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                              Edwidge Danticat

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Biography

Edwidge Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince Haiti in 1969.  Her father
immigrated to the United States just 2 years later looking for work.  Her
mother followed him in 1973.  Danticat remained in Haiti eight more years,
raised by her Aunt.  At age 12 she reunited with her parents in a
predominantly Haitian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn, NYC.  Two short
years later, Danticat published her first writing in English, including a
newspaper article about her immigration to the U.S.  that inspired her first
novel, Breath, Eyes Memory.  She returns to Haiti often to visit relatives.

          Edwidge Danticat received a degree in French Literature from
          Barnard College and an MFA from Brown University. Her short
stories have appeared in 25 periodicals and been anthologized several
times.  She has also published a collection of stories (Krik? Krak!) and two
novels (Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of the Bones).  Her work has
been translated into Korean, Italian, German, French, Spanish and Swedish.
She currently teaches Creative Writing at NYU.

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Themes

"A Silenced Haiti has once again found its literary voice." -Paule Marshall
(1)

Although Edwidge Danticat feels being the voice of Haiti ignores and
silences the multiple Haitian voices speaking Haiti into being across the
globe(2), her own experiences and concerns mirror those of the Haitian
diaspora.  Among her many concerns in her novels, several salient themes
appear: migration, sexuality, gender and history.  These issues are integral
to a post-colonial endeavor where nations are often invoked in the minds of
exiles, migrants and newly freed governments.  Danticat’s emphasis on women
not only embraces a herstory that seems particularly salient to the economic
realities of the Caribbean but also subverts the nation and the exile as
gendered male.  Moreover, Danticat’s emphasis on women critically examines
the possibility for a post-colonial feminism in each of her novels.

Avoiding the easy identification of certain languages, English, French and
Spanish, with the colonizer, Danticat takes a nuanced look at how language
operates as personal and political expression.  Danticat herself spoke
Creole as a child but learned French in school.  When she arrived in New
York, she began the process of learning and writing English.  As a child, as
opposed to an adult, she claims she was "completely between languages" able
to express herself orally in Creole but unable to express herself in prose
in any language.  She tried to reflect this challenge to self-expression
that is integrally linked to the migrant nature of globalization and
post-colonial workforces in the structure of Breath, Eyes, Memory.  "Part of
the reason that Breath, Eyes, Memory is told in these four fragments is that
Sophie, the narrator, is a recent speaker of English, and in telling a story
in English she would definitely try to be economical with her words. . . .
She would mostly get to the important events, right to the point." (3)

The Farming of the Bones highlights the connection between language and
personal and social meaning.  On the one hand the characters in the novel
actively create histories through the stories that they tell each other and
themselves about the 1937 massacre using language to create, or express, a
differing narrative of history that helps uphold their self-images.  On the
other, the names, religious references and other linguistic
nuances mark the characters as either Haitian or Dominican long
before they are identified as such in the narrative.  Names of buildings and
towns do the same, French being Haitian and Spanish being Dominican.  The
title of the book itself plays on the multiple meanings of language
referring at once to the massacre and the gathering of cane.  Thus the title
of the book not only invokes the events of 1937 but also the economic
situation that led to those events and the colonialism and slavery that
created that economy.

In the same way that language cannot be severed from history, Danticat’s
novels illustrate how gender and sexuality are forever entwined with history
and colonialism.  In both novels, Danticat’s main characters are women
involved in complicated sexual relationships.  Both Senora Valencia and
Amabelle experience love through their relationship to the massacre.  La
Senora rewrites her husband’s role in the massacre in order to justify
staying with him, while Amabelle leaves her lover behind in order to survive
the massacre.  Her advice to him on where to hide places him in the line of
danger and he is presumed dead.

Breath, Eyes, Memory also invokes the body as a map of history. Sophie’s
face reminds her mother of the rape by the Tonton Makout on her way through
the cane fields as a child.  Sophie’s mother’s testing of her virginity and
Sophie’s own forceful rejection of the testing through the breaking of her
hymen forever marks her own body as a place of physical trauma.  Thus, even
 hough Sophie did not experience a Haiti dominated by the Makout her own
sexuality is marked by the trauma of not being free.

