Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide ed. by Martin Munro (review)

If the publication of an anthology devoted entirely to her work is any indication, Edwidge Danticat has truly arrived as an author of critical and cultural significance. This first collection devoted to Danticat’s work is so welcome a contribution to scholarship on this beloved writer that many of her devotees may wonder why such a text hasn’t appeared sooner. The opening question of Munro’s “Introduction: Borders” suggests one possible reason: “When you go to a bookstore to look for something by Edwidge Danticat, which section do you go to first?” (1). As Munro asserts, Danticat contributes to but resists full incorporation into any one categorization of writers—Haitian, Caribbean, African American, black, or ethnic—and by extension any one field of literary analysis. Her status in-between identity positions, nevertheless, causes her work to serve “as a bridge between previously separated literary traditions” and, I would add, makes her writing accessible to a wide variety of readers (9). Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide is appropriately designed to “situate Danticat in relation to the various geographical, literary, and cultural contexts with which her work intersects” and is usefully divided into four sections (5): the first explores the “Contexts” to which Danticat contributes; the second, “Texts and Analyses,” provides fresh readings of her full-length works through The Dew Breaker (2004); the third, “Danticat and Her Peers,” offers appreciative essays by literary peers; and the fourth, “Interview and Bibliography,” features an interview focused on her memoir Brother, I’m Dying (2007) and a bibliography of Danticat’s works and related texts.

The general tone of the volume is laudatory, beginning with Dany Laferrière’s “Foreword: A Heart of Serenity in the Storm,” which praises Danticat’s remarkable “composure and serenity” and her style characterized by “a simplicity that erases all traces of toil” and makes “her nothing less than a contemporary classic” (viii). The greatest strength of this collection is its effort to establish Danticat’s position within the Haitian and Caribbean literary traditions, in the process offering a rich range of analytical approaches to this important writer. In this review, I will highlight a selection of the eighteen pieces that compose this collection.

The “Contexts” section begins with Munro’s very useful biographical essay on Danticat, which emphasizes her humble roots, a characteristic that distinguishes her from most of her Haitian literary antecedents and causes her to neither idealize nor dismiss the common people of Haiti. Instead, her early immersion in Haitian folk culture and storytelling manifests itself in her preoccupation with the stories of regular people told in a way that “lends dignity and meaning to the lives of people who would otherwise be too easily forgotten” (25). Of particular interest in Munro’s biography is his discussion of Danticat’s transnational experience with literature, which caused her, as an adolescent, to realize that stories told and read in one cultural and linguistic context could have different meanings and effects in another. The understanding that she could tell stories of Haiti and Haitians in Diaspora in English from the United States becomes the basis of her writing. Munro’s articulation of the importance of Danticat’s immigrant experience situates her within the generation of contemporary writers for whom the experience of migration creates, not the loss of homeland, but the complex and evolving relationship to their nation of origin frequently explored in their literary works.

J. Michael Dash offers an enriching study of “Danticat and Her Haitian Precursors” asserting that Danticat “unfailingly acknowledges her Haitian precursors” but revises them to establish a new literary space on which to represent the contemporary struggles of the Haitian people (26). Dash’s brilliant reading of Danticat’s work in conversation with her literary antecedents reveals how Danticat represents Haiti’s political fathers as failing the Haitian people and their literary fathers’ “grand narratives of collective action and utopian dreams [as] inadequate for the ‘tired ghosts’ of the present” (31). Danticat’s “literature of testimony...