individuals coming from different walks of life, many now coming in ships across the oceans, this time, of their own will, with the African continent, Mediterranean, or Caribbean islands at their back. I stood there, speechless: how far we have to go, I thought, if the most famous illegal alien in the United States can so easily stereotype because he has no other tools with which to read his public than the racist, xenophobic prism of a United States that has nourished him since childhood, despite his alien status, unknown to him until he reached his college years. In such moments, I seldom react swiftly. I keep my silence, and my knowledge to myself. But, a few days later, what I would have liked to tell this man was simply, “If you want to know something of the Black refugee experience in America, read Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying.” 78

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Danticat’s memoir, as I have discussed it in this essay, gives us several tools to break received stereotypes about Black immigrants, men in particular, and Haitian migrants/refugees. It humanizes and gives voice to one man who stands for a collective, Joseph Dantica, who died in the Krome detention center in South Florida, in 2004. It shows us his courage, living in a Haiti beset with a violence that reaches back to the violence of US Occupation and intervention. It shows us how such a man curtailed the tenets of toxic masculinity and evaded gender norms in order to both free himself and those around him, despite the debility imposed by a history of colonialism, which resurfaces through bodily ailments, cancers, and other illnesses. It shows us how a people hold on to hope through the memories and stories handed down by grandmothers in order to continue to persist, despite debility, disability, the stripping of human rights, and the loss of the rights of citizenship. It is a valuable document of how humanity can be extinguished by the simple failure to recognize the harms visited upon others in our name, or that of a nation, while we fail to understand the scope of their lives, the importance of such persons within familial webs, and the importance of recognizing that with each life lost to systems of inequity, our global humanity perishes a little more along with it.

Bibliography Bhabha, Homi K. Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Clitandre, Nadège. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. Miami: University of Florida Press, 2018. Danticat, Edwidge. Brother, I’m Dying. New York: Knopf, 2007. Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1999. Puar, Jasbir K. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Shemak, April. Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.

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CHAPTER 5 ALLEYS, CAPILLARIES, THORNS: THE VIOLATED TERRE-NATALE OF VILLE ROSE

Jana Evans Braziel

Alleys, capillaries, thorns: these are the words that writer Edwidge Danticat uses in Claire of the Sea Light (2013) to describe Ville Rose, the imagined seaside slum town on the southern coast of Haiti. Ville Rose, setting for the early stories in Krik? Krak! (1995), is also the town where the fictional events unfold and develop in Claire of the Sea Light, the writer’s most recent novel. These lyrical and poetic words, which I foreground here, evoke not only geographical landscapes but also corporeal circuits and botanical paths, perhaps even the difficult and transitory migrations between life and death, birth and end passageways. Ville Rose is not only the geographical heartbeat and cartographic compass of Danticat’s oeuvre; it is also the intellectual focus of this chapter, which asserts that Ville Rose is essential, even foundational, for understanding violence, particularly sexual, maternal, or infant violence, in Danticat’s literary imagination. J.  Michael Dash’s quotation about Martinican writer Édouard Glissant seems salient here in describing Danticat:  “Glissant,” as Dash explained, “from the outset, proposed that writers and thinkers should be approached and frequented like towns. He said this about Faulkner and later about the figure of Toussaint Louverture.”1 In “ ‘All Geography Is within Me’: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt,” an autobiographical essay recently featured in the winter 2019 issue of World Literature Today, Danticat herself reflects on the “the internal geography of words and how they can bridge distances.”2 Expounding on the Kreyòl phrase “lòt bò dlo,” the other side of the water, Danticat explains, “it can either mean that they’ve traveled abroad or that they have died. My parents were already lòt bò dlo, on the other side of the waters from me, before I fully even knew what that meant”; and, as Danticat suggestively intimates, geography and language, landscapes and literatures, towns (villes) and stories (istwa) are imagined and transitory, even liminal terrains of being and becoming— either across the water; or passed on to the other side; or, perhaps, somewhere in between. Building on geographical intimations of literary imagining, I foreground (in the chapter) the relationship between sexual violence, death, and violated landscapes.3 Ville Rose is a “ville “Detours and Distance: An Interview with J. Michael Dash.” The Public Archive (March 4, 2012). Available online at: https://thepublicarchive.com/?p=3134. 2 Edwidge Danticat, “ ‘All Geography Is within Me’: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt,” World Literature Today 93, no. 1 (winter 2019): 59–65. Cover feature for the winter 2019 issue of World Literature Today: Neustadt Prize Laureate: Edwidge Danticat. 3 In his interview with the author, Erick Gleibermann reflects upon and also asks Danticat to comment upon “the connection between the emergence of life and the approach of death,” in all of her literary writings, but especially in Brother, I’m Dying (2007), wherein she recounts learning of her pregnancy and her father’s terminal illness at the same moment—and wherein she describes this moment as being “in the gap.” Danticat poignantly notes, “There was a life coming, my daughter, and one leaving, my father”—and so, the literary and literal passages between life and death. See Erick Gleibermann, “The Story Will Be There When You Need It: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat,” World Literature Today 93, no. 1 (winter 2019): 68–74. 1

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imaginé,” to evoke a phrase conceptualized by Isabelle Choquet.4 Ville Rose is also hallowed terrain, haunted ground, inhabited by historical revenants, dead bodies, returning spirits, violent memories, and shadowy apparitions. Ville Rose is imagined terrain, yes, in literary language, but also one that is palpably real and lived. Achy Obejas reminds us in her moving homage to Danticat upon her winning of the 2019 Neustadt Prize for Literature,5 the author’s created places (woven through the “sublime architecture”6 of her words) are not just imaginary but also hard-edged places, ones inhabited by real people albeit also literary characters: “The worlds … are complicated, and their inhabitants operate with complicated intentions and ethics, complicated moralities and spiritual paths. But they are also common, as common as you and me, as common as the daily tragedies of children separated from their mothers.”7 Danticat’s poignant, provocative reflections on imagined landscapes and imaginary geographies are crucial for my assertion of Ville Rose as a foundational space for understanding the intertwining of violence and death; and I  more fully elaborate this foundation in the chapter’s final section, where I discuss Ville Rose as a polysemic and literary place of beauty and violence, myth and history in her writings. I do so through the shattered lenses of sexual violence, maternal deaths, and infant mortality, this chapter’s anchor and critical point of departure. To summarize, I begin by discussing the interlocking themes of sexual violence, maternal deaths, and infant mortality in the opening sections, then conclude by asserting that Ville Rose is the violated terrain, or the geographical, literary, and historical lieu de mémoire of slavery and sexual violence. Having previously addressed the harrowing presences of stillbirths, dead babies, and decaying infant bodies in Edwidge Danticat’s literary corpus8—first in an article entitled “Défilée’s Diasporic Daughters,” which was published in 2004, and then later in my book Duvalier’s Ghosts: Race, Diaspora, and U.S. Imperialism in Haitian Literatures (published in 2010)—I return again to these recurrent and haunting presences, which also constitute an inextricable absence in her literary oeuvre and in her imaginary landscapes. In this critical return, I also foreground how these deaths are shadow memories of sexual violence and violations—and thus also how these deaths engage the interrelated, recurrent motif of sexual violence in Danticat’s oeuvre; and in doing so, finally, I also return to and reinterpret daffodils in Danticat’s writings through these images of death and violence.

Isabelle Choquet, “Villes visibles, invisibles et imaginées dans l’oeuvre de Lyonel Trouillot,” Journal of Haitian Studies, 22, no. 2 (2016): 106–27. 5 Achy Obejas, “Bearing the Unforgivable: A Tribute to Edwidge Danticat,” World Literature Today 93, no. 1 (winter 2019): 66–7. 6 Ibid. 7 Obejas, “Bearing the Unforgivable,” 67. 8 A prolific and beloved writer, Edwidge Danticat’s works of fiction and nonfiction include four novels—Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), The Farming of Bones (1998), The Dew Breaker (2004), and Claire of the Sea Light (2013); a short story collection, Krik? Krak! (1996); After the Dance (2002), a travel narrative; two memoirs—Brother, I’m Dying (2007), a memoir about her uncle and her father, and The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (2017), a series of autobiographical essays about her mother’s cancer and death; Create Dangerously (2010), a collection of essays; two young adult’s novels Behind the Mountains (2002) and Untwine: A Novel (2015); a young adult biography, Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490 (2005); and four children’s books—Eight Days: A Story of Haiti (2010), The Last Mapou (with Édouard DuvalCarrié) (2013), Mama’s Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation (2015), and My Mommy Medicine (2019). In August 2019, Danticat will publish a new collection of short stories entitled Everything Inside: Stories. Danticat has also edited four collections of short stories, poems, and essays: The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (2003), Haiti Noir (2010), Best American Essays 2011, and Haiti Noir 2 (2013). 4

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Analytically, I  foreground literary and historical readings that punctuate the istwa (or “stories”) of myriad literary characters in her fiction (Martine, Atie, Sophie, Célianne, Défilé, Jacqueline, Marie, Rose, Amabelle, Valencia, Rosalinda, Rafael, Nadine, and her unborn, aborted child). Their presences are felt, palpably, in and through absence—through hauntings of the literary scene, an aporia within the fictional mise-en-scène. The themes of sexual violence and subsequent births, stillbirths, abortions, maternal death during childbirth, and dead babies recur in all of her fictional works—Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), Krik? Krak! (1995), The Farming of Bones (1998), The Dew Breaker (2004), and Claire of the Sea Light (2013)—and even as a conjectured, theoretical point of possibility in her nonfictional Brother, I’m Dying (2007), when she simultaneously learns of her pregnancy and her father’s impending death, and she asks, “Would I die? Would the baby die? Would the baby and I both die? Would my father die before we died? Or, would we all die at the same time?” As Danticat further laments, “Part of the oral storytelling culture I grew up in had a lot of dead mothers.” Returning to this vexed, even intractable literary aporia—the tangled knot of sexual violence and death—I also offer philosophical meditations on lineage, genealogy, sexual violence, gendered erasure, citizenship, and country, through the theme of infant mortality, or les enfants-morts (dead babies). In Haiti, a country in which the infant mortality rate is 45.4 infant deaths out of 1,000 live births, and in which the rape statistics are also staggeringly high,9 these stark realities remain as lingering and palpable reminders of death that too often marks the beginnings and ends of life itself. Materially and metaphorically, I am invested, thus, in understanding the resonant meanings of these present absences, or absent presences,10 in Danticat’s work; and, as I demonstrate in this chapter, these present absences, absent presences are related to sexual violation and gendered erasure in the Haitian Republic, its revolutionary and recent histories. In my earlier critical analyses, I interpreted these motifs (dead babies, aborted fetuses, stillbirths) as “arrested development” in the Haitian Republic, the erasure of women as citizens, and the apparitional returns of the historical figures of Défilée and Sor Rose as suppressed, silenced, or erased—and therefore in need of resuscitation—femme de istwa within Haiti’s larger historical narrative: “Though submerged, Défilée and Sor Rose form mythic narrative presences in Haiti’s historical fabric.” In “Defilée’s Diasporic Daughters,” as I wrote in 2004, the writer Danticat, by “foregrounding the historical figures of Défilée and Sor Rose, … revisions Ayiti’s history, nanchon, and dyaspora as connected through genealogical and ancestral lines (however history has sought to sever, forget, and erase those familial and feminine lieux de memoire)”; and also, “like Vodou, which historically has been suppressed by both the Haitian government and the Roman Catholic Church, Ayiti’s historical mothers have been suppressed.”11 To gloss these historical figures for those who may be unfamiliar with them:  Sor Rose was, according to Haitian folklore and legend, a Black slave woman who was violently raped by her French master and from this brutal violation conceived and later birthed the Haitian République. Sor Rose, then, is—literally and metaphorically—the violent body and violated The perpetrators are myriad and multinational or foreign, and not, of course, only Haitian men. See Thomas Macho, “Tod und Trauer im kulturwissenschaftlichen Vergleich,” in Der Tod als Thema der Kulturtheorie. Todesbilder und Totenriten im alten Ägypten, ed. Jan Assmann and Thomas Macho (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 99–100. See also the chapter by Anne Brüske in this volume. 11 Jana Evans Braziel, “Défilée’s Diasporic Daughters:  Revolutionary Narratives of Ayiti, Nanchon and Dyaspora, in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” Studies in the Literary Imagination 37, no. 2 (fall 2004): 103–22, 81. 9

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ground from which the country mythically emerged. Dédé Bazile, her actual name—but more popularly known as Défilée-la-Folle or Défilée-the-madwoman—was a meat vendor who followed the revolutionary troops during the Haitian Revolution and who, according to legend, went mad after her two sons were killed in battle. After the revolution ended in 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines was murdered at Pont-Rouge in 1806—then his body mutilated and his remains scattered across the land. Défilée took it upon herself to gather the remains and bury the body parts of Dessalines in order to prevent further desecration and defiling of his corpse. My earlier analyses also foreground Danticat’s role, as one of Défilée’s “diasporic daughters,” in herself gathering together the remains, shards, or fragments of Haitian women’s presences, and suturing those torn fabrics into a lyrical tapestry. In returning to these earlier motifs, I  wish now to foreground Sor Rose in Danticat’s diasporic imaginary, her reimagining of Haiti’s violated terre natale or lieux de mémoire, her genealogical birth through violent rape and sexual violation, as well as through death.12 As Judith Mishrahi-Barak saliently notes in “ ‘My mouth is the keeper of both speech and silence …’, or The Vocalisation of Silence in Caribbean short stories by Edwidge Danticat” (published in 2006), “Death, of adults, children, and often infants, is a … motif that haunts all the stories, sewing them all up together, bringing together the individual and its community”: “Death,” she writes, “is everywhere.”13 Or, as Erik Gleibermann writes in his lovely and lyrically wrought headnote to his interview with Danticat for World Literature Today (winter 2019), “Edwidge Danticat writes about death, even the most brutal, with a lyricism that reminds us of a primal paradox—within the deepest violence and loss, the life-force reasserts itself.”14 Gleibermann evocatively continues, “A mother clings to her starved newborn, a man plunges to his death reviewing moments of love, a boy trapped below earthquake rubble imagines flying a kite, a naked woman bathes quietly in the river where countless compatriots have been slaughtered.”15 Or, as Nadège T. Clitandre writes in her brilliant first monograph Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (2018), “Danticat highlights and emphasizes the plight of orphaned children, bastard children, and abandoned children through thematic repetition.”16 Adopting Édouard Glissant’s notions of filiation, For literary and cultural meditations on rape and the symbolic registers of rape in Haitian and French Antillean literatures, see the following: Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1997), published in the Race and American Culture Series; Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’s book Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Columbus:  Ohio State University Press, 2014), published in the Transoceanic Series; and the following articles by Hartman and Jean-Charles: Saidiya V. Hartman, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power,” Callaloo 19, no. 2 (spring 1996): 537–60; and Jean-Charles, “They Never Call It Rape: Critical Reception and Representation of Sexual Violence in Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Amour, Colère et Folie,” Journal of Haitian Studies 12, no. 2 (fall 2006): 4–21. 13 See Judith Misrahi-Barak, “ ‘My Mouth Is the Keeper of Both Speech and Silence …’, or the Vocalisation of Silence in Caribbean Short Stories by Edwidge Danticat,” Journal of the Short Story in English [Les Cahiers de la nouvelle]. Special issue: Orality 47 (December 1, 2006): 1–20. 14 Gleibermann, “The Story Will Be There When You Need It.” Italics in the original. 15 Ibid.; italics in the original. 16 Nadège T. Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 124. Clitandre’s first book, Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary, is a comprehensive analysis of the literary oeuvre of the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat. In the book, Clitandre explores the “tropical permutations of echo,” the Ovidian myth of Echo and Narcissus, and the philosophical reverberations of echo (notably, Édouard Glissant’s echo-monde) as a trope for the “doublings” of home and diaspora, local and global, literary and material registers in Danticat’s literary corpus. Situated at the theoretical interstices of globalization, postcolonialism, diasporas, and Black feminist thought, Clitandre’s intellectual study foregrounds the geopolitical dimensions of the 12

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Clitandre foregrounds the question of legitimacy in The Dew Breaker. My concern here is not exclusively with the “question of legitimacy” but also with the undeniable reality of violated women’s and girls’ bodies, aborted children, stillborn infants, mothers dying during childbirth, and dead babies as the terre natal, the lieu de violence, or literal and ontological ground of (im)possibility, of the nation of Haiti for its female citizens, historically and still today. I now turn to Danticat’s literary returns, the textual revenants that haunt her fictional oeuvre. These apparitional returns are striking and palpable present absences, or absent presences, in the author’s fiction and nonfiction. “So many of these stories about absent mothers, you realize,” as Danticat herself explains, “it’s because of maternal mortality, women dying in childbirth. If you have very high maternal mortality, these stories almost prepare one for that.”17 The literary analyses that follow are comparative and examine sexual violence, maternal death, and infant mortality through the violated ground of Ville Rose, but in the final section, I focus primarily on Claire of the Sea Light.18

Sexual Violence and Death in Danticat’s Imaginary (Haunted) Haitian Landscapes Rape, sexual violence, and the corporeal remains of these violent acts haunt Danticat’s literary oeuvre: revenants return as shadow figures—present absences, absent presences—as insistent or apparitional remainders in history’s violating forces, its sexual violée. In Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), for example, Danticat establishes sexual violence and state violence as interwoven traumas in the Haitian national and diasporic archive, or diasporic imaginary (to evoke Clitandre’s recently published monograph). For Danticat, then, rape has been instrumentalized as a “weapon of war,” and also as a primal site of literary violence: in Breath, Eyes, Memory, the rape of Martine by the Tonton Macoutes in the cane fields surrounding Croix-des-Rosets and Dame Marie (as well as Martine’s own sexual violation of her daughter Sophie through her regular and invasive “testing” of her virginity and Sophie’s subsequent self-mutilation with a pestle to make the testing end) are the first literary instantiations of sexual violence, a theme that recurs in all of her fictional works and remains inextricable from the recurrent motif of dead babies in her literary oeuvre. Ironically, perhaps, Sophie names her own daughter Brigitte, the namesake of Gran Brigit, the guardian lwa or spirit of the cemetery in Vodou. In contrast to my earlier interpretation of daffodils in Breath, Eyes, Memory as suffused with the positive, ever-promising potential of new diasporic spaces of transplantation—as flowers local and the national (Haiti) to render global insights: in the process, she also meditates on the tenuous and perilous nature of borders; the long-distance tentacles of nations in diasporas; and the literary as a lens into material and political, indeed arduous realities. As an extended case study that proffers global lessons, Danticat’s “reconstitution of nation through a diasporic imaginary,” as Clitandre herself writes, thus allows her readers to discern and reimagine the complicated and deterritorialized terrains of diasporas, the transnational engagements with home and homeland, the interstitial border zones across geopolitical boundaries, and the fractured and fragmented lenses wrought by the multifarious fissures of globalization, international migration, landlocked fixity, impoverished immobility, and the hard, lived realities of neoliberal economics. See Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat. 17 Gleibermann, “The Story Will Be There When You Need It.” 18 The germane, though approximate, historical setting and publication date of Danticat’s most recent novel: Claire of the Sea Light, which was originally set in 2009, a date textually removed from the novel in 2010, following the earthquake, and which was published in 2013.

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of adaptation and adoption—I now envisage daffodils as emblems of colonialist violence and physical, sexual trauma; as oversaturated symbols of mother/daughter asphyxiation; and as intimate if violating floral presences of rape, sexual violence, and post-traumatic stress-induced nightmares:  nightmares and violence in which Sophie is implicated. Sophie is implicated in Martine’s nightmares in myriad ways—as the direct result of the rape; as the biological offspring of the Tonton Macoutes who raped Martine in the cane fields, an historic site of colonialist and plantation economy violences, or the historical rape of slaves by masters; and as Martine’s only child. Sophie—as Martine tells her (and as the girl herself observes when seeing a photograph of herself as an infant in Tante Atie’s arms, not Martine’s arms)—looks like and instantiates the very visage (in her own voice) of her mother’s rapist, the perpetrator of sexual and political violence. In making Sophie her own sexual victim (through “testing” her virginity and by intrusively inserting her finger into her daughter’s vagina; quite literally, the legal definition of rape within most national legal codes and based on the United Nations High Commission for Refugees definition of rape), Martine reenacts both the rape and her first sexual violation by her own mother Granmè Ifé in Dame Marie (when her own mother “tested” her virginity):  Martine further implicates Sophie in her own rape by violating her daughter and passing on this violence through intimate, yet asphyxiating and traumatizing, violation. Although I  earlier contrasted Danticat’s daffodils as flowers of diasporic adoption with Jamaica Kincaid’s daffodils of British colonial (and Anglo-American) imposition, I  now understand Danticat’s daffodils, like Kincaid’s, as similarly imbued with violence and violation. Like Lucy, the diasporic protagonist in Kincaid’s novel Lucy, Sophie has nightmares punctuated by running and being chased, pursued by Martine who was “wrapped in yellow sheets and had daffodils in her hair” and whose arms were like “two long hooks”; in the nightmare, Martine “wrestled” Sophie “to the floor”; and by the end, the daughter dreams herself to be “lost in the yellow of my mother’s sheets.”19 Sophie first has this nightmare after she learns from Tante Atie that her mother has sent for her and has also sent an airplane ticket (signaling a definite and impending departure). Until she arrives in New  York, Sophie only knows her mother Martine through audiocassette tapes that she records and mails to Croix-des-Rosets and through a photograph of Martine that Atie keeps by the bed. Ironically, before sending Sophie to New York, Tante Atie tells her niece that her mother Martine loves daffodils, then buys her a saffron dress smocked with daffodils for her journey. Although she presses the daffodil into the Mother’s Day card that she makes and intends to give to Tante Atie, in the end, she reluctantly, passively hands it to Martine, but does so with fear and apprehension, even trepidation. Sophie is a diasporic daughter and a dutiful daughter, but she is filled with dread and apprehension as she departs from Croix-des-Rosets and arrives in New York: like Lucy, Sophie experiences this “arrival” as cold, strange, alienating, and foreign. Sophie is the product or offspring of her mother Martine’s rape by the Tonton Macoutes—a fact that Martine shockingly discloses to her daughter right after telling her about Granmè Ifé’s testing of her and Atie as girls in Dame Marie, the disclosure itself a form of traumatic sexual and self-violation, further implicating Sophie in her mother Martine’s rape, and also textually portending or foretelling the sexual violence to come in Martine’s testing of Sophie. Up until this moment of violent sexual

Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York: Soho Press, 1994), 28.

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disclosure, Tante Atie has told her that she was born from rose petals blooming: as in the town of Croix-des-Roses, Tante Atie’s love and embrace of Sophie is violently undone by Martine’s overly honest, even cruel, disclosure and the crueler violation of her daughter—all of which transpires in diaspora, in Brooklyn, far away from Atie and Croix-des-Rosets, far from her presumed and mythic “birth” from rose petals. Danticat’s novel Breath, Eyes, Memory directly alludes to and textually engages with Kincaid’s Lucy. Sophie remains, for her mother Martine, “a living memory from the past,” and she tells her daughter that her rapist “put you in me.” Sophie is no longer the girl born from rose petals. These motifs—dead or dying mothers, stillborn, aborted, or dead babies—recur in Krik? Krak! (1995); “Children of the Sea,” the opening story in Krik? Krak!, also recounts state violence, political oppression, and sexually violent retaliation in a narrative that unfolds through a series of unmailed, unread letters written by a young woman trapped at home and her lover who has fled persecution by boat: she, like he, is a “child of sea,” like all those on the boat and those remaining behind. The sea in Vodou is conceived as Ginen, the ancestral homeland and the place of the dead. As the story unfolds the young man recounts to his lover, to himself, the tragedy of Célianne, who was raped by chimès, or armed political gangs opposing Aristide, and whose mother and brother are both also sexually violated: 15 years old, alone, pregnant, Célianne births her baby, which the other refugees name “Swiss” after the Swiss knife used to cut the umbilical cord and which is stillborn and purple in the blazing sun; as water rises in the boat, and the sunstroke-suffering Haitians fear death by drowning, they urge Célianne to throw the dead baby overboard, but she refuses; ultimately, eventually, she allows the baby to pass from her arms into the water, beneath the water, returning to Ginen, the watery, ancestral homeland of the lwas, returning also to Agwe, the spirit of the sea, before throwing herself also into the briny waters below. The young female lover (to whom the fleeing Haitian dissident writes and addresses his letters) also fears sexual violation by the anti-Aristide chimés in control of the country after Aristide is forced into exile. In her own letters to her fleeing lover, adrift at sea, she tells him how families sleep apart—children with uncles and aunts, mothers and fathers with nieces and nephews—to protect daughters from being violated by their own fathers since the gang members who routinely break into houses at night also force fathers to defile their own daughters. As she writes to her lover, They have this thing now that they do. if they come into a house and there is a son and mother there, they hold a gun to their heads. they make the son sleep with his mother. if it is a daughter and a father, they do the same thing. Some night papa sleeps at his brother’s, uncle pressoir’s house. uncle pressoir sleeps at our house, just in case they come. that way papa will never be forced to lay down in bed with me, uncle pressoir would be forced to, but that would not be so bad.20 As the young woman continues in her letter to her lover, “We know a girl who had a child by her father that way.”21 Throughout “Children of the Sea,” and throughout Krik? Krak!, in fact, the entangled knot of sexual violence and death, particularly of babies, recurs.

Edwidge Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” in Krik? Krak! (New York: Soho Press, [1991] 1995), 12. Ibid.

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In the story “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” also in Krik? Krak!, Marie, a house maid, finds an abandoned, already-decaying baby in the garden, takes her home, dresses her, nurses hers, bathes her, names her Rose, before the putrefaction of death is too overpowering, and Marie returns her to the place where she first found her—between the pool and the gardenias— to bury her, but not before being confronted by the Dominican gardener who also works for the same family, a man Marie has made love to, yet who also dispassionately accuses her of having killed the child. The story opens with Marie finding Rose: “She was very pretty. Bright shiny hair and dark brown skin like mahogany cocoa. Her lips were wide and purple, like those African dolls you see in tourist store windows, but could never afford to buy.”22 Inanimate, “dark brown” yet “purple,” doll-like, Rose is beautiful but lifeless; and Marie recalls how she found the beautiful baby “inches away from a sewer as open as a hungry child’s yawn.”23 Compared to a “hungry child’s yawn,” one living, the sewer is still a chasm threatening to devour and destroy Rose, where the infant was abandoned and exposed. Later, Marie remembers that she “had an uncle who bought pigs’ intestines in Ville Rose,” the town where the story is set and after which baby Rose is named. Eventually, “Rose began to smell like the intestines after they hadn’t sold for a few days”; “her skin” grew “moist, cracked, and sunken in some places”; in the end, Rose started “attracting flies,” and she “smelled so bad that” Marie “couldn’t even bring [herself] to kiss” the infant “without choking on [her] breath.”24 Marie returns to the primal site, the lieu de violence, to bury Rose, but she is stopped by the Dominican gardener who accuses the maid of devouring “little children who haven’t even had time to earn their souls.”25 These themes also recur in The Farming of Bones (1998), Danticat’s second novel, the title of which refers to sugarcane production and to the violent Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic. The novel recounts the story of Amabelle, who lost both of her parents as a young child when they drowned in the Massacre River dividing the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Amabelle’s lover, Sebastien, dies in the Haitian Massacre of 1937, and she never conceives any children, claiming there is nothing to pass on but misery. Again, in The Farming of Bones, as in other literary texts, the same motifs recur:  Amabelle, the Haitian servant girl, assists in the birthing of Señora Valencia’s twins, a dark-skinned, frail baby girl born with a caul upon her face and who they name Rosalinda, and a cream-colored, stronger (or so seeming) baby boy they name Rafael, or Rafi, after General Trujillo himself. Concerned for the daughter, yet unworried about her son Rafi, Valencia tells Amabelle that she fears Rosalinda is weak and also that she favors Amabelle in her darker complexion; yet it is the son—fairer, believed to be stronger—who dies moments after birth. After escaping death during the violent massacre of Haitian cane laborers living in the Dominican Republic, fleeing across the Massacre River and the Haitian-Dominican border, and returning only very late in life, Amabelle, herself childless, explains, “The slaughter is the only thing that is mine enough to pass on.”26 “Water Child,” one of the ten interconnected short stories in the book The Dew Breaker (2004), similarly recounts the profound solitude of Nadine Osnac, a nurse working in the ears, eyes, nose, and throat (EENT) ward in a Brooklyn hospital, who lives alone in a one-bedroom

Danticat, “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” 91. Ibid. 24 Ibid., 97, 98, 98. 25 Ibid., 99. 26 Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones (New York: Soho Press, 1998), 266. 22 23

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condominium in Canarsie, who has recently aborted her child, and who has also recently ended her relationship with Eric, also a Haitian dyaspo, and the “near father of her nearly born child.”27 Odd and enigmatic, Nadine refuses friendship and affection, isolating herself at work and eating alone in the dining hall, always a tuna melt and a brownie on “each first Friday,”28 spending her evenings reading letters from her parents in Haiti—hoping to read between the lines, hoping to discern there the palpable signs of trauma, grief, loss, and mourning—and listening to Eric’s recorded voice mail messages, which he leaves when she refuses to answer his telephone calls after the abortion. Like her aborted baby, Nadine, a dyaspo, is a “water child,” one who has crossed lòt bò dlo, to the other side of the water, a Kreyòl phrase that may simultaneously denote death or diaspora. Like the Mizuko kuyō, the Japanese memorial ceremony for the unborn child, or the water child, Nadine grieves as much for herself as for her unborn baby, for whom she has created a shrine on her mantle with a glass of water, a pebble, a drawing of the baby, and seven cassette tapes with recorded messages from Eric, marking the months since the abortion. These recurrent motifs and interwoven thematic threads—sexual violation, maternal death, unborn children, and dead babies—come even more fully to the fore, more discernibly in focus, in Danticat’s most recent novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013). As Lisa Page explains in her review of the novel, “Birth and death are close sisters in Claire of the Sea Light. They come together like twins.”29 The opening line of the novel tells how on “the morning Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin turned seven, a freak wave, measuring between ten and twelve feet high, was seen in the ocean outside of Ville Rose.”30 A fisherman out-to-sea, Caleb is capsized in Fifine, his cutter, and dies at sea. This is not Claire’s, or Ti Claire’s (named after her mother Claire Narcis), first death: her own mother died the day that she was born; and Rose, the daughter of Ville Rose’s local seamstress Madame Gaëlle Cadet Lavaud, the daughter Rose who was named after the town’s namesake and patron saint Sò Rose, or Sainte Rose de Lima, also dies on Claire’s third birthday: the day of her birth is indelibly marked with death and dying. Because Claire Narcis, the mother, died giving birth to Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin, the local town folk believe the girl to be a revenan, a liminal child, who could have and could still follow her mother into death, “into the other world.”31 Claire, then, like Lamort in “The Missing Peace,” a story in Krik? Krak!, is a spirit child, an apparitional presence who seems to move between the realms of the living and the dead. When Claire Narcis dies during childbirth, Nozias Faustin, her “husband” (or “man”), confesses horrible “visions for which he detested himself, fantasies about letting her,” his baby Claire, “starve to death, … dropping her into the sea,” leaving her to die or abandoning her and leaving her “completely parentless.”32 Ultimately, Nozias, the forlorn father, hopes to give his daughter Claire to Madame Gaëlle, who is still grieving for her own dead child Rose. In the novel, rape, as a literary theme, also recurs: Max Ardin, Jr, the only son of Msye Maxime Ardin, headmaster of Ville Rose’s École Ardin, violently rapes Flore Voltaire, the live-in servant, in a willed effort to prove his Edwidge Danticat, “Water Child,” in The Dew Breaker (New York: Alfred Knopf 2004), 56. Ibid., 54. 29 Lisa Page, “Edwidge Danticat Illuminates Haiti,” VQR Online 89, no. 4 (fall 2013): 250; available online:https://www. vqronline.org/edwidge-danticat-illuminates-haiti. 30 Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2013), 3. 31 Ibid., 16. 32 Ibid., 17. 27 28

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masculinity to his father: the child born of this violation and violence both bears and yet also refuses his father’s name; he is Pamaxime, not Maxime, yet the son of papa Maxime. Danticat’s intertexual motifs not only register themes that recur in her own writing, but they also manifest literary allusions to other Caribbean writers, strikingly to Jamaica Kincaid. Kincaid’s “Biography of a Dress” recounts the author’s second birthday through a photograph taken to mark the occasion and the yellow poplin cotton dress that her mother sewed and smocked for the event; similarly, Claire’s father Nozias has a pink poplin dress sewn by Gaëlle each year for her birthday—every year the same fabric, same design, but new and a larger size. Like Annie John in Kincaid’s novel of the same title, whose mother helps prepare the dead for burial, Claire Limyè Lanmè’s mother Claire Narcis works for Albert Vincent, the undertaker, and washes, dresses, and prepares the body of the dead for burial. Like Xuela’s father Alfred Richardson (in The Autobiography of My Mother) who gives his only daughter, born the day her own mother Xuela Claudette Richardson dies, to Ma Eunice to raise, Nozias plans to give Claire Limyè Lanmè to Madame Gaëlle to raise as her own daughter. In Danticat’s fictional universe, we thus have myriad literary returns to rape, death, and dead babies; and these literary returns, like apparitional remains, are indeed historical revenants, as I  argue, intimately, if violently tied to the terre natale. So what do these literary returns signify and symbolize for Danticat and for her fictional oeuvre—specifically, the short stories in Krik? Krak! (1995) and The Dew Breaker (2004), the novels Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), The Farming of Bones (1998), and Claire of the Sea Light (2013)? Violated bodies or corporeal remains return to the lieu de violence, haunt its ground. Within Danticat’s literary oeuvre, and perhaps also in Haiti’s intertwined histories of slavery and colonial domination, rape arguably constitutes a primal act, a mise-en-scène, a foundational violence.

Ville Rose: Ville imaginé: Violated Terre-Natale In navigating the literary instantiations of sexual violence in Danticat’s oeuvre, as well as the recurrent motifs of sexual violence and death, a deeply entangled literary knot, I turn to two literary, historical, and cultural reflections on rape—one during colonial, slavery era (i.e., before the abolition of slavery) and one from the postcolonial period of the late 1940s through the early-to-mid 1960s, roughly the time of the Duvalier dictatorship (1957–86), or at least Duvalier père (1957–71) in Haiti. The colonial or slavery-era meditations on rape—as part of the vile, violent apparatus of control and punishment in America’s “peculiar institution”— is offered by Saidiya Hartman in her groundbreaking first book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (1997). The postcolonial reflections on (and critiques of) rape as a metaphor of historical violence under colonialism and actual violent acts against women and children are offered by Régine Michelle Jean-Charles in her equally groundbreaking first book Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (2014).33 Both critics offer salient insights into how and why rape was operative as historical, material violence against women:  Hartman during colonialism and slavery, Jean-Charles during the late colonial, postcolonial, and contemporary eras in which Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Conflict Bodies:  The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014). 33

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rape was used as “weapon[s]‌of war” and as tools of political repression, violent mechanisms of control and domination. Resisting exclusively or purely metaphorical elaborations of rape as the foundational ground of possibility, or a priori ground, of nation and nationality, citizenship and revolutionary, liberatory struggle—configured as rape of country and citizen—Danticat’s literary returns to rape and sexual violence foreground le viol dans la violence—rendering visible, audible, and palpable the “conflict bodies” (to evoke Jean-Charles’s title) upon which myths of nation and national liberation have too often been wrested and then erased—or what Jean-Charles refers to as the metaphoric trafficking in sexual violence and women’s violated, “conflict bodies.” Jean-Charles importantly urges scholars and critics to rethink (or unthink) the uninterrogated uses of rape as a “symbol or metonymic device,” deployed in order to describe national traumas under colonialism—or rape as a “reflective trope of political turmoil.” Thus heeding Jean-Charles’s caveats against using rape as a metaphor of historical violence—colonialism, occupation, imperialism—I examine the ways that rape as sexual violence is foundational (literally) to the subjugation and violation of Black women as the ground of other forms of historical violence. Ville Rose is, then, not only “ville imaginé” but also the violated terrain (of Black women’s bodies) as the subjugated sites of plantation economies, slavery, colonialism, and historical domination. Danticat’s literary returns to rape and sexual violence, as well as dead babies, stillbirths, and aborted fetuses, point clearly to the ways in which women’s (and children’s) bodies are materially violated daily, weekly, perhaps perennially, and the quite literal ways in which these violations and erasures constitute both the ground of possibility (or ground of impossibility) for Haitian citizenship, for men, women, and children; and in Haiti, where the realities of infant mortality, maternal mortality, sexual violence, rape, or sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) perpetrated against women and children are far too frequent, that is precisely the point. Danticat’s imagined geographies of Ville Rose, named after the mythic Sor Rose— raped, violated, slave mother of the first free independent Black republic in the Americas— also remain palpably suffused with the country’s violent origins and haunted by its historical revenants, the forces that have erased Haiti’s women and children. Jean-Charles rightly cautions against the erasures of rape within larger spheres of historical, social, and political violence, explicitly warning that “the sustained representation of rape purposefully draws our attention to gendered violence that has often been obscured in favor of broader forms of violence (in the forms of slavery, dictatorship, coups, occupation, etc.).” With this caveat in mind, I seek to unearth and understand the ways that rape is always already for plantation economies of the Caribbean, specifically, and the Americas, more broadly, the racialized, gendered, and sexualized foundations of law and history. As Helen Higgins and Brenda Silver explain in Rape and Representation, quoted by Jean-Charles, this effort “requires restoring rape … to the body” or, as Jean-Charles writes, “a restoration of the material violence within the imaginary realm, in order to avoid eclipsing the violent experience of rape.”34 Corporeal and archaeological recovery of a violated body, or violated bodies, is this chapter’s ultimate critical aim. I thus turn in this final section to Danticat’s notion of imagined geographies and to the literary site of historical violence: Ville Rose. See Régine Jean-Charles, “They Never Call It Rape:  Critical Reception and Representation of Sexual Violence in MarieVieux-Chauvet’s ‘Amour, Colère et Folie’,” Journal of Haitian Studies, 12, no. 2 (fall 2006): 4–21. 34

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Ville Rose is a primal place, a mythic space, an imaginary geography, a terre natale and a terre de violence in Danticat’s oeuvre. To conclude the chapter, I return to this primal site— Haiti, historically and geographically, but also, for Danticat, her Ville Rose. In creating the imagined, mythic, and geographical place of Ville Rose, Danticat—like William Faulkner before her in his fictional creations of Yoknapatawpha County, or Gabriel García Márquez in his magic realist town of Macondo—has created her own primal place. Danticat’s fiction has been described as both magical realism and as traumatic realism;35 and as Isabelle Choquet notes (in relation to Lyonel Trouillot’s fiction), Danticat, like Trouillot, imagines and writes into existence “villes visibles, invisibles et imaginées.”36 One primal site or ville imaginé, of course, is Ville Rose. First introduced as the setting for many of the stories in Krik? Krak!, and with a namesake that echoes the ville imaginé of Croix-des-Rosets, also a seaside slum near Port-au-Prince, that figures into Breath, Eyes, Memory, Ville Rose most fully comes into vivid imagination, writerly existence, and textual living-and-dying in the Claire of the Sea Light, where the entire novel is set: “Twenty miles south of the capitol and crammed between a stretch of the most unpredictable water of the Caribbean Sea and an eroded Haitian mountain range,” Ville Rose has, as Danticat writes, “a flower-shaped perimeter that, from the mountains, looked like the unfurling petals of a massive tropical rose, so the major road connecting the town to the sea became the stem and was called Avenue Pied Rose or Stem Rose Avenue, with its many alleys and capillaries being called épines, or thorns.”37 In an interview published in the Brooklyn Review, Danticat openly reflects on Ville Rose, stating “now that the town exists in my imagination, it will always be an ancestral home for my characters”; and in the new collection, Everything Inside (2019), “though no stories are set in Ville Rose—there are characters who are from the town and remember it and talk about it.”38 Reflecting further on Ville Rose, Danticat describes the imaginary town itself as a character in the novel Claire of the Sea Light: “Ville Rose, is really the main character of that book and the different characters each make up a chapter of the book. … if the title was Ville Rose, it would have felt even more like a novel.”39 As Danticat recounts to an interviewer, “I wanted to tell Claire’s story, but also the story of this small town and its dynamics, and a few of its remarkable inhabitants and visitors.”40 In other interviews, Danticat refers to Ville Rose as “this little village, this little microcosm,” modeled in part on Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio”;41 the author also calls Ville Rose “the portrait of a town in peril, which can be read as a microcosm for life in Haiti”;42 and finally, she elaborates that “as the stories progress, the individuals begin to recede slightly, allowing the

Cherie Meacham, “Traumatic Realism in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat,” Journal of Haitian Studies 11, no.  1 (spring 2005): 122–39, Ethnic NewsWatch database. 36 Choquet, “Villes visibles, invisibles et imaginées dans l’oeuvre de Lyonel Trouillot,” 106–27. 37 Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light, 5. 38 Jivin Misra, “An Interview with Edwidge Danticat,” Brooklyn Review (fall 2018); available online:  http://www. bkreview.org/fall-2018/an-interview-with-edwidge-danticat/. 39 Ibid. 40 Author interview published and cited on “Book Browse”; available online:  https://www.bookbrowse.com/author_ interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/1022/edwidge-danticat. 41 Kevin Nance, “Edwidge Danticat on Haiti, Claire of the Sea Light,” Chicago Tribune (September 6, 2013); available online at: https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-0908-edwidge-danticat-claire-sea-light-20130906story.html. 42 Christine Germain, “Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat (review),” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 3 no. 2 (2014): 214–15, Project Muse database. 35

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town itself, Ville Rose, to come to the fore.”43 Danticat’s diasporic imagining of Ville Rose was also influenced by her own mother and her mother’s hometown of Léogâne: “My mother’s name is Rose”; and Ville Rose “is very loosely based on the town where my mother grew up, Léogâne, which is about twenty miles from the capital.”44 As Danticat continues, “My mother’s people … were really grounded in that place,” and as she recalls, “When I was little I used to visit my mother’s mother there.”45 Ville Rose is, as Danticat explains, “a mixture of that place and many other seaside towns I have visited or spent time in over the course of my life.”46 Namesake of Danticat’s own mother Rose, but also the mythic name-bearer of the town’s patron Sainte Rose de Lima, more intimately known as Sor Rose, Ville Rose is suffused with myth and meaning, semiotic and literary symbolism. Ville Rose is also, like an imaginary friend, an imaginary place that captivates the author, a home created in words and fictional genres: for Danticat, then, and for her readers:  one that perhaps “feels even more real than the town where you actually live.”47 Even so, Ville Rose is also “a town on the verge of disaster”;48 and I would add that death—like Ville Rose, like the natural environment49—is also a character, an apparitional one, in Claire of the Sea Light: “Death and loss haunt the other characters in this novel, too, shadowing them like dogged ghosts. It’s no surprise that Ville Rose’s mayor is also the town undertaker, or that Claire’s mother came from a family of professional mourners and worked in the mayor’s funeral parlor, washing and dressing the dead.”50 It is Ville Rose’s deathly presences, its postmortem revenants, its violent beginnings with which I  am most concerned here. Like Faulkner’s rending of the US South, his powerful exposures of the foundational violence, racism, and slavery, at the very heart of Yoknapatawpha County, rooted deeply in its plantation soils, Danticat’s Ville Rose reveals a world founded and grounded in sexual violation, rape, and erotic domination. Ville Rose—named after Sò Rose, Sister Rose, or Sainte Rose de Lima—bears her forebears’ scars, which she passes on Dwyer Murphy, “The Art of Not Belonging,” Guernica (September 3, 2013); available online at:  https://www. guernicamag.com/the-art-of-not-belonging/. 44 Author interview published and cited in “Book Browse”; available online:  https://www.bookbrowse.com/author_ interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/1022/edwidge-danticat. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Murphy, “Art of Not Belonging.” 48 Ibid. 49 Like Ville Rose, nature, or the natural environment, is also a character in Claire of the Sea Light: 43

Nature is indeed a character in this book, especially the sea. The sea gives. The sea takes, then takes again. When you live on an island, it’s very easy to be vulnerable to nature’s wrath. And if you add to that fact that your island is now considered seismic, you increase your vulnerability. I wanted to also show environmental vulnerability in Ville Rose, the way certain things—including whole species of animals—are disappearing or dying off. Sometimes political and other manmade realities force people to make difficult choices vis-à-vis the environment. One also can’t ignore the effect that global economic policies, which destroy the natural environment and financial independence of poor people in the developing world, have in making it nearly impossible for some to have decent lives, to maintain their sovereignty and dignity, and in some cases, to even keep their children with them. So yes, the natural world plays a really large role in the book. It is essentially one of the book’s main characters. (Author Interview published on “Book Browse”) Michiko Kakutani, “Where Sorrow Is as Constant as the Tides,” New York Times (September 5, 2013); available online at:   https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/books/edwidge-danticats-novel-claire-of-the-sea-light.html?login=email &auth=login-email. 50

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to her descendants and those who dwell within her: Sor Rose, raped by her French master, remains scattered throughout the land, the flora, the fauna, the village folk, the seas, and the myriad violences of the village, natural and unnatural, including rape, murder, death-at-sea, motorcycle accidents, and dying while birthing. Ville Rose, then, is an imagined, literary, and historical geography marred by sexual violence. Like Faulkner’s Yoknaptawpha County,51 Danticat’s fictional world of Ville Rose reveals racial violence and racial domination at the heart of the county/village and the country; and as a literary, imaginary place, it also exposes the violences of slavery as the grounding (or founding) violence that produces wealth, power, and disempowerment—that is, through racialized and human (property-based) difference; and like Yoknapatawpha County, Ville Rose also demonstrates how whiteness is a “myth,” but one nevertheless suffused with material reality, legal institutionalization, constitutional gravity, and historical “weight”; and finally, Ville Rose, like Yoknapatawpha, exposes sexual violation as the foundation of racial difference and the a priori ground of slavery and plantation economies in the Americas. Ville Rose, then, becomes for Edwidge Danticat, the diasporic daughter and the diasporic writer, an internal and intimate, if also violent geography, an imaginary landscape, a ville imaginé. It is real and imagined, literal and mythic. And Ville Rose, suffused with violence and its savage remains, literary returns, or haunting revenants, also becomes a ground of possibility for altering the terrains of that violence. To fully capture the semiotic registers and polysemic significance of Danticat’s Ville Rose, her imaginary village or ville imaginé, we need to situate this mythic space, perhaps even her primal place, within the writer’s conceptions of an internal geography, or within the idea that all “all geography is within.”52 I thus return to her nonfiction essay published in World Literature Today (2019), “All Geography Is within Me.” Recalling her mother’s absence once Rose Danticat migrated to New  York, and young Edwidge remained in Haiti with her Uncle Joseph, the writer narrates how they imagined one another—mother daughter, and daughter mother—across geographic distance and diasporic remove through stories and storytelling.53 Danticat also remembers that because her mother did not write letters, but because she, the daughter, wished to hold onto and not forget her mother’s stories, she would “write them down in a small notebook … made from folded sheets of paper bound together by thread.”54 And from this small notebook, a writer was born—imaginary landscapes created to close the diasporic distance. As Danticat, writer and daughter, amazes, “Sometimes we cannot On Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, see all of the following:  George C. Stewart, Yoknapatawpha, Images and Voices:  A Photographic Study of Faulkner’s County (Columbia:  University of South Carolina Press, 2009); Don H. Doyle, Faulkner’s County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha (Chapel: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Martin J. Dain, Faulkner’s County:  Yoknapatawpha (New  York:  Random House, 1964); Christian Häring, William Faulkner, der Chronist von Yoknapatawpha County (German edition) (Norderstedt:  GRIN Verlag, 2010); Malcolm Cowley, The Portable Faulkner:  The Saga of Yoknapatawpha County, 1820–1950 (New  York:  Viking Press, 1967); Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), and also Brooks’s William Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978); Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie, Fifty Years of Yoknapatawpha (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1980); Elizabeth Kerr, William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha: “A Kind of Keystone in the Universe” (New York: Fordham University Press, 1983); Owen Robinson, Creating Yoknapatawpha: Readers and Writers in Faulkner’s Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1996); and William Faulkner, Faulkner’s County: Tales of Yoknapatawpha, Chosen by the Author (London: Chatto & Windus, 1955). 52 Danticat, “All Geography Is within Me.” 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 51

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fully move the world, but it can move us with its vastness, its expanse, its limitlessness, its geography or geographies, its beginnings and endings, its injustices, and lòt bò dlo-ness,” and, as she recalls and recreates in words, “the geographies within me, starting with my beginnings.” Danticat, in the same autobiographical essay, also describes her love for letters, words, phrases, writers, and literature; and Ville Rose—her ville imaginé, her internal geography, her primal place—is above all a literary space, one created in and through language. It is the site of myriad emotional terrains and communal experiences—love, hatred, jealousy, fear, desire, compassion, and brutality:  it is the ground that witnesses life, death, birth, drownings, departures, and returns; it houses the full human experience of haïtiennité, or Haitianness. It is the composite of life on the island, in the country, on its seaside. Ville Rose is also, strikingly, a place where babies are born and mothers die; and sadly, it is too often the place where women and children are violated; but it is also where they resiliently survive, resist, and dwell. Language, thus, offers the tools and the instruments to reimagine and revision these violations and losses, these comings and goings, these states of being cast lòt bò dlo. Language also confers other mothers, bears related and legitimate if literary daughters, births a poetics of relation:55 Danticat, in the same essay, reflects on Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiographical reflections (in Dust Tracks on a Road) about the death of her own mother Lucy, and the younger writer Danticat notes how Hurston, following her mother’s death, was “suddenly forced” (almost like birthing in reverse) into “the beginning of things,” and realizing that “all that geography was within me,” that “it only needed time to reveal it.”56 For Danticat, these words bore their own writerly mother-to-daughter, from Zora-to-Edwidge literary birth: as the younger writer recalls the adopted lines, “All that geography was within me. It only needed time to reveal it.”57 She exclaims, “I love this line so much that sometimes I misquote it as ‘All geography is within me. It only needs to reveal itself.’ ”58 To conclude the essay, Danticat recalls her mother’s cautionary stories about sel, salt, its importance in Vodou, to ritual, to the sea, to protecting oneself from being made into a zonbi, zombie. As part of the sea, the coast, the culture, salt, like stories, heal: “This salt is for me the source of all forceful beginnings and the source of all freedom. We are here,” Danticat confides, “because in some way we were given the salt”; and salt, stories, the blank page to be filled with images, words, characters, like imagined landscapes, or all “geography … within” is a writing for life and in the face of death, setting us adrift at sea, “on the other side of the waters, even lòt bò dlo.”59

Bibliography Braziel, Jana Evans. “Défilée’s Diasporic Daughters: Revolutionary Narratives of Ayiti, Nanchon and Dyaspora.” Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” Studies in the Literary Imagination 37, no. 2 (fall 2004): 103–22. Braziel, Jana Evans. Duvalier’s Ghosts: Race, Diaspora, and U.S. Imperialism in Haitian Literatures. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2010.

Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Danticat, “All Geography Is within Me.” 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 55 56

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha and Beyond. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978. Choquet, Isabelle. “Villes visibles, invisibles et imaginées dans l’oeuvre de Lyonel Trouillot.” Journal of Haitian Studies 22, no. 2 (2016): 106–27. Clitandre, Nadège T. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Cowley, Malcolm. The Portable Faulkner: The Saga of Yoknapatawpha County, 1820–1950. New York: Viking Press, 1967. Dain, Martin J. Faulkner’s County: Yoknapatawpha. New York: Random House, 1964. Danticat, Edwidge, Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Soho Press, 1994. Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1996. Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. New York: Soho Press, 1998. Danticat, Edwidge. The Dew Breaker. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2004. Danticat, Edwidge. Brother, I’m Dying. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. Danticat, Edwidge. Claire of the Sea Light. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2013. Danticat, Edwidge. “ ‘All Geography Is within Me’: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt.” World Literature Today 93, no. 1 (winter 2019): 59–65. Doyle, Don H. Faulkner’s County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha. Chapel: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Faulkner, William. Faulkner’s County: Tales of Yoknapatawpha, Chosen by the Author. London: Chatto & Windus, 1955. Fowler, Doreen, and Ann J. Abadie. Fifty Years of Yoknapatawpha. Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1980. Germain, Christine. “Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat (Review).” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 3, no. 2 (2014): 214–15, Project Muse database. Gleibermann, Erick. “The Story Will Be There When You Need It: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.” World Literature Today 93, no. 1 (winter 2019): 68–74. Glissant, Édouard. Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Glissant, Édouard. The Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Häring, Christian. William Faulkner, der Chronist von Yoknapatawpha County (German edition). Norderstedt: GRIN Verlag, 2010. Hartman, Saidiya V. “Seduction and the Ruses of Power.” Callaloo 19, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 537–60. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Jean-Charles. “They Never Call It Rape: Critical Reception and Representation of Sexual Violence in Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Amour, Colère et Folie.” Journal of Haitian Studies 12, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 4–21. Jean-Charles. Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014. Kakutani, Michiko. “Where Sorrow Is as Constant as the Tides.” New York Times (September 5, 2013), available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/books/edwidge-danticats-novel-claire-ofthe-sea-light.html?login=email&auth=login-email. Kerr, Elizabeth. William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha: “A Kind of Keystone in the Universe.” New York:  Fordham University Press, 1983. Macho, Thomas. “Tod und Trauer im kulturwissenschaftlichen Vergleich.” In Der Tod als Thema der Kulturtheorie. Todesbilder und Totenriten im alten Ägypten, edited by Jan Assmann and Thomas Macho, 99–100. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Meacham, Cherie. “Traumatic Realism in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat.” Journal of Haitian Studies 11, no. 1 (spring 2005): 122–39, Ethnic NewsWatch database. Misra, Jivin. “An Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” Brooklyn Review (fall 2018), available online: http:// www.bkreview.org/fall-2018/an-interview-with-edwidge-danticat/. 96

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Alleys, Capillaries, Thorns Misrahi-Barak, Judith. “‘My Mouth Is the Keeper of Both Speech and Silence …’, or the Vocalisation of Silence in Caribbean Short Stories by Edwidge Danticat.” Journal of the Short Story in English [Les Cahiers de la nouvelle]. Special issue: Orality 47 (December 1, 2006): 1–20. Murphy, Dwyer. “The Art of Not Belonging.” Guernica (September 3, 2013), available online: https:// www.guernicamag.com/the-art-of-not-belonging/. Nance, Kevin. “Edwidge Danticat on Haiti, Claire of the Sea Light.” Chicago Tribune (September 6, 2013), available online: https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-0908-edwidgedanticat-claire-sea-light-20130906-story.html. Obejas, Achy. “Bearing the Unforgivable: A Tribute to Edwidge Danticat.” World Literature Today 93, no. 1 (winter 2019): 66–7. Page, Lisa. “Edwidge Danticat Illuminates Haiti.” VQR Online 89, no. 4 (fall 2013): 250; available online: https://www.vqronline.org/edwidge-danticat-illuminates-haiti. Robinson, Owen. Creating Yoknapatawpha: Readers and Writers in Faulkner’s Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1996. Stewart, George C. Yoknapatawpha, Images and Voices: A Photographic Study of Faulkner’s County. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009.

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PART III ON DEATH AND DYING: NECROPOLITICS IN DANTICAT’S TEXTS

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CHAPTER 6 LOSING YOUR (M)OTHER: DANTICAT’S NARRATIVES OF UN/BELONGING AND UN/DYING

Simone A. James Alexander

Loss via abandonment, migration, and death haunts Danticat’s texts and her characters as the characters “live dyingly,” becoming both the afterlife and the chroniclers of the afterlife of those who have passed on. Chronicling the various hauntings occasioned by the loss/death of a child or a parent, an “other,” in selected texts by Danticat, namely The Art of Death:  Writing the Final Story, Breath, Eyes, Memory, The Farming of Bones, and Untwine, this essay examines the effects of literal and social death on various characters, how they navigate and reimagine new social and literary spaces beyond the hauntings, and how they arrive at a space of spiritual and subjective transcendence, of “necro-transcendence.” Necro-transcendence or immortality, according to Ingrid Fernandez, is “a vital life force that continued after the individual died … at the level of organic matter after medical death has taken place.”1 Literally speaking, necro-transcendence is the ability to transform, to transcend death, to engender life after death. In short, necro-transcendence is what comes after life/living, the afterlife. Politicizing (the condition of) life (the undead) and its attendant death, in relation to the nation-state that exercises its power in determining who lives or dies, and along these lines, who is worthy of citizenship, Achille Mbembé takes up the position that powerful nations engage in “necropolitics.”2 Mbembé argues, “Contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death (necropolitics) profoundly reconfigure the relations among resistance, sacrifice, and terror.” Thus the reconfiguration of social and political relations engendered by the practice of necropolitics results in “vast populations … subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”3 Bolstering Mbembé’s argument regarding sovereignty, Judith Butler singles out dependency and vulnerability as causation of life and death: Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know, a dependency on people we know, or barely know, or know not at all. Reciprocally, it implies being impinged upon by the exposure and dependency of others.4 Ingrid Fernandez, “Necro-Transcendence/Necro-Naturalism:  Philosophy of Life in the Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson,” in Death Representations in Literature:  Forms and Theories, ed. Adriana Teodororescu (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 118. 2 Mbembé introduces the coinage “necropolitics,” within the framework of war and global conflicts, events that curtail the full potential of life/living. 3 Achille Mbembé, “Necropolitics” (trans. L. Meintjes), Public Culture 15, no.  1 (winter 2003):  39–40, italics in original text. 4 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 14. 1

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The production of certain bodies as vulnerable—that can be harmed—exacerbates the condition of the “living dead,” whose nondesirability results in them “not [being] ‘regarded’ as potentially grievable, and hence valuable, [and] are made to bear the burden of starvation, underemployment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and death.”5 Consequently, they are relegated further to the zone of the ungrievable, the expendable—in short, to the zone of nonbeing. Claudia Rankine calls attention to this barebone, “living dead” existence in one of many poignant moments: “Dead blacks are a part of normal life.”6 Emphasizing further the mundaneness, the routinization of Black death: “For African Americans, living in a state of mourning and fear remains commonplace,” Rankine establishes that we have grown accustomed to “assimilate corpses in [our] daily comings and goings.”7 Mourning then, she ascertains, “bears the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding the future for those lives.”8 While on one hand, mourning fosters identification with one’s vulnerability, on the other hand, it enlivens (private) grief, rendering it palpable (public), and the dead grievable. Moreover, mourning engenders a fascination of sorts with the dead, the desire to keep the dead alive, to prolong the remembering, asserting recognition and power to the Black body in death, which it was deprived of in life. Mourning prolongs the haunting as an act of revenge and resistance, intimating a “spite death.”9 Portraying the intricate link between the politics of race and the politics of death in her “death narratives,”10 meanwhile calling attention to the precarity of Black lives and Black existence, Danticat effectuates necropolitics. Moreover, Danticat’s death narratives engender the act of bearing witness, a preoccupation that has consumed Danticat who unabashedly confesses that she has been writing about death as long as she has been writing.11 Addressing her own preoccupation of writing about death, fellow Caribbean author Jamaica Kincaid shares her reason for chronicling her brother’s, Devon Drew, death: “When I heard about my brother’s illness and his dying, I knew that to understand … his dying, and not to die with him, I would write about it.”12 Unsurprisingly, Danticat’s (as does Kincaid’s) writings abound with loss, migration, and death: death of children, parents, family members, lovers, so much so that she has triumphed at what she expertly calls “the art of writing death.”13 Writing manifests as a balm as it metabolizes the death of the significant others, functioning as a mausoleum. Critics Devaleena Kundu and Andrew Bibby propose that the primary function of death narratives is to process the fear of death and dying. Whereas Kundu suggests that “one essential objective of death narratives is to act as subliminal ways of naturalizing the fear of death and

Ibid., 25. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 I invoke the term “spite death” by appropriating Toni Morrison’s phrase: “124 was spiteful,” with which Beloved begins (3). “124” refers to the “haunted” house in which the mother protagonist, Sethe, lives with her family, including her dead baby girl, Beloved, located on 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin, 1988), 3. 10 While Danticat’s writing abounds with imagery of death and dying, in this essay, I categorize some of her works that deal explicitly with death and dying as “death narratives.” Under this classification fall Brother, I’m Dying, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, The Farming of Bones, and Untwine. 11 Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (New York: Graywolf Press, 2017), 6. 12 Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 196. 13 Danticat, The Art of Death, 7. 5 6

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dying,”14 Bibby, while illuminating the political and sociological function of death narratives, ascertains, “The confrontation with human mortality is … part of the larger exploration of the human fear of the unknown.”15 Establishing that the fear of death does not translate to death denial, Kundu, analyzing Freud’s stance on the subject of death denial writes, “[Freud] attested that the human inability to conceive of a state of non-being is what catalyzes the fear of death” (11). Writing about death is undeniably both an expression of fear and a peacemaking, reconciliatory endeavor. While not dismissing that death is fearful, to be feared, I  contend that owing to Black subjects’ experience with (perpetual) proverbial death—nullifying Freud’s theory of the human inability to conceive of a state of nonbeing—life/death narratives are more akin to a death-defying practice than to death denial. Furthermore, this death-defying practice becomes manifest in African-derived traditions where death engenders another beginning, and not an ending. While Danticat registers her preoccupation with death and dying in her memoir fittingly entitled, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, I argue that she is equally motivated by a kind of resurrection, a return (from the dead) that facilitates ghosting, necrotranscendence. Necro-transcendence facilitates new life to the dead, a new beginning, that Danticat captures in the following pronouncement:  “I believe that death is not the end. I’d rather think it’s some type of new beginning, a positive one … I like to think as well that it’s like moving from one place to another, a more beautiful and peaceful place, a more permanent tenement or town.”16 Danticat invokes otherworldliness by suggesting that this place is more beautiful and peaceful; at the same time, she contrasts inadvertently the otherworld with the earthly world, underscoring the aura of transcendence that characterizes the former. Due to the precarity of the lives of Black subjects, they are rendered ungrievable, unworthy, both in life and death. Consequently, Danticat’s death narratives perform an exhumation of sorts of her subjects, resurrecting them from the graveyard of the ungrievable, and rendering them grievable, livable again. Death narratives then function as a new and reimagined space beyond the hauntings, disallowing death to hold one hostage. This continued “play” with (cum resurrection of) the dead (body) emulates necrophilia, a fascination with corpses. These death narratives foster continuing attachment to the dead, keeping the dead alive, so to speak. Hence, grieving the dead requires being in a state of perpetual vigil; in other words, it necessitates “Black being in the wake as a form of consciousness.”17 Black subjects double as both participants in and subjects of the wake;18 as the afterlife and the chronicler of the afterlife. The pervasiveness of death, dying, and death-defying practices give the sense that one is constantly riding (with) death; in close proximity to death; that one is even enlivened by death. This interchange or interaction between life and death, whereby life and death converge and diverge, bears duplicitous characteristic as death shadows life (is always on the heels of life) and vice versa. Karin Kokorski captures this duplicity, this overlap best: “Afterlife [i]‌s simultaneously the end of

Devaleena Kundu, “The Paradox of Mortality:  Death and Perpetual Denial,” in Death Representations in Literature:  Forms and Theories, ed. Adriana Teodororescu (Newcastle upon Tyne:  Cambridge University Press, 2015), 10. 15 Andrew Bibby “Death and Democracy in American Realism,” in Death Representations in Literature:  Forms and Theories, ed. Adriana Teodororescu (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 139. 16 Danticat, The Art of Death, 37–8. 17 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Being and Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 14. 18 My use of “wake” is twofold: first, it signifies being awakened or conscious of pervasive black death, and second, it represents the ceremonious practice of honoring, grieving the dead. 14

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one phase and the beginning of another.”19 Transcending a fleshly/earthly existence engenders body duplication, a state in which “in death, [the body] literally and metaphorically escapes the state of siege and occupation.”20 The afterlife, that is, life after death, the continuation of life in the nonphysical form, engenders a form of ghosting, a shadowing or doubling of the former self. The apparition, the nebulous, phantom image of the ghost/ghosting is akin to shadowing, giving the sense of being followed and observed. Imitative of a ghost, one’s shadow appears and disappears; ghosting intimates being enveloped in shadow even as it casts a shadow over both the living and the dead. Shadowing epitomizes imitation, duplication; shadowing also encompasses secrecy, lending itself to ghosting. Ghosting cum shadowing facilitates new life, the afterlife, which in turn facilitates necro-transcendence or “living dyingly.” Resonating with necro-transcendence, “living dyingly” intimates living a death-like existence, becoming the living dead. By “living dyingly” one “occup[ies] an ambiguous space” between life and death, between living and dying, exemplary of a suspended life.21 Along similar lines, twinning epitomizes doubling, ghosting. In referencing twins, they are characterized often as doubles, as each other’s shadow. This doubling or shadowing is rendered most palpable in Untwine where the surviving twin of Isabelle, Giselle, writes her sister’s life and death and her own life into existence, becoming both the afterlife and the chronicler of the afterlife. She effectuates a ghostwriting of sorts, similar to her creator, Danticat, who doubling as her dying mother’s twin, that is, her mother’s other, chronicles her mother’s and her life, and her mother’s death. Hence, the mother-daughter duo doubles as ghostwriters as they shadow each other. Appropriating the trope “living dyingly” from British-American author and commentator, Christopher Hutchins, who died of esophageal cancer, Danticat surmises that death’s permanence and inevitability has engendered us “living dyingly.”22 While drawing on Danticat’s elaborations of “living dyingly,” this essay extends the definition of the trope to include social (political) death (or loss), even as it establishes that Danticat underscores the lives of precarity that her characters live and inhabit. To this end, I explore how her characters move beyond their fear, their traumatic experiences, their predestined expendability, and death—how they navigate the corridors of grief and the politics of pain, arriving at a space of necro-transcendence. Referencing the death of parents, and, specifically, her personal experience dealing with the death of her own parents, Danticat tackles the subject of mortality as she surmises that if your parents, your creators, can die then you can too. This realization evidences that we are all “living dyingly.”23 “Living dyingly,” one experiences several deaths; Danticat identifies a prolonged illness as one of many deaths, adding that “smaller deaths precede it, including, and among other things, possibly one’s loss of autonomy and dignity.”24 Karin Kokorski, “Representations of Death in Fantastic Literature for Children,” in the Death Representations in Literature:  Forms and Theories, ed. Adriana Teodororescu (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 355. 20 Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” 37. 21 Danticat, The Art of Death, 13. 22 British-American author, essayist, journalist, and social critic, Christopher Hitchens chronicled his experience with cancer in his memoir entitled, Mortality, published posthumously by Vanity Fair in 2002. 23 Danticat, The Art of Death, 13. Chronicling the pain and suffering of the recent death of her mother, Rose Souvenance Napoléon, Danticat celebrates her life-death in her recent memoir, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story. Hereafter, referred to as The Art of Death. She chronicles her father’s and his brother’s, Joseph Dantica, and Danticat’s uncle, life/death in Brother, I’m Dying. 24 Danticat, The Art of Death, 14. 19

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Danticat relates how prior to her mother’s actual physical death, she experienced social death, exclusion, that resulted in her relegation to second-class citizenship:  “My mother in her late thirties was an undocumented immigrant living in Brooklyn … A  factory worker who made handbags for pennies on the dollar. My mother was already lòt bò dlo, on the other side of the water.”25 This life of precarity: an undocumented, invisible female immigrant, and surviving on the bare minimum, a testament of “the discipline of life and the necessities of death (trial by death),” is one of many examples that Danticat’s characters are “divested of political and social status and reduced to bare life.”26 By “living dyingly,” it is safe to assume that Danticat’s characters exist in a zombified27 state; that they live in a “state of injury, in a phantomlike world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity.”28 Despite existing in this phantom-like state, Danticat’s mother fashioned a narrative (her life writing/death narrative) of her own, scripting her imminent death, functioning as the afterlife and the chronicler of the afterlife. Her fellow ghostwriter and daughter recounts that she not only recorded “a series of monologues on a handheld audio-cassette player,” but she also left “detailed funeral instructions … for my brothers and me,” and advised “me what kind of shoes I should wear to her wake (No open toes).”29 Danticat’s mother’s awareness, her acceptance of her fate, her impending death: “I’m not necessarily dying either today or tomorrow … But we all must die one day”30 is transcendental for both mother and daughter; Danticat’s self-transcendence is derived from her being “an onlooker”:31 “I know now, having watched my mother die, that death is a phenomenon of both the body and the mind-her body and mind, and now mine too.”32 While her mother is actively dying, Danticat’s conscious awareness of death, of her own mortality, is freeing. Thus, while keeping wake (vigil), Danticat is awakened to her own mortality. While we are reminded that we are all dying, by participating in the wake, becoming a community of mourners, we not only experience death by proxy, but we also experience the intimacy of death that bears resonance with the intimacy of life.33 Thus, personal and private grief bears the imprint of a public, community enterprise, devoid of silence and secrecy. Agnieszka Kaczmarek provides an insightful assessment of the intimacy of death as “a sign of contestation, a breaking away from silence and secrecy.”34 Danticat’s mother participates in her own funerary rites as she writes her own eulogy so to speak. As a witness, performing a vigil/wake, a deathwatch, literally and discursively,

Ibid., 22. Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” 12, 39. 27 The US occupation of Haiti gave rise to the legend of the zombies as the occupiers struggle to find answers to Haiti’s mysterious power. As a result, Haitians were “scapegoated” as monstrous others. Danticat also engenders the zombie (the bogeyman) legend in Breath, Eyes, Memory in her characterization of the Tonton Macoutes and government officials. I  adopt the term here to chronicle the status of the living, the bare life, zombified existence of Haitians, otherwise known as the living dead. 28 Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” 21. 29 Danticat, The Art of Death, 10, 11. 30 Ibid. 31 Fernandez, “Necro-Transcendence,” 129. 32 Danticat, The Art of Death, 37. 33 As readers of Danticat’s “death narrative,” we are rendered participants, an imagined community of mourners that shares the grief. 34 Agnieszka Kaczmarek, “Writing in the Shadow of Death:  Proust, Barthes, Tuszyńska,” in Death Representations in Literature:  Forms and Theories, ed. Adriana Teodororescu (Newcastle upon Tyne:  Cambridge University Press, 2015), 25. 25 26

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Danticat becomes the chronicler of the afterlife in her own right. Casting fellow author, Audre Lorde in this role: “She has become both a writer and a recorder of a dying body,” Danticat pontificates that as a fellow ghostwriter, Lorde is not only invested in writing about grief and loss.35 Lorde is equally committed to writing about the living/dead. Furthermore, Danticat’s mother’s audiocassette, an obituary of sorts, serves a parallel function as Lorde’s recording of her experience with breast cancer in The Cancer Journals.36 As I  have argued elsewhere, Lorde’s memoir, The Cancer Journals, performs an indictment of the politics of exclusion that, by design, creates surplus people who, for the most part, happen to be poor and Black.37 This differential distribution of precarity renders Danticat’s characters, including family members, most at risk. A case in point, we witness how state-engendered precarity has rendered Danticat’s uncle’s, Joseph Dantica, life unlivable, susceptible to injury and harm, as it is cut short by violence and death. Fleeing gang violence in Haiti, Dantica sought asylum in the United States; instead he was taken into custody at Krome Detention Center where he ended up dead.38 In essence, Dantica’s life was deprived of its grievability.

Ghosting and Necro-Transcendence Portraying the “cane life, travay té pou zo, the farming of bones,” the title of Danticat’s second novel, The Farming of Bones, alludes to both the social and political state of catastrophe within which Haitian laborers find themselves.39 Their bare-bone skeletal existence is just cause for their ungrievability, their relegation to a state of nonbeing, as they experience a continued close encounter with death in life,40 resulting in their characterization as “an orphaned people, … [as not] belong[ing] anywhere … as a group of vwayajé, wayfarers.”41 This bareness, barrenness manifests in the backbreaking compulsory physical labor performed by these laborers, occasioning their zombification. Expertly illuminating how the ungrievability cum expendability of Haitian subjects is intentional, Danticat points to the US occupation of Haiti as a marker of their determination of who must live and who should die. Yves’s father (the fatherson duo toiled in the sugarcane fields) falls victim to this occupation as he dies “organizing brigades to fight the Yanki occupation in Haiti.”42 Calling further attention to the widespread dehumanization of Black subjects, Jamaica Kincaid’s protagonist, Xuela Claudette Richardson Danticat, The Art of Death, 18. Significantly, Danticat characterizes Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor as “ ‘living dyingly’ texts” (The Art of Death, 17). 36 Accordingly, I contend that The Art of Death serves as a eulogy in which Danticat pays tribute to her mother. 37 In my book, African Diasporic Women Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship, I dedicate a chapter to Lorde’s life writings. For discussion on the “surplus people,” see p. 48. 38 For a more detailed discussion, see Alexander’s African Diasporic Women Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship. 39 Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 55. 40 It is no mere coincidence that many critics argue that the backbreaking toil of the cane laborers in The Farming of Bones is akin to slavery for slaves were consigned to a state of nonbeing. Haitian laborers still work in the sugarcane fields and factories in the Dominican Republic as they embody the afterlife of slavery. Articulating that “dozens of people fleeing political persecution in Haiti drown, just as they did in life,” Danticat expresses that death is imitative of life (Art, 6). 41 Danticat, Farming, 56. 42 Ibid. 35

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captures unspeakable brutality on the island of Dominica: “In a place like this, brutality is the only real inheritance and cruelty is sometimes the only thing freely given.”43 Despite being subjected to lives that are unlivable, for Rankine poignantly reminds us that “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,”44 these Black subjects resist state terror, giving voice instead to their grievability. Exploring the representation of death in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Danticat intimates that suicide, an antidote to state terror, paradoxically is a life-affirming act, an act of free will: Suicide was common among enslaved people who sought their freedom in the afterlife. Their deaths were more than physical cessations. They were transitions, spiritual journeys to places from their past, homes that had become idealized—in their minds. Suicide was also the most effective way of nullifying their designation as property. Showing that they could decide whether to live or die was the one way of affirming their humanity.45 Thus, orchestrating their own life/death, Black subjects perform a deathwatch of sorts, celebrating the afterlife by keeping wake/watch. Danticat’s repeated references (returns) to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Sula in The Art of Death have symbolic resonance (that correspondingly deserves added focus here), for in these “death narratives,” the characters double as the afterlife and the chroniclers of the afterlife.46 For example, the eponymous heroine, Sula, orchestrates her own death, a willful, voluntary, and triumphant act. “Dying voluntarily,” Camus writes, “implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the absence of any profound reason for living … and the uselessness of suffering.”47 This uselessness of (lingered) suffering is captured in Sula’s resigned, controlled, and contented smile: A crease of fear touched her breast, for any second there was sure to be a violent explosion in her brain, a gasping for breath. Then she realized, or rather she sensed, that there was not going to be any pain. She was not breathing because she didn’t have to. Her body did not need oxygen. She was dead. Sula felt her face smiling. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she thought, “it didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel.” (emphasis added)48 While Sula does not dwell on prolonged suffering or death, it would be remiss to conclude that she subscribes to the thought of “the absence of any profound reason for living.” Sula further diminishes suffering when she unapologetically tells her childhood friend, Nel, that she lives (and dies) on her own terms:  “I don’t know everything, I  just do everything. Me, I  going down like one of those redwoods. I  sure did live in this world. . . . I  got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.”49 Sula lived as she died, dangerously and unapologetically. Sula’s orchestration, her self-actualization, requires artfulness from an artist Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 5. This is the title of Rankine’s essay. 45 Danticat, The Art of Death, 79. 46 Danticat references other novels of Morrison, including Paradise and Jazz—as well as a wide-ranging and eclectic list of other authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Albert Camus, and Gabriel García Márquez. Arguably, most of these writers have penned death narratives. 47 Danticat, The Art of Death, 2. 48 Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Penguin, 1973), 149. 49 Ibid., 143. 43 44

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who “creates dangerously” as she does without equivocation and with deliberate resoluteness.50 Accordingly, Morrison quips, “Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”51 Sula’s transgressions, her nonconformity and nonconventionality, render her an artist without an art form. Yet, Sula is quite aware of the inevitably and palpability of Black death. In her final conversation with Nel she verbalizes the precarity that characterizes and haunts the lives of Black subjects, and, most notably, Black women:  “I know what every colored woman in this country is doing. Dying. Just like me.”52 Morrison, with precision, captures Sula’s and, by extension, the Bottom community’s stance on the deliberateness of death: “They did not believe death was accidental—life might be, but death was deliberate.”53 Sula engenders her own deathwatch: “She was not breathing because she didn’t have to. Her body did not need oxygen. She was dead. Sula felt her face smiling.” Sula dies seeing herself die, and through her own will. Similar to her counterpart, Beloved, Sula’s death is as “soft as cream.”54 Morrison’s photographic representation of Sula’s final act both communicates and alleviates Sula’s suffering. By not allowing Sula to “die hard,” Morrison reassigns death as a dignified act; while Sula’s humanity remains intact.55 “Living dyingly,” death imitates life, is an extension of living and, ironically, is comforting, an observation that Nel echoes: “Dying was OK because it was sleep and there wasn’t no gray ball in death.”56 Sula’s death is undeniably grievable, a fact rendered most palpable in the scene where her “other,” Nel, mourns her death, albeit belatedly: “The loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. O Lord, Sula,” she cried, ‘girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.’ It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”57 Underscoring the grievability of her imminent death, Sula remains steadfast, adopting an unapologetic stance. Wary of the inhabitants’ of the Bottom misdirected disgust and disdain of her, she informs Nel, “Oh, they’ll love me alright. It will take time, but they’ll love me … And I know just what it will feel like.”58 Sula’s response draws attention to the social death she experiences, her marginalization and the community projecting its fears and shortcomings unto her, and the sacrifice she endures through the community’s scapegoating of her as a means to purportedly cure its plague of denial and self-righteousness. Perceptively, Sula envisions life after death. Danticat assesses Sula’s reach from the otherworld, her embodiment of the afterlife:  “As this eternally smiling face indicates, death is neither the end of Sula’s story, nor the end of her complicated friendship with Nel. ‘Wait’ll I tell Nel’ shows that those two will never be done I appropriate the term “creates dangerously” from Danticat, who adapted the title from Camus. Morrison, Sula, 121. 52 Ibid., 143. 53 Ibid., 90. 54 Morrison, Beloved, 9. Paul D. Garner, Sethe’s lover, inquired after Sethe’s daughter’s, Beloved, death: “Was it hard. I hope she didn’t die hard,” to which Sethe responds, “Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part” (9). 55 Danticat’s mother rejected “prolonged suffering” in favor of a “soft death”: “Rather than fight it, my mother embraced the dying of light” (2017: 21). Similar to Lorde who rejected chemotherapy, Danticat’s mother halted her chemotherapy. I discussed at length the significance of Lorde’s rejection of chemotherapy in African Diasporic Women’s Narratives. Relatedly, Danticat debates how does one meet death elegantly when that individual is ravaged by pain or is losing control of his/her limbs or bowels (2017: 18). 56 Morrison, Sula, 110. The “gray ball” symbolizes Nel’s uncertainty, her self-doubt. 57 Ibid., 174. 58 Ibid., 145–6. 50 51

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with one another. They’re still going to be in touch even though one of them is no longer on this earth” (italics added).59 This trope of continuity/circularity:  Sula’s ability to “circle back,” Nel’s cry had “no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow,” buttresses Danticat’s observation that even death cannot separate the friends who will remain in contact with each other. Sula’s ability to remain in communication posthumously with Nel engenders a return of the dead, that is, ghosting, doubling of the self.60 Having the last word by writing this final chapter of her life, meanwhile becoming the chronicler of the afterlife, Sula ensures that her presence will be felt even in the afterlife. Danticat’s use of the word “eternally” is not lost on her readers.

Grievable Subjects and Grievability Danticat’s invocation of Morrison’s novels is no accident. In a similar fashion to Sula, Martine Caco, the mother-protagonist of Breath, Eyes, Memory, determines her own death. A  rape survivor and mother to Sophie, the product of the rape, Martine is subsequently impregnated by her lover and lawyer, Marc Chevalier. Convinced that this unborn child is the embodiment of her rapist, Martine decides to terminate her pregnancy by stabbing herself in the stomach seventeen times. Suffice it to say, Martine’s act is as willful as Sula’s, wherein she engages a “spectacular putting to death of the self, of becoming … her own victim (self-sacrifice). The self-sacrificed proceeds to take power over … her death and to approach it head-on.”61 Consequently, Martine informs Sophie that giving birth will be at the expense of her self; therefore, she has but two choices: be sacrificed or take matters into her own hands and engage in self-sacrifice. She confesses to Sophie what her repeated nightmares feel: “Like getting raped every night. I  can’t keep this baby … I  will have [the unborn child] at the expense of my sanity. They will take it out of me one day and put me away the next.”62 Drawing on Mbembé’s theory, Martine’s self-realization cum self-consciousness is actualized at the very moment of dying; quite aware of her impending (orchestrated) death, she lives with the knowledge of actually dying. Hence, her death performs a double take: registering self-awareness and also extinguishing life, the conscious being.63 Martine, who occupies the status of a living dead, and, therefore, has always lived with the impression of actually dying: “I’ve had the second chance of my life by being spared death from this cancer. I can’t ask too much,” has lived a life hanging in the balance: “Look at me. I am a fat woman trying to pass for thin. A dark woman trying to pass for light.”64 Even as she lay dying, Martine, in Sula-like fashion, gives voice to her selfawareness, her self-possession. Marc recounts, “She was still breathing when I found her. She could not carry the baby. She said that to the ambulance people.”65 Thus, Martine’s self-sacrifice Danticat, The Art of Death, 26. Eva Peace, Sula’s grandmother, facilitates ghosting or doubling when, much to Nel’s chagrin, she insists that Nel and Sula are one and the same: “Just alike. Both of you. Never was no difference between you two” (169). 61 Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” 38. Appropriately, Sula informs Nel that her “lonely is [hers]”; while Nel’s “is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to [her]. A secondhand lonely” (1973: 143). 62 Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (London: Abacus, 1994), 190, 192. 63 Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” 38. 64 Danticat, Breath, 190, 189. 65 Ibid., 224. 59 60

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is a deliberate act of defiance, a transgressive act in retaliation to the bodily transgression to which she was subjected. Fittingly, Martine’s suicide points to self-determinacy as she chooses to live another life free of male power and subjugation. Martine’s death, paradoxically, resulted in Sophie’s gain as she is able to claim her mother who, first and foremost, was lost to the rapist via the rape, and, subsequently, through proverbial asphyxiation as the faceless rapist “ghosts” Martine, reappearing frequently in her nightmares.66 In death, Sophie is able to forge a relationship with her mother as she experiences a rebirth: “I crouched in the fetal position in the large bed in my mother’s room,” and Martine’s “spectacular putting to death of the self ” is matched by an equally spectacular homecoming, in which Sophie accentuates self-sacrifice and rebellion by adorning her mother in a crimson two-piece burial suit.67 Martine is equally empowered: “She is going to be a butterfly or a lark in a tree. She’s going to be free.”68 Martine attains freedom both in and as the afterlife; Danticat characterizes the “butterfly as an easy metaphor for death and the afterlife.69 This body double that Martine initiates in death engenders her liberation. Earlier, Martine describes her body under siege, being raped every night. Death engenders agency; moreover, death and freedom are interwoven. Martine’s suffering is not aestheticized as Marc’s verbal account of her “putting to death of the self ” attests: “She stabbed her stomach with an old rusty knife. I counted, and they counted in the hospital. Seventeen times … It was seventeen times.”70 I read this death scene within the framework of Butler’s concept of framing. According to Butler, To be framed is a complex phrase in English: a picture is framed, but so too is a criminal (by the police), or an innocent person (by someone nefarious, often the police), so that to be framed is to be set up, or to have evidence planted against one that ultimately, “proves” one’s guilt … If one is “framed,” then a “frame” is constructed around one’s deed such that one’s guilty status becomes the viewer’s inevitable conclusion.71 Marc is framed; encapsulated within Martine’s bodily assault, he reconstructs the crime scene to Sophie, relinquishing his position as a lawyer, now turned defendant. Forced to look at her mutilated body, Marc is enframed, captured within the frame of this death scene, which engenders a haunting that compels him never to forget. Although Sophie does not deem Marc a criminal in the strict sense, she nevertheless views him as the perpetrator of this crime: “How could you sleep? Why did you give her this child? Didn’t you know about the nightmares?”72 Later, Sophie surmises that detectives and flashing cameras will be at the scene, but, in the same breath, she counters that as a lawyer Marc “knew people in power. He simply had to For the most part, the mother-daughter relationship was tumultuous. Martine who left for the United States shortly after her rape, in essence, did not mother Sophie who was left in the care of her aunt, Atie, Martine’s sister. 67 Danticat, Breath, 226. I provided a detailed analysis of the color “red” and the crimson two-piece suit in African Diasporic Women’s Narratives. 68 Danticat, Breath, 228. 69 Ibid., 33. Following in the footsteps of Gabriel García Márquez, Danticat engages the butterfly as “a symbol of visiting spirits, a sign of mystery, and a harbinger of good and bad news” (2017: 33). 70 Ibid., 224. 71 Butler, Frames of War, 8. 72 Danticat, Breath, 224. 66

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tell them that my mother was crazy.”73 The last memory Marc has of Martine is her mutilated, dead body, imitative of a postmortem photograph. This proverbial photograph fixes Martine in an illusion of life, exemplary of the afterlife. The image of Martine lying on the bathroom floor covered in blood and fixed forever in Marc’s mind exemplifies a resurrection of sorts that is rendered complete as Sophie brings Martine back to life. Like the scarlet bird, Caco, after which she is named, Martine soars to new heights: “The Caco bird, when it dies, there is always a rush of blood that rises to its neck and the wings, they look so bright you would think them on fire.”74 Martine’s flight, her rise from the dead, is celebrated as she embarks on her final journey to Guinea. Reflecting on the death she prescribed Martine, Danticat invokes the afterlife, performing a postmortem of sorts—an attempted autopsy on Martine’s body, a do over, a repeat, an act of ghosting: “I wish now that I had included more confrontation, so that it wouldn’t seem as though Sophie had immediately accepted her mother’s death … I  would inflict the mother with fewer stab wounds… I  feel guilty about the mother’s death at times, as though I  had conspired to murder an actual person.”75 This discursive excavation of Martine (body), a return of the dead, engenders ghosting (or “stalking,” as Danticat puts it), wherein Danticat functions as a ghostwriter; she aptly writes, “We write about death to become less haunted, to turn ghosts into words.”76 Moreover, Danticat describes the art of good writing as a form of ghosting, wherein it requires an out of body experience: “Sometimes we must write what we are most terrified to write, and we need our shadows, however haunting they may be, in order to write the best book we can.”77 Even as Danticat mourns her staging of Martine’s death, I contend that the multiple stab wounds inflicted on the already wounded body heighten the mourning of Martine, her grievability, rendering her body that was devalued by the rape/rapist seen. Echoing Rankine’s poignant phrase: “If [she was] seen as living, [she] would not be dying.”78 Martine’s mutilated body performs its own haunting/ghosting—especially on Marc who (gaze) is transfixed by the photographic disfiguration of her body. This photographic portrayal of Martine’s wounded body intimates that “her body mattered enough to be mourned”; at the same time, it challenges, even subverts, the politics of (easy) consumption of the Black female body.79 Moreover, I read the multiple stab wounds as Danticat’s “refusal to keep private grief private,” which in and of itself lends further grievability to Black death.80 In Sophie’s estimation, grievability encompasses accountability, a point she reiterates in the following pronouncement:  “Now [Marc] would have to say it to my grandmother, who had lost her daughter, and to my Tante Atie, who had lost her only sister.”81 Marc recounting the death scene, earlier to Sophie, and subsequently to Grandma Ife and Tante Atie, is redolent of invoking the Danticat, Breath, 225. Ibid., 150. 75 Danticat, The Art of Death, 86. If we engage Danticat’s conspiracy theory, then Marc is guilty as charged by Sophie. 76 Ibid., 29. Danticat shares that she engaged the act of “stalking” a friend who had died by telephoning her repeatedly so she could listen to her voice mail. See The Art of Death, 90. 77 Ibid., 40. 78 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Danticat, Breath, 223. 73 74

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afterlife, of Martine speaking from beyond the grave. Furthermore, Martine’s desire to be seen is portrayed by an “ostentatious display of funereal megalomania” (Kundu 9). Sophie concurs, “[The crimson two-piece suit] was too loud a color for a burial. I knew it. She would look like a Jezebel, hot-blooded Erzulie who feared no men, but rather made them her slaves, raped them, and killed them … It was too bright a red for burial.”82 Posthumously adorned in the “bright red, two-piece suit too afraid to wear to the Pentecostal services,” Martine is fearless, a force with which to reckon.83 Even after her portrayal of this grandiose funereal performance, Sophie engages double speak: “There would be no ostentation, no viewing, neither pomp nor circumstance”; this intentional ambiguity or inversion resonates with the trope of ghosting.84 Sophie’s refusal to stage a viewing of Martine’s body signals her repudiation of pornographic exposure of the female body.

Twinning and Untwining We witness a parallel “ostentatious display of funereal megalomania” in The Farming of Bones that chronicles the 1937 massacre of Haitians by the Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo (the backdrop setting is the birth and immediate death of one half of a twin), and in Untwine that recounts the lives, albeit short, of identical twin sisters, Giselle and Isabelle Boyer, and their subsequent separation through Isabelle’s premature death by accident. In The Farming of Bones, one of the central female characters and the wife of army general Señor Pico, Valencia, unexpectedly loses one half of her boy-girl twins, the boy child, Rafi. To commemorate his short life, she had a coffin built: Once the coffin was built, Señora Valencia was determined to do something herself for her lost child. She wanted to decorate the lid with red orchids before her son could be placed inside … the body lay in reposed behind the dreamy gauze of the lowered mosquito net framing the four-poster canopy bed, his hands crossed over his heart and a crystal rosary laced between his tiny fingers, the glassy beads spilling over onto the bedsheet like frozen tears. (italics added)85 Later “she painted her father’s orchid garden upon her son’s coffin. On the sides, near the handles, she painted four small humming birds … Magenta-colored paint dripped on the floor as she added more to the coffin … The coffin was now covered with a whirl of colors, one seeping into the other, like a sky full of twisted rainbows.”86 Similar to Martine’s flamboyant funeral outfit, Rafi’s coffin, ornate with red orchids, symbolizes passion and defiance; the artwork is emblematic of a death-defying practice. Known as a plant with complex flowers that are bizarrely shaped, orchids symbolize virility, and are unique and almost unreal in their perfection.87 Ibid., 227. Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Danticat, Farming, 89. It can be intimated that Rafi is mummified in a sense, for his hands crossed on his heart enact the Lazarus sign or reflex reminiscent of the Egyptian mummies. 86 Ibid., 91, 92; italics added. 87 https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS837US837&q=Dictionary#dobs=orchid. 82 83

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Hummingbirds are equally colorful with iridescent feathers; their flapping wings enliven Rafi, engendering his resurrection, his bringing back to life, as Valencia fittingly and resolutely informs Pico who, after inspecting the rainbow orchid painting on the coffin, articulated, “We cannot put him in the ground in this coffin … We have to make another:” “No, this is the one he’ll have. He’s a child. The coffin should be playful … No wake, Pico.”88 This desire to preserve playfulness, that is, childhood innocence, finds resonance in the coffin built for Isabelle by her paternal grandmother, Grandma Régine, appropriately called the “picture coffin.” Isabelle’s surviving twin, Giselle, observes of this playful, ostentation pink coffin emblazoned with giant hibiscus: “I’ve never seen a coffin like this, and from the way my parents’ eyes pop, neither have they … [it] is covered with camellias and birds of paradise from my parents’ garden.”89 The color pink captures and frames Isabelle’s innocence, her girlishness, in a state of permanence; fittingly, the camellia, an evergreen plant that has leaves throughout the year that are always green and bears large, conspicuous flowers, reinforces Isabelle’s perpetuity. This “picture coffin” alludes to a picture-perfect image as we later find out that Isabelle appears unbroken and whole. Ultimately approving her grandmother’s choice of coffin, Giselle narrates, Up close, I can see why Grandma Régine chose it. It’s girly in a way that Isabelle liked to be … The inside is lined in pink silk and under her head is a matching pillow. Isabelle looks whole. There’s no sign of any cuts or bruises under the layers of cinnamon-colored stage makeup covering her face … She does look like she’s sleeping. Even after all this time, and given everything her body’s been through, she still looks like herself. I keep thinking that if I nudge her she might wake up. (italics added)90 This wholesomeness gives the illusion that Isabelle is alive, that she is sleeping and “might wake up,” to echo Giselle. Dressed in death “in one of her formal orchestra uniforms, a white blouse and pencil skirt,” as she was in life, lends to the aura of eternity. Further, the “picture coffin” functions as a “ghost” coffin, a fill-in of sorts, as the undertaker informs the Boyer family that it is “made of a hundred percent recycled clapboard, honeycomb based. It’s on loan for the service. She won’t be cremated in it.”91 We later learned that Isabelle will not have a grave. The parents’ refusal to erect a “grave, a headstone, a place to visit and lay flowers,” points to their attempt to preserve her (memory) for eternity.92 This desire to preserve her, an act akin to mummification, is exemplified by the continued postponement of the funeral service and the accompanying repast. Along similar lines, Valencia’s refusal to hold a wake—an aftermath of a death—for Rafi, signals her resistance to relegate his body to the realm of the dead, as corpse. Rafi is frozen in time (as the frozen tears attest and the browned lace and shriveled satin gown and matching

Danticat, Farming, 92. Edwidge Danticat, Untwine (New York: Scholastic Press, 2015), 159. 90 Ibid., 161. 91 Ibid., 158. 92 Ibid. In The Farming of Bones, we learn that the ancestral figure/father, Kongo, did not have a funeral for his son Joël who was killed by Señor Pico who was driving his automobile recklessly. Instead, he had an unceremonious homecoming: “It wasn’t ceremonious the way I buried him, I know. No clothes, no coffin, nothing between him and the day ground” (1998: 108). 88 89

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bonnet in which Valencia was baptized that now adorn Rafi’s body)—(trans)fixed in a perfect child-like and playful state (Valencia’s use of the present tense, as in “he’s a child,” does not fall on deaf ears), and appears to be suspended in a dream (state) as his body lay “in reposed” and encased within the “four-poster canopy bed,” which simultaneously doubles as a tomb. The “whirl of colors seeping one into the other” engenders a state of perpetuity and eternity, as in eternal and everlasting life. At the same time, I argue that “the four-poster bed where Rafi was resting” is indicative that Valencia is equally absorbed by death-denial for she is engrossed in what arguably can be deemed necrophilia (italics added).93 Mourning the loss of her only son, Valencia “slipped into the bed where both her children had been conceived and born.”94 Valencia’s fixation takes on an added dimension as Amabelle, Valencia’s Haitian domestic helper turned midwife, “removed the brushes from her fingers and pulled her hands away from the coffin.”95 Methodically, Valencia revitalizes her father’s (who had also lost a son, and Valencia, a brother) orchid garden by painting it onto Rafi’s coffin, engendering a shadowing, a ghosting of sorts. This revival simultaneously serves as a tribute, a memorialization of her dead mother, Doña Eva, who died in childbirth and her brother who died while he was being born. Paradoxically, Doña Eva’s birthday celebration doubles as her grandson’s, Rafi, unofficial wake. In some ways, Valencia became the afterlife of her brother: “[Papi] took me hunting for birds and taught me to shoot a rifle, as if I were the son who took Mami’s life in childbirth.”96 Further, Amabelle captures Valencia’s zombified state, her death in life experience, calling attention to the stillness in her eyes, that mirrored Rafi’s dead face, and her vacant stare.97 In a similar vein, Rosalinda, the surviving twin-daughter of Valencia, also functions as the afterlife of her dead twin-brother, Rafi: “[her baptismal] celebration was stilled by the memory of Rafi, whose shadow would no doubt follow his sister all her life.”98 Although the motherdaughter duo’s shadowing by their brothers calls attention to their relegation to secondclass female citizenship, Rosalinda’s birth, her survival engenders her own haunting of the Dominican nation perceived as white by its despotic leader, Rafael Trujillo, who obsessed with whitening the nation by privileging European culture and race. Trujillo’s antihaitianismo practice is embodied by Señor Pico and rendered most palpable in the scene where he viciously and angrily destroyed the tea set in which Valencia offered cafecito to the Haitians laborers, “shatter[ing] the cups and saucers, one by one.”99 Pico’s disdain for his daughter, Rosalinda, mirrors Trujillo’s disdain for Haitian subjects: “He avoided his daughter’s tiny hands, which she intuitively held out towards her father as if in recognition of his face or to ward off the Danticat, Farming, 89. The scene in which Rafi lies in the bed under a mosquito net bears eerie similarity to the scene in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” where Homer “himself lay in bed … in a room above stairs,” which was decorated with “valance curtains of faded rose color [and] rose-shaded lights.” Emily herself lay in “one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.” The room in which Homer lay was “decked and furnished as for a bridal”; in like manner, Rafi is decked out in Valencia’s baptismal outfit. Notably, Emily shares a similar pastime with Valencia; she taught china-painting. Of noted significance, at Emily’s funeral many of the men in attendance spoke as if Emily was their contemporary “confusing time with its mathematical progression” (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/wf_rose.html). 94 Danticat, Farming, 102. 95 Ibid., 93. 96 Danticat, Farming, 91. 97 Ibid., 95. 98 Ibid., 119. 99 Ibid., 116. 93

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stinging expression of disfavor growing more and more pronounced on it each time he laid eyes on her.”100 This discernible contempt renders Rosalinda stateless; her statelessness, in turn, evokes her vulnerability as she experiences survivors’ guilt, wanting to make amends for surviving her brother. Revealingly, while an altar “of white island carnations” is erected for the dead Rafi, Rosalinda is regarded as the stateless daughter of the nation.101 Even posthumously Rafi identifies with the masculinist nation-state, while Señor Pico laments his colossal loss, “watching his daughter grow plumper and happier every day while he was thinking of the male heir he had lost.”102 As the darker of the twins who survives, Rosalinda disrupts the neat narrative of white nationalism. The caul that covered her face at birth, rendering her faceless and thus nationless, and the umbilical cord attached around her neck emblematize her (and by default, the Haitian nation) proverbial suffocation and strangulation. Her survival, despite the odds, defies and dismantles white nationalist politics. Mbembé’s theory of the body duplicating itself in death to escape “the state of siege and occupation” takes on a subversive characteristic in the case of actual twins, body doubles. Whereas in death one initiates replication as a means to escape the state of siege and occupation, Rosalinda, the surviving female twin, inhabits a besieged body, as a woman, a nonheiress, and a stateless citizen. Paradoxically, Rafi’s death heightens Rosalinda’s noncitizen status, reiterated by the quintessential statesman’s, Señor Pico, palpable disdain and dismissal of his own offspring. Hence, Rafi’s death is an act of untwining in more ways than one. While he and Rosalinda duplicate each other as biological twins, they are politically at odds. We witness further the act of untwining in the applicably entitled Untwine. En route to a spring orchestra concert the Boyer family gets into a car accident, resulting in Mr. and Mrs. Boyer and Giselle, one of their twin daughters, severely injured, and the other twin, Isabelle, dead. Significantly, at the time of the incident (the investigating detectives notably refer to the mishap as an “incident,” and not an accident) the red minivan was driven by Gloria Carlton, a fellow student and foster child in and out of foster homes, who attends Morrison Charter High School that Giselle and Isabelle attend.103 Reliving cum reviving their lives and the incident leading up to Isabelle’s untimely death, Giselle functions both as the afterlife and the chronicler of the afterlife:  “No one will forget Isabelle as long as I  am walking around with her body and her face. My sister is dead and I am her ghost.”104 Giselle’s confession challenges Kundu’s line of reasoning that “death remains a phenomenon that cannot be shared.”105 The concept of individuality is a remote one for twins. Lamenting the loss of her twin sister, British-Nigerian author, Diana Evans confesses, “We carried each other with us wherever we went and we were never truly alone. … When there are two of you, you can never really escape yourself.”106 Giselle, in essence, is the ghostwriter, simultaneously chronicling her sister’s and her life and death; as such, she experiences death vicariously (as she did, life), whereby she is forced to relive their lives and, now, her sister’s death. Thus, she engenders a form of doubling, for she functions as the ghost/shadow of Isabelle—even as Isabelle simultaneously haunts/ghosts and shadows her. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 113. 102 Ibid., 135. 103 Danticat, Untwine, 181. 104 Ibid., 169. 105 Kundu, “Paradox of Mortality,” 12. 106 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/feb/06/fiction.features1#top. 100 101

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Moreover, it was believed that Giselle had died and not Isabelle. Giselle shares that she and her sister are inextricably bound in death as they were in life: “Riding this thing I can’t quite name. This thing that isn’t really death, because it feels nothing like any other death I’ve been connected to. This thing that is partially like my own death. Or the death of this other girl I used to be.”107 Articulating that the death of the (former) self engenders the death of the “other,” that her twin’s death in some ways signals her own, Giselle shares that she has experienced other deaths, lending voice to “living dyingly.” Giselle lives dyingly in her sister’s shadow as everyone thought she had died. Her above reference to “riding” puns on Basquiat’s artwork, Riding with Death, of which she possesses a print and about which she presented a joint oral analysis for a class project with friends, Tina and Jean Michel. “Lying down [with Tina] directly across from [her] print of Basquiat’s Riding with Death,” Giselle muses, Had Tina, and I somehow known when we’d chosen it as one of our presentation prints that one day I would actually be riding with death? I try to remember what Tina had said in front of Mr. Rhy’s class, that Basquiat must have known he was going to die young because in that painting he seems to be so at ease with death. The man riding the skeleton seems almost like he was on his way to a celebration.108 Riding with Death encompasses duplication; while it strikes a triumphant note in having possession over death, it simultaneously signals accompaniment, death as life’s companion, whereby death follows, shadows the rider, announcing its inevitability. This intertextuality— invocation of Basquiat’s artwork—engenders doubling. Giselle’s simultaneous naming and nonnaming of the death (experience) is classic Basquiat who was known for puzzling his audience; however, this puzzle is inherent to death itself. Its unnameability is a testament to its ghostly attributes. Significantly, Basquiat once expressed to those who deemed his paintings undecipherable: “I paint ghosts.”109 These ghosts not only haunt the canvass of Basquiat’s art but also his life, so much so that Riding with Death was eerily prophetic; it was one of his last paintings before his death in August 1988. One can reasonably assume that the painting is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Basquiat is well known for his advocacy of race and social injustices; the Black figure riding the skeletal death exemplifies Black lives approximating death. The scattered limbs or bones speak to the precarity, to the bare-bone, skeletal existence of Black subjects. Giselle is quick to point out that this precarity rules/ruins their lives:  “My parents seem to realize that there are no safe places left in the super-booby-trapped minefield all around us.”110 This precarity is rendered most palpable in her near-death experience that came on the heel of her reappropriation of Basquiat’s art. Although the surviving twin, now experiencing a singular pain, she is “riding with death” continually: “Isabelle must have taken her last breath. Then she must have pulled me under, carrying me away with her for a while,”111 emphasis added). Here, Giselle intimates that she has also suffered death by proxy. Isabelle, a graffiti artist in her own right, can be likened to

Danticat, Untwine, 192–3; italics added. Ibid., 186. 109 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/sep/03/jean-michel-basquiat-retrospective-barbican. 110 Danticat, Untwine, 198. 111 Ibid., 216. 107 108

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Basquiat: “Everything else in her room, every wall, sheet or curtain is either red, white, or black, her three favorite colors. She used her walls mostly as a bulletin board, for things she didn’t want to forget. There’s a large calendar above the daybed, with the day of the concert, the day of the car crash, circled in red.”112 The things Isabelle did not want to forget, Giselle is forced to remember; not only does her memory engenders a return, ghosting, but also the “wet footprints” she leaves on the cherrywood floor next to Isabelle’s bed.113 Uncoincidentally, she adopts Basquiat’s art in her presentation, who has left an indelible imprint on the world, whose afterlife has taken on a life of its own as both he and his art continue to live and haunt beyond the grave.114 While Isabelle articulates that she is “pulled under, carr[ied] away” by Giselle, Aunt Leslie breathes life into her, performing a resuscitation of sorts:  “You’re going to wake up. Like Lazarus.”115 Likened to the biblical character, Lazarus: “Between my sister and me, I am Lazarus. I  have returned from the dead,” who, after spending four days in his tomb, was restored to life by Jesus, Giselle, details her own restoration to life, positing Aunt Leslie, who miraculously appears “sitting in the only chair at [her] bedside,” as her redeemer: “Science is her anchor, but when it comes to family she’ll take faith. She’ll take Lazarus.”116 Located in a “small white room with a large glass window panel” that likens Giselle more to “a prisoner” than to a patient, and reminiscent of a tomb, “Aunt Leslie is the first one to arrive [at her bedside] … wearing her white doctor’s coat.”117 Aunt Leslie, the medical doctor, the healer akin to Jesus; the twin’s godmother, also referred to as the “good mother,” bequeathed Giselle the “Hand of Fatima,” also known as the Hand of God as she was about to suffer a cardiac arrest.118 Notably, the placing of the Hand of Fatima in Giselle’s hand by Aunt Leslie remains a mystery/miracle as Giselle has no recollection of receiving it. Patiently waiting for Giselle to awaken from what appears to be a deep sleep, Giselle’s friend, Tina, relates after Giselle has regained consciousness: “You were a medical mystery. Granddad called you Lazarus. … You weren’t waking up. It just seemed like you were in a really deep sleep. … You were like horror-movie Sleeping Beauty.”119 Realizing this duplication, the simultaneous invocation of Lazarus and Sleeping Beauty, the princess of a fairytale who is wakened from an enchanted sleep by the kiss of a prince, Danticat intimates that both characters undergo restoration to life. She nevertheless demystifies the magical, romanticized aura that characterizes the female character, Sleeping Beauty, through oxymoronic juxtaposition: “horror-movie Sleeping Beauty.” While the fairytale engenders the silencing of Sleeping Beauty; after all she is sleeping and her commodification, her attendant beauty, occupies center stage, her second-class citizen status is magnified by her dependence (the kiss) on the prince who awakens her from her slumber. Danticat satirizes this restorative kiss of life in the scene where Giselle questions Tina if Jean Michel kissed her: “Did Jean Michel kiss me in the hospital?” I ask her. “Basquiat?” she adds. Ibid., 196. Ibid., 196. 114 Giselle confesses that she “like[s]‌to draw and think of [her]self as an artist—a future one anyway … She spend[s] most of [her] time in art history class half listening and half sketching” (2015: 6, 25). Moreover, Giselle Sandrine Boyer is named for her “grandma on her Mom’s side” who “was one of those people with acrylics, oils, and a color palette in her blood” (2015: 19, 34). 115 Danticat, Untwine, 52. 116 Ibid., 21, 52. 117 Ibid., 16, 23. 118 Ibid., 20, 31. 119 Ibid., 187. 112 113

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“They must have given you some super-powerful drugs.”120 Underscoring the incredulity of this chance encounter exposes the triviality of the fairytale that administers proverbial anesthesia, intended to stifle female creativity and curiosity. Giselle portrays a parallel horror scene in her interrogation of the gendered biblical story of Lazarus: “Is [Pastor Ben] calling me Lazarus? After the man who came back from the dead? Wasn’t there ever a girl who came back from the dead? A set of twins? An entire family?”121 In both stories, men reign supreme as liberators or ideal candidates for citizenship, for spiritual redemption. Interrupting this narrative of male citizenship through subversion, Giselle’s return from the dead facilitates necro-transcendence, while Aunt Leslie serves as the venerated savior. Danticat denounces the trivialization of young girls/women in the traditional fairytale; as Sleeping Beauty, contrary to Douglas’s assessment of other fairytales “that familiarize children with the concept of death incorporating some of its historical and cultural meaning,” engenders defamiliarization.122 Additionally, constructed within the framework of the fantastical, death is rendered unfamiliar. Consequently, Danticat opts for the spiritual, the transcendental, a fact reiterated by Giselle in the following articulation: “In a situation like mine, a lot of people say that they see a bright light, then levitate towards it, away from their bodies. Then their lives flash before their eyes, until they meet a comforting angel, their own firebird, or grey wolf, or beautiful princess, or dead relative who encourages them to float back into their skin and remain among the living.”123 The message here is one of positive reinforcement. Moreover, this relationship is not one of dependency, but rather interdependency where women exercise agency and freewill over their life and death. Offering a more realistic portrayal of death and dying, Danticat does not idealize life or life after death; consequently, children are not “forced to live in the ‘kingdom where nobody dies’.”124 Significantly, the character, Lazarus, also appears in Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother, as a gravedigger, who contrastingly did not experience a restoration to life, but instead underwent an entombing of sorts. Living a life of precarity, the denial of nails by Alfred Richardson, Xuela’s father, the highest official of the colonial government, to rebuild his roof that was shattered by the hurricane, is indicative of Alfred driving the proverbial nail into Lazarus’s coffin. In essence, Alfred becomes Lazarus double as he “ghosts” him usurping his position as gravedigger. This skeletal existence discussed earlier extends to Gloria Carlton, a foster child who was placed with this current couple after her previous foster family had run off with her. Trafficked, it is unsurprising that Gloria possesses several aliases, including Janice Hill. Accustomed to a life on the run, the night of the fateful accident, Janice had taken the couple’s van attempting to escape from them.125 On the run yet again, Janice and what became later knowns as her traffickers are eventually captured by the police. In a strange twist of events, her arrest doubles as a rescue mission. “Living dyingly,” Gloria greets her capture by the police with

Ibid., 188. Ibid., 39. 122 Cristina Douglas, “Once upon a Time:  Understanding Death during Childhood through Fairy Tales,” in Death Representations in Literature:  Forms and Theories, ed. Adriana Teodororescu (Newcastle upon Tyne:  Cambridge University Press, 2015), 306. 123 Danticat, Untwine, 14. 124 Douglas, “Once upon a Time,” 305. 125 Danticat, Untwine, 266. 120 121

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relief, exhibiting a deep sense of remorse and admitting to a reporter that she would change places with Isabelle if she could. Giselle’s declaration:  “Gloria Carlton is the skeleton rider in our lives”126is valid in that she is riding death in life, haunted by several deaths: death of the self, death of childhood/innocence, and death occasioned by child trafficking. She is the embodiment of the very skeleton that she rides: “She doesn’t look like someone who would stand out in a crowd, someone you’d notice right away. She looks like someone who always wanted to be somewhere other than where she was. She looks like she’s always tired.”127 Later, we learned that Gloria Carlton does not exist, her identity is erased.128 As a foster (a stand-in, a substitute) child, Gloria embodies the ghost/rider. Cataloguing Isabelle’s death as an “incident” instead of an “accident” alludes to one of many unfortunate incidents in her life. It equally focuses on the precarious lives of both victim and perpetrator, of their existence on the fringes of society. Giselle is quick to point out that there are no winners. Even in death Giselle and Isabelle remain twinned, are inseparable; their lives are intertwined, rendering the title of the book, Untwine, a misnomer. Similarly, Janice and Isabelle’s lives will forever be twinned as Janice’s survival is realized through the death of Isabelle. True to form, “a lost girl has been rescued and saved”—not by a prince charming, but by another young girl, Isabelle.129 Janice is no Sleeping Beauty. While death registers disentanglements, it simultaneously calls attention to and give voice to complicated entanglements. Untwine also references the unraveling of Gloria’s life as she is being trafficked; it also intimates the crumbling marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Boyer. On another level, untwining is an attempt to deal with pain, with grief, with death: “One day, I will be able to draw myself as no longer a twin, as the dosa, the untwinned one. The untwined one. But not just yet” (italics in original text).130 Even as Giselle experiences death pangs, the memory of her twin, Isabelle, will remained forever etched on her memory/body. As Danticat fittingly reminds us, “We need our shadows, however haunting.”131 While “living dyingly,” Giselle refuses to give up the ghost, to surrender to life and death, for freedom is sought in life and in the afterlife. Bearing witness, an act of ghosting, to Black life and death challenges Black exclusion and erasure and Black death as normative, as ungrievable. Writing about death functions as an outlet for mourning and grieving; it also engenders a revival, an awakening. Even as death haunts, shadows, the Black subjects who “live dyingly,” they transcend this state of liminality, of precarity, as they make peace with both life/living and death/dying, arriving at a space of spiritual and subjective necro-transcendence.

Bibliography Agamben, G. State of Exception. Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 2005. Alexander, Simone A. James. African Diasporic Women Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014.

Ibid., 186. Ibid., 183. 128 Ibid., 189. 129 Ibid., 266. 130 Ibid., 270. 131 Danticat, Untwine, 40. 126 127

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat Bibby, Andrew. “Death and Democracy in American Realism.” In Death Representations in Literature: Forms and Theories, edited by Adriana Teodororescu, 138–56. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2010. Danticat, Edwidge. The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story. New York: Graywolf Press, 2017. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. London: Abacus, 1994. Danticat, Edwidge. Claire of the Sea Light. New York: Random House, 2014. Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Danticat, Edwidge. Untwine. New York: Scholastic Press, 2015. Douglas, Cristina. “Once upon a Time: Understanding Death during Childhood through Fairy Tales.” In Death Representations in Literature: Forms and Theories, edited by Adriana Teodororescu, 301–22. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Fernandez, Ingrid. “Necro-Transcendence/Necro-Naturalism: Philosophy of Life in the Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson.” In Death Representations in Literature: Forms and Theories, edited by Adriana Teodororescu, 117–37. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Kaczmarek, Agnieszka. “Writing in the Shadow of Death: Proust, Barthes, Tuszyńska.” In Death Representations in Literature: Forms and Theories, edited by Adriana Teodororescu, 24–34. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Kincaid, Jamaica. The Autobiography of a Mother. New York: Plume, 1996. Kincaid, Jamaica. My Brother. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. Kokorski, Karin. “Representations of Death in Fantastic Literature for Children.” In Death Representations in Literature: Forms and Theories, edited by Adriana Teodororescu, 340–58. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Kundu, Devaleena. “The Paradox of Mortality: Death and Perpetual Denial.” In Death Representations in Literature: Forms and Theories, edited by Adriana Teodororescu, 7–23. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Mbembé, Achille. “Necropolitics” Translated by L. Meintjes. Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. Mirabal, Nancy Raquel. “Dyasporic Appetites and Longings: An Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” Callaloo 30, no. 1 (2007): 26–39. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin, 1988. Morison, Toni. Sula. New York: Penguin, 1973. “My Other Half: Diana Evans on Losing Her Twin, Paula.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/ feb/06/fiction.features1#top. Accessed February 22, 2020. Sawyer, Miranda. “The Jean-Michel Basquiat I Knew ...” https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2017/sep/03/jean-michel-basquiat-retrospective-barbican. Accessed February 22, 2020. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Being and Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

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CHAPTER 7

LÒT BÒ DLO: PRODUCING HAITIAN SPACES OF DEATH AND DIASPORA IN DANTICAT’S THE DEW BREAKER

Anne Brüske

Death and diaspora are analogous and entangled states of being. This affirmation, a veritable leitmotif in Edwidge Danticat’s fictional and essayistic oeuvre, finds its literal confirmation and theoretical elaboration in the author’s latest collection of essays, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, in which she articulates her grief over her mother’s death with a reflection on the interconnectedness of death, diaspora, and the limits—and possibilities—of their literary representation: “In Haitian Creole, when someone is said to be lòt bò dlo, ‘on the other side of the water,’ it can either mean that they’ve traveled abroad or that they have died. My mother at forty was already lòt bò dlo, on the other side of the water.”1 Throughout Danticat’s work, death and diaspora are not only omnipresent on the textual surface as phenomena of absence, they are intricately connected to one another on the level of both storyline and discourse. Their interplay and entanglement are constitutive for the ethics and aesthetics of her texts. This is certainly true for Danticat’s novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013), where a series of interconnected deaths lies at the core of the story, for her memoir Brother, I’m Dying (2007), in which Danticat critically reflects upon her father’s and her uncle’s death, and for her manifesto as an immigrant writer, Create Dangerously (2010), which discusses the meaning of death and diaspora for Haitian diasporic writing.2 However, Danticat’s second short story cycle, The Dew Breaker (2004) presents one of the author’s most intriguing reflections on death and diaspora, linking them to the production of both literary and worldly space. The production of the entangled spaces of lòt bò dlo in this chef-d’oeuvre of US-Caribbean diaspora fiction will be at the center of my considerations.

The Dew Breaker between Haitian and US-Haitian Discourses The Dew Breaker (2004) occupies a special socio-spatial position in Haitian literary discourse. On the one hand, the text is one of the many literary negotiations by Haitian writers both in and outside Haiti that deal with the dictatorships of François and Jean-Claude Duvalier (1957– 71 and 1971–86, respectively) and their consequences for Haiti as an “imagined community.” On the other hand, published in the United States almost twenty years after the dechoukaj, the

Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death. Writing the Final Story (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017), 22. For a reflection on the strong interconnection between death and birth in Danticat’s writing, see Lucía Eugenia Stecher Guzmán, Narrativas migrantes del Caribe:  Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid y Edwidge Danticat (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2016), 145. 1 2

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ousting of Jean-Claude Duvalier, The Dew Breaker negotiates the experience of dictatorship and the de- and reterritorialization from a geographical, temporal, generational, and linguistic distance. Being one of the rare fictional texts written in English by a Haitian-American writer of “generation 1.5,” it thus (also) belongs to the US-American literary field.3 Due to its dual affiliation within transnational Haitian literature as well as US-American literature, The Dew Breaker occupies a special position in the literary field, which is reflected in the production of space by and within the text. The story cycle comprises a reflection on the Haitian imagined community as a transnational diasporic community between de- and reterritorialization from a specifically US-Haitian perspective, as it produces a kaleidoscope of Haitian spaces in Haiti and the United States. By consequence, The Dew Breaker offers a fictional portrait of the heterogeneous Haiti of the 2000s as an “imagined [transnational] community”4 and as a fragmented social space determined by the leitmotif of lòt bò dlo, where the “undead,” the homeless and “helpless victims,” and their perpetrators wander.5 Nevertheless, the The Dew Breaker goes further than creating fictional narrated spaces of Haiti on the story level and offering a space of representation to the voiceless “victims of the vagaries of [Haitian] history,” such as the transatlantic slave trade, the colonial era, and continuing political violence and instability.6 On the meta-literary level, The Dew Breaker discusses the legitimacy and the possibilities of diasporic writing by elaborating on the text’s spaces of narration, that is, the physical and mental places from which the text is narrated.7 It articulates the literary production of social space with a reflection on the meaning of language in the contexts of traumatic deand reterritorialization and dictatorship and on the limits—and possibilities—of the linguistic and literary representability of extreme (human) experience, thus touching ethical questions concerning the legitimation of literary writing. The motifs of death and diaspora are central to the spatial production and spatial semantics of the text, both for the elaboration of the narrated space(s) and for the space of narration. Following the leitmotif of lòt bò dlo, I will first retrace how The Dew Breaker produces Haiti as a transnational narrated space in the wake of death and diaspora. For this purpose, I will analyze two of the cycle’s most important short stories, “The Book of Miracles” and “Night Talkers,” which produce very different versions of Haitian space, an urban diaspora space and an “authentic” rural space in Haiti’s hinterland. Second, I will focus on the production of a Haitian space of narration that evolves particularly through the book’s intertextual dialogues. On “generation 1.5,” cf. Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Life on the Hyphen:  The Cuban-American Way (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1994), 4–5. For a biographical sketch of the author, cf. Martin Munro, “Inside Out:  A Brief Biography of Edwidge Danticat,” in Edwidge Danticat:  A Reader’s Guide, ed. Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). 4 I understand nation or national space in the sense of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities,” while I draw on a constructivist perspective for the definition of diaspora as an “imagined transnational community.” Cf. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 6th impr. (London: Verso, 2006); Martin Sökefeld, “Mobilizing in Transnational Space:  A Social Movement Approach to the Formation of Diaspora,” Global Networks 6, no. 3 (2006): 267–8. 5 J. Michael Dash, “Danticat and Her Haitian Precursors,” in Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, ed. Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 34–5. 6 Ibid., 35. Cf. also ibid., 33. Dash writes, “A space where the voices of the disempowered victims and their persecutors are allowed to speak.” 7 Cf. Seymour Benjamin Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 96; Russell West-Pavlov, Spaces of Fiction / Fictions of Space: Postcolonial Place and Literary DeiXis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 71. 3

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This space of narration, I  will argue, allows the author to develop and legitimate her own position as a diaspora writer and to overcome the symbolic “gap” between Haitian and US shores. Doing so, I will particularly draw on the intertextual dialogues between “Night Talkers” and Danticat’s essayistic work and with Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée (1944) and Dany Laferrière’s Pays sans chapeau (1996).8 In order to conceptualize the notions of a narrated space and a space of narration, I draw on Henri Lefebvre’s phenomenological model of space, complementing it with narratological approaches to fiction by Gérard Genette, and the paradigm of de- and reterritorialization as conceived by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.9 Lefebvre understands space as a continuous dialectical negotiation of “perceived space,” “conceived space,” and “lived space” (or “spatial practices,” “conceptions of space,” and “spaces of representation”).10 Adapting this model to fiction, I  contend that fictional spaces, in The Dew Breaker and in fiction in general, are equally produced by the interplay of these three dimensions in and by the text on both the discourse and the story level. While narrated space can be defined as the space that is produced by the actual interaction of the text and each of its readers, space of narration refers to the (often implicit) place from which the story is told and which might be representative of the artist’s lived experience or conception of space. In return, however, the literary text as a space of representation—composed of narrated spaces and spaces of narration—in its own right contributes to our, the readers’, production of ‘real’ extrafictional space and influences thusly our experience of the world.

