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3 Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière Parasitic and Remittance Diaspora Bowing my head in shame at being called a parasitic dyaspora. Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously Peter Hallward, the author of a book on the former Haitian president JeanBertrand Aristide, writes in his preface, “This is not a book motivated by any personal association with Haiti. . . . A philosopher and a literary critic by training , I have visited Haiti only twice, and make no claim to the sort of insider or anthropological knowledge that authorizes much published work on the country.”1 In response to Hallward’s disclaimer, the critic Jana Evans Braziel insists in Duvalier’s Ghosts that “a direct knowledge of Haiti . . . does matter”2 if one seeks to be a credible source. This allows Braziel to legitimize her own credibility by then closing her “acknowledgments” with an expression of gratitude for the person who risked his life in order to bring her closer to the action in Haiti: “[He] took me into Cité Soleil when I pressed him to do so and even when he felt that it was against his better judgment.”3 Braziel’s “acknowledgments ,” as a paratextual guarantee of so-called direct exposure to the subject, carries the effect of, if not fully identifying, at least partially associating the author with the survivors, the “ghosts of Cité Soleil.” “The Ghosts of Cité Soleil” refers to a song by Wyclef Jean, featured in Asger Leth’s 2006 documentary of the same title that recounts the dangers of daily life in Cité Soleil, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince deemed to be extremely dangerous. The lyrics depict Wyclef’s wife and mother begging the singer not to go to Cité Soleil, but to no avail. Upon Wyclef’s return, they call him “the ghost of Cité Soleil” because he survived an experience with presumably no way out. Yet, as Braziel argues in her preface, “Those with the privilege to come and go, those who have the means to find a way out, are not the ghosts of Cité Soleil.”4 For her, the real ghosts live in Cité Soleil and as such face the daily danger of Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière: Parasitic and Remittance Diaspora 91 being kidnapped, raped, or killed there: “they are the ones for whom there is no way out.”5 But the “real” ghosts do not come out to tell their story. The go-betweens, on the other hand, like Braziel and Wyclef, are the ones who, as transnational brokers, bring and even sell the story to the overseas party. Every contribution to the history, politics, or culture of Haiti produced outside of the country seems to come with some sort of disclaimer, given that the contribution is always already guilty of its not-direct-enough exposure to the country. In an Adorno-resonance of “no poetry after Auschwitz,” the immediacy of the Haitian experience does not tolerate an outside, an after. The fact of getting out, even only to report the story, grants a privilege to the survivor whose credibility is refuted by the mere fact of reporting from the other side—what the Haitians call lot bod dlo, “the other side of the water.” Though “the guilt of absence,”6 as Nick Nesbitt calls it, consumes the Haitian diasporic writer, it undeniably also fuels his or her writing. For immigrants, absence is often nourishing, immigration being the backbone of an economy of production, exchange, and two-way circulation between the adopted land and the home country. Economically challenged countries, in particular, rely on a Western Union type of immigration. Western Union is an international money transfer service, and its frequent use by Caribbean migrants shows, as Kezia Page pointedly argues, the “material cultural evidence of the active interchange between Caribbean migrant and diaspora communities and their communities at home.”7 The argument is equally valid for an economy of creative production. The migrant goes to the other side of the water to produce a story on Haiti that could not have been produced in the homeland. One side relies on the other in order to boost diasporic creativity. The Haitian Creole expression itself, lot bod dlo, which insists on a border-to-border perspective, calls to mind the uncut umbilical cord between the homeland and the adopted land, with the water between them the amniotic fluid nourishing both sides. Absence, in the Haitian context of lot bod dlo, is not a barren rupture but rather the...

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