She Came a Long Way: Spotlight on Edwidge Danticat
by Anna Battista
I'm silently waiting in a corner of the stage where just a few minutes ago, Edwidge Danticat, author of Krick? Krack!, Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones, received two prizes, the International Flaiano Prize for literature and the Super Flaiano Prize for her novel The Farming Of Bones. The photographer is still taking a few pictures: Edwidge is unpretentiously sitting at the long table, behind her back is the big orange manifesto that reads "XXVI Premi Flaiano." Technicians are rambling around while a few journalists are waiting in the theatre room, by now nearly empty, to interview her.
Edwidge Danticat has come a long way: she was born in 1969 in Haiti, where she lived till the age of 12. Then she went to the States, to New York, to reach her parents and her family, leaving Haiti where she had lived with her aunt. She studied, received a degree in French, and started writing in English, not in French or Creole - the former was the language she learnt at school while in Haiti, the latter the language she spoke at home, but wasn't able to write in.
Her first book, Krik? Krak!, was a collection of short stories, nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1995. Breath, Eyes, Memory, her 1994 novel, won a Granta Regional Award for Best Young American Novelist. Her second novel, The Farming of Bones, received tonight two awards in Pescara, a seaside resort in the centre of Italy.
Tonight was an exciting night for Danticat: she had indeed to await for the jury to give the final vote and the verdict of the best book. There were minutes of agony in the theatre while the literary contest between the young Edwidge Danticat and the venerable Vincenzo Consolo (author of Lo Spasimo di Palermo) and Max Gallo (author of La Voce del Destino) went on. I witnessed the contest behind a column of the auditorium, mumbling a joyful "WE won" when Danticat's book was proclaimed absolute winner, because I thought that, for once, a young and refreshing voice (and a woman as well) had prevailed.
There is still a sense of palpable excitement hanging in the air and that's probably why, while waiting for the photographer to take the last picture, I find myself still thinking about what happened during the discussion that preceded the final vote and the awarding ceremony. There was in fact a lecture before the awarding ceremony took place.
The round table was about the issue "Literature and Science" and about how often they are considered as two contrasting and dividing entities, one generated our dreams, the other by our reason.
During the round table the writers invited gave their personal opinions and new means of communication such as the Internet, were cherished or criticised. The Internet was mentioned and someone claimed that the speed at which we receive information will eventually kill literature.
"I feel that with or without science we'll always have some kind of literature," Edwidge Danticat stated during the round table. "Science doesn't have to put an end to literature and literature doesn't have to put an end to science. Science can enlighten literature and literature can enlighten some aspects and help science." After her comment I sort of felt better since, many other writers commenting before Danticat scarily talked about the death of literature, mentioning the Internet, without realising that literature has to move with times, because the new generations are really hungry for it, but at the same time, they need to be entertained by other narrative strategies or new means of communication, such as novels that can be downloaded from the Internet, or written by many writers based in different places who have maybe never met before, but who sit down and write in virtual chat-rooms. Literature pertains to the sphere of the Greek notion of "dromos": the race, the speed, in the same way as language, belongs to this dimension. Language, the clog in constant motion inside the clock of the human race, constantly changes and so does literature. Both are therefore free from every imaginary restrictive chains we try to trap them into.
"And when I think of literature, I'm considering oral and written tradition," Danticat pointed out, "Literature is without time, whether we're talking about oral literature, where stories are passed to one another, to one voice to the other, to a generation to the another and whether we are talking about written literature. There is always something that we look for in a story and that we can't find anywhere else."
When we think of the Caribbean, we often think of sunny lands, marimba bands and occult voodoo ceremonies, elements which are present in Haiti, but which often reduce the characters of novels settled in these exotic and mysterious places to mere caricatures.
With Danticat, this doesn't happen because she gives the right dimension to her characters, so if there are doses of folk tales and traditions, there is also a great sense of humanity that mirrors the high respect Danticat has of the culture and of the people she belongs to.
During the round table Danticat passed to explain how the stories told by the African griots, local storytellers, and the stories painted by painters were the first genuine stories. "Painters and storytellers used what they had to tell us our stories. There is an African proverb which says that every time a person dies it is as if a whole library burnt. Today, if a person dies it doesn't mean that a whole library burns."
Danticat underlined with her words the importance of culture, of the various means it develops through and spreads around: today, in fact, we can have access to different instruments, we have tape and video recorders, audio and video supports that can help us preserving certain pieces of information created so that people can enjoy different materials.
"Imagine if we had recordings from Shakespeare," suggested Danticat. "I don't think that we should see science and literature as antagonists. There are writers, such as George Orwell in 1984, who showed brilliantly the dark side of history. Writers are witnesses to history and scientists part of the historical process," she continued, before explaining, "I think that maybe there are many things that scientists and writers have in common. Both are questioning themselves and I think both are looking for impossible answers to impossible questions."
So, after debating the apparently contrasting issue "Literature vs. Science," Edwidge Danticat underlined the value of literature, "Literature is a society mirror. I think that empathy is necessary for our common surviving. Literature teaches us to step into the other. Literature doesn't only teach the secrets of our hearts, but of the others' hearts as well and science will never be a menace to that," she concluded on this subject.
