Greetings, literature-loving Kossacks! It's been a long time since I've dusted off this old series, but given recent events, now seems like a good a time as any to resurrect it in honor of a writer who's been trying to get us to pay attention to Haiti for quite some time.
Is there such a thing as a collective memory? Does the trauma of a nation make itself felt even among generations removed from it? Does it manifest itself in our language, and in our understandings of ourselves?
Join me below for a discussion of how one Haitian-American author has been exploring these questions, and how the recent earthquake has affected her.
My cousin Maxo has died. The house that I called home during my visits to Haiti collapsed on top of him.
What sounds like a compelling opening to a novel is, sadly, a recent statement of fact. The author, a popular Haitian-American novelist, penned these lines only last week as part of a New Yorker profile on the impact of the earthquake. Her cousin Maxo had featured prominently in her autobiographical Brother, I'm Dying.
Edwidge Danticat, recent recipient of the MacArthur ("genius") fellowship, was born in Port-au-Prince. Though she's spent much of her adult life in this country, her Haitian heritage has informed most of her literary works: like an emissary, she's translated the Haitian-American experience into compelling fiction that both entertains and educates. She's written fiction and nonfiction - novels, short stories, travelogues, and memoirs - and she was short listed for the prestigious National Book Award for the 1996 collection Krik? Krak!
Danticat's work is evocative, shifting between the sensations of urban and rural life, extremes of wealth and poverty, moments of extreme violence and spaces of calm. Like the language of Haiti itself (more on this below), the mish-mash of experiences creates a flavor all its own.
Naturally, her birth city figures in much of her work. Here, the narrator of her novel Breath, Eyes, Memory describes her first visit to the capital:
Colorful boutiques with neon signs lined the street. Vans covered with pictures of flowers and horses with wings scurried up and down and made sudden stops in the middle of the boulevards.
But the more evocative description comes from her aunt, who used to sneak out with the narrator's mother to see the city during the holiday season:
They would take a tap tap van in the afternoon so as to arrive in Port-au-Prince just as the sun was setting, and the Christmas lights were beginning to glow. They stood outside the stores in their Sunday dresses to listen to the sounds of the toy police cars and talking dolls chattering over the festive music. They went to Mass at the Gothic cathedral, then spent the rest of the night sitting by the fountains and gazing at the Nativity scenes on the Champs-de-Mars. They bought ice cream cones and fireworks, while young tourists offered them cigarettes for the privilege of taking their pictures. They pretended to be students at one of the gentry's universities and even went so far as describing the plush homes they said they lived in. The white tourists flirted with them and held their hands. They laughed at their silly jokes, letting their voices rise and fall like city girls. Later, they made rendezvous for the next night, which of course they never kept. Then before dawn, they took a van back home and slipped into bed before my grandmother woke up.
I focus on moments like these because the horrors of Haitian history, violence, and poverty often overshadow one of its major virtues: Haiti can be a place of tremendous beauty. The balancing act that underpins Danticat's work is the acknowledgment of the horror and the beauty together: if we want to understand this country and this people, we cannot ignore either.
Key to Danticat's work and her presentation of Haiti is the inescapable nature of a history still present in the poverty and violence of the nation. From the colonial experience and the crushing debt that followed to the local demagogues whose corruption and violence stunted its growth in the latter part of the last century, present-day Haiti is filled with the ghosts of its past.
In novels like The Dew Breaker and The Farming of Bones, Danticat juxtaposes the knowledge of the past with the often banal minutiae of the everyday present. Individuals may move on (or so they think), but the scars remain. The irony of history - the way this juxtaposition puts both past and present into sharp relief - allows us to reconcile the two for a more coherent understanding of what it means to be Haitian.
Naturally, class economics is an important part of this stew, especially the struggle of the popular majority against an often oppressive ruling class. In Brother, I'm Dying she has this to say of her uncle's political involvement (note: the 'Bel Air' mentioned here is a suburb of Port-au-Prince)
Uncle Joseph's hero in the 1950s was a politician named Daniel Fignolé. Uncle Joseph liked to recount how as a young legislator, Fignolé went to the public hospital in Port-au-Prince, and finding poor patients lying on the floor while the rich patients recovered in beds, he forced the rich off the beds and gave them to the poor. Soon after my uncle moved to Bel Air, Fignolé started the Laborers and Peasants Party (Mouvement Ouvrier-Paysans), which my uncle joined. For years, he and Tante Denise opened their house to Fignolé sympathizers for regular meetings, which were lively affairs with plenty of homemade liquor - kleren - and food prepared by Tante Denise, who everyone in their circle agreed was one of the best cooks in Bel Air. When it came time to address the fifty or so people who'd gathered in his pink living room, kept sparsely furnished to fit in the largest possible number of Fignolists, who often brought their own chairs with them, he would model Fignolé's forceful and direct Creole diction and speak in a clear, powerful bass, allowing only a few well-chosen pauses.
"We have struggled since we became an independent nation in 1804," my uncle recalled saying. "Certain people think that in order for the country to progress, only the rich minority need succeed. This country cannot move forward with out the majority. Without us."
(If this is the same Daniel Fignolé who later became head of the nation, this story does not have a happy ending. After only three weeks, Fignolé was ousted by military action that led, three months later, to the ascendancy of Papa Doc Duvalier. He died in exile in New York in 1986.)
Notice in particular how she highlights his "Creole diction". The crux of Danticat's work is language, and the way Haitian identity reveals itself in its beautiful creole mishmash of French and Fongbe, generously seasoned with Spanish, English, and languages indigenous to the region.
But language is also power: the language of the people is not the proper French of its colonial heritage, and Creole became an official language only in the 1960s (constitutionally, only in the late 1980s!) Class distinctions are magnified by language, so Danticat makes a special point of absorbing our English ears in the unique rhythms of everyday speech - a speech sometimes lost among those who've immigrated away:
"Who?" he asked.
"M pa konnen," she said.
He thought maybe she'd said a name, Lubin or Firmin.
"Who were they mistaken for?" he asked her again.
"M pa konnen," she repeated. "I don't know."
Rediscovering one's language is the key to rediscovering one's origins: our memories transmit via words, in the stories we tell each other, and in the histories we preserve. Danticat's work is more than just fiction-as-entertainment: it's a way of capturing a past that's integral to our present, and preserving it in amber for the generations that follow. We must understand where we're coming from if we want to move past it.
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Since the earthquake, Danticat has been approached by media outlets again and again for comment: her literary identity is so intimately tied to Haiti that she's become something of a go-to expert. You can hear her discussing the tragedy on NPR, where she talks about locating family in the Port-au-Prince area.
In a sadly prescient (but must-read) interview from 2004, she had this to say about American knowledge of Haitian life:
I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.
I wish her the best during these times. No American writer has more actively brought our attention to Haiti than she, so I cannot imagine the kind of emotional agony she must be facing right now, nor what's at stake in the long months ahead. My only point of reference - as a New Orleans native prior to Katrina - hardly compares with the scope of this tragedy.
I'll end with the lines from her New Yorker essay, which again underscores this theme of resilience, Haitian-style:
My nearly six-foot-tall twenty-two-year-old cousin—the beauty queen we nicknamed Naomi Campbell—who says that she is hungry and has been sleeping in bushes with dead bodies nearby, stops me [from crying].
"Don’t cry," she says. "That’s life."
"No, it’s not life," I say. "Or it should not be."
"It is," she insists. "That’s what it is. And life, like death, lasts only yon ti moman." Only a little while.
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More on the Author:
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Thanks to a certain other user for suggesting I write on her work, years ago. Sorry the series has been in hibernation.