CANR
WORK TITLE: EVERYTHING INSIDE
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Miami
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: SATA 342
http://www.randomhouse.com/book/36740/claire-of-the-sea-light-by-edwidge-danticat#abouttheauthor http://www.npr.org/2013/08/25/214857669/haitian-youth-illuminated-in-sea-light
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Name is pronounced “Ed-weedj Dan-ti-kah”; born January 19, 1969, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; immigrated to the United States, 1981; daughter of André Miracin (a cab driver) and Rose Souvenance (a textile worker) Danticat; married Fedo Boyer; children: Mira, Leila.
EDUCATION:Barnard College, B.A. 1990; Brown University, M.F.A., 1993.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Clinica Estetico (filmmakers), New York, NY, production and research assistant, 1993-94; writer, educator, and lecturer, 1994—. New York University, New York, professor, 1996-97; University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, visiting professor of creative writing, spring, 2000.
MEMBER:Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha Kappa Alpha.
AWARDS:National Book Award finalist, 1995, for Krik? Krak!, finalist, 2007, for Brother, I’m Dying; finalist, 2014, for Claire of the Sea Light; Lannan Foundation Fellowship, 2004; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, 2004, and PEN/Faulkner Award nomination, 2005, both for The Dew Breaker; Pushcart Prize for short fiction; American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, for The Farming of Bones; National Book Critics Circle Award for Brother, I’m Dying, 2007; MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, 2009; Langston Hughes Medal, City College of New York, 2011; OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, 2011, for Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work; fiction awards from periodicals, including Caribbean Writer, Seventeen, and Essence. Honorary degrees from Smith College, 2012, and Yale University, 2013; Andrew Carnegie Medal, 2014; Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 2018.
WRITINGS
Writer and narrator of the films Poto Mitan, 2009, and Girl Rising, 2013.
SIDELIGHTS
Fiction writer Edwidge Danticat conjures the history of her native Haiti in award-winning short stories and novels. She is equally at home describing the immigrant experience—what she calls “dyaspora”—and the reality of life in Haiti today. Danticat’s fiction “has been devoted to an unflinching examination of her native culture, both on its own terms and in terms of its intersections with American culture,” wrote an essayist in Contemporary Novelists. “Danticat’s work emphasizes in particular the heroism and endurance of Haitian women as they cope with a patriarchal culture that, in its unswerving devotion to tradition and family, both oppresses and enriches them.” Readers will find “massacres, rapes, [and] horrible nightmares in Danticat’s fiction,” wrote an essayist in the St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers, “but above all these are the strength, hope, and joy of her poetic vision.”
Danticat’s first novel, the loosely autobiographical Breath, Eyes, Memory, was a 1998 selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, thus assuring its best-seller status. Other works by Danticat have won warm praise as well, with some critics expressing surprise that such assured prose has come from an author so young. Antioch Review correspondent Grace A. Epstein praised Danticat for “the real courage … in excavating the romance of nationalism, identity, and home.” Time reporter Christopher John Farley likewise concluded that Danticat’s fiction “never turns purple, never spins wildly into the fantastic, always remains focused, with precise disciplined language, and in doing so, it uncovers moments of raw humanness.”
Danticat was born in Haiti and lived there the first twelve years of her life. She came to the United States in 1981, joining her parents who had already begun to build a life for themselves in New York City. When she started attending junior high classes in Brooklyn, she had difficulty fitting in with her classmates because of her Haitian accent, clothing, and hairstyle. Danticat recalled for Garry Pierre-Pierre in the New York Times that she took refuge from the isolation she felt in writing about her native land. As an adolescent she began work on what would evolve into her first novel, the acclaimed Breath, Eyes, Memory. Danticat followed her debut with a collection of short stories, Krik? Krak!, which became a finalist for that year’s National Book Award. According to Pierre-Pierre, the young author has been heralded as “‘the voice’ of Haitian-Americans,” but Danticat told him: “I think I have been assigned that role, but I don’t really see myself as the voice for the Haitian-American experience. There are many. I’m just one.”
Danticat’s parents wanted her to pursue a career in medicine, and with the goal of becoming a nurse, she attended a specialized high school in New York City. But she abandoned this aim to devote herself to her writing. An early version of Breath, Eyes, Memory served as her master of fine arts thesis at Brown University, and the finished version was published shortly thereafter. Like Danticat herself, Sophie Caco—the novel’s protagonist—spent her first twelve years in Haiti, several in the care of an aunt, before coming wide-eyed to the United States. But there the similarities end. Sophie is the child of a single mother, conceived by rape. Though she rejoins her mother in the United States, it is too late to save the still-traumatized older woman from self-destruction. Yet women’s ties to women are celebrated in the novel, and Sophie draws strength from her mother, her aunt, and herself in order to escape her mother’s fate.
Breath, Eyes, Memory caused some controversy in the Haitian American community. Some of Danticat’s fellow Haitians did not approve of her writing of the practice of “testing” in the novel. In the story, female virginity is highly prized by Sophie’s family, and Sophie’s aunt “tests” to see whether Sophie’s hymen is intact by inserting her fingers into the girl’s vagina. Haitian-American women, some of whom had never heard of or participated in this practice, felt that Danticat’s inclusion of it portrayed them as primitive and abusive. Many American critics, however, appreciated Breath, Eyes, Memory. Joan Philpott, writing in Ms., described the book as “intensely lyrical.” Pierre-Pierre reported that reviewers “have praised Ms. Danticat’s vivid sense of place and her images of fear and pain.” Jim Gladstone concluded in the New York Times Book Review that the novel “achieves an emotional complexity that lifts it out of the realm of the potboiler and into that of poetry.” And Bob Shacochis, in his Washington Post Book World review, called the work “a novel that rewards a reader again and again with small but exquisite and unforgettable epiphanies.” Shacochis added: “You can actually see Danticat grow and mature, come into her own strength as a writer, throughout the course of this quiet, soul-penetrating story about four generations of women trying to hold on to one another in the Haitian diaspora.”
Krik? Krak! takes its title from the practice of Haitian storytellers. Danticat told Deborah Gregory of Essence that storytelling is a favorite entertainment in Haiti, and a storyteller inquires of his or her audience, “Krik?” to ask if they are ready to listen. The group then replies with an enthusiastic “Krak!” The tales in this collection include one about a man attempting to flee Haiti in a leaky boat, another about a prostitute who tells her son that the reason she dresses up every night is that she is expecting an angel to descend upon their house, and yet another explores the feelings of a childless housekeeper in a loveless marriage who finds an abandoned baby in the streets.
New York Times Book Review contributor Robert Houston, citing the fact that some of the stories in Krik? Krak! were written while Danticat was still an undergraduate at Barnard College, felt that these pieces were “out of place in a collection presumed to represent polished, mature work.” But Ms. contributor Jordana Hart felt that the tales in Krik? Krak! “are textured and deeply personal, as if the twenty-six-year-old Haitian-American author had spilled her own tears over each.” Even Houston conceded that readers “weary of stories that deal only with the minutiae of ‘relationships’ will rejoice that they have found work that is about something, and something that matters.”
Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones concerns a historical tragedy, the 1937 massacre of Haitian farm workers by soldiers of the Dominican Republic. In the course of less than a week, an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic were slaughtered by the Dominican government or by private citizens in a classic case of “ethnic cleansing.” The Farming of Bones is narrated by a young Haitian woman, Amabelle Desir, who has grown up in the Dominican Republic after being orphaned. As the nightmare unfolds around her, Amabelle must flee for her life, separated from her lover, Sebastien. In the ensuing decades as she nurses her physical and psychological wounds, Amabelle serves as witness to the suffering of her countrymen and the guilt of her former Dominican employers. The massacre, Danticat told Mallay Charters in Publishers Weekly, is “a part of our history, as Haitians, but it’s also a part of the history of the world. Writing about it is an act of remembrance.”
Dean Peerman wrote in Christian Century that “ Breath, Eyes, Memory was an impressive debut, but The Farming of Bones is a richer work, haunting and heartwrenching.” In a Nation review, Zia Jaffrey praised Danticat for “blending history and fiction, imparting information, in the manner of nineteenth-century novelists, without seeming to.” Jaffrey added: “Danticat’s brilliance as a novelist is that she is able to put this event into a credible, human context.” Farley also felt that the author was able to endow a horrific episode with a breath of humanity. “Every chapter cuts deep, and you feel it,” he stated, continuing on to say that Amabelle’s “journey from servitude to slaughter is heartbreaking.” In Américas, Barbara Mujica concluded that Danticat has written “a gripping novel that exposes an aspect of Dominican-Haitian history rarely represented in Latin American fiction. In spite of the desolation and wretchedness of the people Danticat depicts, The Farming of Bones is an inspiring book. It is a hymn to human resilience, faith, and hope in the face of overwhelming adversity.” Jaffrey ended her review by concluding that the novel is “a beautifully conceived work, with monumental themes.”
Behind the Mountains takes the form of a diary of a Haitian teenager named Celiane Esperance. Celiane is happy in her home in the mountains of Haiti, but she hasn’t seen her father since he left for the United States years before. She had intended to join him in New York, along with her mother and older brother, but visa applications are inexorably slow. After eight years, the visas are granted, and the family reunites in Brooklyn. After an initially joyful reunion, however, the family begins to slowly unravel. A child when her father left Haiti, Celiane is now a young woman with her own mind and will. Her brother, Moy, a nineteen-year-old artist, does not quietly slip back into the role of obedient child. Even more universal concerns, such as the freezing New York winters, difficulties at school, and the need to make a living, chip away at the family’s unity.
Good intentions go awry in a book showcasing “friction among family members” exacerbated by “the separation and adjustment to a new country,” but especially by the inevitable maturation of younger family members and the unwillingness of parents to acknowledge it, wrote Diane S. Morton in School Library Journal. Hazel Rochman, writing in Booklist, praised the “simple, lyrical writing” Danticat demonstrates in the novel. “Danticat brings her formidable skill as a writer and her own firsthand knowledge of Haiti and immigrating to America to this heartfelt story told in the intimate diary format,” wrote Claire Rosser in Kliatt.
The Dew Breaker is a work of mystery and violence. It is a collection of stories (many previously unpublished) connected by the character of the Dew Breaker, a torturer whose nickname is based on the fact that he attacks in the dawn before the dew has disappeared in the light of day. The Dew Breaker ultimately moves from Haiti to Brooklyn, becomes a barber, and raises a loving family. In Danticat’s stories, the Dew Breaker reveals his secrets out of guilt, and his victims reveal their secrets, too, to ease the pain of their memories.
Danticat’s “spare, lyrical prose is ever present,” wrote Marjorie Valbrun in the Black Issues Book Review, “in the gentle telling of stories that are soft to the ear even when pain and violence seem to scream from the pages.” “The text presents two levels of truth,” commented Robert McCormick in World Literature Today. In the course of reading, one comes to understand much, he hinted, but “what we don’t know … is just as important.”
In addition to her own works, Danticat has also edited the fiction of others, including The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States. This work is a collection of stories, poems, and essays from Haitian writers living in America and Europe, many of whom are concerned with the feeling of displacement that is perhaps an inevitable consequence of emigration.
Denolyn Carroll suggested in Black Issues Book Review that the pieces in The Butterfly’s Way “help paint a vivid picture of what it is like to live in two worlds.” Carroll also felt that the work adds “new dimensions of understanding of Haitian emigrants’ realities. This compilation is a source of enlightenment for us all.” Booklist contributor Donna Seaman found the book “a potent and piercing collection” that will help all Americans understand “the frustrations … of Haitians who are now outsiders both in Haiti and in their places of refuge.”
After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Haiti is Danticat’s nonfiction account of her first encounter with Carnival, the boisterous, sometimes debauched, sometimes dangerous celebrations that rock Haiti every year. As a child, she did not have the opportunity to attend Carnival. Her family inevitably packed up and left for a remote area in the Haitian mountains each year to escape the celebrations, perpetuating an almost superstitious distrust of the event. At times, though, staying clear has been a good idea. During the regime of Haitian dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, carnival-goers were “subject to beatings and arrest by Duvalier’s infamously unregulated militiamen,” wrote Judith Wynn in the Boston Herald. Danticat therefore approaches her first experience of Carnival uneasily. Her trip, however, beginning a week before the actual event, immerses her in the rich culture and history of Haiti, the cultural importance behind Carnival, and the background of the celebration itself. Danticat’s “lively narrative” describes a country with a deep history, “influenced by Christianity, voodoo, Europeans, pirates, dictators, past slavery, and an uncertain economy,” wrote Linda M. Kaufmann in Library Journal. Seaman, writing in Booklist, observed that “as in her fiction, Danticat writes about her odyssey with an admirable delicacy and meticulousness,” while a Publishers Weekly critic noted that the author “offers an enlightening look at the country—and Carnival—through the eyes of one of its finest writers.”
In the well-received memoir Brother, I’m Dying, Danticat tells the story of her father and his brother Joseph, a pastor who had remained in Haiti and had cared for Danticat and her brother in their early years. In 2004, the eighty-one-year-old Joseph, in poor health after a bout of throat cancer, sought asylum in the United States. Looters had burned his church in Haiti, and he had received death threats. Though Joseph had often visited family in the United States and had a passport and visa, immigration authorities detained him in Florida and took away his medications. Joseph’s health quickly deteriorated, and he died in custody only two days after setting foot in the country. Soon afterward Danticat’s beloved father, Mira, succumbed to pulmonary fibrosis—a diagnosis he received the same day that the author learned she was pregnant with her first child. Mira lived only long enough to hold his newborn granddaughter—named for him—and was buried in the same gravesite as Joseph in Queens, New York.
The memoir, Danticat told Democracy Now interviewer Amy Goodman, attempts to present “a picture of my uncle, of what he meant to us, but also to link his cause to the greater cause of mistreatment and lack of medical care of immigrants in detention.” Her desire to be a writer, she went on, comes from “all of these things that I witnessed. … Just observing different things, I always thought I wanted to document things. And the way that the storytellers of my childhood told stories, that’s really what made me want to be a writer.”
Many reviewers admired the book’s gripping details and heartfelt emotion, as well as its engagement with issues of exile. Calling Brother, I’m Dying a “fierce, haunting book,” New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani observed that Danticat “gives the reader an intimate sense of the personal consequences of the Haitian diaspora.” Desa Philadelphia, writing in Paste magazine online, highlighted the political message of the book: “For Haitians in particular, Danticat … has taken on the task of literally rewriting their image in America, exposing the racist inaccuracies of the ‘boat people’ persona that has been thrust upon these immigrants in this country.”
Praising Danticat’s skill in weaving together the political and the personal without resorting to any predictable response, New York Times Book Review contributor Jess Row called Brother, I’m Dying “a memoir whose clear-eyed prose and unflinching adherence to the facts conceal an astringent undercurrent of melancholy, a mixture of homesickness and homelessness.” Donna Rifkind, writing in Los Angeles Times, also noted the emotional strengths of the book but added that narrative coherence and “rigor” are less evident. In a review in World Literature Today, Robert H. McCormick, Jr., likewise noticed an “aesthetically awkward” element in the memoir, but found this more than compensated for by Danticat’s “never-failing emotional intimacy with her characters.” Writing in the Boston Globe, Renée Graham hailed the “poetic truth” that Danticat finds in the “relentless hardships of her native Haiti and its people.” The memoir, Graham concluded, is a “stellar achievement from a writer whose stunning talents continue to soar and amaze.”
Anacaona, Golden Flower: Haiti, 1490, published in 2005, is a novel for the upper-elementary and middle-school grades, written in the form of a diary. Anacaona is a young princess of the Taíno people who comes of age in the time of Christopher Columbus. She weds a royal chieftain who lives nearby and undergoes military training to defend her island home. Booklist reviewer Gillian Engberg predicted that “readers will connect with Danticat’s immediate, poetic language, Anacaona’s finely drawn growing pains, and the powerful, graphic story.”
Claire of the Sea Light follows the life of Claire Limye Lanme (which is Haitian for “Claire of the Sea Light”). Claire is seven years old. Her mother died in childbirth, and she and her father live alone in a shack. Set in the fictional Haitian town of Ville Rose, the novel portrays Claire’s and her father’s struggle to make ends meet. Her father works as a fisherman, and he thinks the best way to secure Claire’s future is to give up his parental rights. A wealthy businesswoman whose daughter died wants to adopt Claire, and the story concludes with a decision that will change the course of the little girl’s life. The tale is told from the points of view of Claire, her father, and her would-be mother. Danticat told online Guernica interviewer Dwyer Murphy: “I started writing about Claire and her father, and then it became too about the town where they live and how some of the town people are linked in some way, large or small, to this little girl. The story is told from different points of view. At first you get the story from her father, then from the woman to whom she’s being given, then from Claire herself. I broke those stories up, as the three pillars of the book, and I always knew that Claire’s story would come last. Because one of the pressing questions of the book is where is this girl going. Even I wasn’t sure for a long time. … The last thing I did, just before the galleys went through, was decide what happens to Claire.”