“Presence in Absence”: On the Structural Analogy of Death and Diaspora Given the importance of forced and voluntary mobility in Haitian history, it is not surprising that Danticat’s writing links death and diaspora to the production of fictional spaces and to the protagonists’ evolution through these Haitian realms in the United States and in Haiti and thusly materializes these im/material, lived phenomena, rendering them perceptible. Most often, these fictional spaces are spaces of death and mourning, such as cemeteries,

For an inspiring and groundbreaking analysis of The Dew Breaker’s intertextual echos as a “poetics of reverberation,” cf. Nadège Tanite Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat:  The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 2018), 114–37. 9 Cf. Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, 4th ed. (1974; Paris: Anthropos, 2000); Gérard Genette, “Discours du récit,” in Figures (Paris: Seuil, 1972); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit, 1980). For a more detailed explanation of the adaptation of Lefebvre’s spatial model to post/colonial Caribbean diaspora literature, cf. Anne Brüske, “Spatial Theory, Post/Colonial Perspectives, and Fiction:  Reading Hispano-Caribbean Diaspora Literature in the US with Henri Lefebvre,” in Perspectives on Henri Lefebvre:  Theory, Practices and (Re) Readings, ed. Jenny Bauer and Robert Fischer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 182–88. 10 Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, 42–3, 49; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (repr., Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 33, 39. In La production de l’espace, Lefebvre insists on the lived experience of space (“espace vécu”) its users make, but also points to the fact that espace vécu (lived space) is experienced through symbols and to the role imagination plays in this process. Following his lead, I understand lived space here as the immediate lived experience of space in fiction, for instance, a character experiences as well as lived experiences of space in the past and spatial imaginations both on the level of story and discourse, narration, narrators, and characters. Conceived space corresponds to the dimension of spatial concepts whereas perceived space points to social practices in and concerning space. 8

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mausoleums, or deadly waters, but some are also spaces of everyday life, such as the houses and homesteads of the protagonists. These spatial productions focus particularly on the negotiation of a paradoxical emptiness: the void created by the death of a beloved human being. Upon death, the deceased person, as a negotiation of body and soul, becomes irreversibly absent, while his or her corpse remains physically present. Thomas Macho has captured this paradox in the concise formula of “presence in absence,” which represents two sides of the same coin.11 Just like the corpse remains present in the instant of death while the person as a phenomenon becomes absent, later on, despite his or her death, the dead person lives on in absentia, namely in the memory of others, while his or her body is given to decay.12 Absence also plays a central role for the phenomenon of diaspora, understood both as physical dispersion from a homeland and a subjective state of consciousness:13 from the perspective of geographically scattered people, the absence of their mythical, imagined, or actually experienced homeland, and their longing for it, exerts a cohesive force, creating a sense of community. This absence, lived as a negative experience of deterritorialization, of separation from one’s ‘original’ territory and one’s culture, often goes hand in hand with collective “myths of return.” The country of origin may be unreachable, but it continues to thrive in the form of a “desire for a homeland”14 in the collective memory and imagination of diasporic communities. By contrast, from the reverse perspective of those remaining in the country of origin, those who have left are missing, although still present in memory and through various channels of communication. They too are present in absence. In Haitian cultural thought, death and diaspora not only share a common linguistic signifier, lòt bò dlo (“on the other side of the water”), but are also intricately linked through the oral traditions of Vodou and Haitian folklore. These oral traditions constitute important sources of inspiration for Danticat, which she interweaves into her own fictional worlds.15 Vodou and, more generally, Haitian folklore transform the spatial-material, conceptual, and lived experience of historical de- and reterritorialization—the experience of uprooting, arrival, and adjustment of the enslaved Africans to the context of Caribbean colonialism and slavery— into a culturally specific religious space of representation, with its own spatial imagination and spatial symbolism.16 Like many religious systems of thought, Afro-Caribbean Vodou as a space of representation metaphorizes death as a journey of the soul, the gwo bon anj, to the land of

Thomas Macho, “Tod und Trauer im kulturwissenschaftlichen Vergleich,” in Der Tod als Thema der Kulturtheorie:  Todesbilder und Totenriten im alten Ägypten, ed. Jan Assmann and Thomas Macho (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 99. 12 Ibid., 99–100. 13 Cf. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (1997; repr., London: Routledge, 1998), 16, 197. 14 Brah writes, “Where is home? On the one hand, ‘home’ is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination. In this sense it is a place of no return, even if it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as the place of ‘origin.’ On the other hand, home is also the lived experience of a locality.” Ibid., 192. 15 Cf. also Edwidge Danticat, “Daughters of Memory,” in Create Dangerously:  The Immigrant Artist at Work, ed. Edwidge Danticat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 68. Here, the author writes, “My first little stories filled with my self-created folklore—my fake-lore—my hybrid and métisse warm-weather daffodils.” For an analysis of “folklore” as rewriting in Breath Eyes Memory and Krik? Krak!, see Marie-José N’Zengou-Tayo, “Rewriting Folklore: Traditional Beliefs and Popular Culture in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!” MaComère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars 3 (2000). 16 Cf. Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, 49; The Production of Space, 39. Although Nicholson Smith suggests “representational spaces” as a translation for “espaces de représentation,” I consciously refer to the more accurate term “spaces of representation.” 11

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the ancestors, situated on the other side of the Atlantic, lòt bò dlo, and ultimately as a return to the world of the living in another gestalt.17 In the same vein, not only the sea but also sweet water is conceived of as a mystic space of transition where the departed souls are believed to rest for a year and a day until they can reemerge and the spirits can be reborn, this belief generating various rituals connected to water.18 The common linguistic signifier of death and diaspora emphasizes the spatial dimension of both states of being. On a spiritual level, it evokes the historical deterritorialization of the enslaved African ancestors and their imagined space, Ginen, as a space of death. By returning to lòt bò dlo, they reverse the Middle Passage and the deterritorialization of the Afro-Caribbean population on a symbolic level. From a contemporary Haitian perspective, though, lòt bò dlo also refers to the contemporary (double or deterritorialized) diaspora in geographical space, for example, in Canada or in the United States.19 Hence, lòt bò dlo as a cultural conception of space not only comprehends death as a de- and reterritorializing movement from the world of the living to imagined places, but it also equates the state of diasporization with a first (social) death and the place of reterritorialization with a space of death, the water representing a contact zone or a transitional space between the both material and symbolic shores. Those who leave Haiti die socially as they leave behind their former homeland, while they also suffer spiritual death through their physical and social deterritorialization, which may translate a sentiment of uprootedness and disorientation in their new country of residence. This analogy between death and diaspora, already palpable in Danticat’s explanations of the term lòt bò dlo, literally permeates The Dew Breaker, where Danticat uses traditional Haitian cultural thought to contemplate the relationship between death, diaspora, and dictatorship, on both a fictional and a metafictional level. The structure of “presence in absence” and its translation into fictional spaces then constitute the short story cycle’s underlying structure.

Many cultures imagine and metaphorize death as a journey to new realms or to the land of the deceased’s ancestors. Cf. Macho, “Tod und Trauer,” 116. In Haitian Vodou thought, death is considered a stage in the cycle of life, death, and birth and is interpreted as a possible door to a higher state of consciousness for the disembodied soul. Cf. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Claudine Michel, “Danbala / Ayida as Cosmic Prism:  The Lwa as Trope for Understanding Metaphysics in Haitian Vodou and Beyond,” Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 4 (2013): 468. 18 In an essay in the New Yorker on the occasion of the first anniversary of the 2010 earthquake, Danticat elaborates on the important mortuary ritual “ouete dan ba dlo”: 17

In the Haitian vodou tradition, it is believed by some that the souls of the newly dead slip into rivers and streams and remain there, under the water, for a year and a day. Then, lured by ritual prayer and song, the souls emerge from the water and the spirits are reborn. These reincarnated spirits go on to occupy trees, and, if you listen closely, you may hear their hushed whispers in the wind. The spirits can also hover over mountain ranges, or in grottoes, or caves, where familiar voices echo our own when we call out their names. The yearand-a-day commemoration is seen, in families that believe in it and practice it, as a tremendous obligation, an honorable duty, in part because it assures a transcendental continuity of the kind that has kept us Haitians, no matter where we live, linked to our ancestors for generations. (Edwidge Danticat, “A Year and a Day,” The New Yorker, January 17, 2011) Cf. also Myriam Moïse, “Vodou Symbolism and ‘Poto Mitan’ Women in Edwidge Danticat’s Work,” in Vodou in Haitian Memory:  The Idea and Representation of Vodou in Haitian Imagination, ed. Celucien L. Joseph and Nixon S. Cléophat (New York: Lexington Books, 2016). 19 Cf. Stuart Hall, “Negotiating Caribbean Identities,” in New Caribbean Thought: A Reader, ed. Brian Meeks and Folke Lindahl (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2001), 28; Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (1997; London: Routledge, 2008), 124.

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Lòt bò dlo: Narrated Spaces of Death and Diaspora By its achrononlogical, multilocal, and multiperspective structure, The Dew Breaker, which consists of nine loosely connected stories that are situated between the late 1960s and the early 2000s in post-Duvalier Haiti, New York, and Florida, produces a wide variety of narrated spaces and, consequently, a truly polyphonic discourse of space. Due to the permanent change of time, place, characters, and narrators, none of the narrated spaces can be considered a part of a dominant meta-narrative of space. Two of the short stories in which death and its spaces are omnipresent, however, allow for a deeper understanding of the interconnection between the cycle’s underlying structure of the lòt bò dlo and its spatial production: “The Book of Miracles” and “Night Talkers” are located at the heart of the short story cycle. Both are set at the turn of the millennium, yet they create very different spaces. Whereas “The Book of Miracles” presents the urban landscape of New York City with skyscrapers, heavy traffic, encircled public cemeteries, Christmas lights, and a church in Brooklyn full of attendees, the plot of “Night Talkers” is situated in the Haitian hinterland, that is, “behind the mountains,” on the periphery of the periphery of the periphery.20 Moreover, “The Book of Miracles” and “Night Talkers” elaborate two individual productions of space from the point of view of their respective protagonists. They relate the question of the protagonists’ individual spatial production to reflections on the consequences that dictatorship entails for human communication while the internal focalization on the respective protagonists emphasizes their subjective “worldsense”21 and perception of space. Anne and Dany—and thus their spatial production—differ, however, not only in terms of their geographical location but also with regard to their divergent positions within the diasporic post-Duvalier society. Whereas “The Book of Miracles” stages the internal view of the wife of a former Tonton Macoute who now lives in Brooklyn, in “Night Talkers” the readers follow the steps and thoughts of a Haitian migrant whose parents were murdered by the same Dew Breaker22 decades ago and who returns for the first time to the village of his ancestors. “The Book of Miracles” depicts the voyage of a family of Haitian migrants from New York to their Brooklyn Christmas Mass on Christmas Eve and the inner turmoil that the family experiences during the ceremony when the daughter believes herself to have recognized Emmanuel Constant, a Haitian paramilitary and human rights criminal. Through the perspective of Anne, a middle-aged wife and mother of the family, who fears that the community might identify her own husband as a former torturer, the short story reflects on the complex sense of space that diasporic communities may develop in the face of de- and reterritorialization and of political violence. The short story consists of three parts:  the family’s car ride through the nocturnal urban landscape of Brooklyn, with its cemetery and its Christmas decorations, to St. Thérèse of Lisieux Cathedral,23 the Christmas Mass, and the farewell scene in front of the

Cf. the title of Danticat’s young adult novel: Behind the Mountains (New York: Orchard Books, 2002). Oyèrónké Oyêwùmí, “Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects,” in African Gender Studies: A Reader, ed. Oyèrónké Oyêwùmí (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 4. 22 “Dew breaker,” choukèt lawoz in Haitian Creole, stands for Duvalier’s militia men, as one of Danticat’s characters explains in the short story “The Bridal Seamstress”: “We called them chouket lawoze … They’d break into your house. Mostly it was at night. But often they’d also come before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves, and they’d take you away.” Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (2004; New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 131. 23 Ibid., 69–75. 20 21

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Cathedral.24 The first part stages Anne’s outer journey through Brooklyn’s urban space and through the nocturnal cemetery, which, at the same time, represents an inner journey back to her childhood in Haiti and into her spiritual imagination. Through this double journey, the short story produces a complex interplay of different spatial dimensions and (social) spaces from Anne’s perspective, which, despite its uniqueness, can be regarded as exemplary for the spatial production and location of a Haitian diaspora population between de- and reterritorialization. Moreover, by translating the proximity of life and death into the cemetery, the short story underlines the copresence of the living and the dead, those left behind in Haiti and the deterritorialized. At the beginning of the story, which depicts the family’s ride to the cathedral, the narrative alternates between the flowing passage of vehicles along Jackie Robinson Drive, a heavily trafficked thoroughfare crossing the cemetery, and the sluggish traffic in Brooklyn’s city center, giving the movement of the characters a special dynamic.25 Their cartographically precise movement in space contrasts with the family’s flow of conversation and with Anne’s perception of time and space. During the rapid passage through the cemetery, whose gravestones shine in the evening light, Anne closes her eyes and stops talking about the latest Christian miracles until her daughter liberates her from her torpor by uttering the words “We’ve passed the cemetery.”26 In Brooklyn’s almost static traffic, Anne has no trouble resuming the conversation, returning from her “presence in absence,” during which her consciousness (or her shadow, lonbraj) was in one world and her body in another.27 By narrating the physical actions and perceptions in space as well as Anne’s spatial imaginations and her reflections on urban planning, that is, on spatial politics, the text produces a variant of a Haitian diaspora space from the perspective of Anne. At the same time, it discloses the processuality of this spatial production, which I read as a negotiation between the three dimensions of the perceived, the conceived, and the lived/imagined space. Before closing her eyes as she turns onto the thoroughfare that crosses the cemetery and plunging into inner and outer darkness, Anne takes a final look at the brightly illuminated buildings of the city: Anne got one last look at the surrounding buildings, which were lit more brightly than usual, with Christmas trees, Chanukah and Kwanzaa candles in most of the windows. She tried to keep these visions in her mind, of illuminated pines, electric candles, and giant cardboard Santas, as the car merged into the curvy, narrow lane.28 The material space of the cemetery (espace perçu) evokes in Anne the painful memory of her baby brother drowning in Haiti during one of her epileptic seizures.29 As she crosses the Ibid., 84, 85–6. For a complementary interpretation of this short story, cf. Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, “Danticat and the African American Women’s Literary Tradition,” in Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, ed. Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 65–6. 25 Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 70–5. 26 Ibid., 72. 27 Cf. Jean-Charles, “Danticat and the African American Women’s Literary Tradition,” 65–6. 28 Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 70. 29 This becomes evident in the final short story of the cycle, “The Dew Breaker,” where Anne and her stepbrother reflect on the circumstances of their younger brother’s drowning. Cf. Ibid., 215, 20. Anne’s epileptic condition, in Vodou thought often considered to indicate a special connection with the divine, also constitutes an intertextual reference to Jacques-Stephen Alexis’ novel Compère Général Soleil, in which the protagonist 24

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cemetery, Anne experiences the moment of her brother’s death in flashbacks as if she herself were drowning, imagining her brother sinking into a strange “world of starfishes, sea turtles, weeds, and sharks,” reminiscent of the undersea world and wet graves of the African slaves drowned during the Middle Passage.30 Another layer of imaginary space emerges in Anne’s consciousness. This imaginary space superimposes itself upon the actual images of her brother’s disappearance and complements them with Anne’s subjective and physically lived world of imagination, that of the subsequent errance of her little brother, who, as one of the undead, as a border-crosser, wanders the earth in search of his grave: Every time she passed a cemetery, Anne held her breath. When she was a girl, Anne had gone swimming with her three-year-old brother on a beach in Grand Goave, and he had disappeared beneath the waves. Ever since then, she’d convinced herself that her brother was walking the earth looking for his grave. Whenever she went by a cemetery, any cemetery, she imagined him there, his tiny wet body bent over the tombstones, his ash-colored eyes surveying the letters, trying to find his name.31 In Anne’s consciousness, the primary place of her individual, and subsequently the story’s, spatial production, the sight of the ‘real’ cemetery becomes entangled with the remembered and imagined spaces of death—the sea and the imagined cemetery—and evokes a strong feeling of panic in the protagonist (“her heart raced”).32 The images of the lived experiences of the past are superimposed upon the cemetery in Brooklyn so that the cemetery of the short story’s present turns into the actually experienced space of death in the Haiti of the past. Hence, Anne’s subjectively produced space emerges as a relational space born out of the negotiation between Brooklyn and Léogâne as well as between the present, the past, and an atemporal imagination. Anne links this dialectical negotiation of the dimensions of the ‘real’, the lived, and the imagined with a more general reflection on the conceptual relationship between the world of the living and the dead. Thus, she poses the following (rhetorical) question: “Who would put a busy thoroughfare in the middle of a cemetery … forcing the living and their noisy cars to always be trespassing on the dead?”33 This question is followed immediately by her personal answer: It didn’t make sense, but maybe the parkway’s architects had been thinking beyond the daily needs of the living. Did they wonder if the dead might enjoy hearing sounds of life going on at high speed around them? If this were so, then why should the living be spared the dead’s own signs of existence: of the shadows swaying in the breeze, of the laughter and cries of lost children, of the whispers of lovers, muffled as though in dreams.34

Hilarion also suffers from this disease, and to Danticat’s short story “The Children of the Sea,” in Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak! (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 3–29. 30 Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 71. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 72.

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Anne’s interpretation of the concepts of the urban planners reverses a ‘western’ perspective that privileges the viewpoint of the living and seeks to exclude death.35 On the contrary, it focuses on the dead to which she concedes a presence of their own and, most importantly, agency:  “why should the living be spared the dead’s own sign of existence?”36 This radical change in perspective not only problematizes the hierarchy between the dead and the living but also foregrounds the fact that the two worlds are interdependent as well as the need to pay tribute to the dead’s omnipresence in their absence. Ironically, Anne’s reflections suggest that the New York urbanists’ thoroughfare through the cemetery reestablishes a lost equilibrium between the dead and the living. For a small moment, the time of the crossing, it reestablishes an atemporal spatial contiguity and cohabitation of the living and the dead, opening a passage to lòt bò dlo, the realm of the spirits. The movement of crossing reminds of lwa Legba, the guardian of crossroads who creates a channel from the world of the living to the realm of the spirits at the beginning of each Vodou ceremony. Even more, it alludes to the frightful lwa Bawon Samdi, head of the Gede family, who as the guardian of cemeteries controls the passage between life and death, menacing to intrude into Anne’s life.37 Anne’s conception of the cohabitation between the living and the dead corresponds to Haitian cultural tradition, which comprises complex mortuary rites, a culture of commemoration with “elaborate mausoleums … in our backyards,”38 and a strong belief that the dead return as ancestral spirits. The imagined space of the drowned child looking in vain for his grave imposes itself upon Anne’s consciousness via the material presence of the Brooklyn cemetery. The undead and unburied brother gains presence as a “haunting legacy.”39 This imagined space of the search for the grave draws on the Vodou conception of the zombi astral, a deceased being without a grave, who is caught in a transitional zone between life and ‘real’ death, represented here by the water, and cannot return to the land of the ancestors:40 “Technically [her brother] was not sleeping, but he’d never been buried, so his spirit was somewhere out there, wandering, searching, and if he were chosen to go up to Heaven, maybe the Holy Mother would keep him there.”41 However, the figure of the absent little brother not only represents a painful individual

Jan Assmann, Tod und Jenseits im Alten Ägypten (München: Beck, 2001), 17, note 29. For a reflection on the exclusion of death in European civilizations, cf. Jean Baudrillard, L’échange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); Jean Ziegler, Die Lebenden und der Tod (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1977). 36 Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 72. 37 Cf. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo. 2nd ed. (2003; New  York:  New  York University Press, 2011), 125–6, 128–9. 38 Edwidge Danticat, “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work,” in Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, ed. Edwidge Danticat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 17. 39 Cf. Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies:  Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2010). 40 In his ethnography Le vaudou haïtien (1958), Alfred Métraux mentions the belief in wandering souls:  “Près des cimetières et dans les endroits solitaires on s’expose à rencontrer des zombi (il ne faut pas les confondre avec les zombi de chair et d’os): ce sont les âmes errantes de ceux qui, ayant péri à la suite d’un accident, sont condamnés à rester sur terre le temps que Dieu leur avait assigné à vivre.” Alfred Métraux, Le vaudou haïtien (1958; Paris: Gallimard, 2015), 229. The protagonist’s younger brother corresponds to a zombi astral, a soul bereaved of its body without the proper separation rituals. Cf. also Gudrun Rath, “Zombi Narratives:  Transatlantic Circulations,” in Reshaping Glocal Dynamics of the Caribbean: Relaciones y Desconexiones—Relations et Déconnections—Relations and Disonnections, ed. Anja Bandau, Anne Brüske, and Natascha Ueckmann (Heidelberg: heiUP, 2018), 397. 41 Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 77. 35

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fate; as a metonymy for the Haitian collective, it points to the Haitian diaspora, which is trapped between the past on the island and a future in the diaspora, lòt bò dlo, in a movement of effective deterritorialization and impossible reterritorialization. The Haitian diaspora, disrupted from the homeland and from the ancestors and unable to make itself at home in the US context because of the unsevered, ghostly relation to Haiti, finds itself in a floating state of limbo between the two shores. The little boy’s sister Anne, now living in Brooklyn, is also bound to Haiti by his death: As she relives the accident that drowns her brother, she is neither present in the car nor for the conversation that her family is having. Anne’s mind takes her to Haiti, and as she recognizes that a part of her also died right along with her brother, we come to understand how an element of her spirit/shadow will always remain on the island.42 The short story postulates a clear spatial and conceptual separation between the dead and the living in the ‘western’ US-American sphere. The disturbance of the peace of the dead by the noisy street and the intrusion of death into the space of the living coincide with Anne’s individual experience and Haiti’s collective experience of a culturally and historically compelled copresence of the living and the deceased. The urban space of The Dew Breaker, a space mostly depicted as alienating and hostile to the short story cycle’s migrant or diasporic protagonists, does not favor a peaceful copresence of the living and the death in everyday life. The brutal intrusion of death into everyday space alludes to the trauma of dictatorship, which, in addition to poverty as a deterritorializing push factor, caused the Haitian exodus to mainly the United States and Québec between 1960 and 1990.43 For Anne’s general reflections on the copresence of life and death can also be read as an allegory for the coexistence of “hunter” and “prey,” perpetrators and victims, in Haiti and in the diaspora. These determine the same questions of good and evil, “forgiveness and regret,” and a “kinship of shame and guilt,”44 which point to a legacy of transgenerational trauma.45 Although Anne is certainly not an identifier for readers from the Global North, her almost naive projections onto New York’s urban planning correspond to the poetics of Danticat, as fictionalized in “The Book of the Dead” and elaborated in “Create Dangerously.” Just as the cemetery becomes a (compelled) place of coexistence of the living and the dead and thusly exhibits their relationality, according to Danticat, literature serves as a mausoleum, as a place of encounter between the living and the dead. Here, the narrated lived space of the protagonist— the cemetery as a place of encounter and the diaspora as space of death—and the metafictional space of representation—literature as a mausoleum and “memorial art”—coincide.46

Jean-Charles, “Danticat and the African American Women’s Literary Tradition,” 65. For an analysis of the Haitian exodus to the United States and the consequences of Haitian transnationalism for US-Haitian relations, cf. Nina Glick Schiller, “The Implications of Haitian Transnationalism for U.S.-Haiti Relations. Contradictions of the Deterritorialized Nation-State,” Journal of Haitian Studies 1, no.  1 (1995). See also Cédric Audebert, La diaspora haïtienne: Territoires migratoires et réseaux (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012), chap. 7, paras 24–47. 44 Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 81. 45 Cf. Schwab, Haunting Legacies. 46 In “Create Dangerously,” Danticat conceives of literature as “memorial art,” comparing the writer to the ancient Egyptian sculptor, who 42 43

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The short story “Night Talkers” echoes “The Book of Miracles” as an answer to the themes of a Haitian diaspora space as a space of death and of the associated problem of silence and speechlessness.47 Already the title, “Night Talkers,” points to this: palannits, “people who wet their beds, not with urine but with words,”48 are people who, in contrast to the character of Anne, pronounce the unpronounceable and the suppressed. While “The Book of Miracles” exhibited the space of the urban diaspora as that of an intended artificial separation between the living and the dead, “Night Talkers” sketches a rural counter space of the social inclusion of death into community life. Similar to “The Book of Miracles,” “Night Talkers” begins with a journey, but not a car ride through a cold nighttime Brooklyn, rather an arduous hike through the glistening hinterland of the Haitian coastal town of Léogâne. Dany, who lives in the United States, travels there to visit his old aunt. He thinks he has recognized in his landlord in Brooklyn the Tonton Macoute who once murdered his parents and robbed his aunt of her sight. Yet, the aunt eludes serious conversation and finally chooses silence over talk as a strategy for reconciliation: “M pa konnen” (“je ne sais pas”).49 Two spatial aspects stand out in this short story: the description of the village Beau Jour, which, as a socially intact rural area, contrasts with inhospitable nature and socially deficient urban civilizations (be they Port-au-Prince or New York), and the spatial and social proximity of the living and the dead, which is reflected in the family mausoleum and in the detailed was described as “one who keeps things alive.” Before pictures were drawn and amulets were carved for ancient Egyptians tombs, wealthy men and women had their slaves buried with them to keep them company in the next life. The artists who came up with these other types of memorial art, the art that could replace the dead bodies, may also have wanted to save lives. In the face of both external and internal destruction, we are still trying to create as dangerously as they, as though each piece of art were a stand-in for a life, a soul, a future. As the ancient Egyptian sculptors may have suspected, and as Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin surely must have believed, we have no other choice. (Edwidge Danticat, “Create Dangerously,” 20) Literature can thus be considered a space of remembrance, a textual mausoleum of the death, which gives the dead and the departed virtual presence (and thus a form of life) while they are physically absent. 47 Anne’s voicelessness and silence continues throughout the second and third parts of the story. She remains unable to explain the veritable miracle to her daughter, namely her husband the former torturer’s redemption and conversion to a quiet peaceful person. Cf. Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 72. As a “complex political victim” and an involuntary confident, Anne feels “shame and guilt” and holds herself coresponsible for her husband’s unatoned for past as a political murderer. Cf. Sarah G. Waisvisz, “Remembering Perpetrators: The Kunstlerroman and Second-Generation Witnessing in Edwidge Danticat’s ‘The Dew Breaker’,” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights, ed. Sophia A. McClennan and Alexandra Schultheis Moore (London: Routledge, 2016), 94. At the same time, she dreads the moment in which her husband’s cover as a simple migrant from the Haitian mountains might be lifted: Still, every morning and evening as her eyes wandered to the flyer on the lamppost …, Anne had to fight a strong desire to pull it down, not out of sympathy for Constant but out of a fear that even though her husband’s prison “work” and Constant’s offenses were separated by thirty-plus years, she might arrive at her store one morning to find her husband’s likeness on the lamppost rather than Constant’s. (Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 80) The reflection and concentration of personal and individual guilt in the character of Anne gives the question of conviviality in a post-dictatorial society a universal dimension. 48 Ibid., 98. Cf. Rebecca Fuchs, Caribbeanness as a Global Phenomenon: Junot Díaz, Edwidge Danticat, and Cristina García (Trier: WVT, 2014), 129–30. 49 Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 109. On silence as a survival strategy in the Haitian tradition, cf. Yveline Alexis, “Mwen Pas Connait as Resistance: Haitians’ Silence against a Violent State,” Journal of Haitian Studies 21, no.  2 (2015). On the motif of silence in literature written by Haitian women, cf. Myriam J. A. Chancy, Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997).

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description of the village mortuary rituals. The short story begins with an internal view of the main character Dany:50 “He thought that the mountain would kill him, that he would never see the other side.”51 Despite its enchanting colors (“sapphire sky, the craggy hills”), Dany experiences nature in its glaring heat as a life-threatening space.52 This portrait of a hostile nature is nuanced by the solidarity of the people Dany meets within the archaic and materially poor but intact village community. After all, the narrative depicts the village Beau Jour as a paradisiac place with a waterfall in which the village women bathe and with gardens in which lush plants provide a subsistence economy:53 “Estina Estème lived in a valley between two limegreen mountains and a giant waterfall, which sprayed a fine mist over the banana grove that surrounded her one-room house and the teal ten-place mausoleum that harbored the bones of many of her forebears.”54 By evoking this peaceful idyll, the text produces a heterotopy55 of the preceding short story’s urban space of New York. This portrait also emphasizes the significant social and material space the community dedicates to their dead: “a ten-place mausoleum”— as compared to the aunt’s modest hut, “her one-room house.” In contrast to the cemetery in Brooklyn, which is sharply delineated from the world of the living, in Beau Jour, the dead have their own subspace in the bosom of the community. The mausoleum fits perfectly into the aunt’s miserable garden: “a flock of hens and roosters … seeking shelter on top of the family mausoleum.”56 Furthermore, this natural copresence of the living and the dead also becomes visible in the burial rituals and in the villagers’ belief in the circular journey of the souls, the gwo bon anj, who travel to the imagined space of Ginen and back to the world of the living. On the story level, the unexpected death of Dany’s aunt Estina forms an internal turning point. The second part of the story focuses on Dany’s apathetic disease-like state and his mourning,57 the archaic mortuary rituals of the village community and Dany’s decision to renounce his intent to take revenge. He finally befriends Claude, a young Haitian American parricide who has recently been deported from the United States to the land of his ancestors and has been taken in by his kin in Beau Jour. If Dany shares with Claude the experience of death and of guilt, though respectively from a victim’s and a perpetrator’s point of view, the two of them have another communality. As “palannits,” both of them have the talent of communicating their nightmares, of breaking the silence: The only thing Dany could think to do for his aunt now was to keep Claude speaking, which wouldn’t be so hard, since Claude was already one of them, a member of their tribe. Claude was a palannit, a night talker, one of those who spoke their nightmares out

Cf. Edwidge Danticat, “A Taste of Coffee,” Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters 1, no. 2 (2001): 39. Cf. Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 87. 52 “Here on top of a mountain, deep in the Haitian countryside, where the closest village seemed like a grain of sand in the valley below?” Ibid. 53 Ibid., 100. 54 Ibid., 93. 55 On the notion of heterotopy, cf. Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, 189–90, 422–3; Michel Foucault, “Von anderen Räumen (1967),” in Raumtheorien: Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Jörg Dünne and Stephan Günzel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006). 56 Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 93. 57 Dany, deterritorialized from Haiti and partially reterritorialized in the United States, develops an ethnographer’s perspective on the space of the Haitian hinterland, with its mortuary rituals that are supposed to prepare the dead for the journey to Ginen and back and give the bereaved space for their mourning. 50 51

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loud to themselves. Except Claude was even luckier than he realized, for he was able to speak his nightmares to himself as well as to others, in the nighttime as well as in the hours past dawn, when the moon had completely vanished from the sky.58 In contrast to the strict separation of the dead and the living in US-American New York, the idyllic space of Beau Jour unites the living and the dead on a material and a conceptual level. The integrative power and the solidarity of the traditional village community “behind the mountains” also enable Haitians living in Haiti and lòt bò dlo to reunite and ultimately to heal. However, “Night Talkers” produces a highly idealized depiction of rural Haiti, drawing upon visual representations found in Haitian primitivism and reminding one of the literary tradition of indigenism as manifest in Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée (1944). This also bleeds through in the precise descriptions of the villagers’ mortuary rituals, which are strongly reminiscent of Alfred Métraux’s observations on Vodou mortuary cult in his ethnography Le vaudou haitïen (1958).59 To be sure, even in the short story’s idealized world, the phenomena of death and diaspora, that is, of presence in absence, cannot be fully suspended, neither by the imagined journey of the souls to Ginen nor by the return of the diaspora population.60 Nevertheless, Dany finds consolation in participating in his aunt’s preparation for her voyage to the symbolic lòt bò dlo of the dead and the spirits. With regard to lòt bò dlo in the sense of diaspora, however, through its protagonists, “Night Talkers” reverses the common Haitian perspective. Not the United States, but Haiti now occurs as lòt bò dlo from the point of view of Dany and Claude, who have become strangers to their ancestral homeland. Yet, as in “The Book of Miracles,” breaking the silence appears to be the key to finding an adequate form of commemoration of these hidden, unacknowledged, and always painful presences. This becomes possible in the tranquil seclusion of the Haitian countryside, not in the hectic und spiritually polluted spaces of the metropolis, in the conversation between the two “palannits”— “night talkers”—Claude and Dany. Finally, whereas in “Night Talkers” Haitian rural space is portrayed as authentic and memorial, almost as a utopia of solidarity, in which material nature appears as a dyad of both threat and a source of life, in the urban space of “The Book of Miracles,” the urban landscape of New York City, with its streets, lights, and its cemetery, becomes a second instance of nature and a place of reflection.61 This urban nature is, however, a mostly hostile and dangerous one in which the enemy might even appear during Christmas Mass, in your own house, or on the street. However different these fragments of narrated spaces from the “The Book of Miracles” and “Night Talkers” may appear, in both of them the structural analogy of diaspora and death unfolds. While in “Book of Miracles” the space of the diaspora evolves from the text as a Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 120. Vgl. Métraux, Le vaudou haïtien, 216–35. 60 For a reflection on Haitian primitivism and its function as a discourse of alterity, cf. Carlo Célius, “Art et anthropologie:  Perspectives à partir d’Haïti,” in Reshaping Glocal Dynamics of the Caribbean:  Relaciones y Desconexiones—Relations et Déconnections—Relations and Disonnections, ed. Anja Bandau, Anne Brüske, and Natascha Ueckmann (Heidelberg: heiUP, 2018). 61 Cf. hereto Dash, “Danticat and Her Haitian Precursors,” 27; Carine M. Mardorossian, Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 133. “The novel not only activates the idea of a redemptive periphery against the present dystopia of the United States, but also uses a monolithic racial solidarity to subvert the nation state in both its Haitian and American manifestations.” Dash, “Danticat and Her Haitian Precursors,” 27. 58 59

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space haunted by the dead of the past, the space of rural Haiti in “Night Talkers” emerges as a space of cohabitation and reconciliation of the living and the deceased. Despite the differences with regard to their protagonists’ perception of the Duvalier era—a clear victim perspective of Dany and the more complex perspective of the victim and involuntary accomplice Anne— both subspaces are haunted by similar problems: living together in the wake of dictatorship, poverty, and exploitation of Haitian immigrants in the United States.

Spaces of Narration and Intertextual Dialogues in “Night Talkers” As the analysis of the two short stories suggests, the double semantics of death and diaspora are fundamental to the narrated spaces in The Dew Breaker. In return, cemeteries and mausoleums materialize the ghostly voids and presences in absence, as they stand for a deterritorialized, fragmented Haitian space that is characterized by experiences of loss and death and by the tension between silence and speech. Apart from this overlay of spatial semantics and concrete spatial elements, also intra- and intertextual dialogues that resonate within the story cycle and with other texts play an essential role in shaping this narrated Haitian space, as well as in configuring the space(s) of narration of Danticat’s fiction, that is, the place(s) from which Danticat and her narrator-characters speak.62 This double spatial production, both as a narrated space and a space of narration, to which intertextual references to other fictional or factual spaces contribute primordially, is central to “Night Talkers.” For it is by means of the production of narrated spaces and of a specific space of narration that the short story negotiates the (self-)location of the “immigrant writer” and his or her literature in a literary tradition. The story’s space of narration becomes visible as such through the intertexts of the short story. On a meta-literary level, the text can thus be understood as an implicit negotiation of the place, the task, and the legitimacy of the “immigrant artist,” that is, the function of Haitian literature created in and by the diaspora and the possibilities of literary representation. If the representation of death constitutes a limit of literary representation as Danticat suggests in The Art of Death, in The Dew Breaker narrated spaces of death open a path to a self-positioning of the “immigrant artist” between de- and reterritorialization through her own space of narration. By establishing intertextual dialogues with different types of texts, “Night Talkers” as a text breaks the silence on an aesthetic level, just as its protagonists do so on the story level, searching for alternative forms of literary speech, of representation of death and diaspora. Its most salient intertexts belong to two categories. On the one hand, the short story refers to two Haitian texts that prominently deal with both the decay of Haiti, the idea of death, and the return to Haiti: Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée (1944), one of the central foundational fictions written in the aftermath of the US occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), and Dany Laferrière’s postmodern novel Pays sans chapeau (1996), published in Montréal.63 According to Julia Kristeva, I understand “intertextuality” here as a dialogue between texts, which produces new texts. Those newly produced texts, as a “mosaïque de citations,” bear out an ambivalence in meaning. An intertext, then, is a particular text that is in dialogue with another particular text. Cf. Julia Kristeva, “Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman,” Critique : Revue générale des publications francaises et étrangères XXIII, no. 239 (1967): 440–1. A paratext is a text that accompanies and frames a more predominant text, for instance, the title of a book, a preface or afterword, etc. Cf. Gérard Genette, Seuils, Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1987). 63 Cf., e.g., Dash, “Danticat and Her Haitian Precursors,” 27, 32–3, 34. 62

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Danticat’s, Roumain’s, and Laferrière’s texts then form an intertextual triangle in which “Night Talkers” cites elements from Pays sans chapeau, whereas both “Night Talkers” and Pays sans chapeau use Gouverneurs de la rosée as an important point of reference. On the other hand, “Night Talkers” also refers to Danticat’s own oeuvre. It is closely related to two autobiographical, nonfictional essays that frame the genealogy of the short story and its metafictional content: the pre-text “A Taste of Coffee” (2001),64 which in turn takes up parts of the afterword of Breath Eyes Memory,65 and the post-text “Walk Straight” (2010), published in Create Dangerously. Both texts contain important aspects of the storyline in “Night Talkers,” for instance, the tiring hike, the image of the mausoleum, the presence of an old, soon-to-be-dying aunt, and an intact village community. In contrast to, for instance, The Art of Death, the short story “Night Talkers” and thus the whole story cycle presents itself through its mainly Haitian intertextual (and not Haitian-US-American) entanglements as a primarily Haitian-Haitian dialogue. The two categories of intertexts then seem to fulfil different functions with regard to the leitmotif of lòt bò dlo and its translation into fictional space. While the strong references to the material spaces of death as evoked by Laferrière’s and Roumain’s texts contribute to accentuating the themes of death and diaspora on the level of the narrated space, it is through Danticat’s own corpus of pre- and post-texts to “Night Talkers” and through Laferrières metafictional reflections in Pays sans chapeau that the text reflects its own position between re- and deterritorialization.

Metafictional Positions between De- and Reterritorialization: Producing a Space of Narration via Intertexts Against the background of its autobiographical pre- and post-texts, “Taste of Coffee” (2001) and “Walk Straight” (2010), “Night Talkers” comprises a conceptual reflection on migration and diaspora within the paradigm of de- and reterritorialization, while also negotiating the place and function of diaspora writers. In the pre-text “A Taste of Coffee,” the first-person narrator, an alter ego of the author herself, characterizes herself as one of the “moun mòn,” “mountain people,” to whom the protagonist Dany from “Night Talkers” can also be attributed.66 In “A Taste of Coffee,” this attribution to the “moun mòn,” who on the one hand are portrayed as “fit and robust,” on the other as “unsophisticated, backwards, marooned from large society, exiled by destiny, if not by choice,” is tightly linked to the migration experience of the firstperson narrator who returns to Beausejour—the supposedly nonfictional name of Dany’s Beau Jour—for the first time in many years. By trekking back from Brooklyn’s skyscrapers to the Haitian valley with her “mountain legs,” the narrator reverses the original movement of going

Also the intertexts of “Night Talkers,” as mosaic compositions themselves, refer back to other texts: Gouverneurs de la rosée points to the ethnographic literature of Haitian indigenism, Pays sans chapeau to Édouard Glissant’s poetry collection Pays rêvé, Pays réel (1985). For a thorough analysis of the intertextual dialogue between Gouverneurs de la rosée and Pays sans chapeau, cf. Martin Munro, “Master of the New: Tradition and Intertextuality in Dany Laferrière’s Pays sans chapeau,” Small Axe 18, no. 3 (2005). 64 Danticat, “A Taste of Coffee.” 65 Cf. Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 2nd ed. (1994; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 235–6. 66 Danticat, “A Taste of Coffee,” 39. The narrator explains here: “nou se moun mòn,” meaning literally “we’re mountain people.”

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lòt bò dlo:67 “I have come to revisit these mountains from which our family has sprung … I have come to see how far we have trekked in less than two generations, from Beausejour peyizan (peasants) to Brooklynites, from the valley to skyscrapers.”68 This geographical and socio-spatial mobility and the experience of taking a temporary journey are mimicked in The Dew Breaker, both on the microstructural level of histoire in “Night Talkers” and on the macrostructural level of the arrangement of the short stories within the story cycle. The trip through cold and dark Brooklyn in “The Book of Miracles” is followed by Dany’s hike through the Haitian hinterland in “Night Talkers,” when he returns there to visit after decades abroad. The post-text “Walk Straight,” published six years after The Dew Breaker, anchors its narrative in the logic of the collection of essays Create Dangerously (2010), thus emphasizing the position of the “immigrant writer” and the significance of fictional, in comparison to factual, for example, journalistic, texts. As a nonfictional text and a kind of literary manifesto, it focuses on elaborating Danticat’s space of narration rather than on narrated spaces and narratives of migration. From which inner place does Danticat write her fiction and, by extension, where between de- and reterritorialization are the narrators of her texts located? And, how legitimate is diaspora writing? The tedious confusion of fictionality and factuality, a recurrent problem in the reception of migrant or diaspora literature as ethnographies rather than as works of art, is also (r)evoked by the framing of the essay within the overall composition of Create Dangerously. “Walk Straight” follows the title essay “Create Dangerously” and explicates the inner genealogical and cultural location of the author. Moreover, the essay precedes “I Am Not a Journalist,” in which Danticat, in homage to the radio journalist Jean Dominique, distinguishes her texts from journalistic texts. This chain of titles already implies the author’s position, who defends her right to her positionality as a diasporic writer and as a writer of creative fiction, as compared to a journalist. “Walk Straight” uses the example of the extreme criticism of Danticat’s debut novel Breath Eyes Memory to reflect on the legitimacy and legitimation of diaspora fiction by correlating these ethical questions with her own spatial location.69 Consequently, the first-person narrator of the essay stages herself as pondering the difference between poetry and truth, fiction and falsehood at the grave of her great-grandparents:70

Ibid., 40. Ibid.

67 68

With that label comes mixed implications. Of course, mountain people are fit and robust—they have to be to travel such long distances to places of unmarked paths and slippery trails, places where neither cars nor bicycles could tread. However, mountain people are also considered unsophisticated, backwards, marooned from the larger society, exiled by destiny, if not by choice, from the urbanites of the island. I have come to revisit these mountains from which our family has sprung, and which have released us to different types of migrations. I have come to see just how far we have trekked in less than two generations, from Beausejour peyizan (peasants) to Brooklynites, from the valley to skyscrapers. I have come to see an aunt whom I have seen only once before in my life, when I was eight years old, because she has literally refused to come down from the mountain. “Nou se moun mòn could now also mean that we are nomads, constantly leaving and returning to these mountains either in actuality or in our dreams.” Ibid., 45 (Danticat’s emphasis). 69 This reflection is absent from “A Taste of Coffee,” published before the second edition of Breath Eyes Memory. 70 Edwidge Danticat, “Walk Straight,” in Create Dangerously:  The Immigrant Artist at Work, ed. Edwidge Danticat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 31–5.

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I return a few more times to my great-grandparents’ graves, often by myself … During one of my visits to my great-grandparents’ grave, I  had with me a book of essays Afterwords: Novelists on Their Novels … So, while I was sitting at the gravesite, I wrote the following letter to my first novel’s main character, Sophie. And since the immigrant artist must sometimes apologize for airing, or appearing to air, dirty laundry, my note to Sophie was later published as an afterword in all subsequent editions of the book, becoming an addendum to the text.71 With this spatial self-presentation, a gesture of self-location and self-legitimation, the writer Edwidge gives shape to the inner space of narration from which she writes.72 Danticat’s inner space of narration is a rural, ancestral Haiti situated in the mountains, whose higher geographical position also suggests elevated moral standards and foresight. This is echoed by the letter to the main character Sophie Danticat included in the second edition of Breath Eyes Memory: Dear Sophie, I am writing this note while sitting on the edge of my great-grandmother’s grave, an elevated tombstone in the high mountains of Léogane, overlooking a majestic lime-colored mountain range. Suspended as I am here, far from tierra firma and close to the clouds, I feel that this is the one place in the world where I truly belong. This is the place that I most wished as a home for you too, the place I had in mind when I had Tante Atie stand with you in the middle of a cemetery plot and pronounce, “Walk straight, you are in the presence of family.”73 Similar to the mausoleum in “Night Talkers” and different from the haunting image of the graveyard in “The Book of the Miracles,” the cemetery of the ancestors appears here as a place of detachment (“suspension”), where other temporal and spatial references are suspended. It is presented as the writer’s true home: “the one place in the world where I truly belong.” In Danticat’s fictional texts, this space of narration can be assumed to be the implicit space of the narrative act and thus of the act of spatial production. With Lefebvre, we may understand this space of narration as emergent from the lived space of the artist and from a spatial conception (conceived space) that favors the ‘authentic’ Haiti and its cultural and aesthetic traditions over that of the diaspora in the United States. The space of narration forms the starting point for Danticat’s fictional spatial production.74 Its function, however, is above all to posit Danticat as a ‘truly’ Haitian writer, who is still anchored both internally and externally in Haiti. The nonfictional, internal intertexts “Walk Straight” and “A Taste of Coffee” refer to the metafictional meaning of the short story. This meaning becomes visible in the foregrounding of the first-person narrator’s cultural affiliation to the “moun mòn” (in “Taste of Coffee”) and by the emphasis given to the cemetery of the village Beausejour (in “Walk Straight”). Consequently, Ibid., 31, 33. This space of narration could be assumed to be the space of the fictional narrative frame in which the act of narration is staged, as in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). Cf. West-Pavlov, Spaces of Fiction / Fictions of Space, 61–3. 73 Danticat, “Walk Straight,” 33–4; Breath, Eyes, Memory, 235 (both my emphases, A.B.). 74 Concerning Lefebvre’s understanding of the nature and the potential of a piece of art, cf. Henri Lefebvre, La présence et l’absence: Contribution à la théorie des représentations (Tournai: Casterman, 1980), 24–5, 213. 71 72

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Dany’s fictional village Beau Jour—which corresponds to Beausejour—is indirectly presented as the fictional space of narration from which the implicit narrator produces the narrated space.75 If this is true, the character of Dany, whose cultural affiliation to the social space of the “moun mòn” is accentuated by the image of the mausoleum, standing for the physical proximity of the dead and the living and for the significance of ancestors, corresponds to an allegory of a writer who finds their way back to their literary roots.

Literary Positions: Indigenism versus Postmodernism? In “Night Talkers,” two more intertexts contribute to further carving out the artist’s space of narration between de- and reterritorialization and to positioning it within different traditions of Haitian literature. Roumain’s indigenist novel Gouverneurs de la rosée, its village Fonds Rouge, its dramatic lack of water, and its ancestral rites serve as important intertexts concerning the depiction of the archaic but functional community and its connectedness to Haitian Vodou traditions.76 By contrast, the references to Laferrière’s postmodernist, autofictional novel Pays sans chapeau deploy an explicit reflection on the position that a writer confronting Haitian cultural and literary tradition should adopt. In Pays sans chapeau, an imaginary lòt bò dlo, the land of death to which the novel’s title alludes, serves as an allegory for the choice that a diaspora writer faces. Among other similarities, for example, the white dust, the lack of water, and the temporary returning of the migrant to his homeland, Laferrière’s protagonist, the author-double Da, also bears the same name as Danticat’s main character in “Night Talkers.” Da enters this parodic land of death in a dream state and encounters egoistic and primitive Haitian lwa, ancestral spirits in Vodou belief.77 When entering this afterlife, the lòt bò dlo, Da does not choose the trampled down, broad path of literary and cultural tradition, but rather the bumpy, though not dusty, path of innovation:78 J’ai décidé, sans raison, de ne plus suivre ce qui semble être la route principale pour prendre ce sentier, sur ma gauche. Le chemin paraît plus accidenté, mais je n’ai plus cette poussière blanche qui me rentrait par la bouche et le nez. J’ai marché un bon kilomètre avant de comprendre ce qui vient de se passer. C’est qu’à n’importe quel moment on peut changer de route … Qui m’obligeait à aller sur cette route poussiéreuse? Personne. Qui m’empêchait de prendre le sentier parfumé? Personne. Pourtant, j’acceptais comme un fait accompli cette situation intenable. Cette route déjà tracée, quoique poussiéreuse, semblait mener quelque part. C’était ça ma certitude jusqu’à ce que je comprenne que quel que soit le chemin, il nous mènera toujours quelque part.79 Cf. Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 235. For an analysis of the whole story cycle’s relation to Roumain’s foundational novel cf. Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat, 118–24. 77 On the lwa, see, e.g., Laënnec Hurbon, “Vodou et modernité en Haïti,” Iberoamericana 42, no. 1 (1991): 47. The pantheon of Haitian lwa corresponds to the ensemble of African spirits from different ethnic groups as well as new, genuinely Caribbean spirits. In the process of transculturation and syncretization, these have been reorganized into different families (nations) of spirits, reconstructing and reimagining thusly the lineages that were destroyed during slavery. 78 Cf. hereto Munro, “Master of the New,” 182–3. 79 Dany Laferrière, Pays sans chapeau (1996; Paris: Le Serpent à plumes, 1999), 253. 75 76

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In this respect, Da (and the whole novel) resists turning to Haitian “primitivism” in the sense of a naive and transfiguring folkloristic representation of Haiti’s cultural and religious traditions and distances itself from the indigenist tradition and its exoticizing potential.80 On the contrary, he emphasizes the freedom to explore and exploit this heritage playfully. This is exactly what happens when the novel turns itself against the almost compulsory use of Vodou aesthetics, but at the same time instrumentalizes it. For instance, Pays sans chapeau criticizes the indigenistic ethnographic tradition and its strong influence on twentieth-century Haitian literature by depicting the character of J.-B. Romain, a professor of ethnology, as a rather ridiculous double of Haitian lwa Damballah. The character’s name alludes, of course, to the writer, communist politician, and ethnologist Jacques Roumain, who cofounded the magazine La Revue Indigène (1927) and, with Jean Price-Mars, the Institut d’Éthnologie (1941) in Port-au-Prince.81 In the course of his visit to the “land without hat,” Romain, who is ‘mounted’ by Haitian lwa Danbala, tries to convince Da to write a book on this land of death in order to revalorize Haitian cultural and religious thought, Vodou, as opposed to the ‘western’ success story of Christianity. When Da categorically declines this request, Romain/Danbala leaves the final decision to him. The writer Da, Laferrière’s alter ego, then gives the situation a further metafictional twist, declaring “Je vais dire la vérité, c’est ça qui m’intéresse …”82 From this ambivalence between—from a ‘western,’ rationalist point of view—an obviously invented, not factually accurate story and the character’s commitment to the truth finally emanates the essence of fictional literature: the ambiguity between invention and higher consciousness. In contrast to postmodernist Laferrière, Danticat (in The Dew Breaker and later in Create Dangerously) does not explicitly problematize her relationship to the literary tradition of the Haitian post-occupation period and the early Duvalier years. For instance, “Night Talkers” includes elements of both Laferrière and Roumain’s work without hierarchizing them. On the contrary, in her fictional and essayistic work, Danticat clearly places herself in the line of Jacques-Stéphen Alexis, Jacques Roumain, and Marie Vieux-Chauvet by regularly quoting them.83 Nevertheless, the author also refers to Laferrière, the deterritorialized enfant terrible of Haitian Diaspora literature.84 Laferrière belongs neither to the older generations of exile, such as Emile Ollivier or René Depestre, who uses Vodou mainly as an allegory for the dictatorship, nor to that of the younger Stanley Péan, who has a more casual, almost playful relation to it. He rather seeks to evade a clear literary categorization by insisting on the deterritorialized character of his literature, that is, its liberation from national contexts, and by foregrounding its reterritorialization through the act of reading, as the author suggests in Je suis un écrivain

Munro, “Master of the New,” 188. According to Munro, Laferrière “demystifies the heritage of Indigenist tradition.” Léon-François Hoffmann, “Biographie de Jacques Roumain,” Association Île en île, http://ile-en-ile.org/biographiede-jacques-roumain/; Gérarde Magloire, “Jean Price-Mars,” Association Île en île, http://ile-en-ile.org/price-mars/. 82 Laferrière, Pays sans chapeau, 270. 83 Cf. Dash, “Danticat and Her Haitian Precursors”; Danticat, “Daughters of Memory,” 61–2, 66. The collection of essays The Art of Death nuances this exclusively Haitian affiliation by insisting particularly on Danticat’s affiliation to Toni Morrison. Concerning the African American affiliation of Danticats, cf. also Jean-Charles, “Danticat and the African American Women’s Literary Tradition”; Edwidge Danticat and Maxine Lavon Montgomery, “Putting Together the Fragments: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat,” in Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, ed. Maxine Lavon Montgomery (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 206. Concerning Danticat’s constructions of literary filiations in The Art of Death, cf. Lucía Eugenia Stecher Guzmán, “Muerte y escritura en L’Énigme du retour de Dany Laferrière y The Art of Death de Edwidge Danticat,” unpublished manuscript (2019). 84 Danticat, Create Dangerously, 15–16. 80 81

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japonais (2008).85 Danticat’s overt commitment to Laferrière and to diasporic positions of deterritorialization translates the diasporic character of her fictional and nonfictional oeuvre: not only the return to the (distant) homeland but also the lateral connection to other Haitian literatures outside Haiti plays an important role in Danticat’s Haitian-Haitian textual dialogues. Like Laferrière’s Pays sans chapeau, “Night Talkers” positions itself and its author within the paradigm of de- and reterritorialization via its two categories of intertexts. Different from Laferrière’s extreme position, which emphasizes deterritorialization as a potential release from outworn traditions and fixed identities, Danticat strives for a dialectical abolition of deterritorialization, a de-territorialization, by staging the return of Haitians from the US diaspora to their roots and their reconnection to living and dead ancestors. Analogously, she connects her own writing as an “immigrant artist” back to the simple people in Haiti, the “moun mòn,” and their traditions. Her writing becomes a journey into the heart of an imagined Haiti, which with its idealization of the countryside and its implicit references to ethnographically informed texts is reminiscent of indigenist thought.86 Danticat, with her literature visibly and consciously rooted in Haiti, stands for an obvious attitude of “engagement” as opposed to Laferrière’s “dégagement.”87 If Danticat does emulate literary role models such as Roumain and Alexis, she does not adopt Roumain’s or Alexis’s explicit political claim, nor a culturally nationalist claim. She rather continues their tradition in the direction of a transnational Haitian space by trying to give the victims of history on both sides of the water a voice, a space of representation:88 Danticat harks back to the earlier experience of literature, one that is historically bound, where the writer has a social responsibility, yet one from which the element of the author as transcendental modernist visionary and the ideological mission of literature have been removed … unlike the ideologically driven narratives of political commitment, Danticat’s fictions are not about speaking on behalf of the masses but attempt to establish a space where the voices of the disempowered victims and their persecutors are allowed to speak.89 Danticat’s writing can be interpreted as a form of cultural remittance to the Haitian community, fueled by the “guilt of absence.”90 The basis of Danticat’s engaged writing does not consist in a destructive deterritorialization, that is, a toxic uprooting, and a detachment from Haiti, nor in turning to a world experienced as global. Neither does it lie in its constant straddling between the Haiti of the past and the United States of the present.91 Her texts are rather built Cf. ibid., 15. Cf. Stecher Guzmán, Narrativas migrantes del Caribe, 188–90. 87 Bénédicte Boisseron, Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 97; Danticat, The Dew Breaker, [viii]; “Create Dangerously,” 10–14. 88 Dash, “Danticat and Her Haitian Precursors,” 32. 89 Ibid., 32–3. 90 Nick Nesbitt, Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virgina Press, 2003), 204. On the burden of guilt as a central motif of Haitian diaspora literature, cf. also J. Michael Dash, “Fictions of Displacement: Locating Modern Haitian Narratives,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 3 (2008): 40. For a reflection on diaspora literature as a sort of cultural “remittance” to Haiti, cf. Boisseron, Créole Renegades, 97–8, 113–15. 91 Cf. Danticat, “Create Dangerously,” 17, 51. Danticat writes, “People with their feet planted in both worlds.” 85 86

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on the dialectical suspension of deterritorialization (in the Hegelian sense of aufhebung) by a physical-material, but above all mental, re-reterritorialization in Haiti. Literature as a “memorial art,” as an “art of commemoration,” acknowledges and lends presence to the absent, thus soothing those who are left behind.92 Danticat herself, as the spatial production of her texts suggests, writes from a state of mental presence in Haiti (at the foot of the graves of the ancestors), while being simultaneous physically absent. This mental location in an imagined and remembered Haitian space of narration refers back to the worldsense of the Haitian rural population. It interconnects previously unconnected voices, stories, and places93 through the diaspora experience of the writing subject and thus legitimizes the voice of those who write from lòt bò dlo.

Bibliography Alexis, Yveline. “Mwen Pas Connait as Resistance: Haitians’ Silence against a Violent State.” Journal of Haitian Studies 21, no. 2 (2015): 269–88. Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 6th impr. London: Verso, 2006. Assmann, Jan. Tod und Jenseits im Alten Ägypten. München: Beck, 2001. Audebert, Cédric. La diaspora haïtienne. Territoires migratoires et réseaux. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012. doi:10.4000/books.pur.26969. Baudrillard, Jean. L’échange symbolique et la mort. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick, and Claudine Michel. “Danbala / Ayida as Cosmic Prism: The Lwa as Trope for Understanding Metaphysics in Haitian Vodou and Beyond.” Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 4 (2013): 458–87. Belting, Hans. “Aus dem Schatten des Todes. Bild und Körper in den Anfängen.” In Der Tod in den Weltkulturen und Weltreligionen, edited by Constantin von Barloewen, 92–132. München: Diederichs, 1996. Boisseron, Bénédicte. Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. 1997. Reprinted. London: Routledge, 1998. Brüske, Anne. “Spatial Theory, Post/Colonial Perspectives, and Fiction: Reading Hispano-Caribbean Diaspora Literature in the US with Henri Lefebvre.” In Perspectives on Henri Lefebvre: Theory, Practices and (Re)Readings, edited by Jenny Bauer and Robert Fischer, 178–206. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Célius, Carlo. “Art et anthropologie: Perspectives à partir d’Haïti.” In Reshaping Glocal Dynamics of the Caribbean: Relaciones y Desconexiones—Relations et Déconnections—Relations and Disonnections, edited by Anja Bandau, Anne Brüske, and Natascha Ueckmann, 159–69. Heidelberg: heiUP, 2018. Chancy, Myriam J. A. Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. New Brunswick:  Rutgers University Press, 1997. Chatman, Seymour Benjamin. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.

Cf. Hans Belting, “Aus dem Schatten des Todes: Bild und Körper in den Anfängen,” in Der Tod in den Weltkulturen und Weltreligionen, ed. Constantin von Barloewen (München: Diederichs, 1996), 94–5. See also Macho, “Tod und Trauer,” 102. 93 Cf. Dash, “Danticat and Her Haitian Precursors,” 33. Dash argues here:  “Downplaying the image of the writers as the ‘kitchen poet,’ as she put it in the epilogue to Krik? Krk!, she must establish a space of narration in which communication is initiated between voices, histories, and place that were never previously connected.” 92

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Lòt bò dlo Macho, Thomas. “Tod und Trauer im kulturwissenschaftlichen Vergleich.” In Der Tod als Thema der Kulturtheorie. Todesbilder und Totenriten im alten Ägypten, edited by Jan Assmann and Thomas Macho, 89–120. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000. Magloire, Gérarde. “Jean Price-Mars.” Association Île en île, http://ile-en-ile.org/price-mars/. Accessed September 30, 2020. Mardorossian, Carine M. Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Métraux, Alfred. Le vaudou haïtien. 1958. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. Moïse, Myriam. “Vodou Symbolism and ‘Poto Mitan’ Women in Edwidge Danticat’s Work.” In Vodou in Haitian Memory: The Idea and Representation of Vodou in Haitian Imagination, edited by Celucien L. Joseph and Nixon S. Cléophat, 125–43. New York: Lexington Books, 2016. Munro, Martin. “Inside Out: A Brief Biography of Edwidge Danticat.” In Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, edited by Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, 13–25. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Munro, Martin. “Master of the New: Tradition and Intertextuality in Dany Laferrière’s Pays sans chapeau.” Small Axe 18, no. 3 (2005): 176–88. N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José. “Rewriting Folklore: Traditional Beliefs and Popular Culture in Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Breath Eyes, Memory’ and ‘Krik? Krak’!” MaComère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars 3 (2000): 123–40. Nesbitt, Nick. Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Oyêwùmí, Oyèrónké. “Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects.” In African Gender Studies: A Reader, edited by Oyèrónké Oyêwùmí, 3–21. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Rath, Gudrun. “Zombi Narratives: Transatlantic Circulations.” In Reshaping Glocal Dynamics of the Caribbean: Relaciones y Desconexiones—Relations et Déconnections—Relations and Disonnections, edited by Anja Bandau, Anne Brüske, and Natascha Ueckmann, 385–96. Heidelberg: heiUP, 2018. Schiller, Nina Glick. “The Implications of Haitian Transnationalism for U.S.-Haiti Relations: Contradictions of the Deterritorialized Nation-State.” Journal of Haitian Studies 1, no. 1 (1995): 111–23. Schwab, Gabriele. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Sökefeld, Martin. “Mobilizing in Transnational Space: A Social Movement Approach to the Formation of Diaspora.” Global Networks 6, no. 3 (2006): 265–84. Stecher Guzmán, Lucía Eugenia. “Muerte y escritura en L’Énigme du retour de Dany Laferrière y The Art of Death de Edwidge Danticat.” Unpublished manuscript. Stecher Guzmán, Lucía Eugenia. Narrativas migrantes del Caribe: Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid y Edwidge Danticat. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2016. Waisvisz, Sarah G. “Remembering Perpetrators: The Kunstlerroman and Second-Generation Witnessing in Edwidge Danticat’s ‘The Dew Breaker’.” In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights, edited by Sophia A. McClennan and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, 94–101. London: Routledge, 2016. West-Pavlov, Russell. Spaces of Fiction / Fictions of Space: Postcolonial Place and Literary DeiXis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Ziegler, Jean. Die Lebenden und der Tod. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1977.

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CHAPTER 8 DEATH AND THE MAIDEN: WRITING DEATH IN DANTICAT’S FICTION

Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo

In Haitian literature, death is a recurring motif, tied most of the time to politics. Early Haitian fiction establishes the connection between political commitment and death, not only for the fictional character but also for the writer. The main protagonist is lead to his death because of his/her political commitment. This is particularly illustrated by the early Haitian realist novels at the turn of the nineteenth century, Thémistocle Epaminondas Labasterre (1901), La Vengeance de Mama (1902), La Famille des Pitite-Caille (1905), and Zoune chez sa nainnaine (1906), which show how promising young intellectuals lost their lives because of their political activism. The German critic Ulrich Fleishmann has noted that literature has been used by Haitian would-be politicians as a mean to obtain intellectual recognition taking therefore a step toward political success. Referring to an analysis by two Haitian literary historians Dieudonné Fardin and Hérard Jadotte,1 Fleishmann expands their analysis and concludes that literature and politics are “naturally” connected and both are the means to achieve an objective that is to effect social change in the country.2 Hence the political commitment expressed in most Haitian writing. As a result, the theme of death appears in most Haitian fiction as either the consequence of political commitment or as a trigger for political commitment. The most exemplary text is Jacques Roumain’s chef d’oeuvre Gouverneurs de la rosée (1945), which set the tone for the tragic death of the hero. The French philosopher and critic Michel Serres commented extensively in his article “Christ Noir” (1973) on Manuel as a messianic figure whose death is presented as a layman’s sacrifice for the redemption/reconciliation of his community. Emile Ollivier’s first novel Mère Solitude (1983) is also exemplary from this viewpoint as his main protagonist, Narcès, embarks on a quest for his origins after the death of a teacher during a public lecture, which turned into a protest. This death brings back the memory of his dead mother and the novel is an attempt at elucidating the circumstances of her death, which in turn becomes a reconstitution of his family’s story. In 1990, Haitian novelist and literary critic Yanick Lahens (L’Exil: entre l’ancrage et la fuite, l’écrivain haïtien) examined the act of writing and its relation with the experience of exile. One of her hypotheses was about the connection between writing and exile, which led to the conclusion that artistic creation is associated with and conditioned by a feeling of isolation and internal exile and she concludes her short essay by musing on Haitian contemporary writers’ future approach to literary creation and the need for writers to come to terms to internal According to them, the political standing of a writer would guarantee his literary success. Ulrich Fleishmann, Ideyoloji ak reyalite nan literati ayisyèn (1981), 125. Creole translation of Fleishmann 1969 doctoral dissertation Ideologie und Wirklichkeit in der Literatur Haitis by Jeannot Hilaire (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag Otto H. Hess). 1 2

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exile and the need to accept the “alien” within themselves. On more recent occasions, Lahens has questioned writing by Haitian women and argued at several conferences3 that “[Haitian] women write from within the ‘eye’ of the hurricane.” In an interview with Nadève Ménard,4 she acknowledges the importance of literature in her life and the connection between reading and writing as well as political commitment. In the interview, she recounts how her political commitment in the 1986–2006 period has fed her literary imagination and her fiction.5 She also expounds on her statement about women “writing from within the eye of the storm.”6 Even though, death is also a recurring theme in her fiction, Lahens does not connect it (at least publicly) to the act of writing. Though I have not reviewed all statements by Haitian writers concerning the reasons for which they write, I do believe that Edwidge Danticat is the first (and maybe the only one) who openly admits that writing is a mean to exorcise her fear of death.7 In her most recent personal essay, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (2017), she acknowledges the importance of death in her work. In the introduction she confesses how much her fear of death shaped and continue to shape her writing: Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses, including deaths. I  have been writing about death for as long as I  have been writing. … While much of my work is based on actual events, I  chose those particular subjects in part because, early in my life, before anyone close to me had died, I was so afraid of death that I wanted to desensitize myself to it.8 This statement reveals how personal questions surrounding death are for Danticat. It also presents the act of writing as a mean to exorcize the fear of death. Though The Art of Death is a personal commentary and critical reading of works that resonated in her imagination, the introduction gives some indications about the importance of the theme in her early writing: Spoiler alert here: the mother of the narrator of Breath, Eyes, Memory commits suicide. (Maybe Mary’s silence had something to do with that.) Dozens of people fleeing political persecution in Haiti drown, just as they did in life, in my second book, a shortstory collection called Krik? Krak! My third book and second novel, The Farming of Bones, recounts the 1937 massacre in which thousands of Haitians were methodically slaughtered on the orders of Rafael Trujillo, a dictator from the neighboring Dominican Republic.9

“L’apport des romancières haïtiennes au roman moderne,” Haitian Studies Association annual conference, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1995; “Les Femmes écrivent dans l’œil du cyclone.” Haiti Now! UWI, Saint Augustine, Trinidad, 2007. 4 Yanick Lahens and Nadève Ménard, “Yanick Lahens: Toujours ancrée,” in Écrits d’Haïti: Perspectives sur la littérature haïtienne contemporaine (1986–2006), ed. Nadève Ménard (Paris: Karthala, 2011), 189–96. 5 Ibid., 190, 195. 6 Ibid., 194. 7 Here I must recognize that she is the second writer I have heard to establish a connection between his/her writing and his/her fear of death. The first one was the French-American writer Julien Green who recounts a crisis of anxiety leading him to take a train without even knowing its destination. 8 Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, Kindle edition (New York: Graywolf Press, 2017), viii. 9 Ibid.; emphasis mine. 3

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However, we should not allow ourselves to be blindsided by the novelist. While she is pointing to the obvious (suicide, drowning, and slaughtering of thousands of people), she stops short of elaborating on her “art of writing death.” Indeed, in all of Danticat’s fiction, death is a multifaceted overarching presence. The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (2017) is an essay in which she critically discusses how death is dealt with by selected writers and at the same time engages in grieving her mother’s passing; a previous book, Brother, I Am Dying (2007) published ten years earlier, and recounting the circumstances leading to death of her uncle in an American retention center, had given some hints about the connection between death and her creative imagination. In a 2007 interview with Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, it is the interviewer who brings out the connection and Danticat’s response contradicts the assertion made in The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story. E. W.-H.: Although there is so much death in the work, it is not morbid. It is terrifying at times, often very touching, always engaging, but not morbid. Did you want to avoid a morose view of death? E. D.: Because I saw so much death growing up—my uncle presided over a lot of funerals as minister of his church—I became less afraid of death. Also, the way the dead were treated was so holistic. There was a loving transition with no sense of emergency. … It was not morbid or scary unless there was some tragic accident or shooting and there was blood.10 Yet, three pages later in the same interview, she confesses how a fearful person she is. It is then Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw who makes the association between fear and death. She notes: E. W.-H. You constantly evoke the feelings of fear and fright: … Then there is also the fear of death. Is the work also an attempt to look at fear and to try and understand the nature of it?11 To which Danticat replies, “I hadn’t even noticed the connections between those two. I would have unsuccessfully tried to make more of it if I had.”12 Interestingly, she implies that knowing about the “fear of death” expressed in her work, she would not have been able to play on it. She had to wait ten years in order to be able to delve into the connection between fear of death and the act of writing. This paper examines Danticat’s variations on death and considers the following questions: How does she confront the inevitability of death? How do her characters continue their lives after the loss of a loved one? Beyond Danticat’s acknowledgments, I wish to take a second look at how the theme of death is interwoven in her novels and short stories. The paper will examine selected short stories and novels (Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!; The Farming of Bones; The Dew Breaker; and Claire of the Sealight) in an attempt at identifying differences and/or repetitions in the ways in which Edwidge Danticat’s characters confront, negotiate, struggle with or accept death. First, it will seek to determine a “typology” of death and its function in the narration. The underlying question being what part did death play in the

Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, “Writing Haiti: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat,” MaComère. The Caribbean Woman: Imagining/Creating/Theorizing 9 (2007): 36. 11 Ibid., 39. 12 Ibid. 10

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development of the plot. I will follow the chronological order of publication when discussing the novels and/or short stories with a view to identifying a possible evolution of or variations on the theme. Then, I look at how surviving characters overcome their grief. Indeed, in her introduction to Writing Death, Danticat does not comment on how her fiction examines the life of survivors after the death of their loved ones, which may be as difficult as taming death, yet the very act of writing The Art of Death … could be considered as part of her grieving and a strategy to cope with the loss of her mother.

Danticat’s Variations on Death Death by Suicide In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Danticat’s first novel, the death of Martine, Sophie’s mother, occurs toward the end of the novel.13 Though the account of her attempted suicide after her rape and while she was pregnant with Sophie could have led to expect the fatal outcome, the extreme violence of her suicide is totally unexpected even though some days earlier, during the Sophie’s visit with her husband and daughter, there is a sense of foreboding when Martine sings stanza from a negro-spiritual “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child” and concludes her rendition by saying, “I want that sung at my funeral.”14 First, we are told that after the sudden death of her husband, Charlemagne Caco, Man Ifé (Sophie’s grandmother) adopted the black dress for the rest of her life as a perpetual mourning of the deceased or as a preparation to her own death. In fact, she is preparing to die alone (her two daughters have left the home village, one for the Capital City and the other for the United States). During the visit of Sophie, she tells her about a song going around in the village about a woman whose children send remittances and keep her well-off but who is condemned to die alone. Man Ifé has done all her preparations and even visited the church in order to plan her funeral. The irony of the story is that she will survive her daughter. By contrasting the unexpected death of her grandfather with the anticipated preparations of her grandmother, Sophie deflects our attention from the possible death of her mother. Shortly before her suicide, Martine tells Sophie that Man Ifé sent a telegram to announce that everything was “ready for her funeral”; in the same chapter, she comments on her sister Atie’s grief after the departure of Louise (Atie’s lover) stating that according to Man Ifé, “Atie will die from chagrin.”15 It is only retroactively that warning signs are reinterpreted, which create the impression of an inevitable/inescapable death. Toward the beginning of the novel, Sophie states, “It took me twelve years to piece together my mother’s story. By then it was too late.”16 Martine’s suicide is particularly gory (seventeen self-indicted stab wounds). It seems that Danticat chose this extreme to translate the depth of her psychological breakdown. Martine has spent twenty-five years reliving her rape every night and then one night as she is pregnant with her second child, she hears the fetus speaking to her with her rapist’s voice.17 What is striking Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York: Soho Press, 1994), 223. Ibid., 215. 15 Ibid., 205. 16 Ibid., 61. 17 Ibid., 199, 219, 217. 13 14

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with Martine’s choice is that she has refused psychological or psychiatric aid. She justifies her decision by her fear of being committed to an institution and worse, the fear to be forced to confront her memory of the rape. Martine’s argument goes beyond the stigma associated with madness, as she expresses the fear that her nightmare could become reality. Implicit is the belief that our imagination could shape reality: Martine’s response go against the suggestion of Sophie’s psychotherapist who is an adept of confrontational therapy. Suicide recurs in two other stories by Danticat: a short story “Children of the Sea” in Krik? Krak! (1996) and a novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013). These suicides are not central to the plot in both cases, yet they have an impact on the main protagonists. For instance, in “Children of the Sea,” the suicide is reported by the narrator and main protagonist who is fleeing Haiti on a flimsy boat. The character who commits suicide is a young girl, Céliane. The circumstances leading to her suicide are reminiscent of Martine’s in Breath, Eyes, Memory. Like Martine, Céliane has been raped and mistreated by thugs in the aftermath of the 1991 coup against the democratically elected president of Haiti. Following the rape, she disfigured herself and attempted to flee the country while pregnant. She gives birth on the boat but the newborn does not survive. Céliane clings to the lifeless body of her baby until being forced to throw it to the sea. She surrenders but throw herself in the water shortly after. Céliane’s suicide foretells the fate awaiting the narrator/writer: “I must throw my book out now. It goes down to them, Céliane and her daughter and all those children of the sea who might soon be claiming me.”18 In that story, the death of the narrator is presented as inevitable as if it had always been his destiny: “I go to them now as though it was always meant to be, as though the very day that my mother birthed me, she had chosen me to live life eternal, among the children of the deep blue sea … Perhaps I was chosen from the beginning of time to live there with Agwé at the bottom of the sea.”19 Suicide or accidental death? In another story from Krik? Krak!, “A Wall of Fire Rising,” Guy, a jobless worker, jumps to his death from a hot air balloon. The reasons for his gesture are not clear. A family man, he struggles to find a steady job. As the owner of the neighboring sugar mill plant bought a hot-air balloon, he has become obsessed with the balloon and dreams of riding it to a “nice place” in order to start anew.20 One day, he climbs on board and takes off with the balloon but as the balloon drifts away, he climbs out and plunges to his death. It is not clear whether he did that out of fear (being unable to control the balloon) or out of despair (being unable to provide for his family); however, his death seems to trigger a form of revolt in his young son (who recites the lines of a play about the Haitian Revolution making them sound as a tribute to his father) and wife (who refuses to have his eyes closed as required by death rituals). In Claire of the Sea Light, death is an overwhelming “presence” as it overshadows the life of many protagonists, starting with that of the main protagonist, a little girl named Claire Limyè Lanmè whose mother died while giving birth to her. However, the attempted suicide of one protagonist comes as a surprise as nothing in the plot had forewarned the reader about this

Edwidge Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” in Krik? Krak! (New  York:  Random House, Vintage Contemporaries— Vintage Books, 1996), 27. 19 Ibid., 27–8, emphasis mine. 20 Edwidge Danticat, “A Wall of Fire Rising,” Krik? Krak! (New  York:  Random House, Vintage Contemporaries— Vintage Books, 1996), 73. 18

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possible outcome. Claire of the Sea Light tells about life in a Haitian small town and follows several characters whose lives intersect at one time or another. Among these characters is a young man, Maxime Ardin Jr, who was sent to the United States ten years earlier and has returned to Haiti seemingly to reconcile with his father who is part of the town’s establishment and the owner of a successful private school. The visit however does not go smoothly as Maxime Jr is caught by his past. Memories of the event that precipitated his departure (the rape of a young servant) and the one that took place shortly after (the murder of his best friend) come back to haunt him. Both memories are accompanied by a sentiment of guilt and inadequacy, which overwhelms him and leads him to death. Maxime’s attempted suicide is very different from Martine’s.21 Through the protagonist’s stream of consciousness, the text exudes a mix of nostalgia, melancholy, and a feeling of powerlessness, which renders logical Maxime’s next move: he walks into the sea and lets himself be drowned. By interspersing Maxime’s stream of consciousness with the description of his surrounding, by interrupting the narrative point of view, shifting from Maxime to Claire Limyè Lanmè, Danticat tones down the violence of the gesture. We will never know whether Maxime died or was saved at the last minute. The account of the moment is made from Claire’s viewpoint and from a great distance: In the middle of the lamp circle, half of which was now in the water, she saw someone pull a man in a red shirt out of the sea. Like a dying fish, the man’s body jerked about. Madame Gaëlle and her father were standing together in front of him. The man reached up, grabbing both her father’s and Madame Gaëlle’s legs, … … She had to go back and see her father and Madame Gaëlle, whose own sorrows could have nearly drowned them. She had to go down to the water to see them take turns breathing into this man, breathing him back to life.22 Death and Political Violence In her essay Create Dangerously, Danticat explores how reading and writing in Haiti could be a life-threatening activity. “Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.”23 Violent deaths linked to Haitian politics abound in Danticat’s novels and short stories, particularly for stories set during times of political turmoil during and after the Duvalier dictatorship and the 1991 Coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. For instance, in the short story collection Krik? Krak! gruesome deaths caused by political henchmen from one group or another affects Danticat’s main protagonists. Some stories are more striking than others but, in all cases, the psyche of the protagonist is forever scarred. “Children of the Sea” evokes the period following the 1991 coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Through the diary/correspondence of two young lovers, one at sea, the other in Haiti, we learn about the

It seems that Maxime does not die as he is thrown on the beach by the tow still alive and resuscitated by Mrs. Lavaud, another protagonist of the novel. 22 Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2013), 236–7, 238. 23 Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 21

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violence exerted against supporters of the Aristide government and their families. The female diarist chronicles the horror and cruelty of crimes committed by the anti-Aristide militia.24 In “The Missing Peace,” a character, Emilie, is trying to locate her mother who disappeared the night of the coup. She had an encounter with a group of thugs and witnesses them dragging a corpse to a mass grave. Saved from harm by the main protagonist, Lamort/Marie-Magdalène, she decides to write down the names of the militia men at the back of her mother’s picture “for posterity.”25 By writing these stories, Danticat who was very active during the 1991–4 period seems to prolong the work of her uncle who every morning … got up to count the many bloody corpses that dotted the street corners and alleys of Bel Air. … In his notebooks he wrote the names of the victims, when he knew them, the condition of their bodies and the times they were picked up.26 Indeed, when she recounts her first visit in Haiti in 1994 and recalls her uncle showing her his lists, she notes that “all I could see was … the hundreds of men and women who’d died, their mutilated bodies eternally rotting under the boiling sun.”27 The brutality of the period has marked her creative imagination in a more recent essay on writing, Create Dangerously (2010); Danticat connects writing as a reaction to/protest against political violence in a chapter evoking the public execution of two young opponents to Duvalier, Louis Drouin and Marcel Numa, the last surviving members of the Jeune Haïti group of thirteen. Commenting on the execution, she says, “All artists, writers among them, have several stories … that haunt and obsess them. This is one of mine.”28 The link between death and political violence is present in many stories by Edwidge Danticat, though not always at the center of the story. In her first novel, a brief episode taking place during Sophie’s visit in Haiti gives an insight in the terror caused by the Macoutes, which permeates the life of rural Haitians.29 During her stay at her grandmother’s house in the mountain, Sophie witnesses the brutality of young Macoutes who beat to death a charcoal vendor named Dessalines.30 The episode that could have been an anecdote illustrating the hardships of Haitian villagers in the countryside is connected to the plot as it will act as a “push” factor justifying Louise’s migration from Haiti, breaking the heart of Atie, Sophie’s aunt. It is a way to establish the connection between violence and migration of many Haitians in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Danticat’s second and third novels The Farming of Bones and The Dew Breaker examine historical circumstances during which many Haitians lost their lives. The Farming of Bones is set in the Dominican Republic and tells about the slaughter of Haitian cane workers in 1937.

See Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” 4–5, 7–8, 12–13; 15–17; 19, 22. Edwidge Danticat, “The Missing Peace,” in Krik? Krak! (New  York:  Random House, Vintage Contemporaries— Vintage Books, 1996) 120, 121. 26 Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 139. 27 Ibid., 141. These two stories were published in anthologies: “From the ocean floor” in Short Fiction by Women (1993) and “The Missing Piece” in Just a Moment (1992). 28 Danticat, Create Dangerously, 5. 29 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 138–9. 30 Ibid., 118, 121. 24 25

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The novel is an homage to Jacques Stéphen Alexis’s Compère Général Soleil, yet it does not have the political overtone of Alexis; instead, Danticat shows how the life of a young woman, Amabelle Désir, was torn apart by the genocide ordered by Trujillo yet how she managed to survive and reconstruct her life. In the story, the individual and the collective are intertwined to bring out the humanity of the victims. Amabelle’s life has been marked by death since a young age. She lost her parents who drowned in the river bordering Haiti and the Dominican Republic. An orphan, she was raised on a farm as a domestic/playmate to the daughter of the Dominican farmer, Valencia, who also lost her mother when she was a child. From the beginning of the novel, both Valencia and Amabelle are still living with the memory of their parents. Amabelle has recurring nightmares of her parents’ drowning while Valencia feels the presence of her mother (particularly on the day she gave birth to her first twin children: “Last night, when my first pains began, I felt like my mother was with me. … My mother sat here next to me, in this bed”).31 However, the specter of the dictator is present through his portrait hanging in the main room of the house and a car accident that caused the death of a Haitian cane cutter: Valencia’s husband hit him as he was driving too fast in order to be with his wife and newborn children.32 What gives pause is the fact that Pico Duarte does not seem the least concerned by the death of the worker, Joël (which is in stark contrast with the subdued and remorseful attitudes of his father-in-law and his gardener who were also in the car). Instead, he announces to his wife that he has been chosen to oversee the security of a reception and a mysterious project “a new border operation.”33 Pico Duarte’s indifference to the death of the Haitian worker tells about his contempt for him and foreshadows the massacre in which he is about to take part. Danticat then recounts the 1937 slaughter of the Haitians and Amabelle’s plight as she tries to escape death. The Dew Breaker presents a more complex perspective of the violence experienced by ordinary Haitians under the Duvalier (father and son) dictatorship. One of the most paradoxical elements of the book is that it presents itself as a short story collection, yet these stories are loosely connected through the looming presence of the torturer who shattered the lives of ordinary Haitians and then ended up migrating to the United States where several of his victims had fled. Danticat’s stories recount how some of his victims tried to reconstruct their life in the United States (mostly in New York) just to have it disrupted again by the knowledge that their torturer now lives in New York.34 Among the various stories, there are two stories that stand out. The first one, “The Book of the Dead,” narrates how a sculptor nicknamed Ka discovers that her father was a torturer while she always thought he was a victim of the regime. The last story of the book, “The Dew Breaker,” recounts the story of the Dew Breaker and how he met his wife. As the stories unfold, the reader is made aware that the father of the narrator/ sculptor of the first story was a macoute but what is more overwhelming is the revelation in the last story that he married the sister of his last victim, a preacher whose sermons displeased the dictator and that he had confessed his crime to his wife shortly after the birth of their daughter. Danticat captures the confusion and ambivalence of the daughter who has to come Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones (New York: Soho Press, 1998), 27. Ibid., 38–9, 44. 33 Ibid., 42. 34 The motif of The Dew Breaker presents some similarity with Raoul Peck’s Haitian Corner (1987) with the exception that Peck’s film was focused on one protagonist trying to take revenge of his torturer while Danticat opts for a broader scope and examine various responses to the victim–torturer confrontation or interaction. 31 32

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to terms with what she resents as a double betrayal from her parents. The three characters are haunted by death: the father/Macoute is haunted by the memory of the people he tortured and/ or killed and by the fact that he will have to face his own death; the mother/wife is haunted by the memory of her two brothers who both died tragically, one by drowning and the other at the hand of the dew breaker. Crimes of Honor and Revenge In some stories, reference to death is made in side stories stemming from the main plot. For instance, in The Farming of Bones, there are two occurrences in which violent death is viewed as the appropriate response to a wrong deed. First, after the death of Joël, there is a desire for revenge among his close friends and family. Mimi, a young Haitian woman, laments the impossibility for Haitian workers to obtain justice and states, “I say, An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”35 Joël’s common-law wife calls for revenge also but as a way to “teach” the masters to respect their workers’ lives “to teach them that our lives are precious too.”36 The second occurrence takes place in Haiti where Amabelle has returned after fleeing the massacre and could be called a “crime of honor.” The story is not related directly to the main plot but is an embedded story, told in order to shed light on the personality of the perpetrator as well as indicating the weight of social pressure in a small community. In fact, the story is told twice. The first version is told to a survivor of the slaughter (Yves) by his mother (Man Rapadou) as he is eating voraciously. The story is about a prisoner returning home after being arrested by the Americans. He was so famished when he arrived home that he asked for food and ate so much that he fell dead in front of his plate. The story is told publicly, as a joke that nobody seems to appreciate. In the second version, told several years later to Amabelle by the same Man Rapadou, we learn that the prisoner was Yves’s father and she was the one who poisoned him because she had learned that he had accepted to spy on his fellow villagers. She indicates that her crime was dictated by the duty to protect the family honor. Yet, as she is old and about to die herself, she is preoccupied by the probable encounter in the afterlife. I am going to him soon and I’m afraid. What will I say to him in the life after? “Love is only pleasure; honor is duty.” I cannot simply say this thing that I told myself then. It is not enough now. … greater than my love for this man was love for my country. I could not let him trade us all, sell us to the Yankis.37 A similar situation arises in Claire of the Sea Light; in piecing the story together, we realize that Mrs. Gaëlle Lavaud is the one who paid two rogue policemen to kill the men she held responsible for the death of her husband. An innocent man, Bernard Dorien was killed and his parents’ business destroyed. Ten years later, Gaëlle Lavaud recognizes that her revenge did not brought her solace: “She hadn’t thought that the deaths would bring her husband back, but she’d expected a hole to feel plugged that never was.”38 We find the same sense of guilt emerging with the passing of time. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 63. Ibid., 66. 37 Ibid., 277. 38 Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light, 145. 35 36

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“Ou libere?” (Are You Freed?):39 Grieving, Mourning, and Getting along with One’s Life … All Danticat’s novels are mostly preoccupied with ways of surviving and coping after the death of a loved one. A recurring motif is the difficulty to accept the finality of death. Most characters remain attached to the departed either through Christian or Vodou or secular traditional rituals (regular visits to the cemetery, lighting of candles, etc.) or through dreams. In The Farming of Bones, Amabelle who lost her parents when she was 8 interacts with them (but more particularly with her mother) in her dreams. One night after she has been rescued on the Haitian side of the border, she dreams of her mother: “In my sleep, I see my mother rising, like the mother spirit of the rivers, above the current that drowned her.”40 This visit is the occasion of a dialogue between mother and daughter in which Amabelle’s mother brings reassurance of her love to her daughter and promised that she will recover from her wounds. Similarly, she later dreams of her lover, Sébastien, and converse with him. In many of her stories, Danticat seems obsessed by a form of fusional relationship with the departed. None of her characters is really able to let go the departed even though they seem to carry out their daily chores or engage in social interchanges. For instance, in “Caroline’s Wedding,” a story from Krik? Krak!, two sisters always dream of their departed father. They have refused to comply with the tradition of wearing red panties in order to keep the ghost of the departed at bay and avoid the risk of incestuous intercourse. Instead they cherish his “nocturnal visits” in the dream knowing that their mother would be upset. The dreams of the two sisters are revealing of their attachment to their father. Ten years after his passing, the daughters are still dreaming of him and particularly at a moment of transition—the younger daughter is about to marry and normally, if the father was alive, he would be the one handing her to the groom. The bonding between the two sisters and their father is indicated by the fact that both have the same recurring dream but on alternate days, as if the father was taking turns to visit each daughter. The narrator connects these dreams with the early months of the father’s passing; as time passes, the initial dream is phased out and replaced by memories of shared moments. As Caroline’s wedding is approaching, she announces that she dreamed of her father. The dream announces in a certain way that she is breaking away from him: she sees him at a party, she calls him but he does not answer, she “realize(s) that he can’t see (her).”41 Such a dream would call for a Freudian analysis of the father–daughter relationship but for the purpose of this paper, what is of interest is the fact that Caroline’s dream triggers three subsequent dreams for the narrator. The first dream reveals the narrator’s attachment to her father yet the inability to establish a physical contact as the father disappear “like smoke,”42 which could be interpreted as a reminder of the separation between the dead and the living. In the second dream, the narrator becomes closer to establish a contact. She hears her full Haitian name, Gracina, uttered by her father’s ghost and as she was about to touch his fingertips, she wakes up. In the third dream, she has a conversation with her father by “a stream of rose-colored

Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 233, 234. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 207. 41 Edwidge Danticat, “Caroline’s Wedding,” in Krik? Krak! (New  York:  Random House, Vintage Contemporaries— Vintage Books, 1996), 172. 42 Ibid., 175–6. 39 40

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blood” and he asks her some riddles.43 While for the first time she is able to connect with the spirit of her father, she wakes up “afraid” for the first time, of the father in her dream.44 From the family story, one has the impression that Gracina is the daughter who is closest to her parents since she was born in Haiti even if she was too young to remember life in Haiti; it seems that being born there gives her an innate understanding of her parents’ experience. This would explain the feeling of exclusion experienced in the first dream yet at the same time her willingness to abide by the traditional Haitian rituals. After receiving her passport, she visits her father’s tombstone with her new passport “for him to see” and bring the news of Caroline’s wedding, adding, “We felt like you were there.”45 The inability to breakaway from the departed is a recurring motif in most if not all Danticat stories. This is particularly true of Amabelle in The Farming of the Bones and of Gaëlle Lavaud and Nozias Faustin in Claire of the Sea Light. A comment by Maxime Ardin Sr, an occasional lover of Gaëlle Lavaud, could be applied to all Danticat’s grieving characters: “No one will ever love you more than you love your pain,” … his words ringing even louder in the dark. She had not understood what he meant at first, but eventually it occurred to her that he might be right. Her pain, her losses: these were what was keeping her in this town.46 In the case of Amabelle, we are told that twenty-four years after the slaughter, she was still searching for answers, trying to comprehend how such a massacre could have taken place, perpetrated by people who knew their victims. Twenty-four years later, she crosses back the border clandestinely and returns to Alegria, the small town of her childhood, to see and be recognized by Señora Valencia. The visit is disappointing as Amabelle is not convinced by Señora Valencia’s account. She returns to Haiti but requests to be left by the border river in the middle of the night. The time by the river brings back two sets of memories: memory of those who died during the slaughter and memory of Amabelle’s parents. Her visit to the river on the anniversary day of her fateful crossing only forces her to acknowledge that it is time to let go: I thought that if I relived the moment [her parents’ drowning] often enough, the answer would become clear, that they had wanted either for us all to die together or for me to go on living, even if by myself. I also thought that if I came to the river on the right day, at the right hour, the surface of the water might provide the answer: a clearer sense of the moment, a stronger memory. But nature has no memory. And soon, perhaps, neither will I.47 In an analysis of The Farming of Bones, Australia Tarver posits that “Danticat’s novel is the literary counter-memory of this massacre.”48 She examines how Danticat intertwines history and memory and “privileges a history that emanates from the orally derived memories of Ibid., 209–11. Ibid., 211. 45 Ibid., 214. 46 Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light, 153. 47 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 309. 48 Australia Tarver, “Memory and History in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones,” MaComère 5 (2002): 233. 43 44

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Haitian peasants who seek mutual support in their common suffering over and above an official narrative or hegemonic discourse that rejects their humanity.”49 In her discussion of the ending of the novel, Tarver shows that while there is a hint at a possible suicide, the final words (“looking for the dawn”)50 tell about the possibility of a “new beginning.”51

Conclusion In her two books of essays, Create Dangerously and The Art of Death, Edwidge Danticat gives us some keys to her creative writing. Of all her novels, Claire of the Sea Light is the most representative of her art of writing death. We see how personal and family experience surrounded by the violence of Haitian politics have shaped her imagination resulting in a body of fiction in which death becomes an ominous presence that determines the lives of her characters and dominates the atmosphere of the novel. If Danticat gave us some clues about the importance of death in her fiction, what she did not mention was the equal if not greater importance she gave to survival strategies after the death of loved ones. Mourning, grieving, and then getting along are responses to death explored in almost all her novels and short stories. Her characters invent rituals that help them to fill the void left by the departed. Some are unable to console themselves, others confront bravely the absence and try to reconstruct new lives. Women are the ones tying their belt “the way some old Haitian women tightened rags around their middles when grieving”52 and face the day (met fanm sou ou).53 Through dreams (or nightmares), the connection, and sometimes a fusional one, with the departed remains for better or worse. As she writes at the end of The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, “Dreams are sometimes portals of grief.”54 Danticat’s fiction goes beyond death as an allegorical figure or a philosophical concept. It is un art de vivre and it is not surprising to learn that Michel de Montaigne is among the writers who sat at her side while she was conjuring her own death exorcisms.55

Bibliography Aristotle. Poetics. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press—Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1970. Danticat, Edwidge, Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Soho Press, 1994. Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! New York: Random House, Vintage Contemporaries—Vintage Books, 1996. Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. New York: Soho Press, 1998. Danticat, Edwidge. The Dew Breaker. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2004. Danticat, Edwidge. Brother, I’m Dying. New York: Alfred A. Knopf —Borzoi Book, 2007.

Ibid., 240. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 310. 51 Tarver, “Memory and History in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones,” 241. 52 Danticat, “Caroline’s Wedding,” 168. 53 Danticat, The Art of Death, 14. 54 Ibid., 139. 55 Ibid., 11, 117–18 (Kindle edition, 2017). 49 50

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Death and the Maiden Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Danticat, Edwidge. Claire of the Sea Light. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2013. Danticat, Edwidge. The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, Kindle edition. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017. Fleishmann, Ulrich. Ideyoloji ak realite nan literati ayisyèn. Translated by Jeannot Hilaire from German: Ideologie und Wirklichkeit in der Literatur Haitis (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag Otto H. Hess, 1969). Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1981. Lahens, Yanick. L’Exil: Entre l’ancrage et la fuite, l’écrivain haïtien. Port-au-Prince: Editions Henri Deschamps, 1990. Rougemont, Denis. L’amour et l’occident (1939, 1956). Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1971. Serres, Michel. “Christ Noir.” Critique 29 (1973): 3–25. Reprinted in Hermès III: La traduction. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1974, 243–68. Tarver, Australia. “Memory and History in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” MaComère 5 (2002): 232–42. Walcott-Hackshaw, Elizabeth. “Writing Haiti: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.” MaComère. The Caribbean Woman: Imagining/Creating/Theorizing 9 (2007): 30–41.

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PART IV TIFIS AK FANM, GIRLS AND WOMEN

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CHAPTER 9 “SOMEBODY, ANYBODY SING A BLACK GIRL’S SONG …”: DANTICAT AND HAITIAN GIRLHOOD

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles

In her keynote address for the 2018 Haitian Studies Association Conference, Edwidge Danticat invoked the life and the work of Black feminist writer Ntozake Shange whose canonical choreopoem, For Colored Girls who Have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf is a powerful ode to Black and brown girlhood. Referencing Shange’s commitment to Black girls around the world, Danticat cited the author’s determination to write about and for girls as explained in an interview, “I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think.”1 The choice of this particular quotation is remarkable because the careful reader of Danticat’s oeuvre can identify the same thread in the Haitian author’s writing—pointed attention to Black girls and girlhood in a way that consistently affirms their existence and creates spaces for them. As early as 1998, Danticat emphasizes this impulse in her own work stating that she writes for the “girl she was at age fifteen.” Sophie Caco in Breath, Eyes, Memory, Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin in Claire of the Sea Light, Anacaona of Anacaona Golden Flower, Giselle and Isabelle in Untwine—there is no shortage of girl protagonists in Edwidge Danticat’s corpus.2 Interestingly, in Danticat’s texts this attention to girls deploys tropes of inattention, invisibility, and erasure in order to foreground their lived experience of girlhood in both Haiti and in the diaspora. In this essay, I argue that Danticat uses the logics of visibility and invisibility to draw attention to how girls are invisibilized, but refuses to focus exclusively on that erasure. Rather, she also offers a counter-narrative focused on Black girls’ interiority to highlight their voices and visions. My readings of how girls figure in Claire of the Sea Light (2013) and Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) posit that for Danticat girlhood serves aesthetic, ethical, and heuristic functions. Beginning with her most recent short story cycle and working my way backward to her first novel, throughout this essay I explore how girls are made present even through absence to argue that Danticat pairs invisibility and visibility in order to make a point about Black girl subjectivities. Throughout this essay, I refer to scholarship from the field of girlhood studies in general and Black girlhood studies in particular to guide my analyses of Claire of the Sea Light and Breath, Eyes, Memory. The field of Black girlhood studies has gained significant traction in the past several years. In the United States, scholars and activists have devoted their attention

Danticat Keynote, Haitian Studies Association Conference, 40th anniversary. Port-au-Prince, Haiti, November 2018. Compare this passage from The Farming of Bones about Amabelle Désir’s girlhood: “When I was a child, I used to spend hours playing with my shadow, something that my father warned could give me nightmares, nightmares like seeing voices twirl in a hurricane of rainbow colors and hearing the odd shapes of things rise up and speak to define themselves. Playing with my shadow made me, an only child, feel less alone” (4). See Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones (New York: Soho Press, 1998). 1 2

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to exploring Black girls as racialized and gendered subjects whose intersectional identities influence how they experience childhood and come of age. Scholarship on Black girlhood by feminist scholars, in particular, seeks to actively center and interrogate constructions and representations of Black girls in myriad contexts. For example, in Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century, Nazera Wright argues for a Black feminist mode of reading texts of girlhood. “Reading these girlhood texts aright, means paying close attention to clues about the meaning of age distinctions … Clues about age provide a deeper, more intimate understanding of Black girlhood.”3 Though my examination of girlhood in Danticat’s work focuses in a different century and setting, I find Wright’s method of analysis instructive for how it proposes a Black feminist reading strategy that seeks to account for what is not said as much as what is said. My indebtedness to Black girlhood studies as a critical frame also acknowledges the increased visibility of Black girls as subjects of critical analysis in the past several years. As Reighan Gillam explains, “By bringing to light discourses on and experiences of Black girls, scholars have been working to make Black girls visible in the academic literature. The literature on Black girlhood is broad,” but there is still much work to be done.4 In my view, the work to be done includes more ample consideration of Black girls who are not African American. When we also take into account how failure to critically interrogate girlhood as an embodied subject position is also evident in Haitian studies, an examination of Danticat’s oeuvre from this vantage point is especially timely. Despite the extensive work that has been done on Danticat, few scholars have endeavored to critically interrogate figurations of girlhood in her work. By anchoring my study of Danticat’s protagonists in the field, this essay demonstrates the utility of Black girlhood studies as a critical frame for reading Danticat. I am convinced, as Gillam concludes, that “Black girlhood [should] not be confined to the United States under the umbrella of African American girlhood. Racism and sexism are global projects with particular contours in different spaces, requiring that the project of elaborating Black girlhood take on a global dimension as well.”5

Absence and Presence in Claire of the Sea Light Throughout Claire of the Sea Light, the protagonist’s presence is juxtaposed with her absence—a dynamic that is pronounced when we consider her interiority, the use of her name, and how other characters perceive her. The stories that bookend Claire of the Sea Light—“Claire of the Sea Light” and “Claire de Lune”—draw attention to Claire’s presence and absence as a girl in her community. Claire is the beginning and the end of the story. “The morning Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin turned seven, a freak wave, measuring between ten and twelve feet high, was seen in the ocean outside of Ville Rose.”6 The first sentence calls attention to the little girl’s age then names her as a point of reference for events that occur in the small seaside town. As a 7-year-old girl she falls into the category of “youthful girlhood” described by Wright.7 By the Nazera Wright, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 13. Reighan Gillam, “Representing Black Girlhood in Brazil: Culture and Strategies of Empowerment,” Communication, Culture and Critique 10 (2017): 612. 5 Ibid., 623. 6 Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light (New York: Knopf, 2013), 3. 7 Wright, Black Girlhood, 10. 3 4

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end of the first paragraph, we learn her full name, her age, her father’s name and his profession. The repeated use of Claire’s full name becomes a way to signify her presence even when she is absent. This tension between presence and absence is one of the main ways that visibility and invisibility register in Claire of the Sea Light. Yet despite the author’s insistence on the girl’s name, one wonders, is Claire Limyè Lanmè really the book’s protagonist? She is certainly the eponymous character, which indicates her centrality to the short story cycle. But, she is absent from most of the plots that make up these stories. The book begins and ends on the day of her disappearance, which is also the day of her seventh birthday. Her birthday, which the narrator refers to as “this most impossible of days, this day of both life and death” holds several instances of birth and death together.8 Because her birthday represents the day her mother died as well as the day each year that her father negotiates with the woman to whom he will give her, this celebration of life is also marked by an imminent absence. Just as the presence of death hovers over her, the possibility of separation from her father becomes a part of her yearly celebrations. There are at least three ways in which absence and presence emerge in the book: through the use of dialogue, references to death and life, and the action of the plot. Death and life connote absence and presence as well as the intimate relationship between the two. From the beginning of the story, in its acknowledgment of death and life, Claire of the Sea Light illustrates how absence also marks presence, or rather, it reveals the mutually interdependent relationship between presence and absence. Another marker of absence is that Claire’s spoken voice is rarely present in the course of the book. If the 7-year-old protagonist of Claire of the Sea Light is at the center of the text, what does it mean that she so rarely speaks? Can she still be the main character and so rarely speak aloud? If she does not speak can she still have a voice? I want to suggest here that in the absence of an audible voice, seeing becomes an operative modality for how we can analyze and interpret this character. The relationship between voice and visibility is essential here: even though Claire does not speak, she sees. The trope of visibility that dominates Black girlhood studies often focuses on girls being seen. Here, I want to emphasize that seeing is equally, if not more, important than being seen because it is the different between being object and being subject. In the scene Claire is clearly seen, but in my view what Claire sees, how she sees, and who sees her are of critical importance. The logics of visibility are thus informed by the act of seeing (subject) and being seen (object) as well as an awareness of how the two interrelate. For example, in the first story Claire is aware of how she is seen and appraised by both her father and the fabric vendor. On the one hand she is unnoticed, but on the other hand she notices that she is unnoticed. That awareness of how she is seen seems to inform her eventual decision to determine her own future on her own terms. By looking at how Claire sees herself in relation to how others see her and talk about her, we notice a dialectic of presence and absence that reveal much about who she is. The extent to which her voice is barely audible in these stories is also a way to acknowledge how girls are (un) seen in the society. As Ruth Nicole Brown points out in Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood, silent Black girls have much to tell us. “Silent Black girls have a lot to say; however, without time, good relationships, and patience, their voices remain a backdrop to conversations about them.”9 Nowhere is this more apparent for Claire than in the final story Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light, 31. Ruth Nicole Brown, Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 184. 8 9

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when the reader is privy to all her mind has to say. In the final story, we witness her robust and precocious intellect: she is highly critical of adults, and attentive to the power dynamics that structure the society in which she lives. Danticat constantly reminds the reader that despite her young age, Claire’s life is shaped by her lived experiences of race, class, and gender. For example, Nozias’s desire to give his daughter away is best understood in terms of class and gender. His attempts to give her away are rooted in what he perceives as his inability to care for her, not a comment on her value or importance. That “[he] didn’t want to leave something as crucial as his daughter’s future to chance” clearly demonstrates how deeply he cares for his daughter and realizes that his life as a fisherman will not allow her to have the kind of life that he desires for her.10 His main reason for wanting to give Claire away is his feeling that as her father he would not be able to take care of her because she is a girl. “But he was a man. What did he know about raising a little girl? Maybe if she were a boy, he could try to do it. But with a girl, there were so many things that could go wrong, so many hopeless mistakes you could make.”11 Nozias’s anxieties about gender lead him to believe that he is unable to care for his daughter. Seen through Claire’s eyes, his attempts to give her away are perplexing. “The good news, Claire thought, was that her father did not try to give her away every day. Most of the time, he acted as though he always wanted to keep her.”12 Similarly, his understanding of his class position drives him to seek the wealthier woman, Madame Gaëlle, to care for his daughter. Described as a “small and unlucky town,” the fictitious Ville Rose features characters who connect to Claire in unexpected ways, and her visibility is further informed by how they notice and describe her. To Albert Vincent, who pays her school fees, she is Little Claire. “How is Ti Claire? Albert Vincent asked. He often referred to Nozias’s daughter as Ti Claire, Little Claire.”13 Another example is Louise, the radio host who visits Claire’s school to read to the children, observes her and comments on the girl’s peculiar nature: Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin, an attentive little girl from one of the primary-school classes at École Ardin. Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin’s hair was always braided in what seemed to be a hundred yarnlike plaits, each individually fastened with different colored bow-shaped plastic barrette … The girl was so quiet that Louise worried that there might be some other frightful things about Claire that might link them.14 Despite their differences in age and life experience, Louise sees herself in Claire. “Claire was the one child in the classes she read to who reminded her much of herself when she was young.”15 For Louise, Claire’s quietness makes her more noticeable. Presence and absence are established here through the idea that the girl is oddly quiet, making her seem absent even when she is present. For the people of Ville Rose, there is also a spiritual or mystical dimension to Claire that people from the community notice. “To most people Claire Limyè Lanmè was a revenant, a child who had entered the world just as her mother was leaving it. And if these Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light, 9. Ibid., 15. 12 Ibid., 8. 13 Ibid., 30. 14 Ibid., 126–7. 15 Ibid., 127. 10 11

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types of children were not closely watched, they can easily follow their mothers into the other world.”16 As a so-called revenant she occupies a mystical and marginal space that speaks to her otherworldly nature. Even in this description there is absence and presence: Claire, if not watched, will follow her mother. In the absence of Claire’s speaking voice, Danticat deploys narrative devices to place her at the story’s center. One of the main ways she achieves this centering is through the use of Claire’s name. Seven times in the opening story, her full name is repeated and each time includes an age marker that highlights her youthful girlhood. When the father and daughter go visit the cemetery, the repetition of her name highlights her presence and is almost rhythmic in nature. “Her mother’s name has also been Claire. Claire Narcis. He father had named her Claire Limyè Lanmè, Claire of the Sea Light, after her mother died.”17 That Claire is named for her mother strengthens the link between her and the dead woman. Second, Claire’s centrality is also evident in the fact that throughout the story, her birthday marks other happenings in the town. She is a point of reference for other subplots that unfold and that we learn more about later in the collection. “The day Claire Limyè Lanmè turned six was also the day Ville Rose’s undertaker, Albert Vincent, was inaugurated as the new mayor.”18 Last, the omniscient narrator’s descriptions of Claire shape how she is seen in these stories, highlighting that she is in fact visible. Here the reader does the seeing. “On the edge of the crowd, perched on Nozias’s shoulder, Claire Limyè Lanmè was wearing her pink muslin birthday dress, her plaited hair covered with tiny bow-shaped barrettes.”19 In the dress and carefully placed barrettes she represents a girl who is well-cared for. Earlier the narrator explains, “Ville Rose was home to about eleven thousand people, five percent of them wealthy or comfortable. The rest were poor, some dirt poor,” and Claire is a part of this poor majority.20 Through textual gestures such as detailed descriptions of Claire, Danticat marks the girl’s presence. During the conversation between Nozias and the fabric vendor, Claire becomes aware that she is being spoken about and that there is a transactional air to the conversation between the two adults. In this passage, we see Claire move from being subject to object then back to subject again as she realizes that the fabric vendor is evaluating and appraising her. As a wealthy older woman, the fabric vendor occupies a privileged position juxtaposed with Claire’s identity as poor little girl. Standing between Nozias’s and Claire’s cots in the middle of the shack, the fabric vendor asked Claire to twirl by the light of the kerosene lamp, which was in its usual place on the small table where Claire and Nozias sometimes ate their meals … The walls of the shack were covered with flaking, yellowed copies of La Rosette, the town’s newspaper, which had been glued to the wood long ago with manioc paste by Claire’s mother. From where she was standing, Claire could see her own stretched-out shadow moving along with the others over the fading words. While twirling for the lady, Claire heard her father say, “I am for correcting children, but I am not for whipping.” Only then did Claire realize

Ibid., 16. Ibid., 13. 18 Ibid., 4. 19 Ibid., 6. 20 Ibid., 5. 16 17

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who this “her” was that they were talking about, and that her father was trying to give her away. Her legs suddenly felt like lead, and she stopped twirling, and as soon as she stopped, the fabric vendor turned to her father, her fake hair blocking half of her face. Nozias’s eyes dropped from the fabric vendor’s fancy hairpiece to her pricey open-toed sandals and red toenails.21 I cite this passage at length because it emblematizes the relationship between visibility and invisibility that interests me. The passage makes clear that Claire herself understands the dynamics of seeing and being visible even if she is not seen. In some ways, she only figures marginally because Nozias and the fabric vendor are more engrossed in their conversation— which, though it is about her does not acknowledge her subjectivity. In other words, Gaëlle and Nozias look at Claire without seeming to see her. She, upon realizing that they are also discussing her, looks at them but remains unseen. These logics of visibility reveal that Claire can be looked at without being seen. Even when she turns her gaze to the adults in the room, it is clear that they only see each other, because her father at that point looks at the fabric vendor’s clothes. The bond between Nozias and Claire depends largely on how he sees her. “Walking away from Albert Vincent, Nozias realized that he’d lost sight of Claire.”22 The structure of this sentence is important because Nozias is the subject who sees Claire, but that she is out of sight also foreshadows what will take place later on when she runs away. When Claire disappears, the bond with her father is made more explicit for the reader. “He was certain that Claire would return, and he wanted to be there when she did.”23 He cannot imagine Claire leaving for good. He can accept Claire’s absence when he is the architect, but not when she is the agent deciding when and where to go. For this reason, Nozias seems to convince himself that Claire will return. “Claire had never done anything like this before. Yes, she would sometimes go off walking, wandering around town, as her mother used to. But someone—if not him, then one of the women who kept an eye out for her—always knew which direction she was headed, where she was going, and when shed be back.”24 The last sentence of the story mentions Claire’s name twice. “Then he left [Madame Gaëlle] alone in the shack and walked over to wait next to the rocks where the two of them had been sitting with Claire before Claire disappeared.”25 Claire’s disappearance will linger like a fog over the remaining stories if it is not explicitly mentioned altogether. For example, the following story, “The Frogs” begins with a mention of Claire’s disappearance. “Ten years before the night she showed up to take Nozias Faustin’s child, Gaëlle Cadet Lavaud was expecting her own child.”26 Madame Gaëlle is, of course, the fabric vendor who ends up being the person to whom Nozias wants to give Claire. Like Claire’s mother, her connection to the girl is also informed by death. Her own daughter dies on one of Claire’s birthdays and when the motherless infant requires nourishment, Nozias approaches her to nurse his daughter.

Ibid., 7. Ibid., 30. 23 Ibid., 39. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 40. 26 Ibid., 41. 21 22

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Claire’s interiority, which relates her perspective on what happens around her, further underscores her presence in the story. This interiority is not fully developed until the final story, “Claire de Lune,” which returns to the scene between Claire, Nozias, and Madame Gaëlle fabric vendor this time referencing the famous French lullaby Au clair de la lune. In “Claire de Lune,” we learn far more about the 7-year-old girl for whom the book is named as her point of view is carefully amplified. The story affirms Claire’s existence by showcasing her dreams, inner thoughts, and actions. Told entirely from Claire’s perspective, it begins with a dream. Sometimes Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin would dream about the day she was born. In her dream, it was a gray morning and the sky too was pregnant, with rain. On one side of the room was a brand-new sisal broom, which, as in many home births, a midwife would brush across her mother’s bare stomach to help “sweep” her out … “A revenan” she would hear the midwife saying. “She is a revenant.”27 Throughout “Claire de Lune,” the young girl’s interiority is marked by incessant questions and evaluations. Her interior monologue exposes the reader to these secret thoughts and they function as a heuristic through which we see her coming into knowledge about herself and her community. She is always posing questions to herself about the world around her and especially about the adults in it. Her constant questions recur in each paragraph if not almost in every other sentence. “Where would she have gone if the fabric vendor had said no yet again? Who would have taken her in for the rest of her life?”28 The questions are the most probing when they concern the adults around her. “But what if there was no better life? How could granmoun, grown people, not understand such things? How could they not understand everything?”29 Claire’s silent thoughts also speak to her otherworldly nature that disconnects her from those around her. “She disliked people sometimes. She felt them moving around her, exchanging places. Sometimes she wished people, especially adults, were trees. If only trees could move … But trees didn’t cry. They didn’t complain.”30 Claire’s interiority is also reflected in her play time, which reifies her quotidian experience as a little girl. Play is essential to the context of Black girlhood because of the ways that different societies tend to age girls of African descent, demanding that they be seen as older. In order to challenge representations of Black girls that thrust them into early adulthood, scholars of Black girlhood have turned to play as a way to center girls as children. As another feminist scholar of Black girlhood studies, Kyra Gaunt, explains in The Games Black Girls Play, musical traditions are woven into the play of African American girls. Similarly, in the Haitian context, the songs are an important part of play. “In the distance, Nozias saw his daughter holding hands in a circle with five other girls, spinning one another in a dizzying game called the won.”31 In addition to this, Gaunt reminds us that Black girl sociality is learned through games. In other words, games are “where ideals about relationships and social norms take root.”32 Taking seriously Ibid., 211. Ibid., 217–18. 29 Ibid., 221. 30 Ibid., 214. 31 Ibid., 28. 32 Kyra Gaunt, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double Dutch to Hip Hop (New York: New York University Press 2006), 15. 27 28

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Gaunt’s question, “What if, in considering the games of Black girls, we considered how these games transmit and express notions about race and gender … through their physicality and embodied movement?” I am interested in what observations of play, or lack of play, reveal about these Haitian girls.33 Games are omnipresent in the novel both thematically and structurally. Maxine Montgomery argues that the game of wonn functions more than thematically, but has a structural significance in the book. She writes, “The novel finds its deeper meaning in the vernacular tradition defining Black girlhood in Haiti.”34 For Claire, play is a rare sign of belonging and sociality. “While playing wonn, when she held hands with other girls, especially at school or on the beach, when they swayed their arms up and down before taking off in their circle, when they were deciding which way to play or which song to sing, she would always think of the same song.”35 Still, even as she plays with the girls she feels her own alterity. She is different from them because she is a revenant, because she has lost her mother, because of her otherworldly nature. What we learn about Claire in this story of her inner life is both revelatory and heartbreaking. She has very few friends:  “She would have to leave her school and the one or two children in her class who spoke to her.”36 Her secret thoughts reveal that she worries that her father resents her for her mother’s death. “The way he told the story always made her feel like someone who had shown up uninvited somewhere, as if she shouldn’t have come. As if her mother’s death were her fault.”37 And they reveal how she feels about the moment when her father gives her away, which makes her sad to the point of being unable to speak or express what is happening to her: “She could never write a letter that could explain how she was feeling at that moment.”38 Along with these sad facts marking her existence, there is a curious, confident, and critical version of Claire who analyzes everything happening around her. She evaluates the actions of adults: “Madame Josephine had no voice, so she made up a new language with her hands. It was a more direct language than the on the other adults spoke.”39 An important part of Claire’s interiority is her observation of adults combined with her evaluation of what they are thinking. Each time she expresses a desire to speak her mind though, she repeatedly chooses not to do so. For example, in her conversation with Madame Gaëlle, “she wished she could explain to Madame Gaëlle before answering that she was not trying to be disrespectful by looking into her eyes. She knew that looking into an adult’s eyes was as disrespectful as whistling in public of making ugly remarks about someone’s mother. So instead of speaking, she nodded her answer.”40 Here Claire chooses not to speak as a way to honor social codes of behavior that govern interactions between adults and children. Her choice not to speak is deliberate and reveals her understanding of how she is expected to behave as a child. Again, in these revelations from Claire’s mind, we notice sharp awareness aware of how others see her: “Madame Gaëlle

Ibid., 2. Maxine L. Montgomery, “Lasiren Song for the Wonn: Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light and the Legend of Mami Wata,” CLA Journal 59, no. 4 (2016): 316. 35 Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light, 219. 36 Ibid., 217. 37 Ibid., 218. 38 Ibid., 229. 39 Ibid., 215. 40 Ibid., 223. 33 34

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was watching her the way her father watched her.”41 That “she knew this the way she knew everything else, by hearing bits of things adults said to one another when they didn’t think she was listening” indicates Claire’s ability to use her invisibility to her advantage.42 The sharpness of her young mind reminds us that Claire is actually wise beyond her years. These moments of wonder, dreaming, questioning, and critiquing affirm Claire as a thinking and seeing subject with her own viewpoints and visions of the world. Claire of the Sea Light disrupts the equivalence between spoken words and interiority by presenting a girl protagonist whose inner monologue reveals robust intellectual patterns. For the reader, unlike the characters, the audibility of her voice is not impacted by what is spoken or unspoken. Instead, what matters is how the reader hears and understands what is happening to her. Her voice with all of its internal percolations—whether these are hypotheticals, conjectures, or dreams—is a dynamic example of subjectivity in the context of Haitian girlhood.

Unbelonging and Defiance in Breath, Eyes, Memory Although it is a coming-of-age novel, Sophie Caco’s childhood in Breath, Eyes, Memory seems fleeting. Given the traumatic nature of what Sophie experiences in the novel, we can read the brevity of her childhood in terms of how girlhood intersects with loss. Sophie’s childhood takes up such little narrative space in the story that we can also read it productively in terms of presence and absence. She is 12 years old when the story begins and from the time she migrates to the United States, the narrative moves rapidly toward her adulthood. Unlike Claire, Sophie narrates the entire story in the first person allowing the reader to become even more familiar and intimate with her thoughts. As in Claire of the Sea Light, though to a far greater extent, the novel maintains Sophie’s subjectivity and perspective as a girl by recording her observations of what the adults around her do. When we contrast those observations with her actions, as I do in what follows, it becomes clear that Sophie is aware of how invisibility and agency operate for girls like her. What Sophie sees around her divulges information about her positionality. When her aunt asks about school and she responds, “I like everything but those reading classes they let parents come to in the afternoon. Everybody’s parents come except you. I never have anyone to read with,” her observation is about being different.43 Sophie’s complaints reveal awareness of how she differs from the other children in her school, each of whom have parents present. For Sophie, her aunt’s absence further confirms her own unbelonging and is a sign of her alterity. That feeling of unbelonging is one that subtly shades the descriptions of her life in Haiti before she migrates. She does not belong to the group of children playing, nor does she belong to her aunt and grandmother, as is made clear by her abrupt departure. The novel maps Sophie’s process of self-discovery that shows her coming to terms with this unbelonging and reformulating her relationship to belonging. As Nadège T.  Clitandre argues in Edwidge Danticat:  The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary, the author “reworks the experience of displacement from the perspective of a Haitian girl forming identity in the diaspora while maintaining ties to home.”44 Ibid., 223. Ibid., 224. 43 Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York: Vintage, 1994), 4. 44 Nadège Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 81. 41 42

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As in Claire of the Sea Light, in Breath, Eyes, Memory Danticat’s use of play in her stories highlights girls’ feelings of isolation in their communities. These literary girls we encounter are not seen playing as often as they are seen watching others play and longing to play. Take, for example, this scene in which Sophie observes the children playing across the street, and wishes she could join in: The children across the street were piling up the leaves in Madame Augustin’s yard. The bigger ones waited on line as the smaller ones dropped onto the pile, bouncing their feet, shrieking and laughing. … They grabbed one another and fell to the ground, rejoicing as though they had flown past the towering flame trees that shielded the hot Haitian sun … “You think these children would be kind to their mother and clean up those leaves,” Tante Atie said. “Instead they are making a bigger mess.” “They should know better” I said, secretly wishing that I too could swim in their sea of dry leaves.45 This passage reveals Sophie’s desire to play with and be like the other children, which in turn displays the isolation she experiences. That she feels unable to openly voice her opinion about the children’s game and join their fun further underscores her isolation. Shortly thereafter, Sophie stares at another group of children and is admonished for doing so. These looks can be interpreted as a longing. Sophie looks at other children because she longs to be a part of their group, or she wants to not be alone. “I continued to watch the children as Tante Atie prepared what she was going to bring to the potluck … ‘You should not stare,’ she said as we passed a near-sighted old woman whispering mystical secrets of needle and thread to a little girl.”46 In her analysis of the daffodils leitmotif in Breath, Eyes, Memory, Jana Evans Braziel also makes note of Sophie’s isolation from the other children writing, “Sophie remains noticeably separate from the group of children.”47 This separation marks Sophie as different from the other children and confirms her unbelonging. Sophie is fully aware of what is expected of her as child according to Haitian social codes of behavior. “I tried to listen without looking directly at the women’s faces. That would have been disrespectful, as bad as speaking without being spoken to.”48 By listening without looking she learns about her destiny. Here we are reminded of Claire who also learns things by listening when people do not notice her, surreptitiously paying attention to what the adults say in order to learn about herself. But in Sophie’s case, perhaps because she is a bit older, perhaps because of the relationship she has with her aunt, she eventually confronts the older woman about what she overhears. “ ‘You lied!’ I shouted. She grabbed both my ears and twisted them until they burned. I stomped my feet and walked away.”49 The exchange is a moment of defiance because Sophie, who earlier worked to not look the adults in the eye not only raises her voice but also shouts at her aunt. Tante Atie punishes her with the physical pulling of the ears, but Sophie still stomps away displaying her dissatisfaction and defiance. Adults keep secrets from the

Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 6. Ibid., 9. 47 Jana Braziel, “Daffodils, Rhizomes, Migrations:  Narrative Coming of Age in the Diasporic Writings of Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 3, no. 2 (2003): 120. 48 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 12. 49 Ibid., 16. 45 46

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children and do not divulge information even when it impacts the children’s destinies more than their own. Tante Atie says to her niece, “You have never done anything to make me sad … that is why this whole thing is going to be hard.”50 To this, Sophie thinks to herself, “I wanted to ask her what was going to be so hard, but she pressed her finger over my lips and pointed towards the house.”51 The aunt’s small gesture speaks volumes. She silences her niece with a touch rather than sharp words or a rebuke. Her message is clear: Sophie is to be quiet—she is to stop asking questions—and go back to the house. This exchange displays the tacit ways that girls are silenced and asked to remain silent even by those who love them. In the Caco family secrets are a way of life that influence all of the relationships. The weighty presence of secrets in the novel can also be read as an example of how presence and absence intersect in Danticat’s work. Secrets in their nature represent absence and presence simultaneously—their presence represents an absence of words, intimacy, and communication. Danticat’s scrupulous attention to Sophie’s interiority reflects the same nuance and care we see at work in Claire of the Sea Light. For example, almost as soon as the novel begins, the deep love that Sophie feels for Tante Atie is tainted by disappointment and betrayal. When Tante Atie announces to Sophie that she must leave to go live with her mother in the United States, the little girl is hurt and angered not only by the prospect of having to leave her life in Croix-des-Rosets but also by the fact that her aunt hid the information from her. An extremely perceptive child who notices the actions and emotions of the adults around her, Sophie observes, critiques, and empathizes with adults. For example, in her mind she understands the contrast between her childhood and that of her aunt and mother, highlighting the different circumstances in the lives of Haitian girls. “Whenever she was sad, Tante Atie would talk about the sugarcane fields, where she and my mother practically lived when they were children.”52 Tante Atie does not tell Sophie that their childhood is the source of her sadness, but the young girl observes her aunt and reaches this thoughtful conclusion. Like Claire Limyè Lanmè, Sophie makes these observations to herself and rarely shares her thoughts with the adults around her. This reinforces that although children are meant to be seen and not heard, they have rich interior lives. That their interiority reflects their thoughts about other people that they do not share means that these girls also understand that their opinions, their voices are not supposed to be heard. In Breath Eyes, Memory, girls are disempowered from making choices about life just as we saw in Claire of the Sea Light. First, there is the example of Martine’s rape, a violation that sets in motion a series of actions in which she has little choice. An unknown man violently forces his body on her because of which she is forced to have a child and then eventually move to the United States. The rape becomes an origin story for the mother’s trauma as well as a challenge in the mother–daughter relationship. The lack of choices at Sophie’s disposal becomes clear when she is forced to move to the United States against her will. As a young girl, she has no autonomy or ability to choose the path she wants for her life. Sophie’s journey to adulthood is marked by a constant tension between how she understands herself and what the accepted modalities of behavior are for Haitian girls. Given the long separation from her mother, the connections between the two of them is tenuous at best. That their relationship is characterized Ibid., 9. Ibid., 10. 52 Ibid., 4. 50 51

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by sexual abuse masquerading as a form of maternal protection reinforces the ways in which trauma is passed down from one generation to the next just as it underscores how patriarchal practices that devalue girls are also enacted by women. Much critical attention has been devoted to exploring the function of storytelling as both form and content in Breath, Eyes, Memory at the levels of both form and content. Again, what interests me here is how Black girls come to occupy the center of these stories not as a way of affirmation but rather to express devaluation and negation. In many ways, the stories about girls in Breath, Eyes, Memory invoke death and desolation as their cultural heritage as in the story below that Grandmè Ifé tells Sophie: The story goes that there was once an extremely rich man who married a poor Black girl. He had chosen her out of hundreds of prettier girls because she was untouched. For the wedding night, he brought her the whitest sheets and nightgowns he could possibly find. For himself, he brought a can of thick goat milk in which he planned to sprinkle a drop of her hymen blood to drink. Then came their wedding night. The girl did not bleed. The man had his honor and reputation to defend. He could not face the town if he did not have a blood-spotted sheet to hang in his courtyard the next morning. He did the best he could to make her bleed, but no matter how hard he tried, the girl did not bleed. So he took a knife and cut her between her legs to get some blood to show. He got enough blood for her wedding gown and sheets, an unusual amount to impress the neighbors. The blood kept flowing like water out of the girl. It flowed so much it wouldn’t stop. Finally, drained of all her blood, the girl died.53 Clitandre points out that the story displays the intersection of class and gender; “class issues in this passage are surrounded by a national ideal, i.e. a poor Black girl can move up in rank by marrying a rich man if she is chaste.”54 A  facile reading of these stories passed on to Sophie might conclude that stories featuring Haitian girls are mostly about suffering and victimization. Clearly this is one message in the tale mentioned above. As Clitandre rightfully observes, “The story of the poor Black girl and the rich man a physical danger imposed on Haitian women’s bodies.”55 Still, in my view it is especially important to note that this is the story about a man and a girl, not a man and a woman. Within this gendered power dynamic, a girl is left harmed and unprotected. She does not survive. I read the story’s purpose within the novel as a cautionary tale. As a story about a girl who does not survive, it encourages Sophie to determine the terms of her own survival, which becomes especially clear as she grows older. When Sophie arrives in New York, she makes note of what she sees and how she is seen. In the scene when her mother sees her at the airport, the woman who was responsible for Sophie on the plane delivers her to the mother and quickly disappears. Sophie notices, “It was as though I had disappeared. She did not even see me anymore.”56 Just as she did when she was in Croix-des-Bouquets, Sophie has thoughts that she wants to share but that she keeps

Danticat, Breath, Eyes Memory, 154–5. Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat, 105. 55 Ibid. 56 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 40. 53 54

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to herself. Before going to school, her mother warns her about the way she may be treated by the American students and Sophie thinks to herself:  “I wanted to tell my mother that I didn’t want to go to school. Frankly, I was afraid.”57 But she does not share these fears with her mother. While she is at a Haitian restaurant with her mother and the man she is dating, a waiter examines the mother and daughter as though searching for resemblance. “He looked at us for a long time. First me, then my mother. I wanted to tell him to stop it. There was no resemblance between us. I knew it.”58 Throughout the dinner, Sophie speaks very rarely but has a running commentary in her head about what she is hearing. When she is spoken to she responds, “I shook my head yes, as though I was really very interested.”59 The chapter ends with the couple continuing to speak about and around Sophie more than they speak to her. Sophie’s interior monologue also shows how much she thinks about her life back in Haiti and constantly compares the two places. Sophie Caco is only a girl for the first part of the novel, which lasts about sixty pages, but the idea of Black girlhood is present throughout all of Breath, Eyes, Memory. It is in the childhood memories that Martine and Tante Atie have about growing up as poor, unprotected, and vulnerable girls long before Sophie was born. It is in the stories from the oral tradition that are passed down to Sophie. It is in how Sophie, living with her mother in the present, remembers what she thought her to be like during her childhood. And it is in the possibilities that exist for baby Brigitte, a sign of reproductive futurity, a girl who represents the next generation of the Caco family.

