Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat (review)

Black women writers have captured a richness in black experiences and shown complexities in black lives that challenge popular perceptions of black humanity and even the belief that black humanity even exists. Grounding experiences in everyday reality becomes subject to debate, so incorporating elements of the supernatural in work heavily grounded in reality adds further dimensions to black women’s writing. Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Gayl Jones are only a few writers whose work takes on black experience in a way that incorporates supernatural elements while remaining firmly grounded in literary tradition. Edwidge Danticat has added her name to this list. Much of Danticat’s writing style takes elements of the supernatural and seamlessly incorporates them into a very real world with characters in Claire of the Sea Light. Danticat’s collection of short stories link together not only with each other but also with previous short story collections, including Krik? Krak! and The Dew Breaker. However, this time she keeps a seven-year-old girl named Claire, the sea, and the coastal town of Ville Rose as the focal points of the collection. Just as Claire’s character bookends this collection of stories, so do the sea and the town of Ville Rose. Danticat makes Claire of the Sea Light the latest in her line of richly drawn portraits of Haitian life and the circle of life and death through the eyes of a colorful assortment of characters.

Claire Limyé Lanmé Faustin is the most important of all these characters and drives the story. The daughter of a fisherman named Nozias, Claire searches for a memory of her birth mother who died in childbirth. Claire is symbolic of the blurred line between life and death as she represents both. Danticat creates Claire as a quiet presence who remains powerful to those who encounter her and her absence remains just as strong when she goes missing on the night of her seventh birthday. In her story, the schoolteacher Louise remembers Claire as a “stunning little girl from one of the primary-school classes at École Ardin” (126). She goes on to say, “Claire was the one child in the classes she read to who reminded her much of herself when she was young. The girl was so quiet that Louise worried that there might be some other frightful things about Claire that would link them” (127). Louise’s description has something of a haunting quality in which Claire appears ghostlike to those who knew her even before she disappears. Danticat draws Claire as a quiet but powerful presence even when she is not the focal point of someone’s world. By using Claire in this way, Danticat creates a somewhat supernatural presence that allows her to link the characters of Ville Rose and show just how much one person’s actions affect another’s in a degrees-of-separation fashion.

In fact, Danticat arranges each story to segue into the next, which allows Claire’s presence to remain as she explores the lives of other characters. “Claire of the Sea Light” meets “The Frogs” in which she further introduces Gaëlle Cadet Lavaud, the woman to whom Nozias hopes to give Claire so that she can be raised by a mother figure. However, “The Frogs” focuses on Gaëlle “ten years before the night she showed up to take Nozias Faustin’s child” as she awaits the birth of her own daughter (41). Interestingly, Claire still has a presence in the story taking place three years before her birth, further giving her a ghostlike quality. Gaëlle seems to fear or anticipate the presence of death as she feels her six-month pregnant belly will meet the same fate as the frogs who explode from the heat plaguing Ville Rose that year. Such imagery not only resonates with Danticat’s theme of life and death but also draws in nature as an essential character to this work as well. In a way, the fear of human life coming to the...