New Crossings

Caribbean Migration Narratives

Anthea Morrison

• Publisher: The University of the West Indies Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9789766407377

This interdisciplinary study focuses on recent migrant literature by five outstanding authors from the anglophone, francophone and hispanophone Caribbean: Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Curdella Forbes and Caryl Phillips. Anthea Morrison offers a unique focus on Caribbean migration from a diverse corpus of texts. The analysis emphasizes the importance of travelling in the Caribbean imaginary and the discourse of identity and offers close readings of several "migrant narratives".

Care is taken to underline the specificity of the national contexts which inform the work of each author, despite the manifest commonalities they share as Caribbean writers, and further, to illustrate the heterogeneity of Caribbean thought. The analysis seeks to demonstrate that Caribbean migrant literature is far from monolithic, not only because of inevitable sociopolitical and historical differences between the distinctive territories but also because of the singularities of temperament and experience which shape the attitudes of individual writers vis-à-vis the land left behind.

At a time when, both regionally and internationally, issues of multiculturalism, migrancy and an apparent resurgence of nativism are topics of urgent discussion, New Crossings brings timely focus to the continuing importance of migration in Caribbean experience and in Caribbean literature.

[CHAPTER 1]

EDWIDGE DANTICAT

The Immigrant Writer as “Witness from Afar”

IN “BLACK BODIES IN MOTION AND IN PAIN”, an essay published in the New Yorker on 22 June 2015, Edwidge Danticat uses the group of paintings the “Migration Series”, by the African American Jacob Lawrence, to make an unexpected linkage between two groups of victims: on the one hand, the Dominicans of Haitian descent rendered “stateless” by a discriminatory Constitutional Court in 2013, and on the other, the churchgoers of Charleston killed by a bigot’s gun on 17 June 2015. What is particularly compelling about this piece is that it exemplifies the breadth of vision which characterizes Danticat’s oeuvre, in which the creative writer/cultural critic focuses on several categories of “black bodies in motion”. In the 2015 essay, Danticat articulates, as poignantly as she ever has, her sometimes painful relation to the notion of “home”. While the piece is a response to the trauma experienced by Dominicans of Haitian descent since the 2013 judicial ruling which deprived them of citizenship, its haunting title alludes not only to the dilemma of soon-to-be deported Haitians, but also to that of African Americans, confronting a problematic underdog status in their supposed “homeland” (one should note that the Jacob Lawrence paintings trace the migration of millions of African Americans from rural to urban areas in the United States):

Human beings have been migrating since the beginning of time. We have always travelled from place to place looking for better opportunities, where they exist. We are not always welcomed, especially if we are viewed as different and dangerous, or if we end up, as the novelist Toni Morrison described in her Nobel lecture, on the edges of towns that cannot bear our company. Will we ever have a home in this place, or will we always be set adrift from the home we knew? Or the home we have never known.¹

Though Edwidge Danticat, like Junot Díaz and also like Caryl Phillips, left the Caribbean while still a child, she is not “set adrift” from her native Haiti, though she is clearly sensitive to the spectre of homelessness. Her generation, her almost second generation of Caribbean migrants, might in theory be somewhat detached, if not alienated, from the “old, familiar ways” of homeland wistfully celebrated in the 1920s by the Jamaican poet Claude McKay:

Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root

Cocoa in pods and alligator pears . . .

My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;

A wave of longing through my body swept,

And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,

I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.²

But I will argue in this chapter that as “immigrant artist”, Danticat, who has been living in North America since the age of twelve, does in fact habitually look southward, to the island of origin. It is worth underlining, in this context, the validity of Alison Donnell’s warning that diasporic criticism may tend to represent migrant writers in such a way that “the Caribbean nation, place and region becomes the dispossessed centre from which literal and intellectual trajectories take their point of departure but make no return”.³ For Haiti is not “dispossessed” in this sense in Danticat’s work: the Haitian American writer demonstrates a persistent preoccupation with a land neither truly native or other. Her commitment to Haiti is manifest not only in a prodigious body of literary texts, but in her activism: for example, Danticat and Díaz were two of four writers, including another Dominican American, Julia Alvarez, who protested through an op-ed published in the New York Times against the legal marginalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent.⁴ More recently, in May 2017, Danticat published an essay advocating for the approximately fifty thousand Haitians in danger of losing the “temporary protected status” they received after the 2010 earthquake in an essay entitled “A Harrowing Turning Point for Haitian Immigrants”.⁵