Danticat additionally explained: “Ville Rose itself is a hybrid of a town, a mix of several coastal towns I have been to or have spent time in while in Haiti. … The best moment in writing any book is when you just can’t wait to get back to the writing, when you can’t wait to re-enter that fictional place, when your fictional town feels even more real than the town where you actually live.” Commending the novel’s setting in the New York Times Book Review, Deborah Sontag remarked: “At first, I resisted what appeared to be the fablelike delicacy of Edwidge Danticat’s new novel, Claire of the Sea Light. Was it going to be too precious? Would her lyricism camouflage or ennoble Haiti’s life-or-death struggles? But it quickly became apparent that her hypnotic prose was perfectly suited to its setting, the tragic and yet magical seaside town of Ville Rose.” Susanne Wells, writing in Library Journal, also applauded the book, declaring that Danticat “has the ability to conjure up the rarified air of Haiti as she manages to pull tightly at one’s heartstrings.” According to a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “there’s tremendous warmth in Danticat’s treatment of her characters, who are striving for human connection in a hard world. Both lyrical and cleareyed, a rare and welcome combination.” Vanessa Bush, writing in Booklist, was equally laudatory, and she found that the characters’ “stories and their lives flow beautifully one into another, all rendered in the luminous prose for which Danticat is known.”
The young-adult novel Untwine is the story of identical twins Isabelle and Giselle. Exceptionally close since birth, exemplified by the fact that they were born with their fingers closely entwined, the girls are sixteen and living with ordinary adolescent issues such as school, their burgeoning independence, and the separation of their parents, when tragedy strikes. On their way to a school concert, the twins are in a car accident that kills Isabelle and leaves Giselle in a coma. But medical staff and family get the twins’ identities confused. Addressed by doctors as Isabelle, Giselle cannot communicate the truth. Nor, torn by her memories and her deep grief, can she summon the will to return to consciousness. Nevertheless, Giselle finally emerges from her coma, only to confront anew the pain of having lost her beloved sister. Danticat depicts not only Giselle’s sadness, but also her uncertainty about creating a new life and identity apart from Isabelle. Danticat also shows the parents’ efforts to come to terms with their daughter’s death, and provides an intriguing subplot in which troubling details about the accident slowly emerge.
The novel “throbs with the vibrant life the twins have experienced,” said Voice of Youth Advocates contributor Katherine Noone, who concluded that the author “has captured poignantly the joy of everyday life sharpened by the awareness of its transience.” Writing in School Library Journal, Janet Hilbun praised the novel as a sensitive and insightful story with “well-crafted characters and strong writing.” In a starred review, a Publishers Weekly contributor said that the final scenes of Untwine “are at once heartbreaking and uplifting.” A writer for Kirkus Reviews expressed similar admiration, pointing out that the book “traverses multiple worlds”—past and present, family and individual, life and death—and presents an “honest, endearing exploration of family, grief, and perseverance.” Jim Higgins, writing in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, predicted that Untwine would win enthusiastic readers among adults as well as adolescents. Admiring Danticat’s insightful exploration of the intimate bond between twins, Bookpage contributor Erin A. Holt said that the author “also beautifully weaves in Haitian culture and family traditions throughout the novel.”
Written for children in early grades and illustrated by Leslie Staub, Mama’s Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation tells the story of Sava, a Haitian-American girl whose mother has been detained in a facility for undocumented immigrants. Sava misses her mother intensely. She loves the recorded stories that her mother is able to send to her from prison but longs to have her mother home again. Sava’s father writes many letters to politicians and to the media, pleading his wife’s case, but no one seems interested in the family’s plight. Inspired by her father, Sava decides that she, too, will write a letter asking for her mother’s release. Sava’s letter is published in the local newspaper. It makes such an impression that people begin making phone calls and writing to officials to demand that a humane resolution be found for the family. These efforts result in the case coming before a judge who rules that Sava’s mother can return to her family and stay with them while she waits for her proper immigration papers.
Mama’s Nightingale received strongly positive reviews. Noting that the book “sheds light on an important reality rarely portrayed in children’s books,” a contributor to Kirkus Reviews deemed Mama’s Nightingale a “must-read.” Jennifer Steib Simmons, writing in School Library Journal, appreciated the book’s message about “the incredible power of words and stories” as well as its empathetic treatment of loss, pain, and hope. Acknowledging book’s specific appeal to Haitian readers, Horn Book reviewer Robin L. Smith said that “the larger issue of the plight of refugees and immigrants makes [the story] universal.”
In her 2017 publication, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, Danticat offers a memoir of her mother dying from cancer as well as a disquisition on how various authors deal with death in their writings. Death, indeed, has been a theme that reverberates throughout Danticat’s fiction, and here she focuses first on her mother’s death from ovarian cancer, going through the tests and diagnosis, to the moments her mother is dying. Thereafter, Danticat explores varieties of death from suicide to execution, natural death, and accidental death, and examines the ways in which a number of authors, including herself, have handled this topic. Among the writers are Leo Tolstoy, William Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Albert Camus, Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and Zora Neal Hurston.
Reviewing The Art of Death, a Kirkus Reviews critic noted: “This work is more about how death is described in literature, and the author asks if we really can describe it adequately at all. Danticat takes on an unpleasant topic with sensitivity and passion.” Similarly, a Publishers Weekly contributor observed, “This slim volume wraps literary criticism, philosophy, and memoir into a gracefully circling whole, echoing the nature of grief as ‘circles and circles of sorrow.'” Writing in World Literature Today, Erik Gleibermann commented: “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. … By titling her most recent book The Art of Death, Danticat explores how writers craft mortality on the page but also alludes to the possibility that wrestling with death might itself become an art. Indeed, her fiction and memoir lead us there.”
Writing in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani had high praise for The Art of Dying, noting: “This book is a kind of prayer for her mother — an act of mourning and remembrance, a purposeful act of grieving. It’s also a book about how Danticat and other writers have tried to come to terms with the fact of death.” Kakutani added: “Danticat writes beautifully about fellow writers, dissecting their magic and technique with a reader’s passion and a craftsman’s appraising eye.” Similarly, writing in the Los Angeles Times, Leah Mirakhor observed: “Danticat’s is a memoir written in a manner akin to the circular, overlapping and overwhelming processes of grief and mourning.” And online Los Angeles Review of Books contributor Tiffany Briere thought that this book “feels like an offering, a study born of devotion.” Briere further commented: “Part essay, part memoir, part elegy, the book has numerous obsessions—lingual, mortal, and parental — that come together to compelling effect. Danticat—who has published novels, short story collections, a memoir, a children’s book, and a volume of poetry—combines these forms fluidly, in a meditation as instructive as it is moving.”
Danticat teamed with illustrator Shannon Wright for the 2019 picture book, My Mommy Medicine, about the comfort a mom offers to her sick child. Among the forms of medicine mommy offers are a strong hug and snuggles, a back run, a cup of hot chocolate, playing cards and a board game, and a comforting bubble bath.
“Cozy and comforting, this is an effective antidote for childhood illness or anxiety,” noted Booklist contributor Lucinda Whitehurst of My Mommy Medicine. Whitehurst added, “This warm, loving account could be a “how-to” guide for parents, demonstrating that the things the girl likes best involve little to no cost.” A Kirkus Reviews critic was also impressed with this picture book, calling it a “sweet celebration of the special touch that only a mother can give.”
Danticat offers her first short story collection in more than a decade with Everything Inside, a gathering of eight tales set in locations from Haiti to Miami, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. In ways, as the author has indicated, the characters in this new collection might be considered grandchildren of those featured in her earlier collections. Here the characters are generally born in the United States and do not face the revolutionary struggles and exile of earlier characters. Instead, more daily concerns confront many in this collection–a romance ending, the struggle to send children to college–but in situations that are nonetheless challenging and emotional. As Women’s Review of Books contributor Shirley Nwangwa noted, Danticat “chronicles eight gut-wrenching snapshots of death, love, disease, adultery, and trauma. …With painstaking care, Danticat paints layered canvases that set mundane details of a nine-to-five or a seemingly innocuous description of beautiful countryside against life-shattering conflicts.” The opening story deals with the kidnapping of a woman named Olivia in Port-au-Prince and the ramifications for the victim’s former best friend in Miami, Elsie, as she empties her bank account to help free Olivia, to no avail. Further stories deal with the death of a parent, a young woman who has AIDS, the recollections of a young artist when she meets her former lover, or the politicizing of a college student by volunteering at a rape recovery center in Haiti.
Nwangwa had praise for Everything Inside, commenting: “People play out whatever fate was handed to them–this is the ultimate reality. Instead of tidy or sweet endings, the reader discovers that the characters in Everything Inside are answering the reader’s own thoughts and questions with every page, and the work becomes a mirror that is almost impossible to put down.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer was also impressed with this collection, calling it “outstanding and deeply memorable,” and further noting: “In plain, propulsive prose, and with great compassion, Danticat writes both of her characters’ losses and of their determination to continue.” Booklist contributor Terry Hong similarly observed: “Danticat once again urges readers out of comfort zones to bear witness to urgent topics–refugee crises, polarizing inequity, violence, disasters–and alchemizes sorrows and tragedies into opportunities for literary enlightenment.” Likewise, a Kirkus Reviews critic concluded: “No one is immune from pain, but Danticat asks her readers to witness the integrity of her subjects as they excavate beauty and hope from uncertainty and loss. An extraordinary career milestone: spare, evocative, and moving.”
“In order to create full-fledged, three-dimensional characters, writers often draw on their encounters, observations, collages of images from the everyday world, both theirs and others,” Danticat remarked in a biographical essay in Contemporary Novelists. “We are like actors, filtering through our emotions what life must be like, or must have been like, for those we write about. Truly we imagine these lives, aggrandize, reduce, or embellish, however we often begin our journey with an emotion close to our gut, whether it be anger, curiosity, joy, or fear.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 94, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996.
Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.
Danticat, Edwidge, Brother, I’m Dying, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2007.
St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.
Short Stories for Students, Volume 1, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1997.
PERIODICALS
America, November 6, 1999, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 10.
Américas, January, 2000, Barbara Mujica, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 62; May, 2000, Michele Wucker, profile of Danticat, p. 40.
Antioch Review, winter, 1999, Grace A. Epstein, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 106.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 29, 2000, Valerie Boyd, review of The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures, p. D3.
Belles Lettres, fall, 1994, Mary Mackay, “Living, Seeing, Remembering,” pp. 36, 38.
Biography, September 22, 2007, Jess Row, review of Brother, I’m Dying, p. 679.
Black Issues Book Review, January, 1999, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 20; May, 2001, Denolyn Carroll, review of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, p. 60; July-August, 2004, Marjorie Valbrun, review of The Dew Breaker, p. 43.
Booklist, January 1, 1999, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 778; March 15, 1999, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 1295; June 1, 1999, review of Breath, Eyes, Memory, p. 1796; February 15, 2000, Deborah Taylor, review of Breath, Eyes, Memory, p. 1096; October 15, 2000, review of The Beacon Best of 2000, p. 416; February 15, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of The Butterfly’s Way, p. 1096; January 1, 2002, review of The Butterfly’s Way, p. 763; August, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Haiti, pp. 1895-1896; October 1, 2002, Hazel Rochman, review of Behind the Mountains, p. 312; May 15, 2005, Gillian Engberg, review of Anacaona, Golden Flower: Haiti, 1490, p. 1674; July 1, 2007, Donna Seaman, review of Brother, I’m Dying, p. 20; September 15, 2010, Hazel Rochman, review of Eight Days: A Story of Haiti, p. 69; December 15, 2010, David Pitt, review of Haiti Noir, p. 25; June 1, 2013, Vanessa Bush, review of Claire of the Sea Light, p. 28; February 15, 2019, Lucinda Whitehurst, review of My Mommy Medicine, p. 52; June 1, 2019, Terry Hong, review of Everything Inside, p. 32.
Boston Globe, Jordana Hart, “Danticat’s Stories Pulse with Haitian Heartbeat,” p. 70; September 16, 2007, Renée Graham, review of Brother, I’m Dying.
Boston Herald, November 17, 2000, Rosemary Herbert, “Writing in the Margins: Author-Editor Edwidge Danticat Celebrates Rich Pageant of Multicultural Stories,” p. 43; September 1, 2002, Judith Wynn, review of After the Dance, p. 61.
Callaloo, spring, 1996, Renee H. Shea, interview with Danticat, pp. 382-389.
Christian Century, September 22, 1999, Dean Peerman, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 885.
Christian Science Monitor, September 11, 2007, Yvonne Zipp, review of Brother, I’m Dying.
Entertainment Weekly, September 3, 1999, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 63.
Essence, November, 1993, Edwidge Danticat, “My Father Once Chased Rainbows,” p. 48; April, 1995, Deborah Gregory, “Edwidge Danticat: Dreaming of Haiti,” interview, p. 56.
Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), June 12, 1999, review of Breath, Eyes, Memory, p. D4.
Horn Book, September-October, 2015, Robin L. Smith, review of Mama’s Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation, p. 77.
Jet, March 31, 2008, “National Book Critics Circle Winners,” p. 25.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2002, review of After the Dance, p. 782; September 15, 2002, review of Behind the Mountains, p. 1387; July 1, 2007, review of Brother, I’m Dying; December 1, 2010, review of Haiti Noir; July 15, 2013, review of Claire of the Sea Light; December 15, 2018, review of My Mommy Medicine; July 1, 2019, review of Everything Inside.
Kliatt, November, 1999, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 16; November, 2002, Claire Rosser, review of Behind the Mountains, p. 8; June 15, 2015, review of Untwine; July 1, 2015, review of Mama’s Nightingale.
Library Journal, November 1, 2000, Barbara O’Hara, review of The Butterfly’s Way, p. 80, Ann Burns and Emily Joy, review of The Butterfly’s Way, p. 103; June 15, 2002, Linda M. Kaufmann, review of After the Dance, p. 83; October 15, 2010, Nedra Crowe-Evers, review of Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, p. 76; March 1, 2013, review of Claire of the Sea Light; September 1, 2013, Susanne Wells, review of Claire of the Sea Light, p. 97.
Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2007, Donna Rifkind, review of Brother, I’m Dying.
Ms., March-April, 1994, Joan Philpott, “Two Tales of Haiti,” review of Breath, Eyes, Memory, pp. 77-78; March-April, 1995, Jordana Hart, review of Krik? Krak!, p. 75.
Nation, November 16, 1998, Zia Jaffrey, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 62.
Newsday, March 30, 1995, Richard Eder, “A Haitian Fantasy and Exile,” pp. B2, B25.
New York, November 20, 1995, Rebecca Mead, review of Krik? Krak!, p. 50.
New York Times, January 26, 1995, Garry Pierre-Pierre, “Haitian Tales, Flatbush Scenes,” pp. C1, C8.
New York Times Book Review, July 10, 1994, Jim Gladstone, review of Breath, Eyes, Memory, p. 24; April 23, 1995, Robert Houston, Krik? Krak!, p. 22; September 27, 1998, Michael Upchurch, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 18; December 5, 1999, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 104; December 10, 1999, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 36; September 4, 2007, Michiko Kakutani, review of Brother, I’m Dying; September 9, 2007, Jess Row, “Haitian Fathers,” p. 1.
Off Our Backs, March, 1999, reviews of Krik? Krak!, The Farming of Bones, and Breath, Eyes, Memory, p. 13.
O, the Oprah Magazine, February, 2002, profile of Danticat, pp. 141-145; August 30, 2013, Deborah Sontag, “Island Magic.”
People, September 28, 1998, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 51.
Progressive, December, 1998, Matthew Rothschild, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 44.
Publishers Weekly, August 17, 1998, Mallay Charters, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 42; November 2, 1998, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 40; September 11, 2000, review of The Beacon Best of 2000, p. 69; December 18, 2000, review of The Butterfly’s Way, p. 65; May 13, 2002, review of After the Dance, pp. 58-59; October 28, 2002, review of Behind the Mountains, p. 72; July 16, 2007, review of Brother, I’m Dying, p. 155; July 30, 2007, Elaine Vitone, “PW Talks with Edwidge Danticat: Family Lines,” p. 66; August 30, 2010, review of Create Dangerously, p. 42; August 30, 2010, review of Eight Days, p. 50; May 27, 2013, review of Claire of the Sea Light, p. 26; June 8, 2015, review of Untwine, p. 61; December 2, 2015, review of Untwine, p. 100; March 27, 2017, review of The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, p. 90; October 22, 2018, review of My Mommy Medicine, p. 83; June 17, 2019, review of Everything Inside, p. 43.
