novelist
Personal Information
Born January, 1969, in Leogane, Haiti; immigrated to the United States, c. 1981; became naturalized citizen; daughter of a cab driver and a factory worker.
Education: Barnard College, B.A., 1990; Brown University, M.F.A., 1993.
Career
Novelist. Associate producer, Jonathan Demme's Courage and Pain (a documentary), c. 1993-94.
Life's Work
Edwidge Danticat is one of only a handful of contemporary novelists of Haitian heritage writing in English. Danticat did not begin learning English until she moved from Haiti to New York City as an adolescent. Her talents in this second language were evident in the award-winning 1994 debut, Breath, Eyes, Memory. In this work, as well as her equally lauded 1995 short story collection Krik? Krak!, Danticat focuses on the lives and losses of Haitians, both at home-- where poverty, political repression, and fear were everyday hindrances for decades--and as transplants to an equally dangerous urban American setting where Haitians face a similar poverty, compounded by racism. "The agonies of Haiti are as wide as they are deep," the Caribbean- focused journal Islands acknowledged. "It would seem impossible, in fact, to write anything about Haiti that wasn't entirely tragic, yet Edwidge Danticat has done it."
Danticat was born in Leogane, a rural area of Haiti, in 1969. When she was two, her father emigrated to New York City to find more promising work. Her mother joined him two years later and left Danticat and a younger brother behind with a relative. The future writer was raised in proximity to several extended family members, some of whom were elders who thrived on telling folk tales. Oral traditions assumed a vital role in the education and sense of heritage for young Haitians like Danticat; for years the country had a marginal literacy rate--one of the lowest in the western hemisphere--and television broadcasts were infrequent because of meager electricity. "My most vivid memories of Haiti involved incidents that represent power failures," Danticat recalled in her publicity biography. "At those times, you can't read, or study, or watch TV, so you sit around a candle and listen to stories from the elders in the house."
Spirituality and the rituals of religion also impacted Danticat as a child. Her uncle was a Baptist minister, and she would attend all the funerals of the community with him. For a young girl whose parents had disappeared from her world--and furthermore, a world where people who curried disfavor with the political regimes of dictator Francois Duvalier and his son, "Baby Doc" Duvalier also disappeared with regularity--death was a lesser dread. Danticat once shared a room with a distant relative, a woman who was more than 100 years old and was present when she passed away. "I accepted her death very easily because in Haiti death was always around us," Danticat remarked in her publicity biography.
Life in Haiti was difficult. Poverty and fear infected daily life and blunted simple childhood pleasures. "I have memories of Jean Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier and his wife racing by in their Mercedes Benz and throwing money out of the window to the very poor children in our neighborhood," Danticat recalled in her publicity biography. Another time, a radio announcement alerted children to a Christmas-time toy giveaway at the presidential palace. "My cousins and I went and were nearly trampled in the mob of children who flooded the palace lawns," she remembered.
More problematic for Danticat, however, was her family situation. "The initial question of my life was explaining to myself first my mother's absence and then my father's," Danticat told New York's Rebecca Mead. "When she [Danticat's mother] was leaving, I didn't understand.... I didn't get it at all--and not just the fact that she was absent, but the conditions that drive that and that separate families...." Her mother's move to New York City--though ultimately only a temporary loss--was nevertheless a difficult cross for Danticat to bear. Haitian culture gives a special reverence to mothers and to be "san manman"-- motherless--is also a synonym for a hoodlum, or someone who knows no boundaries of human decency.
When Danticat was 12, she and her brother flew to New York City to join her parents--and two younger brothers born there. The airport reunion was no picnic for Danticat, however. "I was very, very nervous," Danticat recalled of the moment in an interview with the Miami Herald's Margaria Fichtner. "I didn't know these people. I felt like I was adopted." Her reunited family lived in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, and Danticat was enrolled in a bilingual education program to help with the transition. Danticat later credited the bilingual program at her intermediate school with giving her the platform to obtain a decent education. "It's very easy to get lost in the public school system because it's so big, and I am very shy," she told Joyce Purnick of the New York Times.
Danticat received an English-language set of author/illustrator Ludwig Bemelman's "Madeleine" books as a gift. Danticat's first foray into literary expression was in attempting to write a version of Madeleine with herself cast in the role of the orphaned, misunderstood title character. As a junior-high student, Danticat was teased by peers because of her accent. "Their name-calling pushed an already shy Danticat deeper into her shell, but also led her to take pen to paper searching for words to convey her feelings," wrote B.E.T. Weekend writer Patrik Henry Bass.
Occasionally adolescent tensions would erupt into violence, and Danticat witnessed fights between African Americans and Haitian immigrants. She went on to a high school geared toward teenagers hoping to pursue a career in medicine. Yet the program, in which students actually worked in a hospital after school, ultimately dissuaded Danticat from becoming a nurse.
After high school, Danticat moved into a less stressful atmosphere when she enrolled at Barnard College on a scholarship. She majored in French literature, and, after receiving her B.A. in 1990, was still considering going on to nursing school. Her parents--a taxi driver and a factory worker--strongly felt that their children should enter into well-paid, respected professions. To them, a career in the arts did not seem a solid, income-providing vocation, but Danticat won a scholarship to Brown University and enrolled their graduate writing program.
As an undergraduate, Danticat had begun an essay on herself and her lineage. She sent it to a literary agent, who suggested she expand it a bit more. Danticat turned it into her Brown thesis and eventually sent it back to the literary agency. One week later she was lunching with the agent, and the work became her first book. Breath, Eyes, Memory was published in 1994.
