The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat

422 Pages·2021·2.954 MB·English

by  Jana Evans Braziel, Nadège T. Clitandre

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Jana and Nadège would like to thank our friends, family, and colleagues for their vital
contributions to this collection. Above all, we thank Edwidge Danticat for her input, ideas,
creative collaboration, and, of course, for her beautiful words, her passion, her brilliance, and
her morally grounded convictions as a writer.
For the beautiful photograph of Edwidge and for permission to use it for the cover, we thank
photographer Mark Dellas. For reprint permissions, we also thank Maya Solovej, Danticat’s
agent; Mary Ellen McNeil, University of Virginia Press; Ginetta Candelario, Smith College
and editor of Meridians ; and Diane Grossé, Duke University Press. All of the following are
reprinted with their gracious permissions:
Clitandre, Nadège T. “Appendix: Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” Included in the monograph,
Edwidge Danticat: Th e Haitian Diasporic Imaginary . Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2018.
Danticat , Edwidge. “ ‘ All Geography Is within Me’: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom,
and Salt .” World Literature Today , 93 , no. 1 (winter 2019 ):  59–65 .
Danticat , Edwidge. “Haiti Faces Diffi cult Questions Ten Years aft er a Devastating Earthquake.”
Th e New Yorker (January 11, 2020), https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/haiti-
faces-diffi cult-questions-ten-years-aft er-a-devastating-earthquake.
Loichot, Valérie. “ Edwidge Danticat’s Kitchen History .” Meridians:  Feminism, Race,
Transnationalism , 5 , no. 1 ( 2004) :  92–116 .
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EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: A LITERARY
LIFE AND LEGACY: DANTICAT’S WRITERLY
INHERITANCES
Jana Evans Braziel and Nadège T. Clitandre
Celebrated writer, passionate activist, literary voice, imaginative wordsmith, and heartfelt
conscience of a generation who is an outspoken critic of racism, anti-immigrant politics, police
brutality, sexual violence, military interventions, and hemispheric imperialism, Edwidge
Danticat is a beloved writer who has an extensive literary oeuvre that moves across multiple
genres (short story, novella, novel, memoir, travel narrative, essay, and hybrid, experimental
forms). An award-winning author (Neustadt International Prize, Ford Fellowship, Pushcart
Prize) and a MacArthur Fellow, Danticat is also an accomplished and well-known author;
and her work merits comprehensive and transcontinental engagement. Edwidge Danticat is
the most important Haitian-American writer today, and she was a pioneering voice among
Haitian diasporic writers writing in English, rather than French or Créole. Born in Port-
au-Prince, Haiti, in 1969, Danticat was raised by an aunt in Belair, before migrating to the
United States to join her parents in Brooklyn in 1981. She was twelve years old at the time.
Like so many other Haitian diasporic writers, Danticat’s works stand in the shadows cast by
Duvalierism, the regimes of François Duvalier (from 1957 to 1971) and Jean-Claude Duvalier
(from 1971 to 1986), and post-Duvalier militarism and dictatorship in the nation. Danticat
studied French literature at Barnard College, where she graduated with a BA in 1990, before
studying creative writing at Brown University and earning the MFA degree in 1993. A prolifi c
and beloved writer, Danticat’s works of fi ction and nonfi ction include Breath, Eyes, Memory
(1994), an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak! (1996), a National Book Award fi nalist;
Th e Farming of Bones (1998); Aft er the Dance (2002); Behind the Mountains (2002); Th e Dew
Breaker (2004); Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490 (2005); Brother, I’m Dying (2007); Create
Dangerously (2010); Eight Days: A Story of Haiti (2010); Tent Life: Haiti (2011); Claire of the
Sea Light (2013); Th e Last Mapou (with Édouard Duval-Carrié) (2013); Mama’s Nightingale: A
Story of Immigration and Separation (2015); Untwine: A Novel (2015); Th e Art of Death: Writing
the Final Story (2017); My Mommy Medicine (2019); and Everything Inside (2019). Danticat has
also edited four collections of short stories, poems, and essays: Th e Butterfl y’s Way: Voices from
the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (2003); Haiti Noir (2010); Best American Essays 2011;
and Haiti Noir 2 (2013).
