When Edwidge Danticat tells stories, she taps into a long-flowing stream of family storytellers. Her written passages, luminous and wise, summon the jagged landscapes of memories, strife and love that stretch out across her native Haiti.
So when you ask the author if she’s the only writer in the family, it’s no wonder she responds with a smile and a shrug that says, “I doubt it.”
Perhaps her ancestors were not published authors. Perhaps they weren’t awarded the MacArthur “genius grant,” as Danticat was several weeks ago. Perhaps they were never awarded an American Book Award as she was, or reached the finalist ranks for a National Book Award, a PEN/Faulkner Award, or a National Book Critics Circle Award, as she has.
But, yes, they were writers. They were storytellers.
The most celebrated author of the Haitian diaspora, in such books as Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Dew Breaker, Danticat is as humble as she is revered.
When she heard the news that she had won a $500,000, no-strings-attached MacArthur grant, Danticat says she was thrilled — but she also felt a rush of anxiety.
“I get as anxious about good news as I do about bad news. It’s my Caribbean-ness, I think. I can never be fully joyful, without a bit of anxiety.”
Danticat is a quiet force in her city of immigrants, Miami, where she lives with her husband, Faidherbe Boyer, and their two young daughters in an airy, light-filled home at the edge of Little Haiti. Here, where schoolchildren study — as well as inspire — her works, Danticat is the most understated star in a celebrity-obsessed town.
Calm, graceful and “of the people,” she says her favorite hideouts are, of all places, book stores. Book stores, she says, are “church.”
This is because she found safe harbor in books when she felt lost as a child. She was just 12 when she left Haiti to join her parents in New York, after an eight-year separation during which Danticat and her brother were cared for by an aunt and uncle. Torn from a neighborhood of open doors and neighbors she knew by name, she landed in a large apartment building lined with undistinguishable doors and populated by barely visible residents, a sliver of confinement with a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the train tracks.
“Moving to Brooklyn at age 12, being severed from everything I knew — it was a turbulent time for me. But I was always one to suppress my emotions,” says Danticat, now 40, seated in the book-lined den of her home one recent afternoon.
Her 9-month-old daughter, Leila, plays on the floor just inches away. The baby gazes at her and squeals with delight.
“My brother was 10 and as soon as he got to New York, he thought, ‘This is what I’ve wanted all my life,’” Danticat goes on. “But for me, if I enjoyed anything I’d feel like I was betraying my family back in Haiti. If I enjoyed my pizza too much, I was slighting Haiti. So I’d lose myself in books.”
She devoured anything from novels to comics, searching for roadmaps to the daunting new country that spread out in steely grays and brick browns outside her balcony.
“In books, you find ambivalence, nuance,” she says.
She also found unfamiliar habits and feelings she didn’t recognize.
“In books, for some reason, people are always ‘torn.’ They’re at the dinner table and they’re ‘torn,’” she says, pronouncing the word with some fascination.
Danticat’s voyage into literature not only gave her a sense of place, it introduced her to a range of voices. Now the woman who has heard countless voices, and who finds inspiration in “the way people talk,” believes she is just one in a chorus.
“I’ve always felt that, in my writing, I’m involved in some communal work,” she says.
This belief may explain what moves Danticat to select her topics. From Haitian refugees embarking on perilous sea crossings to the secrets some families keep from their children about violence they’ve seen — and perpetrated — to the slaughter of Haitian laborers under a Dominican dictatorship, the author has delved into the core events that have shaped the Haitian psyche. And she has done this in a language that is both elegant and accessible, opening the pages of her books to literary sophisticates and rank-and-file students alike.
“Edwidge is a cultural treasure. She is a powerful voice for the immigrant experience and for universal human struggles. South Florida is most fortunate to have her here,” says Susana Barciela, policy director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center.
Author and anthropologist Ruth Behar, who won a MacArthur grant in 1988, says she is struck by the balance in Danticat’s writing voice.
“She speaks with an unusual kindness and humility while addressing terrible questions of violence, trauma, and loss,” says Behar, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, who has taught Danticat’s works in her course on ethnographic writing. Danticat, she says, “has made a difference in how we think about literature, identity, history, and community.”
Taking on painful realities head-on gives her perspective and a measure of distance, Danticat says.
Even in trying to heal after 2004, a year of deep personal losses, she says she knows no other way but to walk through the fire. That was the year her father, Andre Miracin Danticat, died in New York and his brother, her uncle Joseph — a frail, 81-year-old Haitian pastor fleeing thug violence against his church — died in U.S. immigration custody while seeking temporary asylum. Her uncle was like a second father to Danticat, caring for her in Haiti during her childhood separation from her parents.
Danticat, who still dresses in black to reflect her deuil, her bereavement, braved the depths of mourning to write her 2007 memoir Brother, I’m Dying, her most recent book.
“It was a way of maintaining my balance,” she says. “Getting it out of me and into an objective space, into the pages of my book, it helped me mourn.”
It also gave her an outlet for the outrage she felt over the senseless death of her uncle, whose medication was taken from him at the time of his detention on U.S. soil.
“What happened to my uncle was maddening. And it kept happening to other people. And it’s still happening to other people,” she says, echoing the frustrations of refugee advocates disappointed with President Barack Obama’s failure to grant Haitian asylum seekers protection from deportation. “It’s stunning. There’s been no change.”
Besides a memoir and a cathartic space, her most difficult year also gave her a great joy: She gave birth to her first child, a girl. The baby was born in Miami shortly before Danticat’s father died.
“He always said, ‘I want to meet the first child of my first child,’” she says.
And, on a day when life seemed to come full circle, making seamless the passage of one story to another story, he did.