Quarterly Black Review, June, 1995, Kimberly Hebert, review of Krik? Krak!, p. 6.
Reference and User Services Quarterly, spring, 1999, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 253.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 21, 1999, Shauna Scott Rhone, review of The Farming of Bones, p. D3.
School Library Journal, October, 2002, Diane S. Morton, review of Behind the Mountains, p. 160; January 1, 2008, Jennifer Waters, review of Brother, I’m Dying, p. 157; July, 2015, Janet Hilbun, review of Untwine, p. 85; September, 2015, Jennifer Steib Simmons, review of Mama’s Nightingale, p. 118; March, 2019, Clara Hendricks, review of My Mommy Medicine, p. 84.
Seattle Times, October 17, 2007, Michael Upchurch, review of Brother, I’m Dying.
Sojourners, April 1, 2008, Rose Marie Berger, “Death by Asylum: An Interview with Immigrant and Author Edwidge Danticat,” p. 32.
South Florida Sun-Sentinel, September 19, 2007, Chauncey Mabe, “Edwidge Danticat Encompasses the Pain of Haiti in a Lovely Family Memoir, Brother, I’m Dying.”
Time, September 7, 1998, Christopher John Farley, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 78.
Times (London, England), March 20, 1999, Rachel Campbell-Johnston, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 19.
Times Literary Supplement, April 28, 2000, Helen Hayward, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 23.
Voice of Youth Advocates, August, 2015, Katherine Noone, review of Untwine, p. 57.
Washington Post Book World, April 3, 1994, Bob Shacochis, “Island in the Dark,” p. 6; May 14, 1995, Joanne Omang, review of Krik? Krak!, p. 4.
Women’s Review of Books, May-June, 2011, Danielle Georges, “Danticat’s Dialogues,” p. 23; July-August, 2019, Shirley Nwangwa, review of Everything Inside, p. 19.
World and I, February, 1999, review of The Farming of Bones, p. 290.
World Literature Today, spring, 1999, Jacqueline Brice-Finch, “Haiti,” p. 373; January-April, 2005, Robert McCormick, review of The Dew Breaker, p. 83; January, 2008, Robert H. McCormick, Jr., review of Brother, I’m Dying, p. 74.
ONLINE
BookPage, http://www.bookpage.com/ (June 4, 2008), Deanna Larson, review of Brother, I’m Dying; (October 1, 2015), Erin A. Holt, review of Untwine.
Bookreporter.com, http://www.bookreporter.com/ (June 4, 2008), Jana Siciliano, review of Brother, I’m Dying.
CBC, https://www.cbc.ca/ (December 17, 2017), “Edwidge Danticat on Memory, Migration and Her Attachment to Haiti.”
Democracy Now, http://www.democracynow.org/ (October 5, 2007), Amy Goodman, interview with Edwidge Danticat.
Edwidge Danticat, https://edwidgedanticat.com (August 19, 2019).
Entertainment Weekly, http://www.ew.com/ (June 4, 2008), Jennifer Reese, review of Brother, I’m Dying.
Fantastic Fiction, https://www.fantasticfiction.com/ (August 19, 2019), “Edwidge Danticat.”
Foreign Policy in Focus, http://www.fpif.org/ (June 4, 2008), E. Ethelbert Miller, interview with Edwidge Danticat.
Free Williamsburg, http://www.freewilliamsburg.com/ (February 11, 2003), Alexander Laurence, interview with Danticat.
Guernica, http://www.guernicamag.com/ (September 3, 2013), author interview.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (September 25, 2017), Tiffany Briere, review of The Art of Death.
Los Angeles Times, https://www.latimes.com/ (July 14, 2017), Leah Mirakhor, review of The Art of Death.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, http://www.jsonline.com/ (September 25, 2015), Jim Higgins, review of Untwine.
National Book Foundation, http://www.nationalbook.org/ (June 4, 2008), Jennifer Gonnerman, interview with Edwidge Danticat.
New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/ (September 11, 2017), Deborah Treisman, “Edwidge Danticat on Memory and Migration.”
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/ (June 26, 2017), Michiko Kakutani, review of The Art of Death.
Paste, http://www.pastemagazine.com/ (September 17, 2007), Desa Philadelphia, review of Brother, I’m Dying.
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (June 21, 2019 ), review of Everything Inside.
University of Central Florida, http://reach.ucf.edu/ (June 4, 2008), Edwidge Danticat profile.
Voices from the Gaps, http://voices.cla.umn.edu/ (February 11, 2003), “Edwidge Danticat.”
Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR, https://www.npr.org/ (January 14, 2018), Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “Author Edwidge Danticat on the Immigrant Experience.”
World Literature Today, https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/ (October 10, 2018), Erik Gleibermann, “The Story Will Be There When You Need It”: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.”
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.
Edwidge Danticat
Haiti (b.1969)
Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. When she was two years old, her father Andre immigrated to New York from Haiti, to be followed two years later by her mother Rose. This left Danticat and her younger brother Eliab to be raised by her aunt and uncle. Although her formal education in Haiti was in French, she spoke Haitian Creole at home.
Genres: Mystery
New Books
August 2019
(hardback)
Everything Inside
Novels
Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994)
The Farming of Bones (1998)
The Dew Breaker (2004)
Claire of the Sea Light (2013)
Untwine (2015)
Collections
Krik? Krak! (1995)
Everything Inside (2019)
Picture Books
Eight Days (2010)
The Last Mapou (2013)
My Mommy Medicine (2019)
Series contributed to
Akashic Noir
Haiti Noir (2010)
Haiti Noir 2 (2013)
Non fiction
Haiti: A Slave Revolution (1995) (with Ramsey Clark, Frederick Douglass, Ben Dupuy and Paul Laraque)
After the Dance (2002)
Behind the Mountains (2002)
Butterfly's Way (2003)
Anacaona, Golden Flower (2005)
Brother, I'm Dying (2007)
Create Dangerously (2010)
Mama's Nightingale (2015)
The Art of Death (2017)
Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti in 1969 and came to the United States when she was twelve years old. She graduated from Barnard College and received an M.F.A. from Brown University. She made an auspicious debut with her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and followed it with the story collection Krik? Krak!, whose National Book Award nomination made Danticat the youngest nominee ever. She lives in New York.
Edwidge Danticat on Memory and Migration
By Deborah TreismanSeptember 11, 2017
The author talks about Alzheimer’s, family, and hanging on to the past, even through heartbreak.Photograph by Jonathan Demme
In your new story, “Sunrise, Sunset,” you write from the perspective of a grandmother who is losing herself to dementia, and of her daughter, who is struggling with her new role as a mother. Why did you choose to write the story from two perspectives?
I was on a plane, some time ago, when a woman boarded with her elderly mother. The mother was carrying an Alzheimer’s doll, a kind of therapeutic baby doll, which was obviously meant to soothe her. The daughter was on the phone, yelling about something totally unrelated to this situation. She was obviously dealing with some painful issue of her own that had nothing to do with her mother’s illness, but the two of them being together on this plane, and the daughter absentmindedly helping her mother with the doll, showed me that they were still very much joined. That was when I got the idea for the story. I tried to write it solely from the mother’s perspective first, then solely from the daughter’s. Neither worked, so I decided to tell the story from both points of view. This gave me an opportunity to explore the characters’ individual issues, as well as the ways in which they misinterpret and misunderstand each other.
Had you already thought of taking on the subject of dementia?
I’ve always been interested in memory, and particularly in how migration can affect and distort it. I have seen many of my parents’ friends start forgetting the things they treasure most, including their memories of Haiti. 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. There are days when she calls the house ten times asking me the same question. I wanted to capture something like that in a story, if not in exactly the same way.
Carole and Victor, the grandparents in “Sunrise, Sunset,” both grew up in difficult circumstances in Haiti and emigrated to the U.S. as soon as they could. How important is that background to the story?
Carole is trying to hang on to her past, even though it was difficult. There was heartache in the past, but also a friendship that she’s never been able to replicate, not even with her daughter. When you forget bad memories, you also lose the good ones. Carole’s backstory is what she treasures the most in her memory bank, if you will.
Victor and Carole have different reactions to the trauma they’ve experienced: Victor dedicates himself to “the pleasure of joy, or the joy of pleasure”; Carole is much more severe and duty-bound. Why do you think their responses are so different?
They are very different people. Carole is the type who holds things in, and her husband is the type who lets them go. But, when it comes to her condition, they agree to follow Carole’s lead in terms of how much to reveal to their daughter.
Carole is told by her doctor that she is not a good “historian,” and she acknowledges that it’s true. Does this complicate the difficulties she faces?
Video From The New Yorker
How to Write a New Yorker Cartoon Caption: The Try Guys Edition
I remember when I first heard a doctor use that term, with one of my daughters. My daughter was told that she was a good historian, because she could describe her symptoms so accurately—when they had started and how. I thought it was amazing that one’s ability to narrate one’s personal ills could be seen in that way. Hearing the word “historian” used as a medical term just blew me away. Carole, like my parents, belongs to a generation of people who grew up during a dictatorship and, because of that, are afraid to share too much about themselves. Off the page, I am a bit that way, too. But now that what Carole could have shared is slipping away, she regrets holding it back. She wishes she had been a better historian.
MORE FROM
This Week in Fiction
George Saunders on the Induced Bafflement of Fiction
By Deborah Treisman
Elizabeth Strout on Returning to Olive Kitteridge
By Deborah Treisman
Salman Rushdie on Corruption and the Opioid Crisis
By Deborah Treisman
Hanif Kureishi on How We Talk About Love and Sex
By Deborah Treisman
Mary Gaitskill on the Power of Fiction for Examining #MeToo
By Deborah Treisman
David Rabe on the Netherworld of Fiction
By Deborah Treisman
Is this story one in a series, or a freestanding piece? Are you working on a new collection?
I have just finished a short-story collection. All the stories are love stories, in some way, even ones, like this one, that involve a parent-child relationship or more political situations. In our current era, there are times when it feels senseless to focus on personal dramas, but, alas, we still have to deal with these things every day. We still have complicated relationships, friendships, and different types of love in our lives. I think that this is one of the “lessons” that Carole and Victor took away from growing up during—and surviving—a dictatorship.
Deborah Treisman is The New Yorker’s fiction editor and the host of its Fiction Podcast.Read more »
Edwidge Danticat on memory, migration and her attachment to Haiti
Social Sharing
Email
CBC Radio · Posted: Dec 17, 2017 3:00 PM ET | Last Updated: December 17, 2017
The story of a fisherman and his daughter reveals Haiti's larger social turmoil and resilience in Claire of the Sea Light, a finalist for the 2014 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. (Lynn Savarese/Knopf)
Listen to the full episode52:12
Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat is the winner of the 2018 Neustadt International Prize for Literature — a biennial $50,000 USD award that's known as the 'American Nobel.' The committee described Danticat as "a masterful storyteller" who "paints scenes of immigrant life in New York and Miami with fresh details and palpable familiarity."
Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1969. Her parents left the country when she was a young child, leaving her to live with her aunt and uncle. When she was 12 years old, Edwidge joined her parents in Brooklyn, New York, where she had to learn English. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory — published when she was just 25 — sold more than 600,000 copies and was chosen for Oprah's Book Club. Her next book, Krik? Krak!, was nominated for a National Book Award.
Edwidge Danticat spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2013 about her novel Claire of the Sea Light, a moving story set in a Haitian fishing village before the 2010 earthquake.
Storytelling grandmothers
"In my family, the men told the jokes and the women told the stories. When people ask me who were my best writing teachers, I always think of those women. The way they told those stories was so audience-oriented. You could hear the same story every time, but it was told differently: there were songs in the stories, they would make it suspenseful if it was late at night, they followed cues in your body language if you were listening or falling asleep. I was always too shy to tell stories the way they told them. But when I started reading, I immediately made the connection that writing is another kind of storytelling. It was suited to me because it was intimate and you could do it by yourself. I am less shy in my work than I am in person."
Optimism as a way of life
"One of the characters in Claire of the Sea Light says precarity is like making butter out of water. Even the very poor in Haiti are not sure how they get by. Sometimes people wake up and they have no idea what they're going to feed their children that day. Somehow they will go out with some optimism and try to find something. It's a kind of extraordinary act of ingenuity and faith. A mother who wakes up and has nothing to feed her child will dress that child very nicely, put a beautiful bow in her hair and send her off to school hoping that by the time she comes home from school there will be something to feed that child. People get by on very hard work, on faith, on relying on one another. It's an extraordinary feat of survival."
Disaster is not the story of Haiti
"I don't think I'm ready to write about the 2010 earthquake or the events that followed as they relate to Haiti. I need a little more time to process it so that the fiction is not competing with the facts. My visits to Haiti have been short and intense. They're often moments of soaking it up and seeing how some things have changed, a continued search for what is different. As I've gotten older, what I've started to notice is the environment — the sea, the trees, the physical landscape and how people adjust to it. If I had written and placed the Claire of the Sea Light story in a time after the earthquake, it would have to be, in some ways, about the earthquake. I didn't feel ready to write a book like that."
Edwidge Danticat's comments have been edited and condensed.
< Author Edwidge Danticat On The Immigrant Experience January 14, 20188:02 AM ET Listen· 6:05 6:05 Playlist Download Embed Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: This past week, President Trump used an especially vulgar slur to describe African nations and El Salvador. And a warning - I'm going to say it now. He called them, quote, "shitholes." He also said the U.S. should welcome immigrants from Norway rather than places like Haiti. He made these remarks while having a bipartisan policy discussion on immigration inside the White House. Today, throughout the show, we are going to focus on the issue of immigration. In 2016, 752,800 people became naturalized citizens of this country. And I was one of them. Sitting next to me at the ceremony happened to be a Haitian woman with a big smile. We were both dressed up for the occasion. And together we spoke the oath of allegiance along with dozens of other people. And after, we were shown a video where President Trump welcomed us to this country. Here's part of it. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You enjoy the full rights and the sacred duties that come with American citizenship - very, very special. There is no higher honor. There is no greater responsibility. You now share the obligation to teach our values to others, to help newcomers assimilate to our way of life and uplift America by living according to its highest ideals of self-governance at its highest standards. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Immigrants, in particular, have been roiled by this most recent controversy. And to get reaction, I'm joined now by another immigrant from Haiti. Award-winning author Edwidge Danticat, welcome to the program. EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Thank you. Thank you for having me. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So Friday - the day after the president made his comment about Haitian immigrants among others, it marked a somber anniversary for Haitians and Haitian-Americans - the devastating earthquake. Help us understand what that day was like, especially after you heard about the president's comments. DANTICAT: Well, for a lot of us, it was a day that we were planning to mourn and reflect and reach out to our loved ones who had gone through that terrible day eight years ago. And then we found ourselves in another kind of similar pattern of Haiti being insulted, being stigmatizing, being stereotyped. But this time it was by the president of the United States - a country where many of us work, where our parents have given their labor and their - brought their dreams and have - you know, try to contribute to. So it was very - it wasn't surprising given the nature of his presidency and other things that the president has said before. But it was certainly disheartening and disrespectful and profoundly racist, I think. GARCIA-NAVARRO: How would you describe your country and the people there? DANTICAT: My country is a country born out of revolution. And the people are very hardworking because we've always had to fight from the beginning of the creation of our republic. We were isolated in this atmosphere because Haiti was a nation of black people in a hemisphere where slavery, including in the United States, was still happening. So we were isolated economically. We had to pay our debt to France for our independence, which really hindered progress to - at the very beginning of the country. So we're a country that's always been somewhat marginalized and stigmatized, but that's always made us stronger, want to try harder. We are certainly not the country that the president is describing. We're a poor country. But we're a country full of pride, proud and strong people who are simply, when they leave, looking for better opportunities elsewhere. GARCIA-NAVARRO: We should mention that the president denied having used those exact words, although others who were in the room have confirmed it. I'd like to hear a little bit about your story. You came to the United States as a child. You lived in a predominantly Haitian-American neighborhood. What was that experience like for you? DANTICAT: Well, I came when I was 12. My parents - my father had migrated before, and then my mother had joined him. And when we came, it was 1981. And I feel in some way that I'm living that moment again because Haiti was one of the only countries put on a list of people for high risk for AIDS. So we were people who lost their jobs at that time because of - the Center for Disease Control had said that, you know, we could pass on AIDS. And so people who were working with sick people, who were working in kitchens lost their jobs. And, me - I was beaten up in school a lot because of that. And this is why the president's words also bring all of that back. And what we realize is that if someone says something like he did about Haiti and El Salvador and these countries in Africa - if someone like that say something like that, it gives others permission to discriminate. It can even lead to violence, which I think is really the consequence of having something like that said about you. It happened to me when I first came when people said, oh, you have AIDS. And then kids felt like they could - they had - they could beat us or call us names. So it's something that the community has lived before. Name calling has - of that nature - has very, very - sometimes really strong and detrimental consequences. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Just briefly. We have a few seconds left. What is the mood among the Haitian community now? We've had TPS revoked and these comments. DANTICAT: We are chill - we're going to fight. I think that's what we just have to continue and do - you see our struggle. We have to see that Haitians are always part of the larger struggle for immigration rights and for, you know, racial equality in America. We're going to continue that struggle however we do it, put letters on the streets. And we're going to try to take care of our neighbors who have come to this country, just like we did in the past, for a better opportunity. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Thank you so much. Edwidge Danticat joined us from Key West, Fla. She's the author of many novels and memoirs. Thanks for joining us. DANTICAT: Thank you for having me. [EDITOR'S NOTE: NPR has decided in this case to spell out the vulgar word that the president reportedly used because it meets our standard for use of offensive language. It is “absolutely integral to the meaning and spirit of the story being told.” ]
QUOTE:
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. ... By titling her most recent book The Art of Death, Danticat explores how writers craft mortality on the page but also alludes to the possibility that wrestling with death might itself become an art. Indeed, her fiction and memoir lead us there.