Edwidge Danticat is one of the most celebrated and beloved contemporary writers, yet, to
date, there exists only one monograph (Clitandre’s E dwidge Danticat: Th e Haitian Diasporic
Imaginary (2018)), one edited collection, and one collection of interviews on Danticat even
though she is arguably one of the most important writers of the twentieth and twenty-
fi rst centuries. Author of more than eighteen books—including six works of fi ction, fi ve
works of nonfi ction, seven young adult and children’s books, as well as scores of essays and
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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat
articles—Edwidge Danticat is one of the most important contemporary writers: she is also one
of the most celebrated and award-winning authors of our era, having won ten literary prizes
and awards and having been nominee and fi nalist for many more. Among her distinctions
include the high honor of MacArthur Fellow (2009), Ford Foundation Fellow (2017), and the
Prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2018), and the Vilcek Prize for Literature
(2020). Danticat has also edited four volumes of fi ction and penned numerous prefaces and
introductions to other books. Books addressing Danticat’s literary and historical importance
include Martin Munro’s E dwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide (2010), Nadège T. Clitandre’s
Edwidge Danticat: Th e Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (2018), Maxine Lavon Montgomery’s
Conversations with Edwidge Danticat (2017), a collection of interviews with the author, and
the volume N arrating History, Home, and Nation: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat , edited
by Megan Feifer, Maia Butler, and Joanna Davis-McElligatt (forthcoming). All of these works
mark the beginning of a serious, engaged scholarship on the fi ction and nonfi ction writings
of Edwidge Danticat and augment hundreds of literary critical essays about her work. Th e
Bloomsbury Companion to Edwidge Danticat builds on this literary reception and will be the
only comprehensive volume on her writings that tackles the literary oeuvre in its entirety,
cross-genre, and organized around myriad themes in her corpus.
Providing an extensive and comprehensive overview to the fi ction and nonfi ction oeuvre
of Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, the book deploys literary, cultural, historical,
political, and social analyses to her literary corpus; and the book is organized around key
themes and concepts in her body of work. Th ree key features of Th e Bloomsbury Companion
to Edwidge Danticat include comparative and multidisciplinary analyses of Danticat’s
literary oeuvre; an expansive engagement with multiple genres—short stories, essays, novels,
memoirs, and young adult and children’s literatures—and the full corpus of her writing; and
an encyclopedic and comprehensive companion to her literary corpus and its location within
Haitian history, folklore, religion, and politics, as well as within circum-Caribbean, inter-
American, and hemispheric frames.
Structure of the Book
In Part I, “Literary Beginnings,” we include (following this editors’ introduction) a nonfi ction
essay by Edwidge Danticat (“ ‘All Geography Is within Me’: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death,
Freedom, and Salt”) and an interview with the author by Nadège T. Clitandre (fi rst published in
her 2018 monograph Edwidge Danticat: Th e Haitian Diasporic Imaginary ). Discussing a wide
range of issues and authors, Clitandre and Danticat address the literary infl uences on her own
fi ction, the political and philosophical problems confronted in her nonfi ction, the importance
of mentors and representation for women and girls, and myriad other ideas. In the nonfi ction
essay, “ ‘All Geography Is within Me’: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt,”
Danticat explores the impact of literary imagination, geography, and the relations to life, death,
survival, and experience in her homeland Haiti. Danticat also probes the literary infl uences
of Zora Neale Hurston and others on her own literary imaginary, inherited genealogies, and
imagined geographies.
Part II is entitled “On Violence and Violated Bodies: Biopolitics in Danticat’s Texts.” Th e
chapters included in this second section are by contributors Judith Misrahi-Barak, Myriam
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Introduction
J. A Chancy, and Jana Evans Braziel. Judith Misrahi-Barak’s chapter, “Reconstructive Textual
Surgery in Danticat’s Krik? Krak ! and Th e Dew Breaker ,” foregrounds literary poetics and body
politics through the concept of biopolitics , a term fi rst introduced by Michel Foucault and later
elaborated by Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, Sibylle Fischer, and myriad other political
theorists, philosophers, and cultural critics. Tying the concept of biopolitics and tortured,
maimed, mutilated, fragmented bodies or body parts to Danticat’s textual forms, particularly
the short story and short story cycle, Misrahi-Barak asserts that the author performs a
“reconstructive textual surgery” that reconstitutes the body and the body politics, however
injured and wounded.
