Dyasporic Appetites and Longings: An Interview with Edwidge Danticat
. . . every meal is a reminder that we're not home.
—Edwidge Danticat
With a few words the author Edwidge Danticat captures the complicated and multiple connections among food, memory, and home. Food is home, regardless of whether we are there or not. It travels with us as seamlessly as does language, personal histories, and the faded photographs of the houses, people, and lives we leave behind. How we prepare food, the ingredients we find and cannot find, the spices we covet and the ones we use instead, the smells we remember and the recipes we forget, are all part of what we take with us and what we leave behind. It reveals who we are and what we care about. It can even speak for us when words fail. And yet, we often underestimate the power of food. Studies and research on immigration, globalization, colonization, and space rarely consider how food eases our diasporic transitions, how it facilitates cultural imaginings and translations.
In this interview Danticat recounts how her father's ritual of cooking for people when they first came from Haiti, was his way of providing comfort and familiarity to friends and family who felt lost and lonely upon arriving to New York. Similar to many immigrants, Danticat's father recognized the healing power of food, of its ability to immediately connect us to our roots through taste, smell and memory. Well aware of how food could assuage, if only for a moment, what she terms our dyasporic longings, Danticat's father was convinced that we could all return home simply by raising a fork to our lips.
At the same time, as Danticat recounts, this is only part of the meanings we attach to food, only part of its complicity. When sick, people lose their appetite for food, for life. When poor, it signals poverty and class in the most obvious and cruel ways. It can, as Danticat conveys, be a source of both celebration and shame. The truth about food is that it can both heal and wound. For many, there is no guarantee of a next meal. Edwidge Danticat's refusal to take the easy way out, to give simple answers, underscores the power of food, the power of nostalgia, and how our continual and effortless ability to render it meaning can both comfort and haunt us. [End Page 26]
The Interview
On an already humid late morning in Miami Beach, I meet with Edwidge Danticat in a café/bookstore on Lincoln Road. She has already ordered fruit and is sitting quietly reading a local newspaper as I approach her. Her face is familiar and even more beautiful than the different back cover photos of her many books. She is one of my favorite writers and I admire her deeply. I have read all of her books and assigned each one in all of my classes. I thought I would be more nervous, but her calm and easy manner immediately puts me at ease. Although aware that this issue of Callaloo is devoted to food, especially to reading Callaloo and eating callaloo, the editors have graciously allowed me to ask other questions not directly related to food. I am aware from the many articles and editorials she has written, and the numerous interviews that she has given, that Danticat is passionate about the rights of Haitian immigrants, and the future of Haiti. I want to ask questions about the Haitian Diaspora, the impact of globalization on Haitian writing and art, on why she moved to Miami, and on why she writes. I want to know how being a mother has influenced and affected her writing. But most of all, I want to know where she sees herself now, and the future direction of her work. I order coffee and sit down next to her at a table close to the big window overlooking Lincoln Road. It's louder than we...
