Danticat, Edwidge

views updated

Edwidge Danticat

1969—

Author

Edwidge Danticat is one of only a handful of contemporary novelists of Haitian heritage writing in English. Danticat did not begin learning English until she moved from Haiti to New York City as an adolescent. Her talents in this second language were evident in her award-winning 1994 debut, Breath, Eyes, Memory. In this work, as well as her equally lauded 1995 short story collection, Krik? Krak!, Danticat focuses on the lives and losses of Haitians, both at home—where poverty, political repression, and fear were everyday hindrances for decades—and as transplants to urban America, where Haitians face similar poverty, compounded by racism. "The agonies of Haiti are as wide as they are deep," the Caribbean-focused journal Islands acknowledged. "It would seem impossible, in fact, to write anything about Haiti that wasn't entirely tragic, yet Edwidge Danticat has done it."

Danticat was born in Leogane, a rural area of Haiti just west of Port-au-Prince, in 1969. When she was two years old her father immigrated to New York City to find more promising work. Her mother joined him two years later and left Danticat and a younger brother behind with her father's brother, Joseph Dantica. The future writer was in close contact with extended family members, some of whom were elders who thrived on telling folk tales. Oral traditions assumed a vital role in the education and sense of heritage of young Haitians like Danticat; the country had a marginal literacy rate—one of the lowest in the western hemisphere—and television broadcasts were infrequent because of meager electricity. "My most vivid memories of Haiti involved incidents that represent power failures," Danticat recalled in her publicity biography. "At those times, you can't read, or study, or watch TV, so you sit around a candle and listen to stories from the elders in the house."

Experienced Hardship in Haiti

Spirituality and the rituals of religion also influenced Danticat as a child. Her uncle was a Baptist minister, and she would attend all the funerals of the community with him. For a young girl whose parents had disappeared from her world—and furthermore, a world where people who fell out of favor with dictator François Duvalier and his son, "Baby Doc" Duvalier, also disappeared—death was a lesser dread. Danticat once shared a room with a distant relative, a woman who was more than one hundred years old, and was present when she passed away. "I accepted her death very easily because in Haiti death was always around us," Danticat remarked in her publicity biography.

Life in Haiti was difficult. Poverty and fear infected daily life and blunted simple childhood pleasures. "I have memories of Jean Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier and his wife racing by in their Mercedes Benz and throwing money out of the window to the very poor children in our neighborhood," Danticat recalled in her publicity biography. Another time, a radio announcement alerted children to a Christmas-time toy giveaway at the presidential palace. "My cousins and I went and were nearly trampled in the mob of children who flooded the palace lawns," she remembered.

More problematic for Danticat, however, was her family situation. "The initial question of my life was explaining to myself first my mother's absence and then my father's," Danticat told New York's Rebecca Mead. "When she [Danticat's mother] was leaving, I didn't understand…. I didn't get it at all—and not just the fact that she was absent, but the conditions that drive that and that separate families." Her mother's move to New York City—though ultimately only a temporary loss—was nevertheless a difficult cross for Danticat to bear. Haitian culture gives a special reverence to mothers and to be "san manman"—motherless—is also a synonym for a hoodlum, or someone who knows no boundaries of human decency.

Immigrated to the United States

When Danticat was twelve years old, she and her brother flew to New York City to join her parents and two younger brothers born there. The airport reunion was not completely joyful, however, for Danticat. "I was very, very nervous," Danticat recalled in an interview with Margaria Fichtner writing in the Miami Herald. "I didn't know these people. I felt like I was adopted." Her reunited family lived in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, and Danticat was enrolled in a bilingual education program to help with the transition. Danticat later credited the bilingual program at her intermediate school with giving her the platform to obtain a decent education. "It's very easy to get lost in the public school system because it's so big, and I am very shy," she told Joyce Purnick in the New York Times.

Danticat received an English-language set of author/illustrator Ludwig Bemelman's "Madeleine" books as a gift, and her first foray into literary expression was an attempt to write a version of Madeleine with herself cast in the role of the orphaned, misunderstood title character. In junior high school Danticat was teased by peers because of her accent. "Their name-calling pushed an already shy Danticat deeper into her shell, but also led her to take pen to paper searching for words to convey her feelings," wrote Patrik Henry Bass in B.E.T. Weekend.