Place, Survival, and Songs In both Claire of the Sea Light and Breath, Eyes, Memory place is formative as well as stabilizing for the Haitian girls Danticat creates. “Experience, then, is also at the heart of what place means and does; it is something that is practiced and enacted in girls’ daily lives, in their localities.”60 Their relationship to place determines their feelings of connection to other people. Sophie cannot imagine a life outside of Croix-des-Rosets without her aunt. Claire is compelled to head back down the mountain and join the people of Ville Rose after she runs away. Nevertheless, both Claire and Sophie imagine and attempt to realize alternative futures in the face of dominant hierarchies that seek to reinforce their marginalization. Claire does so by running away and refusing to be given away. At 18 years old, Sophie does so by breaking her hymen with the pestle in order to end her mother’s abusive testing. Creating these alternative futures is a form of survival. Describing the effects of sexual abuse in The Art of Death Danticat refers to it as “the death of innocence for little girls, some of whom do not manage to survive.”61 The latter part of this sentence interests me most for the purposes of this essay—“some of whom do not manage to survive.” Survival, or lack thereof, resonates with Shange’s project mentioned at the beginning of this essay. These representations of Black girls expose how they create their own strategies for survival, despite what the adults believe them to be capable of. Born from

Ibid., 51. Ibid., 55. 59 Ibid., 56. 60 Carrie Rentschler and Claudia Mitchell, Girlhood and the Politics of Place (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 2. 61 Danticat, The Art of Death, 44. 57 58

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Black girl’s imaginations, these strategies help to demonstrate what Ruth Nicole Brown calls “the creative potential of Black girlhood.” In her work on Black girlhood, Nazera Wright argues that these girls exist in a liminal space. “As raced, gendered, and youthful figures, Black girls occupy a space of in-betweenness, like the figures Hortense Spillers labels ‘not-yet’ subjects: they are not yet citizens and not yet women.”62 From this perspective, centering these “not yet” subjects and making them subjects can also be read as unconventional, and indeed feminist. By focusing on the subjective experiences of different kinds of Haitian girls and devoting pointed attention to their lived experiences, Danticat advances the project to center Black girlhood. Often, their interiority reflects nuanced analyses of social power relations that though they may not have the privilege to express out loud, these girls are keenly aware of. This writing of Haitian girlhood reflects an ongoing commitment to affirming the lives and experiences of girls who use unconventional means to survive in spite of efforts to control and constrain their existence. The ethical, aesthetic, and heuristic functions of girlhood in Danticat’s fiction remind us that Haitian girls have subjugated knowledge that is rich and should be centered, that how girls think, see, and play can be reflected in writing, and that there is creativity that should be associated with coming into girlhood. The author’s investment in stories of girls and girlhood embraces complexity and interiority as the hallmarks of their lives. She presents us with girls, who understand that to some they are invisible yet have voices for themselves, views of their own, and visions for their futures. While she develops tropes of invisibility, absence, and loss to signify the place of Haitian girls in society, she simultaneously clears a space for them by offering visibility, presence, and futurity. These literary girls make unexpected decisions about their lives as Claire does when she runs away or Sophie does when she pierces her hymen with the pestle. In this way self-possession emerges as another central metaphor that regulates how these girls choose to be seen and be heard. They are marked by a will to survive and be free that they pursue despite the circumstances around them that might point to their containment. Ultimately, Danticat’s critique of structures and behaviors that render Haitian girls invisible surfaces through her dynamic use of inattention and invisibility because each time she highlights these registers she also includes an alternative way of seeing and asks that we see through the eyes of Haitian girls. The title of this essay purposefully pairs Edwidge Danticat and Ntozake Shange because, as I explained in the introduction, they are conceptually linked in their attention and devotion to Black girls. The opening scene of For Colored Girls Who Have considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf asks for “somebody … anybody … [to] sing a Black girl’s song”: somebody/ anybody sing a Black girl’s song bring her out to know herself to know you but sing her rhythms Wright, Black Girlhood, 10.

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carin/ struggle/ hard times sing her song of life … sing her sighs sing the song of her possibilities sing a righteous gospel let her be born let her be born & handled warmly. Through representations of girlhood that foreground their interiority, creating multivaried subjectivities of girls as fully embodied with fleshed out personhood, Edwidge Danticat sings a Haitian girl’s songs, affirming their visions, voices, and movements.

Bibliography Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah. “Recovering the Little Black Girl,” in Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Braziel, Jana. “Daffodils, Rhizomes, Migrations: Narrative Coming of Age in the Diasporic Writings of Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 3, no. 2 (2003): 110–31. Brown, Ruth Nicole. Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Clitandre, Nadège. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Cope, Robyn. “ ‘We Are Your Neighbors’: Edwidge Danticat’s New Narrative for Haiti.” Journal of Haitian Studies 23, no. 1 (2017): 98–118. https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed December 10, 2018). Danticat, Edwidge. Claire of the Sea Light. New York: Knopf, 2013. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Vintage, 1994. Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. New York: Vintage, 1998. Danticat, Edwidge. The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story. New York: Graywolf Press, 2017. Gaunt, Kyra. Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double Dutch to Hip Hop. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Gillam, Reighan. “Representing Black Girlhood in Brazil: Culture and Strategies of Empowerment.” Communication, Culture and Critique 10 (2017): 609–25, 609. Montgomery, Maxine L. “A Lasiren Song for the Wonn: Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Claire of the Sea Light’ and the Legend of Mami Wata.” CLA Journal 59, no. 4 (2016): 316–29. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/44325537. Rentschler, Carrie, and Claudia Mitchell. Girlhood and the Politics of Place. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016. Shange, Ntozake. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. New York: Scribner, 1975. Wright, Nazera. Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2016.

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CHAPTER 10 THE GOOD DAUGHTER: DANTICAT’S MIGRATING MEMORIES

Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw

In a recent New  Yorker interview, Edwidge Danticat pointed to the intersections between memory and migration and their effects on the lives of individuals and communities. She also confessed to having always been interested in the ways in which migration could distort memories, using the example of her parent’s friends who, having migrated from Haiti after many years, sometimes forget their most treasured memory of their home.1 As a Haitian American who left Haiti for America at the age of 12, migration has also played a crucial role in Danticat’s life. The memories of migration, on the individual and collective level, occupy a dominant space in Danticat’s narratives; in many of her works her preoccupation with memory and migration correlates with the concept of loss. Migration is a complex trope for Danticat. It suggests physical displacement and all of the personal, political, and cultural struggles that the immigrant experiences in a new home. The treatment of migration in Danticat’s work is sometimes due to illness, both psychological and physiological. Death is another form of migration in Danticat’s works and correlates with the act of writing. As a writer she is not confined to time, space, or place; narrative threads can be interconnected on the page to reconstruct or reimagine what may have been lost or forgotten. In this way the creative act itself is always migratory. The migratory experience is embedded in both Danticat’s fiction and nonfiction. Apart from her own personal narrative of migration, her works have dealt in detail with the trauma and tragedy of the Haitian migratory struggle. Drawing brief attention to just three of these works underscores her preoccupation with memory and migration. In the novel, The Farming of Bones (1998); The Dew Breaker (2003), a collection of interconnected stories; and a memoir Brother I’m Dying (2006), the author explores the struggle faced by migrants from varying sociocultural focal points. The Farming of Bones, related from the perspective of a young Haitian woman, Amabelle Desir, recounts the horrific events of the 1937 Parsley Massacre in which the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the massacre of thousands of Haitians at the border of the two countries. The name given to the massacre was said to be based on a phonological test given to the Haitians to pronounce the word perejil, or parsley in Spanish. Haitians could then be separated and targeted as a result of their Haitian Creole accent. Their dark skin color was another marker used to identify them. Danticat’s treatment of migration in the The Dew Breaker exposes the effects of another dictatorship on the Haitian side of the border. Both Francois Duvalier, “Papa Doc,” and his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, “Baby Doc,” perpetuated a culture of fear and violence that caused mass

D. Treisman, “Edwidge Danticat on Memory and Migration,” The New Yorker (September 11, 2017), https://www. newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/fiction-this-wee-edwidge-danticat-2017-09-18, 1. 1

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migration of Haitians. The Dew Breaker’s examination of this migration to the United States allows Danticat to explore the effects of the Duvalier dictatorship in a diverse and multilayered manner. The Haitian community in this collection of stories spans generations, genders, and classes. These characters reveal the difficulties of the migratory experience as they navigate new lives in their adopted homeland. The structure of The Dew Breaker’s interconnected stories makes their experience both singular and collective. Many of the characters also battle deep psychological traumas, haunted by their Haitian past. The work also exposes the psychological migration of traumatic memories and the impact of terrorizing regimes on the individual. Her memoir Brother I’m Dying relates the failed, tragic attempt of her uncle Joseph’s migration to the United States to escape threats on his life in Haiti. In spite of Danticat’s own efforts to get her 81-year-old uncle out of the US custom’s detention center in Miami, he is imprisoned and dies within days of his arrival. Danticat’s memoir acts as a testimony to the trauma of migration faced not only by her uncle but also by the many Haitians who have received such brutal treatment. The author implicates herself in this drama and her narratives negotiate the distance she needs as a writer to avoid falling prey to sentimentality while drawing on her real-life experiences as a Haitian immigrant. Negotiating this delicate balancing of actor and author is intrinsic to Danticat’s writings. In this chapter, I focus on three works that foreground Danticat’s treatment of migration and loss. The short story “Sunrise, Sunset” (2017) describes the emotional drama of a daughter witnessing her mother’s failing memory. In another short story, “The Book of the Dead,” another daughter “loses” the idea she once held of her father when she learns about the crimes he committed and hid from her. But Danticat’s exploration of these leitmotifs is not confined to her fictional works. The teleology of migration, loss, dying, and death itself permeates her nonfictional writings as well. In the third work to be examined, a memoir entitled The Art of Dying: Writing the Final Story, Danticat acknowledges that writing has been the primary way in which she has tried to make sense of her losses. The author recognizes that she has been writing about death for as long as she has been writing. The Art of Dying captures the writer’s reflections on the notion of death, but it is ultimately the voice of a daughter who has lost a mother to cancer. Apart from the nuanced treatment of migration, the three works also take us into the psychological landscapes of three daughters—two fictional and one as Danticat, writer and daughter. This chapter is buttressed by the intersections of loss, memory, and migration: it is an attempt to map how memories in Danticat’s work migrate to the page. The chapter also explores the ways in which the role of the daughter intersects with the writer’s treatment of migration. Danticat creates a link between motherhood and migration, drawing on the loss of her mother who has “migrated” to place that Danticat can only enter through her memories. Finally, the chapter contends that all of these interrogations point to an underlying conflation of the good writer with the good daughter.

“Sunrise Sunset” … or How to Become a Good Mother Danticat’s inspiration for her short story “Sunrise Sunset” came when she was on a plane. A daughter boarded with her elderly mother who was suffering from Alzheimer’s. The mother held an Alzheimer’s doll while the daughter was yelling on the phone about an unrelated event. It was obvious to Danticat that the daughter was undergoing enormous stress as she 178

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tried to negotiate all the many responsibilities and roles she had assumed in her life. The doll, however, symbolized for Danticat the intimacy that still existed between mother and daughter; it represented a connection that went beyond the trauma they faced. In order to represent and reimagine into a fictional space what she had witnessed on the plane, Danticat initially tried to write the story from the mother’s point of view. Unsatisfied with this single perspective, the author then tried to write it solely thorough the daughter’s eyes. Finally, Danticat decided to allow the reader to enter both worlds, mother’s and daughter’s. According to Danticat: “This gave me the opportunity to explore the character’s individual issues, as well as the ways in which they misinterpret and misunderstand each other.”2 This dual perspective, apart from adding to the psychological layering of the narrative, allowed Danticat to show the dynamic, complex relationship between mother and daughter. It also allowed for emphasis to be placed on the overarching notion of migration and loss. In the story Jeanne, the daughter, is becoming a mother to her own mother, Carole, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. This renegotiation of roles is further complicated by Jeanne’s struggle with postpartum depression after the birth of her son Jude. At a time when Jeanne needs her own mother, she is forced to take on even more responsibility. Carole’s situation is no less traumatic as she fights to hold on to her memory, slowly being lost to a disease. The ideas of change and migration are captured in the author’s complex treatment of temporal and spatial issues in the narrative. The story’s title “Sunrise Sunset” explicitly points to a cyclical understanding of time. “Sunrise Sunset” begins with a christening, but the idea of a new life is quickly dimmed by the realization that memories of another life are fading. Carole, baby Jude’s grandmother, describes these feelings: It comes on again on her grandson’s christening day. A lost moment, a blank spot, one that Carole does not know how to measure. She is there one second, then she is not. She knows exactly where she is, then she does not … Jude is a lively giggler. His whole body shakes when he laughs. Carole often stares at him for hours, hoping that his chubby face will bring back memories of her own children at that age, memories that are quickly slipping away.3 With these opening lines Danticat starts her story in medias res; this common literary device is particularly effective given the author’s desire to mirror from the onset Carole’s feelings of instability and confusion. In the narrative, past and present seem to run consecutively, as Carole tries to hold onto the past as she fights to remain focused on the present. She is at one of the most tragic stages of her disease, that of being aware of the progressive erasure of her life story. Danticat understands this disordered notion of time for the Alzheimer patient: You have to be so much in the present with people whose memories are gone. You’re very aware that what you’re doing with them and what you’re saying to them is not being stored. My mother-in-law has a friend who is sometimes aware that she has Alzheimer’s. … I wanted to capture something like that in a story.4

Ibid. Edwidge Danticat, “Sunrise Sunset,” The New Yorker (September 18, 2017), 3. 4 Treisman, “Edwidge Danticat on Memory and Migration,” 1. 2 3

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The time line of the story itself also creates temporal shifts. Not only does the narrative alternate between the perspectives of mother and daughter, each point of view forces the reader to reenter the narrative from different temporal and spatial locations of both mother and daughter. As such, the illusion of a reassuring temporal trajectory from beginning to end, birth to death, is continuously manipulated to create a destabilizing effect. The psychological impact of these migrating roles as mothers and daughters displace and replace each other is traumatizing for both parties. Carole points to Jeanne’s failures as a mother and cannot accept or understand her daughter’s postpartum depression. For Carole, her daughter’s sadness cannot be defined as a “real tragedy”; mental fragility after giving birth to a healthy baby is, in Carole’s opinion, self-indulgent and a weakness of this younger migrant generation. A life and death struggle under the rule of a “merciless dictator” is Carole’s definition of tragedy. Carole’s father left Haiti for Cuba when she was 12 and never returned, and her aunt was almost beaten to death; these are the experiences that should cause such profound sadness. She therefore cannot accept her daughter’s unhappiness since she never witnessed or experienced such deep suffering. Through this mother–daughter relationship Danticat explores contemporary, intergenerational problems faced by generations of migrant Haitian families. The confusion that Carole endures, however, is no less traumatic than the confusion that her daughter experiences about her own role as a mother. Jeanne’s narrative is filled with questions and self-doubt. By shifting to the daughter’s perspective, the reader is immediately aware that just as Jeanne is being judged by her own mother, Jeanne is also judging her own capabilities as a mother. She wants to know how to become a good mother and “wishes she’d been brave enough to ask her mother before her dementia, or whatever it is that she is suffering from, set in.”5 There is also the haunting feeling that something is missing, something that Jeanne has lost—a feeling that mirrors in many ways what Carole is experiencing: “Jeanne … feels as though a deep and sour hole were burrowing through her body, an abyss that is always demanding to be filled.”6 Danticat ensures that the reader remains unbiased and able to experience the pain of both parties; both mother and daughter are suffering from illnesses: dementia and postpartum depression. Both are undergoing traumatic changes in their lives where they feel they have little control over the outcome. Although Danticat gives mother and daughter separate spaces to tell their stories, there is always the feeling that they are responding to other voices in their heads—mother to daughter, daughter to mother, and both to a collective, societal judgment and approval of what it means to be a good mother or a good daughter. In this way their voices are not always their own as they grapple with this abstract notion of “good.” This word has the power to qualify their identities and roles: the approval is sought after by both mother and daughter. Even though the narrative allows for the dual perspectives of mother and daughter, the story is related in the third person with limited focalization of mother and daughter. The author could have alternated first-person narratives but the use of an “I” may not have allowed for the instability that both parties feel as they judge and feel judged by the presence of a third party. The toast that James offers to his wife suggests, albeit unintentionally, that judgments are made about

Danticat, “Sunrise Sunset,” 7. Ibid., 8.

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mothers and wives: “I want to make a toast to my wife, for not only being a phenomenal wife but for bravely bringing Jude into our lives.”7 The toast, on the surface, seems to compliment his wife but James knows that it is not the truth; he is well aware of how difficult it has been and still is for her. So who then is the toast directed to? It is a gesture to this third party—in this case his family who, like Carole, praise bravery not cowardice as a characteristic of a good mother and wife. This internalized voice of perceived societal values plays a powerful role in the narrative, clouding Jeanne’s judgment of herself and Carole’s judgment of her daughter who does not embody this bravery exhibited in the older generation. Carole’s idea of being a good mother also remains tied to the notion of home. Having migrated to the United States, Carole had hoped to give her children a better life than the one she had in Haiti—through sacrifice and hard work, she provided for them. A great part of her disappointment with her daughter’s mothering is this inability to understand that sacrifices have to be made for one’s children. Carole had to get beyond her own sadness and feels that “she should have told her daughter about the sacrifices she made … when she arrived in this country.”8 The entangled notions of sacrifice, migration, and motherhood define Carole’s notion of courage. The loss of her home may have caused Carole to suffer from profound loneliness, but she survived for her children and because of them. They incarnated the idea of a home, and they comforted her so when she was lonely and homesick: “she kept kissing her babies’ faces, as if their cheeks were plots of land in the country she had left behind.”9 The anger she feels toward her daughter’s cowardly attitude stems from the feeling that Carole’s sacrifice of leaving her home has been wasted. As such if her children are the shining symbols of her sacrifice, then, for Carol, in order for migration from and loss of her home to have been worth it, her daughter must do more than survive; she must shine. The crisis at the end of “Sunrise Sunset” captures the dramatic use of migrating memories and roles. Carole’s illness causes her to think that Jeanne is flirting with Victor, her father: “But here he is now, plotting against her with a woman she does not know, a fleshy pretty woman, just the way he once liked them, just the way she was when he liked her most … this young woman is trying to steal her husband from her.”10 The complex layers of irony make the end of the story even more tragic:  the fleshy lady is Carole’s own daughter who is the image of Carole herself as a young woman. Carole projects this anger, jealously, and resentment onto an image of herself. She is also mistaken about the “doll” she thinks she is holding on the terrace above the pool; it is in fact her grandson, Jude. Jeanne must coax her mother into giving up Jude before she drops him. Eventually, Jeanne manages to convince Carole to hand over Jude but not before Jeanne says these affirming words: “He’s my child, Manman. Please give him to me.”11 The words have a powerful effect on Carole and she returns to her senses for the time being. Jeanne saves her son, but in many ways she has also saved herself and her mother. By taking control of the situation the daughter assumes her role as the mother, and the mother becomes her child—the cycle of migrating roles complete. Carole knows this fact, and we are

Ibid., 9. Ibid., 11. 9 Ibid., 10. 10 Ibid., 15. 11 Ibid., 17. 7 8

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left with her disheartening thoughts: “Soon there will be nothing left, no past to cling to, no future to hope for, only now.”12

“The Book of the Dead”” … or How to Lose a Father “The Book of the Dead” is the first story in Danticat’s 2004 work, The Dew Breaker. This collection of interconnected stories is populated with characters who have in some way been affected by the oppressive Duvalier regime. Their stories of terror have migrated from Haiti to a twenty-first-century New York. Many of their frightening experiences are linked to the Dew Breaker himself—the nomenclature used in Haiti to designate Duvalier’s torturers who would begin their reign of terror in the early morning hours when there was still dew on the leaves. The title also recalls one of the seminal texts of Haitian literature by Jacques Roumain, Masters of the Dew (Gouverneurs de la rosée, 1944). Roumain’s novel centers on the notion of return; his hero-protagonist, Manuel, after having been away from Haiti has come home to save his people. Manuel becomes the symbol for collective rebirth. Roumain, within a Marxist ideological frame, embodies the Christian pillars of sacrifice, forgiveness, and rebirth. Danticat’s protagonist is in many ways the antithesis of Roumain’s; the Dew Breaker has run away from his homeland to escape possible reprisal for his deplorable actions. If Manuel epitomizes the selfless savior, the Dew Breaker epitomizes a self-centered man whose struggle is to save himself, not his people. We are first introduced to the Dew Breaker in the “The Book of the Dead.” The story is told in the first person from the perspective of the Dew Breaker’s daughter, Ka, a young sculptor and second-generation Haitian American whose parents she believed migrated to the United States to escape the Duvalier regime. But Ka’s entire life will soon be destabilized by the revelations to come. The first words of the story are Ka’s, and they prefigure in a dramatic way much of what is to come, her father is gone. Ka is in the process of reporting her missing father to the manager of the hotel and a policeman. In fact her father is not really missing: he has simply left the hotel where he and Ka are staying. Her father has left on a mission to destroy the bust of himself sculpted by his daughter by throwing it into a nearby lake. Both father and daughter were in Miami on their way to take the statue to a rich Haitian star who had purchased the work from Ka. When he finally returns to the hotel, he tells his daughter what he has done with the bust, but more importantly he reveals a hidden truth. Ka learns that her father, a barber and landlord, was not a victim of Duvalier’s regime but instead one of his henchmen, his torturers. Her father was the predator and not the prey. The bust created by his daughter is not the truth. This lie, kept from Ka throughout her life, was perpetuated by both father and mother; both parents are complicit in cloaking her father’s identity. This confession traumatizes Ka, making it difficult for her to come to terms with the loss of the image she had of her life. The first and last stories of the collection, “The Book of Dead” and “The Dew Breaker,” focus on the Dew Breaker’s life. He confesses to his daughter in “The Book of the Dead,” but it is only at the end in “The Dew Breaker” that we are given insights into his personal story. Structuring the collection in this way emphasizes the passage of time and its effect on the

Ibid., 19.

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migratory experience; although the Dew Breaker is no longer physically in Haiti, he is still haunted by his actions. These traumatic migrating memories can only be appeased by this confession. It is also interesting to note that the Dew Breaker remains nameless throughout the entire collection. This effective narrative strategy underscores his personal need for anonymity, but it also represents the collective and pervasive fear and control that torturers like the Dew Breaker under the Duvalier regime wielded over the Haitian people; even in another time and place, they still appear to fear the reprisals of naming their torturers. The title of the story, “The Book of the Dead,” apart from the notion of loss and migration also examines the trope of confession. Ka’s father admired Ancient Egyptian culture and spent a great deal of time in the Ancient Egyptian rooms at the Brooklyn museum. He told Ka how much he admired the ways in which the Egyptians mourned their dead and would read to Ka from The Book of the Dead. This loose collection of funerary texts provided instructions to the deceased in the afterlife in their quest for immortality. The actual translation of the work’s title is The Book of Coming Forth by Day. Ancient Egyptians believed that life on earth was a brief aspect of the eternal journey, and it was considered vital to have a guidebook to navigate the next phase of existence. The texts were filled with spells and magic formulas that would guide the deceased through the underworld. One of the most intriguing texts to Ka’s father was the ritual of “The Negative Confession.” This ceremony took place before the weighing of hearts: it gave the dead a chance to affirm that they had only done good things during their lifetime. “The Negative Confession,” also known as “The Declaration of Innocence,” was a list of sins, which the deceased could say had never been committed when standing in judgment in the afterlife. In the story Ka relates her experience in this way: I think back to the “The Negative Confession” ritual from The Book of the Dead … It was one of the chapters my father read to me most often. Now he was telling me I should have heard something beyond what he was reading. I should have removed the negatives. “I am not a violent man,” he had read. “I have made no one weep. I have never been angry without cause. I have never uttered any lies. I have never slain any men or women. I have done no evil.”13 The Dew Breaker’s “negative confession” must also be considered in the context of the “weighing of the hearts” since it is directly tied to the judgment of the confessor. Ka’s father, through his confession, hopes that his daughter will weigh and judge his sins and eventually forgive him just as Ka’s mother learned to do. In the last paragraphs of the title story of the collection, “The Dew Breaker,” we are taken into the thoughts and rationalizations of Anne, Ka’s mother, who, in a telephone call with her daughter Ka, wants to make Ka understand why she migrated, married, and had a child with a man who killed her own brother: In the early years, there had been more silence than words between them. But when their daughter was born they were forced to talk to and about her. … She was their Ka, their good angel. After her daughter was born, she and her husband would talk about her brother. But only briefly. He referring to his “last prisoner,” the one that scarred his Edwidge Danticat, “The Book of the Dead,” in The Dew Breaker (New York: Knopf, 2004), 23.

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face and she to “my stepbrother, the famous preacher,” neither of them venturing beyond these coded utterances, dreading the day when someone other than themselves would fully convene the two halves of the same person.14 But Ka is no longer on the line, her daughter was already lost “accidentally or purposely, in the hum of a dial tone.”15 The conversation that Anne is having is not with her daughter but with another part of herself—an older Anne trying to understand the actions of a younger version of herself. After Anne migrated to America, she tried to reimagine and revise who she was. Before her daughter hung up the phone, Anne had hoped to tell her about the need for atonement, reparation, and forgiveness. In order to survive, Anne also engaged in the act of a “negative confession,” denying to herself all the horrible things her husband had done. She had gone through the process of the “weighing of hearts” and hoped that her daughter would be able to do this as well. The symmetry of the collection, beginning, and ending, with the personal story of the Dew Breaker, emphasizes Danticat’s preoccupation with loss in all its forms. The daughter, Ka, has lost her family, having been betrayed by both father and mother. The last story ends in an ambiguous manner; feelings are left unresolved; questions remain unanswered. The reader is not sure if Ka will be able to forgive her father and mother. But this lack of resolution of such complex issues encourages readers to reflect on the notions of betrayal, confession, and the complexity of forgiveness.

The Lazarus Effect The Art of Death, Writing the Final Story represents Danticat’s most extensive exploration of the final migration, death. According to Danticat: “Writing has always been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses, including deaths. I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing.”16 The trope of death in Danticat’s works is pervasive, almost allegorical in nature. The Art of Death continues the author’s preoccupation with this desire to make sense of her own losses. Coupled with this personal quest, the book also examines the subject from the point of view of an artist trying to make sense of how writers have treated the subject of death in their works. The Art of Death is one in a series of books where authors focus on a particular theme. Some of the other books in the series have included: The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again by Sven Birkerts; The Art of History: Unlocking the Past in Fiction & Nonfiction by Christopher Bran; and The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between by Stacey D’Erasmo. Danticat’s selected issue— the art of writing about death—is not surprising given her preoccupation with the subject. But The Art of Death is also a window into Danticat’s multiple roles as writer, reader, critic, and daughter. Her treatment of the subject of death is intimate and analytical; she exposes and probes her deepest fears about death and at the same time professes her faith in the art of language. Some writers have inspired Danticat more than others:  one such writer, Toni Edwidge Danticat, “The Dew Breaker,” in The Dew Breaker (New York: Knopf, 2004), 241. Ibid., 242. 16 Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Dying, the Final Story (Minnesota, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017), 6. 14 15

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Morrison has captured Danticat’s need to “better understand death and offload my fear of it, and I believe reading and writing can help.”17 Danticat also draws on Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Lecture where the older writer declares her own faith in the power of language: “We die. … That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measures of our lives.”18 Although Danticat has been writing about death in both her fiction and nonfiction throughout her career, in The Art of Death, she is also writing as a daughter who has recently lost her mother to cancer. The grief and the trauma of this loss are motivating forces in her desire to confront, through her writing, her fears about death and dying. Orphaned as she is now, Danticat is aware of the liminal, ambiguous space we occupy when both mother and father are lost. For Danticat it also brings into question her own mortality:  “If both your parents, who are the people who created you, can die, then you can die.”19 But in art and in life, as Morrison attests, “there is always language.” Danticat uses this idea of language and her faith in its ability to heal those who grieve as her point of departure and closure for this book. The term, the “Lazarus Effect,” tries to capture this faith in words and their ability to bring lost loved ones back to life, to resurrect them through language. This movement of memories through a writer’s imagination is the most profound form of migration. Writing immortalizes (like any other work of art), but her immortality is not Danticat’s quest in The Art of Dying. In the work she writes as a daughter who—through her craft—is confronting the migration of memories. It is an attempt to prevent the finality of forgetting, explored in fictions like “Sunrise Sunset.” In The Art of Death, she hopes to immortalize the memory of her mother through the text. Danticat’s words preserve and protect her mother’s memory from the death that comes from forgetting. The idea of the book as a body, as a living composition, is also an important metaphor for the connection between writing and memory. Language sustains memory, so even after a writer’s death, there is a Lazarus Effect, allowing the memory of the author and the lives recorded to live in the body of the text. The retelling of her mother’s life works in a similar way. Danticat’s mother knew that she was dying. Danticat considers writers like Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag, and Audre Lorde—all fortunate in their ability to write about dying while still alive. Although Danticat’s mother was not a writer she also recorded her experiences of living and dying on her cassettes, much like Hitchens, Sontag, and Lorde. Danticat’s mother also served as an inspiration as much as any of these writers. Throughout The Art of Dying, the treatment of the subject of death from other writers helps Danticat negotiate her role as both daughter and writer. Danticat will need to draw on her writer’s sensibility to create the necessary distance to avoid the traps of sentimentality and at the same time deal with profound personal trauma. Her objective eye (as a writer) must also come to terms with the subjective emotions of a loss. The Art of Death finds itself in between these two poles. As the author states, We write about death to make sense of our losses, to become less haunted, to turn ghosts into words, to transform an absence into language. Death is an unparalleled experience,

Ibid., 7. Ibid. 19 Ibid., 13. 17 18

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so we look to death narratives, and to the people in our lives who are dying for some previously unknowable insights, which we hope people will pass on to us in some way.20 This book is concerned with not only the art of writing about death but also the craft of writing itself. Danticat includes the advice of great writers on form, tone, and content. What unites these writers is their faith in language. She cites Flaubert who believed that “a good sentence in prose should be like a good line of poetry, unchangeable.”21 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in his famous 1981 Paris Review interview, insisted that the problem for every writer was credibility. Danticat also wears the hat of a critic, analyzing texts like Anna Karenina and the works of Anne Sexton to examine the treatment of suicide. Danticat even reflects on her own works and the revisions she would make when writing about death. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, one of her earlier works, Danticat wishes now “that I had included more confrontation, so that it wouldn’t seem as though Sophie had immediately accepted her mother’s death. … If I were writing this now, I would inflict the mother with fewer stab wounds.”22 Tonally, The Art of Death is a mixed bag of contemplation, introspection, revelation, and confession. But this confession, unlike “The Book of the Dead,” is not a negative one. Danticat admits to using her skills as a writer to “make sense of the impossible, the unknowable.”23 To better understand the nature of her grief, she draws on the experience of other writerdaughters including Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road, Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death, and Mary Gordon’s Circling My Mother. The trope of the death is intrinsically linked to the mother–daughter connection, as Danticat says, “Writing, we hope, might make all of this easier to grasp, even though we cannot change the outcome. While I am reading these other daughters’ account, their mothers become my mother.”24 Questions about absence, migration, and loss are common to all three works that I discussed in this chapter: “Sunrise Sunset,” “The Book of the Dead,” and The Art of Dying. These works also illustrate how migrating identities create a space and an absence in Danticat’s writing; however, through the act of writing itself, Danticat confronts and undermines this absence; her language generates a presence. Her characters (or her family members) may die, but the words remain. If death is about absence, then writing about death is about presence; words can resurrect. Through her writing, the past, present, and even future tense can describe what her mother was to her, is, and will be. But this resurrection is what Danticat has also found in the words of other writers who have written about their loss. In this way, language has been a source of resurrection both for her mother’s memory and for Danticat herself. “On the day that we are born, our mother’s face is the face that reflects all things.”25 This sentence captures the profound nature of the mother–daughter connection for Danticat; as a daughter, Danticat has seen her life reflected in her mother’s face, without the presence of her mother in her life the loss is twofold: her mother is gone and Danticat must now see the world without her mother. At the end of the book, Danticat imagines a prayer that her mother would have offered, it is not only touching but also captures her mother’s quick wit. This prayer allows Ibid., 29. Ibid., 40. 22 Ibid., 85–6. 23 Ibid., 135. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 136. 20 21

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Danticat to show the importance of her mother’s voice in the creation of The Art of Dying. For Danticat, her mother’s death was as much an art and a lesson as any of the other writers Danticat admired. The prayer also echoes the sentiment of release and gratitude that we see from the daughter at the end of “Sunrise Sunset.” In the art of Danticat, to be a good daughter is to be a good writer: talent must never be wasted; and for Danticat, they are as interconnected as mother and daughter. The daughter-writer is able to craft what is most valuable, memories, both real and imagined; and like any good artisan, the work has a life of its own.

Bibliography Danticat, Edwidge. “The Book of the Dead.” In The Dew Breaker, 3–34. New York: Knopf, 2004. Danticat, Edwidge. “The Dew Breaker.” In The Dew Breaker, 183–242. New York: Knopf, 2004. Danticat, Edwidge. The Art of Dying, the Final Story. Minnesota, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017. Danticat, Edwidge. “Sunrise, Sunset.” The New Yorker (September 18, 2017), https://www.newyorker. com/magazine/2017/09/18/sunrise-sunset. Treisman, D. “Edwidge Danticat on Memory and Migration.” The New Yorker (September 11, 2017), https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/ fiction-this-wee-edwidge-danticat-2017-09-18.

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CHAPTER 11 “I AM THE ONE TELLING IT”: RESILIENT CHILDREN, FAMILIAL BONDS, AND HAITIAN HERITAGE IN DANTICAT’S PICTURE BOOKS

Cara Byrne

In her autobiography Brother, I’m Dying, Edwidge Danticat recounts a time when she was running errands with her uncle in Haiti and stumbled upon a familiar picture book from a used bookseller that caught her eye. She describes seeing “a nun on the cover and on one side of her were eleven little girls in raincoats and on the other, having the luxury of an entire hand to herself, a little girl who was dressed exactly the same as the others but stood apart somehow. That little girl’s name was Madeline.”1 Danticat notes this encounter with the faded picture book as particularly significant to her. The only birthday present her uncle had ever bought her was a copy of Madeline—which was lost when she moved in with him and her Tante Denise when her parents emigrated to the United States without her. Madeline is a Caldecott Honor picture book written by Ludwig Bemelmans and first published in the United States in 1939. It is one of the most iconic and canonical American picture books that celebrates the strength and ingenuity of a young girl who lives apart from her parents. Danticat describes “pick[ing] up the book, as though picking up Madeline herself, and quickly press[ing] it against [her] chest,” feeling a sense of intimacy with a book and a personal connection to the spunky, adventurous young girl protagonist.2 Madeline is the smallest but bravest of all of the girls she lives with, and after she must have her appendix removed, she is further isolated from those she knows and loves while she stays in a hospital room with “a crack on the ceiling” and an open window.3 Like Madeline, Danticat spent most of her childhood in Haiti away from her parents due to their attempts to gain all members of their family citizenship in the United States; she also experienced a brief illness that temporarily kept her from reunifying with her parents. While Danticat holds a nostalgic relationship to the children’s book and shares some biographical similarities with the infamous picture book character, there are also underlying thematic and characterization connections between resilient Madeline and some of the child protagonists that Danticat features in her own picture books. Danticat has experimented with several genres, including memoirs, novels, and middlegrade historical fiction, but one of the lesser known genres she has contributed to is the genre of children’s picture books. Danticat has written four picture books over the last decade, initially inspired by her young daughters and the lack of picture books featuring Haiti or Haitian characters. Her picture books celebrate strong-willed and wise children and the connection they have to their families—even when they are physically apart. In her first picture book, Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (New York: Vintage, 2007), 67. Ibid. 3 Ludwig Bemelmans, Madeline (New York: Puffin, 1939). 1 2

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Eight Days: A Story of Haiti (2010) illustrated by Alix Delinois, Danticat highlights the lives of Haitian children before, during, and after an earthquake traps them beneath their home. Her second picture book, The Last Mapou (2013), illustrated by Edouard Duval Carrié, celebrates the connection between a young girl and her Grann, whose story and connection to her Haitain ancestors mirror that of the large mapou tree she lives under. Mama’s Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation (2015), illustrated by Leslie Staub, follows young Saya as she navigates her frustrations and sadness over her mother being imprisoned for “not having papers.” And finally, her latest picture book, My Mommy Medicine (2019), illustrated by Shannon Wright, celebrates the love between a mother and daughter as they spend a day together while the daughter has a cold. Several of Danticat’s child narrators are separated from their parents and live within the frustrating boundaries of their circumstances, though they have deep connections to their communities and to the families from which they are separated. Danticat shows that while her characters are forced into early maturity, their responses to difficult conditions help them serve as a catalyst for change for adult and child readers alike. As the child protagonist in The Last Mapou explains, even though her grandmother has passed and can no longer tell her folklores and family stories about the significant mapou tree, she has become “part of the mapou’s story because I am the one telling it.”4 Through storytelling, these child characters offer a powerful vision of their Haitian roots and family connections, highlighting stories that are rarely told in the children’s picture book genre. While some may believe that the genre mainly reflects the stereotypical characteristics of the audience for which it is written—including being childish, simplistic, or light—children’s literature has been a site of radical ideologies and serious subject matter since its inception. In her picture books, Danticat distills complex messages about resiliency, familial bonds, and Haitian culture through her wise and insightful child characters in a deceptively straightforward genre. In this chapter, I  analyze Danticat’s picture books, contextualizing them in the everexpanding genre of children’s literature. For the child protagonists in Danticat’s Eight Days, The Last Mapou, Mama’s Nightingale, and My Mommy Medicine, a close bond to their mother or grandmother is what helps them survive—whether they are underneath rubble after an earthquake, telling a largely erased history of their Haitian heritage, separated due to a flawed legal system, or healing from a common cold. Instead of focusing on the home, wealth, or selfreliance as foundational to one’s comfort and feelings of security, Danticat instead emphasizes generational bonds as being essential to identity construction and strength. These books also challenge how we understand familial bonds in the midst of natural disaster, the history of the oppressed, separation due to colonization or national status, and illness. In featuring Black children, they are also important contributions to calls for more diverse representation in the children’s literature genre (which has largely been limited to sharing the stories of privileged white children). Danticat’s work is inherently aligned with the #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #OwnVoice movements. Overall, even though Danticat’s picture books are often overlooked by scholars and teachers who mainly teach her memoirs and novels, they are a key part of her oeuvre and challenge apathetic or misguided views of Haiti through messages of hope and resilience.

Edwidge Danticat, The Last Mapou (New York: One Moore Book, 2013), 22.

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Eight Days: A Story of Haiti “When you look into the eyes of any child, you are looking at much more possibility than words can ever express.” In her author’s note for her 2010 picture book Eight Days: A Story of Haiti, illustrated by artist Alix Delinois, Danticat expresses the power of the child’s gaze, especially when we try to envision our world through their less cynical and more naive eyes. While this sentiment captures her feelings as a mother of two young girls and a writer sensitive to the transformative nature of childhood, it also helps her explain why she has written children’s literature for the very young. In this sentence, she sets up an argument for why a picture book—a largely visual medium with illustrations to accompany short paragraphs of text—is an appropriate genre in which to narrate the horrors and fatalities of the massive earthquake that hit Haiti on January 12, 2010. The impetus for penning Eights Days came from a time when she first learned of the natural disaster while grocery shopping with her daughters. While she immediately thought of her relatives and those she knew who live there, she also worried about the children of Haiti (as she explains “nearly half of Haiti’s population is under fifteen”) and about her own children’s feelings (as they too were connected to the island and expressed their own worry about their family members who lived there). Danticat’s daughter Mira, who was 5 years old at the time, inspired her to write this picture book as a way to turn “what was an extremely dark time into a moment of creation and hope.” Her daughter’s questions, fears, and concerns, many of which mirrored Danticat’s own, inspired her to write her first book for children. Danticat went on to write several that celebrate and honor the possibilities that their insights, their determination, and their very being hold. In writing a piece of children’s literature about the trauma of the earthquake while simultaneously celebrating Haiti, Danticat challenges apathetic or misguided views of Haiti through messages of hope and resilience. Throughout Eight Days, Danticat features 7-year-old Junior doing some of his favorite activities, including singing a solo in a children’s choir, playing soccer, and riding his bicycle around the Champs de Mars Plaza. However, all of these activities are being dreamed by Junior as he is actually trapped under rubble after a major earthquake. Despite the harrowing subtext of the book, the story and the illustrations emphasize Junior’s dreams instead of his reality. Illustrator Delinois (who, like Danticat, was born in Haiti and moved to New York City as a child) provides accompanying paintings showing Junior running through his family’s colorful living room and enjoying a warm rain with his younger sister in a verdant green countryside. Each spread illustrates a joyful scene that includes splashes of cerulean and highlights the children’s clothing with bursts of warm yellows and marigolds. These vivid colors emphasize how bright the scenes are, celebrating the natural abundance of the tropical island nation. Reviewers notice how Danticat pays homage to her home country, remarking that “American children, whose images of Haiti have been shaped by television, will be amazed by the lush, rain-drenched mountain scenes and surprised by all the fun that the children have.”5 Other reviewers note how the book is a “beautiful and touching picture book” that “is a true testament to the spirit of the people of this nation.”6 While the book was written in response to the devastating earthquake, this picture book does more to reframe ideas about Haiti and the people who live there than to focus on devastation and death. Robin L. Smith, “Eight Days: A Story of Haiti,” The Horn Book Magazine, 86, no. 6 (November/December 2010): 74. Susan Lissim, “Eight Days: A Story of Haiti,” School Library Journal 56, no. 11 (November 2010): 91.

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The picture book has a guide-like quality as Danticat explores both intimate home scenes and national landmarks in Haiti. She and Delinois provide readers who know very little about the day-to-day activities of those who live on this island a largely joyful, vibrant view of the nation. Even though Junior is separated from his family for the bulk of the picture book, his imagination is filled with scenes of him painting with his Manman’s (mother’s) nail polish, helping his father in his shop, or riding his bike with his younger sister. He envisions that while playing hide-and-seek with his friend Oscar in “a dark, dusty corner of the house,” Manman, Justine, and Papa all try to find the boys. At the center of his imagination (and survival) is remembering the comfort and great love of his parents and sister. This familial bond keeps Junior focused on his survival, as he knows he is fighting to be reunited with the family that he loves so deeply. This great devotion between child and parents is reinforced on the cover of Eight Days, which features Junior’s face popping up in between his parents and sister (whose backs are turned to the onlooker). Junior’s father rests his hand on his mother’s lower back, creating a circle connecting the family members, in which Junior’s wide smile appears at the very center. His smile emphasizes the happiness he feels by being reunited with them. On the back cover is a similar full-page illustration of Junior kissing his mother’s cheek while she leans in for an embrace, once again emphasizing the importance of the familial bond. Despite the fact that the title’s “eight days” refers to a period of time when Junior was separated from his parents, the imagined scenes (including the images on the cover) often involve parental involvement. While this complicated contradiction makes the book difficult to follow at times, the theme of a deep connection to one’s parents (especially their mother) fits with the themes in Danticat’s picture book collection quite well. Despite the splendor and abundance Danticat and Delinois present in the book, the subtext and underlying story of Eight Days are often quite dramatic and more horrifying than the scenes let on. At the beginning of the story, Junior is surrounded by people who want to know how he felt after being found after eight days of being trapped under a collapsed building, asking him, “Were you afraid? Were you sad? Did you cry?” As this picture book is published in the United States by Orchard Books, an imprint of Scholastic, the audience for the picture book itself mirrors that of the press more so than Junior. Readers benefit from the media’s request for this young child to discuss the immense trauma he experienced in being entombed in post-earthquake rubble. The gaze of the media, mirroring the gaze of the reader, gives Danticat and Delinois the opportunity to change the narrative and the view of Haiti, while also celebrating this young boy’s resiliency. When Junior responds to the reporters that he was brave and afraid, but that “in [his] mind, [he] played,” the next page quickly transitions to Junior describing activities he enjoys on different days—whether Junior is helping to clean up hair in his father’s barbershop or playing hide-and-go-seek. After reading the first page, readers are to understand that these events are imagined as Junior tries to survive for the eight days that he is trapped, but very few of the days recognize or acknowledge in text or illustration the conditions he is living in. For instance, the fifth day brings the first mention (since the first day) that Junior and the boy he is trapped alongside, Oscar, are experiencing hardship. Junior narrates, “On the fifth day, Oscar and I went out to play soccer with some of our friends. Afterward, we sat on a bench to rest. But then Oscar felt really tired and went to sleep. He never woke up. That was the day I cried.” The focus of most of this text is on children engaging in a typical activity, yet a moment 192

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that should be the least interesting aspect of this sport—sitting on the sidelines—is one of the most jarring moments of the picture book: Oscar’s death. Death is an important theme explored in Danticat’s oeuvre, and she does not shield her youngest readers from death and loss either. While this fits with the reality that children are not safe from the threats of natural disasters, Oscar’s death is not explicitly written or illustrated. Readers know from the subtle nod that “he never woke up” that the conditions of being trapped for five days were too much for him—as was the case for many who were trapped after the 2010 earthquake—especially the most vulnerable in the population like young children. Yet, the illustrations do not match up with this heartbreaking moment. Instead, Delinois illustrates a group of young boys running after a soccer ball on the lawn with other groups of children playing their own soccer matches in the background. Junior is in the center of this small group, giving a big toothy grin as he kicks the ball. It is unclear which of the other three boys, similarly in happy pursuit of the soccer ball, is Oscar. Instead of illustrating the boys sitting on the bench after the game, the painting emphasizes only the happiest imagined moment of the scene. While the illustration fits the tone of the text throughout the book and with the generally happy descriptions of what Junior imagines, it is easy to lose awareness of the horrifying circumstances Junior finds himself in. While it may feel like there is a competing and off-balanced attempt to celebrate Haiti while also capturing the heartache and devastation of an earthquake, this book takes a similar approach to introducing traumatic events to children compared to other contemporary picture books attempting to do the same thing. There are very few picture books that address child fatalities or near-death experiences, as most pieces of children’s literature stray away from reporting national or personal trauma. However, these books are essential to help give adults a tool to explain or explore difficult subject matters with young children. As children are not immune to events like earthquakes or losing loved ones to death, bringing these subjects into the genre captures lived realities. In balancing the desire for awareness of the survivors, the place, and the event that the survivors endured with the recognition of a young audience’s emotional and intellectual capacity to comprehend such an event, these picture books balance complex conditions while serving an important pedagogical function. For instance, several picture books have brought the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York City to young readers, including Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of John J. Harvey (2005) by Maira Kalman and the Caldecott Award-winning The Man Who Walked between the Towers (2003) by Mordicai Gerstein. Both narratives stray from depicting most upsetting aspects of the day, including the deaths of thousands of people and the instability of what at one time were the tallest and most daunting buildings in the city. Instead, Fireboat begins in 1931 and The Man Who Walked between the Towers largely takes place in 1974, placing the focus of the narrative on the tugboat “brought out of retirement” in order to sail on the Hudson River to put out fires associated with the attack or on the tight rope walker who performed daring acts between the towers decades before they fell. Both books acknowledge the tremendous losses in the text and subtly in the illustrations, but the tragedy and trauma of 9/11 are not at the center of the stories. Just as Fireboat and The Man Who Walked between the Towers pay homage to the endurance of the people of New York City and to the city whose landscape changed instead of detailing the event itself, Danticat’s text and Delinois’s paintings similarly celebrate the bravery and beauty of Haitian children and their country instead of explicitly depicting the upsetting situation that Junior finds himself in. This gives them the 193

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opportunity to celebrate Haiti and its people in an empowering and uplifting way without fully ignoring the natural disaster. Eight Days gives young readers a view of Haiti that does not emphasize the ruins, destruction, corruption, or poverty that Haitian people face—which Danticat explores in her writing for adults. Instead, the book celebrates the beauty of Haiti and its national landmarks and focuses on resiliency in order to provide a much more positive vision of the island and to emphasize the Haitian children’s early maturity. Danticat’s child narrators are expected to take on a lot of responsibility and are highly independent, perhaps relating to her own childhood and connection to picture books. On the last page of Eight Days, Junior celebrates the “eighth day, when they finally found me.” He explains that he “was so happy, because [he] could see Manman and Papa and Justine, too. I tell you, I hugged them so tight I thought I would never let go.” The accompanying illustration, which is also the back cover illustration, features Junior’s smiling face as he is hugged by his mother, father, and younger sister. There are many people in the background, yet Delinois illustrates these other people as indiscriminate blobs—with orange, tan, and yellow circles representing the large crowd that surrounds the family, and several roughly sketched lines above the circles, representing the reporters raising their hands to ask Junior a question. As Junior’s back is to this large crowd and his family’s gaze is only on him, it makes for a very intimate and loving moment, capturing the largely positive feelings that Danticat narrates. This picture book ends with the most important message that Danticat and Delinois deliver—which is the central role that family (even when absent) plays in the resiliency of Haitian children.

The Last Mapou Lesser known than her other works for children, Danticat’s second children’s picture book The Last Mapou is similar to Eight Days in that it is set in Haiti and celebrates a child’s close ties to their family; however, while Eight Days speaks more to a readership outside of Haiti in its exploration of the island through Junior’s eyes, The Last Mapou is focused on a single home in Haiti and is written more for Haitian children more than readership from outside the island. The Last Mapou is published by a smaller publisher, One Moore Book, which is an independent nonprofit press that “publishes culturally relevant books that feature children of countries with low literacy rates and underrepresented cultures.”7 While Danticat’s other three picture books were published by larger US-based presses, this book has a more limited circulation, though six years after it was first published in English in 2013, a Kreyòl translation was produced and 1,000 copies of this edition were distributed to children in Haiti in 2019.8 The messages about the origins of Haitian people and their connection to the mapou tree speak to the book’s different audience. Similarly, Danticat’s more experimental storytelling style and Duval-Carrié’s more mature illustrations make this book stand out as distinct from Danticat’s other children’s picture books, which are more similar in style to other picture books

Wayétu Moore, “One Moore Book,” Wayétu Moore, 2020, https://www.wayetu.com/projects. “It’s Here! The Last Mapou Creole Translation:  Dènye Pye Mapou A,” One Moore Book, March 12, 2019, https:// www.onemoorebook.com/single-post/2019/03/12/Its-Here-The-Last-Mapou-Creole-Translation-D%C3%A8nyePye-Mapou-A. 7 8

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published in the United States. Although The Last Mapou is often less accessible to US readers than her other picture books due to its more limited circulation, Danticat develops similar themes about resiliency and familial ties in this picture book and it compliments her other picture books well. In The Last Mapou, the unnamed child protagonist faces the loss of both her grandmother and the large mapou tree that hovers over her Grann’s home. Unlike Eight Days, the child’s safety is not threatened in the same way as Junior’s and the responsibility that she is asked to undertake is tied to her ability to learn and share a history that has largely been erased. As her grandmother teaches her about the two hundred-year-old mapou tree, which stands over 150 feet tall, is very wide, and has leaves “shaped like Grann’s and my hands,” the child also learns about the origins of her family in Haiti. There are many details that the narrator and her Grann share about the tree that connect this impressive but dying tree to their own bodies and lives; however, despite the daunting size and personified traits of the aged tree, the child and her grandmother realize the tree is now threatening to destroy Grann’s home as it falls and they grapple with the painful realization that the tree must come down. This death is not one that is part of a natural life cycle but instead the effects of poor treatment. Grann explains, “Each time it rains … more of the mapou’s legs get pulled apart from their rightful place.”9 Through the book, Grann further explores how the mapou tree’s story is tied to girl’s Haitian ancestors and story and subtly reminds the young girl how it is her responsibility to remember and to share the story of the tree and her ancestors after they have all died. The tree symbolizes origin, familial connections, and a reminder of colonization. The girl’s connection to Haiti is rooted in her family’s long and difficult history on the island—which can be best understood through the story of the mapou tree. Grann explains to her granddaughter that “Haiti was once a forest filled with mapou trees. And many people were living inside the trees.”10 When a man and woman became tired of living within the trees, they emerged and many other tree dwellers followed them. These original ancestors created houses and boats from the mapou’s softwood, mattresses from the mapou’s silk fibers, soap and fertilizer from the mapou seeds, medicine from the mapou’s sap, and decorations from the mapou’s flowers. The mapou serves as a place of birth for people, and it is also tied to their daily lives in ways that support their health, security, and livelihoods. While this may seem like an exploitation of the mapou trees, the original community honors and acknowledges the great roles it serves as being central to their daily lives. Umbilical cords are buried underneath mapou trees, and marriage ceremonies are conducted under the tree “so that each couple could receive the silent blessings of their ancestors.”11 Despite this relationship that is in tune with the tree’s connection to the people, others (including those from “surrounding cities”) cut down all of the mapou trees until the one above Grann’s home is the only one left. The tree must come down, and its death mirrors the passing of the grandmother (who is also ill) and the loss of this incredible history of the girl’s ancestors, which can die with her Grann if she does not learn it. The accompanying illustrations to Danticat’s text in The Last Mapou are created by Edouard Duval-Carrié, an artist who emigrated from Haiti as a teenager, but whose paintings, sculptures, and alter pieces serve as political and social commentary about Haiti. Danticat, The Last Mapou, 6. Ibid., 12. 11 Ibid., 16. 9

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Duval-Carrié’s paintings in The Last Mapou are vivid and abstract, using bold colors and futuristic imagery. While Delinois’s illustrations in Eight Days paint Haiti with calm blues and golden hues, Duval-Carrié’s paintings are much darker in color, with bold purples and deep crimson reds on top of black and navy backgrounds. Initially, his illustrations of the mapou tree are realistic, with snakes and fruit hanging from the tree’s brown branches. Yet as Grann tells the story of the mapou tree, Duval-Carrié paints abstracted nude figures within the tree, whose trunk and branches are now illustrated in electric green shades. In a review of Edouard Duval-Carrié’s work, LeGrace Benson studies the appearance of trees within his art, stating, “With a personalization of tree as a being intimately bound up in human life, this artist creates the imaginaire needed to begin the task modern ecologists long to re-establish: awareness of mutual, reciprocal existence.”12 Duval-Carrié’s style not only honors the trees but also shows viewers how humanity is intrinsically tied to natural wonders. In his mixed media paintings Sick Tree (2011) and Of Cotton Gunboats and Petticoats #6 (2017) and in his engraving Little Crippled Haiti (2018), the human form cannot be visually separated from the tree. Branches cannot be distinguished from hair, and human limbs cannot be disconnected from the tree’s trunk. This beautiful and visually striking design choice further emphasizes the deep ancestral connection the young narrator has to the trees. And just as the trees were used by outsiders or those who do not appreciate their gifts, the Haitian people with deep ties to these trees have also felt similar pain and the exploitation. In pairing Duval-Carrié’s surrealist and graphic art with Danticat’s powerful story, the themes in The Last Mapou speak to the difficult history of Haiti and the responsibility of future generations to be storytellers of their triumphs and pains. While the grandmother and her granddaughter have a close bond, the gifts given by the grandmother come with the weight of carrying on her legacy and that of the now demolished and lost mapou trees. It is the weight carried by those of whose histories have been erased, and one that children of oppressed groups are often asked to carry. Both Danticat and Duval-Carrié left Haiti as young people, yet both have spent years meditating upon their connection to the island through their art—whether visual or written. Danticat has explained how important this connection to grandparents and other generations are, especially to those who live outside of Haiti. She states, “Stories, whether within the family of folktales, or just spirituality and rituals, are so important to survival, to continuity, and that’s what’s always been stressed in my family. We’re connected by our stories.”13 Storytelling is essential not only in sharing a history but also to one’s own survival. This concentration is present in their children’s picture book. In speaking to a child audience, they put forth a challenge to young readers to carry on the history of people who have been erased just like the mapou trees that no longer stand throughout the island. While the narrator is illustrated as a young child throughout most of The Last Mapou, the story is told from the perspective of an adult looking back upon her childhood. The book ends with the narrator as a woman reflecting upon the loss of the mapou and her grandmother. She mentions how she is still in communication with her grandmother through the garden that still stands. She states, “I hear my grandmother’s soft chuckle. Then I hear a voice echo

LeGrace Benson, “On Reading Continental Shifts and Considering the Works of Edouard Duval Carrié,” Small Axe 12, no. 3 (2008): 162. 13 Erik Gleibermann, “The Story Will Be There When You Need It: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat,” World Literature Today 93, no. 1 (2019): 69. 12

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through the rustling leaves of the remaining trees, while telling the mapou’s story.”14 The book closes with the narrator saying, “This time though I  am part of the mapou’s story because I am the one telling it.” This is the only of Danticat’s four picture books that includes the firstperson narration of an adult. Her awareness of the function she serves as the storyteller and historian of her family’s heritage speaks to the task that she is placing on readers—especially young Haitian readers—to learn and share their family’s stories, spiritual beliefs, and strengths as well. While the storytelling style and the art are very distinct for the picture book genre, especially in abstract and bold drawings featuring nude figures and trees, The Last Mapou is a picture book that fits with the themes present in many of Danticat’s other books and speaks to children of Haiti more so than her other three picture books.

Mama’s Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation Danticat’s third picture book moves from Haiti (which serves as the setting for Eight Days and The Last Mapou) to the United States, but Haiti citizenship is a critical element of the story. Like Eight Days, which highlights a young child using his ingenuity and imagination while separated from his parents in order to survive, Mama’s Nightingale:  A Story of Immigration and Separation similarly follows a young protagonist as she imagines and helps create a better future for herself and for her family. In the picture book, Danticat tells the story of Saya, a young American child whose Haitian mother is imprisoned in a correctional facility for “women without papers.” Illustrated with oil paintings by artist Leslie Staub, Mama’s Nightingale does not shy away from providing emotional scenes of young Saya crying in great sadness over missing her mother or showing anger as she is forced away from her mother when visiting her in prison. Unlike Eight Days, which celebrates the country in which it is set, Mama’s Nightingale directly challenges the US inhumane and problematic immigration policies that separate families. Danticat knows this pain of separation and incarceration due to papers well, as she details in Brother, I’m Dying. She was kept apart from her own parents for many years as they attempted to get their papers in the United States, and she lost her uncle when he died in a prison for those without papers when he sought asylum in the United States. While Danticat was unsuccessful as a child and as an adult to bypass or correct the complex and unjust immigration system in the United States, Saya is more successful. Saya’s creativity and commitment to her mother’s freedom eventually brings compassion out of those who report on her story, read her words in the newspaper, and eventually judge her mother’s case. While the recent emergence of picture books about migration and refugees has been notable, authors and illustrators have been bringing in complicated ideas about moving between borders in the genre of children’s picture books for decades. In Mama’s Nightingale, the child protagonist is an architect of her mother’s freedom, which relates to several common themes present in Danticat’s picture books as well as to current topical trends in contemporary picture books. As conversations and attention to the issue of migration, citizenship, and borders have been heightened during the last four years, more and more picture books like Danticat’s have been published that tell the story of those who have migrated from a familiar familial homeland

Danticat, The Last Mapou, 22.

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to one that is intimidating and new. Some of the books offer the first-person narration of a child learning a new language and cultural practices while still retaining connections to their homeland (like Jeri Watts and Hyewon Yum’s A Piece of Home (2016) or Anne Sibley O’Brien’s I’m New Here (2015)), other titles provide empathetic and moving narratives of what it feels like to be a refugee (like Francesca Sanna’s The Journey (2016) and Me and My Fear (2019) and Wendy Meddour and Daniel Egnéus’s Lubna and Pebble (2019)), and others provide a more imaginative view of moving from one space to another (like Rebecca Young and Matt Ottley’s Teacup (2016) and Constance Ørbeck-Nilsse and Akin Duzakin’s Why am I Here? (2016)). These picture books often provide a child’s perspective on moving from one country to another—whether that move is motivated by threats to one’s safety or security or by an adult’s decision to seek different opportunities. And like the immigration stories of the many diverse people who move for different reasons, these titles help readers engage with the personal, political, and geographic challenges of leaving a space more familiar to them. Mama’s Nightingale complicates the stories presented in many of these picture books as Saya blurs the boundaries between countries with her transnational status and by presenting her mother’s vulnerability in a country that does not welcome or support her. Instead of presenting a story about the journey or the challenges of assimilating to a new country, Danticat narrates how traumatic being in between can be. Saya is a citizen of the United States, but this does not keep her from losing her mother. Although this is an important story to tell, especially as many children face similar situations of being separated from parents due to papers, this is not a common storyline in children’s picture books—even in those exploring the topic of immigration. In her recent Pura Belpre award-winning autobiographical picture book Dreamers/Soñadores (2018), Yuyi Morales narrates her crossing from Mexico to the United States with her infant child, carrying symbolic gifts representing her culture and background and walking across a bridge she describes as being “outstretched like the universe.” This bridge offers her a clear path to a new country, though it does not feel steady or recognizable. She explains that her own journey as an undocumented immigrant, who did not speak the same language or understand the customs of those who she met, was daunting yet full of possibility. While she initially struggles to find her place in a new terrain that is sometimes unwelcoming, she ends up finding great comfort and solace in spaces like a public library where she builds friendships and connects to other storytellers. Picture books like Dreamers show the hopeful possibilities of building community and finding peace when one moves to a very different place. Yet, Mama’s Nightingale, even with it also having a hopeful ending like Dreamers, puts pressure on those who have the political power and the comforts of citizenship to recognize their ability to help those with less stability and security due to their national status. Saya is US-born, but she has deep roots in another country, and she and her family are affected by the cruelty that those who are undocumented face. In their 1993 children’s picture book Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del otro lado, author Gloria Anzaldúa and illustrator Consuelo Méndez explore the trials of maintaining a friendship for two children, Prietita and Joaquín, who live on the Mexico/US border. Unlike the bridge that Morales illustrates in Dreamers, which is intimidating but temporary as it leads the protagonist from one nation to another, Anzaldua’s narrative emphasizes that for the children who live directly on a national border with clear boundaries, many distinctions are made between who belongs and who does not. Like Saya in Mama’s Nightingale, Prietita is also 198

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a US citizen and she uses her own privilege to challenge the racism and nationalism of others. Through her friendship with Joaquín, Prietita recognizes and witnesses the immense hardships he endures. Other children who live in their border town bully and mistreat Joaquín, who is undocumented, calling him a wetback or mojado and telling him to “go back where he belongs.” Prietita defends Joaquín, challenging their cruelty by standing in front of Joaquín when one of the boys prepares to throw a rock at him and by asking them, “What’s the matter with you guys? How brave you are, a bunch of machos against one small boy. You should be ashamed of yourselves!” Prietita notices his skinny fingers and the sores on his arms and she introduces him to the herb woman of their community. She also helps hide Joaquín and his mother when patrolmen come looking for “illegals living in the area.” Through her compassionate care of Joaquín, Prietita challenges the older children’s cruelty, the border patrol’s threatening presence, and the hostile environment that mistreats Joaquín’s body. Prietita collects and prepares herbs to treat Joaquín’s arm under the guidance of the herb woman, which is how Anzaldúa shows how children are in the unique position to protect those who are most vulnerable. In the same way that Anzaldúa’s critical Chicana feminist work “proclaim[s]‌the bonds of bridges,”15 her picture book teaches readers to question unjust and unkind boundaries and to weaken borders through a child’s ingenuity and their respect for the land and its people. Published decades later, Danticat’s Mama’s Nightingale similarly accentuates the unnecessary cruelties that emerge from national boundaries and walls—especially for transnational children who have ancestral and emotional connections to more than one culture or country. The cover of Mama’s Nightingale illustrates Saya’s story, showing a loving gesture between a mother and a child while also alluding to the separation of the two. While the two look at each other and seem to be moving toward each other, with Saya’s arms stretched toward to her mother without touching her and Saya’s mother’s left hand cradling Saya’s cheek while she leans into her, they do not hug. Between them are two nightingales: one caged in Saya’s mother’s arm and the other nestled in Saya’s hand. Like Saya and her mother, the caged bird and the free bird look at each other, paralleling the interaction between imprisoned mother and daughter yearning for her to be free successfully. Mama’s Nightingale begins with Saya attempting to connect with her mother by listening to a recording of her voice on the answering machine. Her mother speaks in Haitian Creole, asking for the listener to “Tanpri kite bon ti nouvèl pou nou!”—which translates to “Please, leave us good news.” Saya repeatedly listens to this message until she accidentally deletes it, providing a heartbreaking moment of loss that emphasizes just how wide the distance is between the child and her mother. Saya asks her father if her Mama can have her own papers, and when her father explains that her mother cannot use her daughter’s papers, Saya is deeply disappointed and confused. She struggles to find ways to both connect with her mother and find another means to free her. In Mama’s Nightingale, Saya witnesses her father writing “many long letters” to reporters, judges, and politicians in order to get his wife’s case heard. Saya then decides to write her own letters, which catches the attention of a reporter who then prints Saya’s story in the newspaper, which appeals to the interest of a TV reporter, who interviews Saya and her father. While Saya’s father tries to establish his wife’s connection to the United States, explaining how they started their family in the country and how his wife had worked in a restaurant before Gloria Anzaldúa, “Counsels from the Firing … past, present, future,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 3rd ed. (Berkley: Third Woman Press, 2001), 226. 15

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being arrested by immigration police, Saya gives an emotional plea, reporting how much she misses her Mama and how Saya wishes her mother could be with them again. This media attention leads to sympathy from readers and viewers who make phone calls and send letters to the prison. The book ends with a happy reunion, as Saya’s mother is freed due to a judge’s decision to allow her to return home. Saya’s mother tells Saya a new story about how “a smart and brave little nightingale helps her mommy find the right rainbow trail and the mommy follows it home.” The last lines of the picture book come from Saya stating that she likes the way her Mama’s and her story ends and that it is their words that brought them together again. The ending is utopian and sends the message that a child with enough perseverance, ingenuity, and desire can create a bridge to bring their parent back home. While the narrative of Mama’s Nightingale provides compelling messages about migration, the illustrations also add an important dimension, furthering the important role that Saya plays as a bridge builder and as a resourceful daughter. Straub’s illustrations feature oil paintings of the characters either on a white backdrop—to help the reader focus on the character’s facial features—or on a bold cyan page with winged hearts, birds, stars, locks and keys, and flowers layered on top. Straub uses these visual motifs throughout the book to capture the stories shared between the separated mother and daughter, especially those that compare the two to a pair of nightingales breaking from a small cage together with a key. These illustrations of nightingales and cages allude to a long literary history of the symbol of a trapped bird, but showing a young bird carrying the key of freedom to its mother bird is a powerful symbol that emphasizes the strength and ingenuity of youth. On the last page of the story, which features the rainbow and nightingales that Saya’s mother references in her final story that celebrates how Saya has saved her, we see a large personified heart supporting the rainbow that Saya and her mother float upon. This heart, which shares Saya’s deep brown eyes and smile, holds the small nightingale clutching a key in its hand symbolizing the freedom Saya helped her mother gain. It is through a daughter’s immense love that borders dissipate and noncompassionate policies are changed. This is an important image as the heart, rainbow, and birds all further support Danticat’s message about the child as being at the center of change and bridge building, though this message has also drawn criticism from scholars and teachers who explain that Saya’s story is a grand exception in today’s political climate in the United States instead of a model that other children facing similar circumstances can follow. In her author’s note to Mama’s Nightingale, Danticat explains that “over 70,000 parents of American-born children have been jailed and deported in recent years.” As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s surveillance and arrests have increased over the last several years, this number continues to increase. According to 2015–17 fiscal reports shared to Congress by the US Department of Homeland Security, which are the most recent reports available, ICE deported a total of 87,351 people who claimed to have at least one US citizen child.16 Current policies are not only separating US-born children from their parents, but children who migrate are also being pulled from their parents and being placed in detention facilities in horrifying conditions. Saya represents thousands of children facing the heartache and

“Deportation of Aliens Claiming U.S.-Born Children,” Fiscal Year 2017 Report to Congress, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, October 12, 2017. Available online:  https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ ICE%20-%20Deportation%20of%20Aliens%20Claiming%20U.S.%20-Born%20Children%20-%20First%20 Half%2C%20CY%202017.pdf (accessed August 1, 2019). 16

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confusion as to why papers or unclear policies are keeping them separated from their parents, though Saya’s story of reunification and of the privileges of being with her US-born father separates her story from those of so many children from Latinx backgrounds. In her article “The Struggle Continues:  How the Endings of Children’s Literature Create False Narratives of Social Movements,” Makai Kellogg explains that the close of Mama’s Nightingale “relegates any reference to many other mothers in detention after the story has ended.” Danticat shows that it is Saya’s great love that frees her mother and her childlike unselfishness is what is heard and recognized by the reporters, a judge, and those who are moved by her story. However, most children in a similar situation to Saya’s are not seen, heard, or treated with the same degree of respect, humanity, and love. While the idea of a “happy ending” may appeal to those reading a picture book, Mama’s Nightingale provides an unrealistic and perhaps overly hopeful conclusion. However, as Danticat simultaneously wants to address social issues while celebrating the brilliance and resiliency of Haitian and Haitian American children, Saya’s happy reunion rewards her determination and helps her present these dual narratives. Saya is not the only child protagonist in a contemporary picture book that is estranged from a parent due to their lack of papers. In their 2018 picture book Carmela Full of Wishes, Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson also allude to a parent separated from their child, as birthday girl Carmela brainstorms what she should wish for, including her father to “get his papers fixed so he could finally be home.” Robinson illustrates Carmela and her father’s reunion on a panel of a papel picado, a Mexican folk art style of cutting tissue paper to hang as decoration during a celebration. This is the only moment when Carmela’s father is mentioned in the picture book, and the illustrative style, while indicative of Carmela’s Mexican heritage and of a great celebration, also visually portrays the current distance between Carmela and her father. We do not see much detail in the characters’ faces and instead rely on their body language to see the intimacy and care between the two. This is in stark contrast to Straub’s vivid and detailed illustrations, which show Saya crying, throwing tantrums, and, eventually, joyously celebrating her reunion with her mother. Saya’s voice and perspective are emphasized much more in Mama’s Nightingale, demonstrating that with her writing and creativity, she has the ability to reunify with her mother. Peña and Robinson do not show this same kind of agency and ability for their child narrator, instead alluding to Carmela’s despondency without holding her accountable for her father’s status. However, both of these picture books emphasize the importance of families staying together, especially for the young children whose naivety and anger toward the systems that keep them from their parents help all readers recognize the problems of these borders. In highlighting a child’s confusion about citizenship and her ability to address and change her mother’s status, Danticat encourages readers to consider the inhumanity and the imprudence of the laws that keep families apart. In her 2015 address to the American Library Association, Danticat explains, “It is not Saya’s or my story alone … I wanted it to be about a child who takes matters into her own hands. A child who has the power to direct her own narrative and discovers through the process that there is liberation, there are great possibilities.”17 In focusing on the power of the child as an architect of more humane policies Sanhita Sinha Roy, “Edwidge Danticat:  The Power of Books and Librarians,” American Libraries Magazine, June 29, 2015. Available online:  https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/edwidge-danticat-the-powerof-books-and-librarians/. 17

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and procedures when it comes to separation, Danticat shows the possibilities of breaking down borders when adults listen to the wisdom and the desires of children. Though, with this belief also comes the weight of an unrealistic vision of what a child can accomplish in the face of the immense political boundaries that even adults cannot dismantle. Danticat pushes the idea that children are capable of great civic change and are often more resilient than the adults surrounding them.

My Mommy Medicine While Danticat’s first three children’s picture books highlight Haiti and difficult topics in their themes and messages, her latest picture book, My Mommy Medicine, has a much lighter tone and illustrative style. Danticat’s earlier works were important contributions to the children’s literature genre as they filled a substantial gap in representing Haitian and Haitian American children and their resiliency in the face of incredible challenge. From surviving an earthquake to holding on to largely extinct ancestral stories to freeing their mother from prison, these children take on momentous tasks. In My Mommy Medicine, instead of being concerned about survival or history, the young unnamed protagonist simply enjoys a day at home with her mother as she recovers from a minor illness. While this picture book lacks the same dramatic and mature themes, this book is still critical and key not only to Danticat’s oeuvre but also to the wider genre of children’s picture books. Publisher and children’s book author Denene Millner argues in the title of her 2018 the New York Times op-ed that “Black Kids Don’t Want to Read About Harriet Tubman All the Time,” further stating, “Stories about the everyday beauty of being a little human being of color are scarce … They want to read books that engage with their everyday experiences, featuring characters who look like them. Just like any other child. White children, too, deserve—and need—to see black characters that revel in the same human experiences that they do.” Danticat’s My Mommy Medicine provides this glimpse of the “everyday beauty” that exists even when a child is too sick to leave her house and needs to spend the day cuddling and spending time with her mother. While My Mommy Medicine is an outlier in Danticat’s more rigorous collection of picture books that feature children staying alive in a collapsed building or working to free their mother from prison, it provides a view of the mundane and family-centered aspects of Black childhood and offers readers more than initially meets the eye. My Mommy Medicine centers on a quiet day at home, featuring a mother caring for her sick young daughter. In her author’s note at the end of the picture book, Danticat stresses that the concept of “Mommy Medicine” goes beyond a gendered practitioner, explaining that anyone providing “acts of comfort”—whether a child’s mom, dad, grandmother, aunt, and so forth— can give a child “Mommy Medicine.” Yet textually (through constant references to the young girl’s mother) and visually (through the illustrations of a mother and daughter), this book has a strong woman-centered message. My Mommy Medicine celebrates a mother’s great love and creativity, which nurture her daughter’s feelings of security and wellness. As the unnamed protagonist states, “Whenever I am sick, or just feel kind of gloomy or sad, I can always count on my Mommy Medicine.” This little girl receives “my mommy medicine” in the form of kisses “so loud it reminds me of a French horn at Mardi Gras,” a hug, a menthol back rub, a card game, or “just plain old sitting up.” In calling these acts of affection “my,” the young girl shows 202

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the deep connection between her mother and herself and explains how small acts of physical, emotional, and material kindness heal her when she feels unwell. Illustrator Shannon Wright provides cartoonish illustrations of the mother and daughter, often shaded in warm orange and yellow tones or calming sea greens and turquoises. Unlike Delinois’s vivid and realistic paintings of Junior, Duval-Carrié’s dark and dramatic paintings, or Staub’s folk art style filled with visual motifs, Wright’s illustrations are bubbly and ebullient. With their animation-like style, the illustrations compliment the ease and light themes of the story and text, emphasizing their childlike qualities. My Mommy Medicine’s cover is the simplest of Danticat’s four picture books, with mother and daughter in a tight embrace. The young daughter rests her head in the crook of her mother’s neck and both squeeze their eyes closed with closed lip smiles, showing their contentment and love. Their hair, which shares the same texture and color, creates a single indiscernible mass, again showing just how close their bond is. Despite how positive this book is in its themes and tone, it critically lacks the same degree of appreciation or popularity as Danticat’s other picture books. While Mama’s Nightingale and Eight Days both earned Danticat starred Kirkus reviews, My Mommy Medicine did not. The reviewer stated that while the book provides “a sweet celebration of the special touch that only a mother can give,” the book is “perhaps not memorable enough to become a favorite” (“My Mommy Medicine”). Danticat attempted to pen a book that focuses on a more common theme in picture books—the bond between a mother and child—but the book critically falls flat. While My Mommy Medicine may not hit upon the same themes of survival and loss as Danticat’s other works, it is an important text for what it represents, especially in terms of representation of characters and creators of color. In the field of children’s literature, questions of representation and portrayals of children from different racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds have been at the center of many conversations about the changing genre. In 2014, the “We Need Diverse Books” movement began as renowned author Walter Dean Myers asked in a groundbreaking the New York Times article, “Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?” He wrote from both personal experience of not seeing many characters who look like him or come from backgrounds similar to his growing up and from years of data that show how underrepresented children of color are in children’s literature. Statistics from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC), a leading research library at the University of WisconsinMadison that collects the annual publishing statistics on children’s literature about people of color, show annually that groups including American Indians, Asian Americans, and African Americans are infrequently illustrated in picture books. For instance, of the 3,200 children’s books published in the United States in 2013, only 93 (or 2.9%) were about African Americans. Four years after Myers’s groundbreaking op-ed (and soon after he passed away at the age of 76), and after more scholars, librarians, and teachers began to critique the publishing industry and look more closely at the racial diversity in their own collections, the statistics changed. In 2018, the CCBC collected 3,134 books, and of those books, 301 (or about 10 percent) featured African or African American children.18

“Publishing Statistics on Children’s/YA Books about People of Color and First/Native Nations and by People of Color and First/Native Nations Authors and Illustrators,” Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison, July 5, 2019. Available online:  http://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/pcstats.asp (accessed August 1, 2019). 18

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This increase shows that more children have access to “mirrors” to see themselves and their communities in the books they read, as well as “windows” to learn more about children who do not look like them (as librarian Rudine Sims Bishop explains in her infamous “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors” framework). However, as Sarah Park Dahlen explains, just because the numbers have increased, it does not mean the quality of these stories has kept up with the quantity. She argues that “children’s literature continues to misrepresent underrepresented communities” and not only is there a “low quantity of existing literature” but there is also an “inaccuracy and uneven quality of some of those books.”19 Danticat herself has discussed exploring the genre of children’s literature with her two young daughters, reading books by Dr. Seuss and Jacqueline Woodson alike.20 In telling the story of Haitian or Haitian American children, Danticat shares her own experiences and helps bring to light children who have largely been absent in the genre. She continues a tradition of storytelling in a genre that is much more popular for her children than it had been for her. Over the past couple of years, as representation of children of color has steadily increased, more scholars and critics are now putting more pressure on who is writing or illustrating these texts (calling for “own voice” writers), what types of themes are present, and whether or not the mirror that is reflecting a child’s visage is a “fun house” or “cracked” mirror that does not provide a positive or empowering portrayal.21 Even though My Mommy Medicine does not explore life-threatening or traumatic events, its ordinary qualities might just be another feature that makes the text exemplary, not only in Danticat’s canon but also in the genre of children’s picture books. Featuring a mother doing a “silly dance” or “watching [their] ceiling’s glowin-the-dark stars flicker,” demonstrating the quiet and pervasive love between a mother and child is a powerful and political act—though one that is subtler than showing a child separated from her mother due to incarceration. Yet, few critics recognize the power of showing Black children having quiet days at home with their mothers, like Danticat shows in My Mommy Medicine, and instead place the heavy expectation upon authors of color to produce historical narratives or books that celebrate the lives of well-known people of color. The fact that Danticat is also an author better known and appreciated for her writing for adults may also create the expectation that her work should be serious, presenting topics and ideas often not celebrated or connected to the picture book genre—like incarceration and surviving a natural disaster. Like Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day (1962), Valerie Flournoy and Jerry Pinkney’s The Patchwork Quilt (1985), or Oge Mora’s Thank you, Omu! (2018), My Mommy Medicine is an important contribution to the wider genre of children’s literature in its emphasis on the Black family love. Furthermore, this title also connects to themes in Danticat’s wider canon, further emphasizing the familial bond present in all four of her picture books and in her memoirs as well.

Sarah Park Dahlen, “Picture This:  Diversity in Children’s Books 2018 Infographic,” June 19, 2019. Available online: https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/picture-this-diversity-in-childrens-books-2018-infographic/ (accessed July 30, 2019). 20 “By the Book: Edwidge Danticat,” New York Times, Sunday Book Review, 2013, 6. 21 Dahlen, “Picture This.” 19

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Conclusion Danticat joins many well-known twentieth-century authors primarily known for their work for adults who have also written picture books for children. Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Umberto Eco have all written text for picture books that complement their writing for adults in themes and literary styles. Yet, even in the works of children’s literature, which address topics including systemic racism (like Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976)), feelings of isolation and sadness (like Brook’s Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956)), and conflict arising from difference (like Eco’s The Three Astronauts (1966)), the language and tone are distinct from these author’s works for adults, especially in their inclusion of more concise sentences, less complex narratives or poetic structures, and a simpler vocabulary. As all of these writers took on penning a work of children’s literature after they had already written and published works for adults, these books offer readers the ability to see how these writers view children and what their expectations are of the youngest generation. Despite the complex and nuanced visions of the world presented in children’s literature, few critics and scholars integrate these works into their analysis of a well-known author’s collected works. Picture books written by authors like Danticat are often lesser known in their canons and rarely discussed in scholarship, perhaps because the picture books are often noted as being side projects for these authors or because scholars do not imagine that the books carry the same kind of depth that can benefit from critical analysis. However, studying their contributions to children’s literature gives us better insight into these writers’ philosophies and their views on what role they believe children play in bringing about the political change they would like to see. Children’s literature scholar Perry Nodelman argues that while most noticeable in a picture book is the simple text and narrative presented, there is also a “shadow text” that lurks within the book. This shadow text carries the weightier expectations that adults have about the children they write to and write about. He states, “The children in the phrase ‘children’s literature’ are most usefully understood as the child readers that writers, responding to the assumptions of adult purchasers, imagine and imply in their works.”22 Writing in the genre of children’s literature challenges writers and artists not only to write for a new audience of children but also to learn what the adult purveyors of the genre will accept. Danticat has brought new themes, settings, and characters to children’s picture books, from writing about children separated from their families due to natural disasters and imprisonment, though she does not lose sight of the adults who will buy, distribute, and publish these books. Danticat’s picture books are politically minded and attempt to give a voice to a population that is unassuming and often portrayed more as the victims of natural disasters and immigration laws than those who are able to change and improve their world. Danticat’s child protagonists are resilient, loved, and resourceful—even when they are facing hardship. Studying Danticat’s children’s picture books can give us great insights into how she uses this genre to speak to the youngest generation and to adults reading these books, even though she is better known for her contributions to other genres. Perry Nodelman, Hidden Adult:  Defining Children’s Literature (Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 5. 22

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Her themes of children’s resilience and creativity, familial bonds, representation, and transnational identity carry underlying pressures upon children to deliver political action and survival that is not always possible for the young. Danticat grew up with the insecurity of not knowing when she would see her own parents on an island going through political turmoil, causing her to grow up early and learn resiliency. While she uses the picture book genre to create child characters facing similar challenges of family separation and uncertainty, she did not grow up with childhood rich with children’s picture books. Danticat explains that she “was not read to as a child” and that Madeline was the “only one non-school related book” she owned before she was 12.23 However, she was “told fabulous stories by [her] aunts and grandmothers and many family friends.”24 The stories Danticat presents in her picture books, like those she was told, celebrate Haiti and the children’s ties to family, though in different ways. While the tone and story of each of these four picture books are quite distinct, the imagery and the narratives consistently point to the importance of familial bonds. Through their keen sense of empathy and creative resourcefulness, these children survive under incredible devastation, undermine those who attempt to reinforce separation and boundaries, and reaffirm the power and influence of a caregiver’s affection. Like her better-known work for adults, Danticat’s picture books provide a difficult, yet hopeful vision of the world.

Bibliography Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Counsels from the Firing … past, present, future,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 3rd ed., 261–6. Berkley: Third Woman Press, 2001. Bemelmans, Ludwig. Madeline. New York: Puffin, 1939, 1998. Benson, LeGrace. “On Reading Continental Shifts and Considering the Works of Edouard DuvalCarrié.” Small Axe 12 no. 3 (2008): 151–64. Project Muse. Muse.jhu.edu/article/252601. “By the Book: Edwidge Danticat,” New York Times, Sunday Book Review, August 11, 2013, 6. Dahlen, Sarah Park. “Picture This: Diversity in Children’s Books 2018 Infographic.” June 19, 2019. Available online: https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/picture-this-diversity-inchildrens-books-2018-infographic/ (accessed July 30, 2019). Danticat, Edwidge. Brother, I’m Dying, New York: Vintage, 2007. Danticat, Edwidge. Eight Days: A Story of Haiti. London: Orchard Books, 2010. Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. New York: Vintage, 2011. Danticat, Edwidge. The Last Mapou. New York: One Moore Book, 2013. Danticat, Edwidge. Mama’s Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation. New York: Dial Books, 2015. Danticat, Edwidge. My Mommy Medicine. New York: Macmillan, 2019. “Deportation of Aliens Claiming U.S.-Born Children.” Fiscal Year 2017 Report to Congress, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, October 12, 2017. Available online: https://www.dhs.gov/ sites/default/files/publications/ICE%20-%20Deportation%20of%20Aliens%20Claiming%20U.S.%20 -Born%20Children%20-%20First%20Half%2C%20CY%202017.pdf (accessed August 1, 2019). de la Peña, Matt, and Christian Robinson. Carmela Full of Wishes. New York: Random House, 2018. Duval-Carrié, Édouard. Sick Tree (2011). http://duval-carrie.com/project/sick-tree/ (accessed November 15, 2019).

“By the Book,” 2013, 6. Ibid.

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“I Am the One Telling It” Duval-Carrié, Édouard. Of Cotton Gunboats and Petticoats #6 (2017). http://duval-carrie.com/project/ of-cotton-gunboats-and-petticoats-6/ (accessed November 15, 2019). Duval-Carrié, Édouard. Little Crippled Haiti (2018). http://duval-carrie.com/project/little-crippledhaiti/ (accessed November 15, 2019). “Eight Days: A Story of Haiti.” Kirkus Reviews 78, no. 16 (August 15, 2010): 785. Gleibermann, Erik. “The Story Will Be There When You Need It: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.” World Literature Today 93, no. 1 (2019): 68–74. doi:10.7588/worllitetoda.93.1.0068. “It’s Here! The Last Mapou Creole Translation: Dènye Pye Mapou A.” One Moore Book, March 12, 2019. Available online: https://www.onemoorebook.com/single- post/2019/03/12/Its-Here-The-LastMapou-Creole-Translation-D%C3%A8nye-Pye-Mapou-A (accessed November 1, 2019). Kellogg, Makai. “The Struggle Continues: How the Endings of Children’s Literature Create False Narratives of Social Movements.” Social Justice Books: A Teaching for Change Project (2019). Available online: https://socialjusticebooks.org/the-struggle-continues/ (accessed July 4, 2019). Lissim, Susan. “Eight Days: A Story of Haiti.” School Library Journal 56, no. 11 (November 2010): 91. Miller, Denene. “Black Kids Don’t Want to Read about Harriet Tubman All the Time.” New York Times, March 10, 2018, SR 10. Moore, Wayétu. “One Moore Book,” Wayétu Moore. Available online: https://www.wayetu.com/projects (accessed November 28, 2019). Morales, Yuyi. Dreamers/Soñadores. New York: Holiday House, 2018. Myers, Walter Dean. “Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?” New York Times, March 16, 2014, SR1. “My Mommy Medicine.” Kirkus Reviews 86, no. 24 (December 15, 2018): 152. Nodelman, Perry. Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. “Publishing Statistics on Children’s/YA Books about People of Color and First/Native Nations and by People of Color and First/Native Nations Authors and Illustrators.” Cooperative Children’s Book Center. School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison. July 5, 2019. Available online: http:// ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/pcstats.asp (accessed August 1, 2019). Sinha Roy, Sanhita. “Edwidge Danticat: The Power of Books and Librarians.” American Libraries Magazine, June 29, 2015. Available online: https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/ edwidge-danticat-the-power-of-books-and-librarians/ (accessed September 1, 2019). Smith, Robin L. “Eight Days: A Story of Haiti.” The Horn Book Magazine 86, no. 6 (November/ December 2010): 73–4.

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CHAPTER 12 HAITI FACES DIFFICULT QUESTIONS TEN YEARS AFTER A DEVASTATING EARTHQUAKE

Edwidge Danticat

January 11, 2020 This past December, as what would have been my mother’s eighty-fourth birthday approached, I  kept dreaming of death. In the most frequent of these dreams, my mother, who died, of ovarian cancer, in October, 2014, in Miami, is telling me to run out of the single-story house where I spent most of my childhood, in Port-au-Prince, before the house falls on top of me and several members of my family. I knew why I was having these dreams. The anniversary of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010—leveling parts of Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas, and leading to thousands of deaths, including those of several friends and family members—was coming. And sometimes anniversaries hurt. You feel them in inexplicable aches in your body, or in a general unease that you keep trying to shake until you realize, yes, it is that time of year. Again. This past year, there has been a lot more than usual to worry about. Haitians have been protesting against President Jovenel Moïse since July 6, 2018. They have been demonstrating against fuel hikes, corruption, and other systemic problems, such as high rates of unemployment, spiking inflation, currency devaluation, and extrajudicial killings, some of which have been linked to government officials. Between September and early December, 2019, the country was on an extended lockdown, or peyi lòk. Forty-two protesters were reported to have died during that time, and more than eighty injured. Nearly two million students could not go to school. Health care, already a challenge, became harder to access. Gang violence has intensified. Greater food insecurity looms ahead. The president refuses to resign. Haitian opposition leaders, some belonging to Moïse’s own political party, have vowed to keep protesting, but most parliamentarians’ terms will expire on January 13, and, since no legislative elections have been held, the president can soon rule by decree. This is only one snapshot of the Haiti that will commemorate the tenth anniversary of its most catastrophic natural disaster this Sunday. For some Haitians, in addition to navigating the country’s current and chronic problems, the anniversary might make them feel as though they’re still being attacked, both literally and figuratively, by the soil. This is how one older family member who survived the earthquake once described the early, single-digit anniversaries to me. This is how I imagine one younger relative might have felt after losing several toes to part of a collapsed wall in the earthquake, only to nearly die again last year after being shot by another young man who wanted his motorcycle. Sorrowful anniversaries magnify absence. I think of a story often shared by Marie Guerda Nicolas, a Haitian American clinical-psychology professor at the University of Miami School of Education and Human Development, and one of the founders of Rebati Santé Mentale, an

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organization collaborating with mental health workers in Haiti. Soon after the earthquake, Nicolas was in the western coastal town of Léogâne, my mother’s birthplace and the epicenter of the quake. Nicolas met a woman who, after searching with other distraught parents through the rubble of her 8-year-old daughter’s school, found one of her daughter’s legs, which she recognized by the style and color of the shoes and socks the girl had been wearing that day. The woman took the leg home, washed it, and laid it on her daughter’s still-intact bed. Eventually, Nicolas persuaded the woman to bury the leg. I think, too, of a discussion I had with family members in Port-au-Prince when they called to inform me that a loved one’s torso had been found. The decision was made to bury him immediately near the site where he’d died, but the horror of suddenly spotting his favorite shirt, after days of searching for him in the rubble, still haunts his surviving children. Sorrowful anniversaries also inevitably make us wonder what might have been. What if 316,000 people—the death count, according to government estimates—had not perished? What might they have contributed to their communities, their country? What if Haiti had actually been “built back better,” as President Bill Clinton, who served in a triple role as United Nations Special Envoy for Haiti, international cochair of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, and one of the two presidential faces of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, had often promised? What if the $13.5 billion in pledged and donated funds had actually been disbursed and invested in improving the lives of most Haitians, creating genuine paths for a better future? What if more seismic-resistant homes, hospitals, schools, and universities had been built, or rebuilt, to reduce future casualties? What if rural entrepreneurs, women’s organizations, and peasant farmers—who face the brunt of diminishing food production, environmental degradation, deadly hurricanes, and climate change—had been integral players in the reconstruction plans? What if …? Many of my family members in Haiti often refer to the country’s current political and economic challenges as another earthquake, one with no foreseeable end. I was in a supermarket in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood on the afternoon of January 12, 2010, when news of the earthquake broke. I tried calling friends and family members in Haiti, and then I called my mother, in New York. Between crying and praying, she, too, was trying to reach everyone she knew in Port-au-Prince and Léogâne. “What will the country be like now?” she kept asking me, something she did each time yet another tragedy had befallen Haiti. “Ten, twenty years from now, what will the country be like?” On this anniversary, like all the others to follow, Haitians must ultimately decide.

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CHAPTER 13

CREATE DANGEROUSLY: A POETICS OF WRITING AS MEMORIAL ART; THE TEXT AS ECHO CHAMBER

Anja Bandau

Published shortly after the earthquake in January 2010, the essays compiled under the title Create Dangerously:  The Immigrant Writer at Work delve into the poetics of writing in situations of sheer survival. Danticat reflects on her introductions to literature at the Brooklyn Public Library, writing, Inasmuch as our stories are the bastard children of everything that we have ever experienced and read, my desire to tell some of my stories in a collaged manner, to merge my own narratives with the oral and written narratives of others, begins with my reading of the two books I eagerly checked out from the Livres Haïtiens section of the Brooklyn Public Library.1 Resembling a number of established Haitian writers (Yanick Lahens, Dani Laferrière, Kettly Mars) in their intent to voice and articulate their struggle with the (im)possibility of their modes of fiction, Edwidge Danticat’s fiction comes to a halt as she reflects on writing and creativity in the face of massive destruction. Linking this moment to different traumatic events in Haitian history, the essays explore what modes of writing literature can engage in under the conditions of dictatorship, oppression, and other forms of life-threatening violence (such as an earthquake). As Danticat unfolds her very own approach to the problem of how to speak of the unspeakable, of traumatizing events, her essays also point to more general issues of aesthetic imagination. Caribbean writers have provided prolific reflections on the link between art, society, history, and memory.2 One might allude to the generation of independence, which addressed the “loss of history, the amnesia” and countered it with “imagination as necessity, as invention”:3 Wilson Harris4 put forward “creative imagination” and the notion of limbo as space in-between, as a bridging that symbolizes fragmentation and rearrangement. More recently, Edouard Glissant’s Poétique de la relation (1990) incorporated invisible ties, traces, as well as archipelagic thinking (Brathwaite)5 and transformed them into a Caribbean cultural

Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously:  The Immigrant Artist at Work (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2010), 62. 2 Christoph Singler and Anja Bandau, “Fictions dans les Caraïbes:  de la mémoire culturelle à la globalisation,” in Fictions et Cultures, ed. Anne Duprat and Françoise Lavocat (Paris: SFLGC, 2010), 230. 3 Derek Walcott, “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16, no. 1 (1974): 6. 4 Harris Wilson, Tradition, the Writer and Society (London: New Beacon, 1967). 5 Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). 1

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theory. In a polemic and tongue-in-cheek manner, Dany Laferrière’s Je suis un écrivain japonais expresses a diasporic, migrant’s position of creation, that is, a mobile position of identity. The list is far from complete but it shows that this Caribbean tradition to think about the relation between memory, history, and the role of art as imagination is predominantly masculine. This is the case, if we do not consider the more subtle poetics of female writers such as Maryse Condé or Jamaica Kincaid, imbedded in their fictional and essay writing. The more implicit modes of aesthetic reflection these writers engage in refer us to the gendered conditions of writing. Female authors in the Haitian literary tradition speak of their situation as internal exile due to the conditions of writing in a male-dominated intellectual space6 to which access is regulated both by a concept of the writer’s subject creating from a position of authority and individuality, differing from their own, and by certain literary modes that claim such authority. In the very specific post-2010 moment, Danticat publishes her compilation of essays with the programmatic subtitle “The immigrant artist at work,” explicitly linking two essential conditions of her creativity as an author:  the precarious position of writing from outside, from a distance (diaspora), and the position of the author or intellectual in the Haitian society in situations of violence. Nadège Clitandre observes that these positionings are inevitably gendered as Danticat uses the term “immigrant” in contrast to the privileged notion of exile used by male writers.7 I would like to position my reading of Edwidge Danticat’s essays against this background and discuss the relation between the diasporic position of the writer, questions of bearing witness, that is in particular the mode of testimonial writing and the place of the literary in this constellation, all coming together in Danticat’s notion of memorial art. With this emphasis I coincide with John Dayan’s observation that the entire collection’s concern is how memorial art ensures the “saving act of commemoration.”8 The act of bearing witness in the post-earthquake situation implicates the act of speaking for a community or a communal matter, a discussion that Gayatri Spivak has raised as crucial in relation to the ability and the right of the postcolonial writer to speak for his or her community. The tradition of testimonial writing in Latin America9 that I see present in Danticat’s text also takes the question of representation of subaltern positions center stage: The complex question whose voice and testimony is authorized through the text points to the differences in access to the public space. This chapter discusses, then, the relation between the notion of memorial art, the image of the echo chamber, and the mode of testimonial writing in Danticat’s writing. After presenting the essays as a hybrid form that uses the anecdotal mode to present (forgotten) historical events and a variety of aspects related through analogy in the first section, I then pass on to the second section that discusses the poetics of “create dangerously,” a notion taken from Albert Camus. It evolves around the relationship between art and the political that— for Danticat—is unfolding as a question of choice and disobedience.10 This relationship is

See Nadège T. Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 11–12. 7 Ibid. 8 See Colin Dayan, “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Edwidge Danticat. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. (Book review),” New West Indian Guide 85, nos. 3–4 (2011): 266. 9 See Georg M. Gugelberger, The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 10 See Danticat, Create Dangerously, 5sqq. 6

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triggered by what the author calls her creation myth11—haunting and obsessive stories “beyond the scope of [one’s] own life.”12 The third and fourth sections discuss the diasporic condition and a (trans)national literary tradition that are established introducing the notion of memory. The fifth section examines Danticat’s image of an echo chamber in that many different voices become interwoven as her appropriation of the testimonial writing mode. In the final section, the notion of memorial art acquires a more comprehensive meaning pointing toward its dimension beyond language, the visual. I  will show how—at the brink of speechlessness— images become counterpoint to and replacement for words.

Danticat’s Use of the Essay: Structure and Modes of Writing in the Essayistic Genre The programmatic introductory essay “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work” originates from a lecture that was inspired by Albert Camus’s “The artist and his time” (L’artiste et son temps)13 and was held at the Toni Morrison lecture series at Princeton University, March 25, 2008. Several articles were ones that Edwidge Danticat first published in Time Magazine, the New Yorker, The Progressive, and Miami Herald between 1999 and 2010. They provide the basis for the remaining chapters. Danticat wrote some essays specifically for this publication.14 All these texts are linked by the overarching question of how to create in situations of violence, of threats against individual and collective existence. The compilation’s manifesto-like character becomes clear. Events and stories appear in a new light as they are reread from a post-earthquake angle. The dedication to the victims of the earthquake of January 12, 2010, “two hundred thousand and more,” explicitly sets this tone. The book’s epigraph is taken from Maya Deren’s famous account on Haitian vodou Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haïti,15 more precisely, the opening section of its first chapter, “The point of departure.” In the quote, Deren connects myth as “fiction of beginnings,” told in the past tense, and its celebration in the present, a specific reenactment of that myth, linking memory to the present16 and setting a frame for the essays and poetical inquiries that follow (memorial art keeps things alive). As Dayan17 points out, Danticat teaches her readers a lesson in how to engage with the dead, the lost, discarded, depending on “marked moments of intense ordinariness”18 and Vodou having a part in it. In Create Dangerously, Danticat constructs a constellation of texts that excavate the forgotten, deal with the complexity of coming into existence, and address the possibility of working through traumatic events and the difficulty of grasping errant memory (mémoire errante). Danticat reflects on the possibilities of representing testimony, the necessity of memory, and the power of images that provide media coverage. The hybrid genre of the essay weaves together discursive, narrative, lyrical fragments of memory, momentary images

Ibid., 5. Ibid., 7. 13 Albert Camus, “L’artiste et son temps,” in Discours de Suède (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). 14 See Danticat, Create Dangerously, 175sq. 15 Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haïti (Kingson, NY: McPherson, [1953] 2004). 16 Ibid., 22. 17 Dayan, “Create dangerously,” 265–339. 18 Ibid., 266. 11 12

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similar to documentary photography, allowing the author to explore the border space between journalism, fiction, testimony, and memorial art. Danticat’s essays evoke hidden moments of Haitian history and perspectives on more prominent ones, such as the bicentenary of Haitian independence, violence in Haiti since Duvalier, events such as 9/11, hurricane Katrina, or archetypal situations of the diasporic (the plane ride between Port-au-Prince and Miami) and crucial moments in family life (such as birth and death). They portray Haitian artists and intellectuals such as the famous radio presenter Jean Dominique, photographer Daniel Morel, and painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as Alèrte Bélance, who witnessed violence after the coup against Aristide, among others. With the help of photographs, biographical episodes, and orally transmitted stories in personal conversations, the texts reconstruct a network of places, situations, and martyr figures that all share the experience of exile. The essay-chapters pinpoint small incidents, anecdotes that represent the entanglement of politics, history, art, and literature of Haiti, individual history, reading, and encounters with family and friends inside and outside Haiti. Resembling snapshots, they capture episodes, feelings, atmospheres; they gather voices that narrate unknown, unexpected, and seemingly second-rate details as they gain central significance. The essay, a subjective, non-fictional, personal and informal genre is characterized by a reflective mode, drawing on older texts and texts from other authors. To this practice of including texts by other women writers—as highlighted in a feminist essay tradition19—I return in the fourth section. The essay relies on discursive as well as narrative passages and oftentimes circular forms of reasoning, linking exposition and coda. An apparatus of references is set up in the index and acknowledgments— establishing a network of thought and writerly tradition. The anecdote is a structural element of the essay; it implies, even in written form, a strong aspect of orality.20 The specific link between the literary and the referential, the representational and the factual world of events, of event and context, as well as the posture of reflexivity in the storytelling21 guarantee the anecdote’s special effect. In historiography as well as in journalism, the anecdote functions as a reference to the factual, to historic episodes, individuals, and events that often illuminate conditions of crisis. The anecdote delivers a point often linked to a violation of common conventions, considered legitimate by writer and reader.22 A number of Danticat’s essays show the surprising turn of an argument, revealing an unexpected meaning in a symbol (e.g., “The Other Side of the Water,” “Bicentennial,” or “Flying Home”). The essay texts end with a sudden twist of the story, often in the last sentence. As in historiography, anecdotes represent the seemingly insignificant, telling example. Whether it is the hidden and disquieting parallels between the United States and Haiti in crisis management after a natural disaster in “Another Country,” aiming to view Haiti as not exceptional, or the old aunt who

As an introductory reading see Diane P. Freedman, An Alchemy of Genres: Cross-Genre Writing by American Feminist Poet-Critics (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992) as well as Ruth-Ellen Boettcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman, eds., The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Gloria Anzaldúa’s aesthetic of hybridizing genres in her seminal Borderlands/La Frontera (1986) was a reference for numerous female authors from the 1990s onward considered back then under the label of ethnic minority literature. 20 Ernst Rohmer, Artikel “Anekdote,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. 1, ed. Gert Ueding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), 569. 21 See ibid., 566. 22 See ibid., 570. 19

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lost her son “Lòt bò dlo,” the “other side of the water” in the diaspora.23 This mode of writing participates in unraveling received notions and master narratives, and reveals ties, unexpected and exemplary at the same time, that facilitate new perspectives on Haiti and Haitian culture. Danticat weaves together her multifaceted readings of Haitian and non-Haitian literature to form a canvas of voices that complement, comment, and put into perspective the testimonies gathered in her reportages.24 I will discuss this technique, of utmost importance for Danticat’s poetics, in the fourth and fifth sections, referring to the image of echo chamber that in Danticat’s use is closely linked to her testimonial mode of writing. Important in this context is also the work of translation (Creole and French into English)—addressed and practiced throughout the essays, bearing witness to acts of translation of Edwidge Danticat’s own story into French or Creole. A further characteristic of the essay is analogical thinking that establishes links between global and local history and literature. By way of establishing a parallel to Albert Camus’s oeuvre and his notion of an art inserted into its time, the author generates a crucial connection for her own argument, which I will return to in the next section. Another crucial literary tradition, magical realism, and its founding narrative are introduced in Chapter Seven, “Bicentennial,” where Danticat binds together two founding myths that keep reminding the reader of the formative power of (literary) discourse. Her essay alludes to the “silenced” historical event— the country’s coming into existence by the Haitian Revolution and its late recognition on one hand and links it to what is considered one of magical realism’s first manifestos. In the famous prologue to one of the most widely read novels on the Haitian Revolution, Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo, the Cuban author situates the magic real in the religious expressions of indigenous and African descendent cultures that he defines as source for creativity and conceives as genuinely Caribbean and Latin American mode of writing. Here, the practice of constituting meaning through the process of establishing analogies inscribes Haitian sociocultural production onto the global map.

Danticat’s Poetics of Creating Dangerously and Its Genealogy In her introductory essay, Danticat takes up the notion of an art inserted into its time (un art embarqué), which Albert Camus brought forward in his speech “L’artiste et son temps,” given at Uppsala University shortly after his Nobel prize lecture in December 1957.25 The dialogue with Camus evolves out of a shared experience of devastating totalitarianism, a diasporic position26 Danticat, Create Dangerously, 94. Danticat herself refers to different parts in Create Dangerously as “reportage” (see Elvira Pulitano, “An Immigrant Artist at Work: Conversation with Edwidge Danticat,” Small Axe 36, vol. 15, no. 3 (2011): 58). 25 In English the title is changed from “The Artist and His Time” to “Create Dangerously,” a phrase taken from the speech. The English translator Justin O’Brien translated the key notion embarqué with “impressed,” even “embarked,” and—more appropriate from my point of view—with “inserted into its time” (in “The Wager of our Generation”). The opposition between embarqué and engagé translates into “inserted” versus “committed,” voluntary versus compulsory. Cf. Albert Camus, “The Wager of our Generation,” Interview in Demain, October 24–30, 1957, in Albert Camus, Restistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 237–48; and Albert Camus, “Create Dangerously,” in Restistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York, Vintage Books, 1995), 249–72. 26 Camus’s French-Algerian status is of course different from Danticat’s Haitian-American position of enunciation, as his context is that of the colon. 23 24

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in Francophone culture, as well as Western literary tradition and, more specifically, out of the shared interest in the artist’s role in their respective times and societies. According to Camus, the artist cannot just be silent or talk about something other than the pressing matters of his time. Camus sees the artist involved in these inevitable issues. He places the artist “in the arena of the circus of history” and not among the ranks of spectators.27 To him, diverging from Jean Paul Sartre’s notion of littérature engagée (1947), the artist’s role is not a question of commitment, not an act of will. So, for Camus, “to create today is to create dangerously.”28 The imperative of taking a stance in the face of a violent social reality implies various challenges that affect not only the status of art in the community but also the definition of art in general. Danger not only concerns the artist’s life but also the artist’s choice on the nature of his or her art. An artist’s responsibility lies within his or her commitment to an art free of doctrines: neither art for art’s sake nor an ideologically tainted realism. The artist must realize that his struggle for a certain form of art is a struggle for his place in society and it leads to the crucial question how, in the midst of all ideologies, the freedom of creation—l’étrange liberté de la création29—becomes possible and secure. This freedom Camus sees in the service to those populations who suffer and for whom the artist must speak. Danticat translates the concept into the Haitian political and cultural context of dictatorship and suggests, again referring to Camus, whose notion of l’homme revolté we have in mind,30 that “creation as a revolt against silence” means “disobedience” in a situation where both, “creation and reception,” are “dangerous undertakings.”31 So, memorial art in this sense means commemorating the silenced/ the threatened by silence. Here a whole network of writers enters the picture—familiar with the creative conditions under oppressive regimes, creating art from eccentric positions such as the marginal, the minoritarian, the diasporic, exile, and/or providing primal scenes that testify to the possibilities of literature. They feed Danticat’s reflections on creation, creativity, and on how to become involved in the matters of her community and country. Danticat, the essayist, initiates this affiliation with different authors through the rereading of their texts and by establishing new, unexpected connections, thus forging a literary tradition of her own: a transnational literary history. Besides Camus, whose poetic reflections bring a tradition of critical realists such as Tolstoi into view, authors from Greek classicism such as Sophocles are reread from a postcolonial perspective. Characters such as Antigone are appropriated and shed light on exemplary situations and primal scenes. Tony Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker point to the African American, the African Diaspora experience. Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier are introduced to highlight the link to a Latin American and Caribbean literary cosmos and a mode of literary representation associated with lo real maravilloso (the marvelous real) and magical realism. In establishing these multifaceted ties Albert Camus, “L‘artiste et son temps,” in Discours de Suède (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 26 (my translation). Danticat, “Create Dangerously,” 251. In the original French version: “Créer aujourd’hui, c’est créer dangereusement” (Camus, “L‘artiste et son temps,” 28). 29 Camus, “L‘artiste et son temps,” 29. 30 Although Danticat gives her readers one specific text as reference, clearly more texts and notions of Camus come to mind. The interview with Camus, “The Wager of Our Generation,” conducted by the French magazine Demain in 1957 and published together with the speech under the title of The Artist and His Time, has to be considered as further intertext. The same is true of other essays in the volume containing those texts, which Camus himself believed the most important to appear in English translation. I mention only two further titles: “Defense of Freedom” “Pessimism and Tyranny.” 31 Danticat, Create Dangerously, 11. 27 28

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into multiple literary traditions, Danticat establishes her memorial art not as hermetic and monological but as interconnected and transnational. Danticat follows Camus’s poetic conviction that places images at the origin of creativity and develops a point of departure based on “stirring” images. At the heart of what Danticat calls her creation myth, she evokes a scene that opens the book and resurfaces various times throughout it: the images of the public execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, political activists but also writers, taken from the visual account of a propaganda film made by Duvalier’s regime in 1964. Members of the group Jeune Haïti, the two young men returned from exile in New York to Haiti to fight the dictatorship of Duvalier. After the failure of their plans and their arrest, Duvalier’s propaganda tried to refute their patriotism immediately and declared them foreign rebels. In her approach to these foundational images, Danticat draws on Deren’s Divine Horsemen (present in the epigraph) to explore the meaning of such a story of beginnings. In this foundational myth, the exiled are punished for disobedience; in Danticat’s remembrance this act of disobedience and punishment gains the status of a haunting symbol and a trigger of creation (see last section of this chapter). As Marcel Numa’s and Louis Drouin’s life stories lead far beyond the dimension of the private, Danticat’s creative myth “exists beyond the scope of [her] own life.”32 On different levels, Danticat invests this incident with meaning: the status of images in the initiation of creation, the link between patriotism and exile, the threat of silence (ultimately through death) that violence brings to creativity.

“The Immigrant Artist at Work”—Creating from a Diasporic Situation The visual account of the execution of these young patriots, emigrants, and writers alludes to the link between exile and creation. When mortal danger exists for whoever speaks up in public, how can one live and continue to create? Their brutal exclusion from the national community as “good-for-nothing blans (blancs)”33 establishes a discontinuity between people in the diaspora and Haiti that disqualifies the intellectual voice from the diaspora. Danticat interprets the case of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin as the possible reason behind her parents and many others leaving the country, for her life in the diaspora.34 It becomes a founding scene of diasporic existence under Duvalier, its justification, the birth of the insider/outsider paradigm and significant for Danticat’s own confrontation with the entanglements of politics, creation, and exile that the immigrant artist experiences.35 By working through this primal scene from different angles, the author connects diasporic creation (precarious in the sense of a distance, a mnemonic void, a nonaffiliation, and in consequence the threat of de-authorization) and creation in the home country (precarious because of the brutal repression of freedom of expression under the Duvalier dictatorship as well as during post-dictatorial times), as both tend to restrict artistic creation. Danticat reunites these two conditions in one genealogy of the “precarious,” a vital danger that continuously points back to Haiti. These constellations Ibid., 7. Ibid. 34 Ibid., 14. 35 See the first chapter of Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat, for the development of Haitian immigration from the period of Duvalier’s dictatorship onward, the insider/outsider paradigm in Haiti, the intricate entanglement of these position (40–1), and its continuities during post-Duvalier times. 32 33

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resurface throughout the essays in the representations of various Haitian intellectuals and their taking a stance, their “dangerous creation.” Among this long line of Haitian intellectuals creating art from entangled in- and outsider positions is the radio journalist Jean Dominique, who after several periods of exile had been successfully operating the radio station HaitiInter in Port-au-Prince before being killed on his way to work in 2000. Danticat mentions the Haitian-American filmmaker Patricia Benoît, who left Duvalier’s Haiti as a child together with her parents and is now shooting a film about Haitian torture victims; furthermore, the photographer of one of the most prominent images of the 2010 earthquake, Daniel Morel;36 the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat; the writers Jacques Roumain, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Dany Laferrière, and Marie Vieux-Chauvet. If, on the one hand, “the nomad or immigrant … must always ponder travel and movement” and if “in the intimate … union between writers and readers a border can[’t] really exist,”37 the subjectivity that speaks is constantly looking to the island itself for references, to the family members that live there. Decisions to leave and to return are reviewed closely in the light of pressing questions. Exile becomes the overarching perspective on Haiti; borders become questionable and dynamic. The struggle over the notion of “my country,” a point from where to speak, resurfaces in various essays, paired with uncertainty (49sq) and the feeling of an underlying reproach of “Dyaspora”38—for not being present, for being distant, and therefore not witnessing the events in person. Here, older essays and fictional texts enter the debate, where the diasporic condition of the writer and intellectual is constantly explored, put into question, and legitimated; feelings of guilt and shame also surface.39 Boisseron speaks of a “poetic of geographical discrepancy,”40 a term that nevertheless seems a little excessive since it is Danticat’s project to overcome that gap. Eventually, other Haitian authors living inside the country such as Yanick Lahens, Kettly Mars, or Lyonel Trouillot join in on Danticat’s reflections on how to write after the earthquake. Where Danticat introduces guilt, others question the position of the writer, the intellectual per se. When Yanick Lahens cautions that the writer creates from a multiple exile, she makes us well aware of the precarious relationship to the community the writer supposedly speaks to, or even, for: “l’exil de l’écriture dans une société encore orale, celui de la langue française et celui de la distance avec la culture populaire rurale et aujourd’hui urbaine.”41 In Failles, Lahens concludes, “Gardons-nous de nous prendre pour les justiciers que nous ne sommes pas.”42 Lahens translates this distance from a popular culture that is dominantly oral and creolophone For the Haitian photographer Daniel Morel, the publicly staged execution of Numa and Drouin becomes the trigger for his project to document Haitian contemporary history. Living in exile, he became a photojournalist and after numerous photo reports on the subject of Haiti his photographs were among the first to document the extent of death and destruction after the earthquake in 2010. 37 Danticat, Creating Dangerously, 16. 38 Danticat coins her own concept of diaspora, using the creolized version of the term “dyaspora,” intertwined with the notion of the tenth department, designation for the Haitian diaspora under Aristide. It points to different identity positions in Haiti, in the United States, and in other diasporic situations. Cf. Edwidge Danticat, “Haiti: a Bi-cultural experience,” in Encuentros (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank/ Cultural Center, 1995), vol. 12, 1–9. See also Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat, 20–3. 39 Ibid. 50. 40 Bénédicte Boisseron, Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2014), 117. 41 Yannick Lahens, Failles (Paris: Sabine Wespieser, 2010), 130–1. 42 Ibid., 131. 36

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into a situation of exile in writing. Here, Lahens refers to the borders between different social groups within the homeland. That is, the border between diaspora and homeland becomes only one between many—its distance relative. The divide lays elsewhere—between different social groups, the creolophone and the francophone communication, and literary production.43 After the earthquake, Haitian authors writing on the island make the point that, whether one is writing within or outside it, one must in any case deal with the challenge of creating dangerously. The divide between writing from inside and writing from outside that has been defining Haitian literary production since Duvalier seems less abysmal and possible to overcome in the light of the post-earthquake situation.

A Transnational Haitian Literary Tradition and the Importance of Remembering Within the essay collection, the diasporic author creates a constellation of Haitian texts that become meaningful for the writer’s own location in literary history and her way to create new narratives of Haiti. This leads to formal decisions: Inasmuch as our stories are the bastard children of everything that we have ever experienced and read, my desire to tell some of my stories in a collaged manner, to merge my own narratives with the oral and written narratives of others, begins with my reading of the two books I eagerly checked out from the Livres Haitiens section of the Brooklyn Public Library that day, books that could have been written only by literary orphans, to offer to other literary orphans.44 The two Haitian texts that appear in the citation above and are at the origin of yet another narrative of beginning are Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneur de la rosée (1946) and Jan J. Dominique’s Mémoire d’une amnésique.45 The urge to collage other voices into her texts is linked to the special value ascribed to the dialogue with Haitian female and male authors writing during different epochs of exile.46 The genealogy of Haitian writers includes both male and female voices, although the strong presence of female authors who address the gendered condition of making oneself heard as an artist is a deliberate decision. This dialogue becomes a crucial moment of self-assurance in a relatively young postcolonial literature, the beginning of which is traced back to Boisrond Tonnerre in an essay on the “Bicentennial” of the Haitian Revolution. In Danticat’s rendition of Haitian literary history, the “Haitian poet” who drafted Haiti’s declaration of independence in 1804 is one of the first to discursively perform the rupture with colonial domination and culture, a condition Danticat refers to with the notion of “literary orphans.”47 This notion—adopted from Jan J. Dominique, daughter of the abovementioned radio-journalist—addresses various historical fault lines as well as its gender dimension. These fissures led to repeated experiences of being deprived of a tradition and

Cf. Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat, 54. Danticat, Create Dangerously, 62. 45 Jan J. Dominique, Mémoire d’une amnésique (Montréal: CIDIHCA/Éditions du Remue-ménage, [1984] 2004). 46 Danticat, Create Dangerously, 61–2. 47 Ibid., 62. 43 44

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the aim to create a literary tradition from scratch. The status of writing and literary creation is marked by the “nearly impossible”48 task of performing the cut with a colonial, European tradition and at the same time finding a relation to anti-colonial European traditions. This practice has been addressed in the above section where the transnational, interconnecting character of Danticat’s essayistic text has been emphasized. The author searches for alternative, subaltern practices that relate to a strong presence of orality/orally transmitted experience and to the lack of written testimony, while she at the same time experiences the constant feeling of being outside a shared European literary tradition. The violent and oppressing circumstances during dictatorship only heighten this dilemma. Jan J. Dominique’s notion “literary orphans” explicitly speaks to the status of female authors in the Haitian tradition. It addresses issues of their visibility and lack of voice. Danticat’s response to this condition is to include multiple female voices that create and at the same time authorize her own voice. Giving credit to this gendered condition her collected female voices are also understood in their intersectional performance and reintegrated into the broader anti-colonial picture. The essay “Daughters of Memory” reconstructs a lesser-known female line of tradition and the dialectics between remembering and forgetting that Jan J.  Dominique addresses in Mémoire d’une amnésique.49 Dominique’s autobiographical writing comes to terms with a childhood under the American occupation and Duvalier; in Mémoire errante,50 the author copes by giving the report of the assassination of her father. Both texts deal with unbearable memories that often make the act of writing almost impossible. The paradoxical binding together of memory and amnesia in the first title speaks to this difficulty of confronting these memories:  “Memories when not frozen in time are excruciating.”51 To unfreeze them is a painful task. If they cannot be articulated, how do they find a form? Danticat’s essay links this painful dimension of memory with Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s novel Amour, colère, folie (1968). Written during the dictatorship and published outside Haiti, this novel has not only become one of the most important literary confrontations with Haiti under Duvalier but also has a dramatic history of publication, where the notion of creating dangerously takes on an exemplary meaning. Forcing the author into exile in New York, the Gallimard French edition was removed from the market and existing copies were bought up by the family out of fear of retaliation for the family members remaining in Haiti. A few copies sold clandestinely and the novel did not circulate widely until a reedition in 2005. The genealogy Danticat constructs here is one of authors (in majority female) creating dangerously; the desire to inscribe her own writing into this line is ambiguous, as she herself states:  “Writing is nothing like dying in, for and possibly with, your country.”52 But the “immigrant artist[’s] need … to feel that he or she is creating dangerously”53 is, nevertheless, presented as a driving force for Danticat’s own writing. Presumably closer to Sartre’s notion of commitment, the diaspora artist feels the obligation to take risks and to testify to what has not been testified to before (in the sense of Primo Levi). The essays assemble moments where the

Ibid., 104. Dominique, Mémoire d’une amnésique. 50 Jan J. Dominique, Mémoire errante (Montréal: Les Éditions du remue-ménage, 2008). 51 Jan J. Dominique in Danticat, Create Dangerously, 65. 52 Ibid., 12. 53 Ibid., 19. 48 49

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dead or those deprived of their voice confirm the necessity of bearing witness, of testifying, be it in the name of a stranger or a third party.

