Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre (review)

Edwidge Danticat is one of the most important Caribbean authors writing in the diaspora today. Her entire body of work may be summarized as a response to the displacement she experienced first after her parents left her behind with her aunt to immigrate to the US, and secondly after she herself left to join them at twelve years of age. Haiti may be the country where she first felt orphaned, but the United States is the place where she truly experienced transplantation after leaving the only home she had ever known. Danticat has since remarked that it was only through and in her encounter with the English language that she felt like she was home again. Language was the space she could enter, engage, learn with, use, and manipulate without judgment or fear of reprisal. It is the tool through which she could fashion her own identity, represent and move beyond the many traumas of her life. It was home.

Nadège T. Clitandre’s new book on Danticat beautifully renders this transnational and prolific author’s complex negotiation of the diasporic consciousness and its multilayered relation to the nation of origin. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary is a much-needed critical analysis not only because it offers the first sustained monograph about the works of this celebrated author, but also because it successfully recalibrates our understanding of diaspora in postcolonial studies. Indeed, over the last few decades, postcolonial studies has moved from nation to diaspora as a key concept, with many scholars highlighting the opposition between the two. By contrast, Clitandre emphasizes the dialogic relationship between nation and diaspora in Danticat’s work. Her recasting of diaspora as a more complicated phenomenon than what has been theorized under the aegis of “transnationalism” is lucidly articulated, but it is also evocatively and lyrically rendered through the trope of the “echo.” Clitandre shows that the echo effect and its reverberation in any diasporic context may truly be the only appropriate way in which the silenced histories of post-slavery migration and transplantation can actually be represented; that is, through the resonances and traces left by often undocumented and inaccessible wounds whose effects remain as pervasive today as if we had witnessed them firsthand. These are histories that can only be returned to us in a diffused and indirect way, in echoes rather than through any mimetic representational rhetoric.

As Clitandre points out, the diaspora is often configured in Caribbean women’s narratives through strategies and metaphors of doubleness, another concept that evokes the repetitive quality of the echo. The double, Clitandre rightly points out, is a recurring trope especially in texts that tackle sexual trauma (as most Caribbean women’s fiction does). As such, it functions both as a coping mechanism and as a narrative strategy, a double-pronged dimension whose rippling repercussions are indeed echo-like.

In Chapter One, it is through a review of Haiti’s turbulent history of colonialism and decolonization that the echo takes on an even more resonant valence. Clitandre discusses, for instance, the three waves of Haitian migration to the US and the echoing ways in which they completely transformed the social and relational fabric of the two countries. She also shows how “Danticat’s literary return to a localized, geographically bounded fictional space does not expunge the diasporic and transnational contours of the small village” (31). Considering the realities of diasporic subjects that have and maintain dual relationships and loyalties to multiple places in our era of globalization, this historicized intervention could not be more timely.

Also particularly successful is the theoretical discussion that frames the historicized chronicling and close readings that are offered throughout the book. Clitandre does a convincing job of clearly referencing the theoretical paradigms she uses to articulate her reconceptualization of diaspora, nation, identity. For instance, she offers an illuminating distinction between the Fanonian and the Duboisian notions of double consciousness. The...