Beginning with a powerful anecdote and a cautionary tale about racial, ethnic, and
immigrant presuppositions, Myriam J. A. Chancy, in her chapter “ ‘I Might Lose All My
Life’:  Brother, I’m Dying and (Black) Immigration Discourse in the United States,” tackles the
geopolitics and imaginary terrains of contemporary immigrant politics in the United States
and in Canada. From this account, and drawing from and textually analyzing Danticat’s
literary memoir, B rother, I’m Dying (2007), she stages a literary debate about contemporary
immigrant politics and policies in North America, specifi cally the United States and Canada,
foregrounding diasporic approaches that center on Haitian immigrant experiences in the
two countries. Chancy importantly reminds readers that Black biopolitics in North America
need to incorporate African and Caribbean diasporic experiences, and that not doing so
demonstrates the devaluation of Black existence in the body politic.
In the chapter, “Alleys, Capillaries, Th orns: Th e Violated Terre-Natale of Ville Rose,” Braziel
explores the ville imaginé of Ville Rose in Danticat’s literary oeuvre as the historical ground
of sexual violence in Haiti. Rereading all of Danticat’s literary texts for their treatments of
sexual violence, maternal death, and dead babies, Braziel illustrates the ways in which these
violences are foundational not only for understanding Haiti’s entangled histories of slavery,
colonial domination, and rape but also for understanding the ways in which Danticat’s literary
reimaginings of these histories create alternative spaces for women and children within that
violated historical ground: by demonstrating the violences that transpired, the author points
to women and children’s absences, or presences as violated terrains, and demonstrates that
Haitian futures must unearth these violated terrains and create new spaces—not just imagined
spaces but ones that are social and political and economic—for women and children as
historical actors and political agents.
Part III is entitled “On Death and Dying: Necropolitics in Danticat’s Texts” and includes
chapters written by Simone A. James Alexander, Anne Brüske, and Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo.
Simone A. James Alexander, in her chapter “Losing Your (M)Other: Danticat’s Narratives of
Un/Belonging and Un/Dying,” foregrounds Danticat’s literary and philosophical engagements
with death and dying: in the chapter, Alexander adopts Danticat’s ideas of “living dyingly”
(from Th e Art of Death ) to conceptualize the spiritual and transcendent terrain of dying
through the term “necro-transcendence.” For Alexander, necro-transcendence captures the
processes of un/belonging and un/dying; and she analyzes death through this lens in several
literary works by Danticat—B reath, Eyes, Memory ; Th e Farming of Bones ; Th e Art of Death ;
and Untwine —as well as draws parallels to literary treatments of death and dying in works by
American literary authors, particularly Toni Morrison’s S ula and Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”
Further developing the discussion of Danticat’s literary preoccupations with death and
dying, Anne Brüske, in her chapter “L ò t bò dlo : Producing Haitian Spaces of Death and
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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat
Diaspora in Danticat’s Th e Dew Breaker , examines the ways in which death (as theme and
trope) informs not only the content of Danticat’s texts but also the author’s “aesthetic form.”
Brüske draws on Th omas Macho’s concept of “presence in absence” to do so; and she focuses
her analyses of death and dying as aesthetics in Th e Dew Breaker , though she also surveys the
“spaces” of death throughout myriad texts— Th e Farming of Bones ; Create Dangerously ; Claire
of the Sea Light ; and Th e Art of Death . Using Danticat’s Haitian Kreyòl phrase, “lòt bò dlo,” “the
other side of the water,” Brüske explores the mythical spaces of death in diaspora, centering her
reading through Vodou understandings of death and the spaces of death.
Extending discussions of death and dying in Danticat’s oeuvre, Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo,
in her chapter entitled “Death and the Maiden: Writing Death in Danticat’s Fiction,” delves
into literary treatments of death as “exorcism” of the “fear of death,” as the author herself
fi rst introduces in Th e Art of Death . Probing this recurrent theme—death, dying—in several
diff erent literary texts (B reath, Eyes, Memory ; Krik? Krak! ; Th e Farming of Bones ; Th e Dew
Breaker ; and Claire of the Sealight ; as well as in Th e Art of Death) , Nzengou-Tayo off ers readers
a “typology” of death in Danticat’s literary corpus as well as its role in narration and in the
writer’s narrative forms. Nzengou-Tayo thus builds on what Brüske defi nes as the “aesthetics”
of death in Danticat’s literature. Finally, and by focusing on processes of mourning, grief, and
bereavement, Nzengou-Tayo, like Alexander, attends to the philosophical dimensions of death
and dying in Danticat’s work.