Trauma, love, sexuality and history also combine in Danticat’s novels to
critique a global feminist agenda.  In Breath, Eyes, Memory Sophie frees
herself through a multi-cultural, multi-national, women’s support group.
Sophie engages in this group ritual not only to free herself, and support
the other women, but also to create a brighter future for her daughter.
Although The Farming of the Bones does not invoke the same shared, yet
multi-vocal, sisterhood it does interrogate the bonds between women in power
and women on the receiving end of that power.  There is no easy answer in
the conversation between Senora Valencia and Amabelle at the end of the
book, only the recognition that in Senora’s eyes she had been as much of an
activist as she could be and in Amabelle’s the loss was too great to justify
clinging to a corrupt system of power.

Danticat claims she has explored mother-daughter relationships and migration
in her novels and is now ready to address something else.(4)  Yet, if her
work so far is any indication, the consequences of post-colonial migration,
i.e. the intersection of race, class, language and gender in transnational
and post-colonial Haitians live, will continue to be an integral part of her
invocation of Haiti.


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Awards

1994 Fiction Award The Caribbean Writer

        1995 Woman of Achievement Award
Pushcart Short Story Prize
National Book Award nomination for Krik? Krak!

1996 Best Young American Novelists for Breath, Eyes, Memory by GRANTA
Lila-Wallace-Reader’s Digest Grant

1999 American Book Award for The Farming of the Bones
The International Flaiano Prize for literature
The Super Flaiano Prize for The Farming of the Bones

Other Awards/recognition:  fiction awards Essence and Seventeen Magazine; 1
of 20 people in their twenties who will make a difference in Harpers Bazaar;
featured in "30 under 30" people to watch New York Times Magazine; one of
the "15 Gutsiest Women of the Year" Jane Magazine; Oprah Winfrey’s Book of
the Month Club for Breath, Eyes, Memory.


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Books Published


Krik? Krak! NY: Vintage Books, 1991

Breath, Eyes, Memory  NY: Vintage Books, 1994

The Farming of the Bones NY: Penguin Books, 1998

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Works Cited

Battista, Anna. "She Came a Long Way:  Spotlight on Edwidge Danticat." Pop
Culture Detox. August 1999 Online. Bluetonic.org 3 April 2000
"A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat" Behind the Books.  Online.
Randomhouse.com. 3 April 2000.
Marshall, Paule. "Back Cover Quote" Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! NY:
Vintage Books, 1995.


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Selected Bibliography

Casey, Ethan. "Remembering Haiti" Callaloo 18.2 (Spring 1995):524-526 (also
available on line
http://muse.jhu.edu:80/journals/callaloo/v018/18.2br_danticat.html)

Charters, Mallay. "Edwidge Danticat: A Bitter Legacy Revisited." Publishers
Weekly. Aug 17. (1998): 42-43.

N'Zengo-Tayo, Marie-Jose. "Children in Haitian Popular Migration as Seen by
Maryse Conde and Edwidge Danticat." 93-100. In Newson, Adele S.
andStrong-Leek, Linda (ed. and introd.). Winds of Change: The Transforming
Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars. NY: Peter Lang, 1998.

Shea, Renee H.. "The Dangerous Job of Edwidge Danticat: An Interview."
Callaloo. 19.2 (Spring  1996): 382-89 (also available online
http://muse.jhu.edu:50/journals/callaloo/v019/19.2shea.html)

Yari Yari : Black Women Writers & The Future : An International Conference
on Literature by Women of African Descent.  Dir. Jayne Cortez.  NY : Third
World Newsreel, 1999.

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Related Sites

   * Brief history of Haiti
   * Antihaitianismo in the Domincan Republic
   * U.S. involvement in 1937 massacre
   * Danticat’s Memories of Haiti
   * Danticat on Literature
   * Interview with Danticat

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Author: Ime Kerlee, Spring 2000

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(Image of an "Homme Carrefour" from Donald J. Cosentino's Sacred Arts of
Haitian Vodou [Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995].)
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Last Update: December 20, 2000