The novel follows the experiences of a young female Haitian immigrant to New York City, Sophie Caco, who is a victim of sexual abuse. The tale also involves Sophie's mother's prior assault by one of Duvalier's secret police--the Tonton Macoute--and touches upon Sophie's bonds with her aunt and grandmother. Danticat stressed in interviews that the abuse these women suffered was not autobiographical in nature. In the Miami Herald, Fichtner noted that many "hailed the book's emotional complexity and its resonant portrayal of the burdens history, politics, and culture impose upon the lives and hearts of women." Fichtner also noted that Breath, Eyes, Memory "has much to say about what it is like to be young, black, Haitian, and female wandering in a world too often eager to regard all of those conditions as less than worthwhile."
Danticat's willingness to tackle controversial subject matter earned her comparisons to African American author Alice Walker, and she even admitted to "borrowing" a character from Warrior Marks, Walker's treatise against female circumcision in lesser developed countries. Danticat explained that she saw the work as a way to give voice to the Haitian community's silenced women: "In our culture, women could not talk about things that bothered them ... because there is such a greater repression," Danticat told Philadelphia Inquirer writer Kevin L. Carter.
As Danticat was enjoying the first flushes of literary success, political events in Haiti brought her homeland into the news, causing reverberations in her own life. The Duvalier regime had spiraled to an end in 1986, and four years later, Roman Catholic priest Jean- Bertrand Aristide, became the nation's first freely elected leader. In 1991, a military coup ousted Aristide, who then fled the country. The international community responded with a trade embargo, which deeply hurt the already-impoverished Haitian people, and U.S. troops were eventually deployed. Haitians in large numbers began fleeing to Florida on makeshift boats; those intercepted on the way were put into refugee camps where conditions were abysmal.
After receiving her master degree, Danticat had taken a job with filmmaker Jonathan Demme's New York City production office; in this capacity she worked as an associate producer on Courage and Pain, a documentary about survivors of torture in Haiti. In an interview with Ingrid Sturgis for Emerge, Danticat spoke of the outlaw status of writers in Haiti's dictatorial past. "In our world, if you are a writer, you are a politician, and we know what happens to politicians. They end up in a prison dungeon, where their bodies are covered in scalding tar before they're forced to eat their own waste." With Demme she traveled back to her homeland in 1994 for the first time since leaving 13 years earlier; she was thus able to view the ceremony marking Aristide's official return to power.
The year 1994 brought Danticat more honors. The New York Times Magazine included her in a "30 Artists under 30" story, a group the editors predicted most likely to make an impact on American culture in the next 30 years. In addition, Breath, Eyes, Memory received the fiction award from the Black Caucus of the American Literary Association.
In 1995, a collection of short stories--some dating back to Danticat's Barnard days--was published by Soho Press. Krik? Krak! takes its title from Danticat's Creole language--"Krik?" one inquires to another at the onset of a folk tale, roughly meaning "I have a story--would you like to hear it?", and "Krak!" comes the reply, the equivalent of "Yes, go ahead!"
In nine interrelated stories, Danticat used some her own family's experiences as a basis for the lives of the characters. Much of the action takes place in the capital city of Port-au-Prince or the rural Ville Rose, where women must sometimes walk two miles each morning for the day's water. The story "1937" follows the travails of a woman imprisoned and tortured for witchcraft. Another takes place on one of the infamous doomed boats heading for Florida. "Children of the Sea" recounts the journey through letters written by a pair of lovers who never receive the other's missives. Through the letters, Danticat's story provides insight into the difficulties of life in Haiti and why so many purposely risked their lives to escape.
"The best of these stories," wrote the New York Times Book Review's Robert Houston, "humanize, particularize, [and] give poignancy to the lives of people we may have come to think of as faceless emblems of misery, poverty, and brutality." Washington Post Book World writer Joanne Omang asserted that Danticat "has woven the sad with the funny, the unspeakable with the glorious, [and] the wild horror and [with the] deep love that is Haiti today." Reviewing Krik? Krak! for the Seattle Times, Michael Upchurch found that "Danticat's often-sobering subjects are leavened by the bracing elegance of her prose and by her fondness for riddle."
Accordingly, the lauded Krik? Krak! was nominated for the prestigious National Book Award in 1995, placing Danticat in the company of established writers Philip Roth and Madison Smartt Bell that year. She announced that her next literary project would be a book about an infamous 1937 massacre of Haitians that occurred in the neighboring Dominican Republic. She also hoped to delve into issues relevant to the African diaspora. "We are all one people," Danticat told Carter in the Philadelphia Inquirer. "It was like there was this boat that left Africa and made a lot of stops; some of us got off here, some got off there."
Awards
Fiction award, Black Caucus of the American Literary Association, 1994, for Breath, Eyes, Memory; Woman of Achievement Award, Barnard College, 1995; Pushcart Prize, 1995; National Book Award nomination, 1995, for Krik? Krak!; named one of Twenty Best Young American Novelists by Granta magazine, 1996, for Breath, Eyes, Memory.
Works
Writings
- Breath, Eyes, Memory (novel), Soho Press, 1994.
- Krik? Krak! (short stories), Soho Press, 1995.
Further Reading
Periodicals
- B.E.T. Weekend, February 1996, p. 20.
- Emerge, April 1995, p. 58.
- Islands, May/June 1995.
- Miami Herald, April 19, 1995.
- New York, November 20, 1995.
- New York Newsday, March 30, 1995; May 16, 1995.
- New York Times, October 23, 1995.
- New York Times Book Review, April 23, 1995, p 22.
- New York Times Magazine, November 20, 1994.
- Philadelphia Inquirer, November 17, 1994.
- Progressive, January 1997.
- Seattle Times, April 30, 1995.
- USA Today, October 20, 1995; November 9, 1995, p. D6.
- Washington Post Book World, May 14, 1995, p. 4.
- Additional information for this profile was provided by Soho Press publicity materials, 1997.
— Carol Brennan