Part IV, entitled “Tifi ak Fanm, Girls and Women,” foregrounds the relationship of women
and girls through feminist lenses and includes contributions by Régine Michelle Jean-Charles,
Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, and Cara Byrne. Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, in her chapter
“ ‘Somebody, Anybody Sing a Black Girl’s Song …’: Danticat and Haitian Girlhood,” centers
the lives and lived experiences of Black girls in Danticat’s literary texts. Foregrounding
analyses of B reath, Eyes, Memory and Claire of the Sea Light , Jean-Charles examines the ways
in which Danticat writes for and about tifi , girls in Haiti and in Haiti’s diaspora. Building on the
interdisciplinary fi eld of Black girlhood studies, Jean-Charles demonstrates how Black girls are
too oft en rendered invisible culturally, historically, socially, and politically, and off ers, through
Danticat, a counter-narrative that places Black girls at the literary and imaginary center.
In “Th e Good Daughter: Danticat’s Migrating Memories,” Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw
takes up the theme of t ifi ak fanm , girls and women, through the fi gure of the daughter. By
focusing on the “daughter” as a literary, philosophical, and historical trope (as do other French
and francophone writers, notably Simone de Beauvoir in M é moires d’une jeune fi lle rangé e ,
translated into English as Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter ), Walcott-Hackshaw off ers literary
critical readings of two short stories—“Th e Book of the Dead” and “Sunrise, Sunset”—and of
Th e Art of Dying , the book of essays in which the writer/daughter philosophically meditates
on the death and dying of her own mother. Th roughout the chapter, Walcott-Hackshaw asks
how daughters understand what is meant by being a good mother, a good daughter, and also
how to lose a father—all experiences that must be meditated on and in relation to memory and
migration, the memories of migration, and the migration of memories.
Cara Byrne, in her chapter “ ‘I Am the One Telling It’: Resilient Children, Familial Bonds, and
Haitian Heritage in Danticat’s Picture Books,” off ers a comprehensive overview of Danticat’s
contributions to children’s literature: Byrne, in the chapter, discusses all of Danticat’s children’s
books—E ight Days ; Th e Last Mapou ; Mama’s Nightingale ; and My Mommy Medicine —and
illustrates the author’s important contributions to diversifying the range of books available to
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Introduction
children that candidly talk about diffi cult topics—race, immigration, detention, and separation.
Th e chapter thus adds nuance and depth to our understanding of Danticat’s literary oeuvre
by foregrounding the writer as writer of children’s books. Byrne’s chapter thus beautifully
concludes the section on tifi ak fanm.
Part V, entitled “Ecri Angaje: Political Writing: Danticat as Public Intellectual,” includes
contributions written by Edwidge Danticat, Anja Bandau, and by Maia Butler and Megan
Feifer. Th e section opens with Danticat’s memorial essay marking the tenth anniversary of
the 2010 earthquake. Th e essay, “Haiti Faces Diffi cult Questions Ten Years aft er a Devastating
Earthquake,” fi rst published in the N ew Yorker , asks readers to consider the progress (or lack
of) in the decade since the devastating natural disaster in the country. Placing the earthquake
in the ongoing struggles against grinding poverty, international interference, political
corruption, and mobilized resistance, Danticat repeatedly and heuristically asks her readers,
“What if …?” What if the earthquake had not killed over three hundred thousand Haitians;
what if the international community had involved Haitians in the reconstruction process; what
if the international funds had not been squandered?
Centering on the idea of “memorial art” and the praxis of politically engaged writing in
the face of disaster or mass destruction, Anja Bandau (in her chapter “C reate Dangerously : A
Poetics of Writing as Memorial Art; the Text as Echo Chamber”) analyzes Danticat’s nonfi ction
collection of essays: for Bandau, Danticat’s nonfi ction form of “creating dangerously” (adopted
from Albert Camus) must be understood as diasporic, written from a migratory position in
relation to the homeland and the site of destruction or ruin. Bandau also theorizes, following
Danticat herself and Clitandre (in E dwidge Danticat: Th e Haitian Diasporic Imaginary ), the
“echo chamber” as a politicized, literary site of polyphonic voices, testimonials that echo,
reverberate, and reiterate the semiotic registers of trauma, including speechlessness or aphasia.
Doing so, Bandau also importantly brings Danticat into echoing conversations with other
Haitian writers, notably Yanick Lahens, Dany Laferrière, and Kettly Mars.
