{"id":248,"date":"2014-06-10T17:27:05","date_gmt":"2014-06-10T17:27:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/?p=248"},"modified":"2017-05-23T15:48:10","modified_gmt":"2017-05-23T15:48:10","slug":"danticat-edwidge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/2014\/06\/10\/danticat-edwidge\/","title":{"rendered":"Danticat, Edwidge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Biography<\/h3>\n
\"Image<\/a>
Image by David Shankbone\/CC Licensed<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Edwidge Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1969. Her father\u00a0immigrated to the United States just 2 years later looking for work. Her\u00a0mother followed him in 1973. Danticat remained in Haiti eight more years,\u00a0raised by her aunt. At age 12 she reunited with her parents in a\u00a0predominantly Haitian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Two short\u00a0years later, Danticat published her first writing in English, including a\u00a0newspaper article about her immigration to the U.S. that inspired her first\u00a0novel,\u00a0Breath, Eyes Memory<\/em>. She returns to Haiti often to visit relatives.<\/p>\n

Edwidge Danticat received a degree in French Literature from\u00a0Barnard College and an MFA from Brown University. Her short stories have appeared in 25 periodicals and been anthologized several\u00a0times. She has also published a collection of short stories (Krik? Krak!<\/em>), three\u00a0novels (Breath, Eyes, Memory<\/em>,\u00a0The Farming of the Bones,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Dew Breaker<\/em>), young adult novels, anthologies and a collection of essays\u00a0(Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Writer at Work<\/em>).<\/em>\u00a0Her work has\u00a0been translated into Korean, Italian, German, French, Spanish and Swedish.\u00a0She\u00a0has taught\u00a0Creative Writing at New York University and the University of Miami.<\/p>\n

Themes<\/h3>\n

\u201cA Silenced Haiti has once again found its literary voice.\u201d -Paule Marshall (1)<\/p>\n

Although Edwidge Danticat feels being called “the voice of Haiti” silences many other Haitian writers and artists (2), her own experiences and concerns mirror those of the Haitian diaspora (see Globalism and Transnationalism<\/a>). Among the\u00a0many concerns in her novels, several salient themes appear: migration, sexuality, gender<\/a> 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\u2019s emphasis on women not only embraces a \u201cherstory\u201d that seems particularly salient to the economic realities of the Caribbean but also subverts the engendering of the nation and the exile as male. Moreover, Danticat\u2019s emphasis on women critically examines the possibility for a post-colonial feminism in each of her novels.<\/p>\n

Avoiding the easy identification of certain languages (English, French and Spanish), with the colonizer, Danticat takes a nuanced look at how language<\/a> 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 \u201ccompletely between languages<\/a>\u201d 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\u00a0Breath, Eyes, Memory<\/em>. \u201cPart of the reason that\u00a0Breath, Eyes, Memory<\/em>\u00a0is 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\u201d (3).<\/p>\n

The Farming of the Bones<\/em>\u00a0highlights 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 Parsley Massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic using language to create or express differing narratives of history that help 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\u00a0created that economy.<\/p>\n

In the same way that language cannot be severed from history, Danticat\u2019s novels illustrate how gender and sexuality are forever entwined with history and colonialism. In both novels, Danticat\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Breath, Eyes, Memory<\/em>\u00a0also invokes the body as a map of history. Sophie\u2019s face reminds her mother of\u00a0her own\u00a0rape by the Tonton Makout on her way through the cane fields as a child. Sophie\u2019s mother\u2019s testing of her virginity and\u00a0 Sophie\u2019s 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 though Sophie did not experience a Haiti dominated by the Makout, her own sexuality is marked by the trauma of not being free.<\/p>\n

Trauma, love, sexuality and history also\u00a0work in Danticat\u2019s novels to critique a global feminist agenda<\/a>. In\u00a0Breath, Eyes, Memory<\/em>\u00a0Sophie frees herself through a multi-cultural, multi-national, women\u2019s 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\u00a0The Farming of the Bones\u00a0<\/em>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\u2019s eyes she had been as much of an activist as she could be and in Amabelle\u2019s the loss was too great to justify clinging to a corrupt system of power.<\/p>\n

Danticat \u00a0has 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,\u00a0 i.e. the intersection of race, class, language and gender in transnational and post-colonial Haitians lives, will continue to be an integral part of her invocation of Haiti. (See also Nationalism<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Awards<\/h3>\n