Edwidge Danticat

• Born: January 19, 1969
• Place of Birth: Port-au-Prince, Haiti

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 first short-story collection Krik? Krak! was published in 1995. Her second short story collection, Everything Inside, was published in 2019. They have been published in major periodicals and anthologies. She has edited, written forewords to, and translated the works of other Haitian writers. She has also published books for children and young adults, including Behind the Mountains (2002), Anacaona, Golden Flower (2005), Eight Days: A Story of Haiti (2010), The Last Mapou (2013), Mama’s Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation (2015), and Untwine (2015).

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; 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; Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010), essays adapted from her 2008 Toni Morrison Lecture at Princeton University; and The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (2017), Danticat’s reflections on losing her mother to cancer and the ways other writers have written about death. Further nonfiction works include Mama's Nightingale (2015), The Art of Death (2017), and My Mommy Medicine (2019).

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, a collection of short stories, 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. In 2009, she received a MacArthur Genius grant worth $500,000. Additionally, she was awarded honorary degrees from Yale University (2013), Smith College (2012), and the University of the West Indies Open Campus (2017). Her short story collection Everything Inside (2019) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the Story Prize, and the Vilcek Foundation Prize.

Danticat has also written professionally and worked as an educator. She taught creative writing at New York University and the University of Miami, edited anthologies, and collaborated with filmmakers on documentaries about Haiti and Haitian art.

Danticat’s writings, translated into several languages, form a whole and complement one another to create a larger picture of the 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 Haiti in the care of an aunt and uncle. The siblings joined their parents and two New York-born younger brothers in Brooklyn when Danticat was twelve. The traditions and stories she learned from her extended family in Haiti influenced her later writing.

Danticat was raised speaking Haitian Creole and 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, graduating 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 editing, translation, and film work. 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 as the diary of a teenage Haitian girl reunited with her family in Brooklyn after eight years of separation, is a coming-of-age story reflecting the stress of emigration on families.

Danticat's third novel, Claire of the Sea Light (2013), tells the story of Claire, whose widower father Nozias gave her up for adoption. Rather than be separated, Claire runs away, prompting a search that reveals the townspeople's long-held secrets.

Danticat moved from New York to Miami’s Little Haiti and married Faidherbe “Fedo” Boyer, owner of a Creole-language translation service, in 2002. She and her husband have two daughters, Mira and Leila 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. 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 with Sophie’s mother sending 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 mother, who would insert her fingers into their vaginas to check for “evidence” ensuring their virginity.

Once Sophie turns eighteen and is ready to start college, she becomes interested in Joseph, a musician who lives next door, and 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 book's second half 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 can 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, including the posttraumatic stress of a woman ever-connected with Haiti, the journey of reconciliation, and the connections between the old and new life.

The Dew Breaker

The Dew Breaker is a series of short stories connected by one character, 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 there. The acts of remembering and telling are as essential to the perpetrator’s story in The Dew Breaker as those of the victims in The Farming of Bones.

The reader meets several characters touched by the dew breaker—his tenants, neighbors, 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, and communicative to secretive. By emphasizing individual persons and focusing each chapter of the book on a character, Danticat makes the reader understand Haiti's complicated, multifaceted story 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. 

Bibliography

Bennett, Ian A. B., editor. Four Writers: Women Writing the Caribbean. Sargasso, 2005.

Clitandre, Nadège T. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. University of Virginia Press, 2018.

Clitandre, Nadège T., and Thadious M. Davis. Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat. U Press of Mississippi, 2022.

Danticat, Edwidge. “An Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” Interview by Bonnie Lyons. Contemporary Literature , vol. 44, no. 2, 2003, pp. 181-98.

"Edwidge Danticat." Columbia University, 2024, afamstudies.columbia.edu/content/edwidge-danticat. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Gleibermann, Erik. "The Story Will Be There When You Need It: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat." World Literature Today, vol. 93, no. 1, 2019, pp. 68-74. doi.org/10.7588/worllitetoda.93.1.0068.

López-Ropero, Lourdes. “Empathizing with the Rights of Others: Reading Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother and Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying as Humanitarian Narratives.” Concentric: Literacy & Cultural Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2016, pp. 85–104. Literary Reference Center Plus, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=119233380&site=lrc-plus. Accessed 30 Mar. 2018.

Montgomery, Maxine Lavon. Conversations with Edwidge Danticat. U Press of Mississippi, 2017.

Munro, Martin. Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrière, Danticat. Liverpool University Press, 2007.