Maia Butler and Megan Feifer, in their coauthored chapter “Haiti’s Past, Present, and
Uncertain Future: Danticat’s N ew Yorker Column as Platform for Public Intellectualism,”
discuss Danticat’s role as a public intellectual and as a politically engaged nonfi ction writer.
In this role, Danticat regularly weighs in on critical, contemporary issues, particularly those
impacting her homeland Haiti and Haiti’s diaspora in the United States, as well as contributing
short stories and other fi ction pieces in the New Yorker , one of the most infl uential literary and
highly circulated cultural journals published in the country (the United States). For Butler and
Feifer, Danticat manifests in these regular contributions the role of “engaged citizen,” a guiding
and vital voice for her readers around salient issues impacting citizenship and the country,
including race, race politics, immigration, presidential politics, mobilized resistances, and the
minority perspectives and vibrant spaces of American literatures.
Part VI is entitled “Food, Haiti, and Haitian Culinary/Literary Inheritance” and includes
chapters by Valérie Loichot, Wilson C. Chen, and Robyn Cope. Reprinted from Meridians: Race,
Feminism, Transnationalism , Valérie Loichot’s chapter “Edwidge Danticat’s Kitchen History”
marks an important foray into the interdisciplinary spaces of food studies, literary culinary
studies, and the importance of food and cooking to women’s writings in the francophone
traditions, here Haitian. Focusing on the roles that food and cooking play in women’s lives,
in Haitian heritage, and as a metaphor for writing, particularly in Danticat’s fi rst short story
collection Krik? Krak! and in her debut novel B reath, Eyes, Memory , Loichot argues that the
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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat
diasporic kitchen is a feminist space of memory, remembrance, legacy, heritage, and creation
in words and in food. Loichot’s original essay (published in 2006) appears here with a new
“Epilogue: Kitchen History, Twenty or So Years Later …”
Further developing this critical, culinary line of inquiry, Wilson C. Chen (in his chapter “ ‘A
People Do Not Th row Th eir Geniuses Away’: Danticat’s ‘Kitchen Poet’ Literary Antecedents”)
opens by responding to Alice Walker’s call from “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” for
literary excavation of lost, maternal genealogies. Quoting Walker’s essay in his title (“A People
Do Not Th row Th eir Geniuses Away”), Chen further probes the importances of food, culinary
traditions, cooking, and kitchens in Danticat’s literature and also seeks out her “kitchen poet”
literary antecedents, primarily (in Chen’s reading) Zora Neale Hurston, Paule Marshall, and
Walker. Chen particularly attends to the literary infl uence of Marshall and her essay “From the
Poets in the Kitchen.”
Robyn Cope, in her chapter “Scattering and Gathering: Danticat, Food, and (the) Haitian
Experience(s),” also probes the interdisciplinary and diasporic spaces of food, cooking, and
culinary metaphors for immigration and memory. Building on the praxes of “scattering”
and “gathering,” which emulate diasporic separation and transnational closing of distance,
Cope examines the generational and geographic divides that Danticat writes across. Drawing
parallels to Jacques Stéphen Alexis, Cope also underscores the ways that Danticat’s “scattering”
and “gathering” through food and culinary traditions also intersections with the Haitian
literary tradition of “marvelous realism.”
Part VII is entitled “Th eoretical Approaches” and includes chapters by Kyrah Malika
Daniels, Kristina Gibby, Carine Mardorossian, and W. Todd Martin. Kyrah Malika Daniels,
in her chapter entitled “S ea, Stone, Sky, and Cemetery : Vodou’s Divine Nature and Religious
Archetypes in Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and A ft er the Dance ,” explores the role that Vodou
spiritualism, ritual, and folklore play in the writer’s literary imagination and moral compass.
Analyzing the short stories in Krik? Krak! alongside the nonfi ction travel narrative Aft er the
Dance , which is about Kanaval (Carnival) in Jacmel, Daniels off ers a brilliant and compelling
analysis of Vodou as integral to the moral and spiritual fabric of Danticat’s literary imagination.
Daniels also incorporates insights from an interview with the author to further underscore the
essential importance of Vodou not only for Danticat but also for Haitians in the country and
in diaspora.
In “ ‘So Much Had Fallen into the Sea’: An Ecocritical Approach to Danticat’s Claire of the
Sea Light ,” Kristina Gibby reads Danticat’s most recent novels through environmental lenses.