“I Am Not a Journalist”: The Writer’s Testimony as an Echo Chamber From the theoretical discussions about testimonial texts and the role of the witness in relation to the Shoa, the genocides in Guatemala and Rwanda, as well as other violent and life-threatening events, we know that the act of bearing witness contains the paradox of experiencing such a lifethreatening event, on the one hand, and surviving to tell, witness it, on the other. Those who experienced the event in its deadly consequences did not survive; they cannot testify. Those who did survive and can testify did not experience the deadly consequences. This situation brings to the forefront the problematic of speaking for somebody, that is, speaking in the name of those that cannot speak for themselves or cannot make themselves heard.54 According to the Italian author and survivor of the Holocaust Primo Levi, those who survived can testify in the name of a third party. But bearing witness is an obligation that faces the difficulties of remembering and keeps present the implicit process of reconstruction inherent in the duty to remember. To Giorgio Agamben Levi’s testimonial of the Shoa permanently renders visible the impossibility of bearing witness; Agamben discusses the possibilities and limits of language to testify to the horrors of the concentration camps and takes into account questions of responsibility, of shame, and guilt. Besides the fact that to Danticat a diasporic position at times had been laden with guilt,55 especially in the aftermath of the earthquake,56 her essays address the paradox of bearing witness in a number of ways and link it to her notion of memorial art. The question of representing those who do not have access to speech has been widely discussed in the framework of Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” It also surfaced in relation to established Haitian authors inside the country and writing after the earthquake in 2010 (see above). For the postearthquake literature, both ethical questions and questions of representational logic arise. Who can represent the catastrophe and how, who can speak for whom, and which voices will be heard, published, and circulated? The crucial question of how to testify on what one has not seen as eye witness—implicit reproach during the days after the earthquake— matches the crux of the immigrant writer who constantly sees herself confronted with not being present, not narrating from a proximity, an immediate experience but from a distance from the community. Both, post-earthquake and diasporic condition demand to define the contradictory relationship between writer and community and the modes of representation the writer can and should turn to. Danticat’s above-cited poetic authority, Camus, is critical of the writer taking the position of the witness, but embraces the responsibility of speaking for somebody. Whereas Levi, as a survivor, saw bearing witness as his duty, Camus rejects the role of a witness for the artist,57 who should deal with both suffering and beauty, leaving it to See Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Homo Sacer III (New York: Zone books, [1998] 2002). 55 “Shamefacedly, I’d bow my head and accept these judgments when they were expressed, feeling guilty about my own physical distance from a country I had left at the age of twelve during a dictatorship that had forced thousands to choose between exile and death” (Danticat, Create Dangerously, 50). 56 See Danticat, Create Dangerously, 157. 57 Cf. Camus, “Wager of our Generation,” 235–48. 54

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the journalist to bear witness. In other words, an ambiguity of genre, the status of the literary within testimony is what is at stake here. The relation between fact and fiction, the status of the imaginary in the context of speaking about life-threatening violence and testifying to it is as well addressed. Bearing witness becomes not merely an act of personal witnessing but rather evolves trough multilayered, polyphone acts of testifying that crystalize in what Danticat calls echo chamber, her mode of creating memorial art, keeping memory alive. The loss of words, the impossibility of writing (fiction or writing at all) after the earthquake that is articulated explicitly in the essay “Our Guernica”: “Words often failed me. … It was too soon to even try to write, I told myself. You were not there. You did not live it. You have no right even to speak—for you, for them, for anyone. So I did what I always do when my own words fail me. I read. I read hundreds of first-person narratives, testimonials, blogs.”58 In her own writing, newspaper articles for the Miami Herald and other news media, Danticat comes close to the situation of bearing witness, testifying to her own “deep and paralyzing sense of loss,” “adding … to a chorus of bereavement.”59 Journalism replaces fiction and poetry, as they have come to a halt. Assembling and replaying voices or eyewitness accounts60 seems like the adequate mode of representation. Writers found other forms of writing—newspaper articles and blogs—when fiction and poetry were not an option: “no poetry in the ashes of Canal Street” are the words poet Suheir Hammad uttered after 9/11. Diasporic authors share this precarious situation with writers from inside the country such as Lyonel and Evelyn Trouillot. Danticat quotes Evelyn Trouillot from a New  York Times article:  “My brother, a novelist, is writing his articles; I am writing mine.”61 In the liminal space between journalism, fiction, testimony, and memorial art, in the hybrid genre of the essay, the author weaves together oral history, accounts of family members, and her own testimony, uniting them with statements of different writer colleagues. Two different sets of utterances come together as they largely constitute the author’s story: the many declarations of fellow intellectuals, artists, and writers inside and outside the confines of Haitian literature, heard or forgotten, and the subaltern voices of fellow Haitians without access to public discourse (for different reasons). To characterize her literary testimony, Danticat evokes the image of an echo chamber62 where many different voices of those surviving and the dead become interwoven (pleading to be heard). Throughout the whole compilation they emerge and constitute the author’s story “in a collaged manner”:63 inserted stories, renarrated sections of conversations, extracts from newspapers, citations from blogs, letters, e-mails, all in the effort of gathering a multiplicity of voices—a polyphony, “a chorus of bereavement”64 that is not, however, necessarily multiperspectival. By manifesting, exploring, and examining these material elements, Danticat also reveals a key concept behind her own writing. In more than Danticat, Create Dangerously, 159. Ibid., 158. 60 Ibid., 159. 61 Ibid., 160. 62 Ibid., 159. 63 Ibid., 62. 64 Ibid., 158. 58 59

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one way, these elements authorize her position of enunciation and gain authority from their inclusion. The selecting, organizing, and framing mind, which is also speaking throughout the majority of the text, is that of the essayist. Danticat’s appropriation of the creole term jounalis, which she introduces somewhat reluctantly as reference to the illiterate part of her family, who uses it to refer to her status as a writer,65 underlines the urgency of the writer’s task to testifying, witnessing, speaking out. It stands for a shift in meaning, addressing not only the social role of the journalist, but that of the artist, both of them precarious, as we have seen in the previous section. The example of radio journalist Jean Dominique, widely known in Haiti during the years of Aristide, stands for the importance of orality and the public function of an organic intellectual in Haiti. Besides all political implications, this role implies a public figure who mediates the different public spaces in a society fractured by language into dramatically separate spaces (see, above, Lahens on the usage of Creole and French). Danticat values this role very much, even though, as we see in the citation above, it reduces her function to precisely this journalistic task of witnessing. In Haitian society, the jounalis is met with great hope and respect. Thus, Danticat reinterprets this concept positively. Immediacy, “creating dangerously”—these ideals are put into sharp contrast with the actual media coverage of the earthquake, and this opposition functions as critique of the latter. Throughout the essay collection, giving voice to the subaltern is linked to various testimonies of survival that evoke not only paradigmatic situations of witnessing—witnesses of torture and mutilation, experiences of gendered violence—but also represent acts of braveness. The fifth chapter, “I Speak Out,” introduces us to the story of Alèrte Bélance—a market woman who survived the death squads after the 1991 military coup. The author tells Alèrte’s story of nearly being executed66 and of becoming a public deponent of testimony through fragments of Alerte’s own published account, interwoven with anecdotes and scenes from the making of Patricia Benoît’s documentary Courage and Pain (1995) on Haitian torture survivors. Danticat’s essay does not insinuate that we may hear Alèrte’s voice without some kind of mediation. Danticat gives her readers an insight into the shooting of a documentary on Alèrte. We understand the dynamics, forms, and difficulties of testifying. Together with the essayist, we observe the interaction between witness and filmmaker (who takes the role of the interviewer and scriptor in the Latin American testimonio tradition), preparations, and filming of Alèrte’s difficult task of testifying to the physical and psychological mutilation of her body and the attack on her life. This also includes her later life as a witness. We share the writer’s observations and reflections and get a glimpse at an act of testifying (from a distance). The latter not only involves verbal expression but also images of Alèrte’s mutilated body and a reading of fugacious moments. These gestures, facial expressions, and nonverbal reactions capture that what often escapes discourse. Alèrte’s testimony is constituted by verbal as much as nonverbal, visual as much as discursive aspects, which are residues of other media and modes of expression. Her invitation to “hear my story”67 at the end of the chapter leaves us with an observation: One cannot do justice to the testimonio without reflecting on its procedures.

Ibid., 28. Ibid., 84. 67 Ibid., 85. 65 66

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Danticat’s work as supporter and editor of anthologies of testimonies—compilations of truly multiple perspectives—is only a logical consequence of her strong convictions on testimony. Together with other women writers of Haitian descent she edited the trilingual anthology of testimonios after the earthquake, So spoke the earth/Ainsi parla la terre/Tè a pale (2012), and contributed a foreword to the anthology of testimonies from earthquake-struck Port-auPrince, Lavil.68 This “communal testimony”69 brings together testimonials from very different social groups, such as “street merchants, teachers, doctors, professors, activists,” translated from Creole into English and published for an Anglophone-reading public. Both, the notion of communal testimony as well as the Latin American testimonio tradition speak to the image of the echo chamber.

Memorial Art: The Potential of the Image for Addressing the Unspeakable70 Images are omnipresent in Danticat’s essays, a characteristic her text shares with many others written after the earthquake of 2010. Haunting images and scenes like the first photographs of the earthquake on Twitter, a graffito of a “beautiful brown chocolate angel” “floating over a pile of muddied corpses” that becomes Haiti’s Guernica,71 the public execution of Numa and Drouin already referred to above; images of consolation and resurrection that take on symbolic meaning. Danticat envisions creation beyond the confines of literature as memorial art, through the visual in photography, film, sculpture, painting, or graffiti. The figure of the sculptor takes on a key role in Danticat’s poetics of memorial art,72 as the sculptor in ancient Egypt was described as “one who keeps things alive.”73 Danticat ponders the different meanings of “keeping alive”: keeping the memory of the lost and dead, of loss and the implicated violence. “Alive,” however, also implies “the art that could replace the dead bodies, may also have wanted to save lives.”74 My hypothesis is that the devastating situation of speechlessness, especially concerning poetry, is met with the intent of finding images, beyond words, that fill the void. Images become the counterpoint to narration, or even its replacement. Images seem to testify more readily to the earthquake; they seem to have a greater potential to speak to a broader audience, supposedly overcoming barriers such as literacy and language fluency.75 Danticat may have been reminded of the centrality of the image by Camus’s reflections on literature, embedded in a broader understanding of art. Camus aimed at an art, a form of writing that thrives off its images, not off arguments of reason. A successful literary text is able to translate philosophy or an ideological message into an image that readers can relate to. In a Edwidge Danticat, “Foreword,” in Lavil:  Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince, ed. Peter Orner and Evan Lyon (London: Verso, 2017). 69 Ibid., 12. 70 For this section, I am indebted to Christoph Singler and his reflections on visual imagery. See our coauthored article on literature and trauma in Haitian post-earthquake literature. 71 Danticat, Create Dangerously, 169. 72 Ibid., 20. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 I cannot discuss here the underlying assumption that images are easier to read and provide a more universal language, an assumption that is problematic in its own. 68

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slightly transformed citation, Camus’s conception explicitly reverberates in Danticat’s poetics, which adapts it to a gender-conscious form: “a [person’s creative] work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his [or her] heart first opened.”76 As we already saw in one of the past sections, Danticat places images at the origin of creativity. The filmic sequence of the execution of Numa and Drouin demonstrates how images become the trigger for memories. In the penultimate chapter, “Acheiropoietos” (a term referring to the Christian tradition of an image not made by human hands), Danticat invokes the icons of her poetic landscape, at the core of her memorial art and aesthetics. She returns to the execution through the eyes of the young Daniel Morel, who witnessed their deaths and immediately decided to become a photojournalist. The propagandistic photographs of the dead bodies on display turned out to be at the origin of his creation myth:  “I immediately wanted to be a photographer so that I  could document Haitian history.”77 A  conversation between photographer and essayist on the role of photography evokes common ideas on the photographic image. Referring to Susan Sontag78 and Roland Barthes,79 Danticat describes the peculiar characteristic of photography, the memento mori that freezes a living being into an image, representing a moment in time and reminding us simultaneously of the vulnerability, the mortality of that living being.80 Morel’s photos have witnessed over twenty-five years of Haitian history. They are images of violent and disturbing scenes,81 taken to incite people to react and act, assuming we believe the photographer. Mirroring his own creative myth, one would like to add. Asked about the relationship between photography and death, Morel takes a radical position, saying that “when you make people pose for a photograph, you kill them.”82 Besides Morel’s possible hint at the difference between posing and shooting a scene in motion, he accentuates the aspect of “capturing”83 an image not offered up voluntarily. This hierarchical situation echoes Felix Morisseau-Leroy’s well-known creole poem “Tourist,” in which the speaker, a “poverty-stricken photography subject actually speaks” back and angrily addresses the tourist to not take his or her photograph out of “fear of being misread, mis-seen, and misunderstood.”84 The photographer enters into this relationship of power as the “capturer,”85 the one deciding which image to show; but “on the flip side” of the photographic act manifested by Felix Morisseau-Leroy’s poem, Danticat introduces an “other paradigm.”86 As a photojournalist, he also participates in documenting the photographed object, saving it from oblivion, resurrecting it. Another incident functions as a plea for photography to commemorate life. Pulitzer Prizewinning photographer Patrick Farrell shot the black and white image of a dead girl’s body in the arms of her father when, in 2008, he came to Haiti for the Miami Herald to report on Danticat, Create Dangerously, 18. Morel in Danticat, Create Dangerously, 139. 78 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, 1977). 79 Roland Barthes, La chambre claire (Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 1980). 80 Danticat, Create Dangerously, 139. 81 Ibid., 140–1. 82 Ibid., 145. 83 Ibid., 146. 84 Ibid., 145. 85 Ibid., 146. 86 Ibid. 76 77

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the devastating effects of Hurricane Ike. Danticat shares with her readers the testimony of a father who implores the photojournalist to take a picture of the dead girl’s body and to tell her story so that she will be remembered.87 The photograph is welcome to keep the memory of the daughter alive; it becomes a piece of memorial art. Morel also affirms this other function of photography. It shows beauty and life in another of his series of photographs.88 “Photography has something to do with resurrection,” the essayist cites Roland Barthes in his La chambre claire,89 and Barthes’ original text continues, “More than other arts, photography offers an immediate presence to the world—a co-presence; but this presence is not only of a political order …, it is also of the metaphysical”90 (plus qu’un autre art, la Photographie pose une présence immédiate au monde—une co-présence, mais cette présence n’est pas seulement d’ordre politique …, elle est aussi d’ordre métaphysique).91 This metaphysical presence Barthes even links to a religious presence, to the idea that the photographic image is not by the hand of man, in the religious tradition of acheiropoietos. Danticat’s interest in this connection might originate from the function of healing, linked to the symbolic function of images in trauma therapy. Carlo Bonomi reminds us, Une autre tâche des symboles est de mélanger renonciation et espoir. … Les symboles ont une fonction d’unification très importante: ils relient le corps au monde extérieur, les émotions aux représentations, le passé au futur, et beaucoup d’autres éléments. Quand une personne est frappée par un trauma, c’est précisément cette fonction d’unification qui est brisée.92 Another task of symbols is to mix renunciation and hope. … Symbols have a very important function of unification: the connect the body to an external/exterior world, emotions to representations, past to future, and many other elements. When a person is affected by a trauma, it is precisely this function of unification that is shattered. (My translation) These reflections on the function of symbols as having the power to unify what has been broken are at the base of Danticat’s powerful image of post-earthquake Haiti. In this sense, visual images and photography, more than fiction, seem to bring a form of hope. These visual images, Edwidge Danticat’s essays suggest, seem to overcome the limits of literary representation, and are thus linked to Danticat’s aesthetic objective of her writing as an echo chamber that tries to capture more than one limited perspective and voice and is aware of the restrictions of the (written) text at the same time. This power ascribed to visual images culminates in the graffito of an angel that Danticat mentions almost at the end of the book’s last essay-chapter: “a stunningly beautiful chocolate angel with her face turned up toward an indigo sky as she floats over a pile of muddied corpses.”93 This image at the entrance of a refugee camp in Léogâne, that Danticat’s painter friend calls “Our Guernica”94 (also the last essay’s title), symbolizes disaster Ibid., 146–7. Ibid., 144. 89 Barthes, La chambre claire, 129, in Danticat, Create Dangerously, 147. 90 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 84. 91 Barthes, La chambre claire, 131. 92 Carlo Bonomi, “Trauma et la function symbolique de la psyché,” Le Coq-héron 174, no. 3 (2003): 55. 93 Danticat, Create Dangerously, 169. 94 Ibid., 170. 87 88

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and resurrection at the same time.95 Just as Pablo Picasso’s painting representing the horrors of destruction during the Spanish Civil War became a lieu de mémoire in Pierre Nora’s sense, Danticat and her companion in the streets of post-earthquake Léogâne come across a piece of popular art that—to them—serves as a symbol capable of unifying and embracing postearthquake emotions.96 Since the angel is quite a frequent figure in Haiti’s popular imagery, we can appreciate its scope. Its presence is justified by its capacity to overcome the fissure left by the traumatizing event of an earthquake so short that narration proves inadequate for its representation.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Homo Sacer III. New York: Zone books, [1998] 2002. Bandau, Anja, and Christoph Singler. “Raconter le séisme.” In Traumatisme et mémoire culturelle. France—Afrique—Canada—Caraïbes, edited by Silke Segler-Meßner et Isabella von Treskow. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. Barthes, Roland. La chambre claire. Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 1980. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. Bergner, Gwen. “Danticat’s Vodou Vernacular of Women’s Human Rights.” American Literary History 29, no. 3 (2017): 521–45. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/668804 (accessed February 12, 2019). Boettcher Joeres, Ruth-Ellen, and Elizabeth Mittman, eds. The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Boisseron, Bénédicte. Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2014. Bonomi, Carlo. “Trauma et la fonction symbolique de la psyché.” Le Coq-héron 174, no. 3 (2003): 50–6. Brathwaite, Kamau. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. London: Oxford University Press, 1973. Camus, Albert. “L‘artiste et son temps.” In Discours de Suède. Paris: Gallimard, 1958. Camus, Albert. “The Artist and His Time.” In Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, translated by Justin O’Brien, 235–62. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Camus, Albert. “The Wager of our Generation.” Interview in Demain, October 24–30, 1957, in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 235–48. New York: Vintage books, 1995. Camus, Albert. “Create Dangerously.” In Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 249–72. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

The Swiss-Haitian artist Pascale Monnin independently created a work of art published in the New  York Times shortly after the earthquake that writer and publisher chose as book cover for Create dangerously. The black and white drawing shows the figure of a mourning woman, her arms spread wide, surrounded by floating sculls and fragments of writing: “Tremble,” “ils sont la,” “sont plus la,” “la terre.” The image of the woman, center of the drawing with the silhouette of a child to her side and the head of a corpse to her feet, has a star and numbers tattooed onto her left arm, reference to the experience first classified as genocide in the past century. Although not featuring the figure of an angel, the drawing seems to immediately relate to Danticat’s image. The uplifted arms—representing mourning—might also be associated with the iconography of Christ’s resurrection. According to the art director at Princeton University Press, Edwidge Danticat found Monnin’s piece of art published in the series “Op-Art: Scenes from a Catastrophe” in the New York Times, shortly after the earthquake in 2010. The multiplication of meanings and allusions possible via this chain of visual analogies and associations positions Haiti in a global historical context of and links Danticat’s text to other artistic media and expressions. It refers once again to analogy as a recurrent feature of Edwidge Danticat’s essay collection Create Dangerously. Pascale Monnin, “Untitled, in Op-Art: Scenes from a Catastrophe,” New York Times, January 24, 2010, http://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/01/24/opinion/20100124opartSS_2. html?src=tpt (accessed February 12, 2019). 96 The Christian iconography of passion as a subtext for both visual representations. 95

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat Carpentier, Alejo. El reino de este mundo, relato. Mexico: Iberoamericana de Publicaciones, 1949. Clitandre, Nadège T. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Danticat, Edwidge. “Haiti: A bi-cultural experience.” In Encuentros, vol. 12, 1–9. Washington, DC: InterAmerican Development Bank/Cultural Center, 1995. Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Danticat, Edwidge. “Foreword,” in Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince, edited by Peter Orner and Evan Lyon, 11–14. London: Verso, 2017. Dayan, Colin. “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Edwidge Danticat. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. (Book review),” in New West Indian Guide 85, no. 3–4 (2011): 265–339. Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haïti. Kingson, NY: McPherson, [1953] 2004. Dominique, Jan J. Mémoire d’une amnésique. Montréal: CIDIHCA/Éditions du Remue-ménage, [1984] 2004. Dominique, Jan J. Mémoire errante. Montréal: Les Éditions du remue-ménage, 2008. Dubois, Laurent. Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New York: Metropolitan, 2012. Fignolé, Jean-Claude. Les possédés de la pleine lune. Paris: Le Seuil, 1987. Fievre, M. J., ed., So Spoke the Earth/Ainsi parla la terre/Tè a pale. A Haitian anthology. South Florida: Women Writers of Haitian Descent,  2012. Freedman, Diane P. An Alchemy of Genres: Cross-Genre Writing by American Feminist Poet-Critics. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992. Glissant, Edouard. Poétique de la Relation. Poétique III. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Gugelberger, Georg M. The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Harris, Wilson. Tradition, the Writer and Society. London: New Beacon, 1967. Laferrière, Dany. Je suis un écrivain japonais. Paris: Grasset, 2008. Lahens, Yanick. L’exil: entre l’ancrage et la fuite, l’écrivain haïtien, edited by Henri Deschamps. Port-au-Prince, 1990. Lahens, Yanick. Failles. Paris: Sabine Wespieser, 2010. Levi, Primo. I sommersi e i salvati. Turin: Einaudi, 1986. Monnin, Pascale. “Untitled, in Op-Art: Scenes from a Catastrophe,” New York Times, January 24, 2010. http://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/01/24/opinion/20100124opartSS_2. html?src=tpt (accessed February 12, 2019) Morisseau-Leroy, Felix. “Tourist.” In Haitiad and Oddities, ed. Felix Morisseau-Leroy and Jeffrey Knapp. Miami, FL: Pantaléon Guilbaud, 1991. Also https://pen.org/tourist-and-boat-people/ (accessed February 12, 2019). Orner, Peter, and Evan Lyon, ed. Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince. London: Verso, 2017. Pulitano, Elvira. “An Immigrant Artist at Work: Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.” Small Axe 15, no. 3 (2011): 39–61. Rohmer, Ernst. Artikel “Anekdote,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, edited by Gert Ueding, Bd. 1, 566–79. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992. Singler, Christoph, and Anja Bandau. “Fictions dans les Caraïbes: de la mémoire culturelle à la globalization.” In Fictions et Cultures, edited by Anne Duprat and Françoise Lavocat, 228–38. Paris: SFLGC, 2010. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, 1977. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–316. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Vieux-Chauvet, Marie. Amour, colère, folie. Paris: Gallimard, 1968. Walcott, Derek. “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16, no. 1 (1974): 3‒13.

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CHAPTER 14 HAITI’S PAST, PRESENT, AND UNCERTAIN FUTURE: DANTICAT’S NEW YORKER COLUMN AS PLATFORM FOR PUBLIC INTELLECTUALISM

Megan Feifer and Maia Butler

Since 1999, Edwidge Danticat has remained engaged in a dialogue with the public through her fiction, nonfiction, op-ed articles, and her column in the New Yorker. This publication has long drawn a highly literate readership, many of whom are interested in the literary features of the latest issues as well as commentary about pressing national issues. Readers can subscribe to the paper copy of the publication for a fee, but those who cannot commit to the payment can still access the posts in Danticat’s column online via the publication’s digital interface. Danticat brings to the New Yorker critical discussion about popular social narratives regarding Haiti and immigration policies in the United States. Through the fiction and nonfiction work on her column, which addresses social issues local to Haiti and the United States and attends to the inextricable relationship between the nations, she raises reader consciousness about the history and current impact of transnational geopolitics on everyday life. Operating from a place of humility and personal impact, Danticat is a thinking and acting engaged citizen in the public sphere whose personal experiences and interests not only inform her fiction but also her crucial insights into exigent issues such as immigration, government corruption, and the lasting effects of US imperialism. Her literary work has long called attention to the far-reaching effects of US imperialism and neocolonialism by drawing tangible relationships between history and the present moment.1 From the publication of her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, Danticat’s literature has daringly addressed issues of immigration, historical accounting (or lack thereof), and the long-term sociopolitical effects of colonialism and imperialism. She privileges the thoroughly politicized lived experiences of herself, her family, and the many people she meets in her ongoing effort to witness, to learn, and to act on the events that catalyze her political consciousness. Her oeuvre centers voices that have repeatedly been marginalized or silenced and effectively traces the relationship between the lived experiences of Haitians living on Hispañiola and abroad, and the transnational forces that impact them. Nadège T.  Clitandre, in her 2018 interview with Danticat, reprinted in this volume, reflects on her “investment in magnifying voices of marginalized individuals who are not heard, who cannot speak for themselves, or who are often silenced when they do speak.”2 In this way, Danticat effectively challenges dominant and damaging narratives about Haiti, insisting her New  Yorker readership understand how our

Deborah Thomas uses the phrase “historicize the present moment” to define archival work that situates current events within a longer sociopolitical history. 2 Nadège T.  Clitandre and Edwidge Danticat, “Interview with Edwidge Danticat,” in Nadège T.  Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 199. 1

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hemispheric and archipelagic American histories and presence are intertwined and, further, underscoring the responsibilities we have to think and act on this fact from our various locationalities, privileges, and abilities. In this chapter we hope to highlight the way Danticat consistently bridges public intellectualism and literary production. The presence of her long-standing column in a publication such as the New Yorker deserves more critical attention by scholars of literature; the op-ed pieces and fictional work posted there can together be read as a multi-genre literary production in conversation with each other. Danticat’s column is an avenue for adding nuance to the public discourse about pertinent issues, entering contemporary debates and correcting the record on economic issues, humanitarian aid, citizenship, and immigrant detention. The seamless connections she draws between literary themes and tangible real-world issues reveal a commitment by a prolific author and activist to use public intellectualism to bear witness to the impact of colonial history on the current moment. This is, perhaps, why Clitandre considers Danticat’s op-ed pieces to be activist work.3 While Danticat’s voice is part of a larger legacy of national and transnational writers doing this critical work, she was one of the first contemporary diasporic writers to speak to the triangular relationship between the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the United States through a focus on contemporary issues such as citizenship and state violence. Her column insists that readers residing in the United States understand how our hemispheric and archipelagic American histories and present are intertwined. Further, she drives home the responsibilities we have to think and act on this fact from our various locationalities, privileges, and abilities. We conceptualize her work as a public intellectual, situating in a long lineage of public intellectuals whose work pushes for awareness, accountability, and reparation for the impact of the centuries-long systematic injustice visited on people in Haiti, America, and elsewhere. In another coauthored chapter entitled “Edwidge Danticat’s Elegiac Project: A Transnational Historiography of U.S. Imperialist State Violence,” we examine Danticat’s New Yorker column in relation to the imperative of Black Lives Matter. We cluster several pieces from her New Yorker column and position Danticat as public intellectual whose cultural commentary speaks to some of the most pressing issues of our time: US state violence against Black and brown communities in the form of immigration policies and actions in communities, the immigrant detention industrial complex, and police brutality as an arm of the prison industrial complex, to which immigrant detention centers are integrally related.4 We discuss her critique of contemporary anti-immigrant rhetoric in the United States and how this crucial work is informed by her lifetime of activist work. In this chapter, we extend our thinking about Danticat’s New Yorker column as increasingly representative of her public intellectual work. Where we argued in the aforementioned chapter that Danticat’s commitment to witnessing and documenting the impacts of the colonial history of the Americans on the present-day realities of Haitians living in Haiti and its diaspora, we now turn to examining her focus on the future of Haiti and Haitians in her column. In that vein, we find the short stories published on her column can be productively read in conversation with

Ibid. For more on how we situate Danticat’s New Yorker column essays in timely discourse about US state violence, see our coauthored chapter “Edwidge Danticat’s Elegiac Project: A Transnational Historiography of U.S. Imperialist State Violence,” in Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era, ed. Emily Rutter (London: Routledge, 2020). 3 4

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the nonfiction found there, especially the pieces that look beyond the turmoil of the present to question what the future holds. Her column continues to detail the injustices Haitians face daily, impacted by transnational economic and military forces beyond their control; the essays resist what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has termed “the danger of a single story,” about Haiti, while answering Gina Athena Ulysse’s call that “Haiti needs new narratives,” in that they feature a more recent generation of Haitians and Haitian Americans living, loving, and determining a different relationship to themselves, their loved ones, and the places they call home. Danticat is attempting, in the New Yorker, to politicize American readers through consciousness raising about the transnational dimensions of Haitian histories and present-day issues as well as inviting her audience to become outraged about their (mis)representation and continuous impact. In a recent article, “ ‘Stretching the Limits of Silence’: Witness and Resistance in Edwidge Danticat’s Nonfiction” (2019), Renee H. Shea highlights the conversations in which Danticat and her work have often been situated. Shea states, “Some call her a literary activist, others a firebrand, an iconoclast; some designate her a public intellectual. Regardless of the label, though, we turn to her nonfiction to hear the voice of an intensely private individual and an increasingly assertive activist.”5 In this quote, Shea chronicles the various designations affixed to Danticat and her work. Ultimately, Shea concludes with the argument that the increasing activism informing Danticat’s nonfiction holds a space for public engagement with political issues. Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual is helpful in our consideration of Danticat as such. Here, Said offers a study of the lineage of intellectualism and, in particular, catalogs the various debates regarding the individual as public intellectual. From Antonio Gramsci and Julien Benda to Michel Foucault, Said traces the “different histories and sociologies of intellectuals available.”6 Ultimately, Said challenges historic notions of the public intellectual as the singular figure, often male and white, for example, “the gifted and morally endowed philosopher kings who constitute the conscience of mankind,” to a much broader understanding of the work of intellectualism.”7 For Said, public intellectualism is a vocation, wherein the intellectual is tasked with the responsibility of publically raising “questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.”8 Public intellectualism is rooted in a longer practice of critical discourse that requires engagement with pertinent issues both “with” and “for” those communities most often silenced by the state. The public intellectual engages in these practices based on a set of fundamental beliefs and/or guiding principles used to address injustice at the hands of “worldly powers or nations.”9 When thinking of Danticat’s work within the established frames of public intellectualism, and even within Said’s definitions, it becomes clear that she challenges the defining parameters. As a Haitian American woman, first and foremost, she defies outdated notions of “philosopher kings,” and as a writer, she is firmly positioned outside of academia. In fact, Renee H. Shea, “ ‘Stretching the Limits of Silence’: Witness and Resistance in Edwidge Danticat’s Nonfiction,” World Literature Today, winter 2019, first page. 6 Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: First Vintage Books, 1996), 28. 7 Ibid., 5. 8 Ibid., 11. 9 Ibid., 11–12. 5

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in several interviews she describes herself as an “accident of literacy.”10 However, there is nothing accidental about her work. Danticat’s inclusion of the narratives of fellow Haitians and Haitian Americans represents this speaking “with,” as an active refusal to position herself as a lone expert on the issues of a people. Danticat says, “I don’t want people to take my version of things as the only one … want people to go beyond me, to explore further, to read more. I hope to at least encourage that.”11 Through direct activism, fiction, and nonfiction, she has single-handedly produced a substantial body of work that has kept vigilant watch on various abuses of power while chronicling injustices in the United States and Haiti. The reluctance to recognize her as a public intellectual effectively renders it impossible to see the breadth of work she has long engaged in. Danticat has firmly established herself as a public intellectual while redefining not only the work of public intellectualism but also the issue of whose voices count as such. Danticat’s Create Dangerously (2011), her collection of essays inspired by her Toni Morrison society lecture is most readily associated with intellectual work. The collection addresses the role of the writer and reader during dangerous times. Inspired by the work of Albert Camus, Danticat frames the conversation around the assassination of Louis Drouin and Marcel Numa12 during the Duvalier dictatorship.13 In the essays, she poses a series of questions about public intellectualism from the perspective of an immigrant writer. She calls attention to the issue wherein “an intellectual is very often looked to by members of his or her nationality to represent, speak out for, testify to the sufferings of that nationality.”14 Here, she problematizes both the motivation behind seeking a singular voice as representative and also the backlash that individual then receives for speaking up. Highlighting these tensions, Danticat illustrates the lambasting experienced by diasporic writers when penning criticisms of the state: “when expressing an opposing political point of view in discussions with friends and family members living in Haiti … they could easily silence me by saying, ‘What do you know? You’re living outside. You’re a dyaspora.’ ”15 Or, as Said highlights, the way in which the intellectual is “beset and remorselessly challenged by the problem of loyalty… national, religious or ethnic.”16 Nonetheless, Danticat still attests to the need to document, to create dangerously. Her insistence is all the more evident in a recent New Yorker essay, “Demonstrators in Haiti Are Fighting For An Uncertain Future,” where she calls attention to the 2018 La Saline Massacre17 in which “seventy-three men, women, and children were wounded, tortured, hacked with machetes, and set on fire … where residents had participated in Petrocaribe protests.”18 The exact population Charlotte Bruce Harvey, “Haiti’s Storyteller,” Brown Alumni Magazine, January/February 2019, 3. Clitandre and Danticat, “Interview,” 192. 12 Louis Drouin and Marcel Numa were two members of the movement Jeune Haiti (Young Haiti) who sought to overthrow Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Both men were captured and executed, the footage of their death filmed and aired repeatedly on radio and TV. 13 See the following texts for more information on the Duvalier dictatorship(s):  See Elizabeth Abbott, Haiti:  The Duvaliers and Their Legacy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988); Jana Evans Braziel, Duvalier’s Ghosts: Race, Diaspora, and U.S. Imperialism in Haitian Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010); and Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Picador, 2013). 14 Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 43. 15 Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (New York: Vintage, 2011), 49. 16 Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 40. 17 The La Silene Massacre of November 13–17, 2018, took place in Port-au-Prince’s La Saline neighborhood. Over the course of four days, men, women, and children were raped and shot to death. 18 Edwidge Danticat, “Demonstrators in Haiti Are Fighting for an Uncertain Future,” New Yorker, October 10, 2019, 3. 10 11

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of peoples Said references when he describes those “routinely forgotten or swept under the rug”; this was precisely the intended result of the massacre but Danticat refuses to let the event go unacknowledged. Danticat builds her theory of creating dangerously upon a deeper understanding of the relationship between the reader and the writer. Wherein, reading is positioned as a critical engagement with political issues regardless of the consequences. In one of the most poignant statements in the collection, Danticat sums up her argument as follows: “Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously … Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.”19While Danticat initially builds her understanding upon the perilous circumstances in which Haitians were reading during the Duvalier dictatorships, she simultaneously recognizes the importance of creating and reading during times that, on the surface, may not appear as dire. In doing so, Danticat expands the notion of dangerous creation to incorporate “revolting against silence” as a commitment to not only those who have engaged in such dangerous work, at the cost of their lives, but also as a vow to the reader to present disquieting truths. In exchange, reading dangerously insists upon the public awareness and critical examination of those political issues previously rendered silent. Danticat’s commitment to the public’s awareness of the critical issues of our time is evident in her New Yorker column, as her post publications are rooted in a “dialogue with the public… [that is] committed to an informed and engaged citizenry.”20 Amid her short stories on the column are op-editorials that address transnational political and cultural news and reveal the disquieting truths to which her imperative to create dangerously infers. In a series of articles, Danticat questions the integrity of contemporary US immigration politics. In “We Must Not Forget” (2018), Danticat warns readers of the dangerous immediate and long-term consequences of the Trump Administration’s “zero-tolerance policy.” In particular, she draws critical attention to the detention of adults and children, and forced separation of children from caregivers. In case readers missed news reports, she reminds them of the “children wrapped in Mylar blankets and sleeping inside cages, [hearing] babies and toddlers crying for their parents.”21 Her piece, “DACA, Hurricane Irma, and Young Americans’ Dreams Deferred,” shares intimate stories of those impacted by presidential threats to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Danticat sums up her critique with the pronouncement that “taking away DACA is not just a loss for Dreamers; it is this country’s loss as well.”22 Finally, in her article “Trump Reopens an Old Wound for Haitians,” she connects anti-Haitian rhetoric and immigration practices to the long legacies of injustice in the United States. From the early 1990s onward, the United States has actively engaged in policies of racial discrimination toward Haitians. Danticat connects this history to the “Trump Administration’s decision to end Temporary Protection Status (TPS)” and his frank willingness to describe countries like Haiti as “shitholes.”23

Danticat, Create Dangerously, 10. Nelson Wiseman, The Public Intellectual in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 15. 21 Edwidge Danticat, “We Must Not Forget Detained Migrant Children,” New Yorker, June 26, 2017. 22 Edwidge Danticat, “DACA, Hurricane Irma, and Young Americans’ Dreams Deferred,” New  Yorker, September 6, 2017. 23 Edwidge Danticat, “Trump Reopens an Old Wound for Haitians,” New Yorker, December 29, 2017. 19 20

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Danticat opens up a conversation about the lived experiences of those directly impacted by forced incarceration and separation from family members, the denial of basic human rights and promised resources, and racial rhetoric weaponized by ever-changing laws. Readers are then required to sit with the uncomfortable truth that the immigration politics in the United States are not just deeply problematic but also deplorable. Danticat appeals to readers’ emotional sentiment by offering up accounts of those individuals bearing the brunt of such policies, including herself and immediate family members. Danticat’s invitation to read dangerously includes the activities of reading more deeply (her nonfictional column posts are replete with hyperlinks that lead readers deeper into related material), reading more broadly, and being willing to reread. Namely, she invites her readers to return to histories that we think we knew, with a willingness to revise our own understandings of history. Further, she is aware that many readers have a knowledge gap perpetuated by racist and nationalist renderings of Haiti and Haitians by US media, curricula, and public discourse. We see three of her New Yorker posts—each published a year after the last—as an arc, in conversation with each other in their invitation to the public to perform this critical rereading work. They respectively address the violence the UN personnel have visited upon Haitians, the failed promise of the Petrocaribe agreement between Haiti and Venezuela, and the recurring, generational nature of international, cooperatively perpetrated disasters such as these, as well as the perennial resistance and calls for justice from Haitian communities. In the New Yorker column post titled “A New Chapter for the Disastrous United Nations Mission in Haiti?,” Danticat glosses the history of MINUSTAH’s deadly violence that impacted her family and many other communities in Haiti, and discusses the ways they avoided accountability and refused to provide justice for the many harmed by the Brazilian and Nepalese peacekeepers and UN soldiers who spread death and disease in their wake. She questions the replacement of the largely failed MINUSTAH with the MINUJUSTAH, formed in October 2017, which she reports is a thinly veiled rebranding effort unlikely to restore justice and human rights in Haiti, and more likely an effort to brush off the past disasters perpetrated by the United Nation’s previous program. She links the ways the governments of the United States (namely, the Department of Homeland Security) and Haiti (in the form of the police and adjacent gangs), combined with the representatives of the United Nations, were linked to the death of asylum seekers abroad in the United States and rape and gun violence at home in Haiti. As she details in her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, her own uncle Joseph Dantica and other family members have been directly impacted by the transnational forces impacting their region of the island nation. Danticat’s documentation of human rights abuses—from the 1991 military coup to the disbandment of MINUSTAH twenty-six years later in 2017— counters the efforts of the various governmental agencies collaborating in these activities, refusing to acknowledge their complicity, and replacing devastating programs rather than providing sincere apology accompanied by any attempt at reparation. Her resistance of these agencies’ collusion and attempts to act with impunity are continued a year later in her column post titled “Haitians Want to Know What the Government Has Done with Missing Oil Money” (2018). “Haitians Want to Know” also details the transnational forces mercilessly oppressing the people of Haiti, this time through an examination of the politics and economics embroiling the misappropriation and embezzlement of Petrocaribe funds by generations of Haitian 236

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government officials. Danticat argues that the profits from Venezuela’s discounted oil funds, which should be applied to programming to support Haitian families and economies grappling with the impacts of colonial forces described in the aforementioned post, have become a staggering debt that future generations of Haitians will be responsible for in the decades to come. In asking the titular question of the article—What has the government done with this money?—Danticat amplifies the voices of many protesting Haitians who have been driven to demonstrating in street protests against the price hikes and surcharges on the life-sustaining resource, gasoline. Just as in the previous post, in which Danticat begins with the impact of the international force of UN soldiers on the very localized level of her family, here Danticat examines the Petrocaribe debacle from the levels of micro- to macroeconomics. She shares the story of a woman who burst into tears upon seeing the final score of the World Cup football game between Brazil and Belgium; she had taken out a high interest loan to purchase a large amount of Brazilian flag merchandise, “jerseys, flags, and bracelets,” to sell on the event of their projected win. Now she feared had no way to sell the merchandise or pay back the loan. Opening with this story of a family friend’s plight, Danticat moves from the woman’s individual turmoil and economic instability to that of the nation she lives in; she traces the impact of their government’s agreement with another South American nation, Venezuela, on the economy of Haiti. When she connects the corruption of Haitian government officials’ mismanagement of the Petrocaribe funds, she comes full circle to show how transnational economics continue to have dire impacts on local families and communities. This upsets narratives about Haitians being an endemically impoverished people, revealing the fact that their own government, in relationship to those of other nations, consistently undermines the peoples’ efforts to gain economic stability. The third column post on “Demonstrators in Haiti Are Fighting for an Uncertain Future” takes up the issues addressed in the previous two posts and reexamines the aforementioned disasters through the resistance efforts of Haitian demonstrators, as well as the thinly veiled effort by government officials to quash those same efforts with more violence. Danticat critiques President Jovenel Moïse’s fraudulent activities, which informed his much contested election, and she traces a connection to the corruption of his predecessor, Michel Martelly, detailing their business relationship that preceded Martelly’s “handpick[ing]” of Moïse. She writes, The funds allegedly pilfered in these schemes came from Venezuela’s Petrocaribe oil program,24 which Haiti joined in 2006. Through the Petrocaribe agreement, the Haitian government bought oil from Venezuela, paid sixty per cent of the purchase price within ninety days, then deferred the rest of the debt, at a one-per-cent interest rate, over twentyfive years. The Haitian government controlled the sale of the oil and was supposed to use those funds for development projects, including infrastructure, agriculture, education, sanitation, and health. This debt to Venezuela has grown to almost two billion dollars over the past decade. Discussing the 2018 announcement of Moïse’s government that prices on petroleum products would be raised by a third to half of current prices, Danticat cites the reasoning behind the price hike for individuals as qualification for “low-interest loans from the International Hyperlink in the original article published in the New Yorker; omitted here.

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Monetary Fund.” The irony here—the connection to her family friend who was forced to take out a high-interest loan in an enterprising risk for survival amid the high costs of living—is that the government sacrificing the stability of families across Haiti for their own enrichment is the cause of protests in Port-au-Prince. Though their anger and demands were certainly warranted, the protestors in Port-auPrince faced devastating backlash. Danticat explains that two of Moïse’s top officials were allegedly involved in the planning of the La Saline massacre. Finally, we can tie Danticat’s characterization of Moïse’s empty promises that he hears his constituents’ complaints and his refusal to resign to her previous column posts in which she shows the refusal of the UN peacekeepers to acknowledge and redress the damage they have done in the nation. While Danticat says demonstrators are fighting for a future they can’t see, she closes the post by saying she hopes they “see some parallels between themselves and those taking part in the equally massive and increasingly violent protests in Hong Kong, to which the world at least is paying attention.” In pushing for the protestors in Haiti to receive the attention that those of other nations do, Danticat continues to use her accident of literacy, and her platform, to bring to light the issues of those whom the national community finds it convenient to ignore and whom the transnational community often doesn’t hear as a result of state repression of the people’s voices. In the article “ ‘All Geography is within Me’:  Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt,” Danticat reflects on beginnings and endings as a writer—both literally and metaphorically. Tracing her origins from “a little girl … born in Haiti during the middle part of a dynastic thirty-year dictatorship” to being “lòt bò dlo,”25 on the other side of the water in the United States, she shares details about her creative and personal growth and development.26 Inseparable from her own coming-of-age story are the very politics she writes about in her New Yorker column. When recalling life in junior high, as a recent immigrant to the United States, she shares her firsthand experience with the racialized rhetoric weaponized against Haitians, the same vitriolic language described in her essay “Trump Reopens an Old Wound for Haitians.” Danticat writes, I moved to the United States in 1981 at age twelve to join my parents soon after cases of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) were first discovered in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control named four groups at “high risk” for the disease: intravenous drug users, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and Haitians … Suddenly, every Haitian was suspected of having AIDS. At the public junior high school where my parents enrolled me, some of the non-Haitian students would regularly shove and hit me and the other Haitian kids, telling us that we had dirty blood.27 Public intellectualism, for Danticat, is about “bearing witness,” speaking truth to legacies and present-day injustice. Her literature and nonfiction are not only creative endeavors but also Lòt bò dlo is a Haitian Creole phrase for someone being on the other side of the water. The saying is often used to represent either someone who has migrated or died. 26 Edwidge Danticat, “ ‘All Geography Is within Me’: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt,” World Literature Today, winter 2019, https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2019/winter/all-geography-within-me-writingbeginnings-life-death-freedom-and-salt-edwidge-danticat. 27 Ibid. 25

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pragmatic works wherein she asks pertinent questions as a means to create space for active engagement with her audience. In the legacy of public intellectuals like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, Danticat critiques popular social narratives and unjust policies while raising readers’ consciousness. In return, she’s produced a remarkable body of work that frames the most pressing issues of our time.

Bibliography Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. The Danger of a Single Story. TEDGlobal, July 2009. https://www.ted. com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en. Butler, Maia, and Megan Feifer. “Edwidge Danticat’s Elegiac Project: A Transnational Historiography of U.S. Imperialist State Violence.” In Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era, edited by Emily Rutter, 200–15. London: Routledge, 2020. Clitandre, Nadège T., and Edwidge Danticat. “Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” In Clitandre, Nadège T. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary, 177–203. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Danticat, Edwidge. “ ‘All Geography Is within Me’: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt.” World Literature Today, winter 2019. https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2019/winter/ all-geography-within-me-writing-beginnings-life-death-freedom-and-salt-edwidge-danticat. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Soho, 1994. Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. New York: Vintage, 2011. Danticat, Edwidge. “DACA, Hurricane Irma, and Young Americans’ Dreams Deferred.” New Yorker, September 6, 2017. Danticat, Edwidge. “Demonstrators in Haiti Are Fighting for an Uncertain Future.” New Yorker, October 10, 2019. Danticat, Edwidge. “Haitians Want to Know What the Government Has Done with Missing Oil Money.” New Yorker, October 19, 2018. Danticat, Edwidge. “A New Chapter for the Disastrous United Nations Mission in Haiti?” New Yorker, October 19, 2017. Danticat, Edwidge. “Trump Reopens an Old Wound for Haitians.” New Yorker, December 29, 2017. Danticat, Edwidge. “We Must Not Forget Detained Migrant Children.” New Yorker, June 26, 2017. Harvey, Charlotte Bruce. “Haiti’s Storyteller.” Brown Alumni Magazine, January/February 2011. Obejas, Achy. “Bearing the Unforgivable: A Tribute to Edwidge Danticat.” World Literature Today, January 2019. Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: First Vintage Books, 1996. Shea, Renee. H. “ ‘Stretching the Limits of Silence’: Witness and Resistance in Edwidge Danticat’s Nonfiction.” World Literature Today, January 2019. Thomas, Deborah. “Caribbean Studies, Archive Building, and the Problem of Violence.” Small Axe 41 (2013): 27–42. Ulysse, Gina Athena. Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2015. Wiseman, Nelson. The Public Intellectual in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.

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PART VI FOOD, HAITI, AND HAITIAN CULINARY/ LITERARY INHERITANCES

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CHAPTER 15 EDWIDGE DANTICAT’S KITCHEN HISTORY *

Valérie Loichot

I took yet another cookie, and another, until the whole box was empty… “I cannot read American,” I said. —Danticat, “The Missing Peace” Her face is mine she is not smiling she is chewing and swallowing I have to have my face … I want to be the two of us … I want the join. —Morrison, Beloved This essay has two goals. First, it establishes food as an unavoidable and complex form of language necessary to remember the past and to heal the self and communities in the aftermath of diaspora, immigration, and exile. Second, it sets out to present Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994)1 as an integral agent of contemporary American identity, not only as immigrant exceptionalism within the United States. As Andrew Warnes has recently shown in Hunger Overcome, culinary practices have not only been overlooked in the study of literary construction but also highly trivialized. If food is at all considered, it is viewed as a form of sub-writing at best, and at worst, as an obstacle to literacy.2 I demonstrate that Danticat, like the African American writers Warnes examines, “draw[s]‌a profound connection between writing and cooking, insisting on the capacity of both to replenish two disabling voids—hunger and illiteracy—that external forces have invested with special prominence throughout American history.”3 Danticat’s Breath could be read as a move toward that very goal. Her character Sophie Caco learns to master a kitchen poetry through which she voices her self, family, and communal history. As in the epigraph above drawn from Krik? Krak! hunger and illiteracy are irremediably linked. The solution to both ailments resides in a control of food and language. Each stage of Breath could be read as a step toward the acquisition and mastery of food and its language. Thus, my demonstration simply follows the book’s narrative order. My first section

*Article originally published in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Volume 5, Number 1, 2004, pp. 92–116. 1 I use the following abbreviations throughout the essay: Breath for Breath, Eyes, Memory, and Krik for Krik? Krak 2 Even though Warnes is right in pointing out that food and literacy have often been seen as antonymic practices, anthropologists and cultural historians since the 1980s and 1990s have abundantly reflected on cuisine as a crucial element of the building of American culture. Among a wealth of examples, see Sidney Mintz’s notable Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, particularly his analyses of U.S. and Caribbean food practices (1996). See Donna Gabaccia’s We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (1998). In her wealthy analysis, Gabaccia demonstrates that American food is inherently Creole, that is, constantly enriched by immigrant contribution (see esp. “Nouvelle Creole,” 202–24). Gabaccia concludes with the idea that two apparently incompatible practices dominate American cuisine:  “Eating homogeneous, processed, mass-produced foods” and “enjoying the multi-ethnic mixtures of particular regions” (1998, 226). It is precisely this cohabitation of homogeneity and diversity that for her defines American ways of eating. 3 Warnes, Hunger Overcome, 2.

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focuses on the beginning of the novel, which coincides with Sophie’s sheltered early childhood in the Haitian village of Croix-des-Rosets. In this childhood memory, food production and consumption connect the individual to the community, to the immediate environment, and to the communal historical past in a harmonious, albeit idealistic and nostalgic, relation. The next two sections of this essay, “Eating and the City” and “Purging the Western Body,” deal with Sophie’s displacement into the foreign urban space of Brooklyn. The relationship she experiences there with her environment and her kin is one of disconnection illustrated by an abundance of random food samples leading to amnesia. Sophie’s body, like the serialized food products she consumes, becomes detached from any coherent system of reference. The body turned thing does not fit the predetermined Western mold. As a consequence, Sophie rejects the food her body ingests and develops bulimia. Moreover, this disease, which her Haitian grandmother does not understand, makes her body untranslatable to the Haitian language and system of communication. Sophie’s body becomes a floating sign, which can belong neither to her native nor to her acquired language. Finally, “The Transcultural Kitchen” reflects on the use of food as healing, a healing that I claim to be, after bell hooks, the most important component of the process of remembrance. Danticat’s Breath and this essay both close with a return to Haiti. This return, however, is not a retrieval of the idealized space of childhood. In this newly found Haiti, links can only be made once its inherent violence is seen and acknowledged. My reading of Danticat accomplishes three interweaving, or synergistic connections, which are essential to a proper appreciation of Danticat’s work and that of the class of transnational writers she epitomizes. First, the personal and familial modes of oppression need to be connected with the country’s political violence. Second, cooking and writing need to become interconnected forms of resistance. This association, which Danticat calls a “braiding” of cooking and writing,4 transforms the daily gesture of women into political acts, and home and kitchen into sites of political resistance. Women’s previously written bodies graduate to writing bodies. They become the agencies for culinary constructions instead of predetermined works, inscribed by their domestic labor. Paule Marshall’s concept of kitchen poets, to which Danticat pays tribute in Krik, serves as the major theoretical tool to interpret the links Danticat makes between cooking and writing, and between the home and the political sphere. In Reena and Other Stories, Marshall demonstrates that kitchen literacy is a prerequisite, not an obstacle, to scholarly education. Finally, Danticat’s writing about food transcends the local, that is, Haiti, and joins a transnational or “transcolonial”5 network of women such as Ntozake Shange, Paule Marshall, Danticat, Krik? Krak! 220. The word is Françoise Lionnet’s: “I will use the term ‘transcolonial.’ I prefer it to the more commonly used ‘transnational’ or ‘postcolonial’ since my goal is to stress the spatial dimensions at the heart of the history of colonialism” (2002, 69). The word “transcolonial” allows us to exit the chronological thinking introduced by the prefix “post” in “postcolonial” and also allows one to bypass the nation as primary reference, as in the word “transnational.” In a parallel move, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai elaborates the concept of a “transnation.” For him, large groups of immigrants and exiles in the United States produce a “delocalized transnation, which retains a special ideological link to a putative place of origin but is otherwise a thoroughly diasporic community. No existing conception of Americanness can contain this large variety of transnation” (1997, 172). The United States cannot hold these immigrant, yet elsewhere-anchored, communities because they resist the universalizing myth of the melting pot. They also challenge hyphenated classifications such as “Italian-American” or “Asian-American” in that the second term of these hyphenated identities loses its nominal privilege, the modifying adjective has equal claim. Thus, Appadurai suggests a reversal of the hyphen: “We can become a federation of diasporas: American-Italians, American-Haitians” 4 5

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and Audre Lorde, who stitch their ripped memories by turning food into a historical text and mode of communication. “Mainstream” American philosophers of the body and the environment such as Susan Bordo and Wendell Berry, even though they do not deal explicitly with immigration and exile, also provide a crucial interpretive framework for Breath. Conversely, Breath helps complement their analysis of American culture. Through such connections, I  will demonstrate that Breath is not only significant as an exotic vernacular text, but I will also show that first and foremost it is an agent toward the construction of U.S. modernities6 and toward the understanding of discourses of consumption, urbanization, and memorialization.

Haiti: The Lost Relation The Haitian village of Croix-des-Rosets described in the first part could be summed up as the place of connection between Sophie Caco and her land, her community, and her mothers. Tante Atie’s and Grandmé Ifé’s homes act as shelters protecting Sophie from an incessant violence and disruption. Haiti as a whole is far from being represented as a utopian land of relation. Outside of home, people die of heatstroke in the cane fields, women get abused and raped, and Tontons Macoutes7 terrify the villagers and brutally torture and kill young protestors. However, Danticat’s allusions to political violence remain “the most gently glancing of references,” as Ethan Casey puts it.8 These glancing references could be explained by the fact that before her departure for Brooklyn, what Sophie wants to see in Haiti is the connection and love flowing between her and Tante Atie and Grandmé Ifé. After they witness the murder of a young student protestor by the army on their way to the airport, Atie asks Sophie, “Do you see what you are leaving?” Sophie responds, “I know I am leaving you.”9 At this point, in the narrator’s mind, the country coincides with Tante Atie, and family love obliterates political violence. As the narrator analyzes her first perception of Haiti, she admits her partial vision of her lost homeland: “I did not press to find out more. Part of me did not understand. Most of me did not want to” (1994, 61). This initial construction of Haiti is thus dominated by nostalgia,

(1997, 173). Intensified diasporic movements also modify the status of the United States in national construction. The formerly centralizing and unifying force becomes a mere “node in a postnational network of diasporas” (Appadurai 1997, 171). Breath’s model functions similarly to Appadurai’s postnation since its only possible viable locus is a Haiti informed and related to the U.S.A. and vice versa, where nodes of belonging multiply instead of converging. However, I prefer to use the term “transcultural” to “transnational,” since Danticat’s heroines make no claim to national pride or belonging, rather to a community shaped by cultural inheritance, such as food and language. 6 Oprah Winfrey seems to have succeeded in mainstreaming Danticat’s novel by including it in her popular show’s book club. 7 The Tontons Macoutes were members of François Duvalier’s private army. The death squad terrorized the Haitian population under his presidency and that of his son Jean-Claude Duvalier. 8 Casey, “Remembering Haiti,” 525. In his astute reading of Breath, Casey concludes that the veiled references to the novel’s “real-life’s backdrop” provide a “necessary though not sufficient literary response to the appalling latest chapter in Haiti’s horrifyingly emblematic story” (1995, 525). Nick Nesbitt also reflects on the inherently guilty nature of Breath, which builds commercial popularity (by its commodification through the Oprah Winfrey Show) on the painful history on Haiti, and which turned historical sufferance into an aesthetic object. “For in speaking of suffering, in representing it aesthetically, the writer participates in a theft in which images are taken from the living and, perhaps worse still, from the dead, and merely represented” (Nesbitt 2003, 207). 9 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 34.

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a self-deceptive experience that contrasts with the remembering that Sophie achieves at the end of the novel. It is a longing to go back home rather than the return to an ambivalent land. The elements of this initial self-sufficient wholeness are incorporated and organized around eating and cooking. Food acts as a conducting fluid, as a vital link unifying the members of the community in a living macro-organism, as a necessary amniotic liquid between humans and the land, and as a glue unifying body and mind. We first need to explore the ways in which food in Sophie’s Haiti defies the violent imposition of clear delineations in the United States. Childhood in Croix-des-Rosets is defined by a unity that precedes Western industrialized practices based on the body- and-mind split and on exaggerated individualization. One of its highlights is a potluck shared by all the members of the village: Tante Atie said that the way these potlucks started was really a long time ago in the hills. Back then, a whole village would get together and clear a field for planting … the women would cook large amounts of food while the men worked. Then at sunset, when the work was done, every one would gather together and enjoy a feast of eating, dancing and laughter.10 Food traditions act as the link of the community to their history, particularly to a historical tradition of resistance—the people of the hills were the ones who escaped slavery and thus kept their West African heritage intact.11 The communal feast also consolidates the members of the konbit,12 who share the labor associated with food gathering and preparation. The reward of community and cooperation is feasting, dancing, and laughing together. Just as food maintains tight links among the members of the community, it establishes a vital relationship between the inhabitants and their immediate environment. The goods consumed come directly from the land. There is no mention of imported or processed products. In the absence of refrigeration, food is obtained daily, from the local market or the garden. Therefore, production, preparation, and consumption of food frame time and community in a tight and cyclical manner. By repeating the gestures of planting, gathering, and preparing—all associated with cyclically repeated seasons—the working woman embodies a memory that transcends an instant that would be isolated in a linear progression. Through the seasonal gestures, memory is extended beyond individual experience. In the body is inscribed a memory of time that transcends it. Since the body is seen as the extension of the land, as a tool that shapes it—through work—and as being shaped by it— through eating—its memory is extended to the land. Again, memory transcends, in space,

Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 11. The same activity of sharing food is presented as an essential function of a community by a village elder in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The loss of a similar practice would lead to the disintegration of community. “A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so. You may ask why I am saying all this. I say this because I fear for the younger generation, for you people” (Achebe 1959, 155). Achebe’s foreboding prophecy, addressed to the people in a Nigerian village on the way to Christianization, might equally remind a generation of young and displaced Haitians who, as Danticat sees, too easily relinquish this important sharing tradition. Sharing food in an established tradition is not only a matter of survival but also a willful attempt on the part of communities to remember and reconstruct their unity and integrity. 12 A konbit is a traditional Haitian method of communal farming. 10 11

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the limits of the individual body. To the dimension of time and space, the feast adds the dimension of community to the extension of memory. Therefore, in the Haitian context presented in the first part of Breath, there cannot be a disruption of memory since there is no individualization. Food also acts as a connecting balm because of its healing properties inseparable from its nutritional functions. It serves to cure a body or a mind struck by illness. Body and mind, a Western distinction, fits badly the concept of the Haitian self, where there is no separation between the two, as the narrator points out: “To my grandmother, chagrin was a genuine physical disease. Like a hurt leg or a broken arm. To treat chagrin, you drank teas from leaves that only my grandmother and other old wise women could recognize” (Danticat 1994, 24). The vegetal essences and the body fluids such as blood permeate and nourish each other; they flow to become only one life: “We washed down our meal with watermelon juice. Tante Atie always said that eating beets and watermelon would put more red in my blood and give me more strength for hard times.”13 This description, where the food consumed flows into and becomes the body, finds a mirroring echo in Ntozake Shange’s If I  Can Cook / You Know God Can, where the blood of the African ancestors flows in the breadfruit tree, symbol of runaway slaves:  “You’ve peeled and seeded the breadfruit already. Don’t be afraid when it changes to a blood-red color, that’s the mourning of our ancestors, hungry for us to live now.”14 The nurturing, rather than flowing in one direction, merges into a continuous cycle where food passes through the body and where the body relives in food. Eating what your ancestors ate is a way to remember them in the strong sense of the word, that is, to incorporate in your living body their dispersed members. Elisa Sobo’s concept of “body-in-relation,” which she draws from her analysis of a rural Jamaican community, supplies a theoretical context in which to interpret the properties of food highlighted above. For Sobo, “The concept of a body-in-relation may seem foreign to U.S.  or Western European readers who tend to view the body like they view the self—as autonomous, individual, and independent.”15 Food links the bodies to the earth, and to other individuals who share the same meal. It is therefore important, according to these criteria, that the body be constantly well fed, since starving it would, in effect, disrupt the community and efface the daily cultural memory of the community. As Sobo describes, “Weight loss signals social neglect.”16 “A thin, dry body reveals a person’s non-nurturing nature and his or her lack of social commitment.”17 These initial remarks on body-and-food-in-relation are important to understand the clash that will occur in young Sophie Caco’s experience and her consecutive dislocation and amnesia in a Western, urban, capitalist, individualistic, male world where all familiar relations fail.

Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 56. Shange, If I Can Cook/You Know God Can, 31. 15 Sobo, “The Sweetness of Fat,” 257. 16 Ibid., 258. 17 Ibid., 262. 13 14

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Eating and the City (Survival in Urban Capitalism) [R]‌andom concoctions: frozen dinners, samples from global cookbooks, food that was easy to put together and brought me no pain. —Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory18 Fried chicken, glazed potatoes, and broiled vegetables. Everything came frozen out of a box. —Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory19 [B]‌acon and eggs and extremely sweet café au lait.

—Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory20

[S]‌paghetti. I would boil it and eat it quickly before I completely lost my appetite. Everything Haitian reminded me of you. —Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory21 The list above is what Sophie and her mother eat in their United States homes. In this series of dishes we can read a strong feeling of disconnection from a cultural tradition—these foods are “global” and anonymous (“samples,” “spaghetti”). They disrupt the rituals of preparation that mark time—the dishes are “frozen,” prepared “quickly” and eaten hastily; they are incomplete (“concoctions”), disordered (“random”), and unhealthy (“fried,” “extremely sweet”). These meals alienate mother and daughter from Haiti because they bear no memory of it and because they are the opposite of Haitian food consumption. They cut, compartmentalize, and sicken instead of making whole, wholesome, and healthy. As French philosopher Michel Picard states in Lire le Temps, the so-called ephemerization of products of consumption in capitalist societies leads to a collective amnesia: Le marché des pays riches multiplie les objets quotidiens jetables après usage, stylo, rasoir, nappe ou contenants variés. … Une continuelle consommation de l’éphémère accompagne … la perte de contrôle de la mémorisation.22 The adoption of this culinary lifestyle marked by a radical disruption of the link between present and past will help us understand how Sophie and her mother forcefully swallow urban contemporary American values and forget their Haitian past. In his The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry describes a similar moral and physical crisis in the life of contemporary Americans. He presents this malaise as a direct consequence of the agricultural paradigmatic shift between the production and consumption of local products to globalized and deterritorialized market practices. The body, severed from the land, and the mind, disconnected from the direct needs of the body, function without bearings:

Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 151. Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 198. 20 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 188. 21 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 183. 22 Picard, Lire le Temps, 137. “The first world economy market multiplies disposable objects such as pens, razors, tablecloths, miscellaneous containers ... a continuous consumption of the ephemeral goes hand-in-hand with the loss of control over memorization” (my translation). 18 19

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And the modern household’s direct destructiveness of the world bears a profound relation—as cause or effect or both—to the fundamental moral disconnections for which it also stands. It divorces us from the sources of our bodily life; as a people, we no longer know the earth from where we come from, have no respect for it, keep no responsibilities for it.23 Berry’s description of a flight from agrarian America to urban industrial life, even though it deals solely with an internal national rural exodus, can easily be applied to Sophie’s situation. Sophie moves from a rural land to a metropolis, from a place where food is daily taken from the land to a kitchen oblivious of the environment. She finds herself in a culture that, as Berry regards it, is destroying the world by ignoring it. Putting Danticat and Berry into dialogue (two texts that apparently belong to different contexts) allows us to read Danticat’s novel as a central contributor to an American cultural discourse. Danticat allows us in turn to complicate and enrich Berry’s definition of an “unsettled America” by the diasporic element she adds to his definition. For example, the mother’s Haitian boyfriend’s advocating of food as a luxurious product directly contradicts the bounty of food available in the United States: “Food is a luxury,” he said, “but we can not allow ourselves to become gluttons or get fat. Do you hear that Sophie?” I shook my head yes, as though I was very interested. I ate like I had been on a hunger strike, filling myself with the coconut milk they served us in real green coconuts.24 In Sophie’s mind, if food is a luxury, then it shouldn’t be wasted; rather, it should be consumed immediately. The American abundance of food and the Haitian urgency for consumption causes a contradiction in the act of eating, a re-valuation that emerges from the clash of two socioeconomic behaviors. Sophie’s mother was herself victim of this dilemma before her daughter: “In the beginning, food was a struggle. To have so much to eat and not to eat it all. It took me a while to get used to the idea that the food was going to be there to stay.”25 The meals prepared by the mother and later by the daughter are not cooked but simply heated or boiled quickly, a direct consequence of the collision between their hand-to-mouth conception of eating and capitalism, the maximal reduction of time spent on non-marketable labor. Communication, cooperation, effort, love, and time are no longer part of the actions of cooking and eating. The latter have become mere acts of survival and commercial process, having lost their socializing properties. Author hooks similarly observes that industrialized practice alters the organism of a community: Industrial capitalism was not simply changing the nature of black work life, it altered the communal practices that were so central to survival in the agrarian South. And it fundamentally altered black people’s relationship to the body.26

Berry, The Unsettling of America, 52. Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 56. 25 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 179. 26 hooks, Sister of the Yam, 179. 23 24

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As Sophie loses the food traditions of her land, she is also deprived of Tante Atie’s food and loses control of her own body. It is significant that the only Haitian meals Sophie eats in the United States are taken in restaurants, in the outside realm, the opposite of home, in particularly faraway places: “He started taking her to restaurants, always Haitian restaurants, sometimes ones as far as Philadelphia. They even went to Canada once to eat at a Haitian restaurant in Montreal.”27 Haitian food becomes an exception, a commercialized event rather than a daily habit, an occasion for dislocation. It also capitulates to the ideology of capitalist and colonialist consumer economy whereby the only Haitian cultural elements tolerated are culinary dishes severed from the practice of communal relation and offered as commodified and entertaining diversions for the American urban palate. The loss of food control deprives the mother of her capacity to hold the community together. When Sophie is asked by her grandmother if her mother still cooks Haitian, she replies: “I don’t know if she remembers cooking Haitian.”28 Food, in the mother’s practice, becomes a tool of disrupting rather than feeding the community. She tells her daughter that she once used food in an attempt to abort her: “When I was pregnant with you, my mother made me drink all kinds of herbs, vervain, quinine, and verbena, baby poisons. I tried beating my stomach with wooden spoons. I tried to destroy you but you wouldn’t go away.”29 This amnesia of cooking Haitian, the forgetfulness of Haiti, a memory of food as only lethal and violent, is central to the split in Breath’s Haitian immigrant community: You will have to choose between the really old-fashioned Haitians and the newgeneration Haitians. The old-fashioned ones are not exactly prize fruits. They make you cook plantain, rice and beans and never let you feed them lasagna.30 The irreducible clash between traditional and Americanized Haitians resides in food differences. Lasagna and plantain rice are presented as incompatible traditions. The link is not there anymore, or it has not been reestablished yet. Sophie’s disconnection from her land, community, and mother—with food as the absent link—provokes a discomfort shared by displaced women of diaspora. Toni Cade Bambara in The Salt-Eaters, her novel on healing, reflects on the disruption of communities of African American women, on their loss of a history grounded not in books but in the product of the earth: “What is happening to the daughters of the Yam? Seem like they just don’t know how to draw up the powers from the deep like before.”31 It is the loss of this sense of connection that Berry regrets. This isolation of the individual entails, according to him, an ill-fitting idea of health and modern Western medicine. It is not the body alone that needs to be cured but the body-in-relation: “the concept of health is rooted in the concept of wholeness. To be healthy is to be whole. … The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole alone.”32 Another disconnection Berry points out is the disconnection of a healthy body from the model constructed and imposed in the American society: Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 60. Ibid., 106. 29 Ibid., 190. 30 Ibid., 80. 31 Qtd. in hooks, Sisters of the Yam, 13. 32 Berry, The Unsettling of America, 103. 27 28

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For the appropriate standard for the body—that is health—has been replaced, not even by another standard, but by very exclusive physical models. The concept of “model” here conforms very closely to the model of scientists and planners: it is an exclusive, narrowly defined ideal that affects destructively whatever it does not include.33 Similar to the domestication, construction, and eventual mechanization of the land, the body, disconnected from nature, becomes the prey of an artificial and forceful construction.

Purging the Western Body Once disconnected from its nourishing environment and its link to the memory of the past and to a community, the isolated body-turned-into-prey develops tools of resistance. Controlling food intake appears to be the only, albeit illusionary and devastating, way to master the body. Thus, it seems almost unavoidable Sophie should develop bulimia. Her illness seems to be prompted by yet another cut: the body-and-mind split. Susan Bordo analyzes this schism helpfully in her Unbearable Weight:  Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body.34 This dualistic conception influenced by Western theology and philosophy necessarily brings about a hierarchy, the body often cast as the inferior element: “The body as animal, as appetite, as deceiver, as prison of the soul and confounder of its projects: these are common images within Western philosophy.”35 This dualism is absent from the view of the self in Sophie’s rural Haiti, as we have seen. A dichotomy between body and mind turns the body into a mere thing, reserving the mind for all thinking and ruling functions. The body-made-object therefore becomes a separate entity, demanding control, open to violence. As Berry explains: “By dividing body and soul, we divide both from all else. We thus condemn ourselves to a loneliness for which the only compensation is violence—against other creatures, against the earth, against ourselves.”36 This separation is what allows Sophie to develop and name her eating disorder—a name that functions and holds meaning only in the American context: After I got married, I found out that I had something called bulimia, I said … I have never heard of a Haitian woman getting anything like that. Food, it was so rare when we were growing up. We could not waste it.37 Her body has become a separate object. It has been externalized and projected into a net of images of alien, constructed bodies. This U.S. construction follows a first overdetermination of female bodies in Haiti where, as Myriam J. A. Chancy demonstrates, “Haitian women are subject to the same outdated Victorian codes of sexual behavior as their female counterparts in the United States and Europe.”38 Sophie, once more constructed, once more separated Ibid., 112. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 2. 35 Ibid., 3. 36 Berry, The Unsettling of America, 106. 37 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 179. 38 Chancy, Framing Silence, 107. 33 34

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from community, cuisine, and corporeal soul, perceives her body as something that does not fit the model, something that intrinsically, interminably has to change. This isolation of the body puts it in the vulnerable position of incorporating negative stereotypes. As hooks argues: “Estrangement from nature and engagement in mind/body splits made it all the more possible for black people to internalize white supremacist assumptions about black identity.”39 Sophie’s body enters the network of negative connotations associated with black women’s bodies in the United States. As Bordo points out, racist white supremacist discourse has constructed the black body as “ ‘primitive,’ ‘savage,’ sexually animalistic,” as a “property, to be ‘taken’ and used at will. Such a body is denied even the dignity accorded a wild animal; its status approaches that of mere matter, thing-hood.”40 Sophie not only struggles to escape the stereotyping of being black in a white-dominated society but also of being a Haitian immigrant in the United States. When Sophie goes to school, her body is perceived as unhealthy and takes on the negative connotations associated with an objectified Haitian body: [Haitian children] were accused of having HBO—Haitian Body Odor. Many of the American kids even accused Haitians of having AIDS because they had heard on television that only the four “Hs” got AIDS— Heroin addicts, Hemophiliacs, Homosexuals, and Haitians.41 The negative stereotypes of corpulence as ugliness depend intrinsically on Western and capitalist assumptions,42 as is clear from the value ascribed to corpulence within many African and African American societies. As Marvalene Hughes describes: The interrelatedness of the concepts “big” and “beautiful” is African. Bigness represents health and prosperity, but in America, thinness is beautiful. Having learned these American values, could it be that the black woman (and black man) enjoy making White America fat and “ugly” by its standards?43 The solution, however, is not simply to import or readopt the African values of bigness advocated by Hughes or by Sophie’s Haitian grandmother. This would only result in a double disconnection. For Sophie—and those like her—it would mean reimposing foreign black models on their already serially Americanized bodies. The illusion of the easy adoption of African values within the context of American society leads black American women to a deep loneliness and invisibility in their struggle with food. Author hooks comments on the invisibility of eating disorders such as bulimia in African American women: Concurrently, in black life “fat” does not have many of the negative connotations that it has in the dominant society. Though black women are the most obese group in this society, being overweight does not carry the stigmata of unattractiveness, or sexual hooks, Sisters of the Yam, 179. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 9, 11. 41 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 51. 42 On the invisibility, silencing, or systematic association of corpulent bodies with the grotesque in contemporary culture, see Braziel and LeBesco’s collection of essays Bodies out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (2001). 43 Hughes, “Soul, Black Women, and Food,” 273. 39 40

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undesirability, that is the norm in white society. This means however, that it is very easy for black women to hide the food addiction.44 The struggle of these invisible women cannot be named and understood within their community. As Bordo argues: “[She is] left alone to deal with an eating-disorder that she wasn’t ‘supposed’ to have.”45 Sophie, alienated from her Haitian mothers who cannot understand her fear of fatness, is also isolated from an American model into which she will never fit. Her body becomes the currency of exchange between two incompatible cultural values. In the situation of immigrants, these two systems clash in a head-on collision. To become American, Sophie rejects her Haitian body.46 When she returns to Haiti, her grandmother remarks on her bony figure and comments on her hollowness. She swallows the cultural sign of skinniness and purges the food she would have taken eating as a Haitian. Sophie’s body is therefore alienated from the American model but is also isolated from the Haitian conception since her struggle does not make sense in a culture favoring a well-fed body. The state of bulimia, consisting in painfully swallowing a plethora of incompatible nutrients and vomiting them forcefully, is the embodiment of Sophie’s forced amnesia. This amnesia is the direct consequence of the indigestible combination of Haitian ideals of fullness and relation, and urban capitalist individualistic consumerism. This impossible integration into any community, which has its roots in an original disruption of food integrity, has further repercussions of a sexual and sensual nature. In Danticat’s texts, food and sexuality are often presented as two correlate plagues for women. In Sophie’s case, the inadequacy of pleasurable sexual relations is not only motivated by the “American” rejection of the body. It also acts as a continuation of her family behaviors, a tradition marked by violence: Sophie’s mother was raped in a cane field when she became pregnant. She repeated the family tradition of “testing”—checking her daughter’s vagina with her fingers to verify her virginity. Sophie, in order to put an end to the “rape” by the mother, rips her flesh apart with a pestle, repeating the act of violence endured by her mother, continuing the vicious circle of victim/torturer. This cycle of violence appears as a continuation of her Haitian past, whereby women, such as Martine, have internalized the socially constructed “codification of women’s bodies as vessels for male gratification in marriage.”47 The extreme pain inflicted to the body is a violent act of memorization through the embodiment of the pain of women before her. As Chancy asserts, “sexuality … serves as a pivotal symbol of Haitian women’s attempt to formulate empowering identities.”48 It is also the protection against the repetition of violence. One remembers in order to prevent. The deflowering-ravishing pestle ren ders impossible any future violence from the mother where there is nothing left to “test.” It protects

Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 71. Ibid., 63. 46 Sophie’s situation is similar to Kim Chernin’s Panamanian patient in The Hungry Self. “ ‘My mother was born in Panama,’ she says abruptly one day, ‘dark- skinned like me. A big woman, but we didn’t think she was fat. Then when we came here, she and my father and my father’s sister … right away the four women went off and enrolled themselves in some diet group. That was what my father wanted. I was fourteen years old. My mother put me on a diet … and all this was part of the way she prepared me to become an American’ ” (Chernin 1994, 5–6). 47 Chancy, Framing Silence, 121. 48 Ibid., 107. 44 45

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Sophie’s daughter, Brigitte, born at the end of the novel, from potential violence. It also renders impossible the rape by Sophie’s fiancé, with whom she has sex after the self-rape. The cathartic pestle, tool of memory, breaks the cycle of violence. It is significant that the tool used for the self-rape is the cooking utensil used uniquely for the preparation of Haitian dishes.49 It consolidates the link of the rape with the Haitian family tradition, and it also mingles cooking tradition and sexuality in the same coercive structure. In “Women Like Us,” a short story by Danticat, a young Haitian girl expresses the two rules of her mother: Always use your ten fingers, which in her parlance meant that you should be the best little cook [and] never have sex before marriage, and even after you marry, you shouldn’t say you enjoy it or your husband won’t respect you.50 In this, the action of cooking and sexuality are presented as the two major subjections of a woman. In Sophie’s case, the forbidden pleasure of sexuality is displaced to the guilty pleasure of eating, as becomes clear in the following episode, where she gorges herself after sexual intercourse with her husband: “I waited for him to fall asleep, then went to the kitchen. I ate every scrap of the leftovers, then went to the bathroom, locked the door, and purged all the food out of my body.”51 Sophie’s remembering body is, however, not a cured body. Sexuality (and food with its associated activities and utensils) is still perceived as violence; men, even the loved, loving, and careful ones, still loom as potential rapists. The purged food is again the symptom of an unacceptable sexuality, the lasting memory of the mother’s rape, in both senses. This purging stands in stark contrast to the celebration of the communal feast that marked Sophie’s childhood in Haiti:  America is the land of disconnections, isolation, and painful oblivion. Moreover, isolation is multiplied to the extent that Sophie attempts to take nourishment in and from the new land: the more she swallows of the American model, the more she appears sick within the American context, and the more she is unable to reintegrate into the once healthy bosom of the Haitian community. The novel ends with the partial patching of these ill-fitting elements; healing, and a culturally complicated understanding of

The mother’s mortar and pestle find antithetical echoes in Audre Lorde’s “Biomythography,” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982, 71–80). For Lorde, the two objects standing proudly in the kitchen cabinet are the necessary tools to authenticate West Indian dishes and thus to conserve their memories by making the dishes “unforgettable” (1982, 72). In Lorde’s experience, the use of the mortar is accompanied by ritual sentences inscribed in “the script written by some ancient and secret hand” (1982, 73). As in Breath, the past of West Indian foremothers is etched in these monumental kitchen objects. Another similarity between the two texts is the transference of cooking gestures to sexuality. In Lorde’s text, the last time the narrator uses her mother’s mortar coincides with her first period. The pestle’s action in the mortar is explicitly described as a sensual sexual intercourse, with the repetition of the refrain “Back and forth, round up and down, back, forth round, round up and down” (1982, 74). The pestle’s movements transfer themselves into the girl’s body: “the tidal basin suspended between my hips shuddered at each repetition of the strokes” (1982, 79). As in Danticat’s novel, Lorde’s mortar and pestle bear the inscription of West Indian woman history, and are strongly linked with sexuality. Lorde however, describes these cooking gestures as a healing and pleasurable experience where both the mortar and pestle interact with the mashed, moist garlic balm between them. Contrast this with Danticat’s language of violence, disconnection, and rupture where the pestle alone acts against a silenced mortar-vagina. 50 Danticat, Krik? Krak! 219. 51 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 200. 49

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eating disorder, requires the re-creation of a transcultural space, with a memory concocted from Haitian and American ingredients.

The Transcultural Kitchen: Cooking Up Memory Generations of black folks who migrated north to escape life in the South, returned down home in search of a spiritual nourishment, a healing, that was fundamentally connected to reaffirming one’s connection to nature, to a contemplative life where one could take time, sit on the porch, walk, fish, and catch lightning bugs. —hooks, Sisters of the Yam52 Sophie painfully overcomes the yoke of food by engaging with it through cooking. In Breath, cooking intervenes in quite a literal manner. Through a meal she cooks, Sophie links the four generations of women of her family. Danticat complicates the action of cooking further in “Women Like Us,” where she links cooking and writing in a reciprocal metaphorical relation. Women’s cooking gestures are poetic acts, just as writing becomes a “survival soup.”53 These interchangeable activities establish a link between the formerly divided: past and present, local and global, mother and daughter, male and female, literary and digestive categories.54 The reconnection with the original land that hooks illustrates above in the epigraph is Sophie’s first step toward healing. Against her therapist’s advice, who thinks it is too early for a “confrontation,” Sophie takes her infant daughter to Haiti to meet the aunt and grandmother who raised her. What Sophie seeks is not a confrontation but, as hooks describes, a mutual “nourishment” among herself, her mothers, and her original land. Cooking is the thread that stitches the four generations of women. Almost magically—considering her previous estrangement to food—Sophie offers to cook for her elders a dish of “Rice, black beans, and herring sauce.”55 Even if Sophie’s biological mother is absent physically, she is included in the sharing since that meal, as the grandmother remarks, is her “mother’s favorite meal.”56 Food defines this community of women and links the generations in a collective, physical ceremony of tradition and memory:  “My grandmother chewed slowly as she gave my daughter her bottle.”57 The theme is a familiar one. In If I Can Cook / You Know God Can, Shange ritually feeds her ancestors by preparing them a New Year’s Eve meal that she eats on her own: “Though I ate alone that New Year’s Eve, I knew a calm I must attribute to the satisfaction of my ancestors. I tried to feed us.”58 With equal ritual hooks, Sisters of the Yam, 180. Danticat, Krik? Krak! 220. 54 In her “Reading Communities and Culinary Communities: The Gastropoetics of the South Asian Diaspora” (2002), Parama Roy brilliantly analyzes the properties of autobiographical and culinary writing, both particularly successful in creating “feminine genealogies” (486). She argues that the “coupling of the literal and the metaphoric upon which autobiographical writing and culinary syntax are both predicated” (473) contributes to establishing links between the present and the past, between the private and the national, between the birth land and the place of immigration and exile. This association of the literal and the metaphoric through the culinary vessel helps to explain the consolidation of the properties of food in Danticat’s texts. 55 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 149. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 151. 58 Shange, If I Can Cook, 9. 52 53

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and sense of tradition, the young narrator of Danticat’s work reinserts herself in the organism of the women of her community. By cooking a Haitian meal in Haiti, she also regrounds herself in the space and time of her childhood, buying the best plantain in the market, taking time to cook, away from a capitalist society: “My grandmother and I spent the day watching the beans boil.”59 The act and ritual of cooking, intrinsically a communal act, reconnects Sophie to orders and rhythms of time that the modern American household ignores. Re-creating oneself as whole is also healing the wounds between the self and others. Sophie, during one of her doublings, meets her mother, whom she calls her marassa,60 after the Haitian folk tradition: “Finally, as an adult, I had a chance to console my mother again. I was lying in bed with my mother … I kept thinking of my mother, who now wanted to be my friend.”61 According to hooks, forgiving those who have hurt us is essential for the recovery, which is that of the self-in-relation with the community.62 Having re-learned in Haiti how, through cooking, to erase the Western, imposed dichotomies, Sophie is now better equipped to erase the personal boundaries between herself and her mother, the boundaries that kept her mother alien from her, the boundaries that prevented her from caring in an engaged way for her mother, and from embracing her past. The necessary forgiving that leads to healing can happen only if the cause of her suffering is acknowledged, only if the mother’s individual gesture is replaced in the chain of violence to which it belongs, only when the individual and the political can be articulated, jointed, joined. Sophie calls it “piec[ing] together my mother’s entire story.”63 Her mother’s story is in fact put together again when the body of Haiti has regained all its parts. In contrast to the nostalgic land of relation constructed in Sophie’s initial stage in her remembrance process, the country represented at the end of the novel and at the end of Sophie’s journey regains its limbs of violence. The experience of a violent political event, the murder of a villager, the coalman Dessalines, directly leads to Sophie’s remembering of her mother’s life of violence: “Somehow, Dessalines’s death brought to mind all those frightening memories.”64 The full-fledged narrative of the mother’s rape, her insanity, her life as a restavec,65 come back to Sophie’s mind directly after her awakened political awareness. Sophie perceives her epiphany as vain: “It took me twelve years to piece together my mother’s entire story. By then, it was already too late.”66 Too late because Sophie’s knowledge will not allow her to cure her mother or to prevent her from aborting violently and from stabbing herself in the stomach. Too late to join with her mother, but not too late to join for her with her land and her past. After her return, Sophie’s husband comments on the fact that Sophie, for the first time, called Haiti home, whereas before “Home ha[d]‌ always been [her] mother’s house, that [she] could never go back to.”67 Again, we see that Sophie’s mother in North America stands as an individual fragment, separated from her history, her past, and her community. Such a disconnected house allows no return, no joining home. Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 121. For an elaborate analysis of marassas in Haitian folklore, its reclaiming in Danticat’s novel, and the general problematic of doubling, see N’Zengou-Tayo (2000, 129–34) and Chancy (1997, 124–28). 61 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 200. 62 hooks, Sisters of the Yam. 63 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 61. 64 Ibid., 140. 65 The restavecs, from the Creole “to stay with,” are slave children and youth in the service of wealthy Haitian families. See Jean-Robert Cadet’s detailed autobio- graphical account of his life as a restavec (1998). 66 Ibid., 61. 67 Ibid., 195. 59 60

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This “join”—in Beloved’s words, as drawn from Toni Morrison’s novel in the epigraph at the beginning of this essay—or this joint, is reached when the collective and the individual meet, when the land of origin becomes more than an imagined haven. When the individual stories of violence and oppression of women are connected with their political sources they are not isolated anymore but enter in a space where stories become histories. Only after acknowledging this violence can Sophie reconstruct for herself a syncretic space, new values, and a solid self. Only then can she build her transcultural self by braiding values of the Haitian and U.S. histories that she bears. The building of this transcultural space needs yet another joint, not in the content but in the medium used. A syncretic vessel for joining emerges from the reconciliation of writing and cooking that Danticat develops with another Haitian American character in her epilogue of Krik.68 In Haiti, as frequently stated in Danticat’s stories, writing is an activity forbidden to women: “And writing? Writing was as forbidden as dark rouge on the cheeks or a first date before eighteen. It was an act of indolence, something to be done in the corner when you should have been learning to cook.”69 The activity of writing is seen as a threat to both the domestic work imposed upon women and the agrarian activity that her family practiced: “We are a family with dirt under our fingers, do you know what that means? … That means we’ve worked the land. We’re not educated.”70 The narrator’s mother perceives her writing as a betrayal considering that her daughter has denied the activities of her ancestors: There are nine hundred and ninety-nine women who went before you and worked their fingers to coconut rind so you can stand here before me holding that torn old notebook that you cradle against your chest like your prettiest Sunday braid. I would rather you had spit in my face.71 From the perspective of a young Haitian living in the United States, writing for others is not a betrayal as the mother sees, but, rather, it is an innovative expression of solidarity toward her mothers and her sisters. “A thousand women urging you to speak, even if they speak in a tongue that is hard to understand. Even if it’s patois, dialect, Creole.”72 Even if these women will not be able to read the words and understand the English language used, it is their voice that Danticat remembers in writing. Through writing (and writing about food and culinary traditions), Danticat heals not only herself but also the anonymous Haitian women calling for her. Cooking and writing appear braided together, far from two irreconcilable activities. To describe her action, Danticat uses the concept of kitchen poets coined by Marshall in Reena: Are there women who both cook and write? Kitchen poets, they call them. They slip phrases into their stew and wrap meaning around their pork before frying it. They make narrative dumplings and stuff their daughters’ mouths so they say no more.73

Danticat, “Women Like Us.” Ibid., 219. 70 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 20. 71 Ibid., 222; italics in original. 72 Danticat, Krik? Krak! 222. 73 Ibid., 219–20. 68 69

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Danticat’s sisters’ cooking is presented as a form of expression similar to an art, like writing: “They carve onion sculptures and potato statues.”74 For women who do not have access to pen and paper, cooking acts as a tool of communication and a method of transmission of a lived history. Both cooked product and cooking body become the site and text of the historiography of generations of silenced women. The kitchen is not any longer a marginalized place outside of history where women are “locked up,” but a center of collective women’s memory. Marshall’s perception of the kitchen also evolves in this direction. In her text, initially, the kitchen evokes women’s alienation: “There again was that awful image of women locked away from the world in the kitchen with only each other to talk to, and their daughters locked in with them.”75 Later in her essay, it becomes the place of “ordinary speech” that makes for the best narratives. The kitchen is presented as a prerequisite, not an antithesis to writing: “I graduated from the corner of the kitchen to the neighborhood library.”76 Another split no longer in value in the context of Caribbean American women is that between the private and the political. The communal memory that is passed on from mothers to daughters is not only that of good cookin’ but also that of political activism: “In this man world you got to take yuh mouth and make a gun!”77 This discourse of empowerment, as Marshall describes, takes place in the kitchen. Danticat’s heroines, like Marshall’s, participate in this politicizing of the private kitchen.78 Writing, perceived as a humiliating “spit in [the] face” or as a degrading “dark rouge,” by the mothers, becomes a war mask that daughters put on the palimpsest of their mother’s indelible text: their cooking history. Unifying the themes of gender and physical and cultural healing, Danticat’s writing is described alternatively as cooking or as a female activity. It is a writing which, like Marshall’s, originated in the mother’s kitchen:  “Your mother, she introduced you to the first echoes of the tongue you now speak when at the end of the day, she would braid your hair while you sat between her legs, scrubbing the kitchen pots.”79 It brings the memory of the past just like cooking does, it braids women together just like food reunites them in an action of solidarity: When you write, it’s like braiding your hair … some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy, others are light, like the diverse Ibid., 221. Marshall, Reena and Other Stories, 3. 76 Ibid., 9. 77 Ibid., 7. 78 For Jeffrey Pilcher (¡Que Vivan los Tamales! 1998), women cooks participate directly in the construction or “imagination,” to use Benedict Anderson’s term, of the Mexican nation. Since culinary products are central to nation building, “by proclaiming their culinary patriotism, women have established their claim to citizenship, and thereby gained a basis for political participation” (6). Danticat’s novel certainly leads in that direction since remaining Haitian in exile relies heavily on speaking Creole and cooking Haitian. For a more explicit equivalence between food and nation building, see Ntozake Shange’s If I Can Cook / You Know God Can (1998) where the author proves by food the existence of an African American nation—in her account of the Fifth of July celebration (6)—and of a transnational diasporic African nation unified by common food emblems such as peas and rice, okras, and greens shared by Cubans, Afro-Brazilians, and Charlestonians. Politicizing the private space of the home and the kitchen is also a priority in nation building in India. In her Indian Traffic (1998), Parama Roy argues that ghar and bahir, or the cultural domains of “inner” and “outer,” or “home” and “work,” respectively, linked to masculinity and femininity need to be reconciled in order to build a nation acknowledging femininity (135). Roy shows that Gandhi, by “staging such everyday questions as clothing, diet, sexual activity, and personal hygiene” (1998, 148), presented traditionally feminized activities as “revolutionary,” and also allowed himself to go through a process of “becoming woman” (148–9). 79 Danticat, Krik? Krak! 224. 74 75

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women in your family. Those fables and metaphors, those similes and those soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their finger.80 The action of cooking, in this dense paragraph, is presented as the writing of a collectivity, the difficult braiding of histories of women. Writing is a “survival soup” made by these women’s hands. Chancy shows that Caribbean women escape what she calls “culture-lacune” “through the written text, through the actualization of identity in language, the world of words shaping a new reality within the inviolable space of the imagination.”81 The action of cooking projected within Danticat’s novel doubles and reinforces this liberating function of writing. It also, and perhaps more important, expands the definition of the written text beyond its culturally ratified definition (ink, pen, and paper in hand) and endows women cooks with authority, authorship. The inclusion of cooking in this wider definition of writing corresponds to what Angelia Poon describes as “a re-writing of the male ‘text’ or a redrawing of its textual borders to include perspectives and areas of experience hitherto excluded or marginalized.”82 By making food the archive of women’s history within a text written by a woman, Danticat braids the uneven threads of Haiti and the United States, the urban and the agrarian, erases borders between mind and body, and intermingles writing and cooking, reading and eating. She invalidates the distinction between the private and the political, overcoming Western dualisms, through the pain of remembrance. To conclude, we must realize that even though food is a painful wound and a daily struggle for many women, it is also through the rehabilitation of cooking as a valuable, historically symbolic, and constructive action that women can regain strength and memory of the past. It is important to note that in her action of writing a kitchen history, Danticat’s voice rejoins the network of the diasporic voices of other women—bell hooks (United States); Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua/United States); Paule Marshall (Barbados/United States); Gisèle Pineau (Guadeloupe/France); Simone Schwarz-Bart (Guadeloupe); and Ntozake Shange (United States), among others—a kitchen full of women who write food and cook their histories, in order to heal themselves and to reconstruct links with their mothers and sisters, both in time and space, through memory and common experience. We need to remember, though, that this jointed kitchen history is not a painless process, that it bears the trace of an irremediable loss, that of Sophie’s mother in Breath, and that of the oral history of the mothers who carve potato sculptures and do not write.

EPILOGUE KITCHEN HISTORY, TWENTY OR SO YEARS LATER “Edwidge Danticat’s Kitchen History,” reprinted in the preceding pages, appeared sixteen years ago and focused on the author’s inaugural fiction Krik, Krak! (1991) and Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994). Since then, Danticat has published seven books of adult fiction and nonfiction

Danticat, Krik? Krak! 220. Chancy, Framing Silence, 115. 82 Poon, “Re-Writing the Male Text,” paragraph 2. 80 81

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and the same number of volumes for young readers. Food, eating, cooking, and hunger have not ceased to marvel and preoccupy her. Thus, Danticat’s “Kitchen History” remains to be written. The title of this piece should also be revised since basic physiological needs and cultural forms of expression and transmission through eating, feeding, and cooking extend beyond the proverbial kitchen. They reach all sites of living, surviving, dying, and “living dyingly.”83 Feeding, or its foreclosure, mark the circuits of care in private relations between parent and child, child and parent, lover and lover, nation and noncitizens, global networks and local fishermen, sea and humans, biological lives and the Anthropocene. The sites of feeding and interrupted feeding are batey or neo-plantations where Haitian workers work for a pittance on Dominican sugar farms (Farming of Bones); contemporary immigration detention centers (Brother, I’m Dying); private and public spaces of dying such as bedroom and hospice room (Brother, I’m Dying and The Art of Death);84 glass-walled restaurants in Miami skyscrapers (Everything Inside);85 the desecrated “midlevel slum” of the fictional Cité pendue (Claire of the Sea Light);86 the eroded land, “dying topsoil,” and fish-depleted sea of the fictional Haitian village of Ville Rose.87 In short, the kitchen, or anti-kitchen, embraces all sites of private, public, political, and global exchanges. In The Farming of Bones, a river of death, the historical Massacre River, interrupts quotidian life. The protagonist Amabelle’s parents drown for simple want of local commerce and exchange to prepare good food: “It is a Friday market day. My mother, my father, and me, we cross into Dajabón, the first Dominican town across the river. My mother wants to buy cooking pots made by a Haitian pot maker who lives there.”88 The cafecitos served in dainty porcelain sets in the seeming delightfulness of Dominican households89 are symptoms of the exploitation of bodies and land, of the exhaustion of both land and humans by an extensive agriculture. In this context, cane workers’ bodies are scarred (“he is lavishly handsome … even though the cane stalks have ripped apart most of the skin on his shiny black face”).90 Life of Haitian workers is subject to a theft that leaves only the time of night as a site of freedom and being, as the elder Kongo explains to young Amabelle: “ ‘M’renmen darkness,’ he said. ‘In sugar land, a shack’s for sleeping, not for living. Living is only work, the fields. Darkness means rest.’ ”91 In this place of terror reducing human bodies to tools of labor and to bones, sustainable circles On the concept of “living dyingly,” see Danticat’s The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017), 9–22. 84 On food consumption and end of life, see my discussion of Danticat’s father’s dying days as she recalls them in Brother, I’m Dying ((New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 259). “The migrant father’s dying words, ordering the plainest of food,” I  argue, “also epitomizes the cultural death of migrants leaving their culinary complexity behind as they assimilate into the new culture” (Valérie Loichot, The Tropics Bite Back (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 63). 85 In “The Gift,” one of the stories of Everything Inside ((New York: Knopf, 2019), 83–108), two lovers, estranged by events of falling in and out love within an extramarital relation interconnected with tragic death and amputation that occurred in the 2010 earthquake, meet to contemplate their disconnection in a Miami hotel restaurant on a Fourth of July that is all but celebratory: “The glass-walled restaurant overlooking Biscayne Bay was her idea … in much happier days, [they] had both found the dim lighting and black leather couches not just intriguing but also romantic” (83). Miami is the author’s residence and, of course, Florida is home to over a hundred thousand people of Haitian descent. 86 Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light (New York: Vintage, 2013), 64. 87 Ibid., 52. 88 Danticat, The Farming of Bones (New York: Soho Press, 2013), 50. 89 “The Dominicans needed the sugar from the cane for their cafecitos and dulce de leche. They needed money from the cane” (ibid., 140). 90 Ibid., 1. 91 Ibid., 107. 83

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of nourishment are broken. According to plantation logic, those who produce are those who starve, in an interrupted relation from a land that should feed and be fed. The “sugar woman” who haunts Amabelle’s dream is a clear manifestation of the traumas of the past: “I am the sugar woman. You, my eternity.” The past is here to stay; the batey is plantation: “She taps her fingers against the muzzle. ‘Given to me a long time ago, this was, so I’d not eat the sugarcane.’ ”92 The tormented ghost of “sugar woman” wears a mask of torture. The muzzle was placed on enslaved humans accused of insubordination or of eating more than their allotment to food to bar their access to food, water, and speech. The persistent night visits of the sugar woman to Amabelle collapse time and subjectivity. The past is not past and the collective enslaved resonates in the individual, precisely through a tortured, enduring relationship to food production and consumption. What remains, however, is the persistence of humanity through beauty (“he is lavishly handsome”) and love (“M’renmen darkness” [I love darkness, my translation]). Similarly, and loudly, the use of parsley in Farming of Bones highlights a food situation that has gone tragically awry. Parsley first appears in the novel as the pleasant, cleansing, gentle herb that accompanies daily eating and rituals:  “We used pesi, perejil, parsley, the damp summer morningness of it … gentle and docile all at once … all this we savored for our food, our teas, our baths, to cleanse our insides as well as our outsides of old aches and griefs … to wash a new infant’s hair for the first time and … a corpse’s remains one final time.”93 In the quotidian, living life of the inhabitants, parsley accompanies basic eating and sacred rituals for the dead and the living. It presents a multilingual peace since the words in Kreyol, Spanish, and English (pesi, perejil, parsley) are juxtaposed in an uncomplicated harmony. But perejil, of course, is also the tragic emblematic weapon of the 1937 massacre of Haitians at the Dominican Republic border, the shibboleth that led to identification, division, and mass murder. Perejil, in the hands of the perpetrators of violence, violates the borders of bodies in an attempt to make artificially airtight political borders of a nation based in part on the exclusion of Black Haitian subjects. “Tell us what it is, one [soldier] said. ‘Que diga perejil’ … But I didn’t get my chance … Our jaws were pried open and parsley stuffed into our mouths.”94 Force-feeding literally drowns speech in the blood shed by handfuls of parsley twigs, thereby turning feeding into the opposite of care. Forced ingestion, a rape of the mouth if you will, kills the possibility of speaking, a prime element of subjectivity. Ritualistic cleansing, a basic performance of humanity becomes, in the hands of perpetrators, the worst kind of inhuman treatment of human beings: racial cleansing.95 What emerges from these scenes is the persistence of the past into the present through food. Amabelle remembers the enslaved sugar woman’s torture; contemporary Haitians in the Dominican Republic continue to be expelled from acute exploitation, to racial discrimination, to statelessness. Similarly, the present gives us “a prophetic vision of the past”96 since the Ibid., 152. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 62. 94 Ibid., 193. 95 Fortunately, not all manifestations of the nation through food are nationalistic. See, for instance, the celebration of soup joumou, soupe giraumon, or pumpkin soup, a national dish associated with Haiti’s independence in 1804 in Danticat’s 2015 Untwine:  “Let there be Haitian food, rice and beans and fried pork, griyo, and pumpkin soup, especially on January 1, when we celebrate Haitian Independence Day by drinking bowl after bowl” (11). The thirst for goodness and national freedom, the pleasurable thirst-hunger for the soup stands, the unity expressed in the pronoun “we,” stand in stark contrast with the parsley scene (and also with the broken family and broken bodies at the center of Untwine: A Novel (New York: Scholastic, 2015)). 96 Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 59. 92 93

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contemporariness of hunger in Haiti has deep roots in historical, land, people, and sea exploitation. In 2019, according to the World Food Program (WFP), one in three Haitians needs urgent food assistance.97 The situation is in part explained by US subsidies unfairly competing with agricultural production in Haiti and by centuries of exploitation, debt, and occupation. Hunger in Haiti is rendered even more severe by the depletion of soil and sea of their resources in the face of ecological crises. In her 2013 novel, Claire of the Sea Light, Danticat faces the question of hunger with an eye on the present-future of the Anthropocene. In her most ecologically aware novel to date, Danticat deplores the situation of hunger experienced in the fictional fishing village of Ville Rose, “twenty-eight miles from” the very real city of Port-au-Prince.98 The novel begins with a “freak wave, measuring between ten and twelve feet high,”99 worthy of the name “tsunami,” often an announcer of earthquakes. Caleb the fisherman, pushed by poverty to fish in extreme conditions, sinks with his boat Fifine. A few pages later, Danticat provides us with an explicitly ecological explanation on unsustainability:  Lapèch, fishing, was no longer profitable … they would pull fish out of the sea that were so small that in the old days they would have to be thrown back. But now you had to do with what you got; even if you knew that deep in your gut that it was wrong, for example to keep baby conch shells … you could no longer afford to fish in season, to let the sea replenish itself.100 This interrupted cycle of nourishment and life, where all living beings struggle for survival, a Haitian reality, also resonates with the depletion of sea and ocean lives worldwide, thus signaling Haiti not as an exception but as a manifestation of a worldwide reality. In a puzzling chapter of Claire of the Sea Light entitled “The Frogs,”101 during an extraordinary heat wave, amphibians “had been dying quietly,” so much so that the chapter’s protagonist, the pregnant Gaëlle Lavaud, had “been haunted by visions of frog carcasses slithering into her mouth.”102 The slow and systematic death of frogs could be explained from an ecological viewpoint. Frogs have been extinguishing at an alarming rate in Haiti.103 Danticat, however, thickens the plot. A strange intimacy, involving care and burial, develops between the woman and the frogs, to the point that “she convinced herself that the frogs needed her and she them.”104 This solidarity may be explained by their shared situation of vulnerability, both living in a world where they are destined to perish. As critic Abdul Jan Mohamed would put it, they are “death-bound subjects.”105 Gaëlle, “more than six months pregnant … feared that, should United Nations World Food Programme, “World Food Programme Ramping Up to Reach 700,000 with Emergency Operations in Haiti,” December 6, 2019. Available online:  https://www.wfp.org/news/world-food-programmeramping-reach-700000-emergency-operations-haiti-0 (accessed February 11, 2020). 98 Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light, 63. 99 Ibid., 3. 100 Ibid., 9. 101 Ibid., 41–63. 102 Ibid., 41. 103 Live Science, “Scientists: Haiti’s Wildlife Faces Mass Extinction,” November 17, 2010. Available online: https://www. livescience.com/8986-scientists-haiti-wildlife-faces-mass-extinction.html (accessed February 20, 2020). 104 Ibid., 43. 105 See Abdul Jan Mohamed’s Death-Bound Subject:  Richard Wright and the Archeology of Death (Durham:  Duke University Press, 2005). 97

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the temperature continue to rise, she too might burst.”106 Gaëlle is with child, a child that an inadequate medical system condemns to severe disability and death: “the gynecologist at Sainte Thérèse had insisted on a sonogram. The baby … was shown to have a cyst growing in her chest and down her entire spine. If she lived long enough to be born, the doctor said, she would probably die soon after.”107 The birth of the child contradicts a false diagnosis (due to obsolete equipment, untrained or rushed staff, the unavailability of a follow-up ultrasound?). Gaëlle’s daughter “was born perfect, a perfect little Rose” who, “when her mother held her up to her breasts … immediately opened her still blood-tinted little mouth and started nursing.”108 The easy access to mother’s milk establishes a smooth flow of life in a space marked by death. The “still blood-tinted little mouth,” however, foreshadows the tragic end of little Rose, who will die at age 7 in a traffic accident, “riding in the back of a motto taxi with her teenage caretaker.”109 Little Rose is in an entangled relation with her namesake Ville Rose, in a context where, as Édouard Glissant would put, are “as many dead as living under the sentence of death.”110 This is also a situation of systemic Black death, which Christina Sharpe so compellingly exposed and theorized in her In the Wake.111 What then, can we draw from the cryptic passage when pregnant Gaëlle forces down her throat an ant-covered tiny baby koki frog? What does it tell us about eating in such a death-bound land? “She took another vigorous gulp and forced [the koki] down farther … somewhere deep inside of her.”112 “Two types of animals were now inside of her, in peril” the narrator states, “her daughter Rose, and now this frog. Let them fight and see who will win.”113 Much is packed in that episode:  animals and humans fighting for depleting resources, the struggle for survival among two death-bound creatures, but also the confusion of the digestive and the gestational (indeed, the swallowed frog somehow makes it from the stomach to the womb). In this ecologically driven passage of Claire of the Sea Light, published almost twenty years after Breath, eating is still enmeshed in questions of overeating, ill eating, or under eating. Twenty years later, eating, for Danticat, is still fraught with violence done onto women’s bodies, whether societal, sexual, or environmental. It is only one example of the many ways in which eating (what should nourish and heal; what should flow like milk from mother’s breast to daughter’s mouth) becomes a channel of violence. But this is no kitchen history. This is an extreme form of eating oppression. Kitchen history, however, prevails from Danticat’s 1996 collection of stories Krik, Krak! to her 2019 collection of stories Everything Inside. It remains the antidote to the violence done onto bodies and lands, the site of transmission that keeps memory, hence humanity, alive. The protagonist of the short story “In the Old Days,”114 a young woman named Nadia, marvels at her mother’s restaurant kitchen. As sure evidence of successful mother-daughter transmission, the owner named her restaurant “Nadia.” “This corner table,” Nadia reflects, “had been in my

Ibid., 41. Ibid., 49–50. 108 Ibid., 62. 109 Ibid., 14. 110 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 6. 111 See Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 112 Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light, 59. 113 Ibid. 114 Danticat, “In the Old Days,” in Everything Inside, 38–62. 106 107

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life for as long as I can remember. It was there when I’d napped in my stroller, where I learned to color between the lines, where I did my homework and read dozens of books as my mother worked … and over the years, I grew to love it.”115 Twenty years later, Danticat’s kitchen readers, writers, and poets still endure.

Bibliography Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1959. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Bambara, Toni Cade. The Salt Eaters. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Braziel, Jana Evans, and Kathleen LeBesco, eds. Bodies out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Cadet, Jean-Robert. Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Casey, Ethan. “Remembering Haiti.” Callaloo 18, no. 2 (1995): 524–8. Chancy, Myriam J. A. Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women Writers. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Chernin, Kim. The Hungry Self. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! New York: Vintage Books, 1995, 1996. Gabaccia, Donna. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Glissant, Édouard. Le Discours antillais. Paris: Seuil, 1981. hooks, bell. Sisters of the Yam. Boston: South End Press, 1993. Hughes, Marvalene. “Soul, Black Women, and Food.” In Food and Culture, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 272–80. New York: Routledge, 1997. Lionnet, Françoise. “Narrating the Americas: Transcolonial Métissage and Maryse Condé’s La Migration des cœurs.” In Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter- American Literary Dialogues, ed. Monika Kaup and Debra J. Rosenthal, 65–87. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. New York: The Crossing Press, 1982. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon, 1966. Marshall, Paule. Reena and Other Stories. New York: The Feminist Press, 1983. Mintz, Sidney. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom. Boston: Beacon, 1996. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. Nesbitt, Nick. Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José. “Rewriting Folklore: Traditional Beliefs and Popular Culture in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!” MaComère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars 3 (2000): 123–40. Picard, Michel. Lire le Temps. Paris: Minuit, 1989. Pilcher, Jeffrey. ¡Que Vivan los Tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

Ibid., 44.

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Danticat’s Kitchen History Poon, Angelia. “Re-Writing the Male Text: Mapping Cultural Spaces in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place.” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4, no. 2 (2000): 30 paragraphs. Roy, Parama. Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Roy, Parama. “Reading Communities and Culinary Communities: The Gastropoetics of the South Asian Diaspora.” Positions 10, no. 2, 2002: 471–502. Shange, Ntozake. If I Can Cook / You Know God Can. Boston: Beacon, 1998. Sobo, Elisa. “The Sweetness of Fat, Health, Procreation and Sociability in Rural Jamaica.” In Food and Culture, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 256–71. New York: Routledge, 1997. Warnes, Andrew. Hunger Overcome: Food and Resistance in Twentieth-Century African American Literature. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004.

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CHAPTER 16 “A PEOPLE DO NOT THROW THEIR GENIUSES AWAY”: DANTICAT’S “KITCHEN POET” LITERARY ANTECEDENTS

Wilson C. Chen

I open with a quotation from Toni Morrison, one also included in Edwidge Danticat’s memorial essay to Morrison and Paule Marshall after their passings:1  in the essay “Rootedness:  The Ancestor as Foundation,” Morrison opines that it is “interesting to evaluate Black literature on what the writer does with the presence of an ancestor.”2 In reflecting on the significance of efforts by African American women writers in the late twentieth century to recover the artistic traditions, vernacular arts, and literary voices of Black women writers, we find perhaps no figure more prominent than Alice Walker, whose breathtaking 1974 essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” first published in Ms. magazine and anthologized widely in subsequent decades, called on readers and writers to excavate, interpret, and validate the imaginative work of these unrecognized intellectual predecessors. Drawing attention to the vernacular arts of her mother, grandmother, and other maternal ancestors who, as artists without the proper name, passed on to her the gift of art, storytelling, and song, Walker presents us with the central metaphor/concept of “gardens” to explain a deep source of Black women’s artistic inheritance. And so it was through this journey “in search of [her] mother’s garden” that Walker found her own.3 In many ways, Walker’s gardens parallel Paule Marshall’s equally suggestive metaphor/ concept of “poets in the kitchen,” vividly described in Marshall’s influential 1983 essay, “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” which was first published in the New York Times Book Review as part of its “The Making of a Writer” series.4 It is precisely this lineage, which also prominently includes the extraordinary voice of Zora Neale Hurston, that Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat invokes in the many ways she pays homage to the “kitchen poets” that inform her literary vision and voice. At the same time, however, Danticat’s encounter with this tradition is rendered in mediated form, much more so than Walker’s or even Marshall’s engagement with these literary predecessors. In her turn to intellectual genealogy, Danticat hybridizes further the tradition of “kitchen poets,” both I would like to thank Steven Burgess, Cesraea Rumpf, Pat Somers, and the editors of this volume for reading and commenting on previous versions of this chapter. Edwidge Danticat, “The Ancestral Blessings of Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall,” New  Yorker, August 17, 2019. Available online:  https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-ancestral-blessings-of-toni-morrison-andpaule-marshall (accessed October 11, 2019). 2 Toni Morrison, “Rootedness:  The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1984), 343. 3 Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens:  Womanist Prose (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1983), 243. 4 It is perhaps worth noting that Marshall published an earlier version of her “From the Poets in the Kitchen” essay in 1973. See Paule Marshall, “Shaping the World of My Art,” New Letters 40 (Autumn 1973): 97–112. 1

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by introducing a specifically Haitian diasporic history and, importantly, by conceptualizing explicitly a highly dynamic, heterogeneous Black female literary tradition in which conflict, negotiation, and even translation enable the drive for unity and coherence. Responding to Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’s helpful observation that Danticat’s writings “should be located at the interstices of the space where black America empties into and converges with black Atlantic,”5 this chapter suggests that Danticat’s multiple positionings—and, in particular, the ways in which her work bridges and translates between different vernacular literary traditions within the Black diaspora—provide readers with a framework for comparative Black diasporic work. This chapter specifically explores how Danticat complicates Marshall’s themes of cultural inheritance by emphasizing difference, conflict, and at times transgression, and also by insisting on the intersubjective dialogue and negotiation necessary to carry forward the tradition of kitchen poets. This is evident in Danticat’s own “kitchen poets” essay in Krik? Krak! It also becomes apparent in her depiction of affiliation vis-à-vis Black diversity in Breath, Eyes, Memory, and in her powerful, compelling expressions of kinship with Zora Neale Hurston.

Danticat’s “Kitchen Poets” In “The Ancestral Blessings of Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall,” a recent, highly personal reflection on the loss of two literary giants who passed within just one week of each other in the summer of 2019, Danticat writes about her love for both Morrison and Marshall, and her intellectual debts to them. Danticat also takes this opportunity to reflect on the value of “ancestor worship” and the power of “ancestral blessings,” for indeed she, Morrison, and Marshall were all “ancestor worshippers.” Citing the influence of Morrison’s essay, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” Danticat explains, “Ancestors, [Morrison] wrote, ‘are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people.’ Growing up, I had been told similar things by the women in my family. I had been assured, and reassured, that our ancestors were always with us, no longer in body but always in spirit.”6 As a younger person, Danticat narrates, as a fledgling writer in the eleventh grade, she encountered a literary ancestral tradition through Mari Evans’s edited collection Black Women Writers (1950–1980):  A Critical Evaluation, which included “scholarly writings on the works of Marshall, Morrison, Lucille Clifton, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, Gayl Jones, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Maya Angelou, and in some cases it also featured excerpts of their work.”7 The Evans collection, a 525-page archive of heterogeneous Black women’s voices, representing fifteen different literary figures, empowered Danticat the emerging writer, who recalls, I felt its combined words trailing me, like an ancestral blessing. It was as though a community of black women had gathered to offer me their approval. The wisdom of the women in my

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, “Danticat and the African American Women’s Literary Tradition,” in Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, ed. Martin Munro (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 67. 6 Danticat, “The Ancestral Blessings.” 7 Ibid. 5

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family had also been reaffirmed. I felt an expanded sense of my cultural lineage in learning that there were many different kinds of storytellers, novelists, essayists, playwrights, and poets.8 This plurality of ancestral voices, in its expansive breadth as a community, provides a powerful blessing for the young writer and also enables considerable agency as she embarks on her own writing career. Both blessing and agency are ultimately foregrounded in Danticat’s own “kitchen poets” essay, “Women like Us.” The epilogue to her short-story cycle Krik? Krak!, “Women like Us” is her explicit, extended engagement with the formative metaphor/concept of “kitchen poets”; it is a narrative in which the theme of matrilineal descent and inheritance is paramount and placed within the vernacular setting of the kitchen. This focus on kitchen poets is fitting for an epilogue to a short-story cycle whose title, Krik? Krak!, is a direct invocation of the rich storytelling tradition in Haiti and the Black Caribbean that continues to be passed down across the generations. A  storyteller’s “Krik?” prompts in response an energetic “Krak!” from an active, listening audience, in a call-and-response pattern that demonstrates the way storytelling traditions are practiced, maintained, and even passed down across generations—say, from an elder storyteller to an active, listening youth. And indeed to a great extent, this epilogue, which features the interplay of female voices across generations of the Haitian diaspora, is structured by this dialogical, call-and-response pattern. The narrative utilizes a provocative secondperson “you” to address the mind of the young female writer (a sort of stand-in for a young Danticat) and reveals ultimately a first-person-plural voice framing the narrative: a collective “we” that both nurtures and challenges the young writer, the “you” of the story. The women in Danticat’s genealogy, like Walker’s maternal ancestors and their “gardens,” were artists even if the expression of their artistic gifts was incipient or only partially realized. In a passage reminiscent of Walker’s essay and the many historic ways that Black women’s artistic practices were thwarted but inwardly sustained, the narrative sheds light on the strivings of a generation of Haitian women under a regime that maintained its power through political repression, brutality, and sexual violence: “Most of the women in your life had their heads down. They would wake up one morning to find their panties gone. It is not shame, however, that kept their heads down. They were singing, searching for meaning in the dust. And sometimes, they were talking to faces across the ages, faces like yours and mine.”9 In a similar vein, Walker, writing about her efforts to recover the power of this creative energy among her maternal ancestors, explains, “And yet, it is to my mother—and all our mothers who were not famous—that I went in search of the secret of what has fed that muzzled and often mutilated, but vibrant, creative spirit that the black woman has inherited, and that pops out in wild and unlikely places to this day.”10 The Haitian women in the life of a young writer like Danticat, having sustained themselves across a dangerous, threatening late twentieth century in which Haiti and its diaspora suffered under the violently repressive Duvalier regime and its aftermath, prove to be kitchen poets through their song and search for meaning under the most difficult of circumstances. But as poets having emerged from this recent Haitian history Ibid. Edwidge Danticat, “Women like Us,” in Krik? Krak! (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 223. 10 Walker, “In Search,” 238–9. 8 9

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in which “writers are tortured and killed if they are men” and called “lying whores, then raped and killed, if they are women,”11 they are far from enthusiastic about a daughter embarking on the path of a writer—and this dissonance is central in Danticat’s epilogue. In “Women like Us,” Danticat pays homage both to Walker’s “gardens” and to Marshall’s “Poets in the Kitchen.” Tellingly, Danticat lauds Marshall as “the greatest kitchen poet of all” in her dedication in Krik? Krak!, and it is also noteworthy that both writers hail from Brooklyn, a geographic space whose cultural significance in Black diasporic history in the United States should not be overlooked. At the same time that Danticat affirms this literary heritage, she also revises Marshall’s vision of “kitchen poets” by foregrounding difference, conflict, and transgression in her staging of an intersubjective dialogue between the young writer and her maternal ancestors. This is not a unidirectional cultural transmission from these elders but instead a complicated, multifaceted negotiation that requires innovation and transition as this tradition is carried forward by the “you” receiving this wisdom. And it is only through this complicated, at times confusing, intersubjective dialogue with her ancestors that the young writer becomes empowered as a storyteller and writer. The kitchen poets featured in Danticat’s story are “women who both cook and write,” and the narrative’s conflation of the imagery of food preparation with the diction of writing suggests how inextricably linked the two practices are among these women—cooking and writing are linked in almost metonymic fashion in the imagery. Cooking becomes an expressive form and artistic practice, as these women “slip phrases into their stew and wrap meaning around their pork before frying it.” Yet these cultural practices are not wholly liberating to their daughters, for if stories are food, then they “make narrative dumplings and stuff their daughter’s mouths so they say nothing more.”12 Hence, “cooking” in these domestic vernacular spaces is both narrative production and narrative repression. The kitchen poets both inspire artistic expression and seek to control, stifle it. Notwithstanding the efforts to repress, this daughter of diaspora will not be silenced, as evidenced by the surreptitious “scraping from her. Krik? Krak! Pencil, paper.”13 And by persisting in her craft, she claims this narrative inheritance, puts pencil to paper thereby shifting her platform to an explicitly written one, and refuses to conform to her mother’s wish that she stay “quiet.” There is struggle at the core of this model of cultural inheritance, both in the efforts of the kitchen poets to control the daughter’s narrative production and in the daughter’s claiming of her own voice. This is conceptually significant, for if we allow ourselves to think broadly and imaginatively about the implications of Danticat’s emphasis on intergenerational struggle within a Black diasporic matrilineage, we may gain further insight into literary representations of dissonance in diasporic cultural inheritance. For instance, with regard to a work like Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981), we might revisit her dramatic depiction of the struggle of one rebellious daughter of diaspora, Jadine Childs, to come to terms with the mythical “diaspora mothers” over contested questions of Blackness, womanhood, identity, and destiny. This is a challenge that Jadine is unable to overcome in the course of the novel, but it is a project that she commits to at the end of the novel. It may be expected then that a presumptive “daughter” figure like Jadine, wanting to create herself and also to mark her own difference from the women who came before her, struggles vigorously with the female ancestral figures that beckon to, taunt, Danticat, “Women like Us,” 221. Ibid., 219–20. 13 Ibid., 220. 11 12

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and challenge her. The struggle of a recalcitrant character like Jadine with these demanding maternal figures is ongoing and fundamentally unresolved in Morrison’s novel; it involves, to the frustration of some readers, Jadine’s alternating episodes of flight/escape, retreat, rejection, engagement, and combat. Danticat’s example of intergenerational struggle offers estranged, “improper” daughters of diaspora a different path forward by emphasizing a different model of self-formation. As it turns out, many metaphors drawn from the domestic space converge in Danticat’s “Women like Us,” including notably the braiding of hair, which figures here both expression and repression—that is, both artistic production and a kind of sublimation linked to the repression of difference. On the one hand, Danticat insists, writing is “like braiding your hair”; taking a “handful of unruly strands,” you attempt to “bring them unity.”14 Moreover, the “unruly strands” are even compared with the “diverse women in your family,” and the writer brings these women and their various influences together to create a kind of unity out of diversity—a familiar expression of collective identity. On the other hand, this activity can also be repressive. Addressing the young writer again in the second person and then linking her collectively to a larger community of kitchen poets, the narrator pointedly observes, “No, women like you don’t write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.”15 In this case, the sublimation has been about containing “the unruliness, the rebelliousness” within acceptable domestic practices, and this the young writer needs to transgress. The daughter refuses to be silenced, and the narrative suggests both continuity and difference in her sustained interactions with her predecessors. She recalls her mother’s “disappointment” in learning that “words” would be her “life’s work” (“like the kitchen had always been hers”) as well as her mother’s insistence that the “family needs a nurse, not a prisoner” (emphasis in original)—repeatedly underscoring the particular vulnerability of writers in recent Haitian history. At the same time, the daughter also draws strength from her maternal ancestors collectively: “You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you looked a lot like your mother and her mother before her. It was their whispers that pushed you, their murmurs over pots sizzling in your head. A thousand women urging you to speak through the blunt tip of your pencil. Kitchen poets, you call them.” Moreover, it is these ancestral figures that “asked for your voice so that they could tell your mother in your place that yes, women like you do speak, even if they speak in a tongue that is hard to understand.”16 To be sure, with the continually changing contexts of a Haitian diaspora in motion and across generations, intersecting and entangled with the cultural politics of surrounding communities, one’s “tongue” and even “voice” pose complex questions and, more often than might be assumed, can be “hard to understand.” (This is a question I  explore more extensively in section three below.) Yet the ancestral “ghosts,” the bolstering energy of a “thousand women,” have been marshaled in this narrative into an “army of women” ready to sustain and support this young writer, for “you have always cried ‘Krik?’ and we have answered ‘Krak!’ and it has shown us that you have not

Ibid. Ibid., 221. 16 Ibid., 222. 14 15

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forgotten us.”17 Stepping into the space of the storyteller, this daughter of diaspora invites and channels the sacred energy of these kitchen poets that came before.