“The Story Will Be There When You Need It”: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat
by
Erik Gleibermann
Photo: Shevaun Williams
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. 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. By titling her most recent book The Art of Death, Danticat explores how writers craft mortality on the page but also alludes to the possibility that wrestling with death might itself become an art. Indeed, her fiction and memoir lead us there. She sometimes uses the Creole expression lòt bò dlo, on the other side of the water, which refers either to someone who has migrated abroad or has died. These are the intertwined journeys Danticat’s stories navigate.
Erik Gleibermann: So, first of all, Edwidge, I want to say it’s an honor to be up here with you having a conversation. Our topic is death, but we may branch out into some other things. Long before you wrote The Art of Death, your most recent book, going all the way back to Breath, Eyes, Memory, almost every book, in an unflinching way, has treated that subject, I think very bravely. You have written about politically oriented massacres, executions, and death from illness in your memoirs, where you have looked closely at your own family, suicide, death in childbirth and, of course, the 2010 earthquake. Where does that come from within you to have such focus on that subject?
Edwidge Danticat: I have a very long-standing attachment to the subject, which I think begins with growing up in a family where my uncle was a minister. When I was two, my father left Haiti to move to the US, and my mom joined him when I was four, and I was left with my aunt and uncle. As part of the minister’s family, we literally had to attend every service my uncle presided over, and sometimes there would be a child baptism on Sunday. The previous Saturday there would be a funeral in the morning and a wedding in the afternoon. And I would have to go to all of these, sometimes in the same little white dress. I remember thinking about death as like these other events, the christening or the wedding. It’s a part of life.
Then realizing when people close to me would die, sometimes from illnesses that elsewhere would have been easily preventable or cured, I had to try to refigure that, to think of why I wasn’t dying. It’s a strange thought to have when you’re a little kid, but I thought I was always on the verge of dying. In Haitian Creole, if you say that someone is lòt bò dlo, on the other side of the waters, it could either mean that they’ve migrated or that they’ve died. My parents had migrated and had not died, so that complicated things a bit, but I always believed both, that I could either travel abroad or die at any time. So, it’s a subject that has always intrigued me.
Gleibermann: One thing that I find very powerful is the connection between the emergence of life and the approach of death. I’m thinking in particular of Brother, I’m Dying, your memoir from 2007. In the beginning, you find out on the same day that your father has a terminal illness and that you’re pregnant. Something that really struck me was the moment where you did the test in the bathroom. You write, “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?” I was struck by this intertwining. Could you say something about that relationship between the coming of life and the fading of life?
If you’re a writer and married to narrative, everything is a story, and in this moment I’m in the middle of this very sad story, but at the same time there was something to rejoice.
Danticat: I feel as though I have spent my whole life hearing about and witnessing the cycle of life that is manifested in that book. But the moment you just mentioned was the first time that I felt like I was literally, as the church people say, in the gap, in that there was a life coming, my daughter, and one leaving, my father. We ended up naming my daughter Mira, which is my father’s nickname. If you’re a writer and married to narrative, everything is a story, and in this moment I’m in the middle of this very sad story, but at the same time there was also something to celebrate. The strange thing about that moment also is that the doctor didn’t tell my father he was terminal, but told me, which is very different than when my mother was diagnosed with advanced Stage 4 ovarian cancer because I felt so much relief that the doctor, who was a friend of mine, when I said I have to tell her, she said, no, that’s my job. But with my father, there was all this debate. I ended up not telling him. I think he knew. That moment of feeling the whole circularity of everything whirling around you, it was like, oh, this is where we’re all headed. It was immediate for me in that moment.
Gleibermann: Before you wrote your memoir, there is a thread of mothers dying in childbirth. Also, there’s a moment in Claire of the Sea Light where somebody says about Claire’s mother, who dies, it was like there was a battle of wills. I was struck by the idea that there’s a very complex relationship in the experience of birth that is related to death somehow.
Danticat: Part of the oral storytelling culture I grew up in had a lot of dead mothers. It’s also in the stories with the notion of the evil stepmother. There’s even a folktale about the magic orange tree where a little girl is singing to make a tree grow. She wants the tree to grow so she can get these oranges to make money because her stepmother is being mean to her. There’s a line in it, “My stepmother’s not my real mother.” My daughter loved this story. She wanted me to go to her school and sing it to the children, and I thought this line is not going to work in an American school.
But so many of these stories about absent mothers, you realize it’s because of maternal mortality, women dying in childbirth. If you have very high maternal mortality, these stories almost prepare one for that. I was always taken by that. In a place of limited resources, like in Claire of the Sea Light, this woman is in a rural area. She might have been saved if she had had better care. In this town the poverty grows out of erosion and depletion of resources. In some cases that leads to people having to decide which child to send to school or which child to keep or to give away to another family, which is the story with Claire. With Claire and her mother, it starts from birth—who gets to live, to consume these very limited resources.
Gleibermann: You mentioned folktales, which are woven so powerfully into your work. Could you say something about how Haitian folklore and also indigenous spirituality and Vodou have influenced the way you treat the topic in your work?
Danticat: 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. You are who you are because your grandmother was this person and your mother was this person or your father was this person, and there are certain traits you carry. I’ve always wanted to incorporate that in my work. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, it’s not always positive for the most recent generation. But there are family rituals and a greater sense of spirituality, whether they’re Baptist or practice the Haitian religion of Vodou, my characters are often deeply spiritual and they tell stories that tie them to their own personal beliefs as well as to these newly acquired or ancestral and inherited faith, which they interpret for their children. I always feel there are ways stories are weaved in that keep people alive for us.
For a lot of us, especially children born outside of the country, this thing about your grandparents—you might have a beautiful black-and-white portrait and then a story that emerges when you act a certain way, and then it’s “your grandmother is just like this” and that’s all you get. When I was younger I was always told the story that I wrote about in Brother, I’m Dying about a girl who misses her father and she asks a woman to go to the land of the ancestors to get her father back. And the woman goes back and says, your father says this is his place now. For me it was just a story until my father died, and then I felt the whole weight of that story and I realized why I was told that story. You’re being prepared for certain things, and the story will be there when you need it.
Gleibermann: As you talk about the importance of story, I think about those who are born in Haiti and grew up in Haiti and are immersed and connected to the storytelling tradition. My question is about the second generation and whether their experience of grief and coping with loss is different or perhaps even more difficult if they’re not as connected to that tradition.
Danticat: Even within Haiti, when I go back and go to a family member’s funeral, the wake is very different. The wake is always a kind of party, but kids are on their phones, they’re texting, so it’s changed even within rural Haiti. It almost seems nostalgic to imagine the scene now, sitting around telling stories. There are certain demands for these wakes. It’s a different approach. It’s not as singular as it seemed to me as a child. It’s progressing more toward technology. People used to wear black based on your proximity to the person over a number of weeks or a number of years. Some things are a little more relaxed. Traditions change.
But I think what hasn’t changed is a sense of community, whether you’re burying your dead in New York or in Haiti. It always shocks people in my family where so-and-so is not invited to a funeral. To them it’s like, of course you’re invited to the funeral. You don’t need an invitation to a funeral. It’s assumed everyone will come to a funeral. For example, we were sitting next to someone at a funeral once and we asked, “How do you know so-and-so?” And the person said, “I’m visiting my mother, and she told me to buy a black shirt because we’re going to this funeral.” She said, “I don’t know the dad. I don’t know the family, but my mother does and we’re here.” You have that sense of community. The way families see it, today it might be this person’s turn. Tomorrow it might be my turn.
Before she died, many Friday nights I would call my mother from Miami, when she was in New York, and I would ask her, “What are you doing?” and she’d say, “I am going to a funeral.” She went to everybody’s funeral because that’s what you do to support the community whether you know them well or not.
Gleibermann: It seems like even if you don’t literally know the person, on some other level, you’re related. It’s not just an event that you’re attending from outside.
Danticat: I write a little about it in Brother, I’m Dying. When my mother was sick, I would find myself going to a lot of people’s funerals just as a rehearsal. It was strange. I would sit there and go through the motions in my head. In Miami, there was a time when a lot of people were coming by boat, and often they would drown. In the 1980s there was a very large number, but more recently there would be a boat and people would be dropped off, maybe not far from shore, but they wouldn’t know how to swim. There was a case of this young woman. Her family didn’t even know she was coming here, and she had gotten on this boat because she couldn’t wait for the whole process to join her fiancé, and she died. The whole community put together a funeral, and the church was packed. Her mother couldn’t even get a visa. But people came to make sure she got a proper funeral. Even if you have a difficult life, the grace of life is by having a proper funeral.
Gleibermann: I want to bring it back to fiction. Another paradox is when you describe grave violence, sometimes with such lyricism—there’s even a sense of sensuality sometimes. I’m thinking of The Farming of Bones. The Massacre River where Amabelle, at the end of the book, has lost her parents in the river, and historically, so many Haitians were killed by the Dominican government around that site. In one of the last scenes, she takes off her clothes, she goes into the river, and has a sensory experience that seems almost like an antithesis of what’s happened before in terms of what the river represents. My question is about how sensuality is connected to the experience of death.
Danticat: The Farming of Bones, for those who haven’t read it, is a novel about the 1937 massacre of Haitian cane workers in the Dominican Republic. It actually happened just this time of year. There’s a vigil that an organization called “Border of Lights,” which is made up of Haitian and Dominican artists led by the writer Julia Alvarez, holds every year to commemorate the deaths. The main character of the book is a woman named Amabelle who is a servant in the home of a Dominican family. She’s a young woman who is in love with a man named Sebastien who goes missing during the massacre. It’s such a big story, and I read so many books. There were all the biographies of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who ordered the massacre. I just didn’t know how to enter it. There were testimonials taken by priests of people who had crossed the border and survived.
One of the things I was reading was the story of a young woman who worked in the home of a Dominican family. The head of the family was in the army, and when the order was given, he murders her right at the table to prove his loyalty to the government. And I thought I want to write that woman’s story, but I want her to live. To talk about the different strata living in the Dominican Republic at that time and also bring in fascism in Europe and people being murdered for who they were. The grandfather from Spain was listening to very early speeches by Franco.
I was trying to bring all that through the lens of this woman. I wanted her to have this love right in the middle of all this craziness. The one positive thing she thought she had was this love for this man. She almost has in the story a voice that’s just for him, and at the end when she goes back to the spot where she thinks he’s murdered, it’s this dance of sex and death. She never gets him, but she gets to be in this place in the water. It’s kind of like Nina Simone doing an extraordinary rendition of this spiritual called “Take Me to the Water” and via that great voice of hers sounding like she is begging to be baptized. Lòt bò dlo. Another way the water is evoked. The other side of the water.
Gleibermann: It feels like a cleansing, too. I wouldn’t want to use the word baptism because the Christian iconography is not necessarily something that you’re using.
Danticat: But I think somewhere it’s cleansing for us.
Gleibermann: I want to switch to something else because I want young people to be represented in the conversation. I don’t want us to forget that you are an author of young people’s literature as well. In those works, you are also talking about the subject of death. Do you approach it differently, or how are your purposes different?
Danticat: I approach it the same way. You would speak slightly differently to an adult than you would speak to a very young child. And in the younger book, I’m writing from the point of view of a young person. I’m lucky that I have so many young people in my life to observe. I think everyone who’s written a children’s book will tell you the first rule is not to talk down to children. There’s no subject that’s off-limits, but it rings false if you talk down to children.
My first picture book was a book I wrote as a fundraiser after the 2010 earthquake. It’s called Eight Days, and it’s about a little boy who’s trapped under his house for eight days. He said, “When I came out, people asked me, what did I do?” and he said, “I played.” So, he used his imagination to pass the time.
My second picture book, Mama’s Nightingale, is about a little girl whose mom is in immigration detention. My mom was in immigration detention when I was in Haiti. She was caught in a factory raid and was detained. When I moved to Miami, I used to volunteer at a place called Boys Town where children were detained, way before we were hearing about children being detained.
My next picture book, which will come out in February, is a little bit lighter. It’s called My Mommy Medicine. It’s about what a mother and daughter do on a sick day. It’s the most fun sick day a child will ever have. A few years ago, I was intrigued by a series called Royal Diaries by Scholastic. Some of the books I read were about women like Cleopatra and the African ruler Nzingha. I wrote one about Anacaona, who was an Arawak leader from the same town, Léogâne, that my family is from. More recently, I published a book called Untwine, about twin sisters. These are books that I wish I could have had to read when I was younger.
Gleibermann: You very briefly mentioned Untwine. It has high-school-age twins. They get in a car crash and one dies.
Danticat: You just spoiled it for everyone.
Gleibermann: I was thinking that, but well, that’s early in the book. How did you come up with that? What kind of response have you gotten from young people, that scenario of twins so closely connected? It’s almost as though they’re one life, the narrator often says.
Danticat: I’ve always been so intrigued by the role of twins. In Vodou there is a whole culture of Marasa, the twin deities and even how that affects the Dosu Dosa, the person who follows the twins. In a lot of African diaspora cultures, the surviving twin literally has to carry an effigy of the lost twin. I’m also intrigued by this medical issue of people who swallow their twin in vitro. I’m obsessed with twins. There are twins in The Farming of Bones. I knew some twins when I was young. Everybody was terrified of them. They were in school with me. The teachers would say, don’t be mean to the twins. They can do things to you. So, I wanted to write about when that relationship is shattered and what that means to the person who survives. Her parents take her back to Haiti with the ashes of her twin, which are scattered in the place where they used to go together.
Gleibermann: You just answered in much richer detail about how the second generation can connect to the rituals and the culture to deal with loss. They go back to Haiti and bury the ashes.
Danticat: My Haitian American nephew, for example, loves soup joumou which most Haitians drink on January 1 to celebrate Haitian independence day, but if we didn’t explain to him that we drink this soup because at the point when we were enslaved, we couldn’t have it, how would he know that? Or maybe he would learn it by reading about it somewhere, but that knowledge has to be passed on.
Gleibermann: I want to put a little bit of spotlight on the books that are not as well known, and you mentioned Eight Days. Although that’s a children’s book, I think in The Art of Death you say that, in trying to address the enormity of the earthquake or any event that is so overwhelmingly devastating, you need to go to the particulars. Maybe an essay would talk about the larger issues, but in a narrative it’s important to go to the particulars. Could you also talk about how the earthquake has affected your writing in terms of how you talk about devastation, tragedy, mortality?
Danticat: There was an earthquake this past weekend in the north of Haiti. When people text their concern, they’ll say, “I know it wasn’t as bad as the last time,” but you think to yourself, it’s as bad as the last time for that one person. The last time they shared that pain with over two hundred thousand people. What fiction does is it draws us into that one life. I realized with The Farming of Bones that when I was trying to tell everybody’s story—in that massacre, between ten and twenty thousand people died—I didn’t have the capacity to tell the story of twenty thousand people, but one person’s story can lead us there. In high school I read The Diary of Anne Frank. For me, that was the entry into the Holocaust. That was a girl my age going through similar things as what I was going through. One story can be universal.
In The Dew Breaker, in order to write about that man, a devil with a horn on his head, I had to become someone like that. I had to step into the shoes of someone who can murder people.
