Edwidge Danticat

The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary

Nadège T. Clitandre, Clitandre T