Marshall, Danticat, and the Politics of Affiliation The implied unity at the end of “Women like Us” is reached in a way that is markedly different from the representation of cultural inheritance in Marshall’s 1983 autobiographical essay, “From the Poets in the Kitchen.” Even as she pays homage to Marshall as the “greatest kitchen poet of all,” Danticat’s own careful rendering of the conditions of affiliation and identification complicate the model of cultural transmission in Marshall’s influential essay. Marshall extends Walker’s gardens metaphor into the expansive, creative spaces of “kitchens,” and significantly, Marshall’s kitchens immediately impress us as a global cultural space in which immigrant Barbadian American identities are negotiated in early-twentieth-century, multiracial, multiethnic, urban Brooklyn. And instead of the figure of the search—as in Walker’s journey—Marshall’s childhood experiences with the kitchen poets are represented through the figure of apprenticeship, as she observes, “It’s all a matter of exposure and a training of the ear for the would-be writer in those early years of apprenticeship.”18 Indeed, Marshall grew up with these poets in the kitchen—even if they didn’t “look like” poets, being “ordinary housewives and mothers” whose daily lives were largely structured by the hard physical labor of scrubbing floors. Their space of creative expression was the “basement kitchen” of her family’s “brownstone house,” and over tea or cocoa, “they talked—endlessly, passionately, poetically, and with impressive range. No subject was beyond them.”19 Not only does Marshall’s “kitchen” space expand Walker’s “gardens” in its vision of Black female vernacular arts, but it also extends literary predecessor Zora Neale Hurston’s celebrated community “porch,” where the hardworking townsfolk in Eatonville gathered at the end of each day of toil to tell stories— one of Hurston’s own spaces of apprenticeship, where early in life she was exposed to the black Southern art of storytelling. In her fictional Their Eyes Were Watching God, which clearly also has ethnographic qualities, Hurston observes a porch at sundown: It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths.20 The porch as a cultural space is both sustaining and transformative, allowing the hardworking residents of Eatonville not only to recover their humanity from conditions of imbrutement but also to create an elevated platform in which they feel “powerful” and become “lords of sounds.”

Ibid., 224. Paule Marshall, “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” in Reena and Other Stories (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1983), 4. 19 Ibid., 5. 20 Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 1. 17 18

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Extending the formative concepts of Walker’s garden and Hurston’s porch, Marshall’s essay (as well as Danticat’s subsequent “Women like Us”) is also suggestive of the thematic linkages between different Black diasporic communities in the United States. The poets in Marshall’s basement kitchen were “women in whom the need for self-expression was strong, and since language was the only vehicle readily available to them they made of it an art form that—in keeping with the African tradition in which art and life are one—was an integral part of their lives.”21 It was in this space that the young Marshall was exposed to the “insight, irony, wit and humor they brought to their stories … and their poet’s inventiveness and daring with language.”22 It was also in this space that Marshall was exposed to the culturally distinctive linguistic practices of Barbadian American immigrant women: They had taken the standard English taught them in the primary schools of Barbados and transformed it into an idiom, an instrument that more adequately described them— changing around the syntax and imposing their own rhythm and accent so that the sentences were more pleasing to their ears. They added the few African sounds and words that had survived, such as the derisive suck-teeth sound and the word “yam,” meaning to eat. And to make it more vivid, more in keeping with their expressive quality, they brought to bear a raft of metaphors, parables, Biblical quotations, sayings and the like.23 Marshall’s insistence on this literary lineage above all others helps to preserve a powerful continuity between different spaces and generations across the Black Atlantic, between West Africa, Barbados, and their brownstone in Brooklyn.24 This diasporic continuity is extended further in Marshall’s own childhood journey from the kitchen to the library, as she eventually discovers the work of African American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar in the Brooklyn Public Library. Dunbar, writing in the post-emancipation United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, published many of his poems in African American dialect. His particular use of English initially presents some difficulty for the young Marshall, but the difficulty quickly gives way to cultural affinity, as Marshall relates, “Although I had a little difficulty at first with the words in dialect, the poem spoke to me as nothing I had read before of the closeness, the special relationship I had had with my father.” Another poem by Dunbar “reminded me of the way my mother sometimes yelled at my sister and me to get out of bed in the mornings.”25 What Marshall emphasizes here is the psychological

Marshall, “From the Poets,” 6. Ibid., 7–8. 23 Ibid., 8. 24 It is perhaps worth observing that Marshall’s valorization of the space of the kitchen table is resonant with many of the values of the broader US women of color literary and social movement of the 1970s and 1980s in which Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press occupied such a central role. Cofounder Barbara Smith explains that “we were officially founded and chose our name because the kitchen is the center of the home, the place where women in particular work and communicate with each other and because we wanted to convey the fact that we are a kitchen-table, grassroots operation, begun and kept alive by women who cannot rely on inheritances or other benefits of class privilege to do the work we need to do.” See Barbara Smith, “A Press of Our Own: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press,” in Communication at the Crossroads: The Gender Gap Connection, ed. Ramona R. Rush and Donna Allen (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1989), 203. 25 Marshall, “From the Poets,” 10. 21 22

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and cultural intimacy of this literary encounter, certainly not difference or distance (a point underscored by her grammatical subordination of “a little difficulty” in her response to the first poem). The takeaway for her is how powerfully the poem speaks to her, and from this point Marshall goes on to invoke a Black intellectual tradition in the United States—citing such luminaries as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth. This affirmation of “ourselves” and “our history” is a moving, powerful, yet rather uncomplicated representation of Black diasporic identity that brings into one community both “West Indian” and “native black American.”26 And with Dunbar inspiring her as a bridge between the vernacular arts of her mother’s kitchen and an African American literary publishing world, Marshall begins pursuit of her own writerly dream. Reflecting on the significance of Marshall’s “Poets in the Kitchen,” I  would suggest that the particular model of literary inheritance that she demonstrates in this essay—that is, Marshall’s tribute to the kitchen poets for the “rich legacy of language and culture they so freely passed on to [her] in the wordshop of the kitchen”27—is in marked contrast to the model of struggle and negotiation found in Danticat’s “Women like Us.” Marshall’s ready embrace of a larger Black intellectual tradition (via Dunbar and the space of the public library) also contrasts with Danticat’s very deliberate, careful rendering of the opportunities for affiliation and identification. Indeed, the literacy spaces historically provided by the Brooklyn Public Library system also signal important thematic continuities between Marshall and Danticat, both of whom experience formative intellectual encounters with Black diasporic literature in the Brooklyn Public Library. In Danticat’s essay, “Daughters of Memory,” from her collection Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010), she identifies her own hunger for “words from home” as a Haitian immigrant encountering racism and xenophobia in the United States; she also explains her prior lack of knowledge of Haitian literary voices—her early education in Haiti being a product of a colonial, Euro-centric educational system and also a brutal dictatorship that repressed Haitian literary voices.28 Hence, it is fortunate that she discovers and then explores, at age 17, the “two new narrow shelves” devoted to Livres Haitiens (Haitian Books) at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.29 Through Livres Haitiens, Danticat encounters the work of Haitian writers Jan J. Dominique, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, and also Jacques Roumain, all of whom help Danticat negotiate her complex web of influences in a Haitian diaspora where cultural memory is challenged, imperfect, mediated, and subject to a haunting history of political repression in Haiti. Identifying herself, along with Jan. J. Dominique, as a “literary orphan” afloat in the diaspora, Danticat traces the beginning of her desire to “merge my own narratives with the oral and written narratives of others” to this early reading of novels by Dominique and Roumain. By exploring the Livres Haitiens shelves of the public library, Danticat finds affiliation with these other “literary orphans” of the Haitian diaspora, and as an adopted literary family of sorts, they become guiding literary lights for her intellectual journey.30 Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12. 28 Edwidge Danticat, “Daughters of Memory,” in Create Dangerously:  The Immigrant Artist at Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 59–60. 29 Ibid., 61. 30 Ibid., 62–3. 26 27

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Let us consider also Danticat’s account in her 1994 novel Breath, Eyes, Memory of a kind of cross-cultural affiliation within the global Black diaspora that takes place through the courtship between the protagonist Sophie, a Haitian-American immigrant, and Joseph, an African American musician from Louisiana. The two immediately bond, humorously, over their respective Creoles, with Sophie admitting to her native Haitian tongue and Joseph affirmatively pointing out, “We have something in common. Mwin aussi. I speak a form of Creole, too. I am from Louisiana. My parents considered themselves what we call Creoles. Is it a small world or what?” Joseph, significantly older than Sophie and in these early cultural exchanges clearly the more didactic figure, invokes, on the one hand, their common Africanness, the notion that, as he puts it to Sophie, “you and I, we are already part of each other.”31 At the same time, in their courtship, the many steps they take in learning about each other, their stories, and their cultures effectively model a kind of Black diasporic encounter in which particular bridges and specific identifications are made. Recognition is a more labored, careful, negotiated, and even imaginative process. For instance, their dialogue about music becomes deeply instructive and a source of diasporic consciousness. Sophie learns that Joseph “liked to play slave songs, Negro spirituals, both on his saxophone and piano… One day, he would move back to Providence for good, and write his own songs.” So she tells him about “Croixdes-Rosets, the Augustins, and Tante Atie” from her life in Haiti, all of whom, Joseph says, “would make a great song.”32 Joseph’s musical journeys figure the diasporic affiliations (both continuities and gaps) that their romantic union also conveys: “He had been to Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil several times, trying to find links between the Negro spirituals and Latin and island music.”33 And in a fitting representation of both their budding love and their complex, growing diasporic affiliations, the two of them visit a Haitian record store in Brooklyn, purchase music, and “ate lunch every day listening to the drum and conch shell beats.”34 While I  have emphasized the process by which affiliation and identification take place across difference in these heterogeneous diasporic spaces, Carine Mardorossian, in her contribution to this volume, “Aha!:  Edwidge Danticat and Creolization,” has theorized helpfully the ways in which Danticat actively resists an unproductive opposition between identity and creolization, and in such a way that Black consciousness is entirely compatible with creolized identities that emerge in the diaspora. Moreover, Mardorossian explains, “creolization … provides the regenerative lens through which identity itself comes to matter. It matters in a fluctuating, infinitely adaptable, and nonexclusionary way, but it matters all the same.”35 Hence, Mardorossian argues that Breath, Eyes, Memory “encourages us to see African American culture within the context of a worldwide black ethos that is itself the sign of a larger intermixed and hybridized (North) America.”36 While I agree with Mardorossian’s understanding of an expansive diasporic Black identity in the text that embraces creolization, the emphasis of my reading has been on the intellectual labor and cultural imagination that allow such identities to cohere. On Haitian storytelling traditions, Mardorossian observes that “the storytelling practices that best represent those Haitian national and cultural traditions Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 72. Ibid., 73. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Carine Mardorossian, “ ‘Aha!’: Edwidge Danticat and Creolization,” in this volume, 1–3. 36 Ibid., 5. 31 32

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embody a transitional space between change and stability.”37 I would place Danticat’s kitchen poets, ancestral figures along with their daughters, in these spaces of transition as they carry forward a literary tradition.

Danticat Encountering Hurston To untangle further the complexities of cultural inheritance within the heterogeneous spaces of the black diaspora, and to return also to Jean-Charles’s call to locate Danticat’s work “at the interstices of the space where black America empties into and converges with black Atlantic,”38 it is worth examining in some detail Danticat’s encounter with the work of diaspora mother Zora Neale Hurston (an appellation that I think is justified in light of such homages as Walker’s 1975 “Looking for Zora”).39 It is helpful to examine the movements within Danticat’s initial “turn” to Hurston as expressed in her account of reading Hurston for the first time as a teenager in Brooklyn.40 We find Danticat’s recollection of this encounter in her 2006 foreword to Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; this memory reveals the translation and negotiation that helped to create this identification with Hurston’s writing.41 Danticat’s memory of this episode underscores the cultural and linguistic bridges that connect what may appear to be discrete ethnic/national/ cultural categories, and that create opportunities for productive dialogue between African American culture of the US South (via Hurston) and the cultures of the black Caribbean. Danticat opens part two of her foreword with her “favorite piece of Hurston trivia,” that Hurston wrote her most acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God while in Haiti, over the course of seven weeks.42 Danticat’s implicit identification with Hurston is amplified in the subsequent reference to Alice Walker’s exhortation, to which Danticat adds by insertion an explicit global emphasis: “‘We are a People.’ (And I include all the international peoples of the African diaspora in this category.) ‘A People do not throw their geniuses away.’”43 The original passage from Walker’s 1979 essay, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and Partisan View,” reads, “We are a people. A  people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone.”44 Danticat’s interpolation insists on a global Ibid., 7. Jean-Charles, “Danticat and the African American Women’s Literary Tradition,” 67. 39 Recall, for instance, the spirit of Walker’s account of posing as Hurston’s “niece” on her search for Hurston’s grave: “By this time I am, of course, completely into being Zora’s niece, and the lie comes with perfect naturalness to my lips. Besides, as far as I’m concerned, she is my aunt—and that of all black people as well.” See Alice Walker, “Looking for Zora,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1983), 102. 40 I use “turn” here as a metaphor/concept in the spirit of Homi Bhabha’s efforts to examine and complicate the ways in which subjects are called, hailed, or interpellated—thereby emphasizing smaller but critical movements within the process of identification. See Homi Bhabha, “Location, Intervention, Incommensurability: A Conversation with Homi Bhabha,” Emergences 1 (1989): 63–88. 41 Please note that key parts of my analysis of Danticat’s foreword to Their Eyes are adapted from my previous work—see Wilson C. Chen, “Narrating Diaspora in Danticat’s Short-Story Cycle The Dew Breaker,” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 25, no. 3 (2014): 237–8. 42 Edwidge Danticat, Foreword to Their Eyes Were Watching God, in Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), x–xi. 43 Ibid., xii. 44 Alice Walker, “Zora Neale Hurston:  A Cautionary Tale and Partisan View,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1983), 92, emphasis in original. 37 38

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emphasis that signals her own cultural positioning in the Black diaspora as an “African Haitian American” (“AHA”)45 and the ways in which she engages this black female literary tradition— in this example, as an African-Haitian-American reading Walker reading Hurston. Danticat’s explicit expansion of “a people” is also, paradoxically, suggestive of the fissures within the collective category, a point that is made entirely clear in the reading lesson that follows. Accompanying and further complicating Danticat’s powerful diasporic identification with Hurston is her narration of her early experiences reading Hurston as a Haitian immigrant teenager in high school: I first read Their Eyes Were Watching God in an elective black history class at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, New York. The class was taught by a young teacher who conducted it during his lunch hour. There was not much reading for young adults about Zora and her work, so we struggled with the plot and the language with a lot of coaching from our teacher. Most of us were new immigrants to the United States and read Janie, Pheoby, and Tea Cake’s dialogue out loud with our heavy Creole accents, and managed to come away with only a glimmer of the brilliance of what we had read.46 Taking place in her formative teenage years, when Danticat identified as a relatively new immigrant to the United States, this deeply suggestive scene of African-American vernacular and cultural literacy takes place in a significant counter-hegemonic setting. This is a Black history class with a curriculum that enables new Black subjectivities. Moreover, the location is Brooklyn, a community with a historical African-American and Afro-Caribbean-American cultural presence, and this is an encounter with one of the giants of the African-American literary tradition. At the same time, gaps and fissures are apparent; the negotiation across linguistic and cultural difference mediates and arguably disrupts Danticat’s introduction to Hurston, and her Haitian immigrant peers’ introduction to Hurston. This process of negotiating linguistic and cultural difference is figured by their efforts to overcome the gap between the Black Southern vernacular of the literary characters and their own “heavy Creole accents” as readers. It is also figured by the students’ dependence on extensive “coaching” from their teacher as they “struggled with the plot and the language.” Yet even as Danticat reveals the discontinuities in this diasporic encounter, she renders this a powerful, meaningful, formative moment for her in this exchange between southern African-American culture and Haitian-American culture—all of this taking place in the culturally mixed setting of 1980s Brooklyn in the United States urban North. This depiction of diasporic literacy, suggestive of both continuity and disjuncture, provides a glimpse of the imaginative work that allows recognition and identification across heterogeneous spaces of the Black diaspora. Significantly, Danticat elaborates on her intellectual affinities with Hurston in a 2010 essay, “Another Country,” also from her collection Create Dangerously, and this essay develops further the dialogue and exchange between black diasporic communities in the US South and the Black Caribbean. “Another Country” is a short reflection on “that other America”—the impoverished and vulnerable “country within a country” that, when revealed, undermines the

For Danticat’s narrative of her African-Haitian-American identification (her “AHA moment”), see Edwidge Danticat, “AHA!,” in Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women, ed. Meri Nana-Ama Danquah (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 39–44. 46 Danticat, Foreword to Their Eyes, xii. 45

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image many Americans have of their own first-world conditions. In such moments of revelation, the plight of our poor appears not entirely different from those in “third world” countries like Haiti. Danticat poignantly opens this reflection with a brief but suggestive discussion of Hurston’s insights into the lives of the working poor in the face of environmental disaster. The character Tea Cake, observes Danticat about Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, is after all a “day laborer”; as it turns out, Tea Cake dies at the end of a sequence of events produced by a devastating hurricane.47 And through the efforts of the characters Tea Cake and Janie to sustain their lives in the aftermath of environmental disaster, readers observe the complete lack of resources for the poor and even the ignominious ways in which their fallen bodies are disposed of—with Black lives and bodies horrendously treated by authorities in this brutal Jim Crow era. Hurston’s narrative of human agency in the face of such a destructive hurricane would certainly resonate with those in the Haitian diaspora, and we note this immediately in Danticat’s empathic description of the catastrophic effects of such a storm on the poor: “And if you manage to survive that hurricane, you might end up with nothing at all. No home. No food or water. No medical care for your sick and wounded. Not even body bags or coffins for your dead.”48 Janie and Tea Cake experience all of this—tragically—yet the novel also observes their vigor, creativity, and persistence in the face of such adversity. Working as migrant, seasonal laborers in the Florida Everglades, they live lives of dignity and strength. In Their Eyes, Hurston’s depiction of this other America that resembles communities in the “third world” (thereby inviting the comparison) incorporates a powerful and vivid representation of the community of laborers in the Florida Everglades—the seasonal workers living and working among the beans, cane, weeds, and so forth, in the “muck,” in the vicinity of Lake Okeechobee. This community of workers includes African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans (e.g., Bahamans), and Native Americans (e.g., Seminoles), and Hurston’s depiction of their bout with the hurricane was inspired by the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane that ravaged Florida and the Caribbean islands with 125-mile-per-hour winds and led to an estimated 2,000 deaths in the Okeechobee region. As Danticat’s reflection “Another Country” reminds us, Hurston’s literary representation of such tragedy, its aftermath, and the persistence, resilience, and creativity of ordinary working people in response to such crisis connects thematically with other critical moments in Black diasporic history. Recent diasporic memory includes “Haiti’s September 2004 encounter with Tropical Storm Jeanne, which left three thousand people dead and a quarter million homeless,” and also “the streets of New Orleans in the summer of 2005,” when Hurricane Katrina exposed the poverty and vulnerability of this other America, whose horrors here included “the desperation of ordinary citizens, some of whom resorted to raiding stores to feed themselves and their families; the forgotten public hospitals where nurses pumped oxygen into dying patients by hand; the makeshift triage wards on bridges and airports; the roaming armed gangs.”49 The horrors of the devastation experienced by these deeply vulnerable populations forced the United States, at some level, to revise its image of itself and recognize “that other America.” To be sure, Danticat reminds us of the universal qualities of Hurston’s depiction of natural disaster, as “unimaginable disaster shows exactly how much alike we are,” and these

Edwidge Danticat, “Another Country,” in Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 107. 48 Ibid., 108. 49 Ibid., 108–9. 47

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narratives, whether a news report or a work of fiction, provide a kind of “passport” to this other America.50 Yet this essay also effectively underscores the hemispheric significance of Hurston’s writings, the global implications of Hurston’s engagement with the cultures of the Black South (informed by her own anthropological journeys between the US South, Jamaica, and Haiti), and Hurston’s continuing relevance to Danticat’s own vision of black diasporic cultures (which is informed by Danticat’s own travels between her home in the United States and Haiti).

Conclusion: Reencountering Marshall through Danticat Interestingly, as we look back at Marshall, the theme of “kitchen poets,” and Marshall’s larger body of work—especially through the lens of Danticat’s “Women like Us”—we do find thematic developments and layers that anticipate the kinds of intergenerational conflict, struggle, and negotiation among female “poets” that frequently come to the fore in Danticat’s writings. Selina Boyce in Marshall’s 1959 debut novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones—a protagonist whom Danticat, in her foreword to the 2006 edition of the novel, calls “one of the most fascinating and memorable female characters in American fiction”51—is compelling in large part because of her fiery independence and her complicated relationship with her family and surrounding Barbadian American community. This is all dramatically on display in her sustained battles with her mother, Silla, an imposing, capable, and resourceful figure who stands tall both in their family and in the community of Barbadian American immigrants. This intergenerational and intercultural struggle is central to Selina’s maturation as an individual and as an artist in this female bildungsroman; even as she grows up exposed to the nurturing influence of her mother’s vernacular knowledges, her storytelling, and her beautifully hybridized Barbadian American English, Selina embodies a rebellious spirit that seeks out different female role models and insists on a life based on values, goals, and priorities empirically different from the upwardly mobile, middle-class, immigrant dreams of her mother. And it is with these sensibilities that Selina, at the end of the novel, begins to emerge as an artist and commits to her own individual journey to the Caribbean islands, on her own terms. Also in contrast with the implied unity and rather uncomplicated model of cultural inheritance that thematically structures Marshall’s “Poets in the Kitchen” essay, we find vigorous—often comical—intergenerational struggle portrayed in Marshall’s short story, “To Da-duh, in Memorium” (1967). The energetic struggle between granddaughter and grandmother underlying “To Da-duh” is rendered with a kind of laugh-out-loud humor by Marshall, especially as she depicts the creativity and audacity of the young female protagonist in her efforts to challenge her formidable grandmother. Marshall has described “To Da-duh” as “the most autobiographical” of her stories collected in Reena and other Stories. It is a “reminiscence largely of a visit I paid to my grandmother … on the island of Barbados when I was nine,” and Marshall describes their relationship as “complex,” as “close, affectionate yet rivalrous.” And during their time together, “a subtle kind of power struggle went on between us. It was as if we both knew, at a level beyond words, that I  had come into the world not Ibid., 110. Edwidge Danticat, Foreword to Brown Girl, Brownstones, in Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones (New  York:  The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2006), ix. 50 51

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only to love her and to continue her line but to take her very life in order that I might live.”52 Insistent on her own “small strength,” the youthful first-person Barbadian American female narrator ultimately stands up for her perception and understanding of the modern world, even as she continues to absorb the lessons of her grandmother about life and culture on the island. Da-duh passes on to her young New Yorker granddaughter precious knowledge of the landscape of their Caribbean island—including the fruits and the sugar cane, contending, “I know you don’t have anything this nice where you come from.”53 The narrator is initially forced to concede the point repeatedly about all that is lacking in her urbanized world of New York, but then, when prompted by Da-duh’s curiosity about the mysterious properties of snow, she seizes the opportunity to convey dramatically her own knowledge, however incipient, of her world. Proclaiming that snow, in its power and glory, would easily vanquish the lush landscape of her grandmother’s Caribbean island, the narrator makes the most of her turn as storyteller and boasts, “And you see all these trees you got there,” I said. “Well, they’d be bare. No leaves, no fruit, nothing. They’d be covered in snow. You see your canes. They’d be buried under tons of snow. The snow would be higher than your head, higher than your house, and you wouldn’t be able to come down into this here gully because it would be snowed under.”54 To put a final exclamation on her performance, the audacious narrator concludes her storytelling sequence by dancing the Truck, a popular 1930s dance, moving rhythmically about the trees and about her grandmother, “right forefinger waving”; then dancing the Suzy-Q, “lean hips swishing, my sneakers sliding zigzag over the ground”; and as a finale by singing a variety of popular American songs. The grandmother is flummoxed, staring at the narrator as if she were “a creature from Mars, an emissary from some world she did not know, but which intrigued her and whose power she both felt and feared.”55 From this point on, the narrator’s storytelling abilities flourish, and at least in her subjective experience, she becomes the dominant voice in their subsequent conversations: “I would feel her give way. I came to know the signs of her surrender: the total stillness that would come over her little hard dry form.”56 Upon hearing about the changing state of race relations in the United States—for instance, that her granddaughter had the nerve to “beat up a white girl”— Da-duh puzzles over how “the world’s changing up so [she] can scarce recognize it anymore.”57 This story, through its humor, invites questions about the transitions and translations that take place across the Black diaspora, in this case in the movement between Barbados and New York and in the spaces that open up between generations separated by land, sea, and time. The narrator’s vigorous, comical battles with her grandmother actually complicate notions of cultural inheritance and anticipate subsequent struggles we find between young female Paule Marshall, “To Da-duh, In Memoriam,” in Reena and Other Stories (New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1983), 95. 53 Ibid., 100. 54 Ibid., 102. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 103. 57 Ibid. 52

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storytellers and their maternal ancestors, whether it be Jadine’s struggle with the diaspora mothers in Morrison’s Tar Baby, or Danticat’s young female writer’s intersubjective exchange with her maternal ancestors in “Women like Us.” In the end, Da-duh dies and the narrator lives on. In her adult life, living above “a noisy factory in downtown New York,” the narrator continues to display the enduring influences of Da-duh in her urbanized artistic life, painting “seas of sugar-cane and huge swirling Van Gogh suns and palm trees striding like brightlyplumed Tutsi warriors across a tropical landscape, while the thunderous tread of the machines downstairs jarred the floor beneath my easel, mocking my efforts.”58 I appreciate Jean-Charles’s vision of the challenges and opportunities connected with efforts to situate Danticat’s body of writing “in relation to African American women’s literature.” For Jean-Charles, this effort involves finding “spaces where we can glimpse continuities with African American women’s writing, while simultaneously acknowledging the writer’s claim to being an AHA [African-Haitian-American] writer and teasing out the discontinuities that such a framing may suggest.”59 I would add to this formulation that Danticat—in her careful attention not only to these continuities and discontinuities but also to the work of translation, mediation, and transitions—demonstrates a commitment to the same comparative project. This commitment is evident in how she builds upon and continues to develop Marshall’s metaphor/concept of “kitchen poets” by hybridizing it further and insisting on the struggle that takes place within this dynamic, heterogeneous literary tradition. While Danticat’s work clearly has multiple, diverse, global literary lineages, her sustained, highly developed engagement with African American women’s literature continues to demand our attention as readers and provides a model for comparative Black diasporic studies in heterogeneous cultural spaces. In this past year in which we mourned the loss of both Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall, Danticat continues to enliven the metaphorical language of kitchen poets in acknowledging, “Both Ms. Morrison and Ms. Marshall have helped me make my narrative dumplings.”60

Bibliography Bhabha, Homi. “Location, Intervention, Incommensurability: A Conversation with Homi Bhabha.” Emergences, 1 (1989): 63–88. Chen, Wilson C. “Narrating Diaspora in Danticat’s Short-Story Cycle The Dew Breaker.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 25, no. 3 (2014): 220–41. Danticat, Edwidge. “The Ancestral Blessings of Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall.” New Yorker, August 17, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/ the-ancestral-blessings-of-toni-morrison-and-paule-marshall. Danticat, Edwidge. “AHA!” In Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women, edited by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, 39–44. New York: Hyperion, 2000. Danticat, Edwidge. “Another Country.” In Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, 107–113. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Ibid., 106. Jean-Charles, “Danticat and the African American Women’s Literary Tradition,” 53. 60 Danticat, “The Ancestral Blessings,” 3. 58 59

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat Danticat, Edwidge. “Daughters of Memory.” In Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, 59–71. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Danticat, Edwidge. The Dew Breaker. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Danticat, Edwidge. Foreword to Brown Girl, Brownstones, in Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones, ix–xii. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 2006. Danticat, Edwidge. Foreword to Their Eyes Were Watching God, in Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, ix–xviii. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Danticat, Edwidge. “Women like Us.” In Krik? Krak!, 217–24. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Jean-Charles, Régine Michelle. “Danticat and the African American Women’s Literary Tradition.” In Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, edited by Martin Munro, 52–69. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Mardorossian, Carine. “ ‘Aha!’: Edwidge Danticat and Creolization.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Edwidge Danticat, edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Nadège T. Clitandre. 2021. Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 2006. Marshall, Paule. “From the Poets in the Kitchen.” In Reena and Other Stories, 1–12. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1983. Marshall, Paule. “Shaping the World of My Art.” New Letters 40 (Autumn 1973): 97–112. Marshall, Paule. “To Da-duh, In Memoriam.” In Reena and Other Stories, 93–106. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1983. Morrison, Toni. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” In Black Women Writers (1950 – 1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 339–45. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1984. Morrison, Toni. Tar Baby. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. Smith, Barbara. “A Press of Our Own: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.” In Communication at the Crossroads: The Gender Gap Connection, edited by Ramona R. Rush and Donna Allen, 202–7. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1989. Walker, Alice. “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, 231–43. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1983. Walker, Alice. “Looking for Zora.” In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, 93–116. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1983. Walker, Alice. “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and Partisan View.” In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, 83–92. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1983.

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CHAPTER 17 SCATTERING AND GATHERING: DANTICAT, FOOD, AND (THE) HAITIAN EXPERIENCE(S)

Robyn Cope

Food imagery has played an important role in Edwidge Danticat’s writing. From the beginning, she has used food to establish herself as part of two distinct but overlapping literary lineages: first, as an Afro-Caribbean diasporic “kitchen poet” who uses words as a weapon to combat triple invisibility as a Black immigrant woman;1 and second, as an eminently Haitian writer, part of a tradition of marvelous realism that captures the Haitian spirit and worldview using indigenous forms of expression.2 Valérie Loichot has placed Danticat’s earliest works firmly within the first tradition, emphasizing the author’s twist on Barbadian-American Paule Marshall’s “From the Poets in the Kitchen” in “Women like Us,” the epilogue to Krik? Krak! (1996) and her rewriting of the mortar and pestle scene from Barbadian-Grenadian-American Audre Lorde’s Zami, A  New Spelling of My Name in Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994).3 Loichot reads Breath, Eyes, Memory’s protagonist’s unhealthy relationship to food as symptomatic of the pain and disruption faced by “unassimilable” Black women immigrants in the United States and as indicative of the need to relate to the Haitian homeland in realistic rather than nostalgic terms.4 Danticat’s association of cooking and writing, contends Loichot, “makes food the archive of women’s history,” “invalidates the distinction between the private and the political,” and “transforms the daily gestures of women into political acts and home and kitchen into sites of political resistance.”5 For my own part, I have argued that Danticat uses a number of symbolic foods (parsley, sugar, coffee, salt, and so on) to illuminate unequal power relations and the plight of Haitian agricultural workers in the Dominican Republic in The Farming of Bones (1998), the author’s fresh take on the so-called Parsley Massacre that was the subject of Haitian Jacques Stephen Alexis’s canonical Compère Général Soleil.6 In so doing, I took my first steps toward placing Danticat’s treatment of food within the second tradition, that of Haitian

See Paule Marshall’s “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” New York Times, January 9, 1983. See Jacques Stephen Alexis’s “Du Réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens,” Présence Africaine, no. 165/166 (January 2002): 91–112. (Originally published in 1956.) 3 See Loichot’s “Edwidge Danticat’s Kitchen History,” Meridians 5, no. 1 (2004): 92–116; and “Kitchen Narrative: Food and Exile in Edwidge Danticat and Gisèle Pineau,” in The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 63–101. 4 Njeri Githire (Cannibal Writes: Eating Others in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Women’s Writings (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014)) has also analyzed food and eating in Breath, Eyes, Memory, extending the metaphor of ingestion and vomiting to the body politic of the host nation. Githire posits the national body as “an ingesting, digesting, and excreting organism” (16) and Haitian immigrants as “indigestible others” (95–6). 5 Loichot, “Kitchen Narrative,” 64–5. 6 See my “Writing Haiti Global: Food and Fascism in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 19, no. 3 (2015): 315–24. 1 2

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marvelous realism. Building upon that initial inclination, in this chapter, I assert that indeed throughout her oeuvre, Danticat has continued to use food imagery to tie her writing back to the Haitian homeland and its literary tradition of marvelous realism even as she has redefined both to include the diaspora. In his 1956 “Du Réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens,” Alexis asserts the need for modes of artistic expression that correspond to the Haitian psyche. For Danticat, food is that culturally relevant, self-determined code. As we will see, in “Caroline’s Wedding,” bone soup and soup joumou convey anxieties surrounding assimilation and cultural memory; in “Walk Straight,” mayi moulen and Haitian coffee recount the challenges of preserving ancestral culture in the face of urbanization and global mass migration; in The Dew Breaker, cooking oil and sugar relate the links between long-standing systems of oppression, economic desperation, and violence; and in Claire of the Sea Light, salt cries out for freedom from precarity and marginalization, for belonging, hope, and humanity. In all this, Danticat employs food imagery to answer Alexis’s call for writing that engages with the Haitian masses’ concrete problems, with the real and the socially relevant.7 At the same time, Danticat’s version of Haitian marvelous realism is markedly diasporic, characterized by what the author herself describes as “a mixed gaze.” This, according to the author, means that she looks at the United States with Haitian eyes and at Haiti with American eyes,8 that she is “both insider and outsider in both cultures.”9 Danticat’s mixed-gaze marvelous realism continually renegotiates the relationship between a multiplicity of individual Haitian experiences, including those in diaspora, and a shared Haitianness.10 Located at the intersection of individual tastes, cultural norms, and universal human needs, food is a logical medium for expressing that push and pull of differentiation and affiliation. “Food is what anchors us to a place,” asserts Danticat in a 2007 interview, “It’s one of our strongest symbols of home, because it’s our first connection to the place where we were born.” On the other hand, she explains, “When we switch cultures what we first see, our most visible change, is the food that we have to eat … Every meal is a reminder that we’re not home.”11 In the series of close readings that follows, drawn from from Krik? Krak! (1996), Create Dangerously (2010), The Dew Breaker (2004), and Claire of the Sea Light (2013), we will see that Danticat has routinely used her characters’ relationship to food to both scatter diasporic experiences into their singularity

Alexis’s ambitions for Haitian marvelous realism include “to seek out the people’s own ways of expressing itself, those that correspond to its psyche,” “to reject art without real social content,” and “to be fully conscious of the precise, concrete problems and crises with which the masses are confronted, with the goal of touching, educating and involving the people in its fights” [my translation] (112). 8 Jennifer Ludden, “Writing in Exile Helps Authors Connect to Home,” Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, November 15, 2010. In Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, ed. Maxine Lavon Montgomery (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 111. 9 Nathalie Handal, “We Are All Going to Die,” Guernica, January 15, 2011. In Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, ed. Maxine Lavon Montgomery (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 119. 10 Nadège Clitandre recently termed Danticat’s unique standpoint, worldview, and creative impulse a “Haitian diasporic imaginary” (Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 2). Drawing upon Glissant, Clitandre theorizes Danticat’s texts as echo, posits the national as the source of the echo, the diaspora as the varied reverberations of the echo, and the writer as the echo chamber, endlessly deconstructing and reconstituting the polyphonic narrative of the Haitian nation (5, 9). 11 Nancy Raquel Mirabal, “Dyasporic Appetites and Longings: An Interview with Edwidge Danticat,” Callaloo 30, no. 1 (2007): 38. 7

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and gather them together again into a constantly evolving, radically inclusive Haitianness that bridges generational, geographical, political, and economic divides.

A Double Tragedy Danticat’s 1996 collection of interwoven short stories, Krik? Krak!, opens with “Children of the Sea,” whose narration alternates between a young man’s last hours among a group of doomed boat people and his lover’s own violent and dangerous circumstances back in Haiti. Mirroring the trajectory of the rickety little boat in “Children of the Sea,” the collection as a whole charts a course from within Haiti itself to the Haitian diaspora in the United States. Set in Haiti, the next four stories draw a vivid picture of the kinds of drivers, from state-inflicted terrorism, including sexual assault, to extreme poverty and economic hopelessness, that might lead people to get into such a boat, risking dehydration, sunstroke, and drowning to escape. The second half of the collection shifts toward where that doomed vessel was headed—the diaspora. In so doing, the arc also shifts away from the hopeless tone set by “Children of the Sea” and toward something more optimistic. At first, the diaspora makes its appearance through the vector of individual characters whose return to Haiti shores up determination and catalyzes resistance in the young female characters with whom they make contact inside Haiti. But eventually, the collection’s setting moves entirely to Brooklyn, where mothers and daughters face a new set of challenges associated with exile and assimilation. In Krik? Krak!’s final short story, “Caroline’s Wedding,” food encapsulates, then spans the divide between a Haitian immigrant woman’s worldview and that of her American daughters. “Caroline’s Wedding” begins the day the narrator, Caroline’s older, Haitian-born sister, becomes a naturalized American citizen. When the narrator arrives home, she shows her mother a photocopy of her application for a US passport, which the older woman looks at “as though it contained boundless possibilities.”12 The good news, announces the narrator’s mother, calls for a meal. Food, as the reader will learn, is Ma’s answer to nearly everything: “We can celebrate with some strong bone soup,” she said. “I am making some right now.” In the pot on the stove were scraps of cow bones stewing in hot bubbling broth. Ma believed that her bone soup could cure all kinds of ills. She even hoped that it would perform the miracle of detaching Caroline from Eric, her Bahamian fiancé. Since Caroline had announced that she was engaged, we’d had bone soup with our supper every single night.13 Although the narrator’s mother suggests that they will eat the bone soup in a spirit of celebration, the narrator emphasizes that her mother typically uses this soup not as a reward but rather as a remedy for life’s afflictions. For some time, Ma has been attempting to use the soup to anchor her younger daughter, Caroline, to Haitian culture and keep her away from her non-Haitian—and therefore undesirable—fiancé. This revelation lends double meaning to the way the mother looks at the US passport application. The “boundless possibilities” she Edwidge Danticat, “Caroline’s Wedding,” in Krik? Krak! (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 159. Ibid.

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imagines for her elder daughter are not then exclusively positive—they necessarily include unwelcome forms of assimilation. Rather than being a form of celebration, this soup may in fact be an attempt to “cure” the same menacing “ill” in the elder daughter as in the younger— acculturation. Whether by marriage or naturalization, this immigrant mother is losing her grip on her American daughters. American-born Caroline has little patience for her mother’s meddling. “This soup is really getting on my nerves,” she tells her sister, and “If she keeps making this soup, I will dip my head into the pot and scald myself blind. That will show her that there’s no magic in it.”14 But Caroline does nothing of the sort. Instead, she turns her mother’s attachment to the soup back on her. If they are not careful, jokes Caroline, the soup may cast an entirely different kind of spell: “If we keep on with this soup,” declares Caroline, “we’ll all grow horns like the ones that used to be on these cows.”15 The young woman’s flippant attitude toward her mother’s food-based folk belief illuminates their divergent worldviews. While the mother attaches deep meaning and potency to food, from her fear that her daughter’s unfulfilled food cravings in pregnancy will give her grandchildren port-wine marks16 to her conviction that sleeping on your back after eating beans gives bad dreams17 to her never ending faith in the healing powers of bone soup, the daughter sees it all as pure—and annoying—superstition. For her part, Caroline’s mother blames her younger daughter’s rebellious attitude and independent spirit on the foreign environment that has shaped her: “ ‘You think you are so American,’ Ma said to Caroline. ‘You don’t know what’s good for you. You have no taste buds. A double tragedy.’ ”18 In fact, points out the narrator, since they were young girls, their mother has always faulted them for their “American rebelliousness”—a culture gap that has frequently manifested itself at the table: When we were children, whenever we rejected symbols of Haitian culture, Ma used to excuse us with great embarrassment and say, “You know, they are American.” Why didn’t we like the thick fatty pig skin that she would deep-fry so long that it tasted like rubber? We were Americans and we had no taste buds. A double tragedy. Why didn’t we like the thick yellow pumpkin soup that she spent all New Year’s Eve making so that we would have in on New Year’s Day to celebrate Haitian Independence Day? Again, because we were so American, and the Fourth of July was our independence holiday.19 In Ma’s eyes, the “double tragedy” of the girls’ Americanness resides not only in their having left Haiti for the United States in the first place but also in the foreign worldview they’ve adopted as a result of that displacement. This Americanness expresses itself through what Ma sees as acts of filial and national disloyalty. It is a calamity that unlike in Haiti, where “you own your children” and children “know their duties to family”; in America, “no one owns anything, and certainly not another person.”20 Whether their mother likes it or not, ultimately, Caroline and Ibid. Ibid., 160. 16 Ibid., 198. 17 Ibid. 188. 18 Ibid., 160. 19 Ibid., 215. 20 Ibid. 14 15

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her sister belong only to themselves and the young women feel entitled to some measure of personal fulfillment. Equally catastrophic is that they have “no taste buds,” which is to say no appreciation for Haitian history and no cultural memory. However, the girls’ behavior and attitudes in fact embody the very values these symbolic foods encode. The fried pig skin, for example, is a reminder of the resourcefulness and adaptability engendered by slavery’s harsh conditions. Just as capable and resilient as her ancestors, young Caroline, who has been missing her left forearm since birth, has not given up on the pursuit of a full, normal life, including romantic love. Meanwhile, the soup joumou epitomizes the Haitian revolutionary spirit and centuries-old commitment to every human being’s right to self-determination. Like their forebears, Caroline and her sister will settle for nothing less than full independence, even from their mother. The narrator, the “misery baby” of her parents’ early years of marriage in a shantytown in Port-au-Prince, seems better equipped to understand Ma’s psychology than is Caroline, the “child of the promised land,” the “New York child,” the “child who has never known Haiti.”21 “Caroline,” explains the narrator, “had been born in America, something that she very much took for granted.”22 Caroline is therefore in no position to fathom what her parents and sister went through—nor what they had to give up—in order to get to Brooklyn. “It was very hard for Ma to watch Caroline prepare to leave us,” observes the narrator with compassion, “knowing that there was nothing she could do but feed her.”23 The narrator recognizes that all the mother’s objections to Caroline’s fiancé—Eric is Barbadian, not Haitian; he did not make a formal proposal as had her own Haitian fiancé; the mother does not like Eric’s cooking and men shouldn’t be cooking anyway24—are really manifestations of Ma’s own anxieties about her daughters losing their connection to her and to Haiti. An invitation to have dinner at Eric’s place does nothing to reassure Ma. “I won’t eat if it is bad,” she warns.25 Despite the narrator’s insistence that her mother should pretend to enjoy the food, Ma can’t seem to bring herself to feign enthusiasm. “Nice or not nice, I came,” she declares, as if it is or should be enough. Then, perhaps regretting her own behavior, “I was not very hungry.”26 Although she is frustrated with her mother’s conduct, the narrator admits that this well-intentioned but poorly planned meal was in fact a missed opportunity at bridge-building: Eric served us chicken in a thick dark sauce. I thrust my fork through layers of gravy. Ma pushed the food around her plate but ate very little. … Eric had failed miserably at the game of Wooing the Haitian Mother-in-Law. Had he known—or rather had Caroline advised him well—he would have hired a Haitian cook to make Ma some Haitian food that would taste (God forbid!) even better than her own.27 Ibid., 189. Ibid., 160. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 184. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 185. 21 22

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The dish Eric has prepared for his future in-laws is an unfamiliar one, one the narrator can only describe (“chicken in a thick dark sauce”) and cannot name (i.e., cou cou or macaroni pie) as she would if she knew it well. Despite her goal of being fully supportive of her sister, the way the narrator characterizes the act of eating hints not only at her mother’s reluctance (“pushed food around her plate”) but also at her own distaste (“layers of gravy”) for the unknown dish. Rather than bringing Eric and Caroline’s family closer together, this alien meal only serves to reinforce the differences between them. Over time, as Caroline lives and eats meals such as this one with her husband, she will surely grow away from Ma and from Haitian culture. As the narrator notes, the young couple might better have used this opportunity to reassure Ma that their future life, even if it is by all rights their own, will retain elements of Caroline’s past. The narrator perceives that what Ma really needs is some proof that Caroline is and will remain both Haitian and hers, that they are made of the same stuff down deep. When Caroline wakes up on her wedding day feeling drowsy and frazzled, overwhelmingly tired and in pain— in short, with a terrible case of cold feet—Ma finally feels some sense of validation. Busying herself preparing an herbal remedy, she declares, “At last a sign … She is my daughter after all. This is just the way I was on the day of my wedding.”28 “My limbs all went dead on my wedding day,” she seems pleased to recall, “I vomited all over my wedding dress on the way to the church.”29 At last satisfied that Caroline is like her mother after all, Ma makes a move toward reconciliation. “ ‘I am eager to be a guest in your house,’ Ma said to Caroline.” This time Caroline is wise enough to know what her mother needs to hear. “ ‘I will cook all your favorite things,’ Caroline said.” And just to be sure Caroline knows the compromise is genuine, Ma adds one last grain of salt: “ ‘As long as your husband is not the cook, I will eat okay.’ ”30 The story’s final culinary reference brings “Caroline’s Wedding” full circle, back to the famous bone soup. “Caroline called,” Ma said. She was standing over the stove making some bone soup when I got home from the cemetery. “I told her that we would still keep her bed here for her, if she ever wants to use it. She will come and visit us soon. I knew she would miss us.” “Can I drop one bone in your soup?” I asked Ma. “It is your soup too,” she said. She let me drop one bone into the boiling water. The water splashed my hand, leaving a red mark.31 Whereas the first pot of bone soup drove Ma and her daughters further apart, this round brings them closer together. In the opening scene, the narrator arrives with her US passport application, a symbol of her potentially amnesic American future; in the final scene, the narrator has just been to visit her father’s grave, confirmation that she has not forgotten her Haitian past. Before, it is Ma who calls out to Caroline, “Soup is ready,”32 in a desperate attempt to keep the young woman close; now, it is Caroline who telephones her mother in order to

Ibid., 201. Ibid. 30 Ibid., 202. 31 Ibid., 215–16. 32 Ibid., 160. 28 29

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maintain the bond between them. At the beginning of the story, both girls resist the soup (and Haiti, and their mother) as they do the work of differentiation; at the end of “Caroline’s Wedding,” the narrator asks to be included in the soup’s preparation, her culinary gestures reinforcing the close bond between herself and her mother (and Haiti). However, as Ma takes care to articulate, this is the narrator’s soup, too. In other words, she has a right to her own relationship with her Haitian roots, roots that have imprinted upon her worldview just as surely as the hot soup has marked her hand. In this conciliatory closing passage, the bone soup at last fulfills its initial promise, transforming itself from a remedy for the world’s ills into a celebration of life’s victories.

Magic Elixir In 2010, Danticat published Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, a collection of essays that contemplate the nature of so-called immigrant writing and ponder the true vocation of the immigrant writer. Create Dangerously’s second essay, “Walk Straight,” in large part drawn from Danticat’s 2001 “A Taste of Coffee,” recalls the author’s 1999 trip to visit Tante Ilyana, her elderly paternal aunt, in Danticat’s father’s ancestral mountain village. “I have come to see just how far we have trekked in less than two generations, from Léogâne’s rural hamlet of Beauséjour to Miami and New York, from the valley to skyscrapers,”33 writes Danticat. In “Walk Straight,” food points up the differences and resemblances between Danticat’s rural, Haitian ancestor’s role in cultural preservation and her own. Much of Danticat’s essay is dedicated to creating a vivid sense of place and time (forgotten), and food imagery plays an important role in that endeavor. Tante Ilyana’s is the kind of place you can only reach on foot or on the back of a mule.34 It is a lost world of almond trees35 and banana groves,36 where the only legal authority is the chèf seksyon, the village chief, and the only religious authority is the pè savann, a lay mountain priest.37 When Danticat, her cousin Nick, and Uncle Joseph arrive in Beauséjour, they find their ancestral relationship to food intact and manifest in the local community: We immediately crash on the front porch, in a cool spot close to the wooden railing at the other end of which the boys are pouring dried corn kernels into a grinder, turning them into bright yellow cornmeal. The boys are surrounded by twelve of Tante Ilyana’s prized hens and roosters, which squawk loudly as handfuls of corn occasionally rain down on their heads … It is corn harvest season in the valley surrounding Tante Ilyana’s house. So over the next three days, we eat lots of corn. We grill ears over charcoal and firewood sticks in the thatched cooking shack by the stream. We boil them smothered with banana leaves in an aluminum pot that seems to have no bottom. We eat the sweet baby ones raw, right Edwidge Danticat, “Walk Straight,” in Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 22. 34 Ibid., 23. 35 Ibid., 21. 36 Ibid., 24. 37 Ibid., 27. 33

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off the cob. From an earlier harvest, we have cornmeal paste, mayi moulen, for breakfast and a sweet corn flour puree, labouyi, for supper.38 At first glance, this is something of an idealized vision of seasonal abundance and pastoral charm. In a farm-to-table progression that would be the envy of Miami or New  York’s restaurant scene, corn is grown, harvested, processed, cooked, and eaten locally. Thanks to folk knowledge and cultural integrity, passed before the author’s eyes from generation to generation, subsistence starch staple crop farming and free-range animal husbandry practices live on. As the author concludes her description with the Haitian Creole mayi moulen and labouyi, she signals that there is something untranslatable about Beauséjour. Like Haitian foodways, Kreyòl is deeply rooted in both culture and place, and one cannot hope to paint a picture of this way of life without some recourse to the language that evolved alongside it. Indeed, both the food imagery that permeates Danticat’s writing and the Kreyòl phrases that pepper her texts constitute those indigenous forms of expression that Alexis hoped would someday capture the Haitian spirit and worldview. Despite this element of pastoral idealism, however, “Walk Straight” does not deny the harsh realities of life in a Haitian mountain village. For all its appealing simplicity, Beauséjour is also the kind of place where the graves are filled with young children39 and where the one-room schoolhouse somehow looks just like the cemetery behind it.40 It’s a place where people die of simple illnesses, where their faraway relatives don’t have a chance to say goodbye, where those relatives are lucky if they make it back in time for the funeral.41 In her father’s ancestral village, very little has changed since Danticat was a small child, and indeed in much longer than that. And as Danticat observes, the villagers’ simple life is by no means easy: They woke up at dawn and fetched water from the stream, made coffee for the household and everyone else who came by, sprinkled the yard with water, and swept it with sisal brooms that made a swooshing music, like a fan concert … [As a child] I was not allowed to do any work other than shell peas and sort corn kernels from the newly harvested corn because I was a city girl and the other types of work were considered too strenuous for me … [As an adult] I  help Tante Ilyana make coffee in the cooking shed by the stream. I hold the swollen pouch, hanging from a rounded piece of coat hanger, while she pours scalding water over the coffee grounds.42 As Danticat reflects on the ceaseless manual labor that characterizes life in Beauséjour,43 she comes face to face with the question of whether or not she has ever fully belonged there. Even as a small child, well before she left Haiti for the United States, she was already a city girl,

Ibid., 25–6. Ibid., 22. 40 Ibid., 24. 41 Ibid., 26. 42 Ibid., 29. 43 Although small-scale agriculture is extremely labor intensive, it is the most effective and sustainable way to reduce poverty and achieve food sovereignty, the key to food security. See “Haiti’s Hunger Games: Disastrous Food Policy Bites Hands That Feed,” Haiti Briefing No. 72, Haiti Support Group, October 2012. 38 39

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exempted by circumstance and (lack of) experience from the most difficult, which is to say the most defining, mountain tasks. Now, as an adult, Danticat yearns to close the gap. As a full participant in preparing the coffee the traditional way, hopes the young woman, she will find a place among the villagers. Somehow, she must earn her way back into the fold her parents had left thirty years before. Danticat, like many children and grandchildren of exiles, is nostalgic for the impossible return to her origins: “Suspended as I am here, far from terra firma and close to the clouds, I feel that this is the only place in the world where I truly belong,”44 she writes. However, in these passages about everyday food preparation in the village, the author reveals deep anxieties about belonging and especially legitimacy. “Can a city girl speak for mountain people?” she seems to ask. “Should she?” Wounded by accusations that her 1994 Breath, Eyes, Memory had exploited her culture for “money and what passes for fame,”45 and frustrated by the tendency to take her fictional depictions of Haitians as representative of the Haitian Experience, Danticat defends her artistic freedom. Asserting her legitimacy as porte-parole for a plurality of singular Haitian experiences, she points up the important role fiction—“lies,” as Danticat puts it—plays in telling the truth.46 As the essay approaches its conclusion, it alludes to comparisons between Danticat’s own role in cultural preservation as a “jounalis, a family writer” and that of Tante Ilyana, “who has never read a word or a sentence, who has never met and will never meet another writer.”47 As the author explains, while everyone else in Danticat’s family (including the author herself) has left the village either for the Haitian capital or other parts of the world, Tante Ilyana has remained firmly in place. Despite her relatives’ insistence that she should move to Port-auPrince to be nearer family as she approaches extreme old age and eventually death, Ilyana refuses to budge. Having built an imposing mausoleum on the family land for her deceased daughter and herself, the old woman plans to hold down the family’s claim from beyond the grave. “Her vocation,” writes Danticat, “is nothing less than to maintain our family’s physical legacy, to guard a very small house in the ancestral village, to sustain a faraway world to which we could return, if we wanted to, and find traces, however remote and faint, of who we are.”48 This, of course, is very near to Danticat’s own occupation. Like Tante Ilyana’s physical body on her little homestead, Danticat’s body of work preserves, for posterity and especially for exiles, a cultural and historical legacy that may one day be lost or forgotten. As the visit comes to a close and the author prepares to leave Tante Ilyana, the old woman gives her a sack of coffee beans to bring back to her ailing father in Brooklyn, insisting that a taste of the coffee will comfort and heal him, even “bring him home.” Impressed by her aunt’s faith in the coffee’s potency, Danticat wonders, “What if such a thing did exist, an elixir against fading memories, a panacea to evoke images of spaces lost to us, to instantly return us home?”49 It is a wonderful thought, of course, but the coffee is confiscated at JFK Airport, its aromatic sorcery no match for the customs officials’ zeal. Three years later, when Danticat learns of Tante Ilyana’s death, her father mourns the loss of the beans. “We sure need that coffee Danticat, “Walk Straight,” 33. Ibid. 46 Ibid., 32. 47 Ibid., 28. 48 Ibid., 38. 49 Ibid., 36. 44 45

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now,” he remarks. “We certainly could have used it that day,” agrees Danticat, “Tante Ilyana’s magic elixir, to help us remember and forget.”50 A comparable alchemy, of course, lies in the essay itself, and in Danticat’s writing in general, including her fiction. Surpassing the limitations of the mortal body, slipping easily across borders, time, and even cultural barriers, the ideas and images she conjures up using words have a special power to protect the family’s intangible legacy, its cultural memory. One is left to wonder, then, if the worldly young writer and her illiterate mountain woman aunt, each of whom is so deeply committed to memory and to place, are not so different after all.

The Price of Sugar Edwidge Danticat’s 2004 The Dew Breaker opens with Ka Bienaimé’s discovery that her father was never, as she has long believed, a political prisoner in Haiti under “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s infamously violent regime. Instead, by his own admission, Ka’s father was a prison guard, a Tonton Macoute, a “dew breaker.” “We called them shoukèt laroze,”51 explains Beatrice, one of his former victims, “They’d break into your house. Mostly it was at night. But often they’d also come before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves, and they’d take you away.”52 Using multiple narrators, including the Dew Breaker’s indirect and direct victims, his wife and daughter, and finally the Dew Breaker himself, and alternating (then) present day with a series of flashbacks, the interwoven stories gradually paint both a terrifying picture of life under François Duvalier’s authoritarian regime and a heartbreaking portrait of its aftermath in the Dyaspora. In The Dew Breaker, food highlights the cleavages and commonalities between Haitian victims of violence and its perpetrators. The next several chapters focus on the devastating economic consequences for everyday people driven out of Haiti by the regime’s violence and corruption. Nadine of “Water Child,” for example, maintains a Spartan lifestyle in Brooklyn in order to send half her paycheck back to her parents in Haiti. Meanwhile, having endured seven years of forced separation, the unnamed janitor of “Seven” works two seven-hour shifts a day in order to afford to bring his wife from Haiti to join him in New York. From Nadine’s daily dose of tuna melt in the hospital cafeteria, “where each first Friday for the last three years she had added a brownie to her meal for scheduled variety”53 to the janitor and his roommates’ equally pleasureless subsistence on cheap restaurant fare, the author uses food to drive home what exile and privation look— taste—like in the quotidian.

Ibid., 40. “It’s an expression, choukèt laroze; it really means somebody who breaks or shakes the dew,” explained Danticat in a 2004 interview. “There is also an expression on the other side, governeurs de la rosée, people who govern the dew, who are kinder people, people of the land who nurture the land and try to control their destiny through the land” (Robert Birnbaum, “Edwidge Danticat.” Morning News, April 20, 2004. In Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, ed. Maxine Lavon Montgomery (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 17). Thus, Danticat’s The Dew Breaker was designed to function in tandem with Jacques Roumain’s seminal Les Gouverneurs de la rosée to depict Haiti’s failings, its greatness, and what lies in between. 52 Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 131. 53 Ibid., 54. 50 51

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When at last the janitor’s wife sets out to join him in the Brooklyn apartment he shares with two other Haitian immigrants, she, like so many characters in Danticat’s oeuvre, must first pass through the gauntlet of US customs, where despite her best efforts, officials confiscate all of the foods she has brought with her from home. The customs man was tearing her careful wrapping to shreds as he barked questions at her in mangled Creole. “Ki sa l ye?” He held a package out in front of her before unveiling it. What was it? She didn’t know anymore. She could only guess by the shapes and sizes. The customs man unwrapped all her gifts—the mangoes, sugarcane, avocados, the grapefruit-peel preserves, the peanut, cashew, and coconut confections, the coffee beans, which he threw into a green bin decorated with fruits and vegetables with red lines across them.54 The torn paper and the broken language, like the woman’s ruptured focus and fragmented memory, foreshadow the struggle that lies ahead of her—the long work of picking up the pieces of shattered lives. As the customs officials strip away tropical fruit and sugarcane, they forcibly separate the janitor’s nameless wife from the Haitian earth. Likewise, as they deprive the bewildered woman of the prepared sweets, they detach her from Haitian culture. Meanwhile, when they take the coffee beans from her, they rob her of a powerful folk remedy—a source of strength in hard times—and of a “magic elixir” whose mystical properties might transport her back home, at least in spirit.55 Even though she has lost all the anchoring foods she hoped to bring with her from Haiti, the janitor’s wife remains determined to use the cookpot and the table to maintain some sense of community in Brooklyn. This comes as a welcome balm to the janitor and to his roommates, whose many years in exile and economic desperation have long since emptied their lives of any sense of connectedness or normalcy. When he came home, he saw that she had used some of what she had found in the refrigerator and the kitchen cabinets to cook a large meal for all four of them. She insisted that they wait for the other men to drift in before they ate, even though he had only a few hours before he had to leave for his night job. The men complimented her enthusiastically on her cooking, and he could tell that this meal made them feel as though they were part of a family, something they had not experienced for years. They seemed happy, eating for pleasure as well as sustenance, chewing more slowly than they ever had before. Usually they ate standing up, Chinese or Jamaican takeout from places down the street. Tonight there was little conversation,

Ibid., 40. Salted coffee is a Haitian folk remedy for hardship, reputed to give one strength to face difficult circumstances. It is a favorite trope for Danticat, who writes about it frequently throughout her oeuvre. See Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones, among others. In Create Dangerously and in a 2012 interview (Kimberly Nagy and Lauren McConnell, “Create Dangerously: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat,” in Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, ed. Maxine Lavon Montgomery (Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 138), Danticat also suggests that Haitian coffee is a “magic elixir” whose taste and aroma can bring on a rush of powerful memories and make one feel as if one is back in Haiti. 54 55

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beyond praise for the food. The men offered to clean the pots and dishes once they were done, and he suspected that they wanted to lick them before washing them.56 Using only what is at the immigrants’ collective disposal in their crowded basement apartment, the janitor’s wife crafts a copious dinner to be shared by all. Refusing to bend to the merciless logic of the market, which values efficiency above all else, she prioritizes the group’s psychological and spiritual well-being. In turn, her cooking draws the individual roommates into a group that is more than the sum of its parts—a family. As the men eat “for pleasure as well as sustenance,” they reclaim their humanity along with their sense of belonging. Next, the reader encounters the Dew Breaker’s psychological and physical impact—the deep and abiding emotional trauma and bodily mutilation inflicted not only by the Duvalier regime in general but by the Dew Breaker in particular. In “Night Talkers,” we discover that the janitor’s roommate Dany, for example, who has realized that their landlord is the Dew Breaker, is always talking in his sleep about the night the Dew Breaker mistook his father for someone “political” and set fire to Dany’s family’s house. For her part, Beatrice, “The Bridal Seamstress,” whom the Dew Breaker tortured decades ago because she refused to go dancing with him, has developed paranoid delusions as a result of her own traumatic experiences. “Maybe there were hundreds, even thousands, of people like this,” speculates Aline, the young Haitian-American journalist who interviews Beatrice, “men and women chasing fragments of themselves long lost to others.”57 How, wonders the reader by this point in the collection of stories, can such villains as the Dew Breaker even exist? The second part of The Dew Breaker attempts to answer to that question. The remaining chapters delve into the societal context that created the heinous Dew Breaker and others like him. In the 1970s, Freda remembers the 1960s Haiti of her childhood, in which food and hunger were the driving force in her parents’ lives: When we heard that the president was coming, we would clean our entire house, dust our cedar table, and my father would stay home from the sea in case the president chose to get out of the car and walk into our house, to offer us something extra, a bag of rice, a pound of beans, a gallon of corn oil, a promise of future entrance to the medical school or the agricultural school in Damien, something that would have bought our loyalty forever, so that twenty, thirty, forty years after he was long dead, we might still be saying, “Things were hard, but we once had a president who gave me a sack of rice, some beans, and a gallon of cooking oil. It was the first and last time anyone in power gave me anything.” As if this sack of rice, this pound of beans, this gallon of cooking oil were the gold, silver and bronze medals in the poverty Olympics.58 As Freda enumerates the cheap food staples that would have ensured her family’s endless devotion to the president, she communicates the sheer desperation of the everyday people, including her poor fisherman father, who saw Duvalier rise to power. It becomes clear that the people’s expectations of their government were and had long been abysmally low. Even the

Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 46. Ibid., 138. 58 Ibid., 171. 56 57

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basics of life, from food to education and the hope of a decent job, were the stuff of dreams, the “something extra” that only exceedingly hard to come by political connections and favors could secure. Regular people didn’t dare expect any of that to change under Duvalier. Driving home the impotence of the masses in Duvalier’s Haiti, Freda suggests that her impoverished fisherman father fantasized about a free sack of rice or pound of beans the way some people might imagine winning an Olympic medal. In Freda’s case, those gold, silver and bronze medals never came. Instead, the Tontons Macoutes took over her father’s modest fish stall, kidnapped him, and knocked out all of his teeth, driving the poor man to throw himself into the sea. Rather than buying Freda’s everlasting loyalty with food, the president’s men obtained her inextinguishable enmity with violence. Exiled for refusing to sing at the National Palace, Freda vows to return to Haiti to fight with the militias that are organizing against the regime. Nonetheless, Freda’s narrative makes it clear that any poor person might have been tempted to follow Duvalier, if it meant relief from insecurity and hunger. In a flashback to Haiti in 1967, while families like Freda’s starve or taste the bitterness of exile, the Dew Breaker grows fat by extorting terrified business owners: Restaurants fed him an enormous amount of food, which he ate eagerly several times a day because he enjoyed watching his body grow wider and meatier just as his sense of power did … Bourgeois married women slept with him on the cash-filled mattress on his bedroom floor … And the people who had looked down on him and his family in the past, well, now they came all the way from Léogâne to ask him for favors.59 Gorging himself is thus part of a larger power trip, calculated revenge on the exploitative mulatto business-owning class whose Haitianness and humanity he denies.60 As he assimilates the source of their influence—control over food—into his own body, the Dew Breaker neutralizes the bourgeoisie’s economic power over him. By having sex with married women, symbols of bourgeois respectability, on a mattress full of money on the floor, as one might with a prostitute, he negates their symbolic dominance as well. When those formerly dominant members of his community must come to him for help, the Dew Breaker revels in what he sees as a total and fully justified reversal of fortunes. Whereas most poor Haitians can only pray to win the “poverty Olympics,” the Dew Breaker now relishes in the capacity to assign and distribute its medals. When a young street boy returns with the cigarettes the Dew Breaker has sent him off to buy, the Macoute’s generosity with the boy only underscores the fact that despite the Dew Breaker’s own ascent, poor boys have not much more access to money—or food—than before. In this young boy, whose hands are perhaps calloused by the teacher’s blows, as the Dew Breaker muses, because he is too hungry to recite his lessons well, and who will (and must) run errands for a known villain in

Ibid., 196. Explains Danticat, “François Papa Doc Duvalier had made nationalism the same as noir-ism, that is you’re only truly Haitian, if you’re dark-skinned. That was his way to stamp out the country’s mulatto elite, exile and kill them” (Opal Palmer Adisa, “Up Close and Personal: Edwidge Danticat on Haitian Identity and the Writer’s Life,” African-American Review (summer/fall 2009):  345–55. In Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, ed. Maxine Lavon Montgomery (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 40). 59 60

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exchange for “a handful of goat meat and fried plantains,”61 the Dew Breaker sees something of himself. Transported by his interactions with the boy, the Dew Breaker succumbs to his memories. It wasn’t solely the unethical bourgeoisie, as he painfully recalls, that made him into what he is today, as he likes to pretend. It was also the Macoutes themselves who orchestrated his odious transformation. After army officers confiscated his peasant family’s land because they wanted to build summer homes there, the Dew Breaker’s father lost his mind and his mother disappeared, leaving him utterly alone at 19 years old. Therefore, when the Volunteers for National Security came rounding people up to make the president’s rallies look more impressive, the young man’s vulnerability wasn’t difficult to exploit. Something about the cigarette boy and his friends reminds the Dew Breaker of his own susceptibility at the time. And so he watched the boys suck the marrow out of the fried goat bones until the bones squeaked like whistles and clarinets and he thought of how hungry he’d been after the president’s speech, when the crowd was left to find its own way home and when one of the many men in denim who were circling the palace that day had approached him and asked him whether he wanted to join the Miliciens, the Volunteers, what later would be called the macoutes.62 Watching the boy share the meager spoils of his minor act of collaboration reminds the hardened criminal of himself, especially of the ways in which he habitually excuses his own participation in Duvalierian violence. From his position of power on the inside, the Dew Breaker has been able to get his father’s land back and even to protect his home village, at least when he feels like it. As a Tonton Macoute, he has the power to channel resources and protection where he will, and that fact, the Dew Breaker convinces himself, justifies his other, less palatable behavior. What is more, the artless way the boys voraciously suck the marrow out of the goat bones long after they have consumed all the meat moves the Dew Breaker to pity the boy and, by extension, to have compassion for his own younger self. “There was a part of him that wished he could buy that child a future,” thinks the Dew Breaker to himself, “buy all children like that a future. Perhaps not the future he would have himself, not the path his life would take, but another kind of destiny.”63 As things stand now, the naive errand boy is on the same path as that erstwhile starved, lonely adolescent who allowed himself to be drawn into a life of state-sponsored crime—the innocent who sold his soul to be free of hunger and powerlessness. The Dew Breaker is not the only one who tries to explain away Duvalierian abuses by pointing out the historical and continued misconduct of the business-owning class. “There were people with shops in our neighborhood,” rationalizes young Romain, the illegitimate son of a Tonton Macoute, “who had always been and would always be powerful, maintaining authority through control of water or bread or some other important resource … no matter what was going on politically.”64 Romain’s reasoning pinpoints two important contributors to

Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 195. Ibid. 63 Ibid., 194. 64 Ibid., 146. 61 62

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the cycle of violence: unequal access to resources (including food and potable water) and the deeply ingrained belief that such inequities are inevitable. And that kind of thinking could easily lead one down the Dew Breaker’s path.65 Going back further still, beyond Duvalierian violence and bourgeois profiteering, Romain cites European colonialism as a key source of Haitian hardship. The young man ties the suffering of the masses to the legacy of racialized slavery using sugar, a food that is emblematic of the Caribbean, its history, and its long-standing systems of oppression. Frustrated with Romain’s tendency to intellectualize, his friend Michel challenges him to face the whole truth about injustice in Haiti. But just then, when he looked at the sweet juice, which I was enjoying very much myself, saying “C’est à ce prix qu’ils mangent du sucre en Europe,” I replied, “Okay, your majesty,” feeling glad that at least his father wasn’t the only thing on his mind. “I’m sharing with you Voltaire’s words,” he said, “I tell you that in Europe they eat sugar with our blood in it and you mock me with a colonial title.” I realized then that it was going to be business as usual, just an ordinary Romain conversation, and so I said, “It seems to me we consume a lot of sugar here too. Does that mean we’re drinking our own blood?”66 On the one hand, Romain is right to point out that the Haitian masses have always been vulnerable to exploitation and that one form of exploitation gives birth to another. The ruthless plantation economy did create highly unequal and racialized socioeconomic categories; unethical socioeconomic elites did lay the groundwork for Duvalier’s rise to power. However, that kind of contextualization means little without an accompanying will to disrupt history. To Michel, who will later unknowingly rent an apartment from the Dew Breaker along with Dany and the janitor, Candide’s famous “price of sugar” commentary is much more than a simple critique of colonialism and racialized slavery.67 It is a universal call to accountability, frank criticism of any and all people whose prosperity or pleasure are derived from other people’s pain. In the end, if Ka Bienaimé and her mother have mistaken the Dew Breaker for one of his own victims, it is perhaps because that could just as easily have been the case. In the collection’s climactic scene, as the Dew Breaker reflects on his own ever-increasing brutality, he borrows a phrase from Alexis:  “Tu deviens un véritable gendarme, un bourreau.”68 Alexis’s secondperson familiar “tu” intimates that this could, even would happen to you—to anyone. But it didn’t. As Danticat’s polyvocal narrative shows, some died, others fled, and still others actively resisted, sometimes in heroic ways. They, unlike the Dew Breaker, found the price of sugar too Danticat has consistently privileged an understanding of the root causes of violence (unemployment, poverty, impulse to retaliation, culture, lack of infrastructure…) as a means of interrupting its perpetuation (Birnbaum, “Edwidge Danticat,” 18–19). Her writing is observation, description, certainly analysis, but never judgment. “I hoped as I was writing the book that it would not espouse one view or another in terms of revenge versus forgiveness,” she told an interviewer in 2009 (Adisa, “Up Close and Personal,” 46). 66 Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 153. 67 The plantation system’s legacy of extractive monoculture, exploitative labor practices, violence, and dehumanization stands in stark contrast to Haiti’s other ancestral inheritance, the sustainable small-scale subsistence agriculture described in “Walk Straight.” 68 You become a real policeman, an executioner. Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 198. 65

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high. And somewhere between recognition of their resemblances and accountability for their differences lies the truth.

Salt Is Life In 2013, Danticat published Claire of the Sea Light, the story of a day in the life of Ville Rose, a small Haitian coastal town. As the story unfolds, it reveals the complex web of linkages that ties the novel’s namesake, Claire, to the other townspeople and to one another, sometimes without their knowledge. The novel is likewise filled with interlocking problems—extreme poverty, environmental degradation, exportation of labor, rapid urbanization, the rise of gangs and violent crime, unequal access to resources including education, ineffective and corrupt government, patriarchy, homophobia and sexual violence—that are intimately connected to one another, even if in unseen ways. In Claire of the Sea Light, food is one of the tools of marvelous realism that the author uses to illustrate not only the singularity of individual Haitian experiences and what makes them Haitian, but furthermore a kinship to what is universally human. The novel begins and ends with the story of 7-year-old Claire, whose impoverished fisherman father Nozias has decided to give her away as a “servant, a restavèk”69 despite his deep love for the girl. Claire’s mother died giving birth to her, all their relatives are too poor to take her on, and Nozias himself must go away, as he explains, “Pou chèche lavi, to look for a better life.”70 As she so often does, Danticat includes these Kreyòl expressions alongside their English translations in order to both tie this dilemma to its Haitian context and facilitate its universal intelligibility. When she learns of her father’s plan to send her away, little Claire runs away to hide and to process what is happening to her. In the novel’s final chapter, the author offers us a window into the child’s individual thoughts and wishes. Using the child’s relationship to salt, Danticat simultaneously emphasizes Claire’s individuality, her Haitianness, and her humanity. Sometimes Claire wishes she could sleep long enough not only to interpret her nighttime dreams but also to discern the meaning of her daytime reality: And finally she might understand why in her real, waking life she had to wash herself in buckets behind the latrines when there was water everywhere, although it was seawater and if you bathed in seawater, you would get a layer of salt on your skin that looked like ash and dust and when you put your tongue on your arm you would taste salt like you tasted salt when you secretly ran your tongue over your father’s gutted and salted fish and your tongue would bleed from rubbing against the salted scales and the salt would sting where you had cut your tongue, making the salt even more delicious.71

A restavèk is a poor Haitian child sent to live with slightly better-off family members or acquaintances. In principle, in exchange for room, board, and school tuition (there is no free public education in Haiti), the children do some housework for their hosts. In reality, they are often little more than slaves. 70 Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 8. 71 Ibid., 212. 69

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In this passage, there is a rapid shift from the third-person internal focalization description of the girl’s childish confusion (“And finally she might understand”), severe poverty, and location in the developing world (“she had to wash herself in buckets behind the latrines”) to the secondperson prolonged meditation on the qualities of salt, wherein little Claire speaks directly to the anonymous reader, with whom she feels sure she has most things in common. While the former arouses pity in its supposition of difference, the latter awakens solidarity in its presumption of sameness. Using the generic “you,” the child draws the reader into her very skin, where her blackness (“you would get a layer of salt on your skin that looked like ash and dust”) and her extreme youth (“when you put your tongue on your arm you would taste salt”)—quite representative of Haiti—and even her clandestine, slightly shocking idiosyncrasies (“when you secretly ran your tongue over your father’s gutted and salted fish and your tongue would bleed … even more delicious”)—quite personal to Claire—are centered instead of marginalized, as they might be in the outside world. In a continued stream of consciousness contemplation of salt, Claire goes on to consider its symbolic importance to her community: Salt was life, she would often hear the adults say. Some of the fishermen’s wives would throw a pinch of crushed salt in the air for good luck, before their men left for the sea. (Some would also refuse to eat, or wash, or comb their hair until their men came back.) When zombies ate salt, it brought them back to life. Or so she’d always heard. Maybe if she ate enough salt, she would finally understand why her father wouldn’t let her wander, flannen. She would always try though. Sometimes while her father was at sea, she would walk through the open market and pretend that she was one of those children sent to buy provisions to bring home to a mother. And she would pick up things at the market and put them down, raising then crushing the hopes of the vendors who would mumble under their breath as she walked away. Every now and again, one of the vendors would shout: Just like her mother. And she would ask herself what else she might do to make them say even more often that she was just like her mother, besides dying, that is.72 At this point in Claire’s musings, the narration shifts back to the third-person internal focalization, reestablishing the separation between Claire’s youthful naïveté and puzzlement and the anonymous adult reader’s resignedly pessimistic grasp of life’s harsh realities. At the same time, the community’s deep attachment to salt shows itself to be both profoundly Haitian and fundamentally human. “Salt is life,” according to the Haitian proverb, and it makes sense to every Haitian and everyone, because salt is a universal human physical need, common to all cultures and circumstances by virtue of our biology.73 Likewise, when the women throw salt in the air to ensure their men’s safe return from the sea, their folkloric gesture is a Haitian manifestation of the shared psychological need to feel safe and in control in a dangerous,

Ibid., 212–13. “Salt is a powerful symbol in Haiti,” remarked Danticat in 2013,

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as elsewhere. Salt of the earth, for example, is an American phrase isn’t it? In Haiti, myth and legend has it that if you are turned into a zombie, if someone gives you a taste of salt, then you can come back to life. And in the life of the fishermen, there are so many little things about salt that I wanted to incorporate. The salt in the air. The crackling of salt in the fire. There’s all this damage, this peeling the fishing boats from the sea salt. But there is also healing from it, sea baths that are supposed to heal all kinds of aches and wounds. (Dwyer Murphy, “The

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unpredictable world. Even the salt-craving zombies, indigenous to the Caribbean and so closely associated with Haiti, encapsulate a broader human nature in their own way, for all have a spiritual need for freedom and for hope that transcends living death. Next, the heartbreaking return to the portrait of Claire as bewildered orphan turns both inward, to the uniqueness of one poor Haitian fisherman’s daughter’s life, and outward, to the Haitianness of her situation as a motherless child.74 But it goes well beyond that. In little Claire’s poignant pretend shopping at the market, the reader finds not just an allusion to the social ills of an impoverished island nation but also a bridge to every little girl who ever needed a loving mother, every child who ever wanted to be like other people, every person who has ever lived without the full portion of his or her human birthright. Using the fantastic qualities of salt, Danticat pulls Claire’s solitary fictional Haitian experience into the patchwork of Haitianness, and, in turn, draws that Haitianness into the mosaic of humanity.

Scattering and Gathering Over the past quarter century, the author has frequently expressed her frustration with widely held stereotypes about Haitians. “Either you’re super resilient or you’re wretched,” Danticat has noted, “I want people to look for that in-between place.”75 Taking personal responsibility for the work that must be done, she has asserted, “I want to claim that complexity for people who I think are sometimes simplistic—looked at in a very simplistic and pitying way.”76 Likewise, she has insisted on art’s superior efficacy as an antidote to ignorance and oversimplification: People sometimes think they know Haiti through what they have seen in the news. When they see a piece of art that we’ve produced, listen to a song, or read a piece of literature that we’ve written, we become closer to them. We are now part of them when the art stays with them. They then come closer to meeting us, and closer to the different layers of who and what we are.77 The secret to communicating the nuances of Haitianness, claims Danticat, is harnessing its composite nature. “The way we get depth is by putting a bunch of singular stories together to tell larger more complex and sometimes even contradictory stories,”78 she explains. Unsurprisingly, throughout her career, the structure of much of her writing has reflected that commitment

Art of Not Belonging,” Guernica, September 2013. In Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, ed. Maxine Lavon Montgomery (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 159) 74 See the World Health Organization’s estimation of maternal morbidity in Haiti, https://www.who.int/gho/maternal_ health/countries/hti.pdf. See UNICEF’s statistics on orphaned children, https://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/haiti_ statistics.html. See Georgette Mulheir’s article on children forced to separate from their parents by extreme poverty, “Thousands of Children Are Living in Orphanages in Haiti—but Not because They Are Orphans.” Independent, June 25, 2015. Available online: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_ guide/mla_works_cited_electronic_sources.html (accessed October 1, 2019). 75 Holdengräber, “Edwidge Danticat: In Conversation.” New York Public Library. November 10, 2010. In Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, ed. Maxine Lavon Montgomery (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 95. 76 Ibid., 96. 77 Handal, “We Are All Going to Die,” 121. 78 Murphy, “The Art of Not Belonging,” 157.

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to mosaic, from interrelated essays (Create Dangerously) to the short story collection/novel hybrid (Krik? Krak?, The Dew Breaker, Claire of the Sea Light), a form she revisits in the recent Everything Inside (2019). From individual Haitian stories, insists the author, there emerges a communal Haitian truth,79 and from that Haitian truth, we can all understand a little better what it is to be human.80 As we have seen, from the soup joumou that commemorates to the bone soup that celebrates, from the corn that connects to the coffee that remembers, from the shared meal that unifies to the blood-laced sugar that divides, to the salt that strengthens, protects, liberates, and even resurrects, food has played a key role in Danticat’s version of Haitian marvelous realism. In Danticat’s writing, food imagery helps make everyday Haitians, especially Haitian women in diaspora, visible to the blind. It also encapsulates a composite Haitian worldview and then makes it accessible to a global, especially North American, audience. In short, she has brought her mixed gaze to serve Jacques Stephen Alexis’s noble ambition for Haitian Marvelous Realism: To sing the beauty of the Haitian homeland, its greatness along with its misery, with a sense of the great perspective and solidarity with all people that the Haitian people’s fights have given them; to thus arrive at the human, the universal and the profound truth of life.81

Bibliography Adisa, Opal Palmer. “Up Close and Personal: Edwidge Danticat on Haitian Identity and the Writer’s Life.” African-American Review (summer/fall 2009): 345–55. In Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, edited by Maxine Lavon Montgomery, 37–53. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Alexis, Jacques Stephen. “Du réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens.” Présence Africaine, no. 165/166 (January 2002): 91–112. Birnbaum, Robert. “Edwidge Danticat.” Morning News, April 20, 2004. In Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, edited by Maxine Lavon Montgomery, 7–20. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Clitandre, Nadège T. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Cope, Robyn. “Writing Haiti Global: Food and Fascism in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 19, no. 3 (2015): 315–24. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Danticat, Edwidge. Claire of the Sea Light. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. New York: Vintage Books, 2010. Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Danticat, Edwidge. The Dew Breaker. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

“There are moments when art becomes part of something bigger, where a singular expression becomes part of the collective” (Handal, “We Are All Going to Die,” 119). 80 “And so there are all these common experiences that sometimes transcend particularities and sometimes the most singular thing is so universal. I’m glad when that happens, because it’s kind of meant some bridging has been done” (Holdengräber, “Edwidge Danticat,” 97). 81 Alexis, “Du réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens,” 109; my translation. 79

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat “Haiti’s Hunger Games: Disastrous Food Policy Bites Hands That Feed.” Haiti Briefing No. 72. Haiti Support Group, October 2012. Handal, Nathalie. “We Are All Going to Die.” Guernica. January 15, 2011. In Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, edited by Maxine Lavon Montgomery, 117–27. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Holdengräber, Paul. “Edwidge Danticat: In Conversation.” New York Public Library. November 10, 2010. In Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, edited by Maxine Lavon Montgomery, 73–102. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Loichot, Valérie. “Edwidge Danticat’s Kitchen History.” Meridians 5, no. 1 (2004): 92–116. Loichot, Valérie. “Kitchen Narrative: Food and Exile in Edwidge Danticat and Gisèle Pineau.” The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Lorde, Audre. Zami, a New Spelling of My Name. Watertown, MA: Crossing Press, 1982. Ludden, Jennifer. “Writing in Exile Helps Authors Connect to Home.” Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio. November 15, 2010. In Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, edited by Maxine Lavon Montgomery, 103–16. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Marshall, Paule. “From the Poets in the Kitchen.” New York Times, January 9, 1983. Mirabal, Nancy Raquel. “Dyasporic Appetites and Longings: An Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” Callaloo 30, no. 1 (2007): 26–39. Montgomery, Maxine Lavon. “Putting Together the Fragments: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.” In Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, edited by Maxine Lavon Montgomery, 203–12. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Mulheir, Georgette. “Thousands of Children Are Living in Orphanages in Haiti—but Not because They Are Orphans.” Independent, June 25, 2015, https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_ style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_works_cited_electronic_sources.html. Murphy, Dwyer. “The Art of Not Belonging.” Guernica, September 2013. In Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, edited by Maxine Lavon Montgomery, 152–62. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Nagy, Kimberly, and McConnell, Lauren. “Create Dangerously: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.” In Conversations with Edwidge Danticat, edited by Maxine Lavon Montgomery, 135–51. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017.

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CHAPTER 18 SEA, STONE, SKY, AND CEMETERY:  VODOU’S DIVINE NATURE AND RELIGIOUS ARCHETYPES IN DANTICAT’S KRIK? KRAK! AND AFTER THE DANCE *

Kyrah Malika Daniels

Edwidge Danticat’s writings reveal a mystic sensibility. Her novels, short stories, and memoirs portray families grappling with mundane realities as well as catastrophic tragedies. With Haiti decidedly situated at the center, her texts explore themes of memory and rupture, love and loss, matrilineal ties and diaspora/djyaspora. They feature determined dreamers and sojourners charged with the hardship of life—se yon chay y ap pote (it is a burden they carry). And yet. Sifting through her oeuvre, sitting with each text, one begins to discern the presence of divine archetypes: one comes to recognize the many mystic doings and sacred happenings. Saints and spirits appear and guide characters along their journeys. Elders bear the names of legendary historical figures and new names are bestowed upon babies who are (re)introduced to the world. The natural environment offers protection to protagonists, as ancient wisdom is revealed at the seaside and at the river-bend, in the forest, and in the graveyard. Most importantly, some things remain mysteries. I open with two quotations and reflections from recently transitioned ancestors, the first by historian of religion Charles H. Long and the second by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, both of whom I invoke with the Kreyòl phrase and Vodou call of mourning, woukoukou:1 The myth is often replete with the bizarre and the paradoxical when compared with the ordinary categories of culture; assent is given to the myth, however, because one is able, in spite of its bizarre character, to decipher the new order of meaning which has been revealed in it.2 It seems to me interesting to evaluate Black literature on what the writer does with the presence of an ancestor … There is always an elder there. And these ancestors are

*I am grateful to mentors, colleagues, and sister-friends Nadège T. Clitandre (University of California Santa Barbara), Rhonda Frederick (Boston College), and Régine Michelle Jean-Charles (Boston College) for their influential work in Caribbean feminist literary studies. Mèsi anpil to Nadège and Régine for their inspiring work on Danticat, and much appreciation to Rhonda for offering insightful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Finally, deep gratitude and ochan to Edwidge Danticat for her generosity of spirit in sharing her wisdom about the religious presences and archetypes of her compelling works. 1 Woukoukou is a Haitian Kreyòl expression used to honor the ancestors in Vodou. Woukoukou is recited during prayer and often undulated when calling a recently deceased ancestor’s name. The term resembles the Nigerian Yorùbá term ibaye and the Mexican Spanish expression presente, both uttered following the recitation of names of people who have recently (or long ago) transitioned to the spirit realm. This chapter on Danticat is dedicated to the memory of the late Toni Morrison (1931–2019), our literary divinity, and the late Charles H. Long (1926–2020), our “bringer of problems.” May their legacies continue to shine brightly within us, between us, and beyond. 2 Charles H. Long, “Prolegomenon to a Religious Hermeneutic,” in Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Study of Religion (Aurora, CO: Davies Group, [1986] 1995), 33.

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not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom.3

Folklore as True Lore Shortly before her passing, historian of religion Davíd Carrasco interviewed long-time friend and novelist Toni Morrison about the influences of African American Christianity as well as African myth and ritual in her work. In a classic “Toni” move, Morrison smiled wryly and replied, “Yes, you’re right that I draw on those sources, but you left out the other part. Religion for me also includes all the strange stuff.”4 Danticat’s oeuvre includes a good deal of what Morrison would have referred to as “strange stuff ”: flying women, underwater palaces, praying trees, weeping statues. Framed within the context of Africana religions, however, these occurrences are neither strange nor unusual. Rather, these literary encounters with “magic,” mystique, and bay mistik (mystic things/ways) serve as entry points into Haitians’s complex religious lives. Danticat reminds us that while Haitians may publicly identify as Catholic or Protestant, the spirits, the lwa, do not vanish overnight—on the contrary, their lives have spanned across the centuries and their mortal children are many. Vodou continues to course through the nation’s veins, and we must remember the collective, ancestral vows made to honor the spirits’ legacy. Over the past twenty years, a small growing body of literature has emerged and begun to focus on religious tropes in the work of Edwidge Danticat.5 This signals an important shift as scholars consider the centrality of religion in Haitian literature specifically, and African Diasporic literature more broadly. Furthermore, for many readers, Danticat may serve as their entré to Haiti, as well as their first introduction to non-maligned and even positive representations of Haitian Vodou. Even when myths and rituals involving Vodou appear morally complex and make certain characters uneasy or afraid in Danticat’s work, the tradition is consistently portrayed with nuance and great respect. In popular culture today, this literary achievement is an epic feat. Certain characters epitomize local Haitian prejudices against Vodou,6 and Danticat herself has remarked about the importance of her “getting it right” in her (re)presentations.7 And due to the flagrancy of Vodou’s gross misrepresentations in the media,

Toni Morrison, “Rootedness:  The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980):  A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor Books, 1984), 343. 4 Davíd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard, “Introduction: Toni Morrison’s Religion,” in Goodness and the Literary Imagination: Harvard’s 95th Ingersoll Lecture with Essays on Morrison’s Moral and Religious Vision, ed. Davíd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 6, my emphasis. 5 See the work of Marie-José N’Zengou-Tayo (2000), Yolanda Pierce (2010), Wilson Chen (2011), Maha Marouan (2013), Maxine L. Montgomery (2016), Myriam Moïse (2016), and Gwen Bergner (2017). 6 In “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” our protagonist Marie works for members of the bourgeoisie known as “Monsieur and Madame.” Despite claiming to like Marie, Danticat suggests that behind her back, her employers say to themselves, “ ‘She is probably one of those manbos … She’s probably one of those stupid people who think that they have a spell to make themselves invisible and hurt other people. Why can’t none of them get a spell to make themselves rich? It’s that voodoo [sic] nonsense that’s holding us Haitians back.” Edwidge Danticat, “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” in Krik? Krak! (New York City: Soho Press, 1995), 95. 7 See Edwidge Danticat and Kyrah Malika Daniels, “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat” (under review). 3

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readers may not have their eyes open in pridèzye8 to perceive the subtleties of sèvite9 (devotee) depictions in her writing. Previous literary studies emphasize Danticat’s feminist religious archetypes and (divine) matriarchies. The author highlights women’s powerful legacies and considers their potential to effect change and offer healing to the next generation of Haitian women. This is especially true of her critically acclaimed novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), the text most closely examined in its portrayal of Vodou. Nadège T. Clitandre10 examines her portrayals of women’s expansive kinship networks as ways to redefine relationships between diaspora, nation, and home as its own form of healing, what Myriam Moïse refers to as Danticat’s “transgenerational female empowerment.”11 Maha Marouan has compellingly identified the African-inspired origins of the entire matrilineal line in Breath, Eyes, Memory, linking Atie to Atibon Legba (spirit of the crossroads); Granmè Ife to the Yorùbá sacred city center of Ilé-Ifè (also a city in Vodou’s mythic realm of Afrik-Ginen12); daughter Sophie to Sophia, a (Black) goddess of wisdom associated with the Egyptian goddess Isis; and granddaughter Brigitte to Catholic saint Brigid and Grann Brijit, Gede queen of the dead.13 To this list of Africanisms, we may also consider Sophie’s domineering mother Martine’s ties to the fearsome Hispaniolan spirit Santa Marta la Dominadora. Ultimately, Martine seeks to heal from her family’s trauma (and her own) by reconnecting with her matriarchal line in Haiti, and in the United States she joins a women’s therapeutic healing circle led by an African American iyalocha (Santería/Lucumí priestess). The dual presence of Èzili (Freda) and the Virgin Mary has been widely documented in Danticat’s writings. This duality reminds us that Haitian Vodou continues to coexist alongside Catholicism not as a syncretic tradition but rather as an additive Africana religion that regularly incorporates figures from other world traditions. Maxine L.  Montgomery has argued that Claire in Claire of the Sea Light blends the maternal/seductive characteristics of LaSirèn, the Vodou mermaid spirit of secrets and deep knowledge, along with Mami Wata, a West African

Along with the late literary scholar VèVè A.  Clark, ethnomusicologist Gerdès Fleurant developed a three-tiered analytic model (bosal, kanzo, pridèzye) based on Katherine Dunham’s study of Haitian initiation to determine the various “levels” of scholars’ interpretation in their studies of Vodou. The level of pridèzye (literally, an opening of the eyes) refers to senior Vodou initiates—high priests and high priestesses. Within this model, pridèzye is used as a metaphor to identify the work of scholars who have reached a sophisticated level of understanding in their studies of Vodou. Gerdès Fleurant, “Haitian Vodou and Its Music,” Performing the Caribbean Experience 2 (2007): 237–50. 9 Sèvite refers to devotees of Haitian Vodou who serve the lwa, the spirits. 10 Clitandre states, “Danticat shows that a focus on women’s individual experiences offers a different way of looking at kinship ties, motherhood, and relationships to homeland and nation, one that moves beyond blood relations, nonpolarized dualities, and patriarchal articulations that are produced to control women’s lives and their bodies. Danticat’s women-centered diasporic spaces provide a more inclusive approach to understand and redefining Haitian identity. Her work displaces the singular voice of male authority and counters the inherently masculinist vision of home, family, and nation.” Nadège T. Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat:  The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 16. 11 Myriam Moïse, “Vodou Symbolism and ‘Poto Mitan’ Women in Edwidge Danticat’s Work,” in Vodou in Haitian Memory: The Idea and Representation of Vodou in Haitian Imagination, ed. Celucien L. Joseph and Nixon S. Cleophat (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 125. 12 Leslie Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 158. 13 Maha Marouan, “In the Spirit of Erzulie: Vodou and the Reimagining of Haitian Womanhood in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory,” in Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits: The Politics of Spiritual Liberation in African Diaspora Women’s Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 47–8, 50–1. 8

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water spirit of fortune and foreignness.14 The trope of the Marasa, sacred twins who correspond with the Yorùbá Ibeji, also appears prominently in Breath, Eyes, Memory. Marasa can manifest as twins and triplets, as well as the child(ren) who follows twins, effectively multiplying the possibilities of personhood. Identifying Danticat’s work as a “Vodou Vernacular,” Gwen Bergner identifies the Marasa’s twinness as a doubled identity that challenges notions of selfhood and the other.15 Additionally in Danticat’s work, dreams deliver messages from the spirits and ritual baths are drawn for daughters’ much needed healing.16 Lastly, Danticat incorporates frequent reference to charms, “maji/magic,” and wanga (a type of mystic work),17 offering a multifaceted portrait of Vodou that depicts people’s intent to take control of their own destinies and ritually enact change in their lives. Most interestingly for scholars of religion and literature, Danticat traverses boundaries between folklore and true lore. In an interview with Clitandre, Danticat shares her appreciation for African myths of origin, explaining her impression of “origin-based storytelling” as a captivating narrative form.18 However, her reverence for epic myths and (s)heroic narratives do not prevent the inspired author from fashioning legends of her own. Clitandre reveals how other Haitian novelists have incited Danticat to create her unique genre of storytelling: “For example, the daffodils she offers her readers in Breath, Eyes, Memory stem from a real story that actually becomes an invented myth in the novel, what she describes as ‘fake-lore,’ only after reading [Marie] Chauvet’s meticulous descriptions of butterflies and owls pregnant with meaning.”19 Thus we might ask ourselves, if folklore expresses re-presentations of inherited knowledge as well as empirical knowledge, what distinguishes “true” accounts from epic myths? Renowned novelist Zora Neale Hurston often flirted with this fine line between folklore and fake-lore, which proved quite memorable in her 1935 Mules and Men. This oral history project offered a compendium of tall tales and “lies” collected in Eatonville, Florida, and rites of Hoodoo or Conjure documented in New Orleans, Louisiana. As many of Danticat’s readers may not be familiar with Haitian myths and rituals, this fake-lore may be interpreted as Vodou “truths.”20 Moïse further elaborates on the liminal “lore” present in her work, explaining, Maxine L. Montgomery. “A Lasiren Song for the Wonn: Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Claire of the Sea Light’ and the Legend of Mami Wata,” CLA Journal 59, no. 4 (2016): 318. 15 Gwen Bergner explains: “Through the Marassa [sic], Danticat describes the person in relation to Vodou’s conception of a simultaneously divided—doubled, even tripartite—identity, bypassing altogether the rational/irrational binary of the Enlightenment subject and dismantling the logic of a human rights universalism that cannot fully accommodate women, blacks, and non-Western others.” Gwen Bergner, “Danticat’s Vodou Vernacular of Women’s Human Rights,” American Literary History 29, no. 3 (2017): 527. 16 In “Caroline’s Wedding,” our narrator relays: “The house smelled like a forest as the leaves boiled on the stove. Ma filled the bathtub with water and then dumped the boiled leaves inside. We undressed Caroline and guided her to the tub, helping her raise her legs to get in … ‘At last a sign,’ she joked. ‘She is my daughter after all. This is just the way I was on the day of my wedding.’ Caroline groaned as Ma ran the leaves over her skin. ‘Woman is angel,’ Ma said to Caroline. ‘You must confess, this is like pleasure.’ ” Edwidge Danticat, “Caroline’s Wedding,” in Krik? Krak!, 201. 17 At one point, the Young Woman of “Children of the Sea” bitterly writes to her lover of his attackers, the Tonton Macoutes, “if only i could kill. if i knew some good wanga magic, i would wipe them off the face of the earth.” Edwidge Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” in Krik? Krak!, 7. 18 Danticat states, “I love the way African mythology and many Haitian folktales try to explain how some things in the world came to be. That origin-based storytelling is very fascinating to me.” Edwidge Danticat, “Appendix: Interview with Edwidge Danticat,” in Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat, 183. 19 Nadège T. Clitandre, “Mapping the Echo Chamber: Edwidge Danticat and the Thematic Trilogy of Birth, Separation, and Death,” Palimpsest 3, no. 2 (2014): 184, my emphasis. 20 For this reason, Marie-José N’Zengou-Tayo examines “how Danticat makes the most of traditional beliefs and stories in her work … [I]‌will also discuss material that could ‘pass’ for Haitian but the origin of which we cannot 14

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“Danticat’s narratives often appear to exist in in-between spaces: they move from real scenes to folk tales, and they intermingle silences, and voices … mix[ing] the global and the local, the mythical and the historical.”21 For these reasons, the voices of Africana religion scholars are vital in distinguishing between Danticat’s representations of Vodou religious realities, its meaningful folklore, and her own clever fake-lore that blends mythic fact and empirical fiction in unforgettable prose.

Pale Daki / The Language of Andaki Danticat establishes herself as a sacred storyteller. Many members of the African Diaspora are familiar with the concept of the West African griot, the town crier, legend keeper, family orator, royal historian, and storyteller. Religion scholar Jacob K. Olúpọ̀nà also introduces the Yorùbá concept of Oriki, which he describes as “praise poetry of individuals and lineages that are rendered by women on certain occasions such as marriage, naming, and burial ceremonies.”22 He notes that women typically serve as the custodians of Oriki, guardians of local myth, legend, and lore. In an African feminist reading of her work, Olúpọ̀nà states of the late, beloved Toni Morrison, “Morrison is one whose Oriki … would have been Ọmọ Òpìtańdìran, that is, where a storytelling becomes an inheritance.”23 Similarly, Danticat’s own storytelling emerges as don, a gift, and a sacred inheritance from previous generations, perhaps from the ancestors themselves. This essay invokes Haitian Vodou epistemologies and African-centered ways of knowing to reveal encoded messages in Danticat’s work. I  focus specifically on her collection of short stories Krik? Krak! (1995), a particularly Vodou-inspired text, and more briefly on her travelogue narrative, After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (2002), which has garnered less attention despite its thoughtful reflections on ritual, performance, and the “spirit” of Kanaval. Danticat’s works may be analyzed as Africana religious texts24 using Olúpọ̀nà’s theoretical lens of indigenous hermeneutics, as he explains, “One must be willing to develop an awareness of Yorùbá and African worldviews, imagination, and hermeneutics … One cannot allow Western discourse to dictate the meaning and function of religion. All useful heuristic concepts and ideas must be reexamined and relocated within their indigenous hermeneutical traditions for their proper application.”25 In Black Atlantic traditions, the visual identify. This second point is based on the assumption that the U.S./non-Haitian reader will consider as belonging to Haitian traditional culture any element that does not relate to US or European culture.” Marie-José N’Zengou-Tayo, “Rewriting Folklore: Traditional Beliefs and Popular Culture in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!,” MaComère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars 3 (2000): 123. 21 Moïse, “Vodou Symbolism and ‘Poto Mitan’ Women,” 138, 140. 22 Jacob K. Olúpọ̀nà, “Ọmọ Òpìtańdìran, an Africanist Griot: Toni Morrison and African Epistemology, Myths, and Literary Culture,” in Goodness and the Literary Imagination: Harvard’s 95th Ingersoll Lecture with Essays on Morrison’s Moral and Religious Vision, ed. Davíd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 56. 23 Olúpọ̀nà, “Ọmọ Òpìtańdìran, an Africanist Griot,” 56. 24 Kokahvah Zauditu-Selassie is perhaps one of the first literary scholars to adopt this Africana religion framework in her thought-provoking book on Toni Morrison. Kokahvah Zauditu-Selassie, African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009). 25 Jacob K. Olúpọ̀nà, City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space, and the Imagination (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 8.

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arts and storytelling practices both feature coded myths and layered messages that help “sort” listeners according to their knowledge level as either initiates or noninitiates of sacred societies. In Haitian culture, the expression andaki or pale daki (literally, “to speak andaki”) signals a secret code to discuss difficult or taboo subjects, especially under times of political repression.26 In the Cuban Yorùbá-derived tradition of Lucumí, the term apataki refers to spiritual parables or archetypal stories.27 Both terms—apataki in Cuba and pale daki/andaki in Haiti—likely derive from the Nigerian Yorùbá term pataki (“important”).28 I assert that Danticat’s representations of Vodou may be regarded as pale daki, as coded messages for readers to interpret based on their familiarity with Haitian mythic archetypes. This framework of pale daki serves to dispel popular misperceptions that Vodou and other African derived traditions are inherently “secretive,” and instead highlights the work required to discern the presence of the sacred that is “hidden in plain view.”29 Drawing from the inspired work of feminist literary theorists Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Maha Marouan, and Marie-José N’Zengou-Tayo, I  call further attention to the mystique/mistik of Danticat’s texts. While humbly depicted as “mere” mortals, I contend that Danticat’s characters embody the powerful presence of the lwa (spirits), zansèt yo (the ancestors), rasin yo (their roots), and anviwònman sakre (the sacred environment). Numerous literary scholars have examined the religious tropes present in Danticat’s work, though few Africana religion scholars have critically engaged with her oeuvre. This chapter reads Edwidge Danticat’s short story collection and memoir from critical perspectives of Africana religious studies, visual art, and material culture. I  analyze several Vodou tropes present in her work and identify various lwa/spirits who serve as divine messengers, revealing themselves as principles of nature and as patrons of cultivated sites and hand-crafted objects. I examine sacred space as hallowed ground and ritual objects as divine entities in Danticat’s writings. As historian Tiya Miles thoughtfully reflects on Toni Morrison’s work, “Morrison reimagines what places are (animate rather than inanimate), what places do (act in the world of humans), and with whom they relate most intimately.”30 For Danticat, six sites—the forest, the sea, the sky, the stone, the river, and the cemetery—all prominently feature hierophany, a moment in which “something sacred shows itself to us.”31 At this time, the spirits manifest and make themselves known to devotees, whether awestruck and fearful or deeply devoted

Conversation with Manbo Marie Maude Evans, February 16, 2020. See also N’Zengou-Tayo, “Rewriting Folklore,” 134. Zauditu-Selassie, African Spiritual Traditions, 97, 173. 28 Religion scholar Funlayo E. Wood-Menzies explains that the West African Yorùbá term pataki means “important” while the term itan traditionally referred to stories or parables in southwestern Nigeria. The term pataki evidently persisted in the African Diaspora in various forms, including its use in the Cuban Lucumí religious context (apataki) to mean “parables” and its use in the Haitian Vodou religious tradition (pale daki or andaki) to mean coded messages. Wood-Menzies points out the remarkable feat of enslaved African elders in the diaspora who successfully relayed this concept of “importance” (pataki) to the next generation, thus ensuring the transmission and renaming of these sacred stories in Africana traditions. Conversation with Funlayo E. Wood-Menzies, February 14, 2020. 29 This notion of “hidden in plain view” is exemplified with the use of African American quilts as “markers” of safety for enslaved Black people journeying to freedom along the Underground Railroad in the United States. See Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard’s Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad, 2000. 30 Tiya Miles, “Structures of Stone and Rings of Light: Spirited Landscapes in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” in Goodness and the Literary Imagination: Harvard’s 95th Ingersoll Lecture with Essays on Morrison’s Moral and Religious Vision, ed. Davíd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 60. 31 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (San Diego: Harcourt, [1957] 1987), 11. 26 27

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as followers. These natural phenomena (forest, sea, sky, river) as well as human-crafted sites/ entities (stone, cemetery) create sacred space associated with a divine energy, and their respective lwa serve as our narrative guides. Ultimately, I argue that these tropes of sacred sites, both natural and human-crafted, and mythic archetypes of spirit, ancestor, and energy help us to illuminate the vibrant religious portraits of Danticat’s works.

See the Forest for the Trees: Realm of Loko, Ayizan, and Gran Bwa Nature is a spirited presence.32 The forest has long been a site of initiation for African peoples. In West and West-Central Africa, rituals take place in the sacred grove to welcome new babies to the world, mark adolescents in their maturation to adulthood, and prepare recently transitioned elders for their journey to the ancestral realm. Healers-in-training venture into the forest to learn about their medicines, while other ritual specialists collect leaves and organic materials for ceremony, ritual baths, and masquerades. This reverence for trees, plants, and animals of the forest has carried over in the African Diaspora, especially in US Conjure and Hoodoo, Cuban traditions of Regla de Ocha (Santería/Lucumí) and Regla de Congo (Palo), Brazilian Candomblé, and Haitian Vodou. The late Vodou Ati (national religious leader) and houngan asogwe (high priest) Max G. Beauvoir once recalled of the forest in Seguin, Haiti: “All of these mountains are referred to as ‘boutilyes,’ which is the land of the first ancestors. It is not unusual to see people who go there to come down from their horses, remove their shoes, and kneel down to pray to their fore-fathers.”33 Danticat’s works frequently depict the forest as a holy refuge, and the creatures who reside there—birds and butterflies especially—often play the role of influential spirit messengers. In Vodou, trees may be shared between spirits or chosen specially for certain spirits as their own, as with Danbala’s mapou (cotton silk tree), Ogou’s kalbasye (calabash tree), and Ayizan’s palmis (palm tree).34 Ultimately, however, all trees belong to Mèt Gran Bwa (literally, Master of the Great Tree), the lwa of the forest depicted with a heart for a head and a body that forms the shape of a grand tree trunk. Historically, Haitian families would cultivate their gardens and tend to trees for their livelihood on the lakou. The lakou is a preciously guarded ritual plot of land that is passed down through the family line.35 With the inheritance of land also comes the inheritance of spirits who protect that land and its residents. Specific trees of the lakou would be chosen for each child in the new generation. Following a child’s birth in Haiti (and other Caribbean nations such as Guadeloupe36), elders in the family would conduct a ceremony, Miles, “Structures of Stone and Rings of Light,” 74. Edwidge Danticat, After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (London: Random House, 2002), 107–8. 34 Mimerose Beaubrun, Nan Domi: An Initiate’s Journey into Haitian Vodou (San Francisco: City Lights, 2013), 129. 35 As Charlene Désir explains, “In many ways, the lakou is more than a community; it is a theoretical and social framework and an integral part of the social fabric of Haiti.” Claudine Michel further notes, “Real or imagined, today’s lakou(s), are relational spaces that serve our communities.” Both cited in Charlene Désir, “Diasporic Lakou: A Haitian Academic Explores Her Path to Haiti Pre- and Post-Earthquake,” in Harvard Educational Review 81, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 282. 36 Ivette Romero-Cesareo cites the work of Dany Bébel-Gisler’s Léonara: L’Histoire enfouie de la Guadeloupe (1994), stating: “[Bébel-Gisler] underlines the historically signifying function of the tree under which the umbilical cord is buried. The cord not only attaches one to the earth but also nourishes the tree that will serve as a landmark for one’s existence:  it is a living monument to one’s life. Second, she affirms our relationship not only to the earth but also to the dead.” Ivette Romero-Cesareo, “Sorcerers, She-Devils, and Shipwrecked Women: Writing Religion in French 32 33

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antere kòd nonbrit (burial of the umbilical cord), in order to root the child to the family land both socially and spiritually speaking. In the story “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” Danticat introduces us to Marie, who has suffered several tragic losses with miscarried children, and who finds an abandoned baby, Rose, whom she cares for her as her own child until they must part ways. Reflecting on birth in the lakou, Marie remarks: Back in Ville Rose you cannot even throw out the bloody clumps that shoot out of your body after your child is born. It is a crime, they say, and your whole family would consider you wicked if you did it. You have to save every piece of flesh and give it a name and bury it near the roots of a tree so that the world won’t fall apart around you.37 Soon, Baby Rose begins to transform before her eyes, and already carrying the loss of her miscarried children, Marie enters a new period of mourning: I gave her one last bath and slipped on a little yellow dress that I had sewn while praying that one of my little girls would come along further than three months. I  took Rose down to a spot in the sun behind the big house. I dug a hole in the garden among all the gardenias. I wrapped her in the little pink blanket that I had found her in, covering everything but her face. She smelled so bad that I couldn’t even bring myself to kiss her without choking on my breath.38 Marie sadly buries the long-deceased Baby Rose underneath a tree in the lakou. Danticat thus signals the profound connection established between baby and tree, both spirits in human and arboreal form. Whether fully manifested as a healthy newborn or arrested in development as a deceased baby, one new life begets another: the baby’s remains (umbilical cord or decomposing body) offer nutrients to the sacred tree, which gives forth to new flowers and fruit. Antere kòd nonbrit, the ritual burial of the baby’s umbilical cord, is reinterpreted here. Haitian readers will recognize the story’s earlier mention of interring the umbilical cord, but in this act, Marie chooses a tree where she will bury the body of her adopted Baby Rose, thus forging a new relationship to her adopted progeny and the land. In the short story “Children of the Sea,” we are introduced to two nameless young lovers through letters that neither will ever receive. A Young Woman39 in Port-au-Prince fights to avoid the violence of the Tonton Macoutes, the Duvaliers’ personal guard, and protect herself in the haven of her family. As time passes, she realizes the depth of her parents’ love for her, even as she challenges her father’s stern, patriarchal ways. Her lover is a Young Man who formed part of the “Radio Six,” a group of student journalists who oppose the dictatorship. He manages to escape on a raft to fight for his freedom and hopes to reach the shores of the United States. During their short time apart, they write love letters to one another: the Young Caribbean Literature,” in Sacred Possessions:  Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean, ed. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 250. 37 Danticat, “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” 93. 38 Ibid., 98. 39 I capitalize “Young Woman” and “Young Man” to honor them while recognizing Danticat’s choice to keep them nameless.

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Man from his place in a slowly sinking raft and the Young Woman from her home, and under the banyan tree. National trees carry both political and spiritual meaning, such as the palm tree depicted on the Haitian flag representing Ayizan, who, as legend has it, served as one of JeanJacques Dessalines’s own protectors and spiritual guides during the revolution.40 In Vodou, all trees serve as repozwa, sacred repositories and residences of the spirits, and as Danticat states herself, “trees were the first temples, for sure, of any kind.”41 As the Young Woman narrates to her lover, “i am writing to you from the bottom of banyan tree. manman says that banyan trees are holy and sometimes if we call the gods from beneath them, they will hear our voices clearer.”42 In her children’s book Dènye Pye Mapou A, the mapou (silk cotton tree), much like the banyan (a type of fig tree), possesses divine energy as a tree of creation, true in both African indigenous and indigenous Taíno traditions.43 As a “holy” entity and residence of the lwa, we can interpret the Young Woman’s installation under the tree as an entreaty to ask the blessed banyan tree to ensure the safety of her lover. However, the forest does not always serve as sanctuary in Danticat’s works; its messengers also carry foreboding news. In her reading of Breath, Eyes, Memory, Jana Evans Braziel points out, “In Lucy’s and Sophie’s dreams, daffodils … [along with] roses, bougainvilleas, hibiscuses, and wildflowers—mark the protagonists’ conflicted feelings about mothers, coming of age, and diasporic distance from home.”44 Despite their beauty, roses and bougainvilleas carry thorns, hibiscuses leave deadly stains, and wildflowers are fleeting. Danticat’s flowers remind her characters of sweet past memories as well as haunting ghosts. And then there are the butterflies. Present everywhere in Danticat’s writings,45 butterflies flit in and out between the pages, delivering news from the spirits above and the ancestors below. These winged creatures also embody spirits as they make their transitions to other realms.46 Danticat explains the mystic presence of butterflies, recounting stories from her grandmother: “I’ve always had this strong belief that the veil [between heaven and earth] is not as thick as we think. That there is a kind of fluidity between life and death. And I feel like it manifests in ways like that, in fireflies, in butterflies, through nature. The ancestors and the dead speak to us. I strongly believe that.”47 In many Africana traditions, winged beings, especially birds, navigate between earth and sky to bring news to mortals. Butterflies do carry a mysterious air about them—they seemingly appear out of nowhere, until colorful wings catch the sunlight and alert their arrival.

It is said that Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s other protective spirit was Ogou, possibly Ogou Oumadja. Patrick BellegardeSmith, Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005): 64. 41 Danticat and Daniels, “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine” (under review). 42 Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” 28. 43 Edwidge Danticat, Dènye Pye Mapou A (Brooklyn, NY:  One Moore Book, 2019) (2013 English edition, The Last Mapou). 44 Jana Evans Braziel, “Daffodils, Rhizomes, Migrations: Narrative Coming of Age in the Diasporic Writings of Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid,” Meridians 3, no. 2 (2003): 127. 45 For more butterfly appearances, see Danticat’s Krik? Krak! (1995), After the Dance (2002), Create Dangerously (2010), and The Art of Death (2017), among others. 46 In Breath, Eyes, Memory, when Sophie dresses her deceased mother in crimson red, someone expresses concern that St. Peter won’t let her into Heaven with this garb. Sophie replies: “She is going to Guinea [sic] … or she is going to be a star. She’s going to be a butterfly or a lark in a tree. She’s going to be free.” Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York: Soho Press, 2015), 229. 47 Danticat explains that her maternal grandmother impressed upon her and her siblings the power of butterflies as winged messengers. Danticat and Daniels, “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine” (under review). 40

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Butterflies are associated with the lwa Loko, the first houngan (Vodou priest), and his wife, Ayizan, the first manbo (Vodou priestess). Papa Loko and Manbo Ayizan, as they are lovingly called, preside over kanzo, rites of initiation. Perhaps because of their powers of transformation, butterflies belong to these primordial parents who oversee the spiritual metamorphosis and ordination of their children. And though appreciated for their rare beauty, black butterflies can be sent as dark angels. We learn the Young Woman of “Children of the Sea” is an artist, as she shares with her lover, “i don’t sketch my butterflies anymore because i don’t even like seeing the sun. besides, manman says that butterflies can bring news. the bright ones bring happy news and the black ones warn us of death.”48 As the Young Woman grows more fearful of her lover’s fate, she also gains appreciation for her father’s sacrifices on behalf of his family. Pining for a love lost before its consummation, the Young Woman observes: today i said thank you. i said thank you, papa, because you saved my life. he groaned and just touched my shoulder, moving his hand quickly away like a butterfly, and then there it was, the black butterfly floating around us. i began to run and run so it wouldn’t land on me, but it had already carried the news. i know what must have happened.49 Several days later, the Young Woman’s worst fears are confirmed, as she learns, “last night on the radio, i heard that another boat sank off the coast of the bahamas … behind these mountains are more mountains and more black butterflies still and a sea that is endless like my love for you.”50 Her vision of “more black butterflies still” offers a mournful meditation on death, recalling the sacrifices of so many people (especially “boat pipl”), the martyrdom of so many Haitian exiles and political prisoners, men and women. The Young Woman invokes the sea that welcomed her lover and the boat’s passengers into its watery graveyard. Though she knows the fate of her lost lover, she identifies the sea not solely as a cemetery but also as a mirror for the depth of her love. And unbeknownst to her, her beloved intuits precisely this same language of love on the open sea, as the Young Man intimates, “At times I  wonder if there is really land on the other side of the sea. Maybe the sea is endless. Like my love for you.”51 Danticat draws from the Black Atlantic philosophy that as a reflective surface, the ocean offers a metaphoric mirror,52 and the two lovers use the sea to express their mirrored love. In this way, we are introduced to the mystic ocean’s infinite depths.

Afrik-Ginen and the Oceanic Afterlife: Agwe’s and LaSirèn’s Domain Danticat features three principal bodies of water in her writings:  the Massacre River, the Caribbean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean, each with their own haunting specters. In an ecocritical literary analysis of her work, Gabrielle Nugent identifies the sea as a primal source and emancipatory site, highlighting “the paradox of the sea as an originary space and the sea Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” 5. Ibid., 28. 50 Ibid., 28–9. 51 Ibid., 15, my emphasis. 52 Kyrah Malika Daniels, “Mirror Mausoleums, Mortuary Arts, and Haitian Religious Unexceptionalism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85, no. 4 (2017): 957–84. 48 49

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as a passageway to freedom through death.”53 This is certainly true of the ocean depicted in “Children of the Sea.” Literary scholars have previously interpreted the sea in this story as a route and passageway that leads only to tragic and untimely death. However, an Africana religious interpretation allows us to understand the Atlantic Ocean as inhabited by an African community of souls that welcome home their kin. As the waves rise and fall with increasing force, the sea reminds the Young Man and fellow passengers of its power as a spirited cemetery. The Young Man prays every day and every night for the storms to subside, but they continue to bombard the small boat as if Agwe, captain of the seas, and Agawou,54 lord of wind and thunder, themselves were sparring in their realms of residence. Even the passengers’ offerings of pipes, notebooks, and Haitian gourdes (and eventually people) does not seem to appease Agwe or his mermaid queen wife, LaSirèn, on the rocky seas. The passengers aboard the raft do not belong to a single faith tradition, and religious differences abound in various interpretations of their misery. At one point, the Young Man observes the number of Protestant passengers, noting, “A lot of them see themselves as Job or the Children of Israel. I think some of them are hoping something will plunge down from the sky and part the sea for us. They say the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. I have never been given very much. What was there to take away?”55 This Protestant theodicy (the problem of evil) presents a fascinating contrast to Vodou cosmology, which does not promise its devotees a life of plentitude either in this lifetime or in the afterlife. Instead, Vodouizan are expected to honor BonDyè (God), invizib yo (literally, the invisible ones, including spirits and ancestors), along with one’s elders, as they recall that Vodou’s rituals provide tools of fortitude and healing to withstand life’s suffering. In Yorùbá diaspora cosmologies, the top third of the ocean is inhabited by Yemayá (Cuba) or Iemanjá (Brazil), the brown-skinned mother of all fishes, while the bottom of the sea represents the home of Olokun (at times gendered male, other times female), who guards deep sacred knowledge and great wealth. Like the Yorùbá diasporic couple Yemayá and Olokun,56 Vodou’s Agwe and especially LaSirèn have become associated with the pain and sorrow of the Middle Passage, as they offered sanctuary to the souls of those whose lives were violently extinguished during slavery on the sea. African Diaspora religious devotees lament the loss of millions of brethren and sistren during the Middle Passage but also regard the sea as a site of homecoming. They recognize how the oceanic spirits suffered greatly watching their children languish, as they wished to comfort them in death. Considering African women’s relationship with the ocean during slavery, Danticat reflects somberly, “The past is full of examples of our foremothers showing such deep trust in the sea that they would jump off slave ships and let the waves embrace them. They believed that the sea was the beginning and end of all things, the road to freedom Gabrielle Nugent, “The Work of Water in Edwidge Danticat’s Environmental Imagination” (master’s thesis, Clemson University, 2018), 1. 54 Agawou, lord of the sky, is associated with powerful gusts of wind, thunder, lighting, and storms, and within Vodou, he parallels the orisa Sango’s prominence in Yorùbá traditions. 55 Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” 7. 56 As Zauditu-Selassie maintains, “In the Western hemisphere, Olokun becomes an Òrìsà of salvation for Africans helping to restore spiritual unity breached by the Middle Passage and the emotion and physical brutality experienced in the crossing into American captivity. Lloyd Weaver notes Olokun is ‘the dark and unknowable bottom of the sea’ and ‘collective unconsciousness of mankind’ (xxviii). Weaver says that because of the millions of bones lying at the bottom of the ocean as a result of the Middle Passage, Olokun becomes a sympathetic messenger on behalf of the ‘spiritual collective’ interred in his domain (xxviii).” Zauditu-Selassie, African Spiritual Traditions, 112. 53

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and their entrance to Ginen.”57 Afrik-Ginen is Vodou’s oceanic afterlife, simultaneously serving as a mythic Africa and a realm beneath the sea, where ancestors, spirits, and the unborn all reside.58 Cosmologically for African Diaspora peoples, the ocean transformed into a spiritual traffic highway for suffering souls to make their passageway back to a sacred birthplace. Unfortunately, this promise begins to feel hollow, as the Young Man despairs that even this mythic homeland would turn the passengers away.59 This oceanic passage to/through Ginen also resembles African Diaspora folklore that recounts Black people’s ability to “fly back to Africa,” which Jacob K. Olúpọ̀nà refers to in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon as a “symbolic interpretation of death and transition into the afterlife.”60 Indeed, the realms of sea and sky are closely connected, and provide potential routes for escape. Whether leaping off a cliff, walking into the sea, or jumping overboard into the ocean, death offers African descended peoples the possibility to reunite with loved ones in the spirit world. The Young Man’s narrative voice takes a solemn tone as he explains that the offerings to Agwe and LaSirèn continue. He introduces Célianne, a 15-year-old girl who was pregnant when she came on board as the result of her rape by the brutal Tonton Macoutes. During the course of their journey, she gives birth to a stillborn baby girl. Heeding the demand of her fellow passengers concerned about their sinking raft, she drops her baby into the sea before jumping in herself. This tale may have been influenced by a true story,61 one that also features a young mother who understands that the depths of the sea will transport her to Afrik-Ginen, where she and her baby may have a chance to be reborn. This is not unlike the enslaved Igbo nations of Igbo Landing who walked into the ocean to escape slavery in the Gullah and Geechee regions of the southeastern United States.62 Linking the pain of Middle Passage Africans with Haitian boat migrants of the 1990s, Danticat reflects, “I see the sea as an international site of memory we share with other African Diaspora people.”63 As political scientist and houngan asogwe Patrick Bellegarde-Smith mourns, “The bones were laid thick; they made a brittle carpet upon which slave ships glided and memories derailed.”64 However, Africans’ tragic deaths and thoughtful suicides have formed a nation of underwater spirits, who have created sacred space in anticipation of the next generation’s arrival. Edwidge Danticat, “We Are Ugly, but We Are Here,” in Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003), 27. 58 For more on the mythic realm of Afrik-Ginen, see Adam McGee’s article “Constructing Africa: Authenticity and Gine in Haitian Vodou,” Journal of Haitian Studies 14, no. 2 (2008): 30–51; and Kyrah Malika Daniels’s “Mirror Mausoleums, Mortuary Arts, and Haitian Religious Unexceptionalism.” 59 As the Young Man remarks, “Sometimes it feels like we have been at sea longer than the many years that I have been on this earth … I feel like we are sailing for Africa. Maybe we will go to Guinin [sic], to live with the spirits, to be with everyone who has come and died before us. They would probably turn us away from there too.” Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” 14. 60 Olúpọ̀nà, “Ọmọ Òpìtańdìran, an Africanist Griot,” 40–1. 61 As Danticat recalls, “Eleven years ago [in 1992], a mother jumped into the sea when she discovered that her baby daughter had died in her arms on a journey that she had hoped would take them to a brighter future. Mother and child, they sank to the bottom of an ocean which already holds millions of souls from the middle passage, the holocaust of the slave trade. That woman’s sacrifice moved many of us to tears, even while it reminded us of a slew of past sacrifices made previously for all of us, so that we could be here.” Danticat, “We Are Ugly, But We Are Here,” 27. 62 For more on Ibo Landing, see Ras Michael Brown’s “‘But the Mermaid Did Not Rise Up’: The Death of a Simbi in the Carolina Lowcountry,” Southern Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2010): 120–50. 63 Danticat and Daniels, “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine” (under review). 64 Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, “The Spirit of the Thing: Religious thought and Social/Historical Memory,” in Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World, ed. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2005), 2. 57

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As the raft sinks more determinedly and passengers’ prayers on board increase in urgency, the Young Man begins to make quiet peace with his final resting place beneath the waters in Afrik-Ginen. Vodou cosmology emphasizes the importance of dreams to relay spiritual messages, as Danticat muses, “I see dreams as an ancestral conversation. I  always have … I think dreams are one of the many ways that the veil [between heaven and earth] is pierced.”65 Fittingly, the Young Man recalls one day: The other night I dreamt that I died and went to heaven. This heaven was nothing like I expected. It was at the bottom of the sea. There were starfishes and mermaids all around me. The mermaids were dancing and singing in Latin like the priests do at the cathedral during Mass. You were there with me too, at the bottom of the sea.66 Though fearful and voiceless (when he opens his mouth to speak in the dream, only bubbles emerge), the Young Man appears mesmerized by the underwater palace, home to Agwe and LaSirèn. Here, Danticat offers us another glimpse of religious plurality, with Vodou mermaids (and perhaps mermen) singing and dancing as if in Catholic mass. As historian of religion Kimberley C. Patton declares, we are reminded in this scene that even the gods have religion.67 Toward the end of the story, the Young Man relinquishes control over his fate at sea: I go to them now as though it was always meant to be, as though the very day that my mother birthed me, she had chosen me to live life eternal, among the children of the deep blue sea, those who have escaped the chains of slavery to form a world beneath the heavens and the blood-drenched earth where you live.68 Undoubtedly, this “life eternal” refers to the spirit residents of Afrik-Ginen, some of whom cycle through life on earth in mortal manifestations, some of whom remain submerged (though no longer chained) in aquatic existence. There is yet another interpretation of the Young Man’s dream and watery descent. In his final moments above water, he murmurs: Perhaps I was chosen from the beginning of time to live there with Agwé at the bottom of the sea. Maybe this is why I dreamed of the starfish and the mermaids having the Catholic Mass under the sea. Maybe this was my invitation to go. In any case, I know that my memory of you will live even there as I too become a child of the sea.69 This language of being “chosen” and “invited” to the bottom of the sea parallels the calling of Vodou devotees to be formally initiated by the spirits, and such messages of initiation are

Danticat and Daniels, “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine” (under review). Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” 11–12. 67 See Kimberley C. Patton’sReligion of the Gods:  Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2009). 68 Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” 27. 69 Ibid., 27–8. 65 66

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often delivered via dreams.70 Literary scholar Marie-José N’Zengou-Tayo offers this thoughtful reading, which I quote at length here: At a primary level, we can interpret this dream as a projection of his worst fears (dying at sea, being prevented from marrying his lover). However, other elements of the dream— the church, the association with Agwe, the lwa of the sea—invite us to consider it also as a “call” dream, in which the protagonist would have to undergo initiation through an underwater journey … As a result, his “prise d’ason” will be his journey toward death and he will become Agwe’s child, a “child of the sea.”71 Both houses of worship referenced in the dream—the aquatic Catholic church and the underwater palace/temple of Agwe and LaSirèn—invite the Young Man to claim his calling as a priest of Vodou. Taking N’Zengou-Tayo’s interpretation one step further, it is not actually Agwe (the captain of the seas associated with the sea’s surface) but, rather, the water-dwelling spirit LaSirèn who is known to capture devotees and take them anba dlo (under the water) for initiation. As time moves differently in the sea, this initiation may take seven years underwater, but only a few days in mortal time. This submarine kanzo bypasses the initiation in an earthly womb (the djèvo, or inner temple), and devotees agree that those initiated anba dlo are entrusted with a wealth of songs, being trained by Manbo LaSirèn herself, the high priestess mermaid. Though he may not see his lover again in this lifetime, the Young Man will be initiated by the divine feminine, a sea spirit of secrets and sacred knowledge. In this way, we might interpret the Young Man’s descent into the oceanic afterlife of Afrik-Ginen as mortal death yet spiritual rebirth in the womb-temple of LaSirèn, African mermaid and Queen Mother of the sea.