Occasionally adolescent tensions would erupt into violence, and Danticat witnessed fights between African Americans and Haitian immigrants. She went on to a high school geared toward teenagers hoping to pursue a career in medicine. Yet the program, in which students actually worked in a hospital after school, ultimately dissuaded Danticat from becoming a nurse.

At a Glance …

Born on January 19, 1969, in Leogane, Haiti; immigrated to the United States, 1981; daughter of André Miracin (a cab driver) and Rose Souvenance (a textile worker) Danticat. Education: Barnard College, BA, 1990; Brown University, MFA, 1993.

Career: Fiction writer and memoirist. Worked as associate producer for Jonathan Demme's documentary Courage and Pain, 1993(?)-94(?).

Awards: Fiction award, Black Caucus of the American Literary Association, 1994, for Breath, Eyes, Memory; Woman of Achievement Award, Barnard College, 1995; Pushcart Prize, 1995; National Book Award nomination, 1995, for Krik? Krak!; named one of Twenty Best Young American Novelists by Granta magazine, 1996, for Breath, Eyes, Memory; Lannan Foundation Fellowship, 2004; Story Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, 2005, for The Dew Breaker; National Book Award finalist, 2007, and National Book Critics Circle Award, 2008, both for Brother, I'm Dying.

Addresses: Agent—c/o Aragi Agency, 143 W. 27th St., Ste. 4-F, New York, NY 10001.

After high school, Danticat moved into a less stressful atmosphere when she enrolled at Barnard College on a scholarship. She majored in French literature and, after receiving her bachelor's degree in 1990, was still considering going on to nursing school. Her parents—a taxi driver and a factory worker—strongly felt that their children should enter into well-paid, respected professions. To them, a career in the arts did not seem a solid, income-providing vocation, but Danticat won a scholarship to Brown University and enrolled in the graduate writing program there.

Published First Work

As an undergraduate, Danticat had begun an essay on herself and her lineage. She sent it to a literary agent, who suggested she expand it a bit more. Danticat turned it into her Brown thesis and eventually sent it back to the literary agency. One week later she was lunching with the agent, and the work became her first book, Breath, Eyes, Memory, which was published in 1994.

The novel follows the experiences of Sophie Caco, a young female Haitian immigrant to New York City who is a victim of sexual abuse. The tale also involves Sophie's mother's prior assault by a member of Duvalier's brutal secret police and death squad—the Tontons Macoute—and touches upon Sophie's bonds with her aunt and grandmother. Danticat stressed in interviews that the abuse these women suffered was not autobiographical in nature. In the Miami Herald, Fichtner noted that many "hailed the book's emotional complexity and its resonant portrayal of the burdens history, politics, and culture impose upon the lives and hearts of women." Fichtner also noted that Breath, Eyes, Memory "has much to say about what it is like to be young, black, Haitian, and female wandering in a world too often eager to regard all of those conditions as less than worthwhile."

Danticat's willingness to tackle controversial subject matter earned her comparisons to African-American author Alice Walker, and she even admitted to "borrowing" a character from Warrior Marks, Walker's treatise against female circumcision in lesser developed countries. Danticat explained that she saw the work as a way to give voice to the Haitian community's silenced women: "In our culture, women could not talk about things that bothered them … because there is such a greater repression," Danticat told Kevin L. Carter in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

As Danticat was enjoying her first flush of literary success, political events in Haiti brought her homeland into the news, causing reverberations in her own life. The Duvalier regime had spiraled to an end in 1986, and four years later Roman Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide became the nation's first freely elected leader. In 1991 a military coup ousted Aristide, who then fled the country. The international community responded with a trade embargo, which deeply hurt the already impoverished Haitian people, and a United Nations peacekeeping force was deployed to maintain order. Many Haitians began fleeing to Florida on makeshift boats; those intercepted were put into refugee camps in which conditions were abysmal.

After receiving her master's degree, Danticat took a job with filmmaker Jonathan Demme's New York City production office; in this capacity she worked as an associate producer on Courage and Pain, a documentary about survivors of torture in Haiti. In an interview with Ingrid Sturgis appearing in Emerge, Danticat spoke of the outlaw status of writers in Haiti's dictatorial past. "In our world, if you are a writer, you are a politician, and we know what happens to politicians. They end up in a prison dungeon, where their bodies are covered in scalding tar before they're forced to eat their own waste." With Demme she traveled back to her homeland in 1994 for the first time since leaving thirteen years earlier; she was thus able to view the ceremony marking Aristide's official return to power.

