Memorial Tribute: J. Michael Dash

Although he didn't like me to acknowledge this fact in public, I first encountered Michael Dash when I took a course he offered in French Caribbean Literature in the Modern Languages Department of the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados; I was in the final year of my undergraduate degree, and it was the mid-1970s. Was this the product of vanity? Perhaps he thought it somehow aged him; I would have contended that if so, it aged us both. In any event, while Francophone literature had not yet become the central focus of my literary study, what I learned from him in that course would certainly provide a firm foundation for such studies as they took shape.

Jean Michael Dash began his career at the University of the West Indies. He was a relatively precocious student, earning a bachelor's degree in 1969 (aged twenty-one) and completing a nine hundred-plus page doctoral dissertation entitled Nationalism in Haitian Poetry, 1915–1946 in 1973 (aged twenty-five). He then served as a lecturer at Nigeria's Ahamadu Bello University before arriving in Barbados, leaving the Cave Hill campus shortly thereafter for the Mona, Jamaica campus. Eventually he was appointed Senior Lecturer and Head of its Department of French and then of its Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. He wrote extensively on Haitian and French Caribbean literature, and it is no exaggeration to say that he was a world-renowned and -respected figure in this field. His prolific output includes Culture and Customs of Haiti (2001), The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (1998), Haiti and the United States National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination (1997), Literature and Ideology in Haiti: 1915–1961 (1981), and Jacques Stephen Alexis (1975), as well as innumerable articles and review essays on literary figures from Aimé Césaire to Jacques Roumain to Edwidge Danticat. He was also the coeditor of Libète: A Haiti Anthology (1999) and the translator of Edouard Glissant's Monsieur Toussaint: A Play (2005), La Lézarde/ The Ripening (1985), and Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (1989), as well as Gisèle Pineau's The Drifting of Spirits (2000).

I did not interact much with Michael during his tenure at Mona, having moved to the US in the early 1980s to pursue graduate work and then entering the job market. So I was pretty surprised when I literally ran into him at the 2000 convention of the African Literature Association in Lawrence, Kansas. Over breakfast, before the conference's end, he explained his decision to move to NYU, leading to a succession of professional and personal encounters over the years as Francophone scholars. One that stands out in particular was his immediate and gracious acceptance of my invitation to be keynote speaker at a major conference I was organizing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to mark the 60th anniversary of French Caribbean departmentalization in 2006. We would also run into each other at other conferences and colloquia in locations from Columbia to Guadeloupe, and as always, we seemed to pick up where we left off, our exchanges regarding developments and changes in the field driven, as always, by his disarming manner and infectious grin. Conviviality was his stock in trade; one of my fondest memories was a moment during that 2006 conference when, at a party I gave at my house for the conference invitees—enlivened, needless to say, by curry, calypso, bass-heavy soca and zouk music, and a selection of Caribbean rums—he displayed his affinity for French Caribbean culture when he took me to one side and asked me where my stash of Martinican rum was. I regarded him as mentor, colleague, and friend—a relationship no doubt enhanced by our mutual West Indian and UWI backgrounds.

Michael was always generous with his presence; he gave a prodigious number of conference papers in myriad locations, and his constant willingness to review academic monographs was unparalleled. In doing all this, his great erudition was unfailingly on display, along with the constant charm and grace that was his...