Other literary forms
Edwidge Danticat has published in a wide variety of literary forms. Her early plays were produced while she was still a graduate student at Brown University, and her short-story collection Krik? Krak! was published in 1995. Her short stories also have been published in major periodicals and in anthologies. She has edited, written forewords to, and translated the works of other Haitian writers. She has also published novels for children and young adults, including Anacaona, Golden Flower (2005).
Danticat’s nonfiction works include After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (2002), which examines her first visit to carnival in Haiti, and Brother, I’m Dying (2007), an autobiographical account of her elderly uncle’s emigration to Miami and his encounter with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Achievements
Through her award-winning writings, Edwidge Danticat has brought an awareness of Haitian culture and Haitian immigrant experience to readers in the United States. Her short fiction won a Pushcart Prize, and her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, led to her selection as one of Granta’s Twenty Best Young American Novelists in 1996. The novel also was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, in 1998. Danticat’s short-story collection Krik? Krak! was nominated for a National Book Award in 1995. The Farming of Bones was written with the help of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation grant and won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. The Dew Breaker was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004 and a PEN/Faulkner Award in 2005. Brother, I’m Dying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography in 2007.
Danticat also has written professionally and worked as an educator. She taught creative writing at New York University and the University of Miami, edited anthologies, and worked with filmmakers on documentaries about Haiti and Haitian art.
Danticat’s writings, which have been translated into several languages, form a whole and complement one another to create a larger picture of Haitian and Haitian American experience. She is considered a leading voice for Haitian American women and has been embraced by feminists, the Haitian American community, the literary establishment, and the general reading public.
Biography
Edwidge Danticat was born on January 19, 1969, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the eldest child of André Miracin Danticat and Rose Danticat. Her father emigrated to the United States (New York) when Danticat was two years old; her mother emigrated when Danticat was four years old, leaving her and her brother, Eliab, in the care of an aunt and uncle in Haiti. The siblings joined their parents and two New York-born younger brothers in Brooklyn when Danticat was twelve years old. The members of her extended family in Haiti and the stories and traditions that she learned there were major influences on her later writing.
Danticat was raised speaking Haitian Creole, and she was educated in French while in Haiti. As a teenager in Brooklyn, she began to write in English, her third language. She majored in French literature at Barnard College and graduated from there in 1990. Danticat went on to earn a master of fine arts degree in writing from Brown in 1993. A version of her graduate thesis was published as her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory.
Danticat’s second novel, The Farming of Bones, a rich and mature work based on the 1937 massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, was published in 1998. The Farming of Bones was followed by work in editing, translation, and film. In 2002, Danticat published her first full-length nonfiction work, After the Dance, and a novel for young adults, Behind the Mountains (2002). This novel, presented in the form of the diary of a teenage Haitian girl who is reunited with her family in Brooklyn after eight years’ separation, is a coming-of-age story reflecting the stress of emigration on families.
Danticat moved from New York to Miami’s Little Haiti and was married in 2002 to Faidherbe “Fedo” Boyer, owner of a service offering creole-language translation. She and her husband have one child, daughter Mira Boyer.
Analysis
Edwidge Danticat writes fiction in a realistic style, making the lives of ordinary people central to her plots. Haitian history, culture, and politics merge with compelling storytelling and characters. She is a writer who turns historical events into art. Writing in beautifully crafted English, Danticat succeeds in portraying the poverty, madness, and violence of Haiti while honoring the country’s history, traditions, and beauty. The rhythms of Africa, the lyricism of French, and the realism of English come together in Danticat’s language and style. Her work connects the great literary themes of the journey, return, and reconciliation with the experiences of the contemporary Haitian American woman.
Breath, Eyes, Memory
Like Danticat, the main character of Breath, Eyes, Memory, Sophie Caco, is raised by her aunt in Haiti and emigrates to Brooklyn to join her mother when she is twelve years old. The novel’s exclusion of the male figures of Danticat’s youth—an uncle, a father, and a brother—strengthens the theme of the enduring strength of Haitian women.
The novel opens as Sophie’s mother sends her a plane ticket to join her in New York. On her first night in Brooklyn, Sophie discovers that her mother has nightmares that cause her to wake up screaming. Before long, Sophie learns the story of her birth: She is a child of rape. She also learns that her mother and aunt were “tested” regularly by their own mother, who would insert her fingers into their vaginas to check for “evidence” ensuring their virginity.
Once Sophie turns age eighteen and is ready to start college, she becomes interested in Joseph, a musician who lives next door and who asks her to marry him. When her mother finds out, she begins testing Sophie’s virginity weekly. Sophie learns to mentally separate herself from her physical body while the testing occurs. Finally she cannot bear the intrusion any longer and violently mutilates herself to make the testing stop. She then runs to Joseph and insists they marry immediately.