Proceeding from ecocriticism and environmental humanities approaches for analyzing literary
texts, Gibby contextualizes Danticat’s fi ction within the interdisciplinary fi eld of Caribbean
environmentalism. Asserting the importance of environmental approaches to Haiti, Haitian,
and Haitian diasporic literatures, Gibby places Danticat’s novel alongside literary texts by other
Caribbean writers (Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Édouard Glissant) who delve into the
environmental terrains of the archipelago.
Carine Mardorossian, in her chapter “ ‘Aha!’: Danticat and Creolization,” positions Danticat
as a writer who presumes her location as one of creolization, hybridity, and diaspora—and
writes from this politics/poetics of location and relation. Whereas an earlier generation of
Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic writers felt the need to defend this positionality, Danticat,
like an entire younger generation of writers and artists, begin from this mixed point of departure
and thereby create relationally and transnationally across previously held national divides.
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Introduction
Doing so allows for greater infl uence and impact in multiple points of departure, location,
and myriad arrivals, as well as liminal spaces in between. In a similar theoretical vein, W. Todd
Martin addresses cultural inheritance, fragmentation, memory, and remembrance as creolized
praxis in and through the short story form in his chapter “Memory and the Possibilities of the
Short Story Sequence in K rik? Krak! ” For Martin, as for Misrahi-Barak and Mardorrosian, the
short story form and the story cycle manifest fi ction written at diasporic distance: a process of
recreating through memory, language, and shards of sutured meaning; and the short story, in
its recurrent characters and narrative fragments, works to recreate and suff use with meaning
what has been lost.
Part VIII is entitled “Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Transnational Hispaniola” and
includes chapters by John D. Ribó and Ramon Ant. Victoriano-Martinez. John D. Ribó, in
“ ‘Neither Strangers nor Friends’:  Transnational Hispaniola and the Uneven Intimacies
of Th e Farming of Bones ,” examines the histories of racism, racial violence, and linguistic
divides between the Dominican Republic and Haiti and analyzes Danticat’s 1998 novel as a
writerly intervention in the vexed relations and borders between the two countries. From
this analytical and critical point of departure, Ribó returns to the border wars between the
two countries through the recent points of cultural, historical, and political collaboration
through the Transnational Hispaniola collective and movement. Transnational and diasporic
activists and scholars, operating from a position of shared Afro-Latinidad and Latinx studies,
have assiduously labored to heal the trauma and historical wounds. While some Haitian
American cultural critics, notably Ayana Legros, declare and champion a Latina identity,
others, saliently, Nathalie Cerin, refuse such identity claims, preferring to remain resolutely
Haïtienne. Foregrounding the debate between Legros and Cerin, Ribó argues for a similar
tension manifest in the novel Th e Farming of Bones between Valencia and Amabelle. In the
end, due to Valencia’s refusal to be historically accountable for the violence, the Haitian
massacre, Amabelle refuses intimacy and affi liation with her. As Ribó concludes, Dominicans
must step forward, accept historical complicity, and acknowledge past and present violences
before healing between the two countries can occur. Th e Transnational Hispaniola is one eff ort
toward that healing. Ramon Ant. Victoriano-Martinez, in the chapter “ ‘Walk Too Far in Either
Direction and People Speak a Diff erent Language’: Navigating Hispaniola in Danticat’s Th e
Farming of Bones ,” places ongoing racial tensions and border divides between the Dominican
Republic and Haiti in the context of earlier historical violences, including the 1937 “Parsley”
Massacre. Placing Danticat’s violence in conversation with other political, literary, and legal
writings in the Dominican Republic, Victoriano-Martinez traces the long history of legislative,
material, and civic violence against Haitians living in the DR.
Part IX, “Critical Sources,” concludes the volume and includes a bibliography of writings by
Edwidge Danticat, a bibliography of literary criticism on Danticat, and the biographical notes
for all contributors, including the author and the editors.
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CHAPTER 1
“ALL GEOGRAPHY IS WITHIN ME”: WRITING
BEGINNINGS, LIFE, DEATH, FREEDOM,
AND SALT
Edwidge Danticat
1
Th is past June I was in Haiti in part for the opening of a library in a southern town called Fond-
des-Blancs. Fond-des-Blancs, which literally means “Th e Fountain of the Whites,” is mostly
known for being home to a large number of people of Polish lineage, the descendants of soldiers
from a Polish regiment that switched alliances from the French armies they were fi ghting
alongside in nineteenth-century Haiti to join the Haitians in their battle for independence
from France in 1804. Th e mutinous Polish soldiers who ended up settling in Fond-des-Blancs
were the only whites and foreigners who were granted Haitian citizenship aft er Haiti became
the fi rst black republic in the Western hemisphere in 1804.