Gleibermann: I’m wondering if, for you, moving through loss or understanding for yourself something that can feel so overwhelmingly big, if drawing a character helps you as a person to gain meaning or gain understanding in your grief?
Danticat: Or joy. Writing is sometimes a bit like being an actor. You really have to step into the body of the character. In The Dew Breaker, in order to write about that man, someone who could easily have been a devil with a horn on his head, I had to become someone like that. I had to step into the shoes of someone who can murder people. You have to imagine the full complexity of that choice. You have to grant a certain level of humanity to people who maybe, if you met them, you would not think they deserve. You have to think how they loved, how they lived, how they compartmentalized these things. And you also have to give them some goodness because they have people in their lives who love them. On a certain level you have to love them.
Gleibermann: I’m going to take you at your word and ask you, do you love all your characters?
Danticat: I can’t say I love all of them afterward. It’s been said that love is not necessarily the opposite of hate. Indifference is. You can’t really write with indifference. If you’re indifferent about something, you’re not going to spend two years writing about it. So, I don’t love all of them, but I feel strongly about everybody I end up writing about.
The Creole expression lòt bò dlo, on the other side of the water, refers either to someone who has migrated abroad or has died. Photo: MabelAmber/Pixabay
Gleibermann: You are ever-evolving as a writer, and also in themes related to mortality and death, I want to bring it toward the present. First of all, it’s been a pleasure these days to get my copy of the New Yorker each week. When I open it up, I wonder, is there a new story by Edwidge? And there has been in the last several months. In “Without Inspection,” from yet another angle you are treating the subject of death. You have a character who has several seconds left and has the experience of looking at his life. Where did that idea come from, and why did you frame the story the way you did? How does it serve what your purpose is in telling his story, a Haitian who has come ashore in South Florida?
Danticat: When I first moved to South Florida, there was and still is a big construction boom. Every once in a while you would hear about a worker in the construction site who would plunge to their death. A Haitian man once fell into one of those cement mixers. It was in the news—a great tragedy. Still, structurally, there’s something exciting about writing someone’s final 7.5 seconds alive. The whole story is supposed to last 7.5 seconds. How do you do that maneuvering? I get to think about what would be the most important thing to that person. You have to stretch the time. You can get away with things because none of us knows.
Structurally, there’s something exciting about writing someone’s final 7.5 seconds alive.
Gleibermann: You play a lot with time and time structures and flashbacks. It seems like a new wrinkle on that. What I want to ask you, though, is that it’s a short story. The previous thing I read by you was a short story. Are there more short stories coming?
Danticat: So, next summer I have a short-story collection coming out called Everything Inside. The neighborhood in Miami where I have lived for the past seventeen years has become quite gentrified. And many of the gentrifiers put scary “safety” signs on their windows. One of them said “Nothing Inside Is Worth Dying For.” The sign also had a human target on it. I thought to myself, what does that mean? I realized it means don’t come in or we’ll shoot you or you’ll die. Then I thought maybe it should be “Everything Inside Is Worth Dying For.” I wrote that into a story and it seemed like a good title, which I then shortened to just “Everything Inside.”
Gleibermann: So, there’s another story on the theme.
Danticat: All the stories are kind of on that theme, of being trespassers both where you live and in other spaces, as immigrants, even if you have the means, and refugees, particularly if you are poor. But these stories, in spite of the man falling from the building, are all love stories. Not just about romantic love, but also about familial loves and friendships.
Gleibermann: For a while you’ve been working in other genres, memoir and novels before that. Do you feel like you’re returning to the short story? I once read that that’s your first love.
Danticat: It is my first love. I love the form. You can pack so much in. It’s so economical. Some of the stories in Krik? Krak! are so short they could be vignettes. The stories in this book are much longer. I have a very short attention span. I think it also goes back to the way I was told stories initially, my storytelling roots. So short stories are perfect for my attention span.
October 10, 2018
Edwidge Danticat
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Edwidge Danticat
Danticat, September 2007
Born
January 19, 1969 (age 50)
Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Occupation
Writer
Nationality
Haitian-American
Education
Barnard College (BA)
Brown University (MFA)
Period
1994–present
Genre
Novels, short stories
Edwidge Danticat (Haitian Creole pronunciation: [ɛdwidʒ dãtika]; born January 19, 1969)[1] is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer.
Contents
1
Early life
2
Career
3
Personal life
4
Themes
4.1
National identity
4.2
Mother-daughter relationships
4.3
Diasporic politics
5
Awards and honors
5.1
Critical Reception
6
Bibliography
6.1
Books
6.2
Short stories
6.3
Film
7
References
8
Further reading
9
External links
Early life[edit]
Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. When she was two years old, her father André immigrated to New York, to be followed two years later by her mother Rose.[1] This left Danticat and her younger brother, also named André, to be raised by her aunt and uncle. When asked in an interview about her traditions as a child, she included storytelling, church, and constantly studying school material as all part of growing up.[2] Although her formal education in Haiti was in French, she spoke Haitian Creole at home.[3]
While still in Haiti, Danticat began writing at nine years old.[4] At the age of 12, she moved to Brooklyn, New York, to join her parents in a heavily Haitian-American neighborhood. As an immigrant teenager, Edwidge's disorientation in her new surroundings was a source of discomfort for her, and she turned to literature for solace.[3] Danticat did not realize the racism until she went to college because of the protection of her community.[5] Two years later she published her first writing in English, "A Haitian-American Christmas: Cremace and Creole Theatre," in New Youth Connections, a citywide magazine written by teenagers published by Youth Communication. She later wrote another story about her immigration experience for New Youth Connections, "A New World Full of Strangers". In the introduction to Starting With I, an anthology of stories from the magazine, Danticat wrote, "When I was done with the [immigration] piece, I felt that my story was unfinished, so I wrote a short story, which later became a book, my first novel: Breath, Eyes, Memory…Writing for New Youth Connections had given me a voice. My silence was destroyed completely, indefinitely."[6]
After graduating from Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, New York, Danticat entered Barnard College in New York City. Initially she had intended to study to become a nurse, but her love of writing won out and she received a BA in French literature[7] She received a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Brown University in 1993.[7]
Career[edit]
In 1993, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Brown University—her thesis, entitled "My turn in the fire – an abridged novel",[8] was the basis for her novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, which was published by Soho Press in 1994.[7] Four years later it became an Oprah's Book Club selection.[9]
The literary journal Granta asked booksellers, librarians, and literary critics to nominate who they believed to be the country's best young author. The standards were that the person must be an American citizen under the age of 40 and must have published at least one novel or collection of short stories before May 31, 1995. In 1997, at the age of 27, with 19 other finalists, Danticat was named one of the country's best young authors.[10]
Since completing her MFA, Danticat has taught creative writing at the New York University and the University of Miami.[11] She has also worked with filmmakers Patricia Benoit and Jonathan Demme, on projects on Haitian art and documentaries about Haïti.[1] Her short stories have appeared in over 25 periodicals and have been anthologized several times. Her work has been translated into numerous other languages, including Japanese, French, Korean, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish.
Danticat is a strong advocate for issues affecting Haitians abroad and at home. In 2009, she lent her voice and words to Poto Mitan: Haitian Women Pillars of the Global Economy, a documentary about the impact of globalization on five women from different generations.[12]
Personal life[edit]
Danticat married Fedo Boyer in 2002. She has two daughters, Mira and Leila.[7] Although Danticat resides in the United States, she still considers Haiti home. To date, she still visits Haiti from time to time and has always felt as if she never left it.[13]
Themes[edit]
Three themes are prominent in various analyses of Edwidge Danticat's work: national identity, mother-daughter relationships, and diasporic politics.
National identity[edit]
Scholars of Danticat's work frequently examine the theme of national identity. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Danticat explores the relationship between women and the nationalist agenda of the state [i] during the Duvalier regime. Throughout the novel, as generations of women "test" their daughters, by penetrating their vaginas with a finger to confirm their virginity, they "become enforcers," or proxies, of the state's "violence and victimization" of black women's bodies (376–377) [i], similar to the paramilitary Tonton Macoutes. However, while the women of Breath, Eyes, Memory replicate "state-sanctioned" control and violation of women's bodies through acts of violence (375), they also "disrupt and challenge the masculinist, nationalist discourse" of the state by using their bodies "as deadly weapons" (387) [i]. Evidence for this claim can be drawn from Martine's suicide, seen as a tragic exhibition of freedom, releasing her body, and mind, from its past traumas [i]. Additionally, the novel demonstrates some inherent difficulties of creating a diasporic identity, as illustrated through Sophie's struggle between uniting herself with her heritage and abandoning what she perceives to be the damaging tradition of 'testing,' suggesting the impossibility of creating a resolute creolized personhood [ii]. Finally, Danticat's work, The Farming of Bones, speaks to the stories of those who survived the 1937 massacre, and the effects of that trauma on Haitian identity [iv]. Overall, Danticat makes known the history of her nation while also diversifying conceptions of the country beyond those of victimization [iii].
Mother-daughter relationships[edit]
Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory explores the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship to self-identity and self-expression [v]. Sophie's experiences mirror those of her mother's Martine. Just as Martine was forced to submit to a virginity test at the hand of her own mother, she forces the same on Sophie after discovering her relationship with Joseph. As a result, Sophie goes through a period of self- hate, ashamed to show anyone her body, including her husband (80) [viii]. Sophie's struggles to overcome frigidity in relation to intimacy with her husband Joseph, as well as her bulimia parallels Martine's struggle bear a child with Marc to term, as well her insomnia, and detrimental eating habits (61–62) [v]. Due to Martine's rape by a Tonton Macoute and Sophie's abuse by her mother, "each woman must come to terms with herself before she can enter into a healthy relationship with a man, and these men attempt to meet these women on the latter's own terms" (68) [vi]. The pinnacle of this mirroring comes when Sophie chooses to be her mother's Marassa, a double of herself for her mother, to share the pain, the trials and the tribulations, the ultimate connection: to become one with her mother. Marassas represent "sameness and love" as one, they are "inseparable and identical. They love each other because they are alike and always together" [vii]. This connection between Sophie and her mother Martine has also been challenged through Sophie's own connection with her daughter Brigitte: "Martine's totally nihilistic unwillingness to begin again with the draining responsibilities of motherhood comments upon and stands in stark contrast to Sophie's loving desire to bring her daughter Brigitte into the welcoming" (79) [viii]
Diasporic politics[edit]
Scholars agree that Danticat manages her relationship with her Haitian history and her bicultural identity through her works by creating a new space within the political sphere. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Danticat employs the "idea of mobile traditions" as a means of creating new space for Haitian identity in America, one that is neither a "happy hybridity" nor an "unproblematic creolization" of Flatbush Brooklyn (28) [ix]. Danticat's open reference to and acceptance of her Caribbean predecessors, especially through the "grand narratives of the dead iconic fathers of Haitian literature," creates a "new community […] in luminal extra-national spaces" that "situates her narrative" in a place that is neither "absolute belonging" nor "postcolonial placelessness" (34) [ix]. Suggestive of the Haitian literary movement Indigenism, in which works sought to connect to the land of Haiti and the "plight of the peasant class" (55) [x], Sophie's complex reality in Breath, Eyes, Memory encapsulates the transnational experience (61) [x]. Translations of Breath, Eyes, Memory, especially those in France, contain slight alterations and "clumsy" replacement of creol/Caribbean terms that shift the empowered stance of Danticat's works to one of victimization, mirroring the fight authors face for a new political space in which dual Caribbean identity is accepted (68) [x]. Danticat's short story cycles in Krik? Krak! demonstrate "a symbolic weaving together" of her works and the transnational communities, including "Haitians, immigrants, women, [and] mothers and daughters," that she attempts to unite (75) [xi]. Through her "voicing the intersubjective experience of a community," Danticat distinguishes herself from other Haitian prose authors (73, 76) [xi]. She creates a space for the "voicelessness" of those unable to "speak their individual experience" (76) [xi]. Danticat's short stories uphold an undivided experience, one that politically aligns itself with an "egalitarian regime of rights and the rule of law" (81) [xi]. The political space in which such a single experience can exist is the means through which Danticat's transnational identity and her characters can survive.
Another work of Danticat's is her travel narrative After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (2002). She believes it provides readers with an inside look and feel of Haiti's cultural legacy, practices related to Lent, its Carnival, and the Haitian Revolution. She embarks on a journey through her work to recover the lost cultural markers of Haiti while also being marked by the Haitian geopolitical privilege and by her own privilege of mobility.[14] Due to her active traveling privilege, she considered herself an "outsider" of Jacmel even though she did originate from Haiti. She explains "This is the first time I will be an active reveler at carnival in Haiti. I am worried that such an admission would appear strange for someone whom carnival is one of life’ passions...As a child living in Haiti...I had never been allowed to "join the carnival" ... it was considered not safe for me...Since I had an intense desire to join the carnival as some peculiar American children have of joining the circus, my uncle for years spun frightening tales around it to keep me away." She said in her narrative of going back to Jacmel, "I was still wearing my own mask of distant observer." Because of this, she advises her reader to look observe her work from the perspective of a diasporic returnee instead of an insider.[15]
Awards and honors[edit]
Danticat has won fiction awards from Essence and Seventeen magazines, was named "1 of 20 people in their twenties who will make a difference" in Harper's Bazaar,[16] was featured in The New York Times Magazine as one of "30 under 30" people to watch,[1][16] and was called one of the "15 Gutsiest Women of the Year" by Jane magazine.[16]
1994 Fiction Award The Caribbean Writer
1995 Woman of Achievement Award, Barnard College
Pushcart Short Story Prize for "Between the Pool and the Gardenias"
National Book Award nomination for Krik? Krak!
1996 Granta magazine's Best Young American Novelists[17]
Lila-Wallace-Reader's Digest Grant
1999 American Book Award for The Farming of Bones
The International Flaiano Prize for literature
The Super Flaiano Prize for The Farming of Bones
2005 The Story Prize for The Dew Breaker
2005 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award[18] for "The Dew Breaker"
2007 National Book Award nomination for Brother, I'm Dying
2007 The National Book Critics Circle Award for Brother, I'm Dying
2008 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Brother, I'm Dying
2009 MacArthur Fellows Program Genius grant
2009 The Nicolas Guillen Philosophical Literature Prize, Caribbean Philosophical Association
2011 Langston Hughes Medal, City College of New York
2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for Create Dangerously
2012 Smith College Honorary Degree
2013 Yale University Honorary Degree[19]
2014 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, shortlist for Claire of the Sea Light[20]
2014 PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Literary Award
2017 Honorary Doctor of Letters (DLitt) degree from the University of the West Indies Open Campus[21][22]
2017 Neustadt International Prize for Literature[23]
Critical Reception[edit]
Edwidge Danticat is an author, creator and participant in multiple forms of storytelling. The New York Times has remarked on Danticat’s ability to create a “moving portrait and a vivid illustration” as an “accomplished novelist and memoirist”. The New Yorker has featured Danticat’s short stories and essays on multiple occasions, and regularly reviews and critiques her work.
Danticat’s creative branching out has included filmmaking, short stories, and most recently children’s literature. Mama’s Nightingale was written to share the story of Haitian immigrants and family separation. The book combines Danticat’s storytelling abilities and work by accomplished artist Leslie Staub. Published in 2015 by Penguin Random House, the children’s book tells “a touching tale of parent-child separation and immigration…with stirring illustrations…and shows how every child has the power to make a difference.” Per a review from the Times, Mama’s Nightingale “will inspire not just empathy for the struggles of childhood immigration, but admiration” of Danticat and Staub, too.
In other creative pursuits, Danticat has worked on two films, Poto Mitan and Girl Rising. The latter received a large amount of press, largely due to the star power involved with the film (including Anne Hathaway, Chloë Grace Moretz, Liam Neeson, Meryl Streep, Alicia Keys and Kerry Washington). In the film, Danticat was tasked with narrating the story of Wadley from Haiti. Girl Rising was defined by The Washington Post as “a lengthy, highly effective PSA designed to kickstart a commitment to getting proper education for all young women, all over the globe”.
In Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, Danticat tells her own story as a part of the Haitian diaspora. Create Dangerously was inspired by author Albert Camus’ lecture “Create Dangerously” and his experience as an author and creator who defined his art as “a revolt against everything fleeting and unfinished in the world.” In Create Dangerously, Danticat is admired for “writing about tragedies and vanished cultures” and how “she accepts that by some accident she exists and has the power to create, so she does.” NPR positively reviewed Create Dangerously and the journey through “looming loss [which] makes every detail and person to whom we are introduced more luminous and precious.” It was chosen by The University of Kansas as the 2018-19 Common Book, which is distributed to all first-year students at the University.