The second half of the book brings together the four generations of women in the Caco family. Sophie brings her infant daughter, Brigitte, to Haiti to visit Tante Atie and Grandmother Ifé as she attempts to reconcile the past with the present. Sophie has been traumatized by her mother’s testing, and is unable to enjoy a happy sexual relationship with her husband. Meanwhile, her mother, who has been mentally unstable since being raped, becomes pregnant by her longtime Haitian American lover and contemplates an abortion. In the end, Sophie makes an uneasy peace with her past, but is too late to save her mother, who commits suicide. It is only through the journey back to Haiti for her mother’s funeral that Sophie is able to face both the past and the future.
Breath, Eyes, Memory explores the pain, strength, and connection with the land that make up the psyche of the Haitian woman. The novel is dedicated to “the brave women of Haiti, grandmothers, mothers, aunts…on this shore and other shores. We have stumbled but we will not fall.” The novel, which emphasizes the significance of oral tradition and Haitian and African stories, has been praised by critics for its deep sense of place, its imagery, and its emotional complexity.
The Farming of Bones
Danticat’s second novel, The Farming of Bones, is a historical novel based on the 1937 massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Amabelle Désir, the protagonist, was orphaned at the age of eight and is now the maid and companion to the young Dominican wife of an army colonel. Amabelle loves Sebastien, a Haitian cane-cutter. As the story opens, they are preparing to marry.
Amabelle helps deliver her employer’s twins. The infant boy is light-skinned, but the tiny girl’s skin is dark. The young mother says, rather ingenuously, that she hopes her daughter will not be mistaken for one of Amabelle’s people, the Haitians. The scene is set for a tale of prejudice and violence. Haitians are necessary workers on the Dominican side of their common border, but they are persecuted and treated as inferiors.
Amid growing rumors of violence against Haitians, the family doctor urges Amabelle to leave the country. Amabelle convinces Sebastien to join her on a truck leaving for the border. She is delayed by complications with her employer’s childbirth, and by the time she reaches the departure rendezvous, the doctor and all the departing Haitians have been arrested.
Amabelle escapes to Haiti by swimming across the same river in which her parents had drowned, but not before being badly beaten by a Dominican mob; several of her companions have been killed. She spends the rest of her life as a seamstress in Cap Haitien, ultimately accepting Sebastien’s disappearance, one among so many other Haitians who were lost. The rest of the novel deals with Amabelle’s endurance as she lives a hollow, posttraumatic life. Many years later she journeys back to her old town on the Dominican side of the border and meets with her old employer in a sort of reconciliation.
Witnessing, remembering, and naming are among the themes of the novel. Amabelle has been a witness to horrendous events. Many would like to suppress these memories, but Amabelle still remembers. The opening line of The Farming of Bones is “His name is Sebastien Onius.” Sebastien’s fate remains unknown, but his name must be remembered.
The Farming of Bones has been described as “haunting.” It is a deeper, more mature work than Danticat’s first novel, bringing a piece of Haitian history to the attention of a wider public through the fictional technique of telling one woman’s story. The novel shares themes with Breath, Eyes, Memory as well, including the posttraumatic stress of a woman ever-connected with Haiti, the journey of reconciliation, and the connections between the old life and the new.
The Dew Breaker
The Dew Breaker is a series of short stories connected by one character, a Tonton Macoute, a member of the secret police-militia of Haitian dictator François Duvalier. As the book opens, the reader meets the dew breaker (so named because he attacks before dawn, before the dew breaks) through the eyes of his grown daughter. He is now a barber living in Brooklyn, a man with a terrible scar on his face and nightmares of his life in Haiti. His daughter has been told only that he got the scar in prison in Haiti, but in the opening story he reveals a part of the truth: He worked in the prison. The acts of remembering and telling are as essential to the perpetrator’s story in The Dew Breaker as they are to those of the victims in The Farming of Bones.
The reader meets several characters who have been touched by the dew breaker—his tenants, neighbors, and clients in Brooklyn, and some of his victims. They are the witnesses to the dew breaker’s history. The characters range from young to old, educated to uneducated, born in Haiti to born in New York, happy to unhappy, communicative to secretive. By emphasizing individual persons, focusing each chapter of the book on a character, Danticat once more makes the reader understand the complicated, multifaceted story of Haiti through the details of ordinary lives. The picture that emerges is one of interconnectedness of past and present, and the connection of life in Haiti to the many faces of the immigrant experience in New York.
The final story of the novel is the most compelling. The tale focuses on the never-named dew breaker’s last act as a Tonton Macoute, his desire to break free of his violent life, and his meeting with the woman who will become his wife (and who will redeem him, as much as redemption is possible). The story is complex, as the dew breaker’s actions are neither condoned nor condemned, but presented as another aspect of the reality of Haiti’s history.
The Dew Breaker showcases Danticat’s skills as a writer and storyteller, her graphic yet understated realism, and her grasp of the madness of life in Haiti. The language is spare and beautiful, in contrast to the ugliness of the story, and the fragmented, nonlinear structure of the novel emphasizes the secrecy and mystery of the dew breaker’s life.