While lacking a shared ethnicity or a common national identity, Danticat and Díaz (whose work will be discussed in chapter 2) both embody an inclusive and sometimes militant Caribbeanness. It is Danticat who has more self-consciously articulated the responsibilities of a group on whom she confers the imperative to “create dangerously” in the 2010 collection of semi-autobiographical texts entitled Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. At the same time, the New Yorker essay cited at the beginning of this chapter underscores what emerges elsewhere in Danticat’s writing – her acceptance of the United States as more than “host country”, as a location with whose political and social realities she engages as if born there. Like Junot Díaz, with whom she has enjoyed a real friendship as well as a literary alliance, Danticat cannot claim the malaise of the political refugee, irrevocably banished from homeland; nor – at the other extreme of the continuum of migrant experiences – does she exhibit the complacency of one who has accepted a comfortable hybridity. Both writers, as well as several of their fictional characters, are keenly conscious of difference, of their difference, and both, while manifestly rejecting the messianism of those who would seek to speak for all their compatriots, seem committed to advocating for inhabitants of these new North American diasporas, as well as for compatriots still in the Caribbean. While the Haitian American does to some extent assume in her fiction the role of interpreter for a people largely misunderstood in North America (and even in the Caribbean region), she does not mask the sociopolitical conditions which motivate migrancy – and which contributed to her beloved uncle’s exile and death (in Brother, I’m Dying). It is clear, then, that to label Edwidge Danticat as either an American or a Haitian writer would be to ignore a complex identity of which language is one vital component, as demonstrated by her choice of English as language of literary creation, as the now familiar and even productive “stepmother tongue”.⁶ In a 1995 lecture/essay, “Haiti: A Bi-cultural Experience”, Danticat used as a compelling metaphor for a divided self a memorable culinary image, claiming that according to her characters, one of the positives of a “bi-cultural life” is that “you have plantains with your Thanksgiving dinner. The proverbs of your language peek through the veil of the English you speak.”⁷

The allusion to the plantain, a Caribbean favourite which knows no nationality, might appear to suggest that Danticat revels in the multiplicity of influences which the migration experience may offer. However, in the fictional and non-fictional texts on which the present chapter focuses – The Dew Breaker; Brother, I’m Dying; and Create Dangerously – the writer undermines comforting assumptions of a fruitful transnationalism or bi-culturalism, making it clear that her duality of vision and experience may also generate angst. It is important to note that for one who, like Danticat, left the Caribbean as a child, identity is not a monolithic entity, frozen in time: rather, the relation to the United States is a changing, growing thing, as revealed in these lines from “Haiti”, which relate to the spring of 1981, the year Danticat and her brother arrived in New York: “None of us at that time considered ourselves anything but Haitians, even though there were many youngsters who denied it any chance they got. . . . In the eyes of our young friends, no amount of chic clothes, or modern hairstyles could hide who we were.”⁸ That certainty of the newly arrived would inevitably give way to a more nuanced form of self-identification, as the now-adult Edwidge acknowledges in the 1995 lecture that “our identities expand” – after quoting the theorists of Créolité who deploy another compelling trope by affirming that “our history is a braid of histories”.⁹

This chapter will discuss the writer’s treatment and negotiation of that sometimes painful relationship with Haiti and with the United States, paying particular attention to the issue of voice, which is, I believe, central to an understanding of Danticat’s creative project – for several reasons. The first point of relevance to Danticat’s fascination with the voice springs from what might seem a truism: the primacy of orality in Haitian culture. Danticat, by her insistence in her creative work on the potency and persuasiveness of the voice, on the resonance of words spoken whether in intimacy to a beloved listener or with authority to a group, dismantles any perceived hierarchy valuing the scribal over the oral (or vice versa). The unique position of Haiti among Caribbean nations in terms of the status given to the vernacular language is certainly worth noting here: Article 5 of the Constitution names the two official languages of that nation as Creole and French, thereby appearing to valorize the popular language: “Tous les Haïtiens sont unis par une Langue commune: le Créole. Le Créole et le Français sont les langues officielles de la République.” (All Haitians are united by a common language: Creole. Creole and French are the official languages of the Republic.)¹⁰ But the situation is perhaps more complex than that simple parity between the European language and the Creole tongue, since 100 per cent of Haitians are créolophones, while the number of individuals fluent in French is significantly less. Thus, the author, who herself writes English with mastery and with lyricism, and who speaks it with the faintest of accents, is certainly sensitive to the function of language in her society of origin, both in practical terms and as a symbol of an inalienable identity (despite the linguistic challenges offered by Spanish, due to the proximity of the Dominican Republic, and by English, as a result of the vast migration to the United States). As underlined by Marie-Hélène Laforest in Diasporic Encounters: Remapping the Caribbean, “Though Danticat relates to Haitian literature, she is also outside of it. Her dislocation to the U.S. has led her to produce a new language: behind her lyrical English, Kreyòl, another language, breathes.”¹¹