The Stone Statue Who Weeps: Èzili Freda’s Tears At times the first line is the most arresting. Danticat opens “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” with this rumination:  “My Madonna cried. A  miniature teardrop traveled down her white porcelain face, like dew on the tip of early morning grass. When I saw the tear I thought, surely, that my mother had died. I  sat motionless observing the Madonna the whole day. It did not shed another tear.”72 Likely set in the 1960s or 1970s, this story introduces us to a powerful matriarchal lineage of women survivors from the 1937 Haitian massacre (referred to as the Parsley Massacre) and also under the Duvalier regime. While neither mother nor daughter refers to one another using their names, we learn from a later story in Krik? Krak! that the narrator-daughter is Josephine and her mother is Manman Défilé.73 Josephine travels regularly

Danticat recounts, “I know friends who have said, I know I need to be initiated, because I’ve had a series of dreams. And that’s how that [message] is communicated to them.” Danticat and Daniels, “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine” (under review). 71 N’Zengou-Tayo, “Rewriting Folklore,” 133. 72 Edwidge Danticat. “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” in Krik? Krak!, 33. 73 In a later story, Marie’s mother delivers messages in her dreams and introduces her to the elder matriarchs: “Mama had to introduce me to them, because they had all died before I was born. There was my great grandmother Eveline who was killed by Dominican soldiers at the Massacre River. My grandmother Défilé who died with a bald head in prison, because God had given her wings.” Danticat, “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” 94, my emphasis. 70

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to see her mother in a prison in Port-au-Prince, where she has been incarcerated for the crime of being a lougawou, a mystic woman who flies at night. During each visit, Josephine arrives cradling a Madonna figurine, a porcelain stone statue who weeps, and who seems to be her mother’s only solace. As Danticat considers the connection between Mother and Mary statue, she states: The mother … for me is definitely a Freda, like the Mater Dolorosa, the suffering Mary, the weeping Madonna figure with the tears. I had just come from the tragic ending of that story [Breath, Eyes, Memory]. And when I wrote this story, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” I  was still carrying that with me, literally the way that they were carrying a physical figurine. And I feel that all my female characters have that, that’s their lwa, Èzili Freda.74 Unquestionably, Èzili is Vodou’s most recognizable Haitian lwa among the goddesses. As Èzili Freda, she is coquettish and persuasive, an affluent spirit with many lovers, but no master besides herself. As Èzili Dantò, she is a fiercely protective mother-warrior who fought during the Haitian Revolution, and patroness of women who love women. There are many Èzili manifestations, including Grann Èzili, the grandmother of the clan; Èzili Jè Wouj, the hottempered fighter and mistreated soul; and some venture to add LaSirèn, Èzili of the sea. And while the family of Èzili spirits is one of the most prolific in Vodou, by no means is Èzili Vodou’s chief female lwa—spirits such as Ayizan, Ayida Wèdo, Rènn Kongo, Kouzin, and Grann Brijit all play vital roles in the pantheon. However, as Colin Dayan reminds us of this divine feminine force, “Since Erzulie [sic] remains the most heavily textualized (and romanticized) of vodoun [sic] spirits, her representation … destabilizes the categorical imperatives of race and gender.”75 Among the lwa, sisters Èzili Freda and Èzili Dantò exemplify the intricacies of intersectionality with regard to color, class, and Haitian womanhood. For Danticat’s characters, Freda reigns supreme in her frequent apparitions, embodying what N’Zengou-Tayo identifies as lwa rasin,76 the protective familial spirit in several novels and short stories. In Haitian culture as well as literary works, Èzili Freda is often paired with her Catholic counterpart, the Virgin Mary, specifically Mater Dolorosa, Our Lady of Sorrows. Many scholars problematically refer to this divine duality as syncretism, which fails to recognize the complex mirroring that occurs between spirits and saints in Black Atlantic religions. Within Africana religious studies, the term syncretism has little to offer us. Every religious tradition in the world, of course, could be defined as “syncretic,” in that they all draw from earlier traditions and neighboring religions. That said, we must recall African derived religions’ transformations in both Africa and the Americas as they encountered Christianity through peaceful and, more often, through violent measures.77 Writing before the rise of evangelical attacks on Vodou in the Danticat and Daniels, “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine” (under review). Joan [Colin] Dayan, “Erzulie: A Women’s History of Haiti,” Research in African Literatures 25, no. 2 (1994): 18. 76 N’Zengou-Tayo, “Rewriting Folklore,” 126. 77 It is important to recall that the Ancient Kingdom of Kongo converted (mostly) peacefully to Catholicism under King Affonso I in 1509, and thus Congolese citizens have spent five hundred years blending indigenous beliefs with Catholicism. This fact, along with the memory of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, helps us to dispel the myth that all Africans encountered Christianity for the first time in the Americas. However, for a more representative perspective on the devastating impacts of Christian missions and missionaries on West African communities, see Malidoma Patrice Somé’s chapter, “In the White Man’s World,” in Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), 88–98. 74 75

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late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, religion scholar Leslie Desmangles eloquently articulated Haiti’s religious pluralism, noting, “Just as tiny parts of a stained-glass window are juxtaposed to form a whole, so too parts of the Vodou and Catholic traditions are juxtaposed in space and in time to constitute the whole … Each had its own divine power, and in the eyes of the worshipers the belief in one was not the denial of the other.”78 This notion coalesces with religious historian Tracey E. Hucks’s concept of dual or multiple religious allegiances,79 whereby African Diaspora communities blended elements of African indigenous religion, indigenous American traditions, and European Christianity. Europeans leaned into this tendency and attempted to further reinforce parallels between Catholic saints and African spirits. In Haiti, a country of multiple religious realities, Èzili Freda does illuminate local understandings of the Virgin Mary. And yet, using a Vodou hermeneutic in our readings, Èzili Freda must also be understood on her own terms. Certain indigenistas such as transnational feminist Gloria Anzalduá suggested that in Mexico, “la Virgen de Guadelupe is a figure used to dominate conquered peoples ideologically.”80 While the forced historical conversion of African descendants and indigenous American peoples is nothing short of abhorrent, it is worth noting that most Haitian Vodouizan observe little conflict between their worship of St. Patrick and Danbala, or the Virgin Mary and Èzili, in all of her multitudes. These spirits and saints walk together, as a common Haitian proverb cites: Dèyè chak lwa, gen set lòt sen/ espri (Behind every lwa, there are seven more saints/spirits).81 In fact, more so than any other lwa in the Haitian pantheon, the Èzilis seem to reveal themselves to artists most often as their saint counterpart, the Virgin Mary. We see this exemplified in Breath, Eyes, Memory, as Sophie arrives in New York City and mentions seeing small statues of Èzili, likely crafted as Madonna figures.82 Thus, we can understand that the weeping stone Madonna from Danticat’s story gives “voice” not only to Mater Dolorosa’s pain for her lost son but also to the tears of Èzili Freda, who weeps with the weight of the world. Embodied in statue form, Èzili Freda is Mater Dolorosa, the Virgin Mary, and in this story, she weeps for the pain that her mortal children, her daughters, have suffered. Daughter Josephine loses her voice when visiting her mother, who is incarcerated. Through her silent powers of emoting, the Madonna helps Josephine connect with her mother, offering a peace-making bridge. Manman Défilé always appears excited to see the porcelain statue and is eager to cradle her,83 as Mary herself might do. Both women battle with silence and voicelessness, as her mother descends into a cavern of stillness: [Défilé] rubbed the space under the Madonna’s eyes, then tasted her fingertips, the way a person tests for salt in salt water. “Has she cried?” Her voice was hoarse from lack of use.

Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods, 8, 47. Tracey E. Hucks, “ ‘Burning with a Flame in America’: African American Women in African-Derived Traditions,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 17, no. 2 (2001): 89–106. 80 Vanessa K. Valdés, Oshun’s Daughters:  The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (Albany, NY:  SUNY Press, 2014): 42–3. 81 Conversation with Manbo Asogwe Marie Maude Evans, November 2016. 82 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 52. 83 Jennifer Scheper Hughes highlights the significance of cradling as a devotional act for many spirits and saints. Jennifer Scheper Hughes, “Cradling the Sacred:  Image, Ritual, and Affect in Mexican and Mesoamerican Material Religion,” History of Religions 56, no. 1 (2016): 55–107. 78 79

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With every visit, it seemed to get worse and worse. I was afraid that one day, like me, she would not be able to say anything at all.84 When Josephine responds to her mother’s query and silently gestures that the Madonna had cried a single tear, her mother cradles the statue closer: “She pressed the statue against her chest as if to reward the Madonna and then, suddenly, broke down and began sobbing herself.”85 People mistakenly believe that Freda weeps for frivolous matters, but often a small infraction can unleash a subdued pain that she feels for the world, like the eruption of an adolescent woman’s tornado of emotions. These tears do belong to Èzili Freda, but have also been inherited from previous generations: “In this light, the Madonna’s mysterious tears turn out to be messages from the passed-away foremothers to the living and thus reinforce the intergenerational womanist lineage.”86 Èzili Freda/Mater Dolorosa grants us permission to weep, allowing space for sorrow. She reminds us of the value of tears: when not suppressed, sadness can release us, and be washed away. Manman Défilé exhibits a similar existential sadness to Freda. On her daughter’s next visit, she stands in the frigid cold of the prison yard and asks aloud, “What has this world come to when the sun can no longer warm God’s creatures?”87 As time progresses, Défilé withers under the harsh treatment of the fearful, accusatory prison guards. She begins to distance herself from the last being whom she lovingly cradled, her cherished Madonna. One day, she even offers to tell her daughter how the Madonna cries, but Josephine reveals (privately) to readers that she has already discovered the silent statue’s secret, how her mother “plans for it weeks in advance to happen. She would put a thin layer of wax and oil in the hollow space of the Madonna’s eyes, and when the wax melted, the oil would roll down the little face shedding a more perfect tear than either she and I could ever cry.”88 Mindful of the guards’ continued allegations of her “mystic ways/travay mistik,” Défilé no longer holds the statue but instead implores her daughter, “Keep the Madonna when I am gone … When I am completely gone, maybe you will have someone to take my place. Maybe you will have a person. Maybe you will have some flesh to console you. But if you don’t you will always have the Madonna.”89 Défilé senses that her life is coming to an untimely (and unceremonious) end and hopes her daughter Josephine will find solace and flesh, meaning a love between people. As a mother, she offers her daughter the very consolation that she desires most, and what she herself needs: affirmation that lespri yo pa janm abandone pitit yo, the spirits/lwa never abandon their children. The weeping Madonna illustrates a moving example of Danticat’s thoughtful “fake-lore.” As N’Zengou-Tayo’s thorough historicizing of the statue reveals: The “Crying Madonna” belongs to the Italian Catholic tradition (as celebrated, for example, in Ancona, Brescia, Pistoie, etc.); however, Danticat introduces it through the

Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 37. Ibid. 86 Anne Brüske and Wiebke Beushausen. “Writing from Lòt Bò Dlo: The Aesthetics and Poetics of Vodou in Edwidge Danticat and Myriam Chancy,” in Vodou in Haitian Memory:  The Idea and Representation of Vodou in Haitian Imagination, ed. Celucien L. Joseph and Nixon S. Cleophat (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 156. 87 Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 42. 88 Ibid., 41–2. 89 Ibid., 43, emphasis in original. 84 85

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artefact (maybe a miniature of an Italian Madonna) given by a French colonist to the narrator’s slave ancestor named Defilé. Artfully, Danticat appropriates world’s traditional belief for her own story and mixes it with Haitian culture and history as the name of the slave ancestor, Defilé, refers to the madwoman who collected Dessalines’ remains and gave them a proper burial.90 Much as European Catholicism became Africanized in the Ancient Kongo Kingdom, then Haitianized in the early Haitian republic, the Italian Madonna becomes a Haitian Mary/Èzili Freda. Danticat also invokes the lineage of a legendary Haitian matriarch by naming both the Great-Great-Great-Grandmother and the Manman Défilé. Défilé, who restored and buried the body of the national hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines, simultaneously serves as a vindicated Mary Magdalene and an Egyptian Isis, who brought life back to her husband Osiris’s body. Keeping in mind Èzili Freda’s own plentiful tears, we understand how the Madonna statue holds multitudes: Catholic and Vodouizan, mother and daughter, unknown fears and known terrors.

Women of the Sky: Marinèt’s Flight and Wings of Flame Historically, women have long inspired fear and awe in men. As creators of life, they have at times been heralded as primordial goddesses; and yet, when fearful of their power, people have castigated them as devils and witches. This is true in European and Africana religions alike. In Yorùbá traditions of southwestern Nigeria, the àjé are elder (female) figures of spiritual power often represented on royal crowns as birds offering divine feminine blessings91 for the oba (male or female monarch92). Due to the fear surrounding women’s dual creative and destructive powers as Ìyá (mothers), the term àjé has erroneously been translated as “night witches,” though feminist sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí explains that its traditional meaning is “a spiritually powerful and gifted being.”93 On the Dominican side of Hispaniola, the ciguapas are mountain sirens linked with the Taíno women who fled into the mountains during Spanish conquest: “Insanely jealous and mostly mute, ciguapas make chirping and trilling sounds like birdsongs to lure men into their river caves forever. No one can ever trace their tracks to rescue the lost men, because the ciguapas’ feet are attached backward and their footsteps always lead in the wrong direction.”94 The wanton sirens of ancient Greece played similar roles as captors of men, and they may have descended mythologically from the Jewish succubus, a female demon with hidden body deformities who sought out sexual relations with men while they slept.

N’Zengou-Tayo, “Rewriting Folklore,” 130. Robert Farris Thompson, “The Sign of the Divine King: An Essay on Yoruba Bead-Embroidered Crowns with Veil and Bird Decorations,” African Arts (1970): 8–17, 74–80. 92 Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí explains the term oba has been erroneously translated as “king,” though historically Yorùbá nations have recognized both male and female oba. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, What Gender Is Motherhood? Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 77–8. 93 Oyěwùmí, What Gender Is Motherhood?, 82. 94 Michele Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (New York: Macmillan, 1999), 28. 90 91

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In Haitian culture, there are many variants of this “treacherous” woman character, who plays a central figure in folklore and literary texts. Previous generations may recall stories about the platonade, a “loose woman who made love to the men she met by a stream and then drowned them in the water.”95 More well known is the djablesse, a beautiful woman who asks to dance with men at a crossroads, in the woods, or near a river, with one human foot and one (hidden) foot in the form of a horse or donkey’s hoof.96 The djablesse lures men to their death and wanders aimlessly in forests and cities, condemned to her fate for “the sin of having died a virgin.”97 Today, female gendered terms such as sòsyè (from the French sorcière) meaning “witch” or “sorceress” may be used to rebuke women, as when the Young Woman recalls, “we saw a soldier shoving a woman out of a hut, calling her a witch. he was shaving the woman’s head, but of course we never stopped.”98 In contemporary Vodou, the common accusation hurled at men and women is the ritual act of manje moun, literally to “eat” people, but actually referring to figurative consumption and the theft of other people’s vital energy and life force.99 Then there is the dreaded lougawou. Though the term does derive etymologically from the French lougarou, this Kreyòl mystic figure is a false cognate, often mistranslated in English as “werewolf.” In fact, the Haitian lougawou is far more mystifying: she peels off her human skin and flies in the night sky as a woman with wings of flame. In much of the Anglophone Caribbean, she is known as volant (one who flies), ole higue100 (in Grenada and Jamaica), or more commonly as the sukuyan (soucounyan), purportedly a word of West African origin meaning those who transform into a ball of fire and suck other people’s blood (like vampires).101 Of course, in all of these instances, women—and especially elders—stand as the most frequently accused perpetrators. Danticat features just such an elder woman in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven.” Manman Défilé is isolated by the community who distrust her leadership within a sacred sisterhood. They first ostracize her, accuse her of murdering a child left in her care, and then drag her out of her own home, shrieking allegations of “lougawou, witch, criminal!”102 Trained by the US marines between 1915 and 1934, the Haitian police built numerous prisons and arrested dozens of innocent victims for crimes of political dissent and “discord.”103 Following her arrest, the prison guards brutalize Défilé’s spirit and her body because they fear her mystic power. Later on, we learn that she is not the only woman unjustly incarcerated for her crime as a lougawou; rather:

Marouan, “In the Spirit of Erzulie,” 50. Romero-Cesareo, “Sorcerers, She-Devils, and Shipwrecked Women,” 254. 97 Dayan continues, slyly remarking, “If you believe in the Church, then you must remain chaste until marriage, but if you listen to the gods, then you must be physically possessed in order to rest in peace. Erzulie might well be telling us that you do not have to choose.” Dayan, “Erzulie,” 25–6. 98 Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” 19. 99 This notion of “eating” energy is widespread in many parts of West Africa and West-Central Africa. As anthropologist John M. Janzen explains of Kongo traditions, “BaKongo did, and still do, use the figure of speech ‘eating’ to speak about consumption of all kinds, whether it be food, medicine, money, or another’s physical and psychic energy. An overabundant consumption, or an inappropriate consumption, is defined as witchcraft.” John M. Janzen, Lemba, 1650–1930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the New World (New York: Garland, 1982), 210. 100 Moïse, “Vodou Symbolism and ‘Poto Mitan’ Women,” 130. 101 Romero-Cesareo, “Sorcerers, She-Devils, and Shipwrecked Women,” 265. 102 Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 39. 103 As protagonist Josephine narrates, “The Americans taught us how to build prisons. By the end of the 1915 occupation, the police in the city really knew how to hold human beings trapped in cages, even women like Manman who was accused of having wings of flame.” Ibid., 35. 95 96

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All of these women were here for the same reason. They were said to have been seen at night rising from the ground like birds on fire. A loved one, a friend, or a neighbor had accused them of causing the death of a child. A few other people agreeing with these stories was all that was needed to have them arrested. And sometimes even killed.104 As long as our societies are made afraid of powerful and united women, such atrocities will continue to transpire on a global scale. When asked about her inspiration for such a story, Danticat gravely explains that such accusations are real, and must be taken seriously as calculated attacks against women. She recalls a moment of insight about this persecution in college: When I started studying feminist theory, there was the notion of the crone, the woman who is unaccounted for. And I thought, That’s what that [the lougawou] was! … mostly the people who were accused, they were not accounted for. In other African traditions, it would be the woman outside the village who didn’t have family. It felt as though it was also punishment for a person being unattached.105 Indeed, some scholars have begun to refer to the Salem Witch Trials of New England as a “genocide against women,” one that targeted elder women, young unmarried women, and women without familial protection in the community. Having lived in both Haiti and Guadeloupe, Marie-José N’Zengou-Tayo alarmingly points out that this victimization of women continues in the Francophone Caribbean,106 as well as worldwide,107 we might add. Interestingly, N’Zengou-Tayo suggests that women may be doubly victimized: first involuntarily “chosen” as lougawou and later accused of this crime. She explains, “Women do not become ‘lougarous’ of their free will: either they inherited this power or they received it in punishment from a lwa because they did not comply with a contract (‘engagement’).”108 This statement reminds us of the complex relationship women have to political and spiritual power. In short, in a patriarchal world, the Caribbean lougawou and sukuyan’s transformations are more terrifying than any mythical beast: she is a woman of power and mystique, dependent on no one for her freedom. Josephine witnesses the terrifying metamorphosis of her mother’s body, which renders her almost unrecognizable. Reminiscing on this tormented vision of Manman Défilé, she states, “I followed her cries to the prison. Her face was swollen to three times the size that it had been. She had to drag herself across the clay floor on her belly when I saw her in the prison cell. She was like a snake, someone with no bones left in her body.”109 In Vodou Ibid., 38. Danticat and Daniels, “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine” (under review). 106 As she explains, “In July 1987, an angry mob stoned an old woman to death along the Pétionville-Port-au-Prince road: she had been discovered stark-naked in the early morning by passers by and accused of being a ‘lougarou.’ The journalist of Radio Métropole (a middle-class oriented radio station) expressed his shock at the backwardness of the mob: they did not have the good sense to find out whether she was a senile old woman or a displaced mad woman.” N’Zengou-Tayo, “Rewriting Folklore,” 128. 107 Mitch Horowitz explains that most often the persecution of “witches” is a persecution of women, children, the economically impoverished, and the socially vulnerable members of community. “The Persecution of Witches, 21st Century Style,” New  York Times, July 4, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/opinion/the-persecution-ofwitches-21st-century-style.html. 108 N’Zengou-Tayo, “Rewriting Folklore,” 128. 109 Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 39. 104 105

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ceremonies, the wise elder Danbala manifests in devotees as a primordial serpent. His chosen chwal (literally “horse,” the person who is ritually mounted) typically falls to the earthen floor and begins writhing about, and communicates silently with fellow devotees through a series of slithering whispers and coded hand salutations for the Rada spirits. The guards took pains to ensure they would not be ambushed by the collective of mystic women prisoners. Every night before the women slept, “the guards made them throw tin cups of cold water at one another so that their bodies would not be able to muster up enough heat to grow those wings made of flames, fly away in the middle of the night, slip into the slumber of innocent children and steal their breath.”110 Despite the brutality of the beatings, this splashing of cold water on the women, especially their heads, was the guards’ most powerful (spiritual) weapon. In Haitian rites of kanzo, initiates are chofe, meaning mystically heated up; their sacred implements (govi—earthen pots, ason—ritual rattles, kat—divination tools) all undergo the same “baptism by fire.” Metaphorically clipping their wings to fly, the guards seem to know instinctively that cold water will extinguish the women’s sacred fire that burns within them. While previous literary scholars have noted Èzili’s prominent role in Danticat’s works, few have paid tribute to the accused woman who burns alive and her patron lwa:  Marinèt Bwa Sèch, Marinèt of the Dry Wood, or Marinèt Pye Sèch, Marinèt of the Dry Feet. Another manifestation of Èzili, Marinèt has led a tortured life: to punish her when she became pregnant with a French colonizer’s child, her enemies cut her child out from her belly while still alive, resulting in both mother and child’s tragic deaths.111 Her Catholic counterpart is Anima Sola (the Forsaken Soul), and her portrait depicts a woman encircled in flames. Wrongly accused and angered with injustice, Marinèt often comes to ceremony in a rage with little sympathy for others. The most committed of her daring devotees aim to be tender in their care for her, though even her followers have been known to try and manipulate her for their own harmful ends. Marouan notably links Marinèt and Sophie’s mother Martine in Breath, Eyes, Memory,112 and I further suggest that Défilé is a chosen child of Marinèt, the one engulfed in angry flames of accusation, but the one who perseveres. In his discussion of characters who fly, Wilson Chen observes, “such images of fire, ashes, and subsequent flight/transcendence (both in Danticat’s narrative and in Haitian revolutionary lore [referring to Makandal’s flight]) may bring to mind the symbol of the phoenix as it has developed from classical mythology.”113 Similarly to how enslaved Igbo peoples were known to end (or recommence) their lives by walking into the ocean, many Africans were familiar with the power to “fly back to Africa.” These women share vulnerability in their imprisonment yet simultaneously unite in their ritual willpower to survive under a repressive regime. Marouan and N’Zengou-Tayo insightfully point out how Danticat’s vilified and victimized women embody female voices of dissent in Haitian society. Marouan eloquently states that Danticat’s depictions of the lougawou, the platonade, and the djablesse all represent “female folk

Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 37–8. Conversation with Manbo Marie Maude Evans, March 8, 2020. 112 Referring to Sophie’s mother, Marouan states: “Martine also evokes Marinet Bwa-chech [sic], another fierce female spirit of the night … Both Marinet and [Èzili] Jewouj are also truer to the Caco women’s working class roots as they clearly defy middle and upper class ideals of women’s decorum and respectability.” Marouan, “In the Spirit of Erzulie,” 45–6. 113 Wilson C. Chen. “Figures of Flight and Entrapment in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!,” Rocky Mountain Review 65 (2011): 43. 110 111

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figures who rebelled against societal rules, despite the resulting harsh punishment … While these stories refer to the high price women pay for their freedom … they interrogate the place of women in Haitian society, but also in Haiti’s historical, literary, and cultural discourses.”114 Whether or not they are given a choice, these mystic women become martyrs in society as female characters who refuse to be silent, who teach themselves rituals of rebellion, and who pass down sacred knowledge to the next generation of female fighters. As legend has it, one night, a man who suspected his wife of removing her skin and flying at night as a lougawou put pepper in his wife’s human shell to teach her a lesson, and when she returned, her peppered skin killed her.115 The guards determine that for any imprisoned lougawou woman, they must burn the body “to prevent her spirit from wandering into any young innocent bodies.”116 Again, it appears that Défilé/Marinèt’s fate in the inferno is predetermined, and her sacrifice in the fire is made so that the secret of flying cannot be passed down, so that the next generation of fire-women does not arise. Shortly before her death, Josephine asks her mother if the myth is true, if it is folklore or true lore—did her mother really fly in the night sky with wings of flame? Her mother scoffs, then sighs and wonders aloud why it has taken her adult daughter so long to inquire before responding, “Oh, now you talk … when I am nearly gone. Perhaps you don’t remember. All the women who came with us to the river, they could go to the moon and back if that is what they wanted.”117 Manman Défilé sidesteps ego in her daughter’s question and answers collectively on behalf of the sacred sisterhood, the women from the river. And slowly, as her mother recounts her own narrative, Josephine recalls: The story came back to me as my mother had often told it. On that day so long ago, in the year nineteen-hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at that moment looked as though it were in flames.118 This mythic retelling of her mother’s leap/flight across the bloodied Massacre River establishes the mother as a divine presence. As Chen articulates, “Danticat counters the discourse of the lougarou [sic] by re-appropriating the figure of the flying woman and reconceptualizing the magic of her flight.”119 Magic is not effaced but contextualized. Danticat dispels the lougawou trope, offering an even more powerful portrait of womanhood. Emerging from the waters “in flames” like Simbi, a spirit of water and fire, Manman Défilé crosses the border between nations in mystic fashion, by river and by sky. The mystic woman is grounded, though not weighed down, by her harrowing past, and before her last breath, she does the unthinkable: she teaches her daughter how to resurrect her through memory and ritual.

Marouan, “In the Spirit of Erzulie,” 50. Ibid. Colin Dayan explains that folklore which invokes tales of peppered skin likely draws from the cruel practices of French slave owners who punished Haitian men and women by peppering their flayed skin during whippings. Joan [Colin] Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 265. 116 Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 36. 117 Ibid., 43. 118 Ibid., 49. 119 Chen, “Figures of Flight and Entrapment,” 37, 49–50. 114 115

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For this reason, Danticat refers to “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” as an extreme reimagining of the stories of the Parsley Massacre’s survivors, and she envisions how some may have become victims of new (religious) persecution. Cognizant of the continued “witch-hunts” of women, she states: The whispers, the name-calling, the people who say everybody knew that so-and-so was called a lougawou. I was always sure that these women were misunderstood. That there must be something powerful about them that everybody’s afraid of. And that’s also what I wanted this story to convey: that there was something very powerful about this woman, be it her trauma or what have you, but also the way that she triumphed over her trauma, and that she had special gifts. But because people didn’t understand or because they couldn’t control them, they decided to punish her instead.120 The ultimate punishment is disavowal, and forgetting. By invoking the names of women who have innocently and violently perished in the flames (#SayHerName, Sakia Gunn, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Michelle Cusseaux, Tanisha Anderson, Natasha McKenna, Sandra Bland, Korryn Gaines, Jassy Correia, Merci Mack, Aja Raquell Rhone-Spears, and Breonna Taylor, among so many others), we honor their lives, and ensure that their spirits can journey home safely to Afrik-Ginen as named ancestors in our collective clan. If well-behaved women seldom make history, or even survive, we must take responsibility for recalling their names and continuing their mystic legacies. Danticat insists: These women, women like my grandmother who had taught me the story of Anacaona [the Taíno queen of Hispaniola], have been part of the very construction of my being ever since I was a little girl … [My grandmother] believed that no one really dies as long as someone remembers, someone who will acknowledge that this person had, in spite of everything, been here.121 Danticat’s work offers a deeply humanizing portrait of Défilé as a woman with resolve to exist as a religious being and defiantly, lovingly, bring into the atrocious world the child of her womb.

The Healing River of Departed Souls: Realm of Simbi (and Gede) If the ocean is the lwa’s primary residence as Afrik-Ginen, the river is where the spirits conduct ritual healing. Many authors of the African Diaspora employ the trope of water as a site of cleansing, healing, and renewal.122 This healing may take many forms, involving the recollection of dreams, the creation of mystic codes, sacred naming rites, and the honoring of departed ancestors. In her novel Farming of Bones about the 1937 Parsley Massacre, Danticat begins with a powerful, perhaps unexpected, dedication: “In confidence to you, Metrès Dlo, Mother of the Rivers.”123 Metrès Dlo could be several different lwa. On one hand, LaSirèn Danticat and Daniels, “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine” (under review). Danticat, “We Are Ugly, But We Are Here,” 27. 122 Toni Morrison, for instance, frequently invokes water as a site of healing, especially in her novel Beloved. ZaudituSelassie, African Spiritual Traditions, 157. 123 Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones (New York: Soho Press, 1998). 120 121

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is considered Metrès Dlo, the mermaid mistress of the sea, and while she does visit rivers, her primary residence is admittedly a saltwater domain. Èzili Freda by another name is also known as Mètres Dlo because of her association with fresh waters, perhaps derived from the Fon vodún (spirit) of the Azili lake.124 I offer yet a third interpretation of this dédicace: that of Simbi Dlo. The lwa Simbi has roots in the BaSimbi (or BiSimbi) spirits of ancient Kongo, who were considered inhabitants of the sacred earth and mystic rivers,125 and were especially fond of sites where the water meets the land. Still remembered in Haiti today, Simbi rules over rites of initiation, rivers, rain, magic, and healing. Like other water spirits, the Haitian Simbi is also somewhat androgynous and gender-fluid, presenting masculine manifestations (Simbi Andezo, Simbi Makaya) as well as feminine form (Simbi Dlo). In order to honor the painful journey so many Haitians made across the Massacre River, Danticat begins this memorial text with an invocation of the “mistress” and “mother” of rivers—Simbi Dlo—a spirit with the power to offer her children redemptive healing. The Massacre River—Rivyè Masak in Kreyòl, La Masacre in Spanish—possesses a long history of bloodletting. In her preface to René Philoctète’s Massacre River, Danticat expresses with great pain, “Between Haiti and the Dominican Republic flows a river filled with ghosts. The river … is one of several natural frontiers, dividing what is geographically one island into two independent nations … When I got there, I expected to see a river running with blood. In the shadow of such gruesome history … How could there be anything else?”126 Many assume that the river that serves as a border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic earned its name during the 1937 genocide when nearly thirty thousand Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans (plus dark-skinned Dominicans) were assassinated under President Rafael Trujillo’s command. In fact, the river’s relationship with suffering is much older, as comparative literary scholar Régine Michelle Jean-Charles expounds: “The name alone, Massacre River (coined during the eighteenth century, when French buccaneers were slaughtered by the Spanish for attempting to cross), imbues the water between the two countries with the imprint of violence and death.”127 One of only two double-nation islands in the world,128 Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the historical atrocity of slavery, but with radically distinct legacies. How does one memorialize a site of atrocity with multiple lineages? According to Danticat, through physical memorials as well as generative stories.

Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage Press, 1983), 167. 125 Tulu Kia Mpansu Buakasa, L’impensé du discours:” Kindoki” et” nkisi” en pays kongo du Zaïre (Kinshasa: Presses Université du Zaïre; Centre d’études et de documentation africaines, 1973). 126 Edwidge Danticat, “Preface,” in Massacre River by René Philoctète (Cambridge, MA:  New Directions, 2008), 7. Roxane Gay articulates similar sentiments when visiting the Massacre River, as she states, “I had pictured the river as a wide yawning and bloody beast, but where we stood, the river flowed weakly. The waters did not run deep. It was just a border between two geographies of grief.” Roxane Gay, “In the Manner of Water and Light,” in Ayiti (New York: Artistically Declined Press, 2011), 71–2. 127 Régine Michelle Jean-Charles. “ ‘A Border between Geographies of Grief ’: River Crossings and Crossroads between Haiti and the Dominican Republic,” in Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies, ed. April J. Mayes and Kiran C. Jayaram (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018), 87. 128 While several other nations share an island (for instance, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia), there are only two dual-nation islands with no other land mass besides the shared space: Ireland and the UK, and Hispaniola, home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. 124

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When visiting the Massacre River, Danticat expressed surprise that no memorial could be found, and Haitians as well as Dominicans seemed unfazed in performing mundane domestic tasks in the once bloodied river. Reflecting further, however, she realized: The trauma was a mere interruption because if you make the river entirely a memorial you’re cutting off a useful resource … We come from a place where trauma is piled upon trauma and, as a friend of mine once said, if we turned every place of trauma in Haiti into an official memorial, there would be no places left for people to actually live their lives.129 To honor the dual-island’s charged history, intentional remembering must be cultivated, whether these memories are embedded in physical memorial structures or etched permanently into people’s hearts and narratives. Echoing the work of literary scholar Florence BellandeRobertson,130 Lucía Suárez introduces the principle of the Marasa, the sacred twins, to contextualize the two nations’ relationship. Drawing from this Vodou motif, Suárez explains of the Marasa: “They are inseparable, conflicted, and in solidarity. Could we not interpret the two nations of Hispaniola as marassa [sic] … [thus linking] the two countries’ experiences, memories, and incessant returns?”131 It is quite fitting, then, that one of the frontiers that divide Haiti and the Dominican Republic is a fluid border, a river of illusory dreams and tormented memories. In many traditions, spirits who reside in the sanctity of river water blur the boundaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The Massacre River holds the memory of its drowned dead, offering a portal into the past. In Nigeria’s Yorùbáland, one of the three principal river goddesses is the òrìsà Ọya (Cuban Oyá and Brazilian Iansã/Yansã), who brings about forceful winds of change, serves as guardian of the cemetery gate, and “provides access for the egressing of departed souls across the river.”132 Even recognizing their viscous nature, rivers and oceans still remain bound to the earth underneath their waters. The terms riverbed and seabed carry new significance when considering these underwater realms and the soil beneath them as repose for restless ancestral spirits. Jean-Charles powerfully observes, “As a metaphor, the fluidity of the river and its ecology opens a space for thinking about how the river can operate as a space of contradiction that can bring both life and death.”133 The Atlantic Ocean has already demonstrated its capacity to serve as a saltwater cemetery—could rivers also play this role of water necropolis? While Simbi’s river domain typically pertains to healing rather than death, if his/her residence suddenly were to become a water burial site—as it did during the 1937 massacre— Simbi might solicit advice from other lwa to determine how to receive humans who have transitioned. In this instance, Gede, the lwa of life and death, may step forward to assist Simbi

Danticat as quoted in “Appendix: Interview with Edwidge Danticat,” in Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat, 186. Florence Bellande-Robertson, “A Reading of the Marasa Concept in Lilas Desquiron’s Les Chemins de Loco-Miroir,” in Haitian Vodou:  Spirit, Myth, and Reality, ed. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Claudine Michel (London:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 103–11. 131 Lucía M. Suárez, The Tears of Hispaniola: Haitian and Dominican Diaspora Memory (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 6. 132 Zauditu-Selassie, African Spiritual Traditions, 161. 133 Jean-Charles, “ ‘A Border between Geographies of Grief,’ ” 86. 129 130

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with the appropriate rites for the dead and usher his new citizens of Afrik-Ginen back home to the oceanic afterworld. The river is simultaneously precious and pained, as Moïse hauntingly states: “The spaces that Danticat describes are both sacred and scarred; on the one hand, it is through the spiritual dimension that continuity and power are made possible, and on the other hand, the landscapes are often depicted as scarred by historical traumas and tainted with blood, a sacred marker of ancestral lineage.”134 Again, we are reminded of the paradoxical yet interconnected nature of spirits who inhabit Simbi’s river of healing and Gede’s graveyard. In “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” Josephine makes “pilgrimage” with her mother as a young girl to Rivyè Masak, and we begin to uncover Manman Défilé’s heavy relationship with this troubled river. To Josephine’s surprise, the river that day flows as clear as day with no trace of blood: “Manman had taken my hand and pushed it into the river, no farther than my wrist. When we dipped our hands, I thought that the dead would reach out and haul us in, but only our own faces stared back at us, one indistinguishable from the other.”135 Her mother guides her hands into the water as a form of salutation and perhaps oath-taking, as the Olympian gods swore all oaths on the River Styx, a goddess whose river possessed miraculous powers and led to Hades, the underworld. This is not the first time that Danticat’s characters greet the river and formally salute the spirits, seeking permission or guidance. Before making the arduous journey across the river in Farming of Bones, Amabelle’s father reaches into the river and sprinkles his face with water, while her mother makes the sign of the cross, both signaling their reverence for the river where they hope to find refuge.136 In her pilgrimage to Jacmel’s renowned Kanaval celebration, Danticat asks her friend Rodney Saint-Eloi to accompany her to the local cemetery, which she determines he will not mind, as “we have traveled together before and he has always shown a singular reverence for the dead, going as far as dipping his hands in rivers and streams and raising his fingers to his forehead to connect himself to those who have crossed the waters, literally and figuratively, before him.”137 As a tradition, Vodou is heterodox rather than orthodox, meaning that there is no one way to honor the spirits; however, a common thread appears here in the encounter with a sacred site of river water and the deference people make to the spirits who reside within (or above). For Manman Défilé, Rivyè Masak simultaneously holds the weight of her mother’s death and the gift of her and her child’s (second) life. In an act that resembles ritual presentations of offerings to the spirits in ceremony, Manman Défilé presents her only child, a daughter of the river. With their hands in the water and speaking now directly to Mètres Dlo, Simbi Dlo, the Manman whispers, “Here is my child, Josephine. We were saved from the tomb of this river when she was still in my womb. You spared us both, her and me, from this river where I lost my mother.”138 With retrospective insight, adult Josephine describes how her mother escaped

Moïse, “Vodou Symbolism and ‘Poto Mitan’ Women,” 126. Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 40. 136 Jean-Charles points to the plural religious rituals enacted by Amabelle’s parents when they attempt to cross the river that would eventually drown them, explaining, “The parents’ entry is telling here: each one performs an act of ritual communication. The father anoints himself with water, greets the spirit of the river, and requests permission to enter. The mother crosses herself. Taken together, the couple’s acts reflect the syncretized combination of Vodou (salute the spirit) and Catholicism (the sign of the cross). With each ripple, the river acts as a spiritual beacon.” Jean-Charles, “ ‘A Border between Geographies of Grief,’ ” 91. 137 Danticat, After the Dance, 25–6. 138 Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 40. 134 135

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El Generalissimo’s bloodthirsty soldiers but regrettably had to leave behind her own mother, whose body was brutalized and tossed into the river-turned-graveyard. As literary theorist Valérie Loichot muses in Water Graves, “In water, the abject and the sacred sharply intersect … Severe is the pain of the people mourning bodies of lost ones that cannot be retrieved, dug up, and given funerary rites such as interments, incineration, or embalming.”139 This is why Manman Défilé returns to the river with her daughter and sacred sisters: to perform pilgrimage and to mourn the named and unnamed dead of this land (known in Vodou as abitasyon koni e enkoni). Further, her fantastical river crossing—perceived by others as mystic flight—can be interpreted as a leap of faith and entry into the crossroads. Jean-Charles insightfully points to the prominence of the crossroads (kafou) motif in Vodou and Haitian culture more broadly, asserting: To cross over to the other side is to leave the physical realm and enter the spiritual realm; but the crossroads, or kafou, are the sites where the spirit world and the physical world meet … Following [LeGrace] Benson, I  posit that understanding the river as a “transcendent geography of life and death” becomes another way to perceive the geographies of grief.140 At the time of the massacre, there was no time for grieving at kafou rivyè, the river crossroads of life and death. As such, Manman Défilé has devoted herself to a lifetime of honoring the dead who could not themselves pass on their own legacies to their next generation. While no burial of these Haitian bodies cast into the river was possible, Manman Défilé’s subsequent birth gave her a renewed sense of promise. Thinking out loud to herself, she shares with Josephine, “At least I gave birth to my daughter on the night that my mother was taken from me … At least you came out at the right moment to take my mother’s place.”141 In Yorùbá tradition, a baby girl born shortly after the passing of her grandmother or another elder woman is named Yetunde, meaning “the mother has returned” (Babatunde is the name given to boys for “father has returned”); in BaKongo culture, the name Mankoko142 (grandmother) is given to the new granddaughter with an elder spirit. Josephine would have been named Mankoko or Yetunde, as she carries her grandmother Eveline’s heritage. Recalling Manman Défilé’s mention of womb and tomb in the same breath and salutation to the river, Myriam Moïse asserts, “Through the bodies of Haitian mothers which were engulfed in its breast, the massacre river embodies matriarchal memory and transcends its tragic history to become a space of connection beyond death.”143 Manman Défilé wants to ensure that Josephine never forgets this legacy, and she vows to make annual pilgrimage to the river, instructing her daughter in the mystic code of the sacred sisterhood. Every November 1, Josephine recalls the sojourn with her mother to the river. In the Catholic Church, November 1 is recognized as All Saints’ Day, while November 2 is All Souls’ Day to honor the dead in churches and cemeteries. In the Vodou tradition, November 1 and Valérie Loichot, Water Graves:  The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean (Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 2020), 14. 140 Jean-Charles, “ ‘A Border between Geographies of Grief,’ ” 91–2. 141 Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 40. 142 Conversation with Mr. Jean-Claude Ludem, February 29, 2020. 143 Moïse, “Vodou Symbolism and ‘Poto Mitan’ Women,” 130. 139

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2 are reserved to honor the nanchon (nation or family) of Gede, the lwa who preside over life, death, and sexuality. On this day, Manman Défilé invited as many women as she knew were connected to the river sisterhood. The women would come bearing offerings and wearing all white, the color of the lwa and one of Gede’s three primary colors (along with purple and black). Holding her daughter’s hand tightly, Manman Défilé silently encouraged her daughter to recall how, We were all daughters of that river, which had taken our mothers from us. Our mothers were the ashes and we were the light. Our mothers were the embers and we were the sparks. Our mothers were the flames and we were the blaze. We came from the bottom of that river where the blood never stops flowing, where my mother’s dive toward life—her swim among all those bodies slaughtered in flight—gave her those wings of flames. The river was the place where it had all begun.144 With this attention to fire, we must recall that the lwa Simbi represents both water and fire: the “hotter” manifestations of Simbi Andezo (Simbi of Two Waters) and Simbi Makaya (Simbi the Healer) work closely with fire, sometimes appearing as blazing rivers or watery spirits with flames dancing on their fingertips. Highlighting this contrast, Jana Evans Braziel reflects, “The ritualistic scene of fusion and separation, violence and regeneration, life and death, water and flame creates a genealogical continuity wherein cause and effect, mother and daughter, are continually created and destroyed.”145 This notion of creation and destruction go hand in hand in many traditions, as Simbi’s water and fire provide and also extinguish life. Just as powerful as these contrasts of water and fire, life and death, however, are the multiplying effects of fire. Moïse suggests of the escalating fire imagery, “Through a series of metonymies based on the fire motif, mothers and daughters appear to inscribe themselves within an amplifying process of lighting fires as the mothers are the ashes, the embers, and then the flames while their daughters are the light, the sparks, and the blaze.”146 Certainly, fire generates more fire. But most powerful here are the cyclical, dynamic relationships between mothers and daughters:  at times the elders are the source (mother’s flames and daughters’ blaze), yet other times the juniors seem to be the catalysts (daughters’ sparks and mother’s embers). During the massacre, the river held space for fire and water, hope and grief. It would be the women’s work in their sisterhood to never forget the lives they collectively mourned and to always remember the mystic code to return to the river.

River Ciphers: Riddles of Initiation The mystic code in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” is shared between generations of women and maintained through a system of riddles. When an elder woman wearing all white, Jacqueline, comes to Ville Rose to find Manman Défilé’s daughter, Josephine doubts whether this auntie

Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 41. Jana Evans Braziel, “Defilee’s Diasporic Daughters:  Revolutionary Narratives of Ayiti (Haiti), Nanchon (Nation), and Dyaspora (Diaspora) in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 37, no. 2 (2004): 85. 146 Moïse, “Vodou Symbolism and ‘Poto Mitan’ Women,” 131. 144 145

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figure is someone from her past. She ponders quietly, “If she were really from the river she would know. She would know all the things that my mother had said to the sun as we sat with our hands dipped in the water, questioning each other, making up codes and disciplines by which we could always know who the other daughters of the river were.”147 This technique of code-speaking does not exist exclusively within religious communities, as N’ZengouTayo earlier reminded us of Haitians’ use of pale daki/andaki under Haiti’s brutal political repression. However, Africana initiatory societies have long proven the sanctity of their inner circle by preventing outsiders’ access through the use of elaborate codes, riddles, and ciphers. Josephine takes ritual matters into her own hands to determine whether Tante Jacqueline is in fact one of the sacred sisters. Calling upon her unforgotten divine feminine power, li mete fanm sou li (she musters all her womanly courage), and the daughter begins to pose the riddles of the river to her elder: “Who are you?” I asked her. / “I am a child of that place,” she answered. “I come from that long trail of blood.” / “Where are you going?” / “I am walking into the dawn.” / “Who are you?” / “I am the first daughter of the first star.” / “Where do you drink when you’re thirsty?” / “I drink the tears from the Madonna’s eyes.” / “And if not there?” / “I drink the dew.” / “And if you can’t find the dew?’ / “I drink from the rain before it falls.” / “If you can’t drink there?’ ” / “I drink from the turtle’s hide.” / “How did you find your way to me?” / “By the light of the mermaid’s comb.” / “Where does your mother come from?” / “Thunderbolts, lightning, and all things that soar.” / “Who are you?” / “I am the flame and the spark by which my mother lived.” / “Where do you come from?” / “I come from the puddle of that river.”148 Each question that Josephine advances, Jacqueline replies with fortitude and grace. Demonstrating multiple sources of strength, Jacqueline cites lineage (I come from that long trail of blood in honor of zansèt yo/the ancestors), blessed statues (I drink the tears from the Madonna’s eyes for Èzili Freda), spirits of river and ocean (By the light of the mermaid’s comb for LaSirèn), women of fire and flight (Thunderbolts, lightning, and all things that soar for Agawou and Marinèt), and ritual origins (I come from the puddle of that river for Simbi). Through this dance of questioning, Josephine relocates the rhythm of the river’s cipher, and Moïse underscores, “Josephine transforms her muted speech into a sort of river speech to which only her female counterparts can respond. In articulating this speech, she not only fully asserts her connection to the river, she also acknowledges her mother’s magical powers and her past flight of resistance and survival.”149 Josephine powerfully reclaims her voice, and is now able to request and even command others from the sisterhood to do the same. Empowered and emboldened, Josephine no longer must rely upon her mother to open the gates of the river’s secret story. She realizes that through her mother’s lessons of the mystic code, she has held the keys to the sisterhood all her life. In one final test, Josephine addresses Jacqueline in the code, urging her, “Speak to me.” Jacqueline draws breath and replies:

Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 41, 44. Ibid., 44–5, my emphasis. 149 Moïse, “Vodou Symbolism and ‘Poto Mitan’ Women,” 139. 147 148

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You hear my mother who speaks through me. She is the shadow that follows my shadow. The flame at the tip of my candle. The ripple in the stream where I wash my face. Yes. I will eat my tongue if I ever whisper that name, the name of that place across the river that took my mother from me.150 Again, the final coded response evokes Simbi’s fire and water, and mournfully identifies the river as reluctant burial ground of mothers (and others). The sisterhood’s code simultaneously resembles Haitian pwovèb mistik (mystic proverbs), Vodou’s langaj (ritual language), and pale Ginen (speech of Ginen/Africa), an intricate method of protecting ancestral wisdom for the next generation. Josephine’s invocation of the river cipher even before her training is complete indicates that she has assumed the role of a manbo makout, a priestess who is known to conduct dream interpretation, card divination, and ritual work without kanzo, formal initiation. In her coded reply, Jacqueline thus proves her membership in the Healing River Sisterhood, and Josephine embraces her, relieved and ready for her spiritual teacher. The mystic code seems to serve as a dual test for Jacqueline as well as for Josephine, much in the way that the ason (the ritual rattle) tests new initiates and high priestesses alike. In the leve kanzo ceremony (literally, to arise kanzo, meaning the initiates), newly ordained manbo asogwe and houngan asogwe (high priestesses and high priests) must prove themselves proficient in the language of the ritual rattle. After the baptismal rite, an officiating priest initiates a sacred battle known as toke (twoke) ason with initiates, who must respond to every question with precision and poise. Each question serves as its own proverb, with the appropriate riddle response. The sacred sisterhood’s river cipher resembles this test of initiates, and as with toke ason, both initiate and priestess can pose one another questions. Though Josephine begins as the examiner, Jacqueline proves herself adept and shifts to the role of spiritual elder as Manman Défilé’s daughter steps into the role of mourning her mother’s loss. When asked about her inspiration for this secret code, Danticat mentioned her interest in initiatory societies such as Bizango. She thought about the sisterhood’s inner dynamics intentionally, reflecting, “The women must have codes to know each other … [because] the characters feel, ‘We have to protect ourselves against people who might want to hurt us, or people who might want to infiltrate our community.’ It’s also a way for them to identify the faces of people they don’t know.”151 Through their invocation of the river cipher, Josephine and Jacqueline reveal to each other a shared body of sacred knowledge. Indeed, the riddles cannot be answered if the proper questions are not posed. And as in the toke ason, there appears to be an infinite number of questions and answers to the river’s riddles, as new initiates and experienced elders create their own generational exchange. Danticat further explains about the women: “They have to have these codes [thereby signaling], ‘This is how you enter, and that there are things you have to learn.’ … What appealed to me in that sense was how much it broadened the society…I think that was also the mother’s gift to the daughter, of expanding the sisterhood.”152 The mystic codes do not simply gauge the women’s connection to community but also their dedication to spirit as a sacred inheritance. Thus, what emerges is an ever-deepening

Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 44–5. Danticat and Daniels, “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine” (under review). 152 Ibid. 150 151

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ritual knowledge base and an ever-expansive sisterhood of the river. Indeed, this is the ultimate sacred gift the women can offer one another: legacy. As an elder within the sisterhood, Jacqueline accepts the role of Josephine’s spiritual teacher following Manman Défilé’s transition to the other side. She seeks out Josephine in Ville Rose, shares news of her mother’s death, brings her to the prison to salute her transitioned mother, and formally welcomes her into the ritual sisterhood. In Vodou, any one temple may have several houngan and manbo asogwe. As evidenced by her special gifts and training, Jacqueline seems to become one of the high priestesses of the women’s river society, like ndoli jowei, keeper of the sowei masks in Mende women’s Sande society of the river.153 For years, Josephine has struggled to recall details of the pilgrimages. While she has embodied the mystic code like the medicine of initiates’ cicatrization marks, she has forgotten the healing rituals performed in honor of the river’s departed souls. As if sensing this lapse in memory, Jacqueline takes Josephine’s hand and allows her to journey, as the daughter-initiate narrates, “For a second, I saw nothing but black. And then I saw the crystal glow of the river as we had seen it every year when my mother dipped my hand in it.”154 Many initiates experience transcendence during their initiation, and here, Josephine recalls her initiation at the river’s edge. In memoirs or short fictional stories, Haitian American authors Roxane Gay and Edwidge Danticat speak about matriarchal connections to the massacre, and the healing that they (or their characters) seek in the river. Roxane Gay narrates a powerful short story about her grandmother’s escape from the Dominican Republic in 1937 and her mother’s conception in the Massacre River. Gay describes her own family’s pilgrimage to the river at night, during which “my grandmother took my mother to the river and told her the story of how she came to be. My grandmother knelt on the riverbank, her bones sinking in the mud as she brought handfuls of water to her mouth. She drank the memories in that water.”155 Gay’s grandmother imbibes grief and trauma in the river water, and undoubtedly, droplets falling from her cupped hand offer libations to the ancestors of the scorched earth. Jean-Charles offers a final musing on the river, describing its paradoxical nature: “This border between two geographies of grief snakes through death and life, possession and dispossession, safety and danger.”156 As painful as they may be, the women of these lineages wisely regard such pilgrimages as essential to their healing. Josephine begins to mourn her mother in the sanctity of sisterhood, and Gay begins to process her own inheritance of the river’s tears. Gay describes her first sojourn to the river that she makes with her mother and grandmother, recollecting somberly, “We mourned until morning. The sun rose high. Bright beams of light spread over and through us. The sun burned so hot it dried the river itself, turned the water into light. We were left kneeling in a bed of sand and bones. I started crying. I could not stop. I cried to wash us all clean.”157 With too little river water in which to perform a ritual bath, Gay offers the riverbed her own tears, a saline salve for the intergenerational losses experienced by Granmè, Manman, and Pitit Fi. Finally, we would be remiss to not realize the symbolic Sylvia Ardyn Boone, Radiance from the Waters:  Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1986). 154 Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 48. 155 Gay, “In the Manner of Water and Light,” 62. 156 Here, Jean-Charles draws inspiration from Roxane Gay’s short story (“In the Manner of Water and Light,” 2011) about her own matriarchal relationship to the Massacre River. Jean-Charles, “ ‘A Border between Geographies of Grief,’ ” 90. 157 Gay, “In the Manner of Water and Light,” 71–2. 153

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importance of colors: the “blue” of river water (from the sky’s reflection) and the red of spilled blood combine to create a deep, rich purple hue—the colors of Bawon Samdi and Grann Brijit, King and Queen of the Dead, respectively.

Garden of the Cemetery: Bawon Samdi and Grann Brijit’s Abode In our final sacred space with Danticat, we arrive in the garden of the graveyard, an apt metaphor for the Gede family’s power over life, death, sexuality, and renewal. In After the Dance:  A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti, Danticat investigates the vibrancy of carnival, including the many weeks (indeed, months) of preparation and the final explosive day of ceremony, masquerade, and revelry. The travelogue offers Danticat an opportunity to adventure through the town (l al flane)158 as she recounts her very first experience with Kanaval. As a child, she had never been permitted to join either as a performer or as a crowd spectator, in part due to her Protestant upbringing. She writes about Jacmel’s history, including a chapter on trees, “Carnival of the Trees,” and another poignantly titled “Carnival of the Dead.” In appropriate Gede fashion whereby death opens the gates, this second chapter in the book considers cemeteries as “an introduction to the town.”159 It is here where Danticat’s voice glows hauntingly with remembrance of the ancestors. In addition to the persistent theme of death and dying in her work, many interviews have revealed Danticat’s fascination with graveyards. While visiting the beautiful southern city, she asks a friend to accompany her to Jacmel’s cemetery to pay homage to the departed souls. She explains her choice of her poet friend Rodney Saint-Eloi, observing: Since he has written a long poem that includes a verse about cemeteries, I figure he won’t mind coming along. Besides, we have traveled together before and he has always shown a singular reverence for the dead … In that way he is a kindred spirit, so I know he will not think it strange if I say hello to the graves, which is something I do now and then when I am in a cemetery.160 Recalling his earlier appearance, Saint-Eloi is the one who occasionally dips his hands into river water to salute the spirits. Danticat expresses her trust knowing that he will be unlikely to question her personal rituals to greet the ancestors and as a “kindred spirit,” he seems to share her regard for the sanctity of public ancestral sites. Danticat takes these visits seriously as sacred journeys, and she narrates, “I have always enjoyed cemeteries. Altars for the living as well as resting places for the dead, they are entryways, I think, to any town or city, the best places to become acquainted with the taste of the inhabitants, both present and gone.”161 Here, Danticat implies a connection that many other Vodouizan make between Legba (master of the celestial gates and entryways) and Gede (lord

Flane is a common Kreyòl expression that refers to one’s meandering and adventuring without a clear destination in mind. 159 Danticat and Daniels, “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine” (under review). 160 Danticat, After the Dance, 25–6. 161 Ibid., 25. 158

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of graveyards and cemeteries). She suggests the cemetery serves as an entryway, an entrance into what we might call the Haitian “village of the dead,” known as Mbansa or nsi ya bafwa in Kongo cultures. 162 Much as trees serve as repozwa for the lwa, she identifies cemeteries as restful sites for transitioned souls. In her words, each grave site becomes an “altar,” sanctified ground whereby the living can make offerings to family spirits and continue to honor the living dead. Danticat also quietly observes the aesthetic qualities of the cemetery, taking note of the tombstones and mausoleums which present families’ dual legacies of Catholicism and Vodou. Admiring the multiple traditions, she mentions that some mausoleums “look like small churches, with pitched roofs and steeples topped by a cross. The crosses can be interpreted in many ways: as symbols of Christianity, Christ’s crucifixion and death, as with the Virgin Mary vines, but also as representations of the guardian of the cemetery, the Vodou divinity Baron Samedi.”163 We are reminded of the cross’s clear association with Christianity, as Haiti officially regards itself as a Catholic nation. However, there are numerous Africana religious connections to the cross, including the ancient Kongo cosmogram known as dikenga,164 Legba’s crossroads between human and spirit worlds, and lastly the tomb-cross of Lord of the Gede, Bawon Samdi. Many Haitians explain that each cemetery includes protective spirits in the form of a designated Bawon Samdi, the first man to be buried, as well as a Grann Brijit, the first woman to be buried. In this way, Vodou begins and ends one’s spiritual life with a balance of divine feminine and masculine energies—the sacred elder couple Papa Loko and Manbo Ayizan assist in one’s initiatory rites while Bawon Samdi and Grann Brijit usher one out of the mortal world. Encountering another sacred code, Danticat notes that the size and location of gravestones at times reveal a family’s means, and what they valued in monuments for the dead, as “contemporary mausoleums are family affairs.”165 Referring again to the cultural fusions of tombstones, Danticat points out a few mausoleums, describing, “They look like a blend between Mexican redondos and miniature Roman pantheons, with vaulted domes, arched doorways, and folding shutter doors.”166 Vaulted domes and arched doorways evoke the grandeur of Catholic churches, while folding shutters call to mind triptychs in which a painted scene comes alive (and is put to rest) when opening and closing the small doors, as if peeking into another world. During her tour through the graveyard, Danticat encounters a captivating sacred vine. Over several of the headstones and at the foot of many tombs, she and Saint-Eloi discover a green vine with red buds resembling berries. An elder woman in mourning passes by and they ask her if she knows the name of the vine. She nods and replies meditatively:

In southwestern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the BaKongo traditionally understood that the ancestors all reside in a “village of the dead” known as Mbansa. Buakasa, L’impensé du discours, 238. In the city of Kikwit, DRC (another part of the southwest) where I have conducted research, the ancestors reside in nsi ya bafwa, literally “the world of the dead.” 163 Danticat, After the Dance, 30. 164 Robert Farris Thompson describes the Kongo cross as the “circular motion of human souls” and the “everlasting continuity” of men and women. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 108. See also Robert Farris Thompson and JosephAurélien Cornet’s The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1981). 165 Danticat, After the Dance, 30. 166 Ibid., 32. 162

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“Se flè kouwòn lavyèj,” she says. These are the flowers of the crown of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary, who does not have the heart to leave her children by themselves in death, gardens their graves to keep them company, she adds. After Jesus was entombed, the Virgin Mary went to the site and wept so much that her tears rained on the ground and created these vines, the green leaves representing her uncontrollable sorrow and the red buds symbolizing Christ’s shed blood, the cause of her pain. And the reason you see the vines sometimes standing at the foot of the graves, she says, sometimes crawling around and over them, sometimes somewhere in between as if kneeling, is because they represent all the physical stages of the Virgin Mary’s grief. “And now these same vines grow in all the places where Christ’s children, the Virgin Mary’s children, are buried.”167 The woman’s description conjures visions of a vibrant graveyard garden. In this Catholic rendering, we recall the Virgin Mary as well as her Vodou counterpart Èzili Freda’s endless flow of tears. And yet Freda does not find the cemetery to be an inviting place. We might reinterpret this iconography with a Vodou lens, understanding that it is in fact the elder Grann Brijit, Empress of the Living Dead, who tends to the grave gardens of her children. Surely there are few spirits more familiar with mourning rites than the Gede family, and few who possess the same patience of a grandmother like Grann Brijit to cultivate new life in the constant face of death. This reading of the passage allows both Vodouizan and Catholic Haitians to see themselves reflected in their respective rituals to honor the dead. Ultimately, it is through her mother’s dying that Josephine rekindles (reignites, even) a sisterhood with the women who stood by her mother’s side in prison, and at the river. Manman Défilé’s body deteriorates rapidly while incarcerated, and ironically, the prison guards use this very mortal sign of premature aging as proof of her status as a lougawou. Observing Défilé’s loss of weight, Josephine notes: These days, her skin barely clung to her bones, falling in layers, flaps, on her face and neck. The prison guards watched her more closely because they thought that the wrinkles resulted from her taking off her skin at night and then putting it back on in a hurry, before sunrise. This was why Manman’s sentence had been extended to life.168 Many of the other prisoners have begun to look the same: fatigued, weary, and beaten down. But the women have not been made beasts just yet. They still remember how to mourn. When Josephine learns of her mother’s death from Jacqueline, the women set out together from Ville Rose to go to the prison and pay their respects. Jacqueline tells the prison guard that they want to visit the (deceased) mother’s cell, a request not made every day. After a moment of hesitation, Josephine watches the guard’s face change: “The guard seemed too tired to argue, or perhaps he saw in Jacqueline’s face traces of some long-dead female relative whom he had not done enough to please while she was still alive.”169 In many Africana traditions, there is a ritual order to be observed and maintained. Referred to as nsiku in KiKongo and reglèman in Kreyòl, these terms signal the importance of holding the transitioned ancestors in high esteem

Ibid., 28–9. Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” 36. 169 Ibid., 46–7, my emphasis. 167 168

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and respecting the ritual order of family elders still living. When one neglects to fulfill spiritual obligations (e.g., making regular offerings to the spirits, observing food and behavior taboos, tending to the dead, etc.), a cosmic imbalance occurs that can be experienced as rupture, disorder, and chaos in the lives of offenders. In this moment, the guard appears to think twice about the women’s entreaty, a simple request to honor their departed mother and sacred sister. Perhaps fearful of the ritual consequences of denying them entry, he follows reglèman and acquiesces to the women’s petition. Upon entering the cell, Josephine finds six of the women holding different belongings from her mother. She observes them quietly, noting, “They kept their arms close to their bodies, like angels hiding their wings. In the middle of the cell was an arrangement of sand and pebbles in the shape of a cross for my mother.”170 Like angels hiding their wings. This is the first time that Danticat so explicitly rejects the haunting epithet lougawou, which is nowhere to be seen in this passage. Not only does she highlight the women’s humanity in constructing for Défilé an ogatwa (a personal and family altar), she also reveals their divine femininity. In the reconstructed and multireligious cross, we see space carved out for funerary rites within Christianity (Jesus’s cross) and Vodou (Legba’s vèvè and Bawon Samdi’s kwa). Finally, sand and pebbles have somehow been procured, perhaps keepsakes after all these years from the site of the Massacre River. As with all African descended peoples, Haitians take death very seriously. Notably, Danticat regards cemeteries as a site of convening across generations, a communal gathering between spirits and humans alike. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Atie and Sophie walk through a graveyard together, and Atie tells her, “Walk straight, you are in the presence of family.”171 Here emerges another aspect of reglèman: spirits always accompany their mortal children on their journeys, but especially when in the presence of ancestors in the cemetery, one ought to pay respects to the transitioned elders afoot. As “altars,” “entryways,” and exit ways, graveyards offer the living a modicum of peace as they adjust to the new rhythm of exchange with their departed loved ones. Danticat explains that in cemeteries, “you have a stable place to go. You’ve stopped, this is where [their] bones are.”172 Though spirits are no longer bound to their bodies and can visit their descendants in dreams, the graveyard as repozwa becomes a resting place for both the living and the living dead to frequent. A kinship of the dead also exists within the necropolis, where ancestors reunite and new family connections are forged in preparation for rebirth. Indeed, Danticat intimates that certain mausoleums function as a “post-life lakou, a communal complex occupied by dozens of members of a very large family.”173 In the lakou as in the realm of the dead, everyone plays a unique role. Elders share the wisdom of Afrik-Ginen with newly arrived spirits while recently departed souls from earth excitedly share family news with long deceased family members. As modeled by the Gede clan’s enormous progeny, death does not signal an end to life but, rather, an initiation into ancestorhood.

Ibid., 47. Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 149. 172 Danticat and Daniels, “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine” (under review). 173 Danticat, After the Dance, 33. 170 171

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Conclusion In their prayers and ritual practice, healers, priests, and priestesses work to cultivate harmony between humans, nature, and the spirits. So, too, can writers. Many critics of diasporic literature have implied that these authors cannot possibly experience the same connection to the land, the sea, and the sky as their brethren and sistren at home. Haitian literary specialist Nadève Menard counters this statement, posing the question: “But even in the works usually cited by literary critics writing about exile, is it really the most important theme? … For every cultural text emphasizing exile, there is another emphasizing rootedness.”174 I argue that this rootedness found in diasporic texts is both metaphorical and literal, as authors strive to remain connected to culture through nature. Literary scholar Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert examines the work of Caribbean authors for whom nature and religion take center stage. In these written works, the houngan and manbo of Haiti, the kimbwazé of Guadeloupe, the santero and santera (babalawo and iyalocha) of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and the Obeah men and women of Jamaica, Trinidad, and Tobago all conduct rituals to reconnect people to their surrounding natural environment. Paravisini-Gebert asserts that the healer, priest, and priestess serve as the focus of her ecocritical readings “as protector of the balance between nature, the spirits, and [hu]man—a chief conservator, so to speak.”175 Further, Paravisini-Gebert identifies how contemporary literary works express environmental concern and “interpret the threat to the Caribbean environment posed by increased pollution and development as a menace to Creole religiosities themselves, whose connection to nature is transformed as landscapes change.”176 As “chief conservators” of nature, we are reminded that manbo and houngan cannot perform their ritual work if the natural world continues to be destroyed. Without forests for medicinal plants and rivers for ritual baths, without soil for sacred burial and the ocean for purifying rites, the priestess loses her most valuable instruments of healing and wholeness. Danticat herself meaningfully observes the “connection of the rituals to nature, to the earth, to the soil, to the water. There are many religions in which you have earth, fire, water, certain types of stones.”177 These natural elements form the cornerstone of Vodou myth and ritual, and lionhearted healers must continue to fight for the perseveration of religion and nature in the twenty-first century. The presence of nature has always played a significant role in her work, and in recent years, Danticat has become an even more impassioned advocate for the conservation of our environment, especially in Haiti. Her recent children’s book illustrated by Haitian artist Édouard Duval-Carrié, Dènye Pye Mapou A/The Last Mapou, for instance, considers the political and spiritual ramifications of tree shortages and environmental degradation. She also points out that much of today’s refuge and waste in Haiti includes mostly foreign and imported goods such as plastic bags, glass bottles, and other unrecyclable materials. However, even while not blaming Haitians per se (as there are few official landfills), Danticat does encourage a reflection on environmental sustainability as it relates to spiritual practice: Nadève Ménard, “The Myth of the Exiled Writer,” Transition: An International Review 111 (2013): 56, my emphasis. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “‘He of the Trees’:  Nature, Environment, and Creole Religiosities in Caribbean Literature,” in Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, ed. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 183. 176 Ibid. 177 Danticat and Daniels, “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine” (under review). 174 175

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There’s such an abuse of our environment … I remember last summer, we were in Haiti, and the places we’ve visited before, there are these beautiful rivers. I’ve always had this practice when I go into a river, [and I] salute the river. But the river is full of trash now! And the ocean is full of trash. I feel like if we could adopt a spiritual approach to our environment, that would be wonderful. Because even cemeteries are full of trash! Really, I found that a bit unsettling … I think of that as a kind of desacralization of space … even sacred spaces have trash. So for me, that’s the next frontier.178 Danticat makes clear that environmental degradation is both a secular and a sacred matter of grave concern. How does one obtain fresh water to drink and salute Mètres Dlo, the spirit of the river, when she is drowning in rubbish? Where does one find tree trunks to make conga drums and collect the necessary plants for initiation if the forests have been cut down? How can one make their peace with death and make offerings to the dead when the cemetery has been littered and despoiled? Indigenous religious communities around the world are battling this “desacralization of space” as they try to save the Mother Ganges River, protect the Amazon Rainforest, and safeguard the Sahara Desert. Perhaps along with the help of our literary word warriors such as Danticat, these religious communities can maintain their sustainable ways of life to keep honoring the spirits and the ancestors who protect the earth and our livelihood. Whether or not she considers herself formally tied to Haitian Vodou, Danticat’s regard for Vodou as an ancestral tradition is evident, and it is clear that Danticat serves the spirits in her writing. As she has powerfully articulated, “I write to communicate with my ancestors.”179 So many spectral presences from nature appear implicitly or explicitly in her writing: lougawou, the wild, flame-winged women of the night, lasirèn and mermaid entities of the sea, spirit visions from the landscape of dreams, and most certainly familial ghosts from the cemetery. Explaining writers’ work to honor those who have transitioned to the other side, Danticat muses, “We write about the dead to make sense of our losses, to become less haunted, to turn ghosts into words, to transform an absence into language.”180 She powerfully expresses how naming the dead and manifesting spirits in writing can allow one to become less haunted. In this way, the spirits recognize that they are being remembered, and can rest in peace knowing that their legacy will continue. In this chapter, I  have offered an Africana religious studies reading of Danticat’s works to demonstrate that her stories of sorrow and rupture, healing and hope, can also be interpreted with a Vodou hermeneutic. A migrant’s untimely death on the sea serves as a calling to mystic initiation with the divine feminine. A woman’s unjust accusation provides urgent incentive for vulnerable women to band together in sacred sisterhood. Codes and ciphers invoke memories of historical trauma and subversive resistance, to be passed down to the next generation. Graveyard tombstones feature both Catholic and Vodou iconography, allowing all Haitians to envision themselves at the center of Danticat’s stories. While I do not suggest that Danticat explicitly intends to highlight these Vodou tropes, I do assert that such a reading offers what Gina Athena Ulysse has identified as an empowering new narrative for Haiti:181 one of multiple religious belongings. Danticat and Daniels, “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine” (under review). Edwidge Danticat, “Three Young Voices” (interview), Essence, May 1996. 180 Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017), 29. 181 Gina Athena Ulysse, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives:  A Post-Quake Chronicle (Middletown, CT:  Wesleyan University Press, 2015). 178 179

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Nadège T. Clitandre, who has penned the first monograph theorizing the work of Edwidge Danticat as a Haitian scholar, explores the notion of voice in an interview with Danticat. Making a connection between voice and spiritual calling, Clitandre thoughtfully remarks, “Every time I think of you and read your work, the phrase that comes up is ‘daughter of a voice.’ There is always a spiritual aspect to this voice in my mind. In rabbinic literature the term bat kol means daughter of a divine voice, and that voice is often described as a small but powerful echo.”182 Surely, we can interpret Danticat as the “daughter of a divine voice,” as she invokes powerful female ancestral presences and reveals the true lore in folklore. Many would agree that Edwidge Danticat is Haiti’s very own Toni Morrison. In response to Clitandre’s question about voice and spirit, Danticat replies contemplatively: Of course, voice is very spiritual. When one creates, one becomes a kind of vessel. That’s why you often hear artists say that they’re unsure where the work comes from. Writers might say that the character takes over. There’s something very deeply spiritual, even mystical, about an act of creation, of putting out in the world something that was not there before. Voices come to me in dreams. Sometimes they come to me while I’m reading. Sometimes they are actual voices I happen to overhear speaking and appropriate it for my work.183 As a vessel of ancestral voices, Danticat has rightfully earned her title as Oriki praise singer and griot, as guardian of Vodou’s sacred code andaki/pale daki, and as keeper of nature’s sacred environment. These voices that come to her may indeed be the voices of the lwa, the saints, and the spirits. And these muses are equally powerful as voices of a divine feminine lineage, voices of real women and goddesses whose stories have not yet been recognized as worthy of telling and remembering. In her moving literary works, Edwidge Danticat refuses to let the individual ego occupy center stage. Rather, her works represent a quilted matriarchy of voices, a sacred tapestry highlighting a chorus of divinity, and especially the divine feminine. She states of one of her works that it should be read as “not a me-moir, but a nou-moir, a we-moire; it’s not just my story but all these stories intertwined.”184 Armed with mystic codes and the blessed shawl of ancestral spirits, Danticat reminds us that even one character’s story ultimately belongs to the community, and each individual spirit has its place in a collective divinity.

Bibliography Beaubrun, Mimerose. Nan Domi: An Initiate’s Journey into Haitian Vodou. San Francisco: City Lights, 2013. Bellande-Robertson, Florence. “A Reading of the Marasa Concept in Lilas Desquiron’s LesChemins de Loco-Miroir.” In Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth, and Reality, edited by Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Claudine Michel, 103–11. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 103–11.

Clitandre as quoted in “Appendix: Interview with Edwidge Danticat,” in Edwidge Danticat, 200. Danticat as quoted in ibid. 184 Here, Clitandre quotes an interview: Opal Palmer Adisa, “Up Close and Personal: Edwidge Danticat on Haitian Identity and the Writer’s Life,” African American Review 43 (2009), 351. Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat, 185. 182 183

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Sea, Stone, Sky, and Cemetery Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick. “The Spirit of the Thing: Religious thought and Social/Historical Memory.” In Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World, edited by Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, 52–69. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2005. Bergner, Gwen. “Danticat’s Vodou Vernacular of Women’s Human Rights.” American Literary History 29, no. 3 (2017): 521–45. Boone, Sylvia Ardyn. Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Braziel, Jana Evans. “Daffodils, Rhizomes, Migrations: Narrative Coming of Age in the Diasporic Writings of Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid.” Meridians 3, no. 2 (2003): 110–31. Braziel, Jana Evans. “Defilee’s Diasporic Daughters: Revolutionary Narratives of Ayiti (Haiti), Nanchon (Nation), and Dyaspora (Diaspora) in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” Studies in the Literary Imagination 37, no. 2 (2004): 77–96. Brüske, Anne, and Wiebke Beushausen. “Writing from Lòt Bò Dlo: The Aesthetics and Poetics of Vodou in Edwidge Danticat and Myriam Chancy.” In Vodou in Haitian Memory: The Idea and Representation of Vodou in Haitian Imagination, edited by Celucien L. Joseph and Nixon S. Cleophat, 156. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Buakasa, Tulu Kia Mpansu. L’impensé du discours: “Kindoki” et “nkisi” en pays kongo du Zaïre. Kinshasa: Presses Université du Zaïre; Centre d’études et de documentation africaines, 1973. Chen, Wilson C. “Figures of Flight and Entrapment in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” Rocky Mountain Review 65 (2011): 36–55. Clitandre, Nadège T. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Clitandre, Nadège T. “Mapping the Echo Chamber: Edwidge Danticat and the Thematic Trilogy of Birth, Separation, and Death.” Palimpsest 3, no. 2 (2014): 170–90. Clitandre, Nadège T., and Edwidge Danticat. “Appendix: Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” In Edwidge Danticat: e Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre, 177–203. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Daniels, Kyrah Malika. “Mirror Mausoleums, Mortuary Arts, and Haitian Religious Unexceptionalism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85, no. 4 (2017): 957–84. Daniels, Kyrah Malika, and Edwidge Danticat. “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat” (under review). Danticat, Edwidge. After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti. London: Random House, 2002. Danticat, Edwidge. The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Vintage Press, [1994] 1998. Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Danticat, Edwidge. Dènye Pye Mapou A. Brooklyn, NY: One Moore Book, 2019 [2013 English edition, The Last Mapou]. Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! New York: Soho Press, 1995. Danticat, Edwidge. “Preface.” In Massacre River by René Philoctète. Cambridge, MA: New Directions, 2008. Danticat, Edwidge. “Three Young Voices” (interview), Essence, May 1996. Danticat, Edwidge. “We Are Ugly, But We Are Here.” In Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, 23–7. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003. Danticat, Edwidge, and Nadège T. Clitandre. “Appendix: Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” In Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre, 177–203. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Danticat, Edwidge, and Kyrah Malika Daniels. “Vodou, the Arts, and (Re)Presenting the Divine: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat” (under review). Dayan, Joan [Colin]. “Erzulie: A Women’s History of Haiti.” Research in African Literatures 25, no. 2 (1994): 5–31. 343

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat Desmangles, Leslie. The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Fleurant, Gerdès. “Haitian Vodou and Its Music.” Performing the Caribbean Experience 2 (2007): 237–50. Gay, Roxane. “In the Manner of Water or Light.” In Ayiti, 57–72. New York: Artistically Declined Press, 2011. Hucks, Tracey E. “ ‘Burning with a Flame in America’: African American Women in African-Derived Traditions.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 17, no. 2 (2001): 89–106. Hughes, Jennifer Scheper. “Cradling the Sacred: Image, Ritual, and Affect in Mexican and Mesoamerican Material Religion.” History of Religions 56, no. 1 (2016): 55–107. Jean-Charles, Régine Michelle. “ ‘A Border between Geographies of Grief ’: River Crossings and Crossroads between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.” In Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies, edited by. April J. Mayes and Kiran C. Jayaram, 81– 103. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018. Jean-Charles, Régine Michelle. “Danticat and the African American Women’s Literary Tradition.” In Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, edited by Martin Munro, 52–69. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Loichot, Valérie. Water Graves: The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Marouan, Maha. “In the Spirit of Erzulie: Vodou and the Reimagining of Haitian Womanhood in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” In Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits: The Politics of Spiritual Liberation in African Diaspora Women’s Fiction, 37–70. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. McGee, Adam. “Constructing Africa: Authenticity and Gine in Haitian Vodou.” Journal of Haitian Studies 14, no. 2 (2008): 30–51. Ménard, Nadève. “The Myth of the Exiled Writer.” Transition: An International Review 111 (2013): 53–8. Miles, Tiya. “Structures of Stone and Rings of Light: Spirited Landscapes in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” In Goodness and the Literary Imagination: Harvard’s 95th Ingersoll Lecture with Essays on Morrison’s Moral and Religious Vision, edited by Davíd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard, 60–77. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Moïse, Myriam. “Vodou Symbolism and ‘Poto Mitan’ Women in Edwidge Danticat’s Work.” In Vodou in Haitian Memory: The Idea and Representation of Vodou in Haitian Imagination, edited by Celucien L. Joseph and Nixon S. Cleophat, 125–43. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Montgomery, Maxine L. “A Lasiren Song for the Wonn: Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Claire of the Sea Light’ and the Legend of Mami Wata.” CLA Journal 59, no. 4 (2016): 316–29. Morrison, Toni. Goodness and the Literary Imagination: Harvard’s 95th Ingersoll Lecture with Essays on Morrison’s Moral and Religious Vision, edited by Davíd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Morrison, Toni. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 339–45. New York: Anchor Books, 1984. Nugent, Gabrielle. “The Work of Water in Edwidge Danticat’s Environmental Imagination.” Master’s thesis, Clemson University, 2018. N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José. “Rewriting Folklore: Traditional Beliefs and Popular Culture in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!” MaComère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars 3 (2000): 123–40. Olúpọ̀nà, Jacob K. “Ọmọ Òpìtańdìran, an Africanist Griot: Toni Morrison and African Epistemology, Myths, and Literary Culture.” In Goodness and the Literary Imagination: Harvard’s 95th Ingersoll Lecture with Essays on Morrison’s Moral and Religious Vision, edited by Davíd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard, 35–59. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. What Gender Is Motherhood? Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “ ‘He of the Trees’: Nature, Environment, and Creole Religiosities in Caribbean Literature.” In Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and 344

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Sea, Stone, Sky, and Cemetery Culture, edited by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley, 182–96. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Philoctète, René. Massacre River. Cambridge, MA: New Directions, 2008. Pierce, Yolanda. “Restless Spirits: Syncretic Religion in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Journal of Pan African Studies 3, no. 5 (2010): 68–77. Pulitano, Elvira. “Landscape, Memory and Survival in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 6, no. 2 (2008): 1–20. Romero-Cesareo, Ivette. “Sorcerers, She-Devils, and Shipwrecked Women: Writing Religion in French Caribbean Literature.” In Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean, edited by Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, 248–66. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Suárez, Lucía M. The Tears of Hispaniola: Haitian and Dominican Diaspora Memory. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. Thompson, Robert Farris, and Joseph-Aurélien Cornet. The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1981. Ulysse, Gina Athena. Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015. Valdés, Vanessa K. Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014. Zauditu-Selassie, Kokahvah. African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009.

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CHAPTER 19 “SO MUCH HAD FALLEN INTO THE SEA”: AN ECOCRITICAL APPROACH TO DANTICAT’S CLAIRE OF THE SEA LIGHT

Kristina S. Gibby

I can’t help but think that the earth is a living entity, the oceans and rivers her blood, the soil her skin, and the stones, her bones. Edwidge Danticat, After the Dance1 Within the context of the Caribbean, Danticat’s imagining of an animate earth takes on special significance. The Antillean environment, like its indigenous people and the African slaves brought to the islands, has been consistently exploited and abused. Monocrop agriculture and deforestation have led to environmental degradation on a large scale. These ecological disasters mirror the nightmare of conquest, colonialism, and slavery. The earth is a witness to such atrocities. Her blood, skin, and bones have absorbed those atrocities. As Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey and George B. Handley emphasize, “the histories of colonial violence [are] embedded in the earth.”2 These historical and environmental realities, however, are often overlooked in the desire to market the Caribbean as a lush and alluring tourist destination, reducing the Caribbean experience to a postcard. These tourist fantasies not only minimize the historical and ecological traumas but also flatten and devalue the humanity of Caribbean people. As Polly Patullo observes, it is assumed that their “life is one of daytime indolence beneath the palms and a night-time of pleasure through music, dance and sex.”3 Such assumptions negate Caribbean subjectivity, including a capacity for actual joy or suffering. Danticat’s 2013 novel Claire of the Sea Light challenges the postcard cliché of the Caribbean, dismantling the stereotype of a sunny paradise filled with oblivious, carefree island inhabitants. In this way, the Haitian-American author confronts the concept of Caribbean people and culture as “distorted echo[es] of what occurs elsewhere.”4 An ecocritical reading of the novel reveals how Danticat disrupts tourist fantasies through her portrayal of Haiti’s environment, including its degradation, and especially through her depiction of the sea. In the novel, the sea is thoroughly sublime, at once beautiful and terrifying. It does not conform to the tourist fantasy of crystal blue waters with white sandy beaches that evoke leisure, relaxation, and recreation. Nature, Danticat illustrates, is more than a human construct. It does, however, Edwidge Danticat, After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (New York: Penguin Random House, 2002), 104. 2 Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, eds., Postcolonial Ecologies:  Literatures of the Environment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5. 3 Polly Patullo, Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean (London: Cassell, 1996), 142. 4 Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America,” The Massachusetts Review 15, no. 1/2 (Winter–Spring 1974): 7. 1

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connect the novel’s human characters. Their various stories intersect at the sea’s shore to illustrate that, despite their socioeconomic differences, the characters have more in common than they realize, namely, sorrow, secrets, and the desire for connection. This desire, however, is obstructed by the pervasive divisions of class and status. The disunity that Danticat emphasizes in Claire makes Haiti into a kind of microcosm of the Antilles. Although the islands share similar violent and traumatic histories, they are not unified, as Ana Lydia Vega’s short story “Encancaranublado” makes painfully clear. In Vega’s story, three Caribbean men, one Haitian, one Dominican, and one Cuban, are stranded at sea in a tiny boat with diminishing food and water. Each has fled their native land with hopes to make it to the United States. Although the three men face imminent danger together and share the same hopes and same fears, they are unable to unite as “Caribbeans” because of their biased perceptions of race, class, and linguistic difference. The senselessness of their prejudice is reinforced when they are rescued (read: captured) by an American ship. The “Aryan” captain cannot distinguish between them as individuals; he only sees the color of their skin. To him they are, all three dark Africans.5 In Claire of the Sea Light, the divisions among the novel’s Haitian characters appear similarly senseless, and in certain cases they are fatal.6 Despite the theme of disunity that runs throughout the text, the novel clearly seeks to emphasize community. The characters are brought together by nature, both through its beauty and its capacity for destruction. This is possible chiefly because, as ecocriticism emphasizes, nature remains outside of and beyond human concerns and societal constructs. The beach, specifically, functions as a space that all the characters, across socioeconomic boundaries, may claim. Ultimately, the portrayal of nature in the novel not only dismantles reductive tourist and colonial fantasies but also emphasizes the need for Haitian unity, especially in the face of tragedy.7 Through the lens of environmental ecology, Danticat illustrates the possibility of human unity through multiplicity, recalling Édouard Glissant’s theory of “poetics of relation.” Glissant establishes his theory by juxtaposing two systems: “the root” and the “rhizome.” Whereas the root (insular and homogeneous) kills everything that surrounds it, the rhizome (expansive and polyphonic) is an interconnected root system. Through the image of the rhizome, Glissant calls for a relational mode of being, which requires one to perceive that “each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.”8 Glissant’s counter to hegemony is a rhizomatic relation. Danticat’s novel underscores this ideal of relation. The multiple and polyphonic voices in her novel echo the relation of natural ecology and illuminate the humanity of her Haitian characters.

Ana Lydia Vega, “Encancaranublado,” in Encancaranuiblado y otros cuentos de naufragio (Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Antillana, 1987), 20. 6 This is the case in the murders of Laurent Lavaud, an affluent patron of the Ville Rose radio station, and Bernard Dorien, a young man from the slums of Cité Pendue who was murdered in retaliation for the death of Laurent. The murders of these two innocent men, each representing an extreme on the class spectrum, were both senseless and tragic. These men became sacrificial victims to division. 7 Claire of the Sea Light was published three years after the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Robyn Cope classifies Claire as a “post-earthquake” novel as it participates in the “creative reconstruction” of Haiti (“‘We Are Your Neighbors’: Edwidge Danticat’s New Narrative for Haiti,” Journal of Haitian Studies 23, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 103). 8 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 11. 5

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In this chapter, I first establish the ecocritical lens through which I analyze Claire of the Sea Light. I then situate the novel within the broader Caribbean context of discovery, conquest, and colonization and establish how contemporary tourist fantasies trace their roots to the early modern European imagining of the Caribbean as a paradise, a new Garden of Eden. I also contextualize Claire within Danticat’s oeuvre, exploring how the author frequently engages with nature in her literary works. I then provide a close ecocritical reading of Claire to prove that Danticat’s portrayal of nature not only disrupts the tourist and colonial fantasies of Haiti but also reclaims Haitian subjectivity.

The Environment, Literature, and the Caribbean In the late twentieth century, ecocriticism emerged in response to ecological crisis with the objective to study the “relationship between literature and the physical environment.”9 Although an intellectual endeavor may seem insufficient in the face of very real material crises, it is a necessary and potent one. As Lawrence Buell observes, “How we image a thing, true or false, affects our conduct toward it.”10 By analyzing literary representations of nature, we can better trace the “logic” behind environmental exploitation. This would, hopefully, lead us to rectify the way that we image nature and reevaluate our conduct toward it. In the western literary tradition, nature’s role, Cheryll Glotfelty explains, has been the stage upon which the human actor performs rather than a participant in the action.11 Nature in this context becomes an object, a construct through which the human story is highlighted. Such literary representations reveal more about human desires and anxieties than they do nature itself and ultimately obfuscate nature’s “story.” William Howarth asserts that the “land has a story of its own that cannot be effaced, but must be read and retold by honest writers.”12 Of course, there is the constant dilemma of representation. We must ask, how does one tell the land’s story “honestly”? Perhaps an honest retelling of nature’s story resists the urge to anthropomorphize or romanticize, recognizing that it is not possible to understand nature in strictly human terms. Thus, ecocriticism calls for a reclamation of nature’s alterity. In this way, ecocriticism’s concerns intersect with those explored in postcolonial studies. Although initially ecocritics seemed chiefly focused on literature from the United States and England, many recent scholars have highlighted the relevance of ecocritical thought in a postcolonial context. Conquest, of course, is not only about territory and resources but people as well. “Domination of nature,” DeLoughrey and Handley assert, “translates into the domination of other humans.”13 The intersection between ecocriticism and postcolonialism is especially relevant within the context of the Caribbean where postcolonial writers look to

Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction:  Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xviii. 10 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 3. 11 Glotfelty, “Introduction,” xxi. 12 William Howarth, “Some Principles of Ecocriticism,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 76. 13 DeLoughrey and Handley, Postcolonial Ecologies, 16. 9

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nature as a means of commenting on the colonial past and even resisting the postcolonial condition, including historical rupture. In Caribbean Discourse, Glissant explains how the slave trade complicates a Caribbean concept of history. History for the descendants of Caribbean slaves is characterized by rupture, violence, and dislocation, which cannot be processed by “a totalitarian philosophy of history” that determines the European historical consciousness.14 For people of the Antilles, “historical consciousness … came together in the context of shock, contraction, painful negation, and explosive forces.”15 Glissant terms this phenomenon “nonhistory” since the collective memory is effaced as a result of the “dislocation of the [temporal] continuum.”16 Many Caribbean authors attempt to recover historical consciousness by turning to the landscape, within which history is embedded. The need to protect the Caribbean landscape, consequently, is especially urgent since, as DeLoughrey and Handley argue, “a gesture of destruction against land and sea, then, simultaneously becomes an act of violence against collective memory.”17 Nature is a recourse to postcolonial amnesia. St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott’s “The Sea is History” is one example of Caribbean literature that confronts the problem of history through an ecological lens. When the poem’s narrator is asked the location of their monuments and tribal memory, they reply, “in that grey vault. / The Sea. / The sea / has locked them up. The sea is History.”18 In this poem, Walcott confronts the horrors of the Middle Passage, which he terms “Genesis,”19 a beginning defined by rupture. In the depths of the ocean lie the bodies of African slaves who either jumped to escape slavery or who were thrown overboard to manage the spread of disease. Their memory is evoked through the image of “Bone soldered by coral to bone.”20 This line conjures the regenerative power of nature. The bones of drowned slaves, soldered together by coral—a marine invertebrate, transcend the finality of human mortality. Their bodies are now one with the sea. Like Walcott, Patrick Chamoiseau, Rosario Ferré, and Maryse Condé—all Caribbean authors—engage with nature to comment on the problem of history and resist the postcolonial condition. In Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco (1997), a father teaches his daughter “his sacred wonder before the smallest shiver that ran through nature.”21 Instilled with the same “sacred wonder,” the daughter then “became obsessed with evoking for the world that beauty available to whoever would look.”22 Chamoiseau’s characters’ appreciation for the beauty of the Caribbean landscape is a triumph and even an act of resistance, considering the Antillean landscape has been “ravaged by colonial violence.”23 The landscape has also been ravaged and degraded through monocrop agriculture and deforestation. In her novel Sweet Diamond Dust (1988), Puerto Rican author Rosario Ferré documents the disastrous ecological Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 62. 15 Ibid., 61–2. 16 Ibid., 62. 17 DeLoughrey and Handley, Postcolonial Ecologies, 8. 18 Derek Walcott, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Baugh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 137. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, trans. Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov (New  York:  Vintage International, 1997), 40. 22 Ibid. 23 DeLoughrey and Handley, Postcolonial Ecologies, 27. 14

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effects of sugar production, which transformed the Puerto Rican town of Guamaní into “hell on earth.”24 The narrator declares, “Far from being a paradise, Guamaní has become a hell, a monstrous whirlpool from which the terrifying funnel of Snow White Sugar Mills spews out sugar night and day toward the north.”25 Ferré’s ecological consciousness is echoed by Guadeloupean Maryse Condé in her novel Crossing the Mangrove (1995). The characters mourn the rampant deforestation on their island: “At three thousand feet the forest of Guadeloupe becomes stunted. Gone are the châtaigniers, the mastwoods, the mountain immortelles and the red cedars.”26 The forest became a “desecrated cathedral.”27 Walcott, Chamoiseau, Ferré, and Condé allow nature to retain its alterity while also documenting environmental degradation. In so doing, these authors pointedly subvert stereotypical images of the Caribbean that have sedimented for over five centuries.

Discovery, Conquest, and Colonialization: The Complicated Lineage of Tourist Fantasies In 1992, Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, five hundred years after Christopher Columbus first set foot on a Caribbean Island. In his Nobel Lecture, Walcott contends with the often-idealized vision of the Antilles, whose warm and verdant landscape invites tourists to imagine a paradisiacal escape from their modern twenty-first-century existence—a return to Eden. The tourist imagination, however, stops short of conceiving of a Caribbean culture and consequently dismisses the full scope of island humanity. “For tourists, the sunshine cannot be serious,” Walcott explains.28 Seriousness, in tandem with history and monuments, has become a token of civilization in the western imagination. He continues, “So how can there be a people there, in the true sense of the word?”29 The Caribbean’s apparent lack of gravitas disqualifies its inhabitants from a claim to history and civilization. This is due in part to the fact that the Caribbean has been conceived of (and constructed) as an “effortless paradise”30 since its so-called discovery in 1492. In his first letter after making landfall, Columbus pointedly paints a paradisiacal image of the Caribbean islands. Columbus describes the Island of Juana (Cuba) as “exceedingly fertile” with “very broad and health-giving rivers.”31 He proceeds to group all of the islands in the same category: “All these islands are very beautiful, and of quite different shapes, easy to be traversed, and full of the greatest variety of trees reaching to the stars. I think these never lose their leaves, as I saw them looking as green and lovely as they are wont to be in the month of May in Spain.”32 Of the island of Hispaniola (which includes present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he writes, “There are very lofty and beautiful mountains, great farms,

Rosario Ferré, Sweet Diamond Dust, trans. Rosario Ferré (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 68. Ibid., 7. 26 Maryse Condé, Crossing the Mangrove, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 55. 27 Ibid., 47. 28 Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), 72. 29 Ibid. 30 David Lowenthal, West Indian Societies (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 14. 31 Christopher Columbus, Columbus’s Letter to Gabriel Sanchez (Boston: Directors of the Old South Work, 1896), 2. 32 Ibid. 24 25

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groves and fields, most fertile both for cultivation and for pasturage. … The convenience of the harbors in this island, and the excellence of the rivers, in volume and salubrity, surpass human belief.”33 In addition to the beauty and fertility of Hispaniola, Columbus lists some of its other natural resources, including spices, metals, and gold. Like the tourism advertisements of today, Columbus attempts to sell a fantasy: a new Eden. He mistakes, however, diversity for fertility, an assumption that will lead to disastrous ecological consequences in subsequent centuries. Early modern Europeans’ imagining of the Caribbean landscape had a direct impact on human conduct toward it. Its landscape was misinterpreted as exceptionally fertile, a bountiful paradise where anything could grow. European colonizers made this faulty assumption, according to the editors of Caribbean Literature and the Environment, mainly because of the “novelty of Caribbean flora and fauna,” which “led to hyperbolic misinterpretations of tropical fecundity.”34 This led directly to ecological disaster as colonizers brought various alien species of plants and animals, which introduced new diseases to the islands. Mimi Sheller observes in Consuming the Caribbean, “The mobility of planters and plant varieties … were thus tightly wedded to the mobility of plant diseases and vectors of agricultural catastrophe.”35 Despite such catastrophe, colonizers continued to imagine the Caribbean through a “distorted lens” in which “lush, verdant nature was the focus, [and] human misery was ignored.”36 In reality, while the diverse islands produce a variety of soils, not all are rich in nutrients. According to David Lowenthal, the islands’ “infertile, dry, or poorly drained soils, precipitous slopes, and long history of soil erosion and depletion” belie the Edenic myth.37 Their misreading of the landscape led colonizers to direct aggressive efforts to cultivate the islands, and though plantations were financially lucrative, the requisite deforestation and consequent pollution led to irremediable ecological disaster.38 Unfortunately, the early modern Caribbean construct that led to terrible environmental consequences is propagated in the twenty-first century. Mimi Sheller asserts, “Contemporary views of tropical island landscapes are highly over-determined,” mainly because of the lengthy history of literary and visual representation of the islands that turned the Caribbean into a “global icon.”39 This iconic status negates environmental and cultural realities. As early as the fifteenth century, the Caribbean landscape was “fetishized and turned into a commodity.”40 The Caribbean is still fetishized, both its landscape and its people. Ecological crises are consciously ignored so that the Caribbean can be “packaged and sold as ‘pristine’ beaches and verdant

Ibid., 3. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley, eds., Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 6. 35 Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (New York: Routledge, 2003), 37. 36 Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, 14. 37 Ibid., 15. 38 Reinaldo Funes Monzote, in From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History Since 1492 (trans. Alex Martin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008)), investigates the disastrous effects of burning and cutting down forests to plant sugarcane in Cuba. He explains that by the twentieth century, “Cuba had come to the same point as neighboring Caribbean sugar islands, whose land had begun to show signs of exhaustion after losing its forests and sustaining years of monoculture” (264). 39 Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean, 37. 40 Ibid., 46. 33 34

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rainforest.”41 The contemporary tourist fantasies about (and demands of) the environment are inextricably linked to the history of colonialism in the region. The contemporary tourist gaze is an extension of the colonial gaze; both erase Caribbean subjectivity and consume (in various ways) the landscape. Although this is the case throughout the Antilles, for the sake of this chapter, I turn to Haiti, specifically, to foreground Danticat’s environmental engagement as a Haitian American author.

Haiti and Danticat’s Environmental Ethics and Poetics The island of Hispaniola was exploited first by the Spaniards, who after “having exhausted the mining possibilities” of the island, “moved on to new adventures,” and then by the French who colonized the western portion of the island, Saint Domingue, “France’s richest colony, the brightest jewel of the French crown.”42 Saint Domingue, which would become Haiti in 1804, was known as the “pearl of the Antilles”;43 it “produced almost half of the entire world’s supply of sugar and coffee, as well as valuable crops of cotton and indigo.”44 The land was exhausted. Environmental degradation continued even after the Haitian Revolution when Black Haitians declared independence in 1804 and abolished slavery and the plantation system. To this day, Haitian trees steadily continue to disappear. In “Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures,” Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert traces the history of deforestation in Haiti and the many literary responses to it. Haitian trees were cleared for plantations, timber, and fuel, leading to “endemic species becoming scare as early as the mid-seventeenth century.”45 Deforestation in Haiti is also a poetic loss since Haiti’s literary tradition emerged out of a “celebration of the beauty and extension of the island’s deep forests.”46 The forest space becomes an essential trope in the national literature post-revolution. As early as the nineteenth century, Haitian authors have been inspired by Haiti’s “musician trees,” like Alcibiade Fleury-Battier and Massillon Coicou.47 In the twentieth century, many Haitian authors mourn the “rapid disappearance” of Haitian forests, including Jacques Roumain, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, Marie Chauvet, and Pierre Clitandre.48 Although Haitian trees are no longer cleared for plantations, they are routinely cut down for charcoal, the principle fuel used for cooking in present-day Haiti.49 Danticat laments the disappearing Haitian forests in After the Dance:  A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (2002). Despite its travelogue genre, this book highlights Danticat’s

Ibid., 37. Danticat, After the Dance, 41. 43 David Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue 1793–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 383. 44 Jeremy D. Popkin, A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 2. 45 Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures,” in Postcolonial Ecologies:  Literatures of the Environment, ed. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 102. 46 Ibid., 108. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 109. 41 42

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environmental ethics in many ways. In After the Dance, she imagines an animate earth, a “living entity,” whose blood, skin, and bones are the waters, soil, and stones.50 The native Haitians she interviews have a similar view of the earth. She records a conversation with Ovid, a peasant farmer she befriends during her trip, who declares, “The land is furious. … [It] stares at you like the white balls of your eyes.”51 Danticat explains for her readers why the land would be furious, specifically lamenting the bare mountains and the “lost trees.”52 She writes, “Anyone who has ever been to Haiti can see the country’s deforestation. So much so that one might feel that in Haiti, trees are lamayòt.”53 Lamayòt, she explains, is “a secret, a benign Pandora’s box one willingly unveils for one’s pleasure.”54 The term could also be applied to an interesting object, or it could refer to “a false personal or political promise.”55 The fact that Danticat does not provide a direct or clear translation for lamayòt heightens the unusual feeling evoked by the presence of trees in a land that has witnessed deforestation on such a large scale. They are an uncanny surprise. By highlighting environmental issues in After the Dance, Danticat breaks with the conventions of the travelogue genre. She (re)presents the Haitian landscape to resist the tourist gaze, which has been sustained through travel writing, another link between the colonial and tourist perceptions of the “Other.” Travel writing, as Mary Louise Pratt clearly articulates in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, was a fundamental element in the imperial process. Pratt argues that “travel writing made imperial expansion meaningful and desirable to the citizenries of the imperial countries” as “they created a sense of curiosity, excitement, adventure, and even moral fervor about European expansionism.”56 Even after colonialism and imperial expansion, the travelogue genre perpetuated a sense of curiosity and adventure for “armchair tourists.” Travelogues about Haiti from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Charles Forsdick explains, were written by North American and European men and tended to perpetuate what others had already written about Haiti; it was consistently presented as bizarrely exotic, at once alluring and frightening.57 Forsdick writes that these travelogues included “seemingly obligatory references to an exoticized Vodou, to zombification, and even (especially in earlier texts) to cannibalism.”58 After the Dance is unique, not only because it is written by a nativeborn Haitian and a woman, but because it does not perpetuate the imperial and tourist fantasies and anxieties about Haiti. According to Forsdick, Danticat’s travelogue is a “reconfiguration of the genre’s boundaries.”59 One of the ways she does this is through her descriptions of the Haitian landscape, both its beauty and degradation. The unlikely travelogue genre becomes an opportunity to engage and educate the tourist, asking them to see a different kind of Haiti and

Danticat, After the Dance, 104. Ibid., 60. 52 Ibid., 86. 53 Ibid., 100. 54 Ibid., 99. 55 Ibid., 100. 56 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 3. 57 Charles Forsdick, “Traveling, Writing: Danticat’s After the Dance,” in Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, ed. Martin Munro (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 101. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 102. 50 51

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hear its voices. The tourist who reads After the Dance is challenged to reconsider the Caribbean, not as a fetishized construct, but as a real place with both scars and beauty. After the Dance is one of many works within Danticat’s oeuvre to highlight the intersection between the environment and postcolonial issues, including the Haitian diaspora. Before turning to Claire of the Sea Light, I want to briefly trace Danticat’s environmental poetics in three works of fiction, all published before Claire, including “Children of the Sea” (1995), “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” (1995), and The Farming of Bones (1998). The first in her collection of short stories Krik? Krak!, “Children of the Sea” is epistolary in form. Two nameless young lovers write letters to each other that can never be delivered. The male narrator has fled Haiti for political reasons and writes to his love from a small, leaking boat with thirty-six other Haitian refugees. The sea is both “timeless” and “endless,” which allows the male narrator to invoke the history of the Middle Passage.60 Time collapses when he realizes that the boat is sinking and he will soon join those drowned slaves at the bottom of the sea. He imagines that he was always destined to “live life eternal, among the children of the deep blue sea, those who have escaped the chains of slavery to form a world beneath the heavens and the blood-drenched earth where you live.”61 The male narrator, the other “boat people,” and drowned slaves are all equally “Children of the Sea.” In this short story, the sea, to quote Walcott, is history. Danticat likewise weaves history, violence, and nature in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” another story from Krik? Krak! that treats the Parsley Massacre of 1937, when Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the execution of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. An unknown number of Haitians were killed and their bodies thrown in the Dajabón River at the Haitian-Dominican border. The Dajabón is also known as the Massacre River, so called for the 1728 massacre of French buccaneers by Spanish colonials. History would repeat itself some two hundred years later. In this short story, Danticat explores how past atrocities haunt the landscape and human memory. The young female narrator Josephine was born at the Massacre River on the day of Trujillo’s order as her mother fled for her life after watching Dominican soldiers throw her own mother’s mutilated corpse in the river. Josephine recalls her first “pilgrimage” to the Massacre River at 5  years old when she “expected [the river] to be still crimson with blood,” but it was “clear.”62 When she and her mother dipped their hands in the river she expected the dead to “reach out and haul us in,” but “only our own faces stared back at us.”63 The river is both a “tomb” and a perpetual reminder of the past horrors.64 The narrator exclaims, “We came from the bottom of that river where the blood never stops flowing.”65 Danticat revisits this history and site in her novel The Farming of Bones. The narrator Amabelle’s parents drowned in the Massacre River when she was a small child, and as an adult she must cross the river to escape the Parsley Massacre. For Amabelle, the Massacre River is a site of historical, personal, and collective trauma. Danticat comments on that trauma through her literary engagement with nature. In The Farming of Bones, the traumatic history of the 1937 massacre is embedded in the landscape. Amabelle longs for “relief from the fear of mudslides and blood bubbling out of the riverbed, where it is said the dead add their tears Edwidge Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” in Krik? Krak! (New York: Soho Press, 1995), 3. Ibid., 27. 62 Edwidge Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” in Krik? Krak! (New York: Soho Press, 1995), 40. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 41. 60 61

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to the river flow.”66 Although the landscape is a reminder of human violence, it is also a refuge and aesthetic comfort for Amabelle who, despite all her suffering, is still “struck by the size and beauty of the mountains.”67 A similar ambiguity exists in Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light. Not only does Danticat celebrate Haiti’s beauty, but she also highlights its dangers and degradation, weaving ecological crisis into and through the human story. There are dangerous mudslides caused by the rivers swelling “in response to the lack of trees, the land erosion, [and] the dying topsoil.”68 Frogs spontaneously explode because of a fungal disease caused by the “hotter-than-usual weather.”69 And a rogue wave that looks like “a supernova explod[es] above the sea.”70 These ecological anomalies signal to the reader that all is not well, neither in the natural world nor in the human society.

Claire of the Sea Light and the Environment Like Maryse Condé’s Crossing the Mangrove, Claire of the Sea Light is a collective portrait of a community with interweaving individual stories. The novel’s structure illustrates the unacknowledged connections among various members of the fictive town of Ville Rose, Haiti. Although Danticat’s setting is an imagined construct, it complicates and resists the colonial and tourist fantasies about the Caribbean. Her characters are not flat stereotypes, and the landscape is more than a mere symbol of human desires. It is more than a stage upon which the human story unfolds. Danticat frames the novel with opening and closing chapters that focus on the relationship between its central characters, widower Nozias Faustin and his only child, Claire Limyè Lanmè (Claire of the Sea Light). The novel begins on the morning of Claire’s seventh birthday, a day that is marked by death. Claire is a “revenan, a child who had entered the world just as her mother was leaving it.”71 After Claire’s birth and his wife’s death, Nozias sends his infant daughter to his wife’s family in the mountains. They return her to him when she is 3 years old, and although he loves his daughter, Nozias is tormented by the idea that he is not capable of adequately caring for her: “What did he know about raising a little girl? Maybe if she were a boy, he could try to do it. But with a girl, there were so many things that could go wrong, so many hopeless mistakes you could make.”72 His fear of parental failure drives him to ask Madame Gaëlle Lavaud, the fabric shop owner, to adopt Claire. A childless widow, Madame Gaëlle had lost her own daughter three years prior in a car accident. Not only does Nozias believe Madame Gaëlle would make room in her broken heart for his daughter, but he also knows that the fabric shop owner would be better able to provide financially. As a poor fisherman, Nozias worries that he will fail to give Claire a quality life or worse, that, because of the dangerous nature of his job, he will disappear at sea and leave her an orphan. Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones (New York: Soho Press, 1998), 310. Ibid., 257. 68 Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 52. 69 Ibid., 54. 70 Ibid., 198. 71 Ibid., 16. 72 Ibid., 15. 66 67

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Although Nozias’s dilemma and his relationship with his beloved daughter is the central focus of the novel, Claire of the Sea Light is also a statement about community. The interior chapters of the novel provide readers with a panoramic view of Ville Rose. Although there are no pointed racial divisions in Ville Rose, the characters are separated by socioeconomic status. At the bottom of the social hierarchy are the poor fishermen, followed closely by the inhabitants of Cité Pendue, an “extension of Ville Rose” so “destitute and treacherous” that “some people called it the region’s first circle of hell,”73 and finally the “wealthy or comfortable” who make up only five percent of the population.74 As the novel progresses, however, readers realize that each tragedy and each character is connected, although the characters themselves are not aware of this fact. Robyn Cope, in her essay “‘We Are Your Neighbors’:  Edwidge Danticat’s New Narrative for Haiti,” explains, “The novel’s nonlinear plotline and multiple internal focalization refute linear conceptions of time and renounce one-sided accounts of events.”75 Although the first and last chapters mark the beginning and end of a single day, Claire’s seventh birthday, the middle chapters provide context and backstory for several characters, including Madame Gaëlle, Louise George (Ville Rose’s radio show host), Max Ardin Senior (the headmaster of École Ardin), and his son, Max Junior. As each chapter introduces these seemingly unrelated characters, readers begin to understand that all the characters are caught in the same web of tragedy. Cope explains, “As the chapters repeatedly circle back in time, they multiply and complicate the connections between the characters.”76 Danticat stresses that no individual life can be understood without context nor without understanding that everything is related.

Claire of the Sea Light and Relation: Natural and Human Ecologies In Connecting Histories:  Francophone Caribbean Writers Interrogating Their Past, Bonnie Thomas explores Danticat’s consistent return to the relationship between the individual and the collective experience. Thomas stresses, “There is no such thing as a life, a culture, or a history lived in isolation from others.”77 In Claire, Danticat draws on ecology in order to accentuate this theme of relation and unity. Danticat first introduces the theme of ecological relationships through Nozias, whose job as a fisherman makes him acutely attuned to the rhythms of nature; however, like the other poor inhabitants of Ville Rose, he has to choose between ecological balance and the duty to provide for his family. This choice leads him and the other fishermen to realize that they “could no longer afford to fish in season, to let the sea replenish itself. [They] had to go out nearly every day, even on Fridays, and even as the seabed was disappearing, and the sea grass that used to nourish the fish was buried under silt and trash.”78 Despite the fishermen’s ecological sensibility, poverty drives them to deliberately disrupt the balance, even though they “knew deep in [the] gut that it was wrong.”79 By underscoring this ecological

Ibid., 63. Ibid., 5. 75 Cope, “‘We Are Your Neighbors’,” 102. 76 Ibid. 77 Bonnie Thomas, Connecting Histories: Francophone Caribbean Writers Interrogating Their Past (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 103. 78 Danticat, Claire, 9. 79 Ibid. 73 74

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dilemma in the novel’s exposition, Danticat signals to readers that in order to understand the deeper implications in the novel, they will need to continue with an environmental sensibility. For example, the particular image of the sea grass “buried under silt and trash,” though a small detail, has significant implications. This specific image contradicts the idealized perception of the Caribbean islands and challenges the “colonial and tourist views of the islands as ahistorical, passive, and idyllic landscapes.”80 Moreover, Danticat highlights the unpredictable, devastating power of nature, which undermines the colonial fantasies of control and domestication. The novel’s first sentence captures nature’s raw destructive power:  “The morning Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin turned seven, a freak wave, measuring between ten and twelve feet high, was seen in the ocean outside of Ville Rose.”81 The adjective “freak” emphasizes the capriciousness of nature; it is not a thing to be regulated. Rather, it ought to be feared. This “freak” wave, “a giant blue-green tongue,” kills Nozias’s friend Caleb, burying his body and his fishing boat in the depths of the sea.82 With this disruptive exposition, Danticat establishes that humans are at the mercy of forces that are beyond their control and even understanding. The ocean is beautiful, but it is also dangerous. As the novel progresses, Danticat continually reminds readers that the Haiti of Claire is not an Eden.

“The Mountains Crumbled and Gave Way” Ville Rose, despite its name, is not a garden. It is no paradise. For many of its citizens, it is an inferno, as apparent in the epithet for the Cité Pendue community: the “first circle of hell.”83 Located twenty miles south of Port-au-Prince, Ville Rose is “crammed between a stretch of the most unpredictable waters of the Caribbean Sea and an eroded Haitian mountain range.”84 Again, Danticat reminds us of the terrifyingly volatile nature of the sea, while adding the detail of the eroded mountain range, a result of deforestation: the trees “vanished into charcoal and the mountains crumbled and gave way, washing much-needed topsoil into the sea.”85 The imagery of a crumbling mountain is a harsh irony since Haiti comes from the Arawak word Ayiti, which translates to “land of high mountains.”86 However, the mountain of Ville Rose is broken. The locals refer to it as Mòn Initil, Useless Mountain. Although verdant, the mountain was “mostly unexplored because the ferns there bore no fruit. The wood was too wet for charcoal and too unsteady for construction. People called this mountain Mòn Initil, or Useless Mountain, because there was little there that they wanted. It was also believed to be haunted.”87 Although

DeLoughrey et al., Caribbean Literature, 12. Danticat, Claire, 3. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., 63. 84 Ibid., 5. 85 Ibid., 64. 86 When the black revolutionaries of Saint Domingue successfully declared independence from France, they (re)named their portion of the island of Hispaniola Haiti—a variation on the original indigenous appellation—to establish a universal victory for the oppressed and, as Laurent Dubois asserts in his essay “Avenging America,” to proclaim “themselves as surrogates for the descendants of the vanished indigenous inhabitants” (“Avenging America:  The Politics of Violence in the Haitian Revolution,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. Norman Fiering and David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 122). 87 Danticat, Claire, 10. 80 81

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this mountain is “useless” to the contemporary Haitians of the novel, it was not useless to the maroons, slaves who escaped the plantations and fled to the mountains, and whose ghosts haunt the hills of Mòn Initil. In the novel’s final chapter, Claire reenacts the maroons’ flight. She escapes to Mòn Initil when she realizes that her father and Madame Gaëlle have settled that Claire will become the fabric shop owner’s daughter. When she reaches the lookout, she fantasizes about remaining on the mountain and invokes the lore of the maroons:  “She would go away. She would go where [her father] would never think to come and find her. Like the fugitives in Madame Louise’s stories—les marons—she would hide inside what was left of Mòn Initil.”88 Even though the mountain is broken, eroded, it is still useful to her. It is a haven. Claire imagines life as a modern maroon, lying on “beds of ferns and listen[ing] to the bats squeal and the owls moan.”89 She commits to not “disturb the marooned spirits who had found refuge there before her.”90 The mountain gives Claire literal and emotional perspective and a connection to the past that allows her to face her future with courage. For most, however, Mòn Initil is a useless mountain unless the elite find a way to further exploit its landscape for profit. As the narrator explains, “In a few years Mòn Initil would no longer be useless or initil since very rich people had figured out that they could burn it down, flatten it, and build their big palaces there. Soon it would have to be called Mòn Palè, or Palace Mountain.”91 Although Danticat’s invention, Mòn Initil invites readers to consider the human tendency to view nature through the lens of exploitation and gain. Unlike Claire, the wealthy Haitians who plan to flatten and burn Mòn Initil have no regard for a sense of place, history, or the spirits of the maroons who had found safety in that mountain. This process of gentrification echoes acts of colonial exploitation. The Haitian elite are like the early conquistadors and colonizers whose vision of the Caribbean was narrow in scope and whose understanding was limited.