Her latest novel, The Farming of Bones, deals with a theme particularly important to Haiti the purity of race: in 1937 the Dominican dictator in Haiti ordered the massacre of the Creole minority. 40,000 Haitians were massacred, so that the title itself, The Farming of Bones, travay tè pou zo in Creole, refers to the harvesting of the cane fields, but also to the massacre, a literal "farming of bones." Indeed in her novel we read:
"Those who die young, they are cheated (...) Not cheated out of life, because life is a penance, but the young, they're cheated because they don't know it's coming. They don't have time to move closer, to return home. When you know you're going to die, you try to be near the bones of your own people. You don't even think you have bones when you're young, even when you break them, you don't believe you have them. But when you're old they start reminding you they're there. They start turning to dust on you, even as you're walking here and there, going from place to place. And this is when you crave to be near the bones of your own people..."
This is how Man Denise, one of the most beautiful characters of the book, comments upon the death of her children. "Writing about this story has made me feel closer to it because, as we said earlier, writing makes you feel closer to somebody else," Danticat explained. "A writer is someone who travels all the roads that the characters travel, both the internal and the external roads, and I do feel that I understand history - not just mine, but the history of others as well and the history of oppression and of triumphs - better when I write."
The story focuses in particular on Amabelle's character, obliged to run away from the house she serves and the love she nourishes for Sebastian to escape the massacre. In the end, she manages to survive, but she loses everything and her body becomes a living map of scars, a testimony of the massacre.
Danticat portrays in her novel the necessity of witnessing and remembering, in the face of the pain of memory, after all, she wrote in Breath, Eyes, Memory: "I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head."
Before receiving one of the prizes, a short piece of the novel was read: 'It all makes you understand that the flesh is like everything else,' the man who had been in the pit with the cadavers said. 'It is no different, the flesh, than fruit or anything that rots. It's not magic, not holy. It can shrink, burn, and like amber it can melt in fire. It is nothing. We are nothing." At this point someone asked Danticat how could a 30 year old woman write such a powerful sentence. She answered, "I think at the time I was young there were many people around me who had lived the experience of the horrors of dictatorship. And, in these conditions, the horror is obvious to children as well as adults. I have always read to understand that better, now I think I write to understand that better."
The photographer is still taking pictures and when he finishes I can finally ask Edwidge Danticat a few personal questions. I ask her where she found the strength and inspiration to write. "I think it probably comes from some of the things I experienced early on in my life. For me, writing has always been about bearing witness and trying to understand who you are and your writing context in the world. Being a child of migrants I think my life was always a kind of search and writing is a way for me to interpret that search."
As we walk off the stage, we examine another problem. Migration and separation of families are at the core of Breathe, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones. They are two core themes, together with the figure of the mother who is strong in Breath, Eyes, Memory, where there is a matriarchal reality, which goes from worshipping the Haitian goddess Erzulie, equalled to the Virgin Mary, to Sophie's mother who tests her daughter's virginity.
Sophie, in Breath, Eyes, Memory says, "Women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to." The story begins on Mother's Day and develops around the relationships between a mother and a daughter. In The Farming of Bones, the main character is separated from her parents and the figures of Sebastian and Mimi's mother Man Denise and Yves' mother Man Rapadou are very important and beautifully crafted. I wonder if Danticat would like to write more about such themes. "No, I think that, in a way, part of that came from the fact that I was trying to interpret the big separations in my life, from my mother, my family and country. I think that I've explored that. It will always be essential for me as a person and it will always be at some level part of my work though."
Danticat recently featured in the collection of stories The Bluelight Corner: Black Women Writing on Passion, Sex and Romantic Love (edited by Rosemarie Robotham) with her story, "Night Woman" alongside Gloria Naylor, Benilde Little, Jamaica Kincaid, Pearl Cleage and Alice Walker.
I ask her how she feels at being compared to great and famous black women writers such as Toni Morrison and Mary McCarthy: "I think I feel like a baby writer in such a comparison," she humbly states. "I'm still learning my craft and I'm learning from them." Danticat teaches Creative Writing at New York University, so I reckon she may be the best person to whom I can ask something about writing, in particular what would she like to suggest to young people who want to be writers. "No matter what you do, just keep writing," she tells me, "I think that's the best thing and ignore the people who put you off. I think that if you have a vision you should be true with it and keep writing."
There are so many things I would like to ask Danticat: how things changed in Haiti, if she has a favourite Italian or Haitian writer, but time is tight and mine has run out many minutes ago. It's time to go for Edwidge Danticat. We depart, but before doing so, she wishes me good luck.
When I finally leave the theatre, I have the impression that I have just met a young woman writer, who at present, is enjoying a great success thanks to her sensibility, her humble and gentle ways and her deep knowledge of her own past and of her country's past. I open the book she has signed for me. Her dedication closes with simple but powerful words "In Sisterhood, Edwidge Danticat." And that "In Sisterhood" suddenly means a lot to me, because it was written by that same woman who dedicated her Breath, Eyes, Memory to "the brave women of Haiti" adding "we have stumbled but we will not fall."
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