Danticat’s thoughtful attention to the dynamic of speech and silence is also informed by her consciousness of the imperative – and the attendant difficulty – of articulating the experience of the historically silenced. In her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, the storytelling grandmother is confident and subversive; listening to her daughter and granddaughter slip unknowingly into English, she disparages the “master tongue” as follows with a harsh, aurally unpleasant epithet: “Oh that cling-clang talk. . . . It sounds like glass breaking.”¹² The figure of the powerful, eloquent storyteller fulfils a multiplicity of roles in the work of this Haitian American Creole/French/English speaker: that of historian and genealogist who speaks for the supposedly illiterate, as well as that of beloved elder who roots a younger generation in “exile” in the dense terrain of the homeland. And behind the figure of the storyteller, one cannot help but glimpse that of the writer herself, weaver of tales, cautious porte-parole (though not griote), whose unique voice speaks for her remarkable people, never wavering, never drowned by the different timbre of other/alien tongues which surround her.

On a more personal level, Danticat’s near reverence for the sound and nuances of the human voice appears connected to her experience as a child of “doubly interpreting” for her beloved Uncle Joseph, rendered mute by cancer, an experience which of course can be seen as metaphorically related to her vocation, to her role as writer. In response to my question,¹³ Danticat agreed that there was a connection between her uncle’s situation and her own sensitivity to the condition of those who cannot speak, going on to cite Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: “I am very intrigued by that kind of voicelessness as much as I am by the type that is imposed on people by circumstances, when you don’t know how to speak another language for example and you suddenly land in another country, for all intents and purposes, mute. . . . So yes, my uncle’s condition made me a close observer of all kinds of voicelessness.”

At the same time, Danticat has emphasized, in response to a simplification of her role based on the assumption that one individual can speak for a heterogeneous people, that she is not the voice of Haiti; one notes particularly the writer’s expressed reluctance to be locked into the role of spokesperson/advocate for all Haitians of the North American diaspora: “I don’t really see myself as the voice for the Haitian-American experience. . . . There are many. I’m just one.”¹⁴ This acknowledgement of plurality – and implicitly, therefore, of the potential for contradiction – is inherent in the several linked narratives which make up The Dew Breaker, a volume consisting of texts loosely and yet carefully assembled, separate and yet capable of being read as a whole, most of them relating the experiences of Haitian migrants to North America, specifically to New York. In considering Danticat’s representation of the Haitian diaspora in the United States, I find it useful to begin with two stories from that collection before examining the memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, to which The Dew Breaker is thematically linked. The uneasy or even melancholy mood of some of the narratives in the collection may be attributed to the implicit connection of many of the fictional characters to the notorious “dew breaker” of the title, the cruel henchman (also known as tonton macoute) of the Duvalier regime who attempts to hide from his past, having fled Haiti for New York. In discussing her translation of Creole terms incorporated in her writing, Danticat has explained the genesis of this title: “The term ‘dew breaker’ . . . was ‘chouket laroze’. That could be translated as ‘dew shaker’ or ‘dew smasher’. But ‘dew breaker’ is much more poetic, so that’s how I translated it.”¹⁵ Danticat’s explanation not only reinforces her self-assigned latitude as creative writer to impose her viewpoint even as translator, but also underscores the author’s sense of the tragic, a sense which pervades the collection – for the verb “to break,” juxtaposed against “dew”, obviously connotes, in this context, a shocking and wilful violence.

Several of the stories constitute, however, more everyday – if not banal – narratives of migration, foregrounding human beings whose absence from Haiti is not obviously the outcome of political turmoil. One such text is the story “Seven”, which poignantly relates the reunion of a young couple, married seven years previously, just before the husband’s departure for New York. As the narrative develops, we learn that both have been unfaithful as a result of the temptations of long separation. At the beginning of the tale, however, the mood is one of high expectancy, as the husband prepares for his wife’s arrival; one of the rare light-hearted moments of the narrative relates to the husband’s insistence that each of his two flatmates wear a specially bought though ludicrous pink satin robe (for decorum’s sake!). Yet the notion of secrecy and disguise, which constitutes a motif in this short story, is a warning that one should not expect a Hollywood-type resolution of the couple’s loss of intimacy; for, as Mary Gallagher has pointed out, “The Dew Breaker traces, both formally and thematically, the secrets and failures, the cracks and short circuits, that undermine authentic connection in relationships”:¹⁶

He told Dany not to mention those nights out again. His wife wasn’t to know that he’d ever done anyt...