Internalizing the Colonial Gaze Danticat specifically highlights this narrow vision by addressing the colonial assumption and fantasy that anything can grow in the Caribbean. She does this through the figure of Max Ardin, Senior. The day before Claire’s seventh birthday, Max’s son (Max Junior) returns from Miami with Jessamine, a woman Max Senior hopes is more than a friend. During a conversation with Max Senior on his porch, Jessamine expresses surprise to see African violets in the front yard, since they are not native to Haiti. As the name suggests, this plant comes from Africa. It invokes the history of the slave trade and, in this scene, acts as a symbol of diaspora, a word whose etymological root is “seed.”92 The presence of African violets in Max Senior’s garden is a reminder that the “colonial process involved a simultaneous uprooting of plants and peoples,”93 which makes Max Senior’s response all the more disconcerting. He quickly informs Jessamine, Ibid., 234, emphasis added. Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid., 233. 92 DeLoughrey et al., Caribbean Literature, 18. 93 Ibid. 88 89

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“Everything can grow here.”94 Of course, Max Senior is wrong. Not everything can grow in Ville Rose; his son is a perfect example. Although deep down Max Senior knows his son is gay, he wishes that Jessamine was in love with his son or, better yet, that his son loves her. When he asks her if she and Max Junior are in love, she responds, “I thought you already knew this … Your son has been in love only once in his life, and the person he was in love with is dead.”95 Bernard Dorien, Max Junior’s best friend and the only man he had ever been with, was murdered the day after Max Junior left for Miami ten years earlier. Now that Max Junior has returned to Haiti, he must face not only the tragic loss of Bernard but also the consequences of his own actions, which were a distorted effort to satisfy his father’s expectations of him. Like the early colonizers whose ignorance brought about ecological catastrophe, Max Senior’s willful ignorance regarding his son’s sexuality caused serious damage with far-reaching consequences. When Max Junior was 19, he raped Flore, the household maid, in an effort to prove his “manliness” to his father. Now he has returned to Haiti to meet his son, whom “he had violently made.”96 Although Flore agrees to bring her son to meet Max Junior, it is clear that she does not want him to be a part of his son’s life. The morning of the meeting she gives an interview on the popular radio show Di Mwen (Tell me) to share her account of the night Max Junior raped her. At the end of the interview, Flore declares that she and her son will leave Ville Rose and go somewhere where Max Junior and his father can never find them. The program airs that night as Max Junior returns to his father’s house after dropping Flore and their son off at her mother’s. When Max Junior pulls into the driveway, Jessamine and his father are on the porch waiting for him. At that moment they hear, blasting from a neighbor’s radio, Flore describe the night he raped her on Di Mwen. Max Junior abruptly drives away and ends up at the beach, the same beach where Nozias and the other fishermen mourn Caleb’s disappearance. Feeling the weight of his guilt, Max Junior remembers the night that he raped Flore. Looking back, he can see that “he had foolishly wanted to prove something to his father that night.”97 He had wanted his father to know that he “could be with Flore. He wanted his father to hear her screams.”98 Although Max Junior is clearly a perpetrator, he is also a victim. Unlike the African violets, Max Junior could not grow, could not thrive in Ville Rose. Even after ten years, Max Junior is still living a lie. He brought Jessamine back with him “so his father would think he had a girlfriend.”99 He had even considered getting her a ring so that he could introduce her as his fiancée. Now, having faced the consequences of his horrible transgression and Bernard’s death, Max Junior slips into the water and surrenders himself to the sea. Unlike the many characters who hide painful and shameful secrets, however, “the sea does not hide dirt.”100 It does not accept him. Whereas, the novel begins with Caleb’s disappearance at sea, it closes with Max Junior’s rescue. This frame, centered on the relationship between humans and the sea, illustrates the central importance of the sea and leads readers to a deeper understanding of the novel. Danticat, Claire, 192. Ibid., 195. 96 Ibid., 184. 97 Ibid., 196. 98 Ibid., emphasis added. 99 Ibid., 155. 100 Ibid., 199. 94 95

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“So Much Had Fallen into the Sea” Although the various characters seem isolated by their suffering and the secrets they carry like burdens, the sea unites them. The sea strips away the differences and exposes their shared commonalities, including death, tragedy, and hope. The sea is both death and life: “You could scatter both ashes and flowers in [the sea].”101 It is at once mundane and fantastic. After Claire runs away, Nozias walks down to the shore and notices that the “seaweed mixed with the reflection of the night sky made it seem as though there were stardust on its surface.”102 Though it has the power to erase—to make one disappear—the sea also sustains the community through its beauty and its resources. Ultimately, the sea is ambivalent: “The sea was both hostile and docile, the ultimate trickster. It was as large as it was small, as long as you could claim a portion of it for yourself … You could take as much as you wanted from it. But it too could take back.”103 This ambivalence, in part, explains Claire’s conflicted attitude toward the sea. On the one hand, the sea represents a maternal presence in Claire’s life. While floating in the sea, Claire yearns for “the warm salty water to be her mother’s body, the waves her mother’s heartbeat.”104 The sea becomes a substitute for her mother’s womb. Maxine L.  Montgomery connects the sea in Danticat’s novel to the Afro-Caribbean water-spirit Mami Wata (Mother Water) in her essay “A Lasiren Song for the Wonn: Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light and the Legend of Mami Wata.”105 Montgomery argues that “Claire’s eventual oneness with Mami Wata … enables a reconnection with a lost, fragmented Africanist heritage.”106 In this way, the sea heals the collective trauma that Claire has inherited from her ancestors, specifically through its maternal quality. This fact allows Claire to move “from margin to center, from a self-relegating position to one of vocality and empowerment.”107 In her essay, Montgomery links Mami Wata to other Afro-Caribbean water-goddesses, like Erzulie and Lasirèn, a figure that Danticat refers to throughout the novel in order to show how Haitian folklore wrestles with the unpredictable nature of the sea. Lasirèn, from the French word for mermaid (la sirène), is seductive but also dangerous. Marilyn Houlberg explains, “Lasirèn has the ability to bring riches and romance, but she can also be violent, and even has the power to lure mortals to a watery death.”108 Her dual physical nature, part fish, part human, reflects the dual nature of her temperament: “She can be the seductive coquette or the angry, demanding mistress. She can change in front of your eyes.”109 Like the sea, Lasirèn is unpredictable and volatile. The fishermen in Claire of the Sea Light pray to Lasirèn for protection. Yet, according to their lore, she was the last thing a fisherman saw before dying at sea. In many ways, they are at her mercy. For this reason, Nozias keeps trinkets in his boat to invoke her protection. Danticat makes it a point to demonstrate that Lasirèn is an important figure for both the poor and the elite. Max Junior’s mother taught him Ibid. Ibid., 200. 103 Ibid., 199. 104 Ibid., 215. 105 Maxine L. Montgomery, “A Lasiren Song for the Wonn: Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light and the Legend of Mami Wata,” CLA Journal 59, no. 4 (2016): 316. 106 Ibid., 318. 107 Ibid., 327. 108 Marilyn Houlberg, “Sirens and Snakes: Water Spirits in the Arts of Haitian Vodou,” African Arts 29, no. 2 (1996): 31. 109 Ibid., 33. 101 102

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that Lasirèn “made her presence known by swelling a wave several feet, whenever she craved human company.”110 This story was his mother’s explanation for “rogue” waves, like the one that swallowed Caleb at the beginning of the novel. Danticat specifically links Lasirèn with motherhood in one of Nozias’s memories of his wife. One night while fishing, his wife (then pregnant with Claire) slips, without warning, out of their boat and into the dark water. For a brief moment, she becomes something otherworldly, encircled by tiny silver fish, making it seem “as though her patch of the sea were being lit from below.”111 From Nozias’s perspective, “in that moment she was his Lasirèn, his long-haried, long-bodied brown goddess of the sea.”112 This version of the goddess embodied by Nozias’s wife, pregnant and swimming in harmony with sea life, contrasts Lasirèn’s destructive power. Like the sea, Lasirèn is associated with both life and destruction. Despite its maternal potential, Claire is acutely aware of the dangers of the sea. Claire’s experience with the sea is a radical departure from the idealized tourist imagining of the Caribbean. She realizes that it could have been her father who was swallowed by the sea that morning. Even at the age of 7, she understands that “you never got back things that fell into the sea … Hats fell into the sea. Hearts fell into the sea. So much had fallen into the sea. So much could still fall into the sea, including Msye Caleb, who fell in that morning, and all the men like her father who went there for fish.”113 Hats, hearts, people. The sea does not discriminate. This understanding leads Claire to wish that the sea would disappear, and yet, if it did disappear, its beauty would also vanish. She realizes that she would miss “its ever-changing sounds: how it sometimes sounded like one long breath. And sometimes like a cry.”114 She would miss its variegated colors, “the turquoise in the distance and its light-blue ripples up close, the white foam at the peaks of the waves.”115 The wonder and beauty of the sea cannot be separated from its potential for destruction. Claire is not, however, completely correct in her assertion that “you never got back things that fell into the sea.” Sometimes the sea does return what it takes. Although Max Junior attempts to drown himself, the sea washes him back onto the shore. There appears to be hope for him to not only survive but also to find a place in the community. Nozias, Madame Gaëlle, and others “take turns breathing into [Max Junior], breathing him back to life.”116 Montgomery calls this act a “ritual gesture of love, communion, affirmation, and repossession” as Nozias and Madame Gaëlle “choose to put aside their personal grief in order to attend to the drowned man.”117 Danticat infuses this scene with hope, despite Max Junior’s guilt, when his rescuers surround him with their lamps, “forming a circle as if they were a sun.”118 This potent scene illustrates the possibility of Haitians uniting and thus brings the narrative full circle. The day began with Caleb’s disappearance at sea and ends with Max Junior’s rescue on the shore. Although these two men represent the extremes of the social hierarchy, they become strange doubles in the sea.

Danticat, Claire, 198. Ibid., 33. 112 Ibid., 34. 113 Ibid., 219–20. 114 Ibid., 220. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid., 238. 117 Montgomery, “A Lasiren Song,” 326. 118 Danticat, Claire, 236. 110 111

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Nature in Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light becomes a site not only of tragedy but also of hope, communion, and belonging. Thus, Danticat offers a multidimensional image of Antillean people and landscape to oppose the flat postcard cliché. Although the tourist gaze (and its colonial predecessor) may appreciate the beauty of the Caribbean environment, it denies the complexity of the Caribbean experience. As Walcott observes, “in the unending summer of the tropics not even poverty or poetry… seems capable of being profound because the nature around it is so exultant, so resolutely ecstatic.”119 Although Danticat does describe the beauty of her native land, she also highlights its environmental degradation and the unpredictability of nature. As her characters struggle against poverty, class difference, and the capricious nature of the sea, they appear fleshy and nuanced, hardly the echoes produced in colonial and tourist fantasies.

Bibliography Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995. Chamoiseau, Patrick. Texaco. Translated by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov. New York: Vintage International, 1997. Columbus, Christopher. Columbus’s Letter to Gabriel Sanchez. Boston: Directors of the Old South Work, 1896. Condé, Maryse. Crossing the Mangrove. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. Cope, Robyn. “‘We Are Your Neighbors’: Edwidge Danticat’s New Narrative for Haiti.” Journal of Haitian Studies 23, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 98–118. Danticat, Edwidge. After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti. New York: Vintage Departures, 2015. First published 2002 by Penguin Random House (New York). Danticat, Edwidge. Claire of the Sea Light. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Danticat, Edwidge. “Children of the Sea.” In Krik? Krak!, 3–29. New York: Soho Press, 1995. Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. New York: Soho Press, 1998. Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! New York: Soho Press, 1995. Danticat, Edwidge. “Nineteen Thirty-Seven.” In Krik? Krak!, 33–49. New York: Soho Press, 1995. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley, eds. Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., and George B. Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Dubois, Laurent. “Avenging America: The Politics of Violence in the Haitian Revolution.” In The World of the Haitian Revolution, edited by Norman Fiering and David Patrick Geggus, 111–24. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Fernández Retamar, Roberto. “Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America.” The Massachusetts Review 15, no. 1/2 (Winter–Spring 1974): 7–72. Ferré, Rosario. Sweet Diamond Dust. Translated by Rosario Ferré. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988. Forsdick, Charles. “Traveling, Writing: Danticat’s After the Dance.” In Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, edited by Martin Munro, 99–116. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Funes Monzote, Reinaldo. From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History Since 1492. Translated by Alex Martin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Geggus, David. Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue 1793–1798. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

Walcott, Twilight, 72.

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CHAPTER 20 “AHA!”: DANTICAT AND CREOLIZATION

Carine Mardorossian

Edwidge Danticat belongs to a new generation of Caribbean writers for whom the theories of hybridity and creolization articulated by their predecessors are no longer concepts to expound and defend but rather the default position from which she can articulate her own dynamic worldview. Creolization, the intermixing of races, cultures, or languages that defines Caribbean reality is very much at the forefront of postcolonial studies today. It is a figuration of crossing that is a much more uneven and interactive process than the somewhat more static notion of hybridity whose “bland interactive model” and “free-floating” nature has been criticized by Caribbean critics such as Michael Dash or Shalini Puri as a “postcolonial fixation.”1 While the concept of hybridity evokes the result of an encounter between two original organisms and is then ultimately and problematically based on a biological phenomenon, creolization involves, by contrast, an unceasing, open-ended and eclectic process of transformation. It is a process that facilitates endless transcultural and transnational synergies. Racial, national, ethnic, or cultural identities/binaries lose their conventional hold in favor of its mosaic of infinitely multiplying “relations” and the ceaseless intermingling of languages, races, cultures, religions, and customs. Still, the term “creolization” has gained such currency in postcolonial studies today that it is often indiscriminately applied to works whose authors share a common experience of transplantation in the Americas. By contrast, Danticat’s interventions make us pause and take note of a more differentiated account of the transnational ethos that defines the creolized experience. Certainly, Danticat’s creolized aesthetics is the natural extension of creolization’s unmooring of culture from fixed and predictable parameters. And as such, it dramatizes the heterogeneity of the Caribbean as well as its interdependency with all plantation cultures of the Americas. But where Danticat diverges from other formulations of a creolized poetics is by staging what Adrienne Rich aptly called a “poetics of location,” by which Rich meant “recognizing our location, having to name the ground we’re coming from, the conditions we have taken for granted.”2 Location, along with the conditions of our own making, is always at the forefront of Danticat’s fictional and nonfictional representations. Her texts work to both transform its enabling dimensions and transcend the limitations it imposes. Throughout her corpus, Danticat reformulates the notion of an unceasing creolization by recasting the workings of place, identity, and difference as dynamic and interrelated. Whereas a previous generation—the Michael Dash, “The Madman at the Crossroads:  Delirium and Dislocation in Caribbean Literature,” Profession (2002):  37. Puri argues that hybridity discourse is seriously flawed, because of its problematic “tendency to present hybridity as the synthetic transcendence of tyrannical and reductive binary oppositions” (The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 38). 2 Adrienne Rich coined the phrase “poetics of location” to advocate for a responsible kind of feminist criticism (Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 129). 1

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créolistes—understandably had to pave the way for a relational paradigm by challenging categorical affirmations of identity, Danticat goes further by reclaiming both creolization and identity through her formulation of a contextual and infinitely shifting interdependence between the two. She shows us not that identity has ceased to matter but that it only exists in and through Relation (to borrow Édouard Glissant’s deceptively simple word) rather than in and of itself. It is in Glissant’s Introduction à une Poétique du Divers that he first distinguished between the three kinds of Americas that constitute the New World: Meso-America, which includes the indigenous people of the Americas and defines Québec and Canada as well as in the United States; Euro-America, which consists of European immigrants who preserved the customs and traditions of their home country (Québec, Canada, the United States, and a cultural section of Chili and Argentina); and last but not least, Neo-America, which is the site of creolization and comprises the Caribbean, including the Brazilian Northeast, the Guianas, Curacao, the Southern United States, the Caribbean coast of Venezuela and Columbia, and an important part of Central America and Mexico. Like Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Glissant celebrates the fact that Neo-America is increasingly influencing the rest of the Americas. What is more, he adds, “the whole world is creolizing itself.”3 Nevertheless, despite such hopeful declarations, Glissant is also careful to identify the conditions in which creolization might occur in an unsuccessful or unproductive manner. Creolization, he explains, “demands that the heterogeneous elements that are in relation ‘intervalorize’ each other, i.e. there be no denigration or diminution of being, either from within or without, in this contact and crossfertilization.”4 And “if some of the cultural elements that are put in relation are seen as inferior to others, creolization does not really occur. It happens but in a bastard and unfair way. … Under these circumstances, creolization still takes place but leaves a bitter and uncontrollable residue.”5 This is why, Glissant argues, intellectual movements like Négritude and indigenism are such crucial and unavoidable stages in (and of) the creolization process. Without the revalorization of Blackness generated by these interventions, creolization as a balanced process that incorporates cultures on a more equal footing would simply not be possible. It took such ethnocentric movements for the right balance between the cultural entities that were meeting in the contact zone to be reestablished. Danticat’s portrayal of the Haitian cultural heritage in her first novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, for instance, revalorizes the Black experience as an inherent aspect of the authentic and productive kind of creolization process that Glissant highlights in his essay. Like Glissant, she highlights the predominance of the African element in the people that constitute Neo-America’s creolization: “And what is interesting in the creolization phenomenon, in the phenomenon that constitutes Neo-America, is that the people of this Neo-America are very special. In it, Africa prevails.”6 She also goes further, however, to suggest that the “special” place the descendants of the ex-slaves occupy in Neo-America is a function not only of their numbers but also of their unique and exemplary relation to creolization. Their openness to the process of unceasing transformation

Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une Poétique du Divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 15. Ibid., 18. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 14. 3 4

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Glissant calls Relation derives not from an inherent or essential condition of Blackness but from the experiences of slavery and oppression that define Black history and (collective) memory. Danticat’s focus on a regenerative Black ethos implies that the dominant Euro-American culture has yet to adequately recognize the kind of intervalorization of cultures that the African diaspora embodies in her work. Her reconceptualization of creolization also echoes, in this respect, Kamau Brathwaite’s valorization of the African legacy in his discussions of Caribbean cultural identity.7 This stands in stark contrast to other theoreticians and philosophers of creolization, for whom its transcultural explosion defines the Caribbean in a way that more directly or summarily cancels out ethnic, racial, or national divisions. Like the créoliste group before him, for instance, Benítez-Rojo urged us to “quit using the traditional raciological distinctions, and to start designating the people of our countries, regardless of their complexion, by the only suitable word: Creole.”8 According to this logic, creole writers dramatize a common aesthetics of relationality irrespective of their socioethnic differences. Racial and national identities have to be forsaken, all the more so since “no person with a truly Caribbean identity—carries his or her own true name, just as his or her skin pertains to no fixed race.”9 It would be difficult for “Blackness” to be mentioned in any other way than as a negative legacy of colonization in such a paradigm. By contrast, Danticat’s work highlights a hybridizing modality in which Black women epitomize creolization even as assumptions surrounding their identity as “Black,” “women,” or “Caribbean” are challenged. In this sense, her creolized aesthetics is closer to Glissant’s poetics of Relation. Her portrayal of the Haitian cultural heritage, for instance, revalorizes the Black experience as an inherent aspect of the productive kind of creolization process that Glissant also highlights in his work. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, for instance, Danticat’s model of cultural integration and intermixing maintains a strong sense of the cultural differences that define the fluid cultural heritage of the Black Atlantic. Joseph’s protestation that he is “not American” but “AfricanAmerican” privileges his link to the African diaspora because unlike the term “American,” he believes it to be inclusive of both continuity and difference. To the Haitian American Sophie’s question “What is the difference?” he retorts: “The African. It means that you and I, we are already part of each other.”10 Joseph’s rejection of an umbrella American identity resonates with Danticat’s own investment in the Afro-creole dimensions of her identity. She encourages us to In his study of colonial Jamaica, Brathwaite defines creolization as “a way of seeing Jamaican society” and the Caribbean islands generally, “not in terms of black and white, master and slave, in separate nuclear units, but as contributory parts of a whole” (Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Jamaica (Jamaica: Savacou, 1974), 307). Yet even as he defends the idea of a Caribbean culture for which creolization in its “infinite possibilities” (310) is “the tentative cultural norm of society” (6), he also emphasizes that “for the Caribbean islands to attain (regain) cultural wholeness,” the culture of the ex-African majority has to be accepted “as the paradigm and norm for the entire society” (30). Evoking Glissant and the créolistes’ recognition that Black consciousness movements like Négritude were the condition of possibility of creolization and creoleness, Brathwaite stresses the need to privilege the African over the European connection as a necessary step toward the completion of the creolizing process. See Chris Bongie’s Islands and Exiles (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) for a discussion of the unexpected similarities between Brathwaite’s and Glissant’s models of creolization (53–76). 8 Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité/In Praise of Creoleness. Paris: Gallimard, [1989] 1993, 90. 9 Antonio Benítez-Rojo, “Three Words towards Creolization,” in Caribbean Creolization:  Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity, ed,. Kathleen M. Balutansky and Marie-Agnès Sourieau (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998), 58. 10 Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 72. 7

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see African American culture within the context of a worldwide Black ethos that is itself the sign of a larger intermixed and hybridized (North) America. She constructs a diasporic Black identity based on a common link to Africa and the history of slavery, and offers this inclusive notion of Blackness as an empowering alternative to white America’s racist ways. This divided yet unifying consciousness in the novel ultimately also reflects the author’s own trajectory as Haitian-American, a trajectory that, as she explains in Create Dangerously, marks her both as just Haitian in the United States of America and not quite Haitian enough when she is back in Haiti. Whereas some hyphenated American writers prefer being identified as American rather than as Caribbean-American, Asian-American, and so forth, Danticat has remained invested in the hyphen and its evocation of cultural difference. In an essay entitled “AHA!,” the HaitianAmerican author even goes so far as to add another hyphen to her already hyphenated identity by “temporarily” endorsing the label of “AHA, African-Haitian-American.” She thus not only reclaims the spaces opened up by the hyphen but also rejects the kind of binary thinking that having one hyphen with one identity on either side of it may generate. Instead, she disrupts any potentially homogenizing narrative of national or transnational identity by “relishing the role of permanent outsider” with which her fragmented identity endows her.11 This doublehyphenated term, she explains, has “the following elements:  African to acknowledge our ancestral roots deep in the African continent; Haitian, because of course most of us were either born in Haiti or were first generation born of Haitian parents; and American because we were from the Americas, living in the other ‘America,’ the United States of America.”12 Such an endorsement of a doubly hyphenated identity thus both reflects and diverges from other Caribbean writers’ emphasis on the fragmented nature of their cultural heritage. What is more, Danticat makes no excuses for reclaiming her country as the cultural and national space through which she reenvisions a regenerative, relational, but also anchored, model of identity. Throughout her writings, Haiti remains her chosen foundation in this “equally a-geographical and poly-geographical” world.13 On the one hand, she claims that “These days, I feel less like an immigrant and more like a nomad” and that there is “no longer a singular harbor” to which people’s bodies and shadows can be anchored exclusively in our interdependent world, while on the other, she paradoxically also affirms that “The more cultures I experience, the more Haitian I feel.”14 Like Glissant, whose theoretical and philosophical formulations transcended nationalism by ironically using the Martinican national, social, and geographical landscape as a springboard, she develops “a poetics of location” in which her privileging of a particular cultural space not only does not hinder Relation but also provides the very condition for it. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, her protagonist Sophie Caco remarkably only begins to think and speak of her native country as “home” as an adult, when she goes back to the Caribbean after many years away. A surprised Joseph tells Sophie that “You have never called [Haiti] that since we’ve been together. Home has always been your mother’s house, that you could never go back to.”15 In other words, Danticat’s novel seems to reify the model of home as a site of Edwidge Danticat, “AHA!,” in Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women, ed. Meri Nana-Ama Danquah (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 44. 12 Ibid., 39–40. 13 Ibid., 44. 14 Ibid. 15 Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 195. 11

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alienation yet  also ultimately belonging and rootedness. Her status as part of a diaspora is ironically the condition for its possibility. Indeed, the sense of dislocation and fragmentation resulting from migrancy is what propels her to rediscover and embrace both the alternative systems of knowledge that ground Haitian cultural identity and the English language as her new “home,” neither of which are ever unchanging or fixed. She rewrites her narratives of legacy by consistently extending existing transnational and cross-cultural paradigms that may embrace creolization as a form of melting pot (where differences literally get melted) or of hybridity (where differences get reified). As a member of the new Caribbean diaspora, Danticat maps a new literary and cultural space that she cannot account for outside the forms of identity and identification within which she grew up. These she reveals as neither stable or fixed nor as dispensable. Her refashioning of communal and individual identities exemplifies a heterogeneous creolized aesthetics that shows that, in stories of cultural encounter, difference neither results in assimilation nor in unchanged vestiges of culture and tradition. Danticat’s work is replete with moments when she champions cultural inheritance, national, cultural, and Black identity without opposing these to a creolized consciousness. In Nadège Clitandre’s words, “unlike theoretical articulations of diaspora consciousness and formations that are foregrounded to problematize the notion of the nation-state and celebrate a postnational imaginary, Danticat’s diasporic consciousness does not privilege diaspora at the expense of the nation and its localized narratives. It does not adhere to a nation/diaspora binary.”16 The relation between nation and diaspora in her writings is not just deconstructed but also reconstituted, in a way that is most visibly embodied in culture and storytelling. In her collection of essays Create Dangerously, for instance, Danticat takes on the conflict that supposedly separates Haitians from lòt bò dlo (“the other side of the water,” which means “abroad” in Haitian Creole) from Haitians at home. She describes overhearing Haitians in Haiti calling her “parasite” for exploiting “your culture for money and what passes for fame” and for misrepresenting Haitian cultural experiences.17 Danticat both recognizes the guilt she feels at hearing these statements and goes on to successfully bridge the gap they assume between Haitian nationals and their diasporic counterparts. She does so by offering an alternative myth of origins for Haiti, one that rewrites the guilt-inducing narrative by revisiting the story of the executions of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, two young men who had, in the 1950s, left their hometown on Haiti’s southern peninsula to study and work in the United States. Both had come back to their home country as part of Jeune Haiti, a CIA-supported group of thirteen men whose mission was to overthrow the dictator Papa Doc Duvalier. Numa was in his early twenties and Drouin in his early thirties when they were apprehended by the regime and put before the firing squad at the national cemetery in Port-au-Prince. This was in 1964, five years before the author was born. These martyrs were, then, both heroes in the national imaginary and members of the very diaspora whose allegiance to the nation Haitians at home sometimes question. As such, they represent both a recognition of the disconnection that results from distance and of the enduring connection and commitment that is produced by it. There is no

Nadège T.  Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat:  The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 2018), 3. 17 Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously:  The Immigrant Artist at Work (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2010), 33. 16

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opposition in Danticat’s recasting of the diaspora/home relationship, only Relation. Home is no less indispensable and central for being portable, metaphorical, and transient. The author’s diasporic consciousness accomplishes the seemingly impossible. In her corpus, she takes the physical transplantation and transculturation that is the basis for an alternative epistemology in most Caribbean poetics, and while using it “to liberate history’s destructive aspect into an imaginative sense of future,”18 she downplays its fragmenting implications in favor of an anchoring in a regional, ethnic, and trans/national identity. In other words, in her reframing, nation and diaspora, self and other, eschew all oppositional framework, and rigid ideals about the purity (or lack thereof) of inherited cultures give way to a focus on the interrelationality that gets obscured when identity and difference are essentialized through discourse. And creolization—which is indeed the foundation of Caribbean identity—ironically provides the regenerative lens through which Black identity itself comes to matter, albeit differently. It matters now in a fluctuating, infinitely adaptable, and non-exclusionary way, but it matters all the same as Danticat generates her “poetics of location,” one that complicates the framing of creolization as purely anti-identitarian. There is no anti in Danticat’s worldview, only with. By reconceptualizing the notion of identity itself as both unstable, contingent yet indispensable, she reclaims it as a dimension whose regenerative and communitarian potential can never be coopted by false claims of fixity made in the name of nation or race. This syncretic approach also defines her relation to Black consciousness movements whose premises and practices she both embraces and hybridizes. These are movements whose genesis, in the Haitian context, can be traced back to movements like Négritude and Haitian “Indigenism,” the latter having emerged in reaction to the American occupation of 1915. That is when, in a spirit of resistance, Haitian intellectuals turned to folk culture and native cultural traditions to launch a literary renewal. They championed this ancestral heritage as Haiti’s rediscovered national culture by foregrounding their African origins as the bedrock of Haitian identity. Again and again, Danticat’s representation of Haitianness reconfigures such Black nationalist movements through storytelling by both embracing their indigenous practices and transforming them. For instance, she makes visible women’s contributions to the heritage and traditions of the nation’s culture in a way that remains anchored in the ethnic and national history she both evokes and syncretizes. She also revises the concept of a Haitian tradition to signify a hybrid and changing space that is open to incorporating aspects of other cultures, irrespectively of the latter’s unwillingness to do the same. For instance, the color red, which is overwhelmingly associated with the oppressiveness of North American racism in Breath, Eyes, Memory, is also the color that, when transposed to the island, turns from a symbol of isolation and alienation into one of survival and creolization. Haiti is the space where in assuming a darker reddish coloration, the European yellow daffodil signifies the flower’s successful adaptation to its tropical surroundings. It is also the place where Sophie dresses her mother’s corpse in red, even though, in the traditional context of the island, it was considered “too loud a color for burial”; and while Sophie’s transgressive act initially makes Grandma almost “fall

David Mikics, “Derek Walcott and Alejo Carpentier:  Nature, History, and the Caribbean Writer,” in Magical Realism:  Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1995), 382. 18

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down, in shock,” it is soon recuperated by the matriarch herself as a sign of Haitian female rebelliousness that she proceeds to transmit to the younger generation through her storytelling:  There is a place where women are buried in clothes in the color of flames, where we drop coffee on the ground for those who went ahead, where the daughter is never fully a woman until her mother has passed on before her. There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear your mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: ‘Ou libéré?’ Are you free, my daughter?19 The novel represents the traditional culture of the past as a stabilizing influence but also as open to reinterpretation. It is not an inert and immutable condition waiting to be unearthed but a dynamic and mutually empowering one. It is in this sense true to Frantz Fanon’s conception of national culture according to which oral traditions should be dynamic in order to ground a successful national consciousness:  On another level, the oral tradition—stories, epics, and songs of the people—which formerly were filed away as set pieces are now beginning to change. The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them alive and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly fundamental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to modernise the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke.20 In her essay “Resistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance or Two Cheers for Nativism,” Benita Parry identifies writers such as Wilson Harris or Édouard Glissant who foreground cultural resistance in oral traditions and popular memory without “enacting a regressive search for an aboriginal and intact condition/tradition from which a proper sense of historicity is occluded.”21 For Danticat, the search for tradition, identity, and culture neither needs to be necessarily regressive nor bereft of a “proper sense of historicity.” Instead, the storytelling practices that best represent Haitian national and cultural traditions embody a transitional space between change and stability. Danticat thus revises decolonizing nationalism’s typical alignment with a pure and stable precolonial past even as she celebrates Haiti’s national and cultural traditions. Grandma Ifé herself, the most obvious repository of the traditional past in Breath, Eyes, Memory, is strikingly aligned with the nation’s “betweenness” vis-à-vis modernity and tradition. Cultural heritage thus becomes a site of interaction between cultures that cannot be accounted for in simple terms, while representing both continuity and the unceasing nature of creolization. In light of Danticat’s creolized aesthetics, it is not surprising to find out that it affects her appropriation of literary and generic categories as much as the cultural ones with which the process of creolization has historically been associated. More recently, she has herself explicitly identified her more recent novel Claire of the Sea Light as a “hybrid novel,”

Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, 227, 231, 234. Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963), 240. 21 Benita Parry, “Resistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance or Two Cheers for Nativism,” in Colonial Discourse/ Postcolonial Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 173. 19 20

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something in between a novel and a story collection.22 But the book is hybrid in more ways than one: it also reframes, hybridizes, and reappropriates the key characteristics of the genre of the marvelous real. For Alejo Carpentier, the pioneering theorist of magical realism, it is “improbable juxtapositions and marvelous mixtures” that define his island’s adherence to the “marvelous real,” one that values Cuba’s historical ties to Latin America over its geographical identity and proximity to the rest of the Caribbean.23 By contrast, Danticat’s brand of revived magical realism in Claire of the Sea Light does not represent “the unreal … as part of reality” but shows reality to be at the mercy of the unreal ways in which humanity interfaces with the environment, people, and animals.24 The novel, which tells the story of Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin, a girl who lives in a close-knit community in the small seaside town of Ville Rose in Haiti, depicts, for instance, the town’s frogs dying in droves, in scenes that echo magical realist writer Gabriel García Márquez’s swarm of yellow butterflies in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Danticat’s novel, however, the imbalance in nature epitomized in the mass dying of animals no longer feels apocalyptic, impossible, or indeed, even extraordinary, since we tragically live in times when scientists and news outlets routinely record mass animal die-offs. In fact, even as the novel adopts the dispassionate tone of typical magical realist fiction in relation to remarkable events, Claire of the Sea Light does not attempt to track “extraordinary figures” or even “extraordinary moments.” The “magic” is more of a hint that lingers through evocation than any (pseudo-) magical occurrence; the implication is that it is an offshoot of the extraordinariness of humanity’s bottomless overexploitation of the resources of the land and the sea, which, at least in Haiti, is inseparable from colonial and imperial history;25 it is less revelatory and more woven in the fabric of social relations and everyday life. No matter how extraordinary the events appear, then, the colonial and political question is always at the forefront of how Haiti’s people, at home and in the diaspora, interact and live. That a loving and devoted father could think of giving away his beloved daughter takes an overfished ocean, the impossibility of social betterment in a country where poverty rules, a land in which foreign powers have destroyed the local economies and overexploited the natural resources

See the Guernica interview. Alejo Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 75–88. 24 Luis Leal, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 119. 25 See Marie Vieux Chauvet’s novels Fond-des-Nègres (1960), which Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert has called “the most sustained exploration of deforestation and its impact on the rural population to be found in Haitian fiction,” and Amour, Colère, et Folie, the major literary work of the Duvalier era. In Amour, a novel set during the US occupation, the fate of the protagonist who is maybe not incidentally also named Claire similarly serves as an allegory for Haiti’s colonialist story, one in which the denuded country can only imagine a better life for its children through exile (epitomized by “Nozias giving away his daughter” and the diaspora). Part of that history in Amour includes the acute deforestation process and lumber exploitation for the benefit of foreign American companies with all their catastrophic consequences: the washing away of topsoil and with it of all the filial and personal attachments to the land that define Haitian culture. In Claire of the Sea Light, the same reality is evoked when Gaëlle goes for a walk and runs into a 22 23

mound of stones [that] had been brought down by a recent mudslide, turning the brook into a deep brown. Some of the almond trees had prematurely shed their fruits and in many places her path was blocked by large branches. Gaëlle stood on the edge of the brook and tried to imagine it filled, as it had been in better days, with crystalline water, rippling over the rocks. (58)

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to the point of complete destruction (deforestation, erosion, and devastating earthquakes), as well as the legacies of a Duvalier regime whose disempowering effects continue to be acutely felt.26 In her writings, Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American writer who was raised speaking French but found a home in the English language after moving to the United States, helps bridge the different traditions, cultures, and nations through which she has come to develop her unique form of creolized aesthetics. She embraces her identities’ shifting and contingent meanings in the context of what constitutes an alternative “poetics of location,” one through which Black women teach us and themselves how to relate to one another differently, compassionately, equitably, and transgenerationally. Her work illustrates again and again that life is not about either/or but about yes, and then. The same refusal to reduce interconnected mesh of our lives to the usual binaries through which the world keeps making sense of itself characterizes her latest book The Art of Death. Here, it is the ultimate opposition between life and death that Danticat’s stories of losing family and friends undoes. In passages that movingly relate the loss of her parents, for instance, Danticat shows how the “writing about death,” which she had initially set out to do for this book, quickly turned into a practice of “writing life.” Far from marking the end of life, then, death is revealed as “one of life’s most spectacular events.”27 Whereas Western conceptions of death and dying stage these experiences as sites of departure, separation, categorical difference, and loss, she unravels a world where they are the condition of return and loving reunion. She reminds us that for enslaved people, “their deaths were more than physical cessations. They were transitions, spiritual journeys to places from their past, homes that had become idealized—in their minds … Showing that they could decide whether to live or die was one way of affirming their humanity.”28 Danticat represents dying not as decline but as an experience that puts the person back in touch with a past of familiar comfort, togetherness, and peace. It is what ironically reconnects: she tells us of her dying dad’s comforting visions of her long-lost grandmother, his mother, and of the conversations her own mother had in turn with him, her predeceased husband, on her deathbed, claiming she could “see” him.29 The Art of Death demonstrates that it is not absence and finality but the fullness of language and of life’s lived experiences that define humanity’s experience at the end of our life’s journey. What emerges from this state of undoing is as much about living as it is about death, the ultimate creolized experience, one that reframes dying as living and that unites all of humanity.

In the Guernica interview, Danticat explains that the idea came to her when

26

I saw a documentary about orphans in Haiti. Or rather, not quite about orphans. It was about kids who have parents, but their parents bring them to an orphanage so they can have a better life. One of the aid workers in the documentary said that the parents do this because these people are not that attached to their kids. Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017), 50. Ibid., 79. 29 Ibid., 81. 27 28

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Bibliography Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. “Three Words towards Creolization.” In Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity, edited by Kathleen M. Balutansky and Marie-Agnès Sourieau. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant. Éloge de la Créolité/In Praise of Creoleness. Paris: Gallimard, [1989] 1993. Bongie, Chris. Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008. Brathwaite, Kamau. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Jamaica. Jamaica: Savacou, 1974. Carpentier, Alejo. “On the Marvelous Real in America.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris, 75–88. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Clitandre, Nadège T. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Danticat, Edwidge. “AHA!” In Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women, edited by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, 39–44. New York: Hyperion, 2000. Danticat, Edwidge. The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Danticat, Edwidge. Claire of the Sea Light. New York: Vintage, 2013. Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Danticat, Edwidge. “Edwidge Danticat Reflects on ‘Going Back’ to Haiti through her Writing.” Interview by Jeffrey Brown. NPR, New York: September 17, 2013. Online: June 11, 2019. Dash, Michael. “The Madman at the Crossroads: Delirium and Dislocation in Caribbean Literature.” Profession (2002): 37–43. Fanon, Frantz. “On National Culture.” In The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington, 206–49. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963. Glissant, Édouard. Introduction à une Poétique du Divers. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Leal, Luis. “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris, 119–25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Mikics, David. “Derek Walcott and Alejo Carpentier: Nature, History, and the Caribbean Writer.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris, 371–407. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “‘All Misfortune Comes from the Cut Trees’: Marie Chauvet’s Environmental Imagination.” Yale French Studies 128 (January 2015): 74–91. Parry, Benita. “Resistance Theory/Theorising Resistance or Two Cheers for Nativism.” In Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen, 172–97. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Puri, Shalini. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Rich, Adrienne. Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986.

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CHAPTER 21 MEMORY AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE SHORT STORY SEQUENCE IN KRIK? KRAK!

W. Todd Martin

Focusing on the complexity of describing the character of the diverse Caribbean peoples, Stuart Hall identifies two different ways of understanding their similarities and differences in his “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” The first and perhaps most common view contends that despite disparities Caribes have a “shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self,’ hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves,’ which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common.”1 The basic premise of this perspective is that an African essence permeates each individual of African descent, an essence that can be uncovered through reconstructing the past. The second (and more satisfying view for Hall) recognizes that “cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power.”2 In this view, cultural identity is not an essence to be reclaimed by reconstructing a foregone past, but something that has evolved in response to various historical events—such as the slave trade and colonization—that, when taken together, provide a means for understanding what one has “become.” Thus, while Caribbean peoples share experiences and in many cases a common place of origin (Africa), disparities of customs and traditions exist: each island’s identity—while the effect of similar means of oppression—has been shaped by equally unique experiences, whether by their colonizer (Dutch, English, French, Spanish) or by their responses to these colonizers. Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat tends to favor Hall’s first notion of cultural identity. In an interview, for example, she comments on Haitian artists, “It’s as if these artists are painting their past lives in Ginen, the ancestral paradise. They’re painting landscapes that our ancestors must have known—on some level these artists are subconsciously or consciously familiar with them.” She concludes, “All this is to say that I believe a collective consciousness does exist in a way that sometimes only art can bring out.”3 Still, Danticat would unlikely dispute the divergences between Haitian ethnicity and that of other Caribes. In her own writing, she is not so much interested in uncovering what Hall calls the “Presence Africaine” or “Ginen” as do these other artists to whom she refers above; instead, she grounds her work in the Haitian experience, a common heritage that unites all Haitians, becoming a source of mythic consciousness that brings together a scattered people. Conceding that she writes first Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 393. 2 Ibid., 294. 3 Sandy Alexandre and Ravi Y. Howard, “My Turn in the Fire: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat,” Transition: An International Review 12 (2002): 119. 1

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and foremost for herself, Danticat targets the diaspora because they are separated from their literal place of origin, often experiencing liminality, a term used in postcolonial discourse to codify persons who live between cultures, who belong fully to neither. Her audience, she explains, consists of “people like my brothers, Haitian Americans who don’t read either Creole or French. I write for my niece and nephew, who were born in the United States three years ago. When they are much older, they will certainly be looking for their ‘roots,’ and I want to plant some seeds for them.”4 Her stories, then, retain a potential mythic value in that they represent the cultural inheritance of the Haitian people, particularly the diaspora who need a sense of their identity. She emphasizes the unifying nature of a shared past—or, more particularly, a shared memory. The prominence of memory in Danticat’s oeuvre is evident in the title of her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, which portrays a young Haitian girl’s struggle to reconstruct her identity in her new home in New York City, a feat that ultimately depends on her reconnection with her matrilineal line and, by extension, to Haiti itself. While the “breath” of the title suggests a life force and the “eyes” the means of experiencing the world (the novel is very visual), “memory”—the ability to place oneself in a sequence of events and among a people group— provides purpose and meaning to both life and experience. When questioned about the title, Danticat stated, “I think memory is the great bridge between the present and the past, between here and there, even between life and death. It’s what helps us rebuild and start over in another country, to reconstruct our lives.”5 Breath, Eyes, Memory portrays the reconstruction of identity through reestablished familial and cultural connections which violence had disrupted and distance had severed. One senses, however, that the form of the novel limits Danticat in developing these connections. Due to the temporal constraints of straight narrative, she is restricted to three generations of women on whom she depends to demonstrate both the cultural disconnect and the personal healing. Likewise, in order to retain the literal divide that separates the diaspora from those who have remained in Haiti while simultaneously having the two interact, Danticat relies on conventional means of transportation for her characters between the United States and Haiti due to the constraints of the conventional form of the novel. Of course, these limitations are not debilitating, but Danticat remedies these constraints in her short story sequence, Krik? Krak!6 The genre of the short story sequence provides Danticat with a fluidity of time and place more in keeping with characteristics of memory. The linear, unified narrative structure of the traditional novel also implies a unity that belies Danticat’s thematic emphasis on broken bonds that, though she attempts to bridge the gaps, are at the heart of her fiction. Social fragmentation permeates Haitian culture; from its inception as the first Black Republic in 1804 and through the Duvalier regimes from 1957

Ibid., 127. Ibid., 125. 6 It should be noted that modern and postmodern novelists have found the technical means to deal with such issues of time and place. Interestingly, though, J. Gerald Kennedy points out that “in its more experimental aspects … the novel has … been veering toward the short story sequence as a decentered mode of narrative representation” (x). Thus, Kennedy suggests that these new formal devices in the novel represent a step in the process toward the story sequence. In this light, Danticat has skipped the intermediary stage. See J. Gerald Kennedy, “Introduction,” in Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), vii–xv. 4 5

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to 1986, the country has been fraught with oppressive dictatorships and military rule. Even now, the country enjoys only marginal political stability, and many of the people still suffer the oppression of extreme poverty. The short story sequence enables Danticat to emphasize such fragmentation while offering a degree of unity, a unique juxtaposition that Margot Kelley argues draws many women—particularly women of “double marginality” or of “visible minorities”—to the genre.7 According to Kelley, the genre provides an alternative to the male-/ Western-dominated novel while still allowing the author a large scale with which to work beyond the more episodic short story.8 She suggests, Both the dynamic of the overall structure and the uses to which the individual gaps between stories are put … offer writers alternatives that help them to circumvent the ideological assumptions about a coherent subject that are implicit to both the conventional short story and the novel, while not miring them in the uncertainties of postmodern forms [i.e., indeterminacy and isolation].9 The short story sequence, then, is appropriate for authors in “liminal cultural positions,”10 for it enables an author to reflect the displacement of her characters while allowing her the continuity of interconnected and interdependent characters who are unified both relationally and culturally. Robert Luscher describes this phenomenon geometrically: The artist who creates a short story sequence … draws a wide circle which contains a number of smaller ones … He takes advantage of the fact that “really, universally, relations stop nowhere,” in order to fashion a work that compels us to trace, by a geometry of our own, that wider circle which unites distinct but related centers of concentration.11 In other words, the author produces apparently disparate stories that are in fact unified by a consistent pattern, a form in keeping with Danticat’s thematic intentions. Each of the stories in Krik? Krak! acts as a memory—an archetype of the Haitian experience that, as Lisa M. Ortiz suggests, “reifies [Danticat’s] cultural history.”12 Through these separate snapshots, Danticat shows the struggles and perseverance of individual characters, but characters who also depend on the collective strength of their forebears, typically the maternal line. Interweaving elements of Haitian history, religion, and mythology, Danticat transforms what appears to be an exploration of the plight of isolated, individual Haitians into a collection

Some critics refer to this genre—a collection of stories unified by character, place, theme, or motif—as a “novelin-stories” while others prefer “composite novel,” “short story cycle,” or “short story sequence.” Each term captures/ emphasizes different characteristics of the genre, and each critic tries to refine the genre. Since my purpose is not to define the genre, I will simply use “short story sequence,” though any given critic to whom I refer may take exception. 8 Margot Kelley, “Gender and Genre: The Case of the Novel-in-Stories,” in American Women Short Story Writers, ed. Julie Brown (New York: Garland, 1995), 301. 9 Ibid., 304–5. 10 Ibid., 307. 11 Robert M. Luscher, “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book,” in Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 154. 12 Lisa M. Ortiz, “Re-membering the Past: Weaving Tales of Loss and Cultural Inheritance in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!,” Journal of Haitian Studies 7, no. 2 (2001): 65. 7

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of experiences and cultural touchstones that establish the Haitian consciousness. Individual stories gain mythic qualities in that they represent the struggles of the Haitian people in general so that the cumulation of the stories has the effect of creating a type of mythic consciousness— not for any particular region, as do many other short story sequences, but for an entire people, regardless of temporal or geographical location. Rocio G. Davis identifies “the notion of an identity within the community” as one of the key themes in the ethnic short story cycle. Speaking of Krik? Krak!, Davis states, In Danticat’s case, the textual tension arises from the presentation of women who struggle to establish and preserve the bonds of the Haitian community in the United States through powerful links with the mother country. Her stories, centering on the politics and the people of Haiti and Haitian immigrants to the United States, illustrate the numerous and varied connective strands that serve to draw the individuals of the short story cycle into a single community. The passage from appreciation of individual stories to the whole presented in the cycle marks the shift from the individual to community, setting the individual against the social group to which he or she belongs.13 Danticat’s “Epilogue” incorporates the image of braiding hair to reinforce the interconnectedness and unity of Haitians, particularly of the women:  like the braids, they are separate but intertwined strands. The “Epilogue” implies that the stories of the collection are the testaments of the individual women who have come before, but they also represent the speaker’s (and Danticat’s, really) own testament, which is the culmination of these predecessors. Each of the speaker’s predecessors lives in her and creates her identity. As the artist, she gives them a voice, empowering those who may have had no actual power.14 In so doing, she also discovers from whence she has come. The expression from which Danticat derives her title, Krik? Krak!, evokes the oral tradition of storytelling; it is a call and response demonstrating the readiness of the audience to listen. More importantly, Danticat comments on the title in an interview with Eleanor Wachtel stating that the tradition of storytelling is “one of the rare moments where people of extreme generations—you have the eldest people in the family and the youngest people in the family—are in an exchange that is really even, and they can exchange stories and they can laugh together.”15 This clearly suggests the emphasis on the theme of community. The epigraph of the novel clarifies the title of the collection and reinforces the intergenerational influence: “ ‘We tell the stories so that the young ones will know what came before them. They say Krik? And we say Krak! Our stories are kept in our hearts.”16 Thus, in her role as storyteller, Danticat takes on the burden of helping Haitians to remember, to rediscover their ties to Haiti. In an attempt to categorize the types of short story cycles, Forrest Ingram distinguishes between the degrees in which the sequences are unified. He divides them into the “composed cycle,” which is written as a whole from its inception; the “completed cycle,” which may be made up of originally independent stories that are then later woven together; and the Rocio G. Davis, “Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle:  Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!,” MELUS 26, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 73. 14 Amanda Putnam, “Braiding Memories: Resistant Storytelling within Mother-Daughter Communities in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!,” Journal of Haitian Studies 9, no. 1 (2003): 57. 15 Eleanor Wachtel, “A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat,” Brick (Fall 2000): 116. 16 Edwidge Danticat, Krik?Krak! (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), n.p. 13

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“arranged cycle,” which is the loosest and which includes stories that are later collected because of a common theme or motif.17 Danticat’s Krik? Krak! would fall most closely in line with the category of the “completed cycle.” While most of the stories in the collection were published individually, she explains in an interview, My idea was to have a progression. The first story would be “1937” and the last, historically, “Caroline’s Wedding.” We also go from Haiti to the New York stories. My editor and I chose them with that idea in mind. Just naturally from writing the stories over several years, some of the characters recurred, so that came together too. But we ended up with a different order because my editor thought that “Children of the Sea” is a story that’s easy to get into; also, it has “krik? krak!” in it, which introduces the idea of why to write the stories. The book was put together with the idea of the stories flowing together and complementing one another.18 The movement of the sequence, then, is more or less chronological and spatial, moving forward in time and from Haiti toward the United States with some transitional stories in which outsiders are introduced into the Haitian context, demonstrating a conscious progression in the stories. Rather than limiting them temporally or spatially, though, the succession of the stories actually reinforces the fact that these elements do not bind them. The progression, which culminates in the diaspora, builds on Ingram’s notion of “recurrent development,” for the final stories depend upon the earlier ones to gain their full significance. As the stories of the diaspora emphasize the need of remembering, the earlier stories that take place in Haiti provide the reader with a variety of “memories” on which to build. Gracina, the narrator of “Caroline’s Wedding,” the final story in the sequence, recalls what her father once told her: “You have lived this long in this strange world, so far from home, because you remember.”19 In particular, the unifying motif of many of the stories of Krik? Krak! is, as in Breath, Eyes, Memory, the mother-daughter relationship on which most critics focus. And, as suggested in the “Epilogue,” one’s identity is the culmination of previous generations, so the daughter typically gains her cultural inheritance through her mother. In “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” for example, some women make an annual pilgrimage to the Massacre River where thousands of Haitians were killed by Dominican soldiers at the beck of Generalissimo Trujillo.20 The Forrest L. Ingram, Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century:  Studies in a Literary Genre (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 18. Kennedy takes Ingram to task for the last of these categories precisely because it cannot ultimately be distinguished from a mere collection. Kennedy argues, “In a sense, every single-author volume of stories manifests certain narrative homologies, commonalities of style or sensibility that (in the absence of scholarly evidence) might be construed as a predetermined design” (ix). Because of the difficulty involved in making such a distinction, Kennedy states, “Given the ultimate inscrutability—if not irrelevance—of authorial intention, we face the impossibility of distinguishing in certain cases between ordered sequences and mere selections of stories editorially arranged. One must concede at least that textual unity, like beauty, lies mainly in the eye of the beholding reader” (ix). Thus, Kennedy defines the sequence more broadly as “all collections of three or more stories written and arranged by a single author” (ix). In terms of defining genre and in deference to Kennedy’s reservations about the “arranged” cycle, I prefer Ingram’s stricter categories of “composed” and “completed” cycles. 18 Renee H. Shea, “Edwidge Danticat,” Belles Lettres 10 (Summer 1995): 14–15. 19 Danticat, Krik? Krak!, 177. 20 This historical event becomes the backdrop of Danticat’s third book, The Farming of Bones, in which she follows the life of Amabelle, a young Haitian living in the Dominican Republic and working for a wealthy Dominican family. It traces her life from working as a domestic to fleeing for her life and barely escaping death by swimming across the Massacre River to the Haitian side. Here, she is left to try to reconstruct her life without her former lover and with 17

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women who travel to the river go to where they lost their mothers in the massacre, iterating the continued connection with their own mothers and their own shared experience of loss; the grief is both individual and communal. The narrator, Josephine, notes that as they dip their hands into the waters of the river in commemoration, the reflected faces of all of the women are “indistinguishable” one from the other.21 Though individual, the women share a common bond. Then, Josephine explains, “We were all daughters of that river, which had taken our mothers from us. Our mothers were the ashes and we were the light. Our mothers were the embers and we were the sparks. Our mothers were the flames and we were the blaze.”22 In this image, Danticat summarizes her view of the past and the relation between the generations, and the “Epilogue’s” metaphoric braids of hair reinforces this motif. The tie to the matrilineal line is one that is vital; subsequent generations must draw on the strength and the history of those who have come before and in turn must carry the torch of those who are deceased. In several of Danticat’s works, though, the generational bond—and thereby the cultural bond—has been severed. “The Missing Peace,” for example, one of Krik? Krak!’s transitional stories from Haiti to the American diaspora, explores the implication of a failure to find such generational ties. In this story, two young women struggle amid political violence to learn the key not so much for survival as for understanding themselves, which, as in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” includes coming to grips with the loss of their mothers; Lamort’s mother died giving birth to her, and Emilie’s mother was killed in a recent violent regime change. Playing the role of the outsider whose connection to her Haitian heritage is tenuous, Emilie arrives from America and wields her US passport and citizenship as if it were a bulletproof vest; she has come to find her mother’s body and exact some kind of revenge. However, Emilie also hopes to piece together her sense of self, represented in the pieces of material she plans to stitch together to make a quilt. So, while the title of the story—“The Missing Peace”—certainly implies the lack of peace in the region and the political upheaval accompanying a regime change, it also appears to be a play on words, referring to the pieces of the quilt on which Emilie works. She chooses purple for the quilt’s backing, and when she inquires about her mother, she refers to her as a woman wearing a purple dress; later she reveals that purple was her mother’s favorite color. When asked what the pieces of cloth are for, she explains: “All her life, my mother’s [sic] wanted to sew some old things together onto that piece of purple cloth.”23 She goes on to identify one scrap as a piece of her mother’s wedding dress and another as a piece of an old baby bib, probably her own.24 The quilt, then, becomes symbolic of Emilie’s attempt to piece together her past, particularly her relationship with her mother, which must be rediscovered for Emilie to be made whole; her mother represents the “missing piece” needed to hold the individual pieces of her past together. By the end of the story, though, Emilie sits with the loosely sewn pieces of cloth coming apart. Emilie has not fully been able to piece them together; the loss of her mother proves too great, and she does not have any other connection back to her heritage and to Haiti. Earlier in

a sense of displacement as she tries to understand the horrors that she witnessed and suffered at the hands of the Dominicans. 21 Danticat, Krik? Krak!, 40. 22 Ibid., 41. 23 Ibid., 114. 24 Ibid.

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the story she made the comment that when a girl loses her mother she becomes a woman;25 Emilie is being forced to become a woman, but no one helps her to identify either what that role entails or its implications for who she is, making wholeness evasive. Lamort’s grandmother could have helped her sew the quilt, but Emilie refuses to accept her offer, claiming she could do it herself. Had Emilie accepted the grandmother as a surrogate, as Josephine does of Jacqueline in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” she would have more fully aligned herself with her heritage; she could have pieced the quilt together more effectively. Instead, in trying to do so on her own, she does not discover the same enlightenment that Josephine does. Because she does things on her own rather than looking to previous generations, something is missing that does not allow her to form a full sense of self. Emilie iterates her loss when she notes that she has lost her mother and therefore her dreams.26 Lamort, on the other hand, recognizes the need to connect with her past—even the most devastating moments—and in the end she claims her mother’s name as her own. In taking the name, she reclaims the relationship with her mother, despite feeling responsible for her death. Emilie fails in this endeavor. The quilt image of “The Missing Peace” serves as an analogy of Danticat’s short story sequence. Each piece of cloth retains its distinctiveness until it can be unified into a whole by a common thread—in this case, Emilie’s mother. Likewise, each story stands apart, signifying the disruptive social context but more specifically the resulting isolation in which each character suffers, an isolation bridged only by the common mother-daughter bond. Still, each story retains the same temporal and spatial limitations as the novel; they are limited to the immediate successive generation. Danticat’s notion of heritage, however, extends well beyond this singular relationship, encompassing multiple generations. She thus strengthens the unity of her work with a wider familial bond, a generational tie that transcends the individual stories and that is revealed in the fulcrum of the sequence, “Between the Pool and the Gardenias.” In a scene that employs elements of magic realism, the protagonist, Marie, discusses an encounter with her deceased mother who introduces her to her forebears: Mama had to introduce me to them, because they had all died before I was born. There was my great grandmother Eveline who was killed by Dominican soldiers at the Massacre River. My grandmother Défilé who died with a bald head in a prison, because God had given her wings. My godmother Lili who killed herself in old age because her husband had jumped out of a flying balloon and her grown son left her to go to Miami.27 Significantly, Danticat records the details about Défilé and her imprisonment in the earlier story, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” where she also recounts the plight of Eveline (Défilé’s mother), though she is not specifically named. Likewise, the story of Lili’s husband is told in “A Wall of Fire Rising,” and Danticat intends the reference to the son’s voyage to Miami to identify him with the male narrator of “Children of the Sea,” a young man who dies on a boat en route to the United States. Another passenger on the same boat is referred to in the final story, “Caroline’s Wedding,” which takes place in New York City. Thus, as Amanda Putnam confirms in “Braiding Memories: Resistant Storytelling within the Mother-Daughter Communities,” the

Ibid., 116. Ibid., 121. 27 Ibid., 94. 25 26

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sequence introduces the reader to a long line of powerful characters—primarily women—who, while they may not interact directly, are intimately united through the bond of blood and struggle, extending even into the diaspora.28 Taken as a whole, then, the sequence embodies the Haitian experience transferred from one generation to another. Individual stories build toward the status of a heritage that is vital to the progeny, for according to Danticat, the key to understanding oneself depends on understanding those who have come before. “Caroline’s Wedding,” which brings the reader fully into the diasporic experience, also focuses on the mother-daughter relationship, and again Danticat uses this relationship to demonstrate the need to reconnect with the past in order to find completion, a tie that is particularly important for the diaspora. However, other intertextual references between the final story of the sequence and the first, “Children of the Sea,” are also valuable to understand the work as a whole, for the two stories create the “frame” for the sequence, providing a thematic context for the other stories. As noted above, Danticat states that the structure of Krik? Krak! was supposed to be strictly chronological; however, she and her editor shifted “Children of the Sea” to the opening spot, which, while it disrupted the chronological sequence, provided an emotional draw for the reader and contextualized the title of the book: “We spent most of yesterday telling stories. Someone says, Krik? You answer, Krak! And they say, I have many stories I could tell you, and then they go on and tell these stories to you, but mostly to themselves.”29 The final comment, “but mostly to themselves,” suggests also that the telling of stories is therapeutic for the individual, a means of coming to grips with their past. More significantly, the placement of “Children of the Sea” also provides a direct relationship with the final story, causing the sequence to circle back on itself. In “Caroline’s Wedding,” the narrator, Gracina, and her mother attend a mass in honor of those recently lost at sea, and specific details about some of the dead tie back to those lost in “Children of the Sea,” identifying the stories as more or less contemporaneous. For example, the priest alludes to Celianne, the young woman who has a stillbirth on the voyage in “Children of the Sea”: “We make a special call today for a young woman whose name we don’t know,” the priest said after he had recited the others. “A young woman who was pregnant when she took a boat from Haiti and then later gave birth to her child on the boat. A few hours after the child was born, its precious life went out, like a candle in the storm, and the mother with her infant in her arms dived into the sea.”30 However, the mass acts as more than just a means of making superficial connections. Rather, it relates back to the dream of the unnamed male narrator of the first story who dreams of an underwater mass in which the “mermaids were dancing and singing in Latin like the priests do at the cathedral during Mass.”31 Haitian Vodou, derived from West African religions that have been conflated with Catholicism (thus the connection to the Mass), typically associates its view

Putnam, “Braiding Memories,” 56. Danticat, Krik? Krak!, 14. 30 Ibid., 167. 31 Ibid., 12. 28 29

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of heaven—Ginen—as being under the sea.32 Moreover, Leslie G. Desmangles, in The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicims in Haiti, notes, Whatever its location, it [Ginen] is the domicile of the gwo-bon-anj [large good angel— also associated with the soul of the deceased], whose residence there initiates the process of its deification. How this happens is not clear, but when the appropriate ritual sequences are performed by the community, the gwo-bon-anj can be reclaimed from Ginen and become an important influence in the lives of the members of the community.33 So, in “Children of the Sea,” the narrator dreams of Ginen, where he will be reunited with his ancestors, ancestors who can also, according to Desmangles, be conjured to participate in the lives of the living, as in “Between the Pool and the Gardenias.” Danticat evokes this religious tradition to showcase the rich heritage of Haitians and to validate her own appeal to previous generations. Both the religious and ancestral references reinforce Danticat’s motif of unifying the Haitian people, a feat achieved by reclaiming one’s heritage through a deeper understanding of those who have come before. “Children of the Sea” also exposes the political turmoil of Haiti and the resulting fragmentation as some of the characters attempt to escape to find refuge in the United States; they leave their country and their loved ones to begin a new life. They do not, however, leave behind the memories or ties to either. Of their country, they sing: “Beloved Haiti, there is no place like you. I had to leave you before I could understand you,”34 a song that is repeated on the radio in “Caroline’s Wedding.” Likewise, the male narrator, who flees political persecution in Haiti, and the female narrator, his lover who remains behind, maintain a strong bond through their letters, though they will never exchange the letters. The lovers become symbolic of the Haitian experience, encompassing both the diaspora and those in Haiti. And the dual narrative structure of the letters they write to one another echo the separation between these two groups, a separation that reverberates in the form of the short story sequence. The separateness of each story reveals at once the isolation in which each of the characters suffers and the unifying potential of their shared history. Whereas the collection of stories begins in Haiti with two lovers being separated as one flees for the United States, “Caroline’s Wedding” concludes the sequence in the United States with the union of a man and a woman, creating a type of closure. However, while the marriage signifies a type of reconnection between the male and female, it also shows a young woman who is leaving her mother and sister behind. These women, as in the earlier stories in the sequence, provide the key to her identity as they are her link to her past and to her native culture (the man she is to marry is not Haitian). She leaves not only her literal home but also the metaphysical home of her heritage embodied in her mother and the traditions that she maintains in the household. While Caroline finds a union with her husband, she must balance that with a similar reconnection with the women in her life.

Leslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 69. 33 Ibid. 34 Danticat, Krik? Krak!, 9. 32

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The necessity of Caroline’s retaining contact with her heritage is comparable to that of the narrator of the penultimate story in the sequence, “New York Day Women,”35 also about the diaspora. Like Caroline, the narrator of the story has become Americanized. Americanization is not in itself negative; after all, her mother adapts to her new setting for survival, too. Such concessions are a reality for the diaspora. Still, the narrator of “New York Day Women” becomes so caught up in her American identity—only a part of herself—that she loses touch with the values of her Haitienité. Similarly, Caroline must also reconnect with her mother to become whole. Like Princess, the protagonist of “Seeing Things Simply,” Caroline must understand her own beauty and the beauty of her people and culture. Raised in Haiti, Caroline’s mother, like the mother in “New York Day Women,” remembers what it was like to live in Haiti and does not take those left behind for granted; she retains many of the traditions with which she grew up. Caroline, on the other hand, takes her American citizenship for granted and seems more like the daughter in “New York Day Women” in that she generally sees her mother as backward and not really assimilated to the way that things are; Caroline, after all, was born in the United States and was granted automatic citizenship. She seems to have forsaken her heritage. Gracina, who was born in Haiti but who came to the United States as a young child, acts as a sort of bridge between Caroline and her mother. She represents a new generation that must assimilate to its new environment, but she also retains an affinity for her culture, respecting and understanding her mother’s views. Demonstrating Caroline’s separation from her heritage is the symbolic nature of her missing arm. Mark Shackleton, in “Haitian Transnationalism: Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Caroline’s Wedding,’ a Case Study of Literary Anthropology,” discusses the issue of Caroline’s amputated arm, but his interest in the story is predominantly in how it reveals Danticat’s own life experience. Shackleton concludes that the missing arm represents the “personal sacrifices immigrants are often forced to endure in order to even gain basic human rights.”36 More plausible, though, would be the tie to Danticat’s recurrent motif: As with Emilie in “The Missing Peace,” what is missing in Caroline’s life (manifest physically in her arm) is a full understanding of her mother, a woman who represents her connection to Haiti. On Sundays, Gracina recounts, she and Caroline used to wish that Caroline’s arm would grow back, that she would be made whole, that she would somehow become reconnected to what she lacked. Later in the story, as her wedding day approaches, Caroline complains of phantom limb pain, and she equates it with the pain of loss. While she was born without the arm, her doctor explains that “with all the pressure lately, with the wedding, … it’s only natural that [she] should feel amputated.”37

“New York Day Women” is an interesting counterpart to an earlier story, “Night Women,” in which Danticat writes of a woman who prostitutes herself in order to care for her son. The former deals with a more “respectable” woman living in the United States while the latter deals with the degradation of women in Haiti—though on another level this woman’s profession ties her with the lougarou, a vampiric supernatural figure in Haitian tradition who preys on men, thus empowering her. What ties these stories together more specifically, though, is that each woman seems to have a dual life. The mother in “New York Day Women” is seen by her daughter who watches from a distance, amazed at the way her mother maneuvers through the city. The narrator in “Night Women,” on the other hand, protects her son from the realities of her existence by telling him stories of beauty, wonder, and mystery. Both stories reveal the complexity of the women, women who are not easily pigeonholed. For a different reading, see Kathleen Gyssels, “Haitians in the City: Two Modern-Day Trickster Tales,” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 7, no. 1 (2002): 34 pars. 36 Mark Shackleton, “Haitian Transnationalism:  Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Caroline’s Wedding,’ a Case Study of Literary Anthropology,” Suomen Antropologi: The Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 28, no. 2 (May 2003): 17. 37 Danticat, Krik? Krak!, 198–9. 35

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The use of the term “amputated” in a more complete sense suggests not only her arm but also that she herself is somehow separated, adding credence to the fact that she lacks something more essential. For the wedding, Caroline acquires an artificial arm as a means of allaying her feeling of separation; however, it is not sufficient for a true, full sense of self. Only at the end of the story, when Caroline calls her mother and talks to her and claims that she will want to see them when she gets back from her honeymoon—bridging the widening gap that had been developing between her and her mother—does Danticat provide a sign that she will retain her connection with her mother-line that ties her to Haiti. Despite the misunderstandings that she and her mother have, she recognizes that this relationship is a valuable one, one that must be retained, and both will work together to understand one another more fully. “Caroline’s Wedding,” then, works as a sort of microcosm of the Haitian diaspora. While circumstances necessitate separation, maintaining contact with one’s origins and understanding one another is vital to the overall unity of the Haitian peoples. Danticat indicates that even those who go on their way to another place (represented in the story in Caroline’s marrying a non-Haitian) need only turn back to the family and to the motherland in order to maintain a connection to the past, but more importantly to their own sense of self. “In emphasizing the connectedness of Haitian people to each other,” Angelia Poon suggests, “Danticat attempts to weave together a dispersed people torn apart by political violence and poverty. Hers is an overtly political strategy to re-define the Haitian community across national boundaries and beyond the geographical space that is Haiti.”38 Danticat achieves this purpose through her emphasis on the role of memory—particularly of whence one comes individually and as a people. Especially for the diaspora, Danticat suggests that even as one assimilates into a new place, one must not forget her heritage. The diaspora, prone to liminality—the result of being neither fully tied to one’s place of origin nor to the place to which one has immigrated—face the existential implications of this state. Those who find themselves separated geographically from their homeland must remember the stories that they bring with them and the stories of those whom they have left behind, for it is from these that they lay the foundation of selfunderstanding. Conversely, it is through the people’s own memories that their cultural past is preserved. In her book Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women, Myriam Chancy suggests that memories are the key to transhistorical survival. Memory, she argues, “is not a claim to an evasion of history but, rather, a challenge to remember that cultures are shaped by what survives from one generation to the next.”39 Thus, Danticat’s reason for weaving these memories—these stories—together is twofold: to create a sense of community through cultural identity even as she hopes to preserve that cultural identity. The theme of reclaiming the past evident in each of the individual stories of Krik? Krak! unites the work not only in that it is repeated but in that each story represents a piece of that past. As a whole, the stories demonstrate a reconstruction of the Haitian experience through these individual tales. In storing up these memories, Danticat may not look nostalgically back to a lost origin such as Stuart Hall’s “Presence Africaine”; however, she takes each isolated

Angelia Poon, “Re-writing the Male Text: Mapping Cultural Spaces in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place,” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4, no. 2 (2000): par. 12. 39 Myriam J.  A. Chancy, Framing Silence:  Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 1997), 11. 38

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account of human suffering and triumph, reflective of the fragmentation of social upheaval, and gathers them into a whole that provides a sense of the Haitian experience—an experience that both unites Haitians and preserves the Haitian cultural identity. If, as the mother in “Caroline’s Wedding” suggests, “we know people by their stories,”40 then one could also conclude, we know a people by their stories. Danticat, in Krik? Krak!, sheds light on the Haitian experience, providing the diaspora with a sense of cultural identity. For other readers, she gives insight into a people too long disenfranchised.

Bibliography Alexandre, Sandy, and Ravi Y. Howard. “My Turn in the Fire: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.” Transition: An International Review 12 (2002): 110–28. Chancy, Myriam J. A. Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1994. Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Davis, Rocio G. “Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” MELUS 26, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 65–81. Desmangles, Leslie G. The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Gyssels, Kathleen. “Haitians in the City: Two Modern-Day Trickster Tales.” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 7, no. 1 (2002): 34 pars. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 392–403. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Kelley, Margot. “Gender and Genre: The Case of the Novel-in-Stories.” In American Women Short Story Writers, edited by Julie Brown, 295–310. New York: Garland, 1995. Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Introduction.” In Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy, vii–xv. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Luscher, Robert M. “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book.” In Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, edited by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey, 148–67. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Ortiz, Lisa M. “Re-membering the Past: Weaving Tales of Loss and Cultural Inheritance in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” Journal of Haitian Studies 7, no. 2 (2001): 64–77. Poon, Angelia. “Re-writing the Male Text: Mapping Cultural Spaces in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place.” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4, no. 2 (2000): 30 pars. Putnam, Amanda. “Braiding Memories: Resistant Storytelling within Mother-Daughter Communities in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” Journal of Haitian Studies 9, no. 1 (2003): 52–65. Shackleton, Mark. “Haitian Transnationalism: Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Caroline’s Wedding,’ a Case Study of Literary Anthropology.” Suomen Antropologi: The Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 28, no. 2 (May 2003): 15–23. Shea, Renee H. “Edwidge Danticat.” Belles Lettres 10 (Summer 1995): 12–15. Wachtel, Eleanor. “A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.” Brick (Fall 2000): 106–19.

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PART VIII HAITI, THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, AND TRANSNATIONAL HISPANIOLA

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CHAPTER 22 “NEITHER STRANGERS NOR FRIENDS”: TRANSNATIONAL HISPANIOLA AND THE UNEVEN INTIMACIES OF THE FARMING OF BONES

John D. Ribó

This history refuses simple containment or categorization by either the terms of language or nation. Hispaniola’s history has left the nations that live there and the languages they speak in far too complicated a relationship for that. Ricardo Ortiz, “Edwidge Danticat’s Latinidad”1 One of Danticat’s great literary appeals is that her work can be read and taught across numerous frameworks. I  often teach Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) in undergraduate and graduate classes focusing on Latinx literatures and cultures to highlight the porous borders that connect Haiti and the Dominican Republic on the island and in diaspora.2 Including Danticat specifically and Haiti more generally in the syllabus of a Latinx Studies course queries the geographic, linguistic, and ethno-racial boundaries of Latinidad—a term derived from Spanish that means “Latinness” or “Latinity” and that describes the diverse qualities of people of Latin America and Latin American descent.3 The decision to include Danticat and Haiti in Latinx Studies courses is not, however, original, nor does it take place in a vacuum; rather, it contributes to diverse and decentralized intellectual, artistic, and activist movements often described under two rubrics: Afro-Latinidad and Transnational Hispaniola. Afro-Latinidad encompasses the diverse Afro-diasporic peoples and cultures of Latin America and Latin American descent. Transnational Hispaniola rethinks Dominican and Haitian Studies as intertwined fields of scholarly and cultural production operating within transnational networks connecting Dominicans and Haitians on the island and in diaspora. Though the phenomena that Afro-Latinidad and Transnational Hispaniola describe are not Ricardo Ortiz, “Edwidge Danticat’s Latinidad: The Farming of Bones and the Cultivation (of Fields) of Knowledge,” in Aftermaths: Exile, Migration, and Diaspora Reconsidered, ed. Marcus Bullock and Peter Paik (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 154. 2 Spanish adjectives are gendered—Latino for masculine and Latina for feminine. The default gender for collective adjectives is masculine. Latinx is a gender-neutral, inclusive form. Other common inclusive variants include Latino/a, Latina/o, and Latin@. For recent discussions of the term, see Catalina (Kathleen) M. deOnís, “What’s in an ‘x’?: An Exchange about the Politics of ‘Latinx’,” Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures 1, no. 2 (2017): 78– 91, Claudia Milian, ed., “Theorizing LatinX,” Special Issue, Cultural Dynamics 29, no. 3 (August 2017), and Lourdes Torres, “Latinx?” Latino Studies 16, no. 3 (October 2018): 283–5. 3 For a discussion of Latinidad and Afro-Latinidad, see Jennifer A. Jones, “Afro-Latinos: Speaking through Silences and Rethinking the Geographies of Blackness,” in Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction, ed. Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 569–614. For a discussion of how Danticat’s writing challenges Latinidad, see Ortiz, “Edwidge Danticat’s Latinidad,” 150–72. 1

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new, these two terms have emerged as vital critical frameworks in scholarship and cultural production of the last fifteen years.4 While Transnational Hispaniola and Afro-Latinidad offer the potential to welcome Haitian and other Afro-Latinx interlocutors from academe and beyond into conversations that expand the communities, canons, and intellectual horizons of Haitian, Dominican, Latinx, and Latin American Studies, these frameworks must contend with painful legacies left by violent histories of enslavement, genocide, exploitation, and marginalization of peoples of African descent in the Americas. To illustrate the complex and, at times, contradictory ways Afro-Latinidad and Transnational Hispaniola play out in lived experience, I compare two recent personal essays on Haitian identity by contemporary Haitian American writers: Ayanna Legros’s “As a HaitianAmerican Woman, I  Know I’m Afro-Latina but It’s Time for You to Acknowledge It, Too” and Nathalie Cerin’s response “I Am Not Latina. I Am Haitian.” As the articles’ titles clearly indicate, Legros’s text demands acknowledgement of her Haitian American identity as an integral part of Afro-Latinidad, while Cerin’s riposte rejects Latinidad as a category describing nations and peoples that have turned their back on Haiti and worse. Rather than adjudicate the Legros-Cerin debate, I  read their contradictory articulations of Haitian identity as an example of uncomfortable togetherness, a form of relation that Haitian American literary scholar Régine Michelle Jean-Charles develops to theorize the Haitian-Dominican border in the wake of massive, state-sponsored Dominican violence against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent.5 I  conclude the chapter by comparing Legros’s reclamation of AfroLatinidad and Cerin’s rejection of Latinidad with Amabelle Désir’s navigation of her final reunion with Valencia Duarte in Danticat’s The Farming of Bones. The reencounter reveals that Valencia’s refusal to take responsibility for her husband’s leadership and her complicity in the 1937 Massacre has allowed Valencia to perpetuate the uneven intimacy at the heart of her relationship with Amabelle with her new Haitian handmaid Sylvie.

Afro-Latinidad and Transnational Hispaniola From its beginnings in Chicanx and Puerto Rican activism of the late 1960s, Latinx Studies has been an academic field rooted in the sustained efforts of diverse communities cooperating See George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2004); Kathryn Joy McKnight and Leo J. Garofalo, eds., Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812 (Indianapolis:  Hackett, 2009); Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, eds., The Afro-Latin@ Reader (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2010); George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America:  Black Lives, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016); Jill Tolliver Richardson, The Afro-Latin@ Experience in Contemporary American Literature and Culture: Engaging Blackness (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Petra Rivera-Rideau, Jennifer A. Jones, and Tianna S. Paschel, eds., Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas (New  York:  Parlgrave Macmillan, 2016); Melissa Castillo-Garsow, ed., ¡Manteca! An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets (Houston:  Arte Público Press, 2018); Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews, eds., Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); April J. Mayes et al. “Transnational Hispaniola: Toward New Paradigms in Haitian and Dominican Studies,” Radical History Review 115 (winter 2013):  26–32; and April J. Mayes and Kiran C. Jayaram, eds., Transnational Hispaniola:  New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018). 5 Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, “ ‘A Border between Geographies of Grief ’: River Crossings and Crossroads between Haiti and the Dominican Republic,” in Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies, ed. April J. Mayes and Kiran C. Jayaram (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018), 101. 4

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in coalition to gain rights and representation in the United States. Within this historical and disciplinary context, Afro-Latinidad is one in a series of shifts in terminology that critique and transform how Latinx Studies defines itself as a field and Latinxs define ourselves and our communities. The shift from Hispanic to Latino, for example, moves away from a Eurocentric emphasis on Spain and highlights Latin America instead.6 Similarly, the ongoing transition from Latino to gender inclusive variants such as Latino/a, Latina/o, Latin@, and Latinx resists linguistic structures of Spanish that reinforce patriarchy and the male-female gender binary. While Afro-Latinidad, as a naming practice, functions similarly, its critique of Latinidad is rooted in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. If Latinidad, as Frances R. Aparicio explains, “emerged most strongly in literary studies as an abstract signifier that remitted us to the condition of being Latina/o,”7 then, as Silvio Torres-Saillant argues, “To call oneself an Afro-Latino (or Asian-Latino or Indo-Latino) is to expose the Eurocentric bias at the core of latinidad.”8 Afro-Latinidad thus critiques Eurocentric racial hierarchies that equate whiteness and Hispanicity with Latinidad, creates an analytical category that renders Afro-Latinxs visible, and emphasizes the importance of the African diaspora across the entirety of the Americas. While none of the changes of nomenclature described above solve the interwoven theoretical and material quandaries of modernity/coloniality, patriarchy, cis-heteronormativity, or race, they raise awareness of structural inequalities, catalyze debates about the elision, exclusion, and erasure of marginalized communities, and signal collective intentions to define Latinx communities in more inclusive ways. Changing language, however, is only the first step in much longer, more difficult struggles toward material progress. It is unsurprising, then, that scholarship on Afro-Latinidad has yet to live up to the full promise of its name. The two components of the hyphenated noun suggest that Afro-Latinidad, in theory, describes all African diasporic peoples and cultures of Latin America and Latin American descent. Jennifer A. Jones theorizes Afro-Latinidad precisely in such an inclusive, comparative, transnational manner writing that “the concept of Afro-Latinidad seeks, in part, to examine how comparable conceptual meanings and experiences of blackness move and take root in various parts of the Americas. It also offers a critical analysis of the forces that sustain anti-blackness throughout the region, despite what many consider dramatically different national discourses about race.”9 Yet for all the potential theoretical capaciousness of the concept, scholarship on AfroLatinidad in Latinx Studies focuses primarily on US-based communities with connections to Hispanophone Latin America. While this focus on US-based Hispanics in work on Afro-Latinidad in Latinx Studies is unsurprising considering the genealogies and geographies that have defined the field historically, the impact of the African diaspora in the Americas transcends national and linguistic borders of colonial origin. For this reason, in the introduction to their groundbreaking edited volume

See Susan Oboler, Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives:  Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 17–43; and María DeGuzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xxi–xxvii. 7 Frances R. Aparicio, “Latinidad/es,” in Keywords for Latina/o Studies, ed. Deborah R. Vargas, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, and Lawrence La Fountain Stokes (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 113. 8 Silvio Torres-Saillant, “Afro-Latinidad: Phoenix Rising from a Hemisphere’s Racist Flames,” in The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature, ed. John Morán González and Laura Lomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 278. 9 Jones, “Afro-Latinos,” 570–1. 6

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on Afro-Latinidad, The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, editors Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores must explain why their collection excludes Brazilian Americans and Haitian Americans: Despite the crucial place of Brazil—the country with a Black population second in size only to that of Nigeria—within the Latin American context, the Brazilian presence in the United States has been relatively small and the Afro-Brazilian negligible. Similarly despite the towering significance of the Haitian Revolution to hemispheric history and the parallels that can be drawn among all immigrant peoples of African descent, in the context of the United States Haitians have consistently been distinguished—and have often distinguished themselves—from Latin@s. Unlike the case of Afro-Latin@s, Haitians are generally understood to be unambiguously Black.10 Though the editors recognize the importance of Brazil and Haiti in the African diaspora and acknowledge shared experiences among “immigrant peoples of African descent,” the collection nevertheless excludes Brazilians and Haitians. These exclusions raise important questions about how Latinx Studies’ disciplinary investments in the United States, demographics, and racial ambiguity erase particular Afro-Latinxs. Conversely, conceptualizing Afro-Latinidad in more broadly inclusive, transnational frameworks has the potential to expand the geographical borders of Latinx Studies and shift the field away from privileging demographics and notions of racial ambiguity rooted in racist discourses of mestizaje from Latin America’s colonial history. Recent edited volumes such as Afro-Latin@s in Movement and Afro-Latin American Studies initiate important conversations that begin to address these issues by including Brazil and bridging divides between Latinx and Latin American Studies, but the work with the most generative potential to connect Afro-Latinidad and Haiti has been taking place within Transnational Hispaniola. The origin of Transnational Hispaniola is relatively recent. In 2010, while working in Dominican Republic as Fulbright scholars, April J. Mayes and Yolanda C. Martín organized the first Transnational Hispaniola conference at the Pedro Franciso Bonó Philosophical Institute in Santo Domingo.11 Subsequent Transnational Hispaniola conferences followed at Rutgers University in 2012 and in Port-au-Prince in 2016.12 Transnational Hispaniola has also sought institutionalization through the expansion of the Haiti/Dominican Republic section of Latin American Studies Association in 2011 and the official recognition of the Transnational Hispaniola working group of the Caribbean Studies Association in 2016. Finally, two publications documenting the work of these conferences have appeared—a brief intervention in Radical History Review titled “Transnational Hispaniola: Toward New Paradigms in Haitian and Dominican Studies” in 2013 and an edited collection with University of Florida Press titled Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies in 2018.

Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, “Introduction,” in The Afro-Latin@ Reader:  History and Culture in the United States, ed. Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3. 11 Mayes et al. “Transnational Hispaniola: Toward New Paradigms in Haitian and Dominican Studies,” 27. 12 April J. Mayes and Kiran C. Jayaram, “Transnational Hispaniola: An Introduction,” in Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies, ed. April J. Mayes and Kiran C. Jayaram (Gainesville:  University of Florida Press, 2018), 4–5. 10

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Transnational Hispaniola contests nationalist narratives that divide the island and peoples of Hispaniola and, instead, argues that the histories, cultures, economies, and ecologies of Haiti and Dominican Republic are inextricably intertwined. It is both a recuperative and a generative project. Transnational Hispaniola seeks to challenge nationalist narratives on historical grounds by recuperating examples that demonstrate that Haitians and Dominicans “have long cooperated with each other in political, social, and economic projects that challenge oppression.”13 It also recognizes that the generation and cultivation of alternatives to these nationalist narratives through “scholarship and creative expression [that] are crucial elements of overcoming the legacies of authoritarianism and dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.”14 In its insistence on recuperating historical precedents and generating new scholarly and cultural production that embodies its ideals, Transnational Hispaniola resembles a vanguard movement. Mayes and her coauthors open their 2013 publication with a description of Transnational Hispaniola that reads like a manifesto: As a collective of scholars, activists, and artists, we seek to transform dominant paradigms in Dominican and Haitian knowledge production, political culture, and pedagogy that reproduce class exploitation, gender violence, and social exclusion on the basis of citizenship, sexuality, language, culture, phenotype, and ability. In this project initiated by politically progressive scholars working in Dominican studies, another goal is to combat antiblack xenophobia and anti-Haitianism, and promote dialogue across the island.15 In the 2018 volume, editors April J. Mayes and Kiran C. Jayaram reaffirm these ideals, situate Transnational Hispaniola within a longer history of Haitian-Dominican and pan-Caribbean collaborations, expand upon Transnational Hispaniola’s theoretical implications, and provide a selection of scholarship from the humanities and social sciences that put these ideas into practice. While Transnational Hispaniola promises to revolutionize both Haitian and Dominican Studies, as a movement launched by Dominicanists in Santo Domingo, its engagements with Dominican Republic and Haiti have thus far been asymmetrical. Though the participation of Haitianists has increased over the last decade, Dominicanists constituted the majority of attendees at the first two conferences, Dominicanists produced the majority of scholarship in the 2018 edited collection, and Transnational Hispaniola has primarily generated counternarratives to anti-Haitian, negrophobic iterations of Dominican nationalism.16 Considering the history of the Dominican Republic in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this is vital and necessary work. As La Sentencia—the 2013 Dominican Constitutional Tribunal’s decision to strip citizenship from Dominicans born of undocumented parents retroactive to 1929—demonstrates, anti-Haitian, antiblack, xenophobic articulations of Dominican national identity institutionalized under the Trujillo dictatorship (1930–61) and sustained throughout Ibid., 2. Ibid. 15 Mayes et al. “Transnational Hispaniola: Toward New Paradigms in Haitian and Dominican Studies,” 26. 16 Mayes et  al. “Transnational Hispaniola:  Toward New Paradigms in Haitian and Dominican Studies,” 28. April J. Mayes and Kiran C. Jayaram. “Epilogue,” in Transnational Hispaniola:  New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies, ed. April J. Mayes and Kiran C. Jayaram (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018), 255. 13 14

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three presidential terms of Joaquín Balaguer (1960–2, 1966–78, 1986–96) continue to thrive in the Dominican Republic today. Nevertheless, the uneven participation of Dominicanists and Haitianists in Transnational Hispaniola raises important questions. Recognizing the importance of this disparity, Mayes and Jayaram close their 2018 collected volume with an anecdote from the first conference in Santo Domingo in 2010 that suggests that this preponderance of Dominicanists is a fundamental issue that Transnational Hispaniola— and Dominicans and Dominicanists more specifically—must confront. The anecdote comes from a panel featuring former Dominican ambassador to Haiti, Rubén Silié, and former Haitian ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Guy Alexandre. After Silié expressed enthusiasm for transnational approaches connecting Haitian and Dominican Studies, Alexandre responded in a more circumspect manner, which Mayes and Jayaram paraphrase thus, “For Dominicans, Haiti and Haitians occupy a great deal of mental energy. The opposite is not true for us. We just don’t think about you very much. There is no need to exorcise the Dominican from our minds as it is for Dominicans to grapple with the Haitian in theirs.”17 In response to Alexandre, Mayes and Jayaram speculate that perhaps Transnational Hispaniola will always necessarily involve more Dominicanists “because Dominicans and those in Dominican studies bear a particular historical burden that Haitians and Haitianists do not.”18 This historical burden “troubles any notion that an invitation to dialogue is a neutral gesture” and suggests that Dominicanists must undertake “ideological, intellectual, ethical, and moral groundwork so that the invitation to Haitianists does not appear to deny or diminish historical or contemporary injustices that incur violence and trauma against Haitians.”19 Thus, rather than conceptualizing Haiti and Dominican Republic as identical halves of a whole, Transnational Hispaniola recognizes that the two nations share a complex history of uneven yet nevertheless complementary relations. While much recent scholarship in Dominican Studies takes up precisely the project of unpacking this historical burden of Dominicans and Dominicanists vis-à-vis Haiti,20 the implications of Alexandre’s intervention extend well beyond Hispaniola and its diasporas. The questions raised by Alexandre lay bare, “what is truly at stake in new research about Haiti and the Dominican Republic:  the meanings of Hispaniola sovereignty and Black freedom more broadly in the twenty-first century.”21 Mayes and Jayaram’s interpretation of Alexandre underlines the foundational role Haiti has played in the Americas. If Haiti, the only nation founded by formerly enslaved Africans who liberated themselves, is the linchpin of Black freedom in the Western hemisphere, then, Mayes and Jayaram argue, “defending Haitian Mayes and Jayaram, “Epilogue,” 255. Ibid. 19 Ibid., 256. 20 See María Cristina Fumagalli, On the Edge:  Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Liverpool:  Liverpool University Press, 2015); Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary:  Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola (New Brunswick:  Rutgers University Press, 2016); Edward Paulino, Dividing Hispaniola: The Dominican Republic’s Border Campaign against Haiti, 1930–1961 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), Anne Eller, We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2016), Lorgia García Peña, The Borders of Dominicanidad:  Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2016); Dixa Ramírez, Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2018); and Sophie Maríñez, “The Quisqueya Diaspora:  The Emergence of Latina/o Literature of Hispaniola,” in The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature, ed. John Morán González and Laura Lomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 561–82. 21 Mayes and Jayaram, “Epilogue,” 256. 17 18

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sovereignty and autonomy requires an island-wide perspective because to insist on Haiti’s freedom is to necessarily insist on the freedom of Hispaniola, the Caribbean, and, indeed, all African descendants in the Americas. Transnational Hispanola is one part of that effort.”22 Mayes and Jayaram thus conclude the volume by situating Transnational Hispaniola within hemispheric traditions of black liberation deeply indebted to Haiti. Through this recognition of Haiti’s foundational role in black liberation in the Americas, Transnational Hispaniola has the potential to transform conceptualizations of Afro-Latinidad in Dominican and Latinx Studies. Moreover, as a theoretical and methodological framework, Transnational Hispaniola interrogates not only the centrality of the United States but also the very concept of nation as primary unit of scholarly analysis. It looks beyond linguistic, ethnic, racial, and cultural divides born of colonial empires and exploited in the interest of nationstates to the fluid and at times elusive diasporic connections that link Africa and the Americas. Transnational Hispaniola thus expands the fields of Dominican and Latinx Studies through the inclusion of communities, archives, and geographies previously excluded. Yet despite these potential contributions, the imbalance between Dominican and Haitian participation in Transnational Hispaniola suggests that recognition of the intertwined nature of Haiti and DR and of the fundamental role Haiti has played in the history of the Americas is merely the first step in transforming understandings of race and ethnicity in the Americas. Moreover, Alexandre’s reticence about Transnational Hispaniola signals that expanding the borders of academic fields to include new subjects is not always welcomed by the subjects slated for inclusion. Dominican and Latinx Studies must cultivate connections beyond the traditional borders of these fields while avoiding the replication of the janus-faced, colonizing logics of the border that functions simultaneously as a bulwark against the other and as a frontier for assimilation of the other.

Legros and Cerin I have articulated Afro-Latinidad and Transnational Hispaniola from Latinx and Dominican Studies perspectives thus far; the remainder of this chapter shifts focus to examine how Haitian cultural production complicates and expands these concepts, frameworks, and fields of scholarly production. Even if, as Alexandre asserts, Haitians do not reciprocate the Dominican obsession with Haiti, a lack of obsession does not equate a lack of insight. Haitian popular culture and literature have plenty to say about Afro-Latinidad and Haitian-Dominican relations. As a Latinx Studies scholar with Dominican roots, I  would argue that attentively reading what Haitian writers have to say on these topics is but a small, preliminary step in the “ideological, intellectual, ethical, and moral groundwork” that Mayes and Jayaram theorize as necessary to render Transnational Hispaniola a truly inclusive invitation to dialogue. To begin contributing to that groundwork, I  next analyze Ayanna Legros and Nathalie Cerin’s 2018 online exchange about Haitian identity before turning to Danticat’s The Farming of Bones. On June 5, 2018, Ayanna Legros published an online op-ed titled, “As a Haitian-American Woman, I  Know I’m Afro-Latina but It’s Time for You to Acknowledge It, Too.” Two

Ibid.

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weeks later, on June 19, 2018, Nathalie Cerin responded with her own editorial, “I Am Not Latina. I  Am Haitian.” Both writers are graduate students—Legros in History and Cerin in Multicultural Education. Both published their op-eds through online outlets designed to cater to underserved publics. Legros’s piece appeared on Fierce, a website that describes itself as “a collection of content that empowers Latinas to use their voice.”23 Cerin published her response to Legros in Woy Magazine, a grassroots, online Haitian publication that promotes its bilingual mission with the slogan “Haiti through our voices. Ayiti nan vwa pa nou.”24 Legros opens her op-ed by describing the intersectional components of her identity. “As a New York City-born Haitian-American woman, I identify as Black, Caribbean-American and Afro-Latina. The latter seems to confuse people, including my fellow Latinx community, but it shouldn’t. That’s because Haiti, located on the western part of the island of Hispaniola, is a part of Latin America.”25 Despite the clear geographical link between Haiti and Latin America, Legros’s identification as Afro-Latina creates confusion, revealing the exclusionary racial and ethnic logics that undergird Latinidad. In response to this confusion, the op-ed’s title, its introductory paragraph quoted above, and its overarching argument all clearly and repeatedly demand recognition of Legros’s Afro-Latinidad. Moreover, in making this personal demand for recognition, Legros demands recognition for the historical contributions of Haitians and of other Afro-Latinxs as well. Legros concludes the piece writing that I identify as Afro-Latina because my family comes from an island in Latin America. I claim Afro-Latina identity to acknowledge the critical contributions Haiti has made throughout the region. I am Afro-Latina because my ancestors gave Latin Americans an alternative to enslavement. When I  assert the term, I  am declaring that every Independence Day Latinxs celebrate would not exist without Haiti. When I embrace the word, I am no longer allowing my fellow Latinxs to exclude Haiti and to deny this Black Latin American history. I identify as Afro-Latina, simply, because I, like my Black Latinx family in the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Cuba, Panama, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Honduras, Peru, Costa Rica and beyond, am Afro-Latina—even if my country remains at the bottom of these collective nations.26 Legros frames her identification as Afro-Latina as a strategy of historical and cultural reclamation that forges transnational networks of solidarity across the African diaspora in the Americas. Though Legros’s message is optimistic, it is not naive—her op-ed’s final words evoke the precarity of Haiti in the hierarchical power dynamics of Latin America. Nathalie Cerin’s rebuttal of Legros, “I Am Not Latina, I Am Haitian,” affirms Legros’s right to identify as Afro-Latina and accepts the premises of Legros’s argument but draws starkly different conclusions. Cerin agrees that Haiti is fundamental to Latin American independence Fierce, Twitter profile, https://twitter.com/fiercebymitu. Woy Magazine, Twitter profile, https://twitter.com/woymagazine. 25 Ayanna Legros, “As a Haitian-American Woman, I  Know I’m Afro-Latina but It’s Time for You to Acknowledge It, Too,” Fierce, June 5, 2018. Available online: https://web.archive.org/web/20190224175427/https://fierce.wearemitu. com/identities/why-i-haitian-woman-identify-as-afro-latina-and-my-sisters-should-too/ (accessed September 23, 2020). 26 Ibid. 23 24

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and that “these facts are not repeated, studied or celebrated enough” but explains that where she and Legros diverge is in her choice to identify as one of them as a way to reverse this. How one identifies is a personal choice, and I am not in the business of dictating to people what they should call themselves. However, as for me and my house? The answer is a hard “no.” Haiti’s exclusion from the term “Latinx” is and has always been deliberate.27 As evidence of the intentional and sustained exclusion of Haitians from Latinidad, Cerin lists examples of Caribbean and Latin American nations turning their backs on Haiti or worse. The list includes Pétion’s inability to secure official recognition of Haiti from a single independent nation of the Americas, Bolívar’s exclusion of Haiti from the Congress of Panama in 1826, the 1937 Massacre on the Haitian-Dominican border, and contemporary instances of abuse and exploitation of Haitian migrants in Chile, Brazil, and Dominican Republic.28 Though this list is far from exhaustive, it leads Cerin to conclude that “the anti-blackness that is at the heart of our exclusion among these nations is not our responsibility to fix. We don’t need labels of groups that have neither invited or welcomed us to make us more exotic or palatable. Being Haitian in itself is enough.”29 Rather than siding with Legros or Cerin, I  advocate considering Legros’s and Cerin’s explanations of their identities alongside one another as two possible articulations of Haitian identity in relation to Latin America. My resistance to resolving Legros and Cerin’s debate is inspired by Haitian American literary scholar Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’s contribution to Transnational Hispaniola. In response to La Sentencia of 2013, Jean-Charles advances “not a polarizing conceptualization of Haiti and the Dominican Republic that reduce[s]‌the problem of Hispaniola either to division or transnational belonging, but rather an approach that rest[s] uncomfortably at the crossroads, taking into account all of the possibilities for death and life together. Not either/or, or even in-between, but uncomfortably, together.”30 Jean-Charles comes to this conclusion at the end of her chapter analyzing depictions of the Massacre River in the fiction of Danticat, Roxane Gay, and Évelyne Trouillot, but I  believe this unresolved form of relation can elucidate intracommunity as well as transnational relations of Hispaniola. Moreover, Jean-Charles’s uncomfortable togetherness of the crossroads beautifully captures the predicament that Amabelle Désir, the protagonist of Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, faces at the end of the novel. Upon her return to the Dominican Republic and reencounter with her former employer Valencia Duarte, Amabelle finds herself caught at a crossroads between the desire for historical recognition and transnational solidarity that draws Legros toward claiming Afro-Latinidad, on the one hand, and the traumatic history of exclusion, exploitation, and violence that motivates Cerin to reject Latinidad, on the other. Through the complexities and contradictions of Amabelle and Valencia’s uneven intimacy, Danticat presents a compelling and unsettling example of the uncomfortable togetherness that Jean-Charles theorizes.

Nathalie Cerin, “I am not Latina, I am Haitian,” Woy Magazine, June 19, 2018. http://woymagazine.com/2018/06/19/ not-afro-latino-haitian/ (accessed September 23, 2020). 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Jean-Charles, “ ‘A Border between Geographies of Grief,’ ” 101. 27

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Amabelle and Valencia In many ways, Danticat’s American Book Award-winning second novel The Farming of Bones can be read as an urtext of Transnational Hispaniola. The novel contests nationalist narratives of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. It develops the historical and philosophical underpinnings of Danticat’s subsequent activism advocating in collaboration with Dominican American writers Julia Alvarez and Junot Díaz for the rights of Haitian migrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic.31 As a work of historical fiction, The Farming of Bones exemplifies Transnational Hispaniola’s recuperative and generative strategies—it recuperates historical elements from journalistic accounts such as Albert C.  Hick’s Blood in the Streets (1946) when possible and generates fictional versions of lost stories of victims of the Massacre when the archive fails.32 Danticat depicts in detailed complexity the uneven socioeconomic and ethnoracial hierarchies that structure Haitian-Dominican relations and interrogates these inequalities in light of Haiti’s unique revolutionary history and contributions to black liberation in the Americas.33 Finally, The Farming of Bones ends without resolution, suggesting that the root causes of the Massacre remain viable threats today. The novel’s unsettling conclusion, like Jean-Charles’s uncomfortable togetherness, reminds readers that the transnational nature of Hispaniola is not a solution to the problems Haitians and Dominicans face on the island and in diaspora but rather a complex reality that must first be acknowledged before working together towards solutions is possible. In The Farming of Bones, fictional protagonist Amabelle Désir recounts her survival of the 1937 Massacre on the Haitian-Dominican border. Amabelle narrates the novel from the first person in two distinct modes. The majority of the narrative unfolds in past-tense chronological action interrupted by oneiric, present-tense interludes offset in bold text. The novel opens with this bolded, dreamlike, present-tense prose describing Amabelle’s partner Sebastien comforting her as she awakens from a nightmare inspired by the memory of her parents drowning as they crossed the Massacre River at the Haitian-Dominican border. The second chapter shifts to plain text and the past tense to describe Amabelle midwifing the birth of her employer Valencia’s fraternal twins—the paler Rafael named for the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and the darker Rosalinda whose complexion “favors Amabelle’s.”34 After speculation that he tried to choke his sister in the womb with her umbilical cord, Rafael inexplicably “los[es] his breath” and dies in his sleep only days after birth.35 Rosalinda, initially thought to be the weaker of the two, survives into adulthood. As Myriam Chancy notes, the marassa trope evoked in this twin birth repeats throughout the novel and Danticat’s oeuvre, and the fates of Rafael and Rosalinda parallel those of Trujillo and Amabelle, to whom the twins are compared.36 From the outset in the first and second chapters, the novel foreshadows the violence of the Massacre in both its

Elizabeth Russ, “ ‘A Hispaniola Conspiracy’: Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz Performing (in) the Caribbean Public Sphere,” in Reimagining the Caribbean: Conversations among the Creole, English, French, and Spanish Caribbean, ed. Valérie K. Orlando and Sandra Messinger Cypess (Landham: Lexington Books, 2014), 121–40. 32 Bonnie Lyons, “An Interview with Edwidge Danticat,” Contemporary Literature 44, no. 2 (2003): 191. 33 Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 212–13, 278–80. 34 Ibid., 11. 35 Ibid., 90. 36 Myriam Chancy, “Violence, Nation, & Memory: Danticat’s The Farming of Bones,” in Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, ed. Martin Munro (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 139–40. 31

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oneiric and realist modes. In the first chapter, Amabelle is already traumatized by her parents’ untimely death while crossing the Haitian-Dominican border, and Sebastien’s body is already scarred from the labor of the cane fields from which the novel gets its name. In the second chapter, twin babies born of the same mother yet distinguished by the color of their skin are already pitted against one another in a life or death struggle in the womb. Despite this ominous foreshadowing, it takes half the novel for the Massacre to commence. Until then, Amabelle and Sebastien live near the Haitian-Dominican border in the fictional Dominican town of Alegría where Amabelle works as a maidservant for Valencia and Sebastien works as a cane cutter on a sugar plantation. The first half of the novel thus depicts a heterogeneous, transnational border community of Dominicans and Haitians living together within uneven and unjust ethno-racial and socioeconomic hierarchies structured by colonial history and US imperial hegemony. Danticat’s choice of setting, protagonist, and pacing center the border town of Alegría and Amabelle, a Haitian woman who lives the majority of her formative years in the Dominican Republic as an integral albeit exploited member of a Dominican family. The novel thus resists two of the primary functions of the 1937 genocide: the marginalization of transnational communities spanning Hispaniola’s borderlands and the naturalization of ethno-racial divisions distinguishing Haitians and Dominicans. Instead, through its portrayal of Amabelle and Alegría, The Farming of Bones emphasizes the complex transnational nature of Hispaniola’s borderlands and reflects what Nadège Clitandre has described as Danticat’s Haitian diasporic imaginary, in which “nation and diaspora, like the local and global, are relational and mutually constitutive, particularly as they connect to the notion of rewriting home in the context of migration experiences and their transnational components.”37 Moreover, as Clitandre insists, the diasporic imaginary evinced in The Farming of Bones “does not adhere to a nation/diaspora binary” nor “efface the circumstances of marginalized individuals and their mundane or dangerous lives.”38 Rather, Danticat’s depictions of Amabelle and Alegría linger in the complexities, ambivalences, and contradictions that emerge when migrant subjects put down roots in inhospitable soil. The name Alegría, for example, offers rich interpretive possibilities about the function of language, place, and kinship in Danticat’s diasporic imaginary. The fictional Spanish toponym highlights the multilingual nature of Amabelle’s community, of the novel itself, and of Hispaniola and its diasporas. Alegría, which means joy, also suggests a prelapsarian happiness fundamental to Amabelle’s sense of belonging in Spanish, in the town, and in Valencia’s household. The genocidal violence the Dominican state and citizenry eventually unleash destroys this precarious sense of diasporic belonging and renders the town’s name devastatingly ironic by the novel’s conclusion. Thus, along with the loss of her partner Sebastien and others killed in the Massacre, Amabelle also grapples with the loss of other aspects of what was once her home—the language, the place, and even the relationships with Dominicans such as Valencia, whom Amabelle once considered more than a mere employer. Through Amabelle and Sebastien, Danticat portrays the complex unevenness of transnational, diasporic subjectivities in Hispaniola’s borderlands. Though they are both from Haiti, Amabelle’s domestic labor and Sebastien’s field work situate them differently Nadège Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 3. 38 Ibid. 37

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in the gendered ethno-racial and socioeconomic hierarchies of Alegría and thus alter their relationships to Valencia and other Dominicans. When Valencia’s husband Pico hurriedly drives home from the military barracks to meet his newborn twins, he runs Sebastien and two co-workers off the road striking and killing Joël, Sebastien and Amabelle’s friend. With this loss still lingering, Sebastien and Amabelle quarrel after Sebastien reacts callously to the death of Pico and Valencia’s son Rafael. Their understated argument quickly turns to Amabelle’s relationship to Valencia and her family: “Who are these people to you?” [Sebastien] asked, pushing at a few of the boils until the blood and pus bubbled to the surface. “Do you think they are your family?” “The señora and her family are the closest to kin I have,” I said. “And me?” he asked. “You too,” I said, wanting to announce that he came first. “We’ll see,” he said.39 The exchange succinctly captures the contradictory dynamics at play in Amabelle’s and Sebastien’s relationships to their community and to one another. Sebastien simultaneously probes his wounded flesh and Amabelle’s loyalties. His gesture subtly underlines that whereas Sebastien’s labor conditions physically manifest in his traumatized body disabuse him of any paternalistic illusions about his relationship to his Dominican employer, Amabelle’s quasikinship with Valencia and her family imbricate her within networks of uneven intimacy from which only the Massacre ultimately extricates her. Once the Massacre commences, Amabelle and Sebastien are separated, Amabelle barely escapes to Haiti, and Sebastien presumably is killed. Decades later, Amabelle returns to Alegría and finds Valencia’s new hacienda. A new Haitian handmaid named Sylvie escorts Amabelle to meet Valencia. When Amabelle encounters Valencia, she sits with her back to Amabelle, turns to meet her, fails to recognize Amabelle, and turns her back on her once more. The reunion thus unfolds like a trial in which Amabelle must prove her identity to Valencia. Amabelle’s arc through this trial parallels Legros’s and Cerin’s articulations of Haitian identity. Similar to Legros, Amabelle first demands recognition of her identity. Yet once Valencia recognizes her, Amabelle realizes, like Cerin, that she no longer wants Valencia’s recognition. Rather than providing closure, relief, or reconciliation, Amabelle and Valencia’s reunion reveals that the uneven intimacy that once connected the two women did not survive the Massacre but has been perpetuated in Valencia’s relationship with her new handmaid Sylvie. Similar to Legros’s demand for recognition of her Afro-Latinidad, Amabelle initially seeks recognition of her identity from Valencia as a reclamation of her past, her existence, and her contributions. After all, Amabelle grew up with Valencia as an integral member of Valencia’s household and helped birth Valencia’s twin children. Also like Legros, Amabelle demands recognition of a past that is not individual but collective. When Valencia initially accuses Amabelle of being an imposter, Amabelle thinks “that she did not recognize me made me feel that I had come back to Alegría and found it had never existed at all.”40 Despite the personal Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 110. Ibid., 294.

39 40

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and intimate nature of their reencounter, Amabelle figures Valencia’s failure to recognize her as the collective loss of the transnational border community of her youth, as if the Massacre destroyed the past itself. Amabelle resists the erasure of her community’s history through storytelling displaying intimate knowledge of Valencia’s past by recounting the details of the birth of Valencia’s son and daughter. The revelation catalyzes the literal and figurative turning point in Amabelle and Valencia’s reunion, but despite this turning of the tide, Amabelle understands the precarity of her situation, that she “had to keep talking,”41 that she may be silenced, cut off at any moment. As Amabelle’s claim for recognition gains momentum, she realizes, “Now it was as if we were doing battle and I knew I must win; she had to recognize me.”42 Yet Amabelle ultimately only gains Valencia’s recognition through narratives that center Valencia and her family. The final proof that Valencia demands in this battle for recognition is a detail from the moment Amabelle entered Valencia’s life. Valencia asks, “Where did we find Amabelle?”43 Though the question may seem, at first glance, to demand of Amabelle testimony equally intimate as that of the birth of Valencia’s children, it does not. Valencia does not elicit an account of the drowning of Amabelle’s parents, the traumatic event that left Amabelle orphaned on the banks of the Massacre River, the memory of which opens the novel and repeats. Rather, the proof that Valencia requires and Amabelle easily provides centers Valencia’s father. “Your father saw me at the side of the Massacre River … Your father, he asked one of the children by the riverside to question me in Kreyòl, asking who I belonged to, and I answered that I belonged to myself.”44 Valencia’s question reveals her perspective of the origin of her relationship with Amabelle: her father found Amabelle. Her father found someone lost. Valencia’s understanding of their first encounter is, in essence, a white savior narrative that paints the actions of Valencia’s father in the best possible light and elides the self-interested acquisition of labor that Amabelle’s adoption also entailed. Though Amabelle recounts her adoption by Valencia’s father in a narrative legible to Valencia and thus ultimately gains the recognition from Valencia that she seeks, she also asserts her independence and freedom both at the time of her adoption and in its retelling. This final detail—Amabelle’s assertion that she belongs to herself despite questions indicating that she must belong to someone else—exemplifies the uneven intimacy at the heart of Amabelle and Valencia’s relationship. Though these two women shared their lives intimately in the past, the uneven power dynamics of the ethno-racial and socioeconomic hierarchies of Alegría that shaped their relationship also inform their knowledge of one another. As her former maidservant, Amabelle knows intimate details of Valencia’s family history, details few others could know. Valencia, on the other hand, is not only ignorant of Amabelle’s intimate history but also incapable of imagining a narrative with Amabelle at the center, a narrative in which Amabelle is her own. Amabelle’s assertion that she belongs to herself from the moment she was adopted until the moment she recounts that adoption parallels the narrative structure of the novel. The Farming of Bones is Amabelle’s story. Despite Valencia’s version of the past, Amabelle is and has always been her own.

Ibid., 295. Ibid. 43 Ibid., 296. 44 Ibid. 41 42

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Once Amabelle gains Valencia’s recognition, she realizes immediately she no longer wants it. When Valencia finally admits to herself that it is indeed Amabelle and sends her handmaid away with a dismissive gesture, Amabelle thinks, “I too wanted to leave at that moment.”45 Living in the luxury of an even more opulent home after the Massacre, served by a younger handmaid scarred by the Massacre like Amabelle, Valencia complains about the lack of loyalty of her servants, offers weak excuses for her husband’s role in the genocide, and admits, in an unconvincing mea culpa, that though she did all she could for victims of the Massacre in Amabelle’s name, she had no option but to choose allegiance to family and nation over the lives of those beaten, mutilated, and killed. Once Valencia finishes unsuccessfully exonerating herself, Amabelle dissolves the lingering, uneven intimacy connecting her and Valencia: “All the time I had known her, we had always been dangling between being strangers and being friends. Now we were neither strangers nor friends. We were like two people passing each other on the street, exchanging a lengthy meaningless greeting. At last I wanted it to end.”46 Far from an optimistic tale of Haitian-Dominican reconciliation, Danticat portrays Amabelle and Valencia’s reunion as a sobering example of the long-term effects of the Massacre, both on its victims and its profiteers. Rather than granting Amabelle a sense of closure, Amabelle’s reunion with Valencia reveals that her former employer never reckoned with her complicity in the massacre and simply replaced Amabelle with Sylvie, another young girl “borrowed … from the slaughter.”47 Amabelle and Sylvie’s relationships to Valencia prove pivotal to the novel’s conclusion. The perpetuation of Valencia’s uneven intimacy with Amabelle in Valencia’s relationship with Sylvie provides a devastating example of the cyclical relationship of exploitation and violence in Hispaniola’s borderlands before and after the 1937 Massacre. Rather than dismissing these intimacies as aberrant, The Farming of Bones encourages reflection on the uneven intimacies that mark all of our lives, consciously or not. As a Latinx Studies scholar with Dominican roots, I  include The Farming of Bones in my scholarship and pedagogy to highlight these uneven intimacies connecting Haitians and Dominicans on the island and in diaspora and to encourage what Lorgia García-Peña describes as “Dominican confrontation with the traumatic historical truth that in 1937, Dominican military and civilian allies killed their own people.”48 I envision reckoning with the uneven intimacies at work in the 1937 Massacre as fundamental to the “ideological, intellectual, ethical, and moral groundwork” that Mayes and Jayaram theorize Dominicans and Dominicanists must undertake to foster more equitable Haitian-Dominican collaboration in Transnational Hispaniola. More broadly, within Latinx Studies, I would argue that the questions Danticat’s The Farming of Bones raises about Latinxs’ participation and complicity in fascist violence policing national borders perhaps never have been more relevant in the US context than now. As deportations, detentions, and family separations of migrants, refugees, and their children reach all-time highs in the United States, more than half of US Customs and Border Patrol officers and nearly one-quarter of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers identify as Latinx.49 Ibid. Ibid., 300. 47 Ibid., 304. 48 García Peña, The Borders of Dominicanidad, 95. 49 Dave Cortez, “I Asked Latinos Why They Joined Immigration Law Enforcement. Now I’m Urging Them to Leave,” USA Today, July 3, 2019. 45 46

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Bibliography Andrews, George Reid. Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Andrews, George Reid. Afro-Latin America: Black Lives, 1600–2000. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. Aparicio, Frances R. “Latinidad/es.” In Keywords for Latina/o Studies, edited by Deborah R. Vargas, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, and Lawrence La Fountain Stokes, 113–16. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Castillo-Garsow, Melissa, ed. ¡Manteca! An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2018. Cerin, Nathalie. “I Am Not Latina, I Am Haitian.” Woy Magazine. http://woymagazine.com/2018/06/19/ not-afro-latino-haitian/. Chancy, Myriam. “Violence, Nation, & Memory: Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” In Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, edited by Martin Munro, 130–46. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Clitandre, Nadège. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Cortez, Dave. “I Asked Latinos Why They Joined Immigration Law Enforcement. Now I’m Urging Them to Leave.” USA Today. July 3, 2019. Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. de la Fuente, Alejandro, and George Reid Andrews, eds. Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. DeGuzmán, María. Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. deOnís, Catalina (Kathleen) M. “What’s in an ‘x’? An Exchange about the Politics of ‘Latinx.’ ” Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures 1, no. 2 (2017): 78–91. Eller, Anne. We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Fierce. Twitter profile. https://twitter.com/fiercebymitu. Fumagalli, María Cristina. On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. García Peña, Lorgia. The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Jean-Charles, Régine Michelle. “ ‘A Border between Geographies of Grief ’: River Crossings and Crossroads between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.” In Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies, edited by April J. Mayes and Kiran C. Jayaram, 81–103. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018. Jiménez Román, Miriam, and Juan Flores. eds. The Afro-Latin@ Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Jones, Jennifer A. “Afro-Latinos: Speaking through Silences and Rethinking the Geographies of Blackness.” In Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction, edited by Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews, 569–614. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Legros, Ayanna. “As a Haitian-American Woman, I Know I’m Afro-Latina but It’s Time for You to Acknowledge It, Too.” Fierce. https://web.archive.org/web/20190224175427/ https://fierce. wearemitu.com/identities/why-i-haitian-woman-identify-as-afro-latina-and-my-sisters-should-too/. Lyons, Bonnie. “An Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” Contemporary Literature 44, no. 2 (2003): 183–98. Maríñez, Sophie. “The Quisqueya Diaspora: The Emergence of Latina/o Literature of Hispaniola.” In The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature, edited by John Morán González and Laura Lomas, 561–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Mayes, April J., and Kiran C. Jayaram, eds., Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018)

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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat Mayes, April J., Yolanda C. Martín, Carlos Ulises Decena, Kiran Jayaram, and Yveline Alexis. “Transnational Hispaniola: Toward New Paradigms in Haitian and Dominican Studies.” Radical History Review 115 (winter 2013): 26–32. McKnight, Kathryn Joy, and Leo J. Garofalo, eds. Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009. Milian, Claudia, ed. “Theorizing LatinX.” Special Issue, Cultural Dynamics 29, no. 3 (August 2017). Oboler, Susanne. Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Ortiz, Ricardo. “Edwidge Danticat’s Latinidad: The Farming of Bones and the Cultivation (of Fields) of Knowledge.” In Aftermaths: Exile, Migration, and Diaspora Reconsidered, edited by Marcus Bullock and Peter Paik, 150–72. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Paulino, Edward. Dividing Hispaniola: The Dominican Republic’s Border Campaign against Haiti, 1930– 1961. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. Ramírez, Dixa. Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Richardson, Jill Tolliver. The Afro-Latin@ Experience in Contemporary American Literature and Culture: Engaging Blackness. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Ricourt, Milagros. The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016. Rivera-Rideau, Petra, Jennifer A. Jones, and Tianna S. Paschel, eds. Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas. New York: Parlgrave Macmillan, 2016. Russ, Elizabeth. “ ‘A Hispaniola Conspiracy’: Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz Performing (in) the Caribbean Public Sphere.” In Reimagining the Caribbean: Conversations among the Creole, English, French, and Spanish Caribbean, edited by Valérie K. Orlando and Sandra Messinger Cypess, 121–40. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. Torres, Lourdes. “Latinx?” Latino Studies 16, no. 3 (October 2018): 283–5. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. “Afro-Latinidad: Phoenix Rising from a Hemisphere’s Racist Flames.” In The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature, edited by John Morán González and Laura Lomas, 276–305. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Woy Magazine. Twitter profile. https://twitter.com/woymagazine.