Danticat published her first novel at the age of 25, and since then has been raved by critics and audience members alike. Some of her most well-known novels include The Dew Breaker, Brother, I'm Dying, Krik? Krak!, and Breath, Eyes, Memory. Each of these novels has won awards including the National Book Award, The Story Prize, and the National Books Critic Circle Award. Danticat usually writes about the different lives of people living in Haiti and the United States, using her own life as inspiration for her novels, typically highlighting themes of violence, class, economic troubles, gender disparities, and family.
The Dew Breaker is a collection of short stories that can either be read together or separately, and detail the intermingled lives of different people in Haiti and New York. According to the New York Times, “Each tale in ‘Dew Breaker’ can stand on its own beautifully made story, but they come together as jigsaw-puzzle pieces to create a picture of this man’s terrible history and his and his victims’ afterlife.” It was rated four out of five stars by Goodreads. Brother, I’m Dying is an autobiographical novel that tells her story of being in Haiti and moving to the United States, falling in love, and having a child. This is one of Danticat’s most well-rated books as it was named Top-10 African American Non-fiction Books by Booklist in 2008. According to the New York Times, it is “giving us a memoir whose cleareyed prose and unflinching adherence to the facts conceal an astringent undercurrent of melancholy, a mixtureness of homesickness, and homelessness.” Krik? Krak! is a collection of short stories of women in Haiti, their trials and tribulations. The Washington Post Book World said “virtually flawless. If the news from Haiti is too painful to read, read this book instead and understand the place more deeply than you ever thought possible.” Finally, Breath, Eyes, Memory was Danticat’s first novel. It tells the story of a girl, a child of rape, as she moves from Haiti to New York City and discovering the traumatic experience her mother endured, and many other women did. This book was chosen for Oprah's Book Club in 2008 and also received four out of five stars on Goodreads. Oprah said it had “vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people's suffering and courage.”
Bibliography[edit]
Books[edit]
Breath, Eyes, Memory (novel, 1994)
Krik? Krak! (stories, 1996)
The Farming of Bones (novel, 1998)
Behind the Mountains (young adult novel, 2002, part of the First Person Fiction series)
After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (travel book, 2002)
The Dew Breaker (novel-in-stories,2004)
Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490 (young adult novel, 2005, part of The Royal Diaries series)
Brother, I'm Dying (memoir/social criticism, 2007)
The Butterfly's Way (anthology editor)
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (essay collection, 2010)
Eight Days: A Story of Haiti (picture book, 2010)
Tent Life: Haiti (essay contributor, 2011)
Haiti Noir (anthology editor, 2011)
Best American Essays, 2011 (anthology editor, October 2011)
The Last Mapou (children's novel, January 2013)
Claire of the Sea Light (novel, August 2013)
Haiti Noir 2: The Classics (anthology editor, January 2014)
Mama's Nightingale (picture book, September, 2015)
Untwine (young adult novel, October 2015)
The Art of Death (biography, July 2017)
My Mommy Medicine (picture book, February 2019)
Short stories[edit]
"The Book of the Dead". The New Yorker: 194–. June 21, 1999.
"Ghosts". The New Yorker. 84 (38): 108–113. November 24, 2008. Retrieved April 16, 2009.
"Quality Control". The Washington Post. November 14, 2014. Retrieved January 31, 2015.
Film[edit]
Poto Mitan – Writer/Narrator, 2009
Girl Rising (Haiti) – Writer, 2013[24]
QUOTE:
No one is immune from pain, but Danticat asks her readers to witness the integrity of her subjects as they excavate beauty and hope from uncertainty and loss.
An extraordinary career milestone: spare, evocative, and moving
Danticat, Edwidge EVERYTHING INSIDE Knopf (Adult Fiction) $25.95 8, 27 ISBN: 978-0-525-52127-3
In her first collection of short stories in more than a decade, Danticat tackles the complexities of diaspora with lyrical grace.
Danticat (The Art of Death, 2017, etc.) is a master of economy; she has always possessed the remarkable ability to build singular fictional worlds in a matter of sentences. This collection draws on Danticat's exceptional strengths as a storyteller to examine how migration to and from the Caribbean shapes her characters, whether they're scrounging up savings to pay ransom for a kidnapping, navigating youthful idealism and the pull of international aid work, or trying to erase the horrors of immigrating to the United States by sea. In "Dosas," Elsie, a home health care worker in Miami Shores, is shocked by a panicked phone call from her ex-husband about his new girlfriend's kidnapping in Port-au-Prince. What becomes increasingly clear, however, is that Elsie's ex-husband is a two-timing scammer who has derailed Elsie's life in more ways than one. With great care, Danticat demonstrates the razor's edge on which Elsie's own financial and emotional security is balanced: from the sacrifices she makes to send Blaise money to her fears about the safety of her own family. "Maybe there was something about her that wasn't enough," Elsie thinks, as she reconsiders her marriage. "Or something about him that wasn't enough....Some people just want to go home, no matter what the cost." When two former lovers meet for dinner on the Fourth of July in "The Gift," they struggle to reconnect across a yawning chasm of loss caused by the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti in 2010. And, in "Without Inspection," an undocumented construction worker hurtles to his death from rickety scaffolding, imagining final visitations with his lover and adopted son. These are stories of lives upended by tragedies big and small, from political coups to closely guarded maternal secrets. Throughout each story, Danticat attends to the ways families are made and unmade: Mothers yearn for children, women recover from divorce, and aging parents suffer from dementia or succumb to death. No one is immune from pain, but Danticat asks her readers to witness the integrity of her subjects as they excavate beauty and hope from uncertainty and loss.
An extraordinary career milestone: spare, evocative, and moving.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Danticat, Edwidge: EVERYTHING INSIDE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A591279019/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e2c5b40e. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A591279019
QUOTE:
chronicles eight gut-wrenching snapshots of death, love, disease, adultery, and trauma. ...With painstaking care, Danticat paints layered canvases that set mundane details of a nine-to-five or a seemingly innocuous description of beautiful countryside against life-shattering conflicts
People play out whatever fate was handed to them--this is the ultimate reality. Instead of tidy or sweet endings, the reader discovers that the characters in Everything Inside are answering the reader's own thoughts and questions with every page, and the work becomes a mirror that is almost impossible to put down
Mosaic of Memory
Everything Inside: Stories.
By Edwidge Danticat
New York, NY; Knopf, 2019, 240 pp., $25.95, hardcover
If joy only exists in a memory, is it real? When a relationship ends in betrayal and one's dreams of a lifelong partner, shared mortgage, and children dissipate along with it, what is the purpose of recalling the good times if they are no longer a reality? As human beings, we will grieve different losses at different times in our life, from romantic relationships to deceased mothers, fathers, children, and other family members, to homes taken by natural disasters, and even to more abstract possessions like freedom and cognitive faculties. Lost time, lost loved ones, lost dignity, and even lost memories pepper the past and present (and likely future) existences of the characters in Edwidge Danticat's Everything Inside. Positive recollections anchor healing, narrative arcs, but these stories don't dwell in the good old days. Instead, tragedies provide the propulsive fuel to move forward.
Everything Inside, the third collection of short stories by the award-winning Danticat, chronicles eight gut-wrenching snapshots of death, love, disease, adultery, and trauma. The stories dare you to stand in judgment of the characters' thoughts and decisions in the midst of their world's upending. With painstaking care, Danticat paints layered canvases that set mundane details of a nine-to-five or a seemingly innocuous description of beautiful countryside against life-shattering conflicts. The background is textured with culturally specific content, mental ills like post-traumatic stress disorder and dementia, and class differences within and across ethnicities. Danticat is Haitian-American, and her stories contain fictional members of the "dyaspora" who bounce between Haiti, Miami, and New York City.
In the first line of the opening story, "Dosas"--a Haitian Creole term that denotes the straggling third child born after twins--main character Elsie receives a grave phone call from her ex-husband, Blaise. He strains to tell Elsie that her former best friend (and Blaise's current girlfriend), Olivia, has been kidnapped back in Haiti. Elsie, a nearly forty-year-old migrant from Port-au-Prince, grinds at an emotionally challenging job in Miami, as caretaker to terminally ill Gaspard. She risks losing her position when Gaspard's daughter catches her father's keeper taking too many personal calls. A multiple-page spanning bout of nostalgia floods Elsie's consciousness with images of her and Blaise's first meeting, Elsie and Olivia's parallel struggles as immigrant healthcare workers in the US, and other sorts of mental re-plays that the mind is prone to initiate when faced with the potential death of a cherished person.
After Elsie breaks down and effectively drains her savings account to help her ex-husband and fellow Haitian pay for Olivia's ransom, she gets the worst possible news about her once-closest friend. Unleashing her guilt, anger, and fear at a neighborhood bar, Elsie taps into vengeance, proclaiming she wants to "pound [the "kidnappers"] heads with a big rock until their brains were liquid, like this drink now in my hand." She does not put any of this into action. At the end of "Dosas," Elsie is left with a gnawing loneliness and a renewed need to protect the life that she has made for herself outside of Haiti. Looking at the door of her small apartment, a guest house behind the property owner's home, she realizes, "This one room was suddenly her everything. It was her entire world."
As the stories continue, characters continue to collide with unfortunate circumstances as Danticat plays with space, time, and point of view. "In the Old Days" tells the story of twenty-five-year-old Nadia, who, while sitting in the restaurant owned by her mother, is told that her absent father is now on his deathbed. "My father's wife" buys Nadia a plane ticket from New York to Miami, where she scans a corpse-like form that vaguely looks like her and whom she'll never really meet, at least not in the reciprocated sense. Nadia has a foot in two worlds: she sneaks to call home and is reminded of her mother's sacrifice as a single parent, abandoned by her husband and father of her child who, she believes, "left me for a country." Back in the presence of her father's frail body, she finds herself in the middle of an old funeral ritual prepped by Haitian friends of a family--her family--she doesn't know.
"I have SIDA. AIDS," says Melisande, a nanny, early in "Port-au-Prince Marriage Special," which is set in a family-owned hotel, where privacy, poverty, and power dynamics aptly play out. False promises of stable companionship and reliable treatment plague Melisande in this story. Her own mother, Babette, a cook for the hotel, reels from the costs incurred by what she perceives as her daughter's stupidity; however, she is less upset about the financial burden than she is livid over Melisande's likely branding as un-marriable whore, incapable of bearing healthy children.
In "The Gift," artist Anika meets up with her ex, Thomas, who, when they were together, also had a wife and a young daughter. While having dinner at their restaurant and sitting at their corner table, Anika internally runs through a string of positive and loving memories of their adulterous relationship, struggling to transform her thoughts into a speech that would make the case for them rekindling at least the physical side of their affair. The whole situation is awkward and heartbreaking, especially since Thomas is a couple of months fresh from surviving the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that took his leg from the knee down, his house, and his wife and daughter, who both perished mere feet from him.
Equally painful, but less successful as a compelling narrative, are "Hot Air Balloons" and "Seven Stories," two coming of age stories that explore the effects of trauma on two different women. In the former, Neah Asher, daughter of a renowned Trinidadian professor at her Miami university, returns from a service trip to Haiti, where she volunteered at a rape recovery center. Neah's story is told from the perspective of her best friend, who can sense that Neah's idealized life (and her plans for a PhD in French literature) has been altered by her experience. Neah decides to drop out of college to volunteer full-time for Leve, the organization that organized her trip to Haiti. (The reader recognizes the passion that university students possess when they latch onto a cause.) Neah's father stops her plans, demeaning her as a stereotypically liberal college student acting out. Her best friend recounts Neah's change of heart:
"I'm too easily swayed by stories," she said.... This sounded like
something her father might have told her to convince her to come back
to school. "I am too easily swayed by every story I hear, or see, or
witness, especially the tragic ones," she said. "I think this is going
to be the story of my life. I'm going to be the girl who is too easily
swayed by other people's stories."
The irony of her being swayed by her father's story about her is poignant, but almost anticlimactic, too. The alternating story depicts the daughter of the murdered Prime Minister of an unnamed Caribbean country as she represses her trauma and even recreates it.
The most exciting pieces of Everything Inside, however, also had the most complicated structure. The tension that Danticat weaves through "Sunrise, Sunset" is immediately detected with the use of third person in the story's first line. "It comes on again on her grandson's christening day." The it, the reader discovers, is another one of Carole's dissociative episodes that have been flaring up since her dementia started disappearing her memories and her sense of self. In the next numbered section, the third person is still used, but the story is told from the perspective of Jeanne, Carole's daughter, who is suffering from postpartum depression and possibly other mental maladies. Jeanne doesn't know why she has no affection for her son Jude, but she does know that her mother can't be allowed to babysit Jude without supervision. Even in her state, Carole maintains her quest to harden her American-born kids to the harsh realities of loss, realities that she experienced growing up in Haiti. Her condition worsens over the course of the story until, finally, the stakes are presented in a starkly haunting manner:
Carole knew from the moment she met Victor that he would take care of
her. She never thought he'd conspire against her, or even threaten to
put her away. 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.
The "fleshy, pretty woman" is Jeanne, the daughter she shares with Victor. The story escalates quickly and ends with a harrowing rescue and the realization that Carole has truly lost her mind.
"Without Inspection," the last story of the collection, could have been disorienting but wasn't. The protagonist, Arnold, is mid-free fall from a scaffold at his construction job. He is sure he is going to die. As he falls, his mind races through different portals of time, as if his memories or his visions will keep him alive. Arnold is an orphan who spent his childhood as a servant in Haiti until he escaped as a young adult to the border. From there, he braved the treacherous journey to Miami, a trip during which many fellow Haitian men, women, and children drowned. But he survived, found work, fell in love with Darline, and became a father to her son, Paris. "Paris was their ring. They loved each other and they loved him. He was their son." His life flashes include Darline and Paris's backstory as well, and the disparate details fit seamlessly; their tragedies are thematically linked, by way of similar immigration stories, equally terrifying brushes with death, and a history of surviving by the skin of their lungs. By the time Arnold lands (I won't say where), the reader has the feeling that Danticat punched a hole into the colorful mosaic that she has spent twenty pages painting.
There is not a single typically satisfying ending to any of the stories of Everything Inside. Perhaps that is Danticat's intention; perhaps the reader is only meant to ride the waves of intrigue, uncertainty, and imminent death as a reminder that in life, entropy is a constant. Where and how we all land on Earth--some of us as survivors, others as survivors of one tragedy just to succumb to the whims of another--is trailed by chaos, and even our birth into one body, one existence versus another, was the result of a messy, cosmic, genetic luck-of-the-draw.
People play out whatever fate was handed to them--this is the ultimate reality. Instead of tidy or sweet endings, the reader discovers that the characters in Everything Inside are answering the reader's own thoughts and questions with every page, and the work becomes a mirror that is almost impossible to put down.
Reviewed by Shirley Nwangwa
Shirley Ngozi Nwangwa is a writer based in New York City. She's a queer Nigerian-American who is passionate about giving marginalized folks a space to be heard. If you see her on the train, chances are she's doing a crossword. If not, reading, music and podcasts are cool, too. She's on twitter and instagram @llovellin.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Nwangwa, Shirley. "Mosaic of Memory: Everything Inside: Stories." The Women's Review of Books, July-Aug. 2019, p. 19+. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A594832896/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=62cc67b6. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A594832896
QUOTE:
outstanding and deeply memorable
In plain, propulsive prose, and with great compassion, Danticat writes both of her characters' losses and of their determination to continue
* Everything Inside
Edwidge Danticat. Knopf, $25.95 (240p) ISBN 978-0-525-52127-3
Families fracture and reform in Danricat's outstanding and deeply memorable story collection. Set among the Haitian "dyaspora" including Miami, New York, and Haiti itself, the tales describe the complicated lives of people who live in one place but are drawn elsewhere. The American children of immigrants discover that their lives have been shaped by their parents' Haitian pasts, as in the touching, funny "In the Old Days," when a New York high school teacher learns that her absent father, who divorced her mother and returned to Haiti, is dying, and rushes to meet him. In the book's standout story, "Sunrise, Sunset," a woman with dementia struggles to impart the lessons of motherhood to her own daughter: "You are always saying hello to them while preparing them to say goodbye to you." And the charming "Hot Air Balloons" follows two college freshmen--Neah, the child of academics, and Lucy, the daughter of migrant farm workers--as each comes to her own understanding of Haiti, a place of "idyllic beaches" and "dewy mountaintops," as well as corruption and poverty, where girls are "recruited for orgies with international aid workers." In plain, propulsive prose, and with great compassion, Danticat writes both of her characters' losses and of their determination to continue: "There are loves that outlive lovers." 50,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc. (Aug.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Everything Inside." Publishers Weekly, 17 June 2019, p. 43. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A590762547/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=beb9778f. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A590762547
QUOTE:
Danticat once again urges readers out of comfort zones to bear witness to urgent topics--refugee crises, polarizing inequity, violence, disasters--and alchemizes sorrows and tragedies into opportunities for literary enlightenment
* Everything Inside.
