Voices from Hispaniola: A Meridians Roundtable with Edwidge Danticat, Loida Maritza Perez, Myriam J. A. Chancy, and Nelly Rosario

Figure 1.

Special Section. Art: From Silk Scarf, painted in the village of Matenwa, Lagonav, Haiti, by the Atis Fanm Matenwa/Women Artists of Matenwa Project

In October 2003, Meridians hosted its first Caribbean Women Writers Series, Voices from Hispaniola: Haiti and the Dominican Republic, at Smith College. In order to celebrate Haiti's 200th Anniversary of Independence in 2004, authors representing both sides of the island spoke to the realities of the conjoined histories of Haitians and Dominicans from women's perspectives by reading from recent creative works and engaging in public dialogue on the current crises facing Hispaniola. Over a week-long period, members of the Smith community and public were treated to readings by Edwidge Danticat, a joint reading with Loida Maritza Pérez and Myriam J. A. Chancy, and a closing reading by Nelly Rosario.

Edwidge Danticat is the author of Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994); Krik? Krak! (1996); The Farming of Bones (1999); After the Dance (2002); Behind the Mountains (2002), her children's book; and The Dew Breaker (2004). Loida Maritza Pérez is the author of a novel, Geographies of Home (1999). Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author of Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (1997); Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (1997); and the novels Spirit of Haiti (2003) and The Scorpion's Claw (2004). Nelly Rosario is the author of Song of the Water Saints (2002). By coming together for this set of readings, the authors sought to provide a forum for the productive exchange of imagined and real Dominican/Haitian realities and to celebrate women's voices from the beleaguered island by representing a small but forceful coalition of contemporary women writers from Hispaniola.

Interviews conducted by Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Smith College, and further coordinated and assembled by the staff of Meridians.

Meridians: Your work explores profoundly ambivalent and ambiguous relationships among women kin, especially grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and sisters. Is there something about these relationships that is particularly revealing about the women of Hispaniola?

Edwidge Danticat (ED): I've always been lucky in that my family has been really supportive in the most important sense. In that if you need things materially, there was always someone to help, even if they didn't have too much themselves. My soul was also fed by family from the time I was a girl. My aunts told lots of stories. My grandmothers too. They were strict and distant in others places in life, but in that way, they were very giving, and there was a closeness we shared in being told and telling a story that didn't exist anywhere else.

Loida Maritza Pérez (LMP): Yes, not only for the women of Hispaniola but for women in general. They are the purveyors of stories, the ones who pass down histories and knowledge to their daughters. It's not that men aren't storytellers. They are. Yet their stories tend to be limited to family gatherings. Women, who share chores and raise the children, pass on knowledge throughout the day. They therefore wield a lot of influence, not only by the stories they pass on but also by those they withhold. It is this selective sharing and willful withholding of certain histories which leads to many of the conflicts within Geographies (Pérez 1999). That Aurelia, the mother, silences her past and is ambivalent about her relationship with her own mother is what leaves her daughters at a loss. Any of them, whether it be Iliana, Rebecca, Marina, or any of the other daughters, would have fared better had they been armed with certain truths rather than shielded from them.

Nelly Rosario (NR): Definitely. I think that all family relationships do reveal a microcosm of the entire country or the entire community. And I'll speak from experience. It's hard to make absolute statements, so I'm basing [my words] on what I've seen growing up...