The year 1994 brought Danticat more honors. The New York Times Magazine included her in a story about "30 Artists under 30," a group whose members the editors predicted would make an impact on American culture in the next thirty years. In addition, Breath, Eyes, Memory received a fiction award from the Black Caucus of the American Literary Association.

Published Acclaimed Short Story Collection

In 1995 a collection of short stories—some dating back to Danticat's Barnard days—was published by Soho Press. Krik? Krak! takes its title from Danticat's Creole language: "Krik?," one inquires to another at the onset of a folk tale, roughly meaning "I have a story—would you like to hear it?," and "Krak!" comes the reply, the equivalent of "Yes, go ahead!"

In nine interrelated stories, Danticat used her own family's experiences as a basis for the lives of the characters. Much of the action takes place in the capital city of Port-au-Prince or the rural Ville Rose, where women must sometimes walk two miles each morning for the day's water. The story "1937" follows the travails of a woman imprisoned and tortured for witchcraft. Another takes place on one of the infamous doomed boats heading for Florida. "Children of the Sea" recounts a journey through letters written by a pair of lovers who never receive the other's missives. Through the letters, Danticat's story provides insight into the difficulties of life in Haiti and why so many knowingly risked their lives to escape.

"The best of these stories," wrote Robert Houston in the New York Times Book Review, "humanize, particularize, [and] give poignancy to the lives of people we may have come to think of as faceless emblems of misery, poverty, and brutality." Joanne Omang in the Washington Post Book World asserted that Danticat "has woven the sad with the funny, the unspeakable with the glorious, [and] the wild horror [with the] deep love that is Haiti today." Reviewing Krik? Krak! for the Seattle Times, Michael Upchurch found that "Danticat's often-sobering subjects are leavened by the bracing elegance of her prose and by her fondness for riddle." Krik? Krak! was nominated for the prestigious National Book Award in 1995.

In 1998 Danticat published her second novel, The Farming of Bones. This work tells the story of a Haitian housemaid in the Dominican Republic, Amabelle Desir, against the historical background of an infamous 1937 massacre of Haitian migrant workers directed by the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo Molina. Writing in the New York Times, Michael Upchurch stated that Danticat "evokes the shock with which a small personal world is disrupted by military mayhem…. Danticat knows the value of understatement in bringing nightmarish scenes to life, and a spare, searing poetry infuses many of the book's best passages."

Danticat's next work, The Dew Breaker, published in 2004, is a series of interconnected tales—variously described as a novel and a short story collection—tracing back to Duvalier's brutal Tontons Macoute. The reader gradually discovers that the characters in the stories are both victims and perpetrators, all haunted by the events of this bloody period in Haitian history. Writing in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani stated that The Dew Breaker is "Ms. Danticat's most persuasive, organic performance yet. As seamless as it is compelling, the novel recounts its harrowing tale in limpid, understated prose." Widely acclaimed, The Dew Breaker was awarded the Story Prize—a $20,000 award for the best short story collection of the year—and was a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist.

Uncle Died in Detention

Also in 2004, the uncle who raised Danticat, Joseph Dantica, became a victim of the chronic political unrest in Haiti and the official indifference of the U.S. government. In the aftermath of military intervention by United Nations troops and Haitian police against armed gangs and political factions in his Port-au-Prince neighborhood, Dantica, an eighty-one-year-old Baptist minister, was threatened with death by gang members who claimed that fifteen of their friends had been killed by military snipers shooting from the roof of his church, and that he would have to pay for their funerals or be killed. Dantica escaped by hiding under a neighbor's bed for three days and eventually fled to the United States on a valid visa. Upon his arrival, he explained that he would be killed if he returned and applied for temporary asylum. Plagued by heart problems and high blood pressure, Dantica collapsed during his interview and began vomiting; the medic on duty announced that he was "faking." Arrested and held in detention, Dantica was denied access to his medication and died in custody.

Three years later Danticat published Brother, I'm Dying, a memoir centered on her father, Mira, and his brother Joseph. As in her other works, Danticat depicted the intersection of private lives with Haiti's tragic history, portraying the brothers on either side of the immigration divide: Mira, the hard-working immigrant who sacrificed everything to secure a better future for his children, and Joseph, who remained in Haiti as long as possible—despite his family's pleas for him to emigrate—seeking to serve his congregation and community. Brother, I'm Dying was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and was nominated for a National Book Award.