By Edwidge Danticat.
Aug. 2019. 240p. Knopf, $25.9519780525521273).
Following The Art of Death (2017), a reflection on her mother's passing and writing, Danticat focuses this haunting eight-story collection on, well, death. Looming death becomes a bargaining chip in "Dosas," when an ex-husband begs his ex-wife to help save her kidnapped replacement, and in "In the Old Days," when an adult daughter is summoned to the final bedside of her never-met-before father. Survivors navigate new lives in "The Gift," which portrays an artist who lost her lover's baby, and her lover, who has lost his wife and young daughter, and in "Seven Stories," in which a prime minister's wife and daughter persevere after his assassination. Fatal illness causes a living death in "The Port-au-Prince Marriage Special," a tale about a young woman diagnosed with AIDS, and in "Sunrise, Sunset," with an aging woman succumbing to memory loss, while inhumane brutality has a similar effect on the Haitian rape victims a privileged U.S. teen encounters as a recovery center volunteer in "Hot Air Balloons." In the final story, a Haitian refugee recalls his life in 6.5 seconds as he plummets to his death. Danticat once again urges readers out of comfort zones to bear witness to urgent topics--refugee crises, polarizing inequity, violence, disasters--and alchemizes sorrows and tragedies into opportunities for literary enlightenment.--Terry Hong
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hong, Terry. "Everything Inside." Booklist, 1 June 2019, p. 32. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A593431427/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0b89796c. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A593431427
QUOTE:
This warm, loving account could be a "how-to" guide for parents, demonstrating that the things the girl likes best involve little to no cost
My Mommy Medicine. By Edwidge Danticat. Illus. by Shannon Wright. Feb. 2019.32p. Roaring Brook, $17.99 (9781250140913). PreS-Gr. 1.
When a child is sick or feeling sad, nothing helps more than "Mommy Medicine," as described here by a young brown-skinned girl. Noisy kisses, hugs, a back rub; some soup or tea; playing a board or card game--the activities are varied but all involve togetherness. Some things are quiet, like whispering prayers; some are louder, like dancing and singing. When the child starts feeling energetic, the pair venture on an imaginary journey to faraway lands. The text is simple but descriptive, expertly making the shared love of the mother and child understandable as both universal and specific. Because no other relatives are discussed, the book could be applicable to all kinds of families, including single parents. Bright, naturalistic illustrations add entertaining texture to the story and show the mother and daughter as regular people rather than idealized figures. This warm, loving account could be a "how-to" guide for parents, demonstrating that the things the girl likes best involve little to no cost. Cozy and comforting, this is an effective antidote for childhood illness or anxiety.--Lucinda Whitehurst
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Whitehurst, Lucinda. "My Mommy Medicine." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2019, p. 52. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A575010069/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=07ef57d9. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A575010069
QUOTE:
sweet celebration of the special touch that only a mother can give
Danticat, Edwidge MY MOMMY MEDICINE Roaring Brook (Children's Fiction) $17.99 2, 26 ISBN: 978-1-250-14091-3
A young girl counts the many kinds of Mommy Medicine that make her feel better when she's down.
Whether she's sick or simply sad, this brown-skinned girl with large, puffy hair can count on her mom to treat her to doses of Mommy Medicine. Mommy Medicine can feel like kisses, hugs, and massages, or it can taste like Popsicles, tea, or fruit. It can be bubbles, games, or "a whispered prayer, just before nodding off at nap time." Songs, dances, playing make-believe, watching a movie, or drawing together--even taking "actual medicine, which might taste yummy or YUCKY"--are also possible remedies. The mother closely resembles the girl, and they cuddle, smile, and laugh together on pages full of digital illustrations that give the text just enough color to sustain the story's momentum. Standout moments include the pair seated on the floor and staring at each other like card sharks over closely held hands of Uno cards, the child swaddled in a blanket, and another of the two of them laughing heartily while snuggling on the couch in front of a movie. Sensory details mark the text with moments of feel-good familiarity, but ultimately the ongoing descriptions add up to little in the way of story.
A sweet celebration of the special touch that only a mother can give, though perhaps not memorable enough to become a favorite. (author's note) (Picture book. 2-6)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Danticat, Edwidge: MY MOMMY MEDICINE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2018. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A565423038/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=89d1fbba. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A565423038
Edwidge Danticat, illus. by Shannon Wright. Roaring Brook, $17.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-250-14091-3
The narrator, a brown-skinned girl, defines "Mommy Medicine" as a special brand of TLC--a combination of pampering and playfulness that her mother offers "whenever I am sick or just feel kind of gloomy or sad." Mommy's indomitable energy and toolkit of healing techniques are something to behold: she can plant "a kiss so loud it reminds me of a French horn at Mardi Gras," deliver a rousing medley, give her all in a session of pretend play, or just sit quietly with her daughter "watching my ceiling's glow-in-the-dark stars flicker, making out own sky." Heartfelt prose by adult author Danticat can seem more like an adult's recollection than a child's impression ("Sometimes it's a whispered prayer, just before nodding off at nap time"), but the vignettes are full of glad familial love. Wright, an illustrator and cartoonist making her picture book debut, supplies largely realistic scenes in a poignant home-video style. Together, they leave no doubt about how good it feels to be the total center of attention--even when there's "actual" yucky medicine involved. Ages 3-6. (Feb.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"My Mommy Medicine." Publishers Weekly, 22 Oct. 2018, p. 83. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A564341514/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=02f74043. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A564341514
QUOTE:
This work is more about how death is described in literature, and the author asks if we really can describe it adequately at all. Danticat takes on an unpleasant topic with sensitivity and passion
Danticat, Edwidge THE ART OF DEATH Graywolf (Adult Nonfiction) $14.00 7, 11 ISBN: 978-1-55597-777-1
A guide to writing--and reading--about death.National Book Critics Circle Award winner Danticat (Claire of the Sea Light, 2013, etc.) adds to "The Art of" series with this work on how writers approach the topics of death and dying. Though the book is slim, it is overarching and broad in scope. Drawing on an array of writers, Danticat presents a wide range of approaches to death, including her own. Having written extensively about her mother's death, for which she was present, the author lends a deeply personal touch to this study. She truly finds her stride after first surrounding readers with the almost impossible depth of her topic. Though not tied to a structure, Danticat explores the varieties of death and how each one is approached by writers. Suicide, execution, natural death, and accidental death all receive attention. Collective deaths also play a role, especially 9/11 and the Haitian earthquake of 2010. The author also examines suicide through the works of writers as diverse as Tolstoy, Faulkner, Albert Camus, Dylan Thomas, Zora Neale Hurston, Christopher Hitchens, and Toni Morrison. For executions, she shares the wisdom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a death row inmate. Regarding death as an all-encompassing end to life, she smartly draws from Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Most movingly, Danticat brings her audience into the very private realm of her own mother's death from cancer. She writes of the tests, the diagnosis, the decline, and the final hours and moments as her mother slipped away. Though faith and fear both come up in this book, they are not highlighted. This work is more about how death is described in literature, and the author asks if we really can describe it adequately at all. Danticat takes on an unpleasant topic with sensitivity and passion.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Danticat, Edwidge: THE ART OF DEATH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329081/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=42d58971. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493329081
QUOTE:
This slim volume wraps literary criticism, philosophy, and memoir into a gracefully circling whole, echoing the nature of grief as 'circles and circles of sorrow.
The Art of Death:
Writing the Final Story
Edwidge Danticat. Graywolf, $14 trade paper
(200p) ISBN 978-1-55597-777-1
In the latest installment of Graywolf's the Art Of series, Danticat (Claire of the Sea Light) tackles a complex subject that reverberates throughout her award-winning fiction. She seeks to "both better understand death and offload [her] fear of it" through the experience of dealing with the deaths of friends and family members, and through the works of writers past and present, from Leo Tolstoy to Ta-Nehisi Coates. She highlights--and perhaps achieves--the writer's desire to "help others feel less alone." For Danticat, death is not an isolated phenomenon. Everything in our lives, and in the fiction we read and write, is informed by our knowledge of the inevitability of life's end: "Even when we are not writing about death, we are writing about death." Danticat pursues two major goals here, and they dovetail gracefully. In a series of linked essays on overlapping topics such as suicide, close calls, and how we relate to catastrophic events, she both shows how great writers make death meaningful, and explores her own raw grief over her mother's death. This slim volume wraps literary criticism, philosophy, and memoir into a gracefully circling whole, echoing the nature of grief as "circles and circles of sorrow." (July)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 90. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487928166/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=813e60bd. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487928166
DANTICAT, Edwidge. My Mommy Medicine. illus. by Shannon Wright. 32p. Roaring Brook. Feb. 2019. Tr $17.99. ISBN 9781250140913. POP
PreS-Gr 2--Danticat (Mama's Nightingale) pays tribute to the ways in which mothers (or other caregivers, as she notes in the back matter) take care of their children when they are sick or down in the dumps. A young black girl shares a descriptive list of the things her mom does to help her feel better: playing games, telling stories, and making food, among many other acts of comfort and healing. She describes each type of "Mommy Medicine" using vivid language, similes, and metaphors. "Or soup--pea, chicken, or squash. I love squash! It's like sunshine in a bowl." The illustrations by Wright, a political cartoonist, burst with the love between the familial pair. She draws with detail and an array of glowing colors that fill each page. The focus is on the mother and daughter, who appear in each vignette like stills from an animation. VERDICT A warm and fuzzy offering for sick days on the couch or everyday reading. A recommended purchase.--Clara Hendricks, Cambridge Public Library, MA
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hendricks, Clara. "DANTICAT, Edwidge. My Mommy Medicine." School Library Journal, Mar. 2019, p. 84. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A576210247/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3a240b13. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A576210247
Edwidge Danticat Returns to Haiti In New Stories
Edwidge Danticat’s collection Everything Inside explores the ethereal and urgent influence of Haiti on its stories’ characters
By Gabrielle Bellot | Jun 21, 2019
Comments
Photo: Lynn Savarese
Edwidge Danticat
“Sometimes people know our most vulnerable places,” Edwidge Danticat says. “Because of that, we do things we know we shouldn’t do—things that have tragic outcomes. This is the kind of conflict that I’m drawn to: people asking very hard questions.”
RELATED STORIES:
PW issue Contents
More in Authors -> Profiles
Want to reprint? Get permissions.
FREE E-NEWSLETTERS
PW Daily Tip Sheet
More Newsletters
In Danticat’s new collection, Everything Inside (Knopf, Aug.), these questions may explore romantic infidelity, broken pacts, or the identity of a long-lost parent; sometimes, they involve the labyrinthine question of whether to return to Haiti—the country—from Little Haiti in Miami, where many of the stories take place. Danticat says that above all, she wished to “show all the layers” of the women in her new stories when they make their decisions—good, bad, and everything in between. And it is this core idea—women faced with choices at once mundane and magnitudinous—that perhaps best characterizes Everything Inside.
Danticat’s earliest fiction was dense with blood and violence, steeped in Haiti’s past: the history of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier’s tyrannical regimes and the horrific presence of the Tonton Macoutes, the Duvaliers’ legendarily brutal, murderous paramilitary force. In “Children of the Sea,” one of the stories from Krik? Krak!, the Macoutes’ excesses are described in excruciating detail: they make family members rape each other in front them, then murder them, acting with the impunity of their belief that vodou protects them. These earlier works subtly nod to Haiti’s other historic moments of violence, from the brutalities of the French during the slave trade to the bloodshed during the former slaves’ epochal takeover of Haiti in 1791, which made it, in 1804, the first free black republic in the Americas.
But Haiti’s history is also one of astonishing rebellion and of ordinary people just trying to get by—facts often ignored by American media, which insists on painting Haiti as an epicenter of suffering. This is what Danticat’s fiction has sought to capture, too, through the tenderness and resilience of its characters. Rather than focusing solely on the ravages, she also shows Haiti’s beauty, geographically and culturally. Her work has always been quietly revolutionary in both its explicit depiction of tragedy and its examination of deep interpersonal relationships.
Danticat’s newest collection takes this idea further, presenting Haitians, Americans, and Haitian-Americans who have varying degrees of distance from the Caribbean nation. Some of the characters have never experienced the horrors that Danticat’s earlier characters fled; many live in America. In these stories, Haiti’s enduring presence feels more ethereal—urgent in a different way for this new generation.
Everything Inside, Danticat says, is “a personal milestone”—the result of trying something new. She wanted to create a story collection that was, inarguably, a collection of stories, rather than, as with The Dew Breaker or Claire of the Sea Light, a text that can be interpreted as a novel in fragments. The narratives in Everything Inside contain “echoes” of each other, she notes, and she points out that the tales, though nonlinear, span a year. Danticat says that she composed Krik? Krak! and Breath, Eyes, Memory in her 20s; this latest book comes as she turns 50, and so, she adds, it signals a turning point for her.
Danticat says that these new characters may be thought of as the grandchildren of the characters in Krik? Krak!, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and The Dew Breaker. In those works, she notes, the protagonists were “brand-new, face-to-face with exile”: they cohabited with horror, unable to escape, for long, the terrors of Haiti’s dictatorial regimes. In Everything Inside, however, the characters include people born in America—they’re from a generation that knows of Haiti’s blood-drenched past but does not feel its weight to such an oceanic degree as the protagonists in her earliest books. These new characters “have a different relationship to Haiti,” she argues. “Most of the characters have been in America for a while. They’re sort of safer than their parents and grandparents were.”
Rather than facing Haiti’s gunmen and ghosts, this post–Krik? Krak! generation is navigating more quotidian concerns such as romantic breakups and sending kids to college. Danticat says that at the same time, they are “dealing with interpersonal exile”—separated from each other by heartbreak and painful secrets. These lacunae permeate Everything Inside.
Exile, to be sure, has always defined Danticat’s work, in all of its protean, poignant forms—be it political, geographic, cultural, or existential. And though Everything Inside focuses perhaps most on interpersonal distances, Danticat’s American characters are still connected to Haiti, and so, she observes, they must face “the flip side of exile: whether or not to return.” When these characters do travel to Haiti, she notes, they don’t wish solely to see monuments to loss; they want to see “the pretty places,” too—“the multiplicity of Haiti and of their ancestry.”
Of course, political exile still appears; in one story, a xenophobic Caribbean minister expresses Trump-like anti-immigrant rhetoric. But generally, these are tales of a different exile, tales of emotional severance and reconnection. Some of Danticat’s protagonists are women who have been wronged, deceived, or dismissed, often by men—though sometimes, it is other women who wrong them. (The latter cases, she says, were “important” to show; her women are not blameless but are morally complex.)
In one narrative, a woman encounters a married man whom she fell in love with before the 2010 Haitian earthquake, when he lost his family and disappeared from her life; their feelings are complicated, as she realizes that he both is and isn’t the man she once pined for. In another, a girl who doesn’t know her father learns that he is dying and must decide whether to ignore him or go see him. With powerful grace, Danticat captures the moment when the woman sees her father’s dead body; they are worlds apart yet linked by a quiet intimacy. And this remarkable, moving tenderness is perhaps the collection’s most persistent theme. Women find moments of special nearness to other women and to men.
In one scene, a woman touches her tattoo to that of her roommate, both tattoos signifying their emotional growth. In an extraordinary moment from another story, a woman, her friend, and her husband lie together in bed in the shadows, holding each other, touching, kissing, losing, at some sense, the knowledge of whose body is whose—a moment of unabashed love, irrespective of gender or body, all the more salient because the protagonist’s husband leaves her afterward for the friend. These stories contain layers of betrayal and secrecy, but their characters find ways to commiserate, forgive, or at least attempt to understand the ones who have hurt them.
It’s important, Danticat says, that Everything Inside not be read purely as a text of a particular cultural moment—partly because she considers books to be “always behind the cultural moment”—but rather as something as much of the present as the past and future. She decries what she identifies as the day-to-day grotesquerie of the American political present. Obliquely, her book, with its focus on transnational figures who have family in Haiti and America, critiques both the closed-border sentiments of the Trump administration and governmental corruption in Haiti. Her characters “are in the middle” of all this, she says, just “trying to keep it together” in a volatile world.
But in the end, Danticat says, this is a collection about people and the complex interactions and decisions they share. Its tenderness feels striking in a hectic 2019. In the end, we are left with these characters’ brutal, banal, and beautiful moments, like a wide night luminous, every so often, with firefly stars.