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CHAPTER 23 “WALK TOO FAR IN EITHER DIRECTION AND PEOPLE SPEAK A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE”: NAVIGATING HISPANIOLA IN DANTICAT’S THE FARMING OF BONES

Ramón Ant. Victoriano-Martínez

The island of Hispaniola with 76,192 square kilometers and approximately 21 million people is one of the most densely populated island in the Caribbean; on top of this complicated demographic factor we have to add that it is home to two independent nations with different languages. Linguistic and historical differences have played a great role in shaping the relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the two nations that share the island. If 1804 (Haitian independence), 1822 (unification of the island under the Haitian flag), and 1844 (Dominican separation) are the three key dates in the nineteenth century, then 1937 (massacre of Haitians and Dominican-Haitians at the border that separate Haiti from the Dominican Republic) is the pivotal moment in the twentieth century. I argue that 2013 (Ruling 168/13) could be the defining moment of the twenty-first century when dealing with the relationship between these two countries. Haitian-Dominican relations are fraught with contradictory instances of comity and confrontation. From 1844 to 1856 the two nations were involved in a series of military encounters that had their origin in the desire of Haitian rulers to keep the island unified under their flag. Once peace was achieved after the Battle of Sabana Larga (Dajabón) in 1856, Dominican intellectuals went on to construct a national and identity discourse based on the displacement of blackness as a category to Haiti and Haitians and the presentation of the Haitian person as an intrinsic and innate enemy of Dominicans.1 However, when the Dominican Republic was annexed back to Spain in 1861, it was Haiti that came to support the fight for Dominican independence during the 1863–5 Restoration War. Haitian fighters and supplies flowed into Dominican territory and helped to defeat the Spanish army in a guerrilla-style war. It should be noted that for the Spanish authorities, Black Dominicans and Black Haitians were indistinguishable regardless of the language they spoke.2 During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the sugar economy expanded in the Dominican Republic, and with the subsequent invasions of Haiti and the Dominican Republic by the United States (1915 and 1916, respectively), the flow of Haitian workers to the eastern part See ­chapter 1, “The Galindo Virgins: Violence, Repetition and the Founding of Dominicanidad,” in The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation and Archives of Contradiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016) by Lorgia García-Peña for a thorough analysis of the strategies use by the nineteenth-century letrados such as César Nicolás Penson and Felix María del Monte to construct the Haitians as the main threat to the Hispanic heritage and whiteness of the Dominican nation. 2 See We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 161, for an account of the arrest of Francisco de los Dolores in 1863. Anne Eller’s book is an excellent historical analysis of this particular period in Haitian-Dominican relations. 1

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of the island accelerated. In 1930, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina conducted a coup d’état against Horacio Vásquez and initiated a dictatorship that would last for thirty years. Trujillo’s regime put forward a Dominican national ideology based on Catholicism, Hispanism, and virulent anti-Haitianism that would expand the work of those nineteenth-century intellectuals mentioned above and enshrined it in textbooks and government propaganda and publications. It is in this context in which the 1937 Massacre took place. Even after that terrible incident, Haiti kept supplying cheap labor that has contributed enormously to Dominican economic growth and generating a vast population of Dominican-Haitians that are kept marginalized and excluded from the benefits of said growth. The legal status of Dominican-Haitians has been at the forefront of national debates during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. From 2004 to 2014, a series of juridical decisions tried to define once and for all the status of persons born in Dominican Republic of Haitian parents. In 2005, the Dominican Supreme Court concluded that the children born of parents who were “illegally” in the country were not Dominicans even though the Dominican constitution recognized the jus soli without qualification at that time. In January 26, 2010, a new Dominican constitution was proclaimed; Article 18 specifically excluded from the Dominican nationality those persons born from “foreigners that were in transit or resided illegally in Dominican territory.”3 Two weeks before the Dominican Republic legislation was passed, on January 12, 2010, at 4:53 pm, a 6.8-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti, destroying the capital, Port-au-Prince, and leaving at least two hundred thousand casualties. The earthquake prompted a wave of Dominican solidarity better exemplified by the case of Sonia Marmolejos, a Dominican mother who left her home to go to the capital to breastfeed Haitian children left orphaned by the tragedy.4 Three years later, on September 23, 2013, the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal (CT) issued Sentence No. 168/13 (“La sentencia”) in which the highest court solved the case of Juliana Dequis, a Dominican-born woman of Haitian descent whose identity card (cédula) had been denied by the Junta Central Electoral.5 This decision deprived Ms. Dequis and thousands like her of previously acquired nationality and citizenship rights, declared that her parents and thousands like them were persons “in transit” even though they have been in the country for decades, and, to add insult to the injury, made this violation retroactive to 1929.6 Edwidge Danticat was one of the many intellectuals that lifted their voices to protest the decision.7 Just as in the works of Julia Álvarez and Junot Díaz, issues of nationality, belonging, citizenship, and bordering of peoples and languages have been present in her work for decades. The 1937 Massacre has been the subject of some of the most important works of literature in the island. Compère Général Soleil (Jacques Stéphen-Alexis, 1955), El Masacre se pasa a pie (Freddy Prestol Castillo, 1973), Le Peuple des terres mêlées (René Philoctète, 1989), and The Farming of Bones (Edwidge Danticat, 1998) are some of the novels that have dealt directly with the massacre. “Parsley,” a poem addressing the massacre by Rita Dove, has been included in See https://www.acnur.org/fileadmin/Documentos/BDL/2010/7328.pdf. See  https://listindiario.com/la-republica/2010/01/17/128354/madre-dominicana-amamanta-ninos-de-haitilesionados. 5 See https://www.tribunalconstitucional.gob.do/consultas/secretar%C3%ADa/sentencias/tc016813/. 6 See Article 11 of the 1966 Dominican Constitution, which was the one in effect when Ms. Dequis was born: https:// www.acnur.org/fileadmin/Documentos/BDL/2012/8872.pdf. 7 See the op-ed signed by Mark Kurlansky, Julia Álvarez, Edwidge Danticat, and Junot Díaz: https://www.latimes.com/ opinion/op-ed/la-xpm-2013-nov-10-la-oe-kurlansky-haiti-dominican-republic-citizensh-20131110-story.html. 3 4

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numerous anthologies since its publication in her book Museum (1983). Two of these works, El Masacre se pasa a pie and The Farming of Bones, have been analyzed as representative of some kind of testimonial literature regarding what took place in October 1937–8.8 Here I would like to tease out some of the premonitory aspects presented by Danticat in The Farming of Bones regarding the condition of Haitians and, specially, Dominican-Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Danticat’s novel is grounded in a solid work of archival and historical research and this, plus the high quality of the prose, is what has contributed to the exalted place that the book occupies in the canon that stemmed from the massacre. In her novel the Haitian-American author not only describes the diegetic present but also incorporates realities that would not pass in full until some fifteen to twenty years after publication; and the vicissitudes narrated by some anonymous characters in the novel are replicated by the lived reality of DominicanHaitians at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Farming of Bones takes place in the fictional border town of Alegría. In this town Haitians and Dominican-Haitians coexist in a fragile relationship marked by mistrust and denial of basic rights: “I pushed my son out of my body here, in this country,” one woman said in a mix of Alegrían Kreyòl and Spanish, the tangled language of those who always stuttered as they spoke, caught as they were on the narrow ridge between two nearly native tongues. “My mother too pushed me out of her body here. Not me, not my son, not one of us has ever seen the other side of the border.” Still they won’t put our birth papers in our palms so my son can have knowledge placed into his head by a proper educator in a proper school.9 These anonymous characters, the woman and her son, are people exactly like Juliana Dequis: the alleged “illegality” of her parents has been transmitted to them.10 The lack of “birth papers” excluded thousands of children from accessing education in the Dominican Republic until a 2004 resolution by the then secretary of education, Milagros Ortiz Bosch, allowed children past sixth grade to be registered without a birth certificate. This practice has continued ever since under various ministers.11 The situation of school children of Haitian descent was also depicted by Freddy Prestol Castillo in You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot, a book written in 1937 while Prestol was part of the juridical cover up of the massacre and not published until 1973: See c­hapter  3 of my book Rayanos y Dominicanyorks:  la dominicanidad del siglo XXI (Pittsburgh, PA:  Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2014) for an analysis of both texts as different types of testimonies. 9 Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones: A Novel (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 69; emphasis added. 10 Ruling 168/13 in its second article decides:  8

To reject, on the merits of the case, the above mentioned appeal, and consequently, to revoke the above mentioned Sentence No. 473/12, since the appellant, Ms. Juliana Dequis (or Deguis) Pierre, even though was born on national territory, is the daughter of foreign citizens in transit, which deprives her of the right to be granted the Dominican citizenship, according to the norm prescribed in article 11.1 of the Constitution of the Republic approved on November 29, 1966, in force at the moment of her birth. (98; emphasis added) Special mention should be made of Circular No. 14–2013 from Minister Carlos Amarante Baret, dated November 7, 2013, addressed to all principals instructing them explicitly to register all children “declared or not” (to be declared is to possess a birth certificate). The government was then in the middle of an international scandal due to Sentence 168/13. 11

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One day, an order from the Ministry of Education, a capricious order as all those from that department were, sent her to the distant frontier to impart classes to the blacks of Haitian origin, the new serfs who, since they had penetrated our lands, now had to be considered Dominicans because they were born on our soil.12 The Dominican-Haitians of Alegría are de facto stateless persons: the Dominican state ignores them and the Haitian state doesn’t even know that they exist: “not one of us has ever seen the other side of the border.” If Dominican-Haitians are presented as anonymous stateless victims, the names of the Dominican characters highlight the ideological place that they occupied in the universe created by Danticat. The first Dominican character that we encounter is Señora Valencia:  “Señora Valencia was lying on her bed, her skin raining sweat and the bottom part of her dress soaking in baby fluid. Her waters had broken.”13 The Dominican characters’ speech reproduces the official and traditional discourse of national identity. When Dr. Javier looks to Rosalinda, one of the twins that Señora Valencia delivers, he says, “She had a little charcoal behind the ears, this one,”14 to which Papi, Señora Valencia’s father, responds immediately, “It must be from her father’s family” Papi interjected, his fingertips caressing the skin of his sun-scorched white face. “My daughter was born in the capital of this country. Her mother was of pure Spanish blood. She can trace her family to the Conquistadores, the line of El Almirante, Cristóbal Colón. And I, myself, was born near a seaport in Valencia, Spain.”15 Papi’s rhetorical displacement of blackness to the Dominican side of his daughter’s marriage is similar to that of Dominican elites in the nineteenth century that attributed Blackness exclusively to Haiti and Haitians. Señora Valencia, on her part, at the moment of seeing the twins for the first time, describe them to Amabelle as follows: “See what we’ve brought forth together, my Spanish prince and my Indian princess … She will steal many hearts, my Rosalinda. Look at that profile. The profile of Anacaona, a true Indian queen.”16 Señora Valencia parrots the nineteenth-century discourse on Dominican identity that identifies the inhabitants of the nation as a product of the “mestizaje” of “Indians” and Spaniards, bypassing the African element. This discourse finds his literary representation in Enriquillo (1882) by Manuel de Js. Galván where this mix becomes the foundational fiction upon which the nation was to be imagined and narrated for decades to come.17 If Señora Valencia is a product of Spaniards, her husband, Pico Duarte, is presented as the quintessential Dominican person:  “Señor Pico Duarte bore the name of one of the fathers of Dominican independence, a name that he had shared with the tallest mountain on the Freddy Prestol Castillo, You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 54; emphasis added. 13 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 5. 14 Danticat reproduces here the Dominican saying:  “Tener el negro detrás de la oreja” (To have the black behind the ears). 15 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 18. 16 Ibid., 29, emphasis added. 17 See Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, vol. 7 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 12

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island until recently, when it was rechristened Pico Trujillo after the Generalissimo … With his honey-almond skin and charcoal eyes.”18 We can see in the description of the skin of the Dominican soldier named after the father of the nation (“honey-almond”) why Papi will blame his son-in-law for the “charcoal behind the ears” of his granddaughter. Pico Duarte not only bears a uber-Dominican name but also harbors a deep hatred of Haitians; when he finds out that his wife has offered coffee to the Haitian workers, he reacts with cold fury: “He did not scold her, but once he discovered that she had used their imported orchid-patterned tea set, he took the set out to the yard and, launching them against the cement walls of the house latrines, he shattered the cups and saucers, one by one.”19 This episode could be read as well as an instance in which a hint of self-hatred is manifested: his skin color marks him as really close to those he despises. The destruction of the tea set is a symbol of his desire of distancing himself from that particular phenotype. Rafael L. Trujillo was known for using creams and makeup to appear lighter than he really was; Pico Duarte can only smash cups and saucers.20 The Dominican people move from smashing cups and saucers to smashing persons in the most wrenching scene in the book. Amabelle and his companions trying to escape from the killings are victims of racist attack in Dajabón, a city located in the northern part of the borderlands and where Trujillo gave the order that started the October massacre in 1937; Dajabón was then and now the major point of economic exchange between Haiti and Dominican Republic.21 Danticat recreates the horror with a detailed account of the attack perpetrated by common villagers, one that started with beatings and stuffing of mouths with parsley and culminated with the death by machete of Haitian man: One of the other boys grabbed Yve’s machete … and plunged it into Tibon’s back … The others kneed Tibon in the ribs and watched him fall to the ground. Tibon turned to his side and closed his eyes … Now the other circled Yves and me. La Orquesta Presidente Trujillo started playing the popular hymn “Compadre Pedro Juan.” The crowd cheered as they watched one of the youngest player squeeze his accordion while holding it over his head.22 The fact that this attack is accompanied by the music of “Compadre Pedro Juan” interpreted by “Orquesta Presidente Trujillo” is a damning allegory of collective guilt and complicity.23 “Compadre Pedro Juan” is the most famous merengue song in the country and has been Ibid., 35. Ibid., 116. 20 See Lauren H.  Derby’s c­hapter  5, “Clothes Make the Man,” in The Dictator’s Seduction:  Politics and Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), for full account of Trujillo’s obsession with his personal appearance. 21 See Marion Werner’s Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean (Hoboken: WileyBlackwell, 2015), especially ­chapter 5, “Reworking Coloniality through the Haitian-Dominican Border,” for an in-depth analysis of how both nations have been affected by the forces of global capitalism and the multiple geopolitical changes in the region during the last three decades. 22 Ibid., 192. 23 “Orquesta Presidente Trujillo” was brought to Santo Domingo in 1936 when the city was renamed Ciudad Trujillo and it was the de facto official orchestra of the dictator. Directed by Luis Alberti, the founder of the so-called merengue clásico, “Orquesta Presidente Trujillo” recorded the first version of “Compadre Pedro Juan” in 1937. See Peter L. Manuel, Kenneth M. Bilby, and Michael D. Largey, Caribbean Currents:  Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006), 122. 18 19

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called “the second national anthem.” Its preeminent place in the Dominican imaginary has been noted by various critics; for example, Juan Otero Garabís in an astute reading grounded in Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions states: “ ‘Compadre Pedro Juan’ … reproduces the representation of generative procreation through heterosexual couplings as an allegory of the consolidation of the nation.”24 If we follow Otero Garabís and assume “Compadre Pedro Juan” as the musical representation of Dominicanness, we can see how it could be read that Danticat assigns a collective responsibility in the massacre to the Dominican people. The attack takes place while Trujillo is still inside the church in Dajabón and at the end of the mass when the dictator is leaving the band plays the national anthem. This way the three main elements that are in play in the massacre are depicted here: The irrational hatred of Haitians, merengue, and trujillista nationalism. This analogy is taken further when the narrator makes explicit the link between the use of parsley for bodily cleansing and the ethnic one attempted by the Trujillo regime: “We used parsley for our food, our teas, our baths, to cleanse our insides as well as our outsides. Perhaps the Generalissimo in some larger order was trying to do the same for his country.”25 “Limpiar el país de haitianos” (Cleaning the country by getting rid of Haitians) is a common phrase in nationalistic circles.26 However, Danticat presents a holistic picture of the horror and notes how ethnic Black Dominicans were also victims of the racially motivated attacks and dispel the notion of two different phenotypically different populations: “ ‘Calmate, hombre,’ mumbled the Dominican. He was black like the nun who came to re-dress his wounds. He’d be mistaken for one of us and had received a machete blow across the back of his neck for it. There were many like him in the room, I was told.”27 Danticat’s indictment of the Dominican people is also validated by the historical fact that besides the Dominican military, civilians, administrative, and judiciary personnel also participated in the killings and the subsequent cover-up.28 Many Dominican historians appeal to the worldwide historical context of the border massacre as a possible explanation of it.29 Señora Valencia, in a conversation with Amabelle in 1961, after Trujillo has been assassinated, tells her, “ ‘We lived in a time of massacres.’ She breathed out loudly. ‘Before Papi died, all he did was listen on his radio to stories of different kinds of … cortes, from all over the world. It is a marvel that some of us are still here, to wait and hope to die a natural death.’ ”30

Juan Otero Garabís, Nación y Ritmo: “Descargas” desde El Caribe (San Juan, P.R: Ediciones Callejón, 2000), 231. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 203. 26 The insistence of cleanliness as a marker of separation between Dominican and Haitians as well as the language of disease and infection is a common trope in Dominican Republic. Haiti as a place of origin and spreading of contamination has been present since the earthquake of 2010. In Dominican literature this image is still prevalent in recent works; see: Rita Indiana Hernández, La mucama de Ominculé (Madrid: Periférica, 2015, translated as Tentacle (Sheffield: And Other Stories, 2018)); Juan Carlos Mieses, El día de todos (Santo Domingo: Editorial Alfaguara, 2009), and Junot Díaz, “Monstro” (New Yorker, June 4, 2012). 27 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 217, emphasis mine. One of the novels that deal with the massacre and its aftermath is René Philoctète’s Peuple des terres mêlées (translated as Massacre River, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: New Directions, 2005)); the title, and the novel, emphasizes the inextricable mixing of the two populations. 28 See Prestol Castillo’s testimonial novel You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot for the role played by him and other members of the Trujillo judicial apparatus in setting up trials and sentences with the only purpose of placating the international pressure brought down by Mexico and the United States. The people sentenced in those hearings gave the appearance of a border conflict with its origin in some cattle and land dispute among peasants. 29 See Bernardo Vega’s Trujillo y Haití, volumen 1 ((Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1988), 318–20) for an analysis of the influence of Nazi and falagista ideology in Trujillo’s government and thinking during this time. 30 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 300. 24 25

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Eighty years later we are back in a time of rising nationalism and neofascist ideologues are in power in many important nations in the world. Legislations are being drafted to exclude people from being part of the nation-state in which they are situated. As we have indicated above, Sentence 168/13 also ordered an audit of all registries from 1929 to identify “irregularly registered aliens” in them and, once identified, to proceed with the “regularization” of such “aliens.” This decision deprived at least two hundred thousand Dominicans of Haitian descent of their nationality. Judicial rulings of this nature do not occur in a vacuum. They are the product of deep-seated cultural, psychological, historical, and political situations and positions. In this particular case, it should be highlighted that for the last fifteen years, the issue of migration, which in the Dominican Republic is really the issue of Haitian migration, has been in the discourse and political hands of Fuerza Nacional Progresista (FNP), a minuscule political party that got less than 2 percent of the votes in the last three general elections. The FNP, with strong ties to the right-wing Catholic ideology espoused by the Opus Dei, has been able to successfully put forward its xenophobic agenda. The secretary general of FNP, José Ricardo Taveras, was Director General of Migration from 2011 to 2015. The stranglehold of the FNP of migration issues produced catastrophic effects in the treatment of Haitian migrants. Decree 631-11, for example, put into effect the Regulation of Application of the General Law of Migration No. 285-4, which in its Article 131 establishes the deportation of all of those declared “illegal aliens.” Therefore, one of the immediate effects of Ruling 168/13 was to mark thousands of Dominican citizens for deportation from their country of birth. The ruling of the CT was the final stage of a Byzantine juridical battle, one that could have the potential of opening a constitutional crisis if the Executive branch of the state decided to disobey the rule. Decisions rendered by the CT are “definitive and irrevocable and they are binding precedents for all public powers and all of the organs of the State.”31 The Dominican government wholeheartedly supported the ruling and, when charged with “civil genocide” both nationally and abroad, responded by proclaiming its strict adherence to the rule of Law and demanding respect of Dominican sovereignty.32 The CT decision was a 11–2 vote, and it is important to delve into it as it can be interpreted as the logical conclusion of the dispossession of nationality and privation of human rights that Danticat presented fifteen years earlier. The two dissenting votes were issued by Judges Katia Miguelina Jiménez Martínez and Ana Isabel Bonilla Hernández. One of the most troublesome aspects of the ruling and one that raises the concerns of Caribbean peoples in the region and diaspora is the redefinition of Dominican nationality that the CT undertakes in one of the paragraphs of the sentence: §1.1.4. In general, nationality is considered a juridical and political tie that binds a person to a State; but in a more technical and precise way is not only a juridical tie but also a sociological and political one whose conditions are defined and established by the State. It is a juridical tie because from it multiple rights and civil obligations come forth; sociological because it entails the existence of a group of historical linguistic, racial

Article 184, Dominican Republic Constitution, 2015. See https://www.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/laws/es/do/do070es. pdf. 32 See the statement by César Pina Toribio, the then Juridical Counsellor of the Executive Power:  https://www. diariolibre.com/actualidad/pina-toribio-cree-que-deben-realizar-un-plan-nacional-de-regularizacin-HMDL404892. 31

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and geopolitical traits, among many, that conform and sustain a particular idiosyncrasy and collective aspirations; and political, because, essentially, gives access to the powers inherent to citizenship, meaning the possibility of electing and being elected to discharge public functions in the government of the State.33 For the first time, the Dominican Republic defines, officially, Dominican identity in terms of racial and linguistic identifiers. This takes the whole issue of belonging back to the nineteenth century and the racial theories of exclusion in vogue at that time. The majority’s drafting of that paragraph seems to have as a source one of the most celebrated books on Dominican identity, El ocaso de la nación dominicana written by the virulent anti-Haitian writer Manuel Núñez. Núñez quotes liberally from writers such as Ernest Renan (1823–1892), Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889), and Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) to affirm that, for example, “Dominicans went to independence [sic] for strictly cultural reasons. The occupation is manifested as a linguistic oppression and hostility,”34 or more relevant to our discussion: “With the Haitians arrive also their ‘cultural worldview,’ their life styles, their work habits, mores, their biological heredity, when they graft themselves to the Dominican ethnic trunk.”35 Nature images and metaphors have long been used to dehumanize the Haitian person in Dominican traditional national discourse.36 Language, on the other hand, has been at the forefront of the construction of differences between Haitians and Dominicans. Since it is very difficult to distinguish a Haitian from a Dominican at a phenotypical level, language becomes the marker. A  Dominican saying states, “el que sea prieto, que hable claro” (“he who is black, better speak clearly”), the saying recognizes Blackness as a commonality at the same time that constructs Spanish language37 spoken with Dominican accent (“hablar claro”) as the definitive proof of belonging. This particular linguistic test was used for decades at the border region between the two countries to distinguish which side people belong to. According to Richard Lee Turits, Many soldiers demanded that those captured utter perejil (parsley), tijera (scissors), or various other words with the letter “r.” Supposed inability to pronounce the Spanish “r” was then represented as an indicator of Haitian identity. This practice may have been borrowed from local guards who had used it in the past to determine whether ethnic Haitians would be required to pay the annual migration tax (as records of birthplace were not necessarily or easily available). Anyone who pronounced the “r” clearly was presumed to have been born in the country and would not be taxed.38

Sentencia 168/13, Tribunal Constitucional de la República Dominicana. Emphasis added. Núñez, El ocaso de la nación dominicana (Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa y Omega, 1990), 27. 35 Ibid., 138. 36 Joaquín Balaguer in La isla al revés affirms: “The excess of the Haitian population therefore constitutes a growing menace to Dominican Republic. It is so for a biological reason: the black, abandoned to his instincts and without the brake that relative elevated standard of living, imposes in all the countries the reproduction [sic], he multiplies himself with a speed almost similar to the vegetable species” (La isla al revés: Haití y el destino dominicano (Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio, 1995), 36). 37   38 Richard Lee Turits, “A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed: The 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 3 (2002): 589–635. 33 34

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The Haitian character Amabelle prefers to call the herb by its Spanish name: “I would go back with Odette to say her ‘pési’ to the Generalissimo, for I would not know how to say it myself. My way of saying it would always be—however badly—‘perejil.’ For somewhere in me, I still believe that perhaps one simple word could have saved all of our lives.”39 This can be read not only as a way to save lives but also as a way to belong to a determinate side of the border. Amabelle’s decision of calling parsley “perejil” signals a desire to be included in the narrative of the Dominican nation, the soil where she grew up. By contrast, Juliana Dequis, a Black Dominican born in Dominican soil and stripped of said nationality, has a Dominican Spanish accent that should have marked her as having those “linguistic traits” that eleven judges deem all Dominicans to possess.40 We could use the same logic of the eleven judges that deemed Juliana Dequis a non-Dominican and apply the principle of inter communia (making the ruling on one person applicable to a group of people in the same situation) to demonstrate that by this ruling the Dominican state represented by the three branches of government (Executive, Judiciary, and Legislative) deprived its own citizens of nationality and citizenship based on xenophobic and borderline racist motives and justifications. Juliana Dequis speaks clearly (habla claro) but she is Black (es prieta) and with a Haitian last name; therefore, for the traditional nationalistic discourse, she cannot be Dominican. Moreover, and as Judge Bonilla Hernández writes in her dissenting opinion, her link to the soil is independent of her ancestry or the legal status of her parents: “The presentation of their documents [Ms. Dequis’s parents] … is fundamentally the proof of their filial relation to her, because as foreigners they do not have to proof their link to the country, because what is relevant for the Jus Soli system, is that the a boy or a girl have been born on the territory of the State.”41 Danticat’s novel, as we can see from the speech of the anonymous woman quoted above, presents a situation that, at the moment of writing and the diegetic moment of the action, was happening de facto but in 2013 became a legal and final reality making people like Juliana Dequis and her community foreigners in their own land: “My son, this one who was born here in this land, has no papers in his palms to say where he belongs … You have no papers in your hands, they do with you what they want.”42 To have “papers,” that most basic of human rights, have been denied to thousands of Dominican-born persons simply because their parents are undocumented foreigners. After a lot of international pressure, the Dominican government tried to right the wrong done by the CT and issued a series of regulations, laws, and decrees that have had the effect of creating a group of people whose nationality was restored, among them Juliana Dequis, and another group that has been asked to declare themselves foreigners in the only land that they have ever known, wait for two years, and then apply to be “naturalized.”43 Two decades after its publication, The Farming of Bones continues to interpellate its readers with its powerful indictment of the Dominican people at a specific time in history, but most

Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 264; emphasis added. See this interview with Juliana Dequis in the one-year anniversary of the sentence:  https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=94ZFsANw1NU. 41 Sentencia 168/13, Tribunal Constitucional de la República Dominicana, 109. 42 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 70. 43 See Bridget Wooding, “Haitian Immigrants and Their Descendants Born in the Dominican Republic,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, January 24, 2018. Available online:  https://oxfordre.com/ latinamericanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-474 (accessed September 5, 2019). 39 40

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importantly, it continues to be a reminder of the necessity to bear witness to the violations of human rights that governments and their agents conduct against the most vulnerable as it happened in September 2013 with Ruling 168/13.

Bibliography Alexis, Jacques S. Compère Général Soleil: Roman. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. Balaguer, Joaquín. La isla al revés: Haití y el destino dominicano. Editora Corripio, 1995. Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones: A Novel. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Derby, Lauren H. The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Dove, Rita. Museum: Poems. London: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1983. Eller, Anne. We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. García-Peña, Lorgia. The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Manuel, Peter L., Kenneth M. Bilby, and Michael D. Largey. Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006. Otero Garabís, Juan. Nación y Ritmo: “Descargas” desde El Caribe. San Juan, P.R: Ediciones Callejón, 2000. Philoctète, René. Massacre River. Translated by Linda Coverdale. New York: New Directions, 2005. Prestol Castillo, Freddy. You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Vol. 7. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Turits, Richard Lee. Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Turits, Richard Lee. “A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed: The 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic.” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 3 (2002): 589–635. Wooding, Bridget. “Haitian Immigrants and Their Descendants Born in the Dominican Republic.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, January 24, 2018. https:// oxfordre.com/latinamericanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/ acrefore-9780199366439-e-474.

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Books Authored Fiction Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), an Oprah Book Club selection Krik? Krak! (1996), a National Book Award finalist The Farming of Bones (1998) The Dew Breaker (2004) Claire of the Sea Light (2013) Everything Inside (2019)

Nonfiction After the Dance (2002) Brother, I’m Dying (2007) Create Dangerously (2010) Tent Life: Haiti (2011) The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (2017)

Children and Young Adult Behind the Mountains (2002) Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490 (2005) Eight Days: A Story of Haiti (2010) The Last Mapou (with Édouard Duval-Carrié) (2013) Mama’s Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation (2015) Untwine: A Novel (2015) My Mommy Medicine (2019)

Books Edited The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (2003) Haiti Noir (2010) Best American Essays 2011 Haiti Noir 2 (2013)

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Literary Prizes 1994 Winner, Fiction Award from the Black Caucus of the American Literary Association for Breath, Eyes, Memory 1995 Winner, Woman of Achievement Award from Barnard College 1995 Winner, Pushcart Prize 1995 Nominee, National Book Award nomination for Krik? Krak! 1996 Winner, Twenty Best Young American Novelists by Granta magazine for Breath, Eyes, Memory 1999 Winner, Twenty Best Young Fiction Writers in America by the New Yorker 2004 Fellow, Flannan Foundation Fellowship 2005 Story Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award finalist for The Dew Breaker 2005 Anisfield-Wolf Book award for The Dew Breaker 2007 National Book Award finalist for Brother, I’m Dying 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Brother, I’m Dying 2008 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Brother, I’m Dying 2009 Winner, MacArthur Fellow 2017 Winner, Ford Foundation, Art of Change Fellowship 2018 Winner, Prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature 2020 Winner, Vilcek Prize for Literature

Published in the New Yorker “Without Inspection.” New Yorker, May 14, 2018. Available online: . “Trump Reopens an Old Wound for Haitians.” New Yorker, December 29, 2017. Available online: . “A New Chapter for the Disastrous United Nations Mission in Haiti.” New Yorker, October 19, 2017. Available online: . “Sunrise, Sunset.” New Yorker, September 18, 2017. Available online: . “DACA, Hurricane Irma, and Young Americans’ Dreams Deferred.” New Yorker, September 6, 2017. Available online: . “The Mysterious Power of Near-Death Experiences.” New Yorker, July 10, 2017. Available online: . “A Harrowing Turning Point for Haitian Immigrants.” New Yorker, May 12, 2017. Available online: . “Poetry in a Time of Protest.” New Yorker, January 31, 2017. Available online: . “Hurricane Matthew’s Devastating Toll in Haiti.” New Yorker, October 6, 2016. Available online: . “James Baldwin’s Hypothetical Country.” New Yorker, February 25, 2016. Available online: . “Sweet Micky and the Sad Déjà Vu of Haiti’s Presidential Elections.” New Yorker, December 3, 2015. Available online: . “The Long Legacy of Occupation in Haiti.” New Yorker, July 28, 2015. Available online: . 418

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Bibliography of Writings by Edwidge Danticat “Black Bodies in Motion and in Pain.” New Yorker, June 22, 2015. Available online: . “Fear of Deportation in the Dominican Republic.” New Yorker, June 17, 2015. Available online: . “Enough Is Enough.” New Yorker, November 26, 2014. Available online: . “Gabriel García Márquez: An Appreciation.” New Yorker, April 18, 2014. Available online: . “Flight.” New Yorker, September 12, 2011. Available online: . “A Year and a Day.” New Yorker, January 17, 2011. Available online: . “After the Collapse” (also published as “A Little While”). New Yorker, February 1, 2010. Available online: . “Ghosts.” New Yorker, November 24, 2008. Available online: . “Crabs.” New Yorker, June 9, 2008. Available online: . “Marie Micheline. A Life in Haiti.” New Yorker, June 11, 2007. Available online: . “Reading Lessons.” New Yorker, January 10, 2005. Available online: . “Seven.” New Yorker, October 1, 2001. Available online: . “Water Child.” New Yorker, September 11, 2000. Available online: . “The Book of the Dead.” New Yorker, June 21, 1999. Available online: .

Online Resources Edwidge Danticat’s website: www.edwidgedanticat.com MacArthur Foundation, Fellows Program: Edwidge Danticat, https://www.macfound.org/fellows/49/ news/?page=2#newsfeed The Edwidge Danticat Society: http://www.edwidgedanticatsociety.org/

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Special Issues of Journals “Edwidge Danticat.” Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, vols. 6–7, no. 2-1, 2005, pp. 139–249.

Monographs on Danticat Clitandre, Nadège T. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018.

Monographs with Chapters on Danticat Alexander, Simone A. James. African Diasporic Women’s Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014, 2016. Anatol, Giselle Liza. The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the CircumCaribbean and African Diaspora. American Literatures Initiative. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Ards, Angela A. Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era (Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015, 2016. Bellamy, Maria Rice. Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Boisseron, Bénédict. Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014. Bouson, J. Brooks. Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings. New York: State University of New York Press, 2009. Braziel, Jana Evans. Duvalier’s Ghosts: Race, Diaspora, and U.S. Imperialism in Haitian Literatures. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010, 2017. Brown-Rose, J. A. Critical Nostalgia and Caribbean Migration. Caribbean Studies 23. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Brown, Caroline A. The Black Female Body in American Literature and Art: Performing Identity. Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature 5. New York: Routledge, 2012. Chancy, Myriam J. A. From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012. Dawes, James. The Novel of Human Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Freeman, John. How to Read a Novelist. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013. Fuchs, Rebecca. Caribbeanness as a Global Phenomenon: Junot Díaz, Edwidge Danticat, and Cristina García. Inter-American Studies/Estudios Interamericanos: Cultures-Societies-History/CulturasSociedades-Historia (Inter-American Studies/Estudios Interamericanos: Cultures-Societies-History/

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat Culturas-Sociedades-Historia) 12. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT); Bilingual/ Bilingue, 2014. Gadsby, Meredith. Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Gerber, Nancy and Andrea O’Reilly (foreword). Portrait of the Mother-Artist: Class and Creativity in Contemporary American Fiction. Lanham: Lexington, 2003. Giles, James Richard. The Spaces of Violence. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson. Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights. New Directions in International Studies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Golden, Marita. The Word: Black Writers Talk about the Transformative Power of Reading and Writing. New York: Broadway, 2011. Gyssels, Kathleen. Passes Et Impasses Dans Le Comparatisme Postcolonial Caribéen: Cinq Traverses. Bibliothèque de Littérature Générale et Comparée (BLGC) 86. Paris: Champion, 2010. Kalisa, Chantal. Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Loichot, Valérie. The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Machado Sáez, Elena. Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction. New World Studies (NWS). Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Maeseneer, Rita De. “El Corte”: Visiones de René Fortunato, Mario Vargas Llosa, Freddy Prestol Castillo y Edwidge Danticat. Liège, Belgium: Presses universitaires de Liège, 2019. Mardorossian, Carine M. Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism. New World Studies (NWS). Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Marouan, Maha. Witches, Goddesses, & Angry Spirits: The Politics of Spiritual Liberation in African Diaspora Women’s Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Mehta, Brinda. Notions of Identity, Diaspora, and Gender in Caribbean Women’s Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Morris, Susana M. Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Munro, Martin. Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrière, Danticat. Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures): 7. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Naimou, Angela. Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures Amid the Debris of Legal Personhood. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015, 2017. Pellicer-Ortín, Silvia, and Julia Tofantshuk. Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing. London: Routledge, 2018. Pitt, Kristin E. Body, Nation, and Narrative in the Americas. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pulitano, Elvira. Transnational Narratives from the Caribbean: Diasporic Literature and the Human Experience. Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature. New York: Routledge, 2016. Railton, Ben. History and Hope in American Literature: Models of Critical Patriotism. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Shemak, April. Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse. American Literatures Initiative. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Suárez, Lucía M. The Tears of Hispaniola: Haitian and Dominican Diaspora Memory. New World Diasporas. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. Tan, Kathy-Ann. Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination. Series in Citizenship Studies. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015. Valkeakari, Tuire. Precarious Passages: The Diasporic Imagination in Contemporary Black Anglophone Fiction. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. Valovirta, Elina. Sexual Feelings: Reading Anglophone Caribbean Women’s Writing through Affect. Cross/Cultures: Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English (CrossC) 174. New York: Rodopi, 2014.

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat Weir-Soley, Donna Aza. Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009, 2017.

Edited Collections on Danticat Joseph, Celucien L., Suchismita Banerjee, Marvin E. Hobson, and Danny M. Hoey, Jr., eds. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Edwidge Danticat. New York: Routledge, 2019. Munro, Martin, ed. Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010.

Edited Collections with Chapters on Danticat Clark, Ramsey, ed. Haiti: A Slave Revolution: 200 Years After 1804. World View Forum, 2010. De Hernandez, Jennifer Browdy, eds. Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean. Boston: South End Press, 2003. Fievre, M. J. ed. So Spoke the Earth: The Haiti I Knew, the Haiti I Know, the Haiti I Want to Know. South Florida: Women Writers of Haitian Descent, 2012. Munro, Martin, and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, eds. Echoes of the Haitian Revolution, 1804–2004. Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2008. Munro, Martin, and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, eds. Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006.

Dissertations with Chapters on Danticat Barchant, Marie. “Translating the Body in Violent Tongues: The ‘Sacrificial Body’ in Narratives by Contemporary Women Writers and Performance Artists.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 68, no. 8, Feb. 2008. Beauclair, Steve. “Hauntings of Haitian History: Marking Political Terror in the Writing of Edwidge Danticat.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 70, no. 7, Jan. 2010, pp. 2523–4. Bowman, Lapétra Rochelle. “Trans-Colonial Historiographic Praxis: Dis/Memberment, Memory, and Third-Space Chicana, Latina, and Caribbean Feminist Embodied Re/Membrance.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 71, no. 5, Nov. 2010, pp. 1628–9. Braziel, Jana Evans. “Nomadism, Diaspora and Deracination in Contemporary Migrant Literatures.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 61, no. 7, Jan. 2001, pp. 2697–8. Clitandre, Nadège Tanite. “Haiti Re-Membered: Exile, Diaspora, and Transnational Imaginings in the Writings of Edwidge Danticat and Myriam Chancy.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 71, no. 6, Dec. 2010, pp. 2121–2. Connolly-Shaffer, Patricia K. “Staging Cross-Border (Reading) Alliances: Feminist Polyvocal Testimonials at Work.” Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 74, no. 4, Oct. 2013. Cope, Robyn. “Between Us There Is Bread and Salt: Food in the Novels of Edwidge Danticat, Gisele Pineau, and Lakshmi Persaud.” Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 74, no. 10, Apr. 2014. Edwards, Allen George, Jr. “Trois Romancières Noires, Trois Similitudes Dans Les Représentations Fictives De La Condition Féminine en Afrique Et Aux Antilles.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 64, no. 12, June 2004.

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat Edwards, Whitney B. “ ‘Migration Trauma’: Diasporan Pathologies in Austin Clarke’s ‘The Meeting Point,’ Edwidge Danticat’s, ‘The Dew Breaker,’ and Cristina García’s ‘Dreaming in Cuban’.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 70, no. 3, Sept. 2009, pp. 877–8. Flores-Rodriguez, Daynali. “Towards a Trans-Caribbean Poetics: A New Aesthetics of Power and Resistance.” Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 73, no. 1, July 2012. Fry, Leah Meagan. “Secrets of the Bush: Abortion in Caribbean Women’s Literary Imagination.” Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 78, no. 5, Nov. 2017. Grant, Wendy Elizabeth. “ ‘Qui Chile Sa?’: The Representation of Intergenerational Relationships in Caribbean Women’s Writing: Merle Collins, Lakshmi Persaud, Edwidge Danticat, and Paule Marshall.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 70, no. 7, Jan. 2010. Hewett, Heather Anne. “Diaspora’s Daughters: Buchi Emecheta, Julie Dash, Edwidge Danticat and the Remapping of Mother Africa.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 62, no. 7, Jan. 2002. Johnson, Linda Ann. “Claiming/Reclaiming Africana Womanist Literary Texts throughout the African Diaspora.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 67, no. 11, May 2007. Kabwila Kapasula, Jessie Zondiwe. “Transnational Feminist Agency in African and Afro-Diasporic Fiction and Film.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 71, no. 10, Apr. 2011. Karash-Eastman, Jennifer Lynn. “The Trialectics of Transnational Migrant Women’s Literature in the Writing of Edwidge Danticat and Julia Alvarez.” Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 77, no. 1, July 2016. Kilinski, April Conley. “Embodying History: Women, Representation, and Resistance in Twentieth Century Southern African and Caribbean Literature.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 67, no. 10, Apr. 2007. Kuryloski, Lauren. “Textual Deviants: Women, Madness, and Embodied Performance in Late Twentieth-Century American Literature and Photography.” Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 78, no. 5, Nov. 2017. Lamont, Corey. “Transnationalism and Diasporic Belongings: (Dis)Recognition, Re-Cognition, and the Body in Selected Afro-Caribbean Women’s Narratives.” Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 77, no. 7, Apr. 2017. Latchman, Renee S. “The Impact of Immigration on Mother-Daughter Relationships and Identity Development in Six Novels of the Caribbean Diaspora.” Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 78, no. 3, Sept. 2017. Lespinasse, Patricia G. “The Jazz Text: Wild Women, Improvisation, and Power in 20Th Century Jazz Literature.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 72, no. 5, Nov. 2011. Lo, Aline. “Manifested Destinies: Refugee Narratives in Contemporary American Literature.” Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 74, no. 11, May 2014. Mefoude Obiono, Sandra Simone. “La Banalité De L’Exclusion. Autopsie in Vivo De Quelques Romans D’Auteures Caribéennes Et Subsahariennes (Condé, Mukasonga, Danticat Et Miano).” Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 78, no. 1, July 2017. Ortiz, Lisa Marie. “Modes of Autoethnography: Genealogical, Autobiographical, and Historical Recovery in the Novels of Alvarez, Cliff and Danticat.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 61, no. 3, Sept. 2000. Peay, Cassandra M. “Challenges to Western Constructs of Motherhood in Novels by Danticat, Erdrich, and Tan.” Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 73, no. 11, May 2013. Pierre-Louis, Barbara Gina. “Re-Configuring Paternal Legacies through Ritualistic Art: Daughters and Fathers in Contemporary Fiction by Women of African Descent.” Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 73, no. 12, June 2013.

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat Pinto-Tomas, Maricelle. “El Caribe en Voz Menor.” Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 75, no. 11, May 2015. Robinson, Kim Dismont. “Probing the Wound: Re-Membering the Traumatic Landscape of Caribbean Literary Histories.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 64, no. 6, Dec. 2003. Rohrleitner, Marion Christina. “Intimate Geographies: Romance and the Rhetoric of Female Desire in Contemporary Historical Fiction by Caribbean American Women Writers.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 69, no. 1, July 2008. Rossi, Jennifer Christianna. “Souls across Spaces: Ambiguity as Resistance and a New Generation of Black Women Writers.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 64, no. 8, Feb. 2004. Salkauski, Jaclyn N. “From Cutting Cane to Planting Seeds: Race, Gender, and Identity in Caribbean Women’s Fiction.” Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 73, no. 12, June 2013. Sampson-Choma, Tosha Kabara. “Identity in Motion: The Symbiotic Connection between Migration and Identity in Four 20th Century Novels by African Diasporic Women Writers.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 72, no. 6, Dec. 2011. Sarthou, Sharron Eve. “Mediating the Negative Space: The Role of the Hyphenated Self in the Work of Edwidge Danticat.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 70, no. 11, May 2010. Schleppe, Beatriz Eugenia. “Empowering New Identities in Postcolonial Literature by Francophone Women Writers.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 64, no. 12, June 2004, pp. 4459–60. Stevenson, Pascha Antrece. “ ‘The Next Best Currency After Dollars’: Exotic Bodies and (Neo)Colonial Desire in Recent Fiction by Caribbean-American Women.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 65, no. 9, Mar. 2005. Thiao, Moussa. “The Transnational Bildungsroman: New Perspectives on Postcolonial Coming of Age Narratives.” Dissertation Abstracts International, vol. 78, no. 7, Jan. 2018. Tomlinson, Yolande M. S. “To Fanon, with Love: Women Writers of the African Diaspora Interrupting Violence, Masculinity, and Nation-Formation.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 72, no. 1, July 2011, pp. 250–1. Victoriano-Martínez, Ramón Antonio. “ ‘Rayano’: Una Nueva Metáfora Para Explicar La Dominicanidad.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 72, no. 7, Jan. 2012. Vilageliu-Díaz, Ada. “Narrative Insurrection in the Short Stories of Toni Cade Bambara, Edwidge Danticat, and Mayra Santos-Febres.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 69, no. 4, Oct. 2008. Wallace, Belinda Deneen. “Cartographic Memories and Geographies of Pain: Bodily Representations in Caribbean Women’s Art.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 67, no. 11, May 2007. Winterbottom, Linda A. “Taking It with Them: Elsewhere Consciousness in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat, Paule Marshall, and Jamaica Kincaid.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 69, no. 11, May 2009, pp. 4341–2. Zinn, Emily R. “Rewriting the Kitchen: Gender and Food in Contemporary Fiction.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 68, no. 4, Oct. 2007.

Interviews with Danticat Adisa, Opal Palmer. “Up Close and Personal: Edwidge Danticat on Haitian Identity and the Writer’s Life.” African American Review, vol. 43, nos. 2–3, 2009, pp. 345–5. Alexandre, Sandy, and Ravi Y. Howard. “An Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” Journal of Caribbean Literatures, vol. 4, no. 3, 2007, pp. 161–74. 425

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat Alexandre, Sandy, and Ravi Y. Howard. “My Turn in the Fire: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.” Transition: An International Review, vol. 12, no. 3, 2002, pp. 110–28. Anglesey, Zoë. “The Voice of the Storytellers: An Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” Multicultural Review, vol. 7, no. 3, Sept. 1998, pp. 36–9. Collins, Michael S. “An Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, vol. 30, no. 2, 2007, pp. 471–4. Gleibermann, Erik. “The Story Will Be There When You Need It: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.” World Literature Today, vol. 93, no. 1, winter 2019, p. 68. Layne, Prudence, and Lester Goran. “Haiti: History, Voice, Empowerment: An Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Language, Literature, and Culture, vol. 2, 2004, pp. 3–17. Lyons, Bonnie. “An Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 44, no. 2, 2003, pp. 183–98. Mirabal, Nancy Raquel. “Dyasporic Appetites and Longings: An Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, vol. 30, no. 1, 2007, pp. 26–39. Montgomery, Maxine Lavon, ed. Conversations with Edwidge Danticat. Literary Conversations Series. Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2017. Shea, Renee H. “The Dangerous Job of Edwidge Danticat: An Interview.” Callaloo, vol. 19, no. 2, 1996, pp. 382–9. Smith, Katharine Capshaw. “Splintered Families, Enduring Connections: An Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2, 2005, pp. 194–205.

Articles Abiada, José Manuel López de. “Trujillo, Trauma, Testimony: Mario Vargas Llosa, Julia Álvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz and Other Writers on Hispaniola.” (Antípodas. Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, XX) Marta Caminero-Santangelo Roy C. Boland Osegueda.” Iberoamericana (2001–), no. 45, 2012, p. 235. Alexander, Simone A. James. “Bearing Witness: De/Cultivating in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Anglistica: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 14, no. 1, 2010, pp. 57–70. Alexander, Simone A. James. “M/Othering the Nation: Women’s Bodies as Nationalist Trope in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” African American Review, vol. 44, no. 3, 2011, pp. 373–90. Alicia E., Ellis. “Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, vol. 19, no. 2, 2011, pp. 200–8. Alonso, María Alonso. “Marvellous Realism and Female Representation from the Caribbean Diaspora.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 47, no. 1, 2012, pp. 59–71. Anker, Elizabeth S. “Embodying the People in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 47, no. 1, 2014, pp. 149–66. Armendariz, Aitor Ibarrola. “The Language of Wounds and Scars in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, a Case Study in Trauma Symptoms and the Recovery Process.” Journal of English Studies, vol. 8, 2010, pp. 23–56. Austen, Veronica. “Empathetic Engagement in Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 44, nos. 2–3, Apr. 2013, pp. 29–57. Ayuso, Mónica G. “‘How Lucky for You That Your Tongue Can Taste the ‘R’ in ‘Parsley’: Trauma Theory and the Literature of Hispaniola.” Afro-Hispanic Review, vol. 30, no. 1, 2011, pp. 47–62. Bellamy, Maria Rice. “Controlled Communication and Care: The Quest for Intimacy in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother I’m Dying.” Explicator, vol. 71, no. 2, Apr. 2013, pp. 99–102. Bellamy, Maria Rice. “Silence and Speech: Figures of Dislocation and Acculturation in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.” Explicator, vol. 71, no. 3, July 2013, pp. 207–10. Bellamy, Maria Rice. “More than Hunter or Prey: Duality and Traumatic Memory in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, vol. 37, no. 1, 2012, pp. 177–97. 426

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat Bergner, Gwen. “Danticat’s Vodou Vernacular of Women’s Human Rights.” American Literary History, vol. 29, no. 3, fall 2017, pp. 521–45. Bethell Bennett, Ian Anthony (ed. and note), and María Soledad (intro.) Rodríguez. “Four Writers: Women Writing in the Caribbean [Special Issue].” Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Language, Literature, and Culture, vol. 2, 2004. Bhaumik, Munia. “Techniques of Humiliation: Neoliberalism and the Noncitizen’s Body.” Diálogo: An Interdisciplinary Journal Published by the Center for Latino Research at Depaul University, vol. 18, no. 2, 2015, pp. 91–103. Birkhofer, Melissa D. “Voicing a Lost History through Photographs in Hispaniola’s Diasporic Literature: Junot Díaz’s ‘Aguantando’ and Edwidge Danticat’s “The Book of the Dead.” Latin Americanist, vol. 52, no. 1, Mar. 2008, pp. 43–53. Borst, Julia. “Violence Et Mémoire Dans Le Roman Haïtien Contemporain.” Publifarum, vol. 10, 2009. Braziel, Jana Evans. “Daffodils, Rhizomes, Migrations: Narrative Coming of Age in the Diasporic Writings of Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 3, no. 2, 2003, pp. 110–31. Braziel, Jana Evans. “Défilée Diasporic Daughters: Revolutionary Narratives of Ayiti (Haiti), Nanchon (Nation), and Dyaspora (Diaspora) in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!.” Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 37, no. 2, 2004, pp. 77–96. Braziel, Jana Evans. “Re-Membering Défilée: Dédée Bazile as Revolutionary Lieu De Mémoire.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 18, Sept. 2005, pp. 57–85. Brice-Finch, Jacqueline. “Edwidge Danticat: Memories of Maäfa.” Macomère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, vol. 4, 2001, pp. 146–54. Brooks de Vita, Novella. “Abiku Babies: Spirit Children and Human Bonding in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!, and Tina Mcelroy Ansa’s Baby of the Family.” Griot: Official Journal of the Southern Conference on Afro-American Studies, Inc, vol. 24, no. 1, 2005, pp. 18–24. Callahan, Sarah. “Passageways of Remembrance.” Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, vols. 6–7, no. 2-1, 2005, pp. 240–9. Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, and Roy C. Boland Osegueda, eds. “Trujillo, Trauma, Testimony: Mario Vargas Llosa, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz and Other Writers on Hispaniola.” Special Issue of Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 20, 2009, pp. 1–261. Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, and Roy C. Boland Osegueda. “At the Intersection of Trauma and Testimonio: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 20, 2009, pp. 5–26. Candelario, Ginetta E. B. “Voices from Hispaniola: A Meridians Roundtable with Edwige Danticat, Loida Maritza Pérez, Myriam J. A. Chancy, and Nelly Rosario.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 5, no. 1, 2004, pp. 69–91. Castro, Anne Margaret. “Caribbean Collusion: Junot Díaz, Edwidge Danticat and the New Yorker Fiction Podcast.” Afro-Hispanic Review, vol. 32, no. 2, 2013, pp. 11–26. Chancy, Myriam J. A. “Floating Islands: Spectatorship and the Body Politic in the Traveling Subjectivities of John Edgar Wideman and Edwidge Danticat.” Small Axe no. 3, 2012, p. 22. Charters, Mallay. “Edwidge Danticat: A Bitter Legacy Revisited.” Publishers Weekly, vol. 245, no. 33, 1998, pp. 42–3. Chen, Wilson C. “Figures of Flight and Entrapment in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!.” Rocky Mountain Review, vol. 65, no. 1, spring 2011, pp. 36–55. Chen, Wilson C. “Narrating Diaspora in Edwidge Danticat’s Short-Story Cycle The Dew Breaker.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 25, no. 3, July 2014, pp. 220–41. Cherie, Meacham. “Traumatic Realism in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat.” Journal of Haitian Studies, no. 1, 2005, p. 122. Clitandre, Nadège T. “Body and Voice as Sites of Oppression: The Psychological Condition of the Displaced Post-Colonial Haitian Subject in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2001, pp 28–49.

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat Clitandre, Nadège T. “Reformulating Haitian Literature Transnationally: Identifying New and Revised Tropes of Haitian Identity in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.”  Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2003, pp. 90–110. Clitandre, Nadège T. “Mapping the Echo Chamber: Edwidge Danticat and the Thematic Trilogy of Birth, Separation, and Death.” Palimpsest: A Journal of Women, Gender, and the Black International, vol. 3, no. 2, 2014, pp. 170–90. Collins, Jo. “Confronting Violence in Reading and Representation: Brutality and Witnessing in the Work of Edwidge Danticat.” Skepsi, vol. 3, no. 2, 2010, pp. 41–50. Collins, Jo. “Between Worlds: Imagining Dyaspora in Danticat’s The Dew Breaker and Chancy’s the Spirit of Haiti.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 42, nos. 3–4, July 2011, pp. 121–41. Collins, Jo. “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Representing Trauma: The Textual Politics of Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 47, no. 1, Feb. 2011, pp. 5–17. Collins, Jo. “Novels of Transformation and Transplantation: The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and Haitian American Youth in Danticat’s behind the Mountains and Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing, vol. 27, no. 4, 2012, pp. 27–34. Collins, Jo. “Bricolage and History: Edwidge Danticat’s Diasporic Life Writing in After the Dance.” Life Writing, vol. 10, no. 1, Mar. 2013, pp. 7–24. Conwell, Joan. “Papa’s Masks: Roles of the Father in Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.” Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, vols. 6–7, no. 2-1, 2005, pp. 221–39. Constant, Isabelle. “Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide Martin Munro (Review).” Nouvelles Études Francophones, no. 2, 2012, p. 260. Cope, Robyn. “Writing Haiti Global: Food and Fascism in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, June 2015, pp. 315–24. Cope, Robyn. “ ‘We Are Your Neighbors’: Edwidge Danticat’s New Narrative for Haiti.” Journal of Haitian Studies, no. 1, 2017, p. 98. Cordova, Sarah Davies. “Echo at Play: In Antillean Women’s Generational Memories.” International Journal of the Humanities, vol. 2, no. 1, 2005, pp. 591–8. Counihan, Clare. “Desiring Diaspora: ‘Testing’ the Boundaries of National Identity in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 37, Mar. 2012, pp. 36–52. Cox, Sandra. “The Trujillato and Testimonial Fiction: Collective Memory, Cultural Trauma and National Identity in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and Junot Díaz’s the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 20, 2009, pp. 107–26. Crosta, Suzanne. “History and Cultural Identity in Haitian Literature.” International Journal of Francophone Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2002, pp. 22–38. Cussen, John. “Claire of the Sea Light. New York. Knopf. 2013. ISBN 9780307271792 Edwidge Danticat.” World Literature Today, no. 2, 2014, p. 56. Dash, J. Michael (moderator), Dany Laferrière, Louis-Philippe Dalembert, Edwidge Danticat, and Évelyne Trouillot. “Roundtable: Writing, History, and Revolution.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 18, Sept. 2005, pp. 189–201. Dash, J. Michael. “Fictions of Displacement: Locating Modern Haitian Narratives.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 27, Oct. 2008, pp. 32–41. Davies, Carole Boyce. “‘Haiti, I Can See Your Halo!’: Migration, Landscape and Nation in Danticat’s Diaspora.” JALA: Journal of the African Literature Association, vol. 5, no. 1, 2010, pp. 87–99. Davis, Rocio G. “Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat’s “Krik? Krak!.” MELUS, no. 2, 2001, p. 65. Dayan, Colin. “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work Edwidge Danticat.” NWIG: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, no. 3/4, 2011, p. 265. Deborah, Stevenson. “Untwine by Edwidge Danticat (Review).” Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, no. 4, 2015, p. 192. Dhar, Nandini. “Memory, Gender, Race and Class: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, vols. 6–7, no. 2-1, 2005, pp. 185–202. 428

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat Duboin, Corinne. “After the Dance D’Edwidge Danticat: Visions Carnavalesques De L’Espace Haïtien.” Transatlantica: Revue D’Études Américaines, no. 2, 2008. https://journals.openedition.org/ transatlantica/2232. Dufault, Roseanna L. “Edwidge Danticat’s Pursuit of Justice in Brother, I’m Dying.” Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 2010, pp. 95–106. Duvidier, Sandra C. “(Re)Writing Haiti and Its ‘Brave Women’ into Existence: Edwidge Danticat and the Concept of Métissage.” Macomère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, vol. 6, 2004, pp. 49–56. El Gammal-Orliz, Sharif. “Area of No Feeling in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and Claire of the Sea Light.” Caribbean Writer, vol. 30, 2016, pp. 208–14. Eliana de Souza, Ávila. “Decolonizing Straight Temporality through Genre Trouble in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Ilha Do Desterro, no. 67, 2014, p. 21. Feng, Pin-chia. “ ‘Ou Libéré’: Trauma and Memory in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne De Littérature Comparée, vol. 30, no. 3–4, Sept. 2003, pp. 737–52. Figueroa, Iliana Rosales. “(Re)Imagining Haiti through the Eyes of a Seven-Year-Old Girl.” Journal of International Women’s Studies, vol. 17, no. 3, Aug. 2016, pp. 177–87. Flores-Rodríguez, Daynalí. “Familial Longings: Trans-Caribbean Narratives of Dictatorship and the Latin American Imaginary.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 60, Nov. 2019, pp. 69–85. Francis, Donette A. “ ‘Silences Too Horrific to Disturb’: Writing Sexual Histories in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 35, no. 2, 2004, pp. 75–90. Francis, Donette A. “Uncovered Stories: Politicizing Sexual Histories in Third Wave Caribbean Women’s Writings.” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, vol. 6, no. 1, 2004, pp. 61–81. Fuchs, Rebecca. “Plátanos and Perejil: Border Thinking in Contemporary Caribbean Literature.” Entertext: An Interactive Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Cultural and Historical Studies and Creative Work, vol. 10, 2013, pp. 58–72. Fuchs, Rebecca. “Hiding and Exposing Violence: Euphemisms in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.” Erudit Franco-Espagnol: An Electronic Journal of French and Hispanic Literatures, vol. 7, 2015, pp. 51–65. Fulani, Ifeona. “Caribbean Women Writers and the Politics of Style: A Case for Literary Anancyism.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 17, Mar. 2005, pp. 64–79. Gérazime, Roselyne E. “Lasirèn, Labalèn: L’abysse en Migration dans Claire of the Sea Light.” Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, spring 2019, pp. 178–200. Gerber, Nancy F. “Binding the Narrative Thread: Storytelling and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, vol. 2, no. 2, 2000, pp. 188–99. Gervasio, Nicole Marie. “The Memory of Words: Historical Recursions and Ideological Determinants in the Present and The Farming of Bones.” English Language Notes, vol. 57, no. 2, Oct. 2019, pp. 151–9. Gilmore, Leigh. “Refugee-Citizen: Mediating Testimony through Image and Word in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina.” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 32, no. 3, 2017, pp. 673–81. Goldblatt, Patricia. “Finding a Voice for the Victimized.” Multicultural Review, vol. 9, no. 3, Sept. 2000, pp. 40–7. Goldblatt, Patricia. “The Implausibility of Marriage.” Multicultural Review, vol. 10, no. 3, Sept. 2001. Goldner, Ellen J. “Ways of Listening: Hearing Danticat’s Calls to Multiple Audiences in The Dew Breaker.” Ariel, vol. 49, no. 2/3, Apr. 2018, pp. 149–78. González, Susana Vega. “Exiled Subjectivities: The Politics of Fragmentation in The Dew Breaker.” Revista Canaria De Estudios Ingleses, vol. 54, 2007, pp. 181–93. Gourdine, Angeletta K. M. “Caribbean Tabula Rasa: Textual Touristing as Carnival in Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Writing.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 20, June 2006, pp. 80–96. Gyssels, Kathleen. “ ‘Schild en Vriend’ in De Dominicaanse Republiek: Edwidge Danticat over Het Bloedbad Van Massacre.” Streven, vol. 67, no. 6, June 2000, pp. 518–25. 429

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat Gyssels, Kathleen. “Haitians in the City: Two Modern Day Trickster Tales.” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2002. http:social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/. Gyssels, Kathleen. “Haitian Literature at the Crossroad of Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Studies.” Francophone Postcolonial Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2003, pp. 55–63. Harbawi, Semia. “Writing Memory: Edwidge Danticat’s Limbo Inscriptions.” Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 16, no. 1, Nov. 2007, pp. 37–58. Harbawi, Semia. “Against All Odds: The Experience of Trauma and the Economy of Survival in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing, vol. 53, 2008, pp. 38–44. Hawthorne, Evelyn. “Sites/Sights of Difference: Danticat’s ‘New York Day Women’, Haitian Immigrant Subjectivity and Postmodernist Strategies.” Macomère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, vol. 6, 2004, pp. 40–8. Herndon, Gerise. “Returns to Native Lands, Reclaiming the Other’s Language: Kincaid and Danticat.” Journal of International Women’s Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, Nov. 2001, pp. 1–10. Hewett, Heather. “At the Crossroads: Disability and Trauma in The Farming of Bones.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, vol. 31, no. 3, 2006, pp. 123–45. Hewett, Heather. “Mothering across Borders: Narratives of Immigrant Mothers in the United States.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 37, nos. 3–4, 2009, pp. 121–39. Hong, Terry. “Horror, Hope and Redemption, a Talk with Edwidge Danticat about Her Latest Novel, The Dew Breaker.” Bloomsbury Review, vol. 24, no. 5, Sept. 2004. Horn, Jessica. “Edwidge Danticat: An Intimate Reader.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 1, no. 2, 2001, pp. 19–25. Ingberg, Pablo. “Edwidge Danticat: La Fiebre De Contar.” Suplemento Cultura La Nación (Buenos Aires), February 27, 2000. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/cultura/la-fiebre-de-contar-nid214384/. Ink, Lynn Chun. “Remaking Identity, Unmaking Nation: Historical Recovery and the Reconstruction of Community in In the Time of the Butterflies and The Farming of Bones.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, vol. 27, no. 3, 2004, pp. 788–807. Jelly-Schapiro, Joshua. “Ground Zero(Es) of the New World: Geographies of Violence in Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat.” Transforming Anthropology, vol. 21, no. 2, Oct. 2013, pp. 169–86. Johnson, Kelli Lyon. “Both Sides of the Massacre: Collective Memory and Narrative on Hispaniola.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, vol. 36, no. 2, June 2003, pp. 75–91. Johnson, Newtona. “Challenging Internal Colonialism: Edwidge Danticat’s Feminist Emancipatory Enterprise.” Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, vols. 6–7, no. 2-1, 2005, pp. 147–66. Jurney, Florence Ramond. “Exile and Relation to the Mother/Land in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones.” Revista/Review Interamericana, vol. 31, nos. 1–4, Jan. 2001. Knepper, Wendy. “In/Justice and Necro-Natality in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 47, no. 2, 2012, pp. 191–205. Lahens, Yanick. “L’Apport De Quatre Romancières Au Roman Moderne Haïtien.” Notre Librairie: Revue Du Livre: Afrique, Caraïbes, Océan Indien, vol. 133, Jan. 1998, pp. 26–36. Lamothe, Daphne. “Carnival in the Creole City: Place, Race, and Identity in the Age of Globalization.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 2, 2012, pp. 360374. Langley, Elizabeth. “Performing Postmemory: Remembering the Parsley Massacre in “Nineteen ThirtySeven” and Song of the Water Saints.” Latin Americanist, vol. 60, no. 1, Mar. 2016, pp. 63–77. Larrier, Renée. “ ‘Girl by the Shore’: Gender and Testimony in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2001, pp. 50–60. Lawton de Torruella, Elena. “Diaspora, Self-Exile and Legacy: About Walcott’s Shabine and Danticat’s M. Bienaimé.” Torre: Revista De La Universidad De Puerto Rico, vol. 11, nos. 41–2, July 2006, pp. 509–18. Loichot, Valérie. “Edwidge Danticat’s Kitchen History.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 5, no. 1, 2004, pp. 92–116. López-Calvo, Ignacio. “A Postmodern Plátano’s Trujillo: Junot Diaz’s the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, More Macondo Than Mcondo.” Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 20, 2009, pp. 75–90. 430

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat López-Calvo, Ignacio. “Empathizing with the Rights of Others: Reading Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother and Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying as Humanitarian Narratives.” Concentric: Literacy & Cultural Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, Sept. 2016, p. 85. MacLeod, Denise. “Review of ‘Brother, I’m Dying’ by Edwidge Danticat.” Transnational Literature, vol. 2, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–2. Malena, Anne. “Found in Translation or Edwidge Danticat’s Voyage of Recovery.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction: Etudes Sur Le Texte Et Ses Transformations, vol. 16, no. 2, 2003, pp. 197–222. Mardorossian, Carine M. “From Literature of Exile to Migrant Literature.” Modern Language Studies, vol. 32, no. 2, 2002, pp. 15–33. Mardorossian, Carine. “Doubling, Healing, and Gender in Caribbean Literature.” Macomère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, vol. 12, no. 1, 2010, pp. 17–29. Mardorossian, Carine. “Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 601–3. Mark, Schuller. “Fault Lines: Views across Haiti’s Divide Beverly Bell Edwidge Danticat.” Journal of Haitian Studies, no. 2, 2013, p. 208. Martin, W. Todd. “ ‘Looking for the Dawn’ in Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Explicator, vol. 65, no. 4, 2007, pp. 248–50. Martin, W. Todd. “Ezili and the Subversion of the Holy Virgin in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Literature and Belief, vol. 27, no. 1, 2007, pp. 29–40. Martin, W. Todd. “ ‘Naming’ Sebastien: Celebrating Men in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Atenea, vol. 28, no. 1, June 2008, pp. 65–74. Martin, W. Todd. “Naming” Sebastien: Celebrating Men in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.”Atenea, vol. 28, no. 1, June 2008, pp. 65–74. Marxen, Patti M. “The Map Within: Place, Displacement, and the Long Shadow of History in the Work of Edwidge Danticat.” Journal of Haitian Studies, no. 1, 2005, p. 140. Mehni, Masoumeh. “Analyzing the Problematic Mother-Daughter Relationship in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Journal of Caribbean Literatures, vol. 7, no. 1, spring 2011, pp. 77–90. Meenakshi, Poornamathi, and Sushil Mary Mathews. “Love, Suffering, and Hope in Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Children of the Sea.’” Language in India, vol. 18, no. 2, 2018, pp. 278–84. Mills, Alice. “The Interplay of Doubles in Edwidge Danticat’s Fiction.” PALARA: Publication of the AfroLatin/American Research Association, vol. 8, 2004, pp. 86–99. Misrahi-Barak, Judith. “ ‘My Mouth Is the Keeper of Both Speech and Silence…’, or the Vocalisation of Silence in Caribbean Short Stories by Edwidge Danticat.” Journal of the Short Story in English, vol. 47, 2006, pp. 155–66. Misrahi-Barak, Judith. “Exploring Trauma through the Memory of Text: Edwidge Danticat Listens to Jacques Stephen Alexis, Rita Dove, and René Philoctète.” Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2013, pp. 163–83. Misrahi-Barak, Judith. “Biopolitics and Translation: Edwidge Danticat’s Many Tongues.” International Journal of Francophone Studies, vol. 17, no. 3–4, Nov. 2014, pp. 349–371. Montgomery, Maxine L. “A Lasiren Song for the Wonn: Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light and the Legend of Mami Wata.” CLA Journal, vol. 59, no. 4, June 2016, pp. 316–329. Mullins, Greg. “Labors of Literature and of Human Rights.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, vol. 20, no. 1, Jan. 2008, pp. 4–12. Munro, Martin. “Writing Disaster: Trauma, Memory, and History in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Ethnologies, vol. 28, no. 1, 2006. N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José, and Elizabeth Wilson. “Translators on a Tight Rope: The Challenges of Translating Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction: Etudes Sur Le Texte Et Ses Transformations, vol. 13, no. 2, 2000, pp. 75–105. N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José, and Elizabeth Wilson. “Rewriting Folklore: Traditional Beliefs and Popular Culture in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!.” Macomère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, vol. 3, 2000, pp. 123–40. 431

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José, and Elizabeth Wilson. “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work Edwidge Danticat.” Caribbean Quarterly, no. 4, 2012, p. 127. N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José, and Elizabeth Wilson. “Martin Munro, ed., Edwidge Danticat: a Reader’s Guide. Preface by Dany Laferrière. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010. 222 pp.” Caribbean Quarterly, no. 2/3, 2012, pp. 167–70. Nesbitt, Nick. “Alter-Rights: Haiti and the Singularization of Universal Human Rights, 1804–2004.” International Journal of Francophone Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2009, pp. 93–108. Nesbitt, Nick. “From Sacrifice to Solidarity: The Truth Politics of Haitian Literature.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne De Littérature Comparée, vol. 38, no. 1, 2011, pp. 14–24. Norman, Brian. “The Survivor’s Dilemma in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 9, no. 3, 2015, pp. 401–15. Novak, Amy. “ ‘A Marred Testament’: Cultural Trauma and Narrative in Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 62, no. 4, 2006, pp. 93–120. Obejas, Achy. “Bearing the Unforgivable: A Tribute to Edwidge Danticat.” World Literature Today, vol. 93, no. 1, winter 2019, pp. 66–7. Okparanta, Chineye. “Negotiating the Boundaries of Nation, Language, and Race in Helen Oyeyemi’s Icarus Girl and Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” JALA: Journal of the African Literature Association, vol. 2, no. 2, 2008, pp. 188–207. Page, Lisa. “Edwidge Danticat Illuminates Haiti.” Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 89, no. 4, fall 2013, p. 249. Patterson, Richard E. “Resurrecting Rafael: Fictional Incarnations of a Dominican Dictator.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, vol. 29, no. 1, 2006, pp. 223–37. Penier, Izabella. “The Formation of Female Migratory Subjects in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!.” Gender Studies, vol. 1, no. 10, 2011, pp. 51–63. Poon, Angelia. “Re-Writing the Male Text: Mapping Cultural Spaces in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! And Jamaica Kincaid’s a Small Place.” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2000. https://legacy.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v4i2/anpoon.htm. Pressley-Sanon, Toni. “One Plus One Equals Three: Marasa Consciousness, the Lwa, and Three Stories.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 44, no. 3, 2013, pp. 118–37. Pressley-Sanon, Toni. “Wounds Seen and Unseen: The Workings of Trauma in Raoul Peck’s Haitian Corner and Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.” Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, spring 2016, pp. 19–45. Pressley-Sanon, Toni. “The Other Side of the Sea Louis-Philippe Dalembert Robert H. Mccormick Jr. Edwidge Danticat.” Journal of Haitian Studies, no. 1, 2016, p. 204. Pulitano, Elvira. “Landscape, Memory and Survival in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, 2008, p. 5. https://anthurium.miami.edu/articles/ abstract/10.33596/anth.123/. Putnam, Amanda. “Mothering the Motherless: Portrayals of Alternative Mothering Practices within the Caribbean Diaspora.” Canadian Woman Studies/Les Cahiers De La Femme, vol. 23, no. 2, 2004, pp. 118–23. Rader, Pamela J. “What the River Knows: Productive Silences in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and ‘1937’.”Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 20, 2009, pp. 27–46. Ramlochan, Shivanee. “The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story.” Caribbean Beat, no. 156, 2019, p. 40. Redman, Russell. “Caribbean Cultural Identity and the Art of Cactus Maintenance.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, 2007. 1–10. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/ anthurium/vol5/iss1/6. Rohrleitner, Marion Christina. “ ‘Breaking the Silence’: Testimonio, Revisionary Historiography, and Survivor’s Guilt in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and The Dew Breaker.” Interdisciplinary Humanities, vol. 28, no. 1, 2011, pp. 73–85. Rohrleitner, Marion Christina. “Critical Readings: ‘Create Dangerously’: Immigration as Radical Hope in Edwidge Danticat’s Fiction and Creative Nonfiction.” Critical Insights: The Immigrant Experience, 2018, pp. 134–50. 432

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat Rossi, Jennifer C. “ ‘Let the Words Bring Wings to Our Feet’: Negotiating Exile and Trauma through Narrative in Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, vols. 6–7, no. 2-1, 2005, pp. 203–20. Rubilar, Lisa Madsen. “The Challenges of Writing from the inside.” Multicultural Review, vol. 19, no. 1, 2010, pp. 33–6. Russo, Adelaide M. “Haitians in Exile: The Theoretical Turn.” Contemporary French & Francophone Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 2018, pp. 227–37. Saint-Éloi, Rodney. “L’Ecriture Bizango: Edwidge Danticat, Le Go-Between.” Notre Librairie: Revue Des Litératures Du Sud, vol. 143, 2001, pp. 58–61. Saint-Loubert, Laëtitia. “Translating Caribbean Thresholds of Pain from Without: Hispaniola out of Bounds, Hispaniola Unbound?” Miranda: Revue Pluridisciplinaire Du Monde Anglophone/ Multidisciplinary Peer-Reviewed Journal on the English-Speaking World, vol. 18, 2019. https:// journals.openedition.org/miranda/16164. Samway, Patrick, S. J. “A Homeward Journey: Edwidge Danticat’s Fictional Landscapes, Mindscapes, Genescapes, and Signscapes in Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures, vol. 57, no. 1, 2003, pp. 75–83. Sarthou, Sharrón Eve. “Unsilencing Défilés Daughters: Overcoming Silence in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!.” Global South, vol. 4, no. 2, 2010, pp. 99–123. Savsar, Leyla. “ ‘Mother Tells Me to Forget’: Nostalgic Re-Presentations, Re-Membering, and Re-Telling the Child Migrant’s Identity and Agency in Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 4, 2018, pp. 395–411. Scheel, Charles W. “From J. S. Alexis’ ‘Claire-Heurese’ in Compère Général Soleil to Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light: What Fate for Haitian Marvelous Realism?.” CLA Journal, vol. 59, no. 2, 2015, pp. 177–93. Scurto, Stephanie. “The Language of Labour, the Labour of Language: Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Work’ in The Farming of Bones.” Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 20, 2009, pp. 47–62. Segura-Rico, Nereida. “Witnessing History: Metatestimonio in Literary Representations of the Trujillo Dictatorship.” Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 20, 2009, pp. 173–90. Šesnić, Jelena. “Wounded History: A Reading of Edwidge Danticat’s Fiction.” Studia Romanica Et Anglica Zagrabiensia, vol. 51, 2006, pp. 231–60. Shakleton, Mark. “Haitian Transnationalism: Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Caroline’s Wedding’: A Case Study of Literary Anthropology.” Suomen Antropologi/Antropologi I Finland/The Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, vol. 28, no. 2, May 2003, pp. 15–23. Sharpe, Jenny. “The Middle Passages of Black Migration.” Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives, vol. 6, no. 1, Apr. 2009, pp. 97–112. Shaw, Denise R. “Textual Healing: Giving Voice to Historical and Personal Experience in the Collective Works of Edwidge Danticat.” Hollins Critic, vol. 44, no. 3, June 2007, pp. 1–13. Shea, Renee H. “Edwidge Danticat.” Belles Lettres, vol. 10, no. 3, 1995, pp. 12–15. Shea, Renee H. “ ‘The Hunger to Tell’: Edwidge Danticat and The Farming of Bones.” Macomère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, vol. 2, 1999, pp. 12–22. Shemak, April. “Re-Membering Hispaniola: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 2002, pp. 83–112. Silvia, Martínez-Falquina. “Postcolonial Trauma Theory in the Contact Zone: The Strategic Representation of Grief in Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light.” Humanities, vol. 4, no. 4, 2015, pp. 834–60. Sommerville-Thompson, Mina L. “Caribbean Postcolonial Women’s Writing: Bildungsroman in the Diaspora.” CCTE Studies, vol. 79, Oct. 2014, pp. 29–37. Sotomayor-Miletti, Áurea María. “Pronunciar ‘Perejil’ en El Río Masacre.” Cuadernos De Literatura, vol. 15, no. 30, 2011, pp. 184–201. Sourieau, Marie Agnès. “La Mémoire Engourdie De Terreurs: “The Dew Breaker” D’Edwidge Danticat.” Journal of Haitian Studies, no. 2, 2005, p. 94. Spears, Crystal. “Removing the Masks of Lady Liberty: The Grotesque in the Literatures of the ‘Defeated’ Americas.” CEA Critic: An Official Journal of the College English Association, vol. 75, no. 3, 2013, pp. 235–42. 433

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat Spengler, Birgit. “Art as Engagement: Violence, Trauma, and the Role of the Reader in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.” Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 8, no. 2, 2014, pp. 189–205. Spleth, Janice. “Narrating Genocide: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and Yolande Mukagasana’s N’aie Pas Peur De Savoir.” West Virginia University Philological Papers, vol. 54, 2011, pp. 144–50. Squint, Kirstin. “Exploring the Borderland between Realism and Magical Realism in Krik? Krak!.” Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction, vol. 5, no. 1, 2004, pp. 116–22. Sweeney, Carole. “The Unmaking of the World: Haiti, History, and Writing in Edouard Glissant and Edwidge Danticat.” Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives, vol. 4, no. 1, 2007, pp. 51–66. Tabuteau, Eric. “American Dream, Urban Nightmare: Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and George Lamming’s in the Castle of My Skin.” Alizés: Revue Angliciste De La Réunion, vol. 22, June 2002, pp. 95–110. Tarver, Australia. “Memory and History in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Macomère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, vol. 5, 2002, pp. 232–42. Thomas, Katherine M. “Memories of Home: Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Kentucky Philological Review, vol. 18, 2004, pp. 35–40. Thompson, Zoë Brigley. “Happiness (Or Not) After Rape: Hysterics and Harpies in the Media Versus Killjoys in Black Women’s Fiction.” Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, 2017, pp. 66–77. Tomaz, Cunningham. “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work Edwidge Danticat.” Journal of Haitian Studies, no. 2, 2011, p. 199. Tomaz, Cunningham. “Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide Martin Munro Dany Laferrière.” Journal of Haitian Studies, no. 1, 2013, p. 311. Vargas, Jennifer Harford. “Novel Testimony: Alternative Archives in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, vol. 37, no. 5, 2014, pp. 1162–80. Vega-González, Susana. “(Dis)Locations of Oppression: Redemptive Forces in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!.” Irish Journal of American Studies, vols. 11–12, 2002, pp. 47–60. Vega-González, Susana. “Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning and History: Danticat’s Insights into the past.” Revista Alicantina De Estudios Ingleses, vol. 17, 2004, pp. 297–304. Vega-González, Susana. “A Comparative Study of Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and Morrison’s Beloved.”Estudios Ingleses De La Universidad Complutense, vol. 13, 2005, pp. 139–53. Victoriano-Martínez, Ramón Antonio. “Los Variados Matices Del Testimonio: El Masacre Se Pasa a Pie De Freddy Prestol Castillo.” Habana Elegante, vol. 52, 2012. http://www.habanaelegante.com/ Fall_Winter_2012/Dossier_DR_VictorianoMartinez.html. Vitiello, Joëlle. “Aunt Résia and the Spirits and Other Stories Yanick Lahens Betty Wilson Edwidge Danticat Marie-Agnès Sourieau.” Journal of Haitian Studies, no. 2, 2011, p. 196. Wachtel, Eleanor. “A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.” Brick, vols. 65–6, 2000, pp. 106–19. Walcott-Hackshaw, Elizabeth. “Writing Haiti: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.” Macomère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, vol. 9, 2007, pp. 30–41. Walcott-Hackshaw, Elizabeth. “Home Is Where the Heart Is: Danticat’s Landscapes of Return.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 27, 2008, pp. 71–82. Waller, Nicole. “Terra Incognita: Mapping the Detention Center in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying and the US Supreme Court Ruling Boumediene V. Bush.” Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives, vol. 6, no. 3, 2009, pp. 357–69. Watts, Richard. “Contested Sources: Water as Commodity/Sign in French Caribbean Literature.” Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives, vol. 4, no. 1, 2007, pp. 87–101. Weir-Soley, Donna. “Voudoun Symbolism in The Farming of Bones.” Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, vols. 6–7, no. 2-1, 2005, pp. 167–84. Wesling, Meg. “Neocolonialism, Queer Kinship, and Diaspora: Contesting the Romance of the Family in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night and Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Textual Practice, vol. 25, no. 4, Aug. 2011, pp. 649–70. 434

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat West, Elizabeth. “Maps, Mythologies and Identities: Zombies and Contra-Anglo Spirituality in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Angie Cruz’s Soledad.” PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/ Romance Association, vol. 17, 2013, pp. 1–12. Wigginton, Sheridan. “Hispanidad as Ethnic Myth and the Anti-Haitian Nation: An Ethno-Symbolic Approach to Understanding Dominican Identity.” PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/Romance Association, vol. 10, 2006, pp. 51–60. Wucker, Michele. “Edwidge Danticat: A Voice for the Voiceless.” Américas (English Edition), vol. 52, no. 3, May 2000, pp. 40–5. Xu, Yan. “To Narrate Is to Be: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, June 2014, pp. 218–29. Zipp, Georg. “Selling Poverty: Junot Díaz’s and Edwidge Danticat’s Assessments of Picturesque Stereotypes of Poverty in the Caribbean.” Zeitschrift Für Anglistik Und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, vol. 63, no. 2, June 2015, pp. 229–46.

Book Chapters in Edited Volumes Adams, Tiffany Boyd. “Janie in the Sun: Invoking Huston’s Caribbean Travels in Tell My Horse.” Zora Neale Hurston and Sharon L. Jones, Critical Insights, Salem: Grey House, 2013, pp. 45–63. Ahrens, Rudiger, Maria Herrerra-Sobek, Karen Ikas, and Lomeli Francisco A., eds. Violence and Transgression in World Minority Literatures. Germany: Universitatsverlag Winter GmbH, 2005. Anatol, Giselle Liza. “Caribbean Migration, Ex-Isles, and the New World Novel.” The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel, Maryemma Graham, Cambridge Companions to Literature (CCtL), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 70–83. Ankumah, Adaku T. “Veiling the Past: Memory and Identity in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.” Outward Evil Inward Battle: Human Memory in Literature, Benjamin Hart Fishkin, Adaku N. Ankumah, Festus Fru Ndeh, and Bill E Ndi. Mankon, Cameroon: Langaa Research, 2014, pp. 133–52. Bandau, Anja. “Memoria Y Lugar: Movimientos Transnacionales en La Escritura Contemporánea De Autores Caribeño-Estadounidense.” Caribbean(s) on the Move-Archipiélagos Literarios Del Caribe: A Transarea Symposium, Ottmar Ette, New York: Peter Lang, 2008, pp. 93–105. Barnabei, Franca. “Spettri Americani: Dentro, Fuori, Al Di Là Dei Confini.” Quale America? Soglie E Cultura Di Un Continente: Volume II, Daniela Ciani Forza and Silvana Serafin, Mazzanti, Soglie Americane: Collana di Studi Americanistici, 2007, pp. 81–93. Bell, Madison Smartt. “Balancing the Jar.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 175–9. Borst, Julia. “Der Körper als Medium Traumatischer Erinnerung bei Lyonel Trouillot und Edwidge Danticat.” Mémoires Transmédiales: Geschichte Und Gedächtnis in Der Karibik Und Ihrer Diaspora, Romanistik, Natascha Ueckmann and Gisela Febel. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2017, pp. 185–204. Bragg, Beauty. “Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory: Historicizing the Colonial Woman.” Literary Expressions of African Spirituality, Carol P. Marsh-Lockett and Elizabeth J. West, Lanham: Lexington, 2013, pp. 163–84. Burchell, Eileen. “As My Mother’s Daughter: Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwige Danticat (1994).” Women in Literature: Reading through the Lens of Gender, Jerilyn Fisher and Ellen S. Silber, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003, pp. 60–2. Caruso, Mary Jo. “The Diaspora Writes Back.” Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Culture, Dorsía Smith, Tatiana Tagirova, and Suzanna Engman, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2010, pp. 215–28. Chancy, Myriam J. A. “Violence, Nation, and Memory: Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 130–46. 435

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat Collier, Rhonda. “There’s No Place like Home: Cultural Memory in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby and Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes and Memory.” Outward Evil Inward Battle: Human Memory in Literature, Benjamin Hart Fishkin, Adaku N. Ankumah, Festus Fru Ndeh, and Bill E. Ndi, Berlin: Langaa Research, 2014, pp. 171–85. Condé, Maryse. “Finally Edwidge Arrived.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 163–7. Cornejo, Josefina. “La Afirmación De La Sexualidad Femenina: Memoria Y Exilio en Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Exilios Femeninos, Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, Instituto Andaluz de la Mujer, Collectanea 32, Huelva, España: Universidad de Huelva, 2000, pp. 355–64. Cuder-Domínguez, Pilar. “Three Ex/Centric Views of Trujillo’s Dominican Republic: Alvarez, Danticat, Vargas Llosa.” The Caribbean Writer as Warrior of the Imaginary/L’Ecrivain Caribéen, Guerrier De L’Imaginaire, Kathleen Gyssels and Bénédicte Ledent, Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English (CrossC) 101, New York: Rodopi, 2008, pp. 359–70. Dash, J. Michael. “Danticat and Her Haitian Precursors.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, Charlottestville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 26–38. Edwards, Whitney Bly. “Psychoanalysis in Caribbean Literature.” The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 314–22. Ferly, Odile. “ ‘The Mirror That We Don’t Want’: Literary Confrontations between Haitians and Guadeloupeans.” Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora in the Wider Caribbean, Philippe Zacaïr and Catherine Reinhardt, New World Diasporas, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010, pp. 58–81. Forsdick, Charles. “Traveling, Writing: Danticat’s After the Dance.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 99–116. Fraile Marcos, Ana Ma. “Afro-Caribbean Women Writers and US Literary Studies: Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, and Elizabeth Nunez.” Nor Shall Diamond Die: American Studies in Honour of Javier Coy, Carme Manuel and Paul Scott Derrick, Biblioteca Javier Coy d’Estudis Nord-Americans. València, España: Universitat de València, 2003, pp. 123–38. Fuchs, Rebecca. “Resignifying Wounds through Silences in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.” Contemporary Immigrant Short Fiction, Robert C. Evans, Critical Insights, Salem: Grey House, 2015, pp. 148–64. Gallagher, Mary. “Concealment, Displacement, and Disconnection: Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 147–60. Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson. “Intimations of What Was to Come: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and the Indivisibility of Human Rights.” Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Shultheiss Moore, Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature, London: Routledge, 2012, pp. 103–19. Gourdine, Angeletta KM. “Palè Andaki: Genre, History and Mother-Daughter Doublespeak in Edwidge Danticat’s Fiction.” Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text: Essays on Caribbean Women’s Writing, Cristina Herrera and Paula Sanmartín, Bradford, Ontario: Demeter Press, 2015, pp. 143–63. Green, Tara T. “ ‘When the Women Tell Stories’: Healing in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Contemporary African American Fiction: New Critical Essays, Dana A. Williams. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009, pp. 82–98. Higgins, MaryEllen. “Writing Haiti from New York: Local and Cosmopolitan Resistance in Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” African Literatures at the Millennium, Arthur D. Drayton, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007, pp. 130–43. Ibarrola-Armendáriz, Aitor. “Broken Memories of a Traumatic Past and the Redemptive Power of Narrative in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat.” The Splintered Glass: Facets of Trauma in the PostColony and beyond, Dolores Herrero and Sonia Baelo-Allué, Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/ Colonial Literatures in English 136, New York: Rodopi, 2011, pp. 3–27. Ibarrola-Armendáriz, Aitor. “Secret Links in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker: Reflections on Another Composite Novel by an Ethnic Writer.” American Secrets: The Politics and Poetics of Secrecy 436

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat in the Literature and Culture of the United States, Eduardo Barros-Grela and José Liste-Noya, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011, pp. 213–25. Irr, Caren. “Media and Migration: Danticat, Díaz, Eugenides, and Scibona.” Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern, Jessica Datema and Diane Krumrey, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2010, pp. 9–26. Jean-Charles, Régine Michelle. “Danticat and the African American Women’s Literary Tradition.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 52–69. Jean-Charles, Régine Michelle. “Of Memories and Men: The Ethics of Life Writing in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother.” Writings on Caribbean History, Literature, Art and Culture: One Love, Irline François, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2018, pp. 127–50. Jones, Alwin A. D. “The Novel Witness(Es): Re-Membering After Trauma in Adichie’s ‘Ghosts,’ Cliff ’s No Telephone, and Danticat’s Farming of Bones.” Between Worlds: An Anthology of Contemporary Fiction and Criticism, Deborah Poe and Wattley Ama, New York: Peter Lang, 2012, pp. 48–58. Keen, Suzanne. “Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion: Postcolonial Fiction.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Lisa Zunshine, Oxford Handbooks, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 347–66. Kekeh-Dika, Andrée-Anne. “Entre Ville Et Village: Quelles Destinées Pour Le Féminin Chez Edwidge Danticat?.” La Ville Plurielle Dans La Fiction Antillaise Anglophone: Images De L’Interculturel, Corinne Duboin and Eric Tabuteau, Interlangues: Littératures, Toulouse, France: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2000, pp. 59–67. Kellough, Gretchen. “The Narrative Weave of Community in the Tisseroman.” Oral and Written Expressions of African Cultures, Toyin Falola and Fallou Ngom, Durham, NC: Carolina Academic, 2009, pp. 185–94. Laforest, Marie-Hélène. “Dimorare in Inglese.” Culture a Contatto Nelle Americhe, Michele Bottalico and Rosa Maria Grillo, Illuminazione di Vincennes: Studi e Ricerche, Italia: Oèdipus, 2003, pp. 121–40. Lafuente, Elia Michelle. “Nationhood, Struggle, and Identity.” Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture: The Emergent Adult, Mary Hilton and Maria Nikolajeva, Ashgate Studies in Childhood 1700 to the Present, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, pp. 33–45. Manzanas, Ana Ma. “Intersecting Atlantic Trajectories in Junot Diaz’s and Edwidge Danticat’s Stories.” The Transnationalism of American Culture: Literature, Film, and Music, Rocïo G. Davis, Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature 20, London: Routledge, 2012, pp. 173–85. Mardorossian, Carine. “Danticat and Caribbean Women Writers.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 39–51. Mata, Irene. “Caribbean Border Crossers: Negotiating Identity and Ideas of Home.” African Diasporas: Ancestors, Migrations and Borders, Robert Cancel and Winifred Woodhull, African Literature Association Annual Series 14, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2008, pp. 107–114. Meehan, Kevin, and Bernadette A. Davis. “Edwidge Danticat (1969-).” Twenty-First-Century American Novelists, Wanda H. Giles and James R. Giles, Dictionary of Literary Biography 350, Detroit: Gale, 2009, pp. 69–79. Ménard, Nadève. “Edwidge Danticat: A Selected Bibliography.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 194–212. Munro, Brenna. “Letters Lost at Sea: Edwidge Danticat and Orality.” Echoes of the Haitian Revolution: 1804–2004, Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2008, pp. 122–33. Munro, Martin. “Inside Out: A Brief Biography of Edwidge Danticat.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 13–25. Murdoch, Adlai. “Being Haitian in New York: Migration and Transnationalism in Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Echoes of the Haitian Revolution: 1804–2004, Martin Munro and Elizabeth WalcottHackshaw, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2008, pp. 134–48. 437

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat N’Zengo-Tayo, Marie-José. “Children in Haitian Popular Migration as Seen by Maryse Condé and Edwidge Danticat.” Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, Adele S. Newson and Linda Strong-Leek, New York: Peter Lang, 1998, pp. 93–100. Navarro, Xavier. “Primal Scream? Rebel Yell! Correlations between Death and Nostalgia and the Preservation of History in the Haitian Storytelling Tradition: Krik? Krak!.” Caribbean without Borders: Beyond Can(n)on’s Range, María del Carmen Quintero Aguiló, Diana Ursulin Mopsus, Gabriel J. Jiménez Fuentes, Marisol Joseph Haynes, and Gabriel Mejía González, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2015, pp. 260–73. Nesbitt, Nick. “Diasporic Politics: Danticat’s Short Works.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 73–85. Nge, Carmen. “Rising in the Ashes: Reading Krik? Krak! As a Response to ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’.” Postcolonial Perspectives on Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the U.S., Martin Japtok, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003, pp. 193–207. Njegosh, Tatiana Petrovich. “Traduzione Di Un’Identità Mancante: The Dew Breaker Di Edwidge Danticat.” La Storia Nella Scrittura Diasporica, Franca Sinopoli, Biblioteca di Cultura 709, Roma: Bulzoni, 2009, pp. 183–214. Page, Kezia. “From Diasporic Sensibility to Close Transnationalism: The Agüero Sisters, The Dew Breaker, and the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 226–33. Parisot, Yolaine. “Les Nouvelles Figures Du Carnavalesque Dans Quelques Romans Haïtiens.” Ajouter Du Monde Au Monde: Symboles, Symbolisations, Symbolismes Culturels Dans Les Littératures Francophones D’Afrique Et Des Caraïbes, Frédéric Mambenga-Ylagou, Montpellier, France: Université Paul Valéry, 2007, pp. 365–83. Peepre, Mari. “Home, Hybridity, and the Caribbean Diasporas.” Bridges across Chasms: Towards a Transcultural Future in Caribbean Literature, Bénédicte Ledent, Liège Language and Literature, English Department, Liège: Université de Liège, 2004, pp. 221–31. Rosello, Mireille. “Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones: Traumatic Memories and the Translucent Narrator.” Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks, Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006, pp. 55–69. Rosello, Mireille. “Marassa with a Difference: Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 117–29. Russ, Elizabeth. “ ‘A Hispaniola Conspiracy’: Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz Performing (In) the Caribbean Public Sphere.” Reimagining the Caribbean: Conversations among the Creole, English, French, and Spanish Caribbean, Valérie K. Orlando and Sandra Messinger Cypess, After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France, Lanham: Lexington, 2014, pp. 121–40. Sarthou, Sharron Eve. “In the Book of the Dead, the Narrator Is the Self: Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker as a Response to Faulkner’s Haiti in Absalom, Absalom!.” Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2013, Jay Watson and James G. Thomas Jr., Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016, pp. 194–206. Scott, Helen. “Ou Libéré?: History, Transformation and the Struggle for Freedom in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Haïti: Ecrire en Pays Assiégé/Writing under Siege, Marie-Agnès Sourieau and Kathleen M. Balutansky, Francopolyphonies 1, New York: Rodopi, 2004, pp. 459–78. Sharpe, Jenny. “The Middle Passages of Black Migration.” New Routes for Diaspora Studies, Sukanya Banerjee, Aims McGuinness, Steven C. McKay, 21st Century Studies 5, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012, pp. 25–43. Shea, Renee H. “A Family Story: Danticat Talks about Her Newest-And Most Personal-Work.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 187–93. Smith, Dorsía. “A Violent Homeland: Recalling Haiti in Edwidge Danticat’s Novels.” Narrating the Past: (Re)Constructing Memory, (Re)Negotiating History, Nandita Batra and Vartan P. Messier, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2007, pp. 133–40.

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Bibliography of Literary Criticism on Edwidge Danticat Strehle, Susan. “History and the End of Romance: Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Doubled Plots: Romance and History, Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 24–44. Tan, Kathy-Ann. “ ‘Creating Dangerously’: Writing, Exile and Diaspora in Edwidge Danticat’s and Dany Laferrière’s Haitian Memoirs.” American Lives, Alfred Hornung, American Studies: A Monograph Series 234, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013, pp. 249–60. Trouillot, Évelyne. “The Right Side of History.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 168–74. Trouillot, Lyonel. “To the Text.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 180–3. Vaclavik, Kiera. “Writing Young: Danticat’s Young Adult Fiction.” Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, Martin Munro and Dany Laferrière, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, pp. 86–98. Waisvisz, Sarah G. “Remembering Perpetrators: The Kunstlerroman and Second-Generation Witnessing in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights, Sophia A. McClennan and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, London: Routledge, 2015, pp. 94–101. Walcott-Hackshaw, Elizabeth. “Dancing at the Border: Cultural Translations and the Writer’s Return.” Echoes of the Haitian Revolution: 1804–2004, Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2008, pp. 149–62. Waller, Nicole. “The Book of the Dead: Inscribing Torture into the Black Atlantic.” Recharting the Black Atlantic: Modern Cultures, Local Communities, Global Connections, Annalisa Oboe and Anna Scacchi, Routledge Research in Atlantic Studies 1, London: Routledge, 2008, pp. 58–70.

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Author Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, Create Dangerously, and Claire of the Sea Light. She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Best American Essays 2011, Haiti Noir and Haiti Noir 2. She has written six books for children and young adults, Anacaona, Behind the Mountains, Eight Days, The Last Mapou, Mama’s Nightingale, Untwine, as well as a travel narrative, After the Dance. Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow.

Editors Jana Evans Braziel is Western College Endowed Professor in the Department of Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University. Braziel is author of five books:  “Riding with Death”:  Vodou Art and Urban Ecology in the Streets of Port-au-Prince (2018); Duvalier’s Ghosts:  Race, Diaspora, and U.S. Imperialism in Haitian Literatures (2010); Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds (2009); Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora (2008); and Diaspora: An Introduction (2008). Braziel is currently completing two book manuscripts—the first entitled ¡Ay, Carajo! ¡Ay, Caribe! Street Art and Urban Ecologies in the Greater Caribbean; and the second book entitled “Occupational Hazards”: Human Rights (Violations) and the UN Mission in Haiti. Braziel has also coedited five peer-reviewed volumes: After the Berlin Wall: Germany and Beyond (with K. Gerstenberger) (2011); Erasing Public Memory: Race, Aesthetics, and Cultural Amnesia in the Americas (with J. Young) (2007); Race and the Foundations of Knowledge: Cultural Amnesia in the Academy (with J. Young) (2005), which was a 2006 Nomination for the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award; Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader (with Anita Mannur) (2003); and Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (with K. LeBesco) (2001). Nadège T. Clitandre is Associate Professor in The Department of Global Studies at the University of California- Santa Barbara (UCSB) and currently holds an affiliate appointment in the Department of Black Studies and Comparative Literature. She is the author of Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (2018) and co-editor of Remembrance: Loss, Hope, Recovery after the Earthquake in Haiti (2016). Clitandre received her BA in English Literature from Hampton University, an MA in the Humanities, and a PhD in African Diaspora Studies with a designated emphasis in Women, Gender, Sexuality at the University of California, Berkeley. Clitandre is the recipient of the University of California President’s Postdoctoral

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Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. Clitandre works on theoretical frameworks of the African Diaspora, migration and displacement, and transnationalism with a particular focus on Haiti and Haitian diasporic literature. Her teaching interests include diaspora studies, anti-colonial literature, postcolonial Caribbean Women’s literature, and NGO and humanitarian intervention in Haiti post-earthquake. Clitandre is also the founder of Haïti Soleil, a nonprofit organization that focuses on engaging youth and building community through the development of libraries in Haiti.

Contributors Simone A. James Alexander is Professor of English, Africana Studies, and Women and Gender Studies and affiliate member of the Russian and East European Studies Program and Latin America and Latino/Latina Studies. She is the author of the award-winning book, African Diasporic Women’s Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival and Citizenship (2014; reprinted in May 2016), which also received Honorable Mention by the African Literature Association Book of the Year Scholarship Award. She is the recipient of the Researcher of the Year Award for African Diasporic Women’s Narratives. Alexander is also the author of Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (2001) and coeditor of Feminist and Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering (2013). Her articles appeared in African American Review, Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, African Literature Today, Anglistica: An Interdisciplinary Journal, New Mango Season: A Journal of Caribbean Women’s Writing, Revista Review InterAmericana, African Literature Association Bulletin, and edited collections. Her current projects include Black Freedom in (Communist) Russia: Great Expectations, Utopian Visions and Bodies of (In)Difference: Gender, Sexuality, and Nationhood. Anja Bandau is Professor of Romance Literatures and Cultures at Leibniz Universität Hannover where she teaches Latin-American, Caribbean, and Spanish Literature and is involved in an Atlantic Studies program. Professor Bandau’s research focuses on (transnational) literatures and cultures in Spanish and French in the Caribbean, Afrodescendent literatures in the Americas, and representation of the Haitian revolution in the eighteenth century. She has published on Chicana/o literature, feminism as well as diaspora, especially Afro-descendent literatures, and transborder literature; she is coeditor of several volumes and author of various journal articles on the Atlantic circulation of literary and historiographical texts from the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries: Les mondes coloniaux à Paris au XVIIIe siècle. Circulation et enchevêtrement des savoirs (2010), El Caribe y sus Diasporas. Cartografía de saberes y prácticas culturales (2011), Reshaping Glocal Dynamics of the Caribbean. Relaciones y Desconexiones— Relations et Déconnexions—Relations and Disconnections (2018), and the first critical edition of Mon Odyssée: L’Épopée d’un Colon de Saint-Domingue, par Jean-Paul Pillet (2015). Professor Bandau was president of the Society of Caribbean Research (Socare) in Germany (2011–18). Anne Brüske, MA Heidelberg, Dr.  phil. Heidelberg, directed the Junior Research Group “From the Caribbean to North America and Back. Processes of Transculturation in Literature, Popular Culture, and New Media” at the Heidelberg University from 2010 to 2017. After studying Romance Literature and Sociology in Heidelberg and Montpellier, she was an associated predoctoral researcher in the PhD program “Gender in Motion” at the 442

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University of Basel and defended her doctoral thesis “Das weibliche Subjekt in der Krise. Anthropologische Semantik in Laclos’ Liaisons dangereuses” in Heidelberg in 2008. Besides her interest in French Enlightenment fiction and culture, she has widely published in the field of Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies. In 2015, she co-organized the international and interdisciplinary conference “Reshaping Glocal Dynamics of the Caribbean,” which was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Her second monograph (2020) is a book-length study on the production of fictional space in Hispano-Caribbean and Haitian diaspora fiction in the United States. This study combines Henri Lefebvres’s spatial framework, intersectional and decolonial approaches, and literary theory and focuses on processes of de- and reterritorialization in contemporary postcolonial fiction. She is coeditor of the volume Reshaping Glocal Dynamics of the Caribbean. Relations et Déconnexions—Relaciones y Desconexiones—Relations and Disconnections (Heidelberg, 2018). Since 2018, she is also the president of the Society of Caribbean Research (Socare) in Germany. Maia L. Butler, PhD, is Assistant Professor of African American Literature at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she is also affiliate faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies. She researches and teaches in African American/Diasporic, Anglophone Postcolonial, and American (broadly conceived) literary studies, with an emphasis on Black women’s literature and feminist theories. She is coeditor of a volume titled Narrating History, Home, and Nation:  Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (2021), and has chapters in the collections Approaches to Teaching the Work of Edwidge Danticat (2019) and Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (2019). She has collaborative work in a colloquium section of Frontiers:  A Journal of Women’s Studies called Sowing the Seeds:  Decolonial Practices and Pedagogies (September 2020) as well as in North Carolina Literary Review (2019, June 2020). She is the cofounding vice president of the Edwidge Danticat Society. Cara Byrne, PhD, is a Lecturer in English at Case Western Reserve University and the Research Advisor on Diverse Children’s Literature for the Schubert Center for Child Studies in Cleveland, Ohio. Her teaching and research interests are centered on studying children’s picture books, African American literature, and visual rhetoric theory. She has published articles about police presence in James Baldwin’s picture book Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, picture book adaptations of Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological work, and fourth-wave feminism in popular YA fiction. In 2018, she received the emerging scholar award from the Children’s Literature Association. Her current book project, Illustrating the Smallest Black Bodies: The Creation of Childhood in African American Children’s Literature, 1836–2015, analyzes visual representations of Black childhood in picture books. Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College. Her Guggenheim-awarded book, Autochthonomies:  Transnationalism, Testimony and Transmission in the African Diaspora, was published in March 2020 and her novel on the Haiti earthquake, What Storm, What Thunder, is forthcoming in fall 2021. Past novels include The Loneliness of Angels (2010), winner of the 2011 Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award for Best Fiction 2010; The Scorpion’s Claw (2005); and Spirit of Haiti (2003), shortlisted in the Best First Book Category, Canada/Caribbean region of the Commonwealth Prize in 2004. Academic publications include: From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions from Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic (2012), Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian

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Women (1997; e-book, 2011), and Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (1997), which was awarded the Choice OAB Award in 1998. She served as an editorial advisory board member for PMLA from 2010 to 2012, as a Humanities Advisor for the Fetzer Institute from 2011 to 2013, and as a 2018 advisor for the John S.  Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Wilson C. Chen is Professor of English at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois, where he teaches African American literature, US Multiethnic literature, and American literature. He also serves as Director of the General Education Curriculum at Benedictine University. He has published essays on Edwidge Danticat in the journals LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory and The Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature. Robyn Cope is Assistant Professor of French at Binghamton University. Her primary research interests include Caribbean women’s writing and literary food studies. She has published articles on Edwidge Danticat in the Journal of Haitian Studies and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies. Her current monograph project, tentatively titled The Pen and the Pan: Food, Fiction, and Homegrown Caribbean Feminism(s), is a comparative study of culinary fiction by Caribbean women writers from the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean. Braiding literature, history, and gender studies, The Pen and the Pan argues that over the past quarter century, Caribbean women writers, including Danticat, have used food and fiction to make visible the invisible histories of Caribbean women’s everyday experiences with oppression and resistance and to advocate for coalitional Caribbean feminism(s). Kyrah Malika Daniels is Assistant Professor of Art History and African and African Diaspora Studies with a courtesy appointment in Theology at Boston College. Her research centers on Africana religions, sacred arts and material culture, race and visual culture, and ritual healing traditions in the Black Atlantic. In 2019–20, Daniels was awarded a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art to complete her book manuscript (Art of the Healing Gods), a comparative religion project that examines sacred art objects used in healing ceremonies of Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Between 2009 and 2010, Daniels served as junior curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. Following the earthquake of 2010, she worked in St. Raphael, Haiti, with Lakou Solèy Academic and Cultural Arts Center, a grassroots organization that develops artsbased pedagogy. Her work has been published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Haitian Studies, and the Journal of Africana Religions. Daniels currently serves as a Leadership Council Member for the African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association (ADRSA), and Co-Vice President for KOSANBA, a Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou. Megan Feifer, PhD, is Assistant Professor of English at Medaille College. She researchers and teaches in Afro-Caribbean diasporic, anglophone postcolonial, and multiethnic literature of the United States, with an emphasis on women’s literature and feminist theories. She is coeditor of a volume titled Narrating History, Home, and Nation: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (2021) and has a chapter in the collection Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (2019). Her article “The Remembering of Bones: Working through Trauma and the CounterArchive in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones” is featured in Palimpsest: A Journal on

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Women, Gender, and the Black International (2020). She is the cofounding president of the Edwidge Danticat Society. Kristina S. Gibby is a Lecturer in Humanities at Utah Valley University. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Louisiana State University and an MA in Comparative Studies from Brigham Young University. Her research focuses on contemporary literature of the Americas, specifically fiction’s potential to broaden historical consciousness. Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is a Black feminist literary scholar and cultural critic specializing in Francophone studies. Her scholarship and teaching on world literatures in French includes Black France, sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti, and the Haitian diaspora. She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an AM and PhD from Harvard University. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Mays Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She is the author of Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (2014) as well as numerous essays that have appeared in edited volumes and journals such as American Quarterly, French Forum, the Journal of Haitian Studies, Research in African Literatures, Palimpsest, and Small Axe. She is currently working on two book projects: one on Black feminist ethics in contemporary Haitian fiction and another on Haitian girlhood in literary and visual texts. Valérie Loichot is Chair of the Department of French and Italian at Emory University where she is Professor of French and English, and a core member of Comparative Literature. She is the author of three books: Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literatures of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (2007), The Tropics Bite Back:  Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature (2013; winner of MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for best book in French and Francophone Studies, 2015), and Water Graves:  The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean (2020). She also directed a special issue of La Revue des Sciences Humaines in honor of her mentor Édouard Glissant (Entours d’Édouard Glissant, 2013). In addition, Loichot has published over thirty articles and book chapters on Caribbean literature and culture, the US Gulf South, hurricanes and climate change, rituals of passing, creolization theory, feminism and exile, contemporary art, and food studies in venues including Callaloo, Études francophones, French Cultural Studies, The French Review, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Mississippi Quarterly, Small Axe, Southern Spaces, the Presses Universitaires des Antilles, and Cambridge University Press. Carine Mardorossian is Professor of English at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, where she specializes in postcolonial, Caribbean studies, nonfiction, and the medical humanities. Her book Framing the Rape Victim finds in Caribbean literature the answer to the impasse current discourses about sexual violence have reached, and her previous book Reclaiming Difference showed how Caribbean women writers have helped reframe identities we would otherwise take for granted and normalize. Her most recent book is coauthored: Death Is but a Dream is written from the perspective of her cowriter Christopher Kerr, a hospice doctor whose work demonstrates that people don’t stop living just because they are dying. She is currently completing a manuscript on Caribbean literature and the environment entitled Creolized Ecologies.

445

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Contributors

W. Todd Martin is W. Todd Martin is Professor of English at Huntington University. He has published on such varied authors as John Barth, E. E. Cummings, Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Mansfield, Julia Alvarez, and Edwidge Danticat, and he is editor of Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group (2017) and of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield (2020). His forthcoming book, Selected Stories of Katherine Mansfield: A Manuscript Critical Edition, stems from his work as the Lester J. Cappon Fellow in Documentary Editing at the Newberry Library. Judith Misrahi-Barak is Associate Professor at University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France, where she teaches English and postcolonial literatures. Her areas of specialization are Caribbean and Indo- and Sino-Caribbean literatures in English. She has published numerous articles and book chapters about diaspora and migrant writing, including in Tracing the New Indian Diaspora (Om Dwivedi, ed., 2014), Turning Tides: Caribbean Intersections in the Americas and Beyond (Heather Cateau and Milla Riggio, eds., 2019), and Windrush (1948) and Rivers of Blood (1968): Legacy and Assessment (Trevor Harris, ed., 2019). Misrahi-Barak is general editor of the series PoCoPages (Collection “Horizons anglophones”), of which Reimagining the Guyanas is the latest volume (2019). Among Misrahi-Barak’s more recent scholarly interests are Dalit literatures. Related to this scholarly area, she coedited Dalit Literatures in India (2015; 2nd edition, 2018) with Joshil K. Abraham and Dalit Text: Aesthetics and Politics Reimagined, with K. Satyanarayana and Nicole Thiara (2019). Misrahi-Barak was co-investigator on the AHRC Research Network series on “Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature” (2014–16) and is now is co-investigator on the AHRC Follow-on Funding for Impact and Engagement on “On Stage and on Page: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts” (2020–21). Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo, PhD, is an independent scholar, retired from the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. A  specialist in French Foreign Language Teaching and a researcher in the Literature and Culture of the French-speaking Caribbean, she chaired the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures (2005–11). In 2004 she received the French order of the Palmes académiques (Chevalier). She is a past president of the Haitian Studies Association (2005–6) and the recipient of two Principal’s Awards for Research in 2016 for her coauthored article with Elizabeth (Betty) Wilson, “Translating the Other’s Voice: When Is Too Much, Too Much” and in 2014 for her article “The Haitian Short-Story: An Overview” (Journal of Caribbean Literatures, vol. 6:3). She is currently a co-book review editor for the Journal of Haitian Studies and a freelance interpreter and translator. John D. Ribó, PhD, is Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University and the 2018– 19 recipient of a McKnight Junior Faculty Development Fellowship. His work has appeared in Chiricú Journal, the Journal of Haitian Studies, Cuban Studies, and ASAP/J and will be included in the forthcoming collection Teaching Haiti beyond Literature: Intersectionalities of History, Literature and Culture, edited by Valérie Orlando and Cécile Accilien. His current book project, Haitian Hauntings, draws upon Haitian, Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban literature, visual arts, music, and media to demonstrate that the Haitian Revolution was foundational not only to the racial formations of the Hispanophone Caribbean and its diasporas but also to the emergence of popular genres that dominate global culture today. Ramon Ant. Victoriano-Martinez (Arturo) was born in the Dominican Republic (1969), where he studied law at the Universidad Católica Santo Domingo (Class of 1994). He is 446

447

Contributors

Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the translator into Spanish of The Struggle for Political Democracy in Dominican Republic (Jonathan Hartlyn, Ramon A.  Victoriano Martinez), published by the Global Foundation for Democracy and Development in 2008. He earned his PhD from the University of Toronto in the area of Hispanic and Latin American Literatures in 2010. His book Rayanos y Dominicanyorks: La dominicanidad del siglo XXI (2014) analyzes Dominican identity, departing from the figure of the “rayano” (the one from the border) and leaning on a critical reading of the following texts: El Masacre se pasa a pie (Freddy Prestol Castillo), The Farming of Bones (Edwige Danticat), Dominicanish (Josefina Báez), and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz). His teaching encompasses Spanish as a Foreign Language, Latin American Cinema and Culture, and Caribbean Literature. As part of his teaching practice, Arturo is also a translator of Dominican literature to supply teaching material for his classes. He is in the early stages of completing a monograph tentatively entitled Revista ¡Ahora!, 1962–1982:  Una historia intelectual de la transición política dominicana (Revista ¡Ahora!, 1962–1982: An Intellectual History of the Dominican Political Transition). In this booklength project and through a close reading of a vast corpus of twenty years (998 issues) he traces the contours of the great political and social issues of that moment with special emphasis on political debates and the representation of women and the Dominican diaspora. Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is Professor of French literature and creative writing at the University of the West Indies. She has published scholarly articles and essays on Francophone Caribbean Literature and had coedited several works including Border Crossings: A Trilingual Anthology of Caribbean Women Writers; Methods in Caribbean Research: Literature, Discourse, Culture; Echoes of the Haitian Revolution (1804–2004); and Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks. She has also published creative works. Her short stories have been widely translated and anthologized. Four Taxis Facing North, her first collection of short stories, was considered one of the best books of the year by the Caribbean Review of Books. Mrs B, a novel, was shortlisted for “Best Book of Fiction” in the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2014. Stick No Bills, her latest collection of short stories was published in 2020.

447

448

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449

INDEX

9/11 attack 32 abused bodies 49 acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) 2, 238, 252 activism 28 affiliation 274–5 African American culture 276 African American national anthem 14 African community 315 African diasporic mythology 23 African Haitian American (AHA) 277 African mythology 23 Afrik-Ginen 314–18 Afro-Caribbean diasporic 283 Afro-Latinidad 389–402 After the Dance (Gaye) 24 Agamben, G. 42 Agawou 315 agency 42, 69, 76–8, 110, 118, 129, 169, 201, 269, 278 Agwe 315–18 AIDS see acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) Alexis, J. S. 15, 19, 25, 36 Alvarez, J. 20, 30 Amabelle 398–402 “American dream” 26 ancestor worshippers 268 andaki 309–11; see also pale daki Angelou, M. 20 Anglophone diaspora 30 “Anglo-Saxonization” 26 “annus horribilis” 32–3 antere ko dnonbrit 312 anti-Black politic 65 anti-immigrant bills 63 anti-immigration 64, 65 Antillean environment 347 anviwonman sakre 310 aporia 83 apprenticeship 272 Archimedes 15 art 12; see also memorial art art of commemoration 141 Art of Death, The (Danticat) 34, 35, 36, 101, 103, 107, 121, 134–5, 146–7 Asylum Speakers (Shemak) 55, 65 Autobiography of My Mother (Kincaid) 118 Ayizan 313, 314

bad hombres 26 Balaguer, J. 394 Baldwin, J. 16, 28 Bambara, T. C. 18, 28, 250 Barbadian American community 279 “bare life” 42 Bawon Samdi 336–9 Bazile, D. 84 Beacon Best of 2000, The (Danticat) 31 Beauvoir, Max G. 311 Beloved Haiti (song) 58 Berkeley 19 Berry, W. 248–9 Best American Essays of 2011, The (Danticat) 31 Bhabha, H. 73–4 Bibby, A. 102–3 Black Alliance for Just Immigration 63, 64 Black diaspora 275 Black immigrant rights 65 Black Lives Matter movement 63, 232 Black male migrants/refugees 72–6 Black Women Writers (1950–1980) (Evans) 14, 268 bland interactive model 365 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison) 20 boat people 71 bodies: abused 49 harks 44 relationship of 51 text and 52–60 tortured 43–52 body-in-relation 57, 247, 250 BonDye (God) 315 “Book of the Dead, The ” 182–4 borders: of academic fields 395 of colonial origin 391 crossing 63–5 geographical 392 geopolitical 74 between mind and body 259 policed 47, 60 political 261 social 25 between social groups 221 textual 259 traditional 395 between two countries 9

450

Index Bordo, S. 251–2 Bourne, R. 26 boutilyes 311 Breath, Eyes, Memory (BEM) (Danticat) 19, 20, 21, 23–4, 29, 32, 83, 85, 87, 90, 92, 135, 146, 161, 169–73, 243 British colonial 86 Brooklyn Bridge 29 Brooklyn Public Library 19 Brooks, G. 15 Brother, I’m Dying (Danticat) 32–3, 35, 53, 65, 77, 83, 121, 147, 189 Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall) 20 Brown University 29 Butler, J. 56 Butterfly’s Way, The (Danticat) 29 Cajuste, A. 51 “Call Krome” 69 Camus, A. 12, 36, 217, 234 Cancer Journals, The 106 Caribbean 349–51 Carpentier, A. 372 Carrié, E. D. 190 Casey, E. 14, 245 Cathédrale du mois d’aout (Clitandre) 19 Centers for Disease Control 14 Cerin, N. 395–97 Chauvet, M. V. 15, 19 Choquet, I. 82 Cité Pendue community 358 Claire of the Sea Light (Danticat) 21, 33, 81, 83, 89, 90, 92–3, 121, 161, 162–9, 262, 356–63 Clinton, B. 212 Clinton Bush Haiti Fund 212 Clitandre, N. T. 19–37, 84, 214, 231 Clitandre, P. 19 colonial 222, 350, 372 assumption 359 British 86 domination 5, 90, 221 education 274 exploitation 359 fantasies 348–9, 358 gaze 353, 359–60 history 232, 347 impacts of forces 237 long-standing 65 process 359 tourist perceptions and 354, 356, 358, 363 violence 74, 347, 350 colonialism 66, 91 colonialization 351–3 community African 315 Barbadian American 279 Cité Pendue 358

450

diasporic 122 functional 138 Haitian 19, 26–7, 32, 140, 178, 250, 254 heterogeneous 36 homogenous 36 imagined 121–2 international 7 Jamaican 247 national 219, 238 native 57 transnational 238 village 132–3, 135 Compere Général Soleil (Alexis) 25, 36 conceived space 123 conflict bodies 91 Conflict Bodies (Jean-Charles) 90 conquest 351–3 consciousness 60, 103, 117, 124, 127, 128–9, 139, 150, 231, 233, 239, 350, 369–71 Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) 203 Create Dangerously (Danticat) 28, 35, 121, 135, 136, 213–29, 234, 274 credible fear 69 creolization 365–73 cross-cultural affiliation 275 culinary survival 57 cultures 276; see also specific cultures Dantica, J. 53, 64–70, 72 Danticat, E. 11–18, 19–37, 41, 52, 74–5, 82, 121, 189 Dash, J. M. 81 Dash, M. 365 death 126–34, 145, 193 crimes of honor and revenge 153 in Danticat’s imaginary 85–90 narratives 102–3 political violence 150–3 by suicide 148–50; see also loss/death Death: Writing the Final Story (Danticat) 147 debility 65–8, 70 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) 235 defiance 169–73 dehumanization 68 Deleuze, G. 123 Delinois, A. 190, 191 DeLoughrey, E. M. 347 Deren, M. 215 de-territorialization 135–8 Dew Breaker, The (Danticat) 20, 24, 31, 36, 42, 49, 53, 58, 60, 83, 85, 88, 90, 121–3, 125, 126, 130, 134, 136, 177–8 “Deye mon gen mon” 18 diaspora 30, 52, 57–8, 123–5, 126–34 diaspora/djyaspora 305 diasporic community 122 diasporic situation 219–21 Díaz, J. 19, 28 dictatorship 21, 24

451

Index disability debility with 67 as difference 66 rights 66 disaster 211–12 disciplines 42, 46 discovery 351–3 disease 14 Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (Deren) 215 docile bodies 42 “docilité-utilité” 46 Dominican Republic 389, 394 Dominique, J. J. 15, 19, 221 “Dona Aída, with Your Permission” (essay) 31 Douglass, F. 274 Drouin, L. 234 Dusseck, R. 14 Dust Tracks on a Road (Huston) 16 Duvalier, F. 49 Duvalier, Jean-Claude 121 Duvalier’s Ghosts (Danticat) 82 ears, eyes, nose, and throat (EENT) 88 eating 48, 248–51 ecocritical approach 347–63 ecological disasters 347 ecologies 357–8 economic consequences 292 economic deprivation 65 Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (Clitandre) 84 Eight Days: A Story of Haiti (Delinois) 190, 191–4 Ellison, R. 34 empathy 64 engagement 140 English 26, 31 environment 349–51, 356–7 environmental ethics 353–6 epilogue 259–64 Euro-American rights 70 Evans, M. 14, 268 Everything Inside (Danticat) 3, 41, 92, 263, 301 expression 271 face nationalism 27 fake lore 306–9 Fardin, D. 145 Farming of Bones, The (Danticat) 24, 27, 34, 36, 42–6, 49, 83, 88, 90, 106, 112, 146, 177, 283, 389 fatwa 20 Faubert, I. 15 Faulkner, W. 92–4 Fernandez, I. 101 Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of John J. Harvey (Kalman) 193 Fire Next Time, The (Baldwin) 16 folklore 306–9 Fond-des-Blancs 11–12, 18

food 48, 56–7 imagery 283 traditions 246–7 Fort, Beatrice Saint 51 Foucault, M. 5, 42, 46, 233 free-floating 365 Friends, The (Guy) 20 functional community 138 Galeano, É. 26 gathering 300–1 gender malleability 65 geographical borders 392 geopolitical borders 74 Gerstein, M. 193 ghosts 118 Giovanni, N. 14 girlhood 161–75 Glissant, E. 213 Glissant, É. 81 globalization 25–6 Good Book 11 gourdes 315 Gouverneurs de la rosée (Roumain) 36, 123, 133–4, 138, 145 Gran met la 23 Grann Brijit 336–9 Graywolf Press 34 Greek myths 23 grievability 109–12 grievable subjects 109–12 grieving 154–6 Guattari, F. 123 Guy, R. 20 Haiti 11–13, 245–7 Haitian Body Odor (HBO) 252 Haitian community 19, 26–7, 32, 140, 178, 250, 254 Haitian Studies Association Conference 161 haitiennité (Haitianness) 95 Haiti Projects 11 Handley, G. B. 347 Harper Perennial Modern Classics 276 Hartman, S. 90 haunting legacy 129 Hawkins, Yusef 29 hemophiliacs 14 heterogeneous community 36 Higgins, H. 91 high risk 14 homogenous community 36 homosexuals 14 hooks, bell 259 houngan asogwe (high priest) 311 House Judiciary Committee 33, 70 How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvarez) 20 Hruska, L. 21 Hughes, L. 274

451

452

Index Hughes, M. 252 Hunger Overcome (Warnes) 243 Hurston, Z. N. 14, 16–17, 20, 36, 274 hybridity 365, 369 hypervulnerability 27 identities 31 Iemanjá (Brazil) 315 Ifé, G. 23 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou) 20 imagination 4, 8, 12, 81, 92, 124, 127, 146, 151, 185, 192, 197, 213–14 imagined community 121–2 immigrant artist 140 immigrant writer 136 immigrant writing 289 immigration 63 justice 63 policies 27–8, 65 rights 64–5 system 65; see also anti-immigration Immigration Act 71 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 200 Imperial Eyes (Pratt) 354 indigenism vs. postmodernism 138–41 ingesting food 56 Ingram, F. 58 intellectual space 214 inter-diction 42 Interim Haiti Recovery Commission 212 international community 7 intertextual dialogues 134–5 interview with Danticat, E. 19–37 with Mirabal, N. R. 25 New Yorker 177 intravenous drug users 14 invizib yo 315 Jackson Memorial Hospital, Miami 14 Jacobs, H. 274 Jadotte, H. 145 Jamaican community 247 James, H. 16 Jean-Charles, R. M. 90–1 Je suis un é crivain japonais (Laferriere) 214 Jeune Haiti 219 Johnson, J. 14, 274 Jones, A. M. 15 Jones, G. 14 Jordan, J. 14 Joy Luck Club, The (Tan) 20 Junta Central Electoral 406 Kalman, M. 193 Kennedy, J. F. 71 Kincaid, J. 90, 259 Kingston, M. H. 20

452

kitchen poets 14, 267–81 Krik? Krak! (Danticat) 18, 21, 24, 29, 41–2, 43, 58–9, 81, 83, 87–8, 90, 92, 146, 243, 269, 284, 375–86 Kundu, C. D. 102–3 labouyi 290 Laferriere, D. 15, 19, 134, 214 Lahens, Y. 145 Lahiri, J. 31 lakou 311 lakou system 27 “land of high mountains” 358 La Revue Indigene (Roumain) 139 Last Mapou, The (Carrié) 190, 194–7 Latinity 389 “Lazarus Effect” 184–7 legal immigrants 64 “Legends” 13, 17 Legros, A. 395–7 lejann 13 Le people desterres mélées (Philoctete) 25, 36 Le Petit Ecolier (biscuits) 56 les enfants-morts (dead babies) 83 Lester, J. 16 Le vaudou haitien (Métraux) 133 lieu de mémoire 82 life 298–300 life-affirming act 107 literature 349–51 littérature engagée (Sartre) 218 lived space 123 Long, C. H. 305 long-standing colonial 65 Lorde, A. 14, 283 loss/death 101; see also death “lot bo dlo” 12, 16, 18 ‘love’ 16 low-wage workers 26 Madeline 189 Magic City Gospel (Jones) 15 malleability 65; see also gender malleability Mama’s Nightingale (Staub) 190, 197–202 Manbo Ayizan 314 manifest, defined 53 manual labor 290 Man Who Walked between the Towers, The (Gerstein) 193 Márquez, G. G. 36 Mars, K. 11 Marshall, P. 14, 20, 259 Martín, Y. C. 389 Massacre River 25 massification 66–7 Mayes, A. J. 389 Melina, G. 23 Mémoire d’une amnésique (Dominique) 221 memorial art 141, 226–9

453

Index memory 375–86 Mere Solitude (Ollivier) 145 Métraux, A. 133 Miami Herald 215 Miami International Airport 15 “microphysique du pouvoir” 47 migration 23, 177–8 migratory experience 177 Mirabal, N. R. 25 Mishrahi-Barak, J. 84 mistocle Epaminondas Labasterre, Thé (Marcelin) 145 mobility 123 “Monkey Tails” 46, 58 monocrop agriculture 347 morphology 72–6 Morrison, T. 14, 20, 36, 107–8, 234, 267, 270, 305 mother/daughter asphyxiation 86 mourning 154–6 multiple identities 31 Mwin aussi 275 My Mommy Medicine (Wright) 190, 202–4 mystique/mistik 310 myths 305 African 23 archetypes 311 of displacement 23 Greek 23 narrated spaces 122, 123, 126–34 national community 219, 238 nationalist pedagogy 73 native community 57 natural environment 93 nature 311–14 navigating Hispaniola 405–14 Naylor, G. 14 necropolitics 101 necro-transcendence 101, 103, 106–9 Nesbitt, N. 51 Neustadt Prize 82 New Yorker 7, 42, 125n18, 177, 215, 231–9 New York Times 16, 31 New York Times Book Review 267 “Night Talkers” 45, 53, 123, 134–5 “Night Women” 13, 51, 58 Numa, M. 234 Obejas, A. 82 oceanic afterlife 314–18 Ollivier, E. 145 Oprah’s book club 21 ordinariness of life 25 Page, L. 89 pale daki 309–11 Papa Loko 314 Pays sans chapeau (Laferriere) 123, 134–5, 140 peculiar institution 90

perceived space 123 petite mort 55 Philoctete, R. 25, 36 physical affections 53 Picasso, P. 229 picture coffin 113 Pierre, J. D. 406 Pineau, G. 259 place 173–5 plantation communities 71 poetics 353–6 Poétique de la relation (Glissant) 213 poets 14 policed borders 47, 60 political borders 261 politics of affiliation 272–6 possibilities 375–86 postcolonial fixation 365 postcolonial practices 65 postmodernism vs. indigenism 138–41 Pratt, M. L. 354 Progressive, The 215 Prou, Marc 31 Puar, J. 65–68, 72 Puri, S. 365 Rankine, C. 102 rape 91 as reflective trope of political turmoil 91 as symbol/metonymic device 91 Rape and Representation (Higgins and Silver) 91 Rastogi, N. 32 realm of Simbi 327–32 Reforming American Immigration 26 relational double 8 remembering, importance of 221–3 repozwa 313 Representations of the Intellectual (Said) 233 repression 271 Republican Congress 33 restavek 46 reterritorialization 135–8 riddles of initiation 332–6 Right to Maim, The (Puar) 66 ritual objects 310 Robeson, P. 15 Roumain, J. 15, 19, 36, 133, 134, 138, 145 Said, E. 233 Salt Eaters, The (Bambara) 18, 250 Sanchez, S. 14 Sartre, J. P. 218 scattering 300–1 Scenes of Subjection (Hartman) 90 Schwarz-Bart, S. 259 sense of power 49 sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) 91 sexual trauma 86

453

454

Index sexual violence 85–90, 94 sezisman 17 Shange, N. 161, 247, 259 Shea, R. H. 233 Shemak, A. 42, 55, 65–6, 68 short story cycle 58–8 shouket laroze 36, 292 Si Dye vle 37 Silver, B. 91 Sister Rose 93; see also Sor Rose small-scale agriculture 290n43 smiling face 108 Sobo, E. 57, 247 social borders 25 Soho Press 21 Something to Declare (Alvarez) 31 Song of Solomon (Morrison) 107 songs 173–5 Sor Rose 83–4, 91, 93–4; see also Sister Rose soup joumou 301 spaces conceived 123 intellectual 214 lived 123 narrated 122, 126–34 of narration 122–3, 134, 135–8 perceived 123 of representation 124 writing 28 Spanish Civil War 229 Spivak, G. 214 Staub, L. 190 stone statue 318–22 stories 11–14, 18 storytelling 76–8 stricto sensu 45 Strong Employment Act 26 sublime architecture 82 suicide 107 “Sunrise, Sunset” 178–82 Surveiller et punir (Foucault) 46 survival 173–5 survival in urban capitalism 248–51 Tan, A. 20 Tar Baby (Morrison) 270 Temporary Protected Status (TPS) 64 testimonial narrative 68 textual borders 259 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston) 276–8 Théodat, Jean-Marie 11 Time Magazine 215 Tometi, O. 63–4 Tontons Macoutes 41, 43, 47, 245, 245n7, 295 tortured body 43–52 tourist fantasies 351–3

454

traditional borders 395 tragedy 285–9 transcultural kitchen 255–9 “Transnational America” (Bourne) 26 transnational community 238 transnational Haitian literary tradition 221–3 Transnational Hispaniola 389–402 traumatic residue 56 true lore 306–9 Trujillo, R. 112 Trujillo dictatorship 393 Trump, D. 15, 26 Truth, S. 274 twinning 112–19 UMass 31 Unbearable Weight (Bordo) 251 unbelonging 169–73 United States 12–13, 14, 26 unsettled America 249 Unsettling of America, The (Berry) 248 unsustainability 262 untwining 112–19 urban capitalism, survival 248–51 US Congress 63 US Homeland Security 65, 74 US immigration system 65 US Occupation 66, 71–2, 79, 105n27, 106, 134 Valencia 113–14, 398–402 village community 132–3, 135 ville imaginé 5, 91–2, 94, 95 Ville Rose 81–2, 85, 88–95 violence 42 Wachtel, E. 25 Walker, A. 14 Warnes, A. 243 “Water Child” 35 Western theology 251 White House 28 witness 16 Woman Warrior (Kingston) 20 women 13, 322–7 World Literature Today (Danticat) 81, 84, 94 World Trade Center 32 woukoukou 305 Wright, S. 190 writer’s testimony 223–6 writing space 28 Yemayá (Cuba) 315 Yoknapatawpha County 92, 94 Zami, A New Spelling of My Name (Lorde) 283