Splintered Families, Enduring Connections: An Interview with Edwidge Danticat

Abstract

Katharine Capshaw Smith is the author of Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (2004) and teaches children’s literature and African American literature at the University of Connecticut.

Edwidge Danticat (b. 1969) is one of American literature's most exciting young writers. In novels, short stories, travel narrative, and young adult fiction, Danticat writes about Haitian-American experience in graceful, imagistic prose, revealing the traumas of cultural dislocation and political violence through suggestion, fable, and metaphor. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Danticat was raised by an uncle and an aunt since her parents had emigrated to New York when Danticat was four years old. In childhood, Danticat experienced the variety of Haitian life; her home was in the urban capital, and she spent summers in a rural community with extended family. In some ways, then, she straddled two worlds even when living in Haiti. In 1981, Danticat left Haiti with two of her brothers to join their parents, and as an adolescent in Brooklyn she found some difficulty bridging the cultural divide between American and Haitian experience. Danticat discovered a way to articulate the difficulties and rewards of her bicultural position through writing. After graduating from Barnard College in 1990 with a degree in French literature, Danticat enrolled in the Masters of Fine Arts program at Brown University where she wrote a draft of her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994). A popular and critically acclaimed novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory drew on Danticat's own experience to depict the migration of a young woman from Haiti to New York. After graduating from Brown University, Danticat returned to the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn and published a collection of short stories entitled Krik? Krak! (1995), which became a National Book Award finalist. Her second novel, The Farming of Bones (1998), diverged from her interest in migration, emphasizing instead a particular moment in Haitian history: the 1937 massacre of Haitians at the border of the Dominican Republic. This text connects with Danticat's other work in its emphasis on the protagonist's cultural liminality, since she lives in close contact with Dominicans, and in its exploration of working class Haitian subjectivity. A travel narrative, After the Dance (2002), took Danticat into nonfiction in its description of Carnival celebrations in Jacmel, Haiti. Danticat recently published The Dew Breaker (2004), a collection of short stories which focuses on a man who worked as a torturer in Haiti under François Duvalier.

Danticat's first young adult novel, Behind the Mountains (2002), returns to her earlier interest in Haitian migration, drawing deeply on Danticat's experience as an adolescent. Written in a diary format, Behind the Mountains offers its reader an intimate portrait of its central character, Celiane, as she experiences the richness of Haitian cultural life and the threats of an unstable political system. When Celiane moves to New York with her family, she longs for connection to Haiti and discovers that her family must negotiate not only the new cultural context, but also new definitions of family relationships. In the interview below, Danticat talks about children's culture in Haiti and the tensions between folk culture and French-based educational and publishing structures. In discussing her own youth in Haiti and New York as a source for her fiction, Danticat stresses the centrality of childhood to her work and alludes to the cross-read nature of her books for adults. She also evades compartmentalization in terms of her own position as an ethnic writer, asserting that she is "a writer of the African Diaspora, Haitian, Caribbean, and African as well." Most of the interview focuses on Behind the Mountains, exploring its linkage of visual to literary arts, its depiction of physical and emotional trauma, and its attempts to make an American readership aware of Haitian investment in American history and identity. Danticat's second novel for young adults, Anacaona, Golden Flower, recently appeared from Scholastic. A major contemporary writer for adult readers, Danticat is committed to rendering complicated and realistic descriptions of ethnicity and historical incident for her young readership.

KCS: Thank you for allowing...