Th e library we were there to celebrate had been started by a nonprofi t called Haiti Projects,
which was run by an acquaintance of mine whose mother is American and whose father is
Haitian. Th e opening-week program included writing workshops and conversations with
writers. I took part in a conversation and writing workshop with the Haitian novelist and
short-story writer Kettly Mars. Our moderator, a Haiti-based educator named Jean-Marie
Th éodat, asked each of us to read both the beginning and the end of one of our short stories,
then explain to the group of twenty-fi ve or so eager teenagers why we had chosen to begin and
end that story the way we had.
If you have ever spoken to a group of teenagers, you know how intimidating it already is
to explain anything to them, but this was a bit extra intimidating for me. It is much easier to
explain or elaborate on an ending than a beginning. For endings, you can always say that it
ended this way because it had begun t hat way. Or it ended that way because something popped
up in the middle that led me there. Beginnings have a much bigger burden and are oft en
less clear.
In the beginning was the Word, the Good Book tells us. And perhaps the Word—or the
Words—was, were …
Once Upon a Time,
Il était une fois or
Te gèn yon fwa or
Krik? Krak!
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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat
I feel the same dilemma right now while trying to trace the geography, or cartography, both
internal and external, that has brought me from my own beginnings to this moment.
Once upon a time, a little girl was born in Haiti during the middle part of a dynastic thirty-
year dictatorship. Her parents were poor, though maybe not as poor as others. My parents didn’t
get very far in school because their parents could not aff ord it. My mother was a seamstress.
My father, a shoe salesman and a tailor.
When I was two years old, my father left Haiti and moved to the United States to look for
work. Two years later, my mother joined him and left me and my younger brother, Bob, in the
care of my aunt and uncle in Port-au-Prince.
One of my earliest childhood memories is of being torn away from my mother. On the day
my mother left , I wrapped my arms around her legs before she headed for the plane. She leaned
down and tearfully unballed my fi sts so that my uncle could peel me off her. As my brother
dropped to the fl oor, bawling, my mother hurried away, her tear-soaked face buried in her
hands. She couldn’t bear to look back.
If my life were the short story I was asked to explain the beginning of in that writing
workshop with the teenagers in Fond-des-Blancs, this might have been my chosen beginning,
the most dramatic one I can remember. Aft er all, as the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus
wrote, a person’s art is “nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art,
those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart fi rst opened.”
Since I was too young to remember my father leaving Haiti for the United States, my
mother’s departure was one of the fi rst images in whose presence both my heart and my art
fi rst opened, an art and a heart that suddenly expanded beyond geographical confi nes and also
made me realize that one can love from both near and far.
In Haitian Creole when someone is said to be “l ò t bò dlo ,” on the other side of the water, it
can either mean that they’ve traveled abroad or that they have died. My parents were already
lòt bò dlo, on the other side of the waters from me, before I fully even knew what that meant.
My desire to make sense of this separation, this l ò t bò dlo -ness, is one of the things that brought
me to the internal geography of words and how they can bridge distances.
One way I used to communicate with my parents was through letters. We spoke on the
phone once a week while sitting in a telephone booth, where we had a standing appointment
every Sunday aft ernoon, but we also communicated through cassettes that we sent back and
forth with people who were traveling between New York and Port-au-Prince. We wrote letters
too. Every month my father would send us a half-page letter composed in stilted French to
off er news of his and my mother’s health as well as details on how to spend the money he and
my mother wired for my and my brother’s food, lodging, and school expenses.
When my parents’ letters and cassettes found their way to me from Brooklyn to Port-au-
Prince, I again realized how words—both written and spoken—can transcend geography and
time. My mother could tell me stories—once upon a time—in my mind. And I knew, because
she later told me this, that she was imagining every day of my life, then would dream of whatever
indispensable thing she thought I needed to know, things she believed that only she could tell
me. Th e way she imagined my life in her absence was sometimes better and sometimes worse
than what was actually happening to me at ages four, fi ve, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven
and twelve, but we were constantly alive in each other’s imagination. And because my mother
did not write letters and because I did not ever want to forget the things I wished my mother
were telling me, the stories I wish she were telling me, I tried to write them down in a small
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