Gabrielle Bellot is a staff writer at Literary Hub. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the Guardian, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and elsewhere.
A version of this article appeared in the 06/24/2019 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Degrees of Distance
QUOTE:
This book is a kind of prayer for her mother — an act of mourning and remembrance, a purposeful act of grieving. It’s also a book about how Danticat and other writers have tried to come to terms with the fact of death." Kakutani added: "Danticat writes beautifully about fellow writers, dissecting their magic and technique with a reader’s passion and a craftsman’s appraising eye."
Edwidge Danticat Wrestles With Death, in Life and in Art
By Michiko Kakutani
June 26, 2017
ImageEdwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat
CreditCreditLynn Savarese
Death and grief haunt Edwidge Danticat’s fiction and nonfiction — ghosts from her own family’s losses, and the sufferings of Haiti (where she was born and spent the first 12 years of her life) over the decades from poverty, murderous paramilitary thugs and a devastating 2010 earthquake that left an estimated 220,000 to 316,000 dead.
In her deeply affecting memoir “Brother, I’m Dying,” Danticat wrote about the deaths of her father and her uncle, and how the Haitian diaspora both fractured and rallied her family. For years, she lived with her uncle and her aunt in Port-au-Prince, while her parents tried to start a new life in America. When she was 4, her mother departed for the United States, leaving Edwidge with 10 dresses she’d sewn — most of them too big, and meant to be saved and worn in the years to come.
In her latest book, “The Art of Death,” Danticat writes about her mother’s death from cancer a few years ago, and the last months she spent by her mother’s bedside remembering the stories and jokes and walks they shared, and trying to piece together — or imagine — her early life and the years they’d lived in different cities or countries.
“There was a kind of fragility to our relationship,” she writes. “Neither one of us thought we could handle a full-blown fight, because of all the years we’d spent apart. The wrong words might have shattered us to pieces. Every moment we spent together was time being made up.”
Image
CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times
This book is a kind of prayer for her mother — an act of mourning and remembrance, a purposeful act of grieving. It’s also a book about how Danticat and other writers have tried to come to terms with the fact of death.
She writes about Tolstoy writing in “Confession” about the deaths of loved ones and strangers, and the rumor that he was so determined to share his own last moments that he “came up with a series of codes, including eye movements, so that when his time came, he could describe to the people around him what it was like to die.” She writes about “Mortality,” Christopher Hitchens’s brave, funny, shattering account of his 18-month fight with esophageal cancer and his steadfast determination not to feel sorry for himself. And she writes about Gabriel García Márquez’s fear of dying, and how, in “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” he wrote about “death as though it were the only possible subject.”
Characters in García Márquez’s novel, she points out, “die alone, en masse, in wars, massacres, executions, drownings, suicides. They die from miscarriages and during childbirth, from old age — very old age — and disease and, every now and then, of natural causes. Some spend months and years dying and get sprawling death scenes. Others are simply done with in a sentence or two or in a few words.”
Like John Updike, Danticat writes beautifully about fellow writers, dissecting their magic and technique with a reader’s passion and a craftsman’s appraising eye. There are illuminating passages in this volume about the role that suicide and murder play in Toni Morrison’s fictional world, where “death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person,” at least not as bad as “the living death that was slavery.” And a moving section about the solace Danticat took — in the wake of the Haiti earthquake of 2010, which claimed members of her own family — in rereading “After the Quake,” Haruki Murakami’s collection of stories set after the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan.
At times, Danticat’s references to books by other writers — including Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor,” Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Mary Gordon’s “Circling My Mother” — proliferate so rapidly that the reader can feel like a student cramming for finals in a seminar on the Literature of Death and Grief. We are given an aside about the obsession with suicide shared by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton; an analysis of why Alice Sebold had the 14-year-old narrator of “The Lovely Bones” recount the story of her own rape and murder; and disquisitions on how novelists like Camus, Thornton Wilder and Don DeLillo have depicted death.
Such passages obviously lack the intimacy of the sections of this book devoted to Danticat’s mother, but the reader gradually comes to understand why the author is circling around and around an almost unbearable loss: As a grieving daughter, she wants to understand how others have grappled with this essential fact of human existence; and as a writer — a “sentence-maker,” in the words of a DeLillo character — she wants to learn how to use language to try to express the inexpressible, to use her art to mourn.
Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani
The Art of Death
Writing the Final Story
By Edwidge Danticat
181 pages. Graywolf Press. $14.
A version of this article appears in print on June 26, 2017, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Wrestling With Death In Real Life And in Art. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
QUOTE:
Danticat’s is a memoir written in a manner akin to the circular, overlapping and overwhelming processes of grief and mourning
Edwidge Danticat writes into the unknown in ‘The Art of Death’
Edwidge Danticat
Author Edwige Danticat.(Ernesto Ruscio / Getty Images)
By LEAH MIRAKHOR
JULY 14, 2017 11 AM
Facebook
Twitter
Show more sharing options
“My father was dying and I was pregnant,” is a haunting echo from Edwidge Danticat’s 2007 memoir “Brother, I’m Dying,” the story of the deaths of her father from pulmonary fibrosis and her uncle in a detention center awaiting to enter the United States from Haiti. Like her acclaimed works of fiction “Breath, Eyes, Memory” (1994), “The Dew Breaker” (2004), “Claire of the Sea Light” (2013), her new book “The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story” delves into the physical and psychic landscapes of loss. In “Brother, I’m Dying,” Danticat translates “Pa pi mal,” a Haitian Creole term her father uses to explain his health, as “Not so good” and “Not so bad,” articulating the precarious nature of his health, but also his condition of living in-between different worlds as a Haitian exile.
So too, in “The Art of Death,” Danticat attempts to convey her mother’s state — as one that has long been wrestling between at least two poles: “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.” This memoir narrates her second crossing, into death.
In early 2014, Danticat’s 78-year-old mother is diagnosed with Stage 4 ovarian cancer and chooses to forgo intensive chemotherapy, telling her doctor and her daughter “it’s up to God now.”
The book is the latest in Graywolf’s “The Art of” series about writing, joining a dozen others loosely addressing the practice of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Danticat’s is a memoir written in a manner akin to the circular, overlapping and overwhelming processes of grief and mourning; she layers her story with other poems, memoirs, novels and essays about death, scaling the personal to wider-ranging political and ecological catastrophes.
Danticat’s is a memoir written in a manner akin to the circular, overlapping and overwhelming processes of grief and mourning.
Two inquiries frame this short but deeply felt memoir; the first is — How does one write about death? All of us are exposed to death, but none of us has experienced death ourselves, and, as she notes we can’t ask anyone else “what it is like to die.” Danticat agrees with Michael Ondaatje, who writes that “death means you are writing in the third person.”
The second inquiry asks what can guide us through what Toni Morrison calls “circles and circles of sorrow.” Reading Elizabeth Alexander’s memoir “The Light of the World,” a moving elegy to her late husband, Danticat reads her confession, “ ‘I want rules, I want the prayers to say every day for a year at dusk and I want them to be beautiful and meaningful.’ I wanted these same kinds of rules and prayers too.”
Danticat attempts to find the rules and prayers through texts that have sustained her throughout her life — undertaking a process of close reading that reinforces how stories are integral to making sense of our experience, echoing James Baldwin’s oft quoted sentiment that “you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
Danticat’s descriptions of both texts and feelings are often unsentimental. She prefers sparseness and silence, refusing to offer herself or her readers closure. In her readings, she also examines the losses of others close to her — aunts, uncles, cousins and friends — many of whose lives were curtailed by tragedy. Reading Morrison’s “Sula,” she thinks of her Tante Rezia’s final moments in a coma, in relation to Sula’s, whose final breaths Morrison describes with lyricism and open-ended possibility.
Like written narratives, folklore becomes a source of prayer to ease trauma. After receiving her mother’s cancer diagnosistogether, on the drive home Danticat didn’t respond with tears but a “terrible silence.” Her mother refused to let Danticat suddenly turn into a zombie, and she heeded the call to “ward off the sezisman, ‘the shock,’” by adhering to a Haitian folklore that liberates zombies “from their living death by eating salt.” Eating salt is also advised for people who suddenly receive tragic news, in shock, and in danger of turning into a lost and wandering body. When they get home, her mother promptly made them each a coffee, “sprinkled with salt.”
“Each death frames previous deaths in a different light, and even deaths to come.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT
But what if she wonders, her mother returns as a ghost, as Zora Neale Hurston’s mother did, and her “travel dust” shadows her? Hurston’s mother’s death left an atmospheric gap; she confesses that it “changed a world. A world,” Hurston writes “which had been built out of her body and her heart.” This, perhaps more than any other phrase, is one that speaks most acutely to the bond shared between Danticat and her mother.
Some of the most moving passages from the memoir take place as Danticat describes the anticipation of her mother’s death and the terror involved in such an immeasurable loss. “Each death frames previous deaths in a different light, and even deaths to come. During the time my mother was sick, I found myself crying uncontrollably over the deaths of people I barely knew. I attended a couple funerals, of relatives of church members, or people from my husband’s past, people I’d never even met. Mid-sob, I would realize that I was imagining sitting in the front row where the family was sitting, but at my own mother’s funeral. If it wasn’t her coffin I was looking at, then why had I come? Then I realized that I was rehearsing, so it wouldn’t hurt so much when it was my turn.”
A few months after her mother died, PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature asked her to write a prayer for a panel. Growing up in a family who prayed all the time, she still had difficulty writing prayer, believing that “prayers are meant to be private, since they often reflect our most vital desires.” “A New Sky,” the prayer she wrote, was inspired by her mother, a prayer where she imagines, much like Morrison does with Sula or Ondaatje with Almásy, her mother’s final words in her final moments — a prayer that accounts for how her mother lived — with faith, humor and grace.
Let them not bury me in an ugly dress.
Guide them to my good wig. (I really should have told my daughter where it was.)
Let them not be talked out of a closed coffin. I now only want you to see my face.
And, please, please let my children survive this. Let them survive this. For I will not be just their Manman now. I will be their light pillar, their rainbow, their moon bow, their sunbow, their glory, their new sky.
Mirakhor is a writer and professor.
QUOTE:
feels like an offering, a study born of devotion.
Part essay, part memoir, part elegy, the book has numerous obsessions — lingual, mortal, and parental — that come together to compelling effect. Danticat — who has published novels, short story collections, a memoir, a children’s book, and a volume of poetry — combines these forms fluidly, in a meditation as instructive as it is moving
Swaying Between
By Tiffany Briere
SEPTEMBER 25, 2017
IN THE MONTHS after my mother’s death, I received dozens of sympathy cards, letters, and prayers from loved ones, each a potential landmine in terms of my grief. So when a friend sent me the prayer “A New Sky,” I prepared to read it in the only way I could manage at that time: as though there were a wall between my body and the page.
I braced myself in anticipation of another painful reminder of all that I’d lost. I was not expecting the voice of a mother — the one voice for which I’d been yearning — to speak to me from the page. Its author, Edwidge Danticat, had written the prayer in tribute to her own mother, and, as with her other works — most notably her recently published contribution to Graywolf’s the Art Of series — the language stirringly marries heart and mind, beauty and precision.
In fact, “A New Sky” is included in The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story. In the penultimate chapter, Danticat describes the prayer as the words she “imagined her [mother] saying in her head during her final moments on this earth, during those minutes when she couldn’t speak anymore but could still hear a little bit, as she was drifting away.” Reading it for the first time, I felt understood by the author, transported however briefly to the before in which my mother was still alive. I experienced what Danticat calls a “shock of recognition” — a visceral reaction to art that speaks to your specific circumstance. That jolt notwithstanding, I would have tucked her prayer between the pages of my notebook for another reason (and this is the objective of the Graywolf series, after all): its craftsmanship. Danticat’s writerly skill is evident in her use of everyday imagery as a contrast to the magnitude of what is taking place: the speaker’s good wig, the $500 left in a tin can in the freezer, a perfectly good blender that just needs a new blade. But it’s the author’s depiction of the speaker’s state of mind, the material (and maternal) concerns this mother clings to in the face of death, that most resonates for this reader: “Let them say nice things about me at my funeral”; “Let them not bury me in an ugly dress”; “Let them not be talked out of a closed coffin.” As the dying woman sways between the concrete and the ephemeral, moving back and forth in this way, Danticat artfully mirrors her gradual transition from one life into the next.
Ostensibly a guide for writers and readers, The Art of Death, much like the author’s prayer, feels like an offering, a study born of devotion. Part essay, part memoir, part elegy, the book has numerous obsessions — lingual, mortal, and parental — that come together to compelling effect. Danticat — who has published novels, short story collections, a memoir, a children’s book, and a volume of poetry — combines these forms fluidly, in a meditation as instructive as it is moving.
“I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing,” she says in her introduction. “I am writing this book in order to learn (or relearn) how one writes about death, so I can write, or continue to write, about the deaths that have most touched my life, including, most recently, my mother’s.” The works she’s chosen to discuss in this volume are deeply personal, and her interrogations of them are as rigorous as they are inspired. From chapter to chapter, she recalibrates the scope of her subject, walking us back to examine depictions of catastrophe, then drawing us in for a look at the smaller deaths that precede the ultimate one, the deaths of autonomy, individuality, and dignity.
Toward the beginning of the book, she asks, “So how do we write about [great misfortunes] without sounding overindulgent, self-righteous, self-piteous, melodramatic, sentimental, or a combination of some or all of the above?” Humor, she suggests, might be one way: to contrast gravity with levity, as writer and commentator Christopher Hitchens has done. In his final collection of essays, published a year before his death from esophageal cancer, Hitchens, as always, confronts his own mortality with intelligence, sarcasm, and, yes, humor — his way, perhaps, of minimizing death’s claim.
“I heard a soothing and capable voice saying, ‘Now you might feel just a little prick,’” Hitchens writes. “‘(Be assured,’ he adds: ‘Male patients have exhausted all the possibilities of this feeble joke within the first few days of hearing it.)’”
Hitchens is describing for us the seven-eighths of his “iceberg,” as Danticat calls it, borrowing the term from Hemingway. To write from the iceberg — the main part of which is submerged beneath the surface, hidden from view — is another way to write about death: to face off with fear, to document the process from within as it is happening, as Hitchens, Susan Sontag, and Audre Lorde have done.
Yet one more way to write about death might be to “spill one’s heart all over the page.” “After all,” the author writes, “death is one of life’s most spectacular events, one that surpasses all existing words and deeds.” She goes on to suggest how we might discover our own language for death, via what writer Brenda Ueland calls “microscopic truthfulness.” Danticat writes: “The more specifically a death and its aftermath are described, the more moving they are to me. The more I get to know the dying person on the page, the more likely I am to grieve for that person.”
Danticat also insists that “[w]e cannot write about death without writing about life.” In fact, the book might have been titled The Art of Living: “Stories that start at the end of life often take us back to the past, to the beginning — or to some beginning — to unearth what there was before, what will be missed, what will be lost.” Whenever possible Danticat offers histories and anecdotes, recollections and analyses of her subjects, and in one case, when she reaches the limits of her research with the death of a central character in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, we are treated to excerpts of her correspondence with the author. Certainly this is one of the reasons why Danticat’s examinations are so exhilarating: her investment in the life before it is lost — another author’s, a character’s, her mother’s most of all — raises its value in our eyes.
Such examples abound: as when a character’s life is slowly “carved away”; or when victims of 9/11 fall through the air “un-boned”; when a final thought before dying is a “concentrated pleasure”; when death “enter[s] the room, pause[s], then move[s] past you before laying its hands on your loved one”; when a beloved character’s suicide causes the author to feel as though she’s conspired to murder, so intense is her guilt. Even the most difficult deaths, both imaginary and real — maternal filicides in Toni Morrison’s novels Beloved and Sula; the murder that opens Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones; the 2010 earthquake in Haiti; the suicide of a writer with whom Danticat was acquainted; and that of her mother, of course — are so closely and beautifully observed as to deliver them into new life.
On the very first page of The Art of Death, Danticat recalls teaching her mother to say in English, “My daughter wrote this book.” After practicing together many times, she herself starts to imagine this “daughter” as a common dream child that she and her mother might share. But it’s when her mother presents her oncologist with Danticat’s novel, in “a moment where your apparent value suddenly rises in the eyes of someone else, especially a person who has your life in his hands,” that the author understands the power of the words they’ve practiced together. It’s a brilliant opening: it names the stakes, paints a portrait of the relationship at the center of the book, and conveys the potential of language to affect who we are and how we think. In that way and throughout, Edwidge Danticat’s The Art of Death offers counterpoint, consolation, and a means of creation to readers and writers alike.