Edwidge Danticat: A Reader's Guide (review)

Central to Edwidge Danticat: A Reader's Guide are issues of identification and classification. How, asks editor Martin Munro, might one face the challenge of categorizing Danticat, a writer whose work fundamentally calls into question "the worth of all literary (and racial) categories?" (2) He and several other of the volume's contributors consider Danticat's multiple belongings—to Afro-American, Afro-Caribbean, Haitian, feminist, and other traditions.

The book's first section takes up these matters explicitly. Munro's biographical sketch situates Danticat transnationally, affirming her story as "that of modern Haiti" (25), and J. Michael Dash evokes the "mobile traditions" (28) at play in Danticat's fiction—a simultaneous engagement with her Haitian precursors and occupation of "the in-between spaces of the displaced Haitian nation" (34). Carine Mardorossian's essay provides finely tuned considerations of Danticat's relationship to a Caribbean woman's literary traditio—her "powerful challenge to the dichotomization of unity/difference . . . in postcolonial studies" (46). Such depictions of shape-shifting boundary-crossing similarly figure in Régine Michelle Jean-Charles's account of the points of intersection between Danticat's work and that of black American women writers.

In the volume's second part, Nick Nesbitt unearths a "politics of solidarity" (83) at the heart of Danticat's short fiction and Kiera Vaclavik provides a wonderful analysis of the author's fiction for young adults. Charles Forsdick's essay establishes convincing parallels between the generic hybridity of Danticat's travel writing and her hybrid identity as a native-tourist in Haiti. Mireille Rosello, Myriam J. A. Chancy, and Mary Gallagher each look at a specific novel—respectively, an elegant psychoanalytic essay on Danticat's treatment of rape and trauma in Breath, Eyes, Memory; a discussion of The Farming of Bones that moves from critical theory to close reading to contemporary politics; and an insightful reading of The Dew Breaker that establishes the narrative's links to and ruptures with Danticat's earlier prose fiction.

The third section of the reader consists of briefer writings on Danticat by her peers. For Maryse Condé (who rather disconcertingly roots her reflections in a Martinican canon), Danticat is a revolutionary. Evelyne Trouillot lauds the "social intelligence" (171) with which Danticat connects the individual to the whole of society. And, referring at once to the woman and to the specifics of her prose style, Madison Smartt Bell's incisive, unpretentious essay lauds Danticat's "poised equilibrium" and the "preternatural, surreal air of calm" that marks her writing (179). Lyonel Trouillot returns to the question of Danticat's belonging. Wary of essentialism, he insists that any attempt at labeling her can only be "extremely vulgar" (181). The volume closes with a poignant interview, in which Danticat speaks with grace and candor about her experience of writing Brother I'm Dying. This is followed by an extensive bibliography.

Pedagogical in its intent and exhaustive in its coverage of Danticat's corpus, this reader offers true insight into Danticat's writings and life. A few essays shine in their analyses, and all are informative. The whole provides a rich portrait of the artist that will engage both newcomers to and serious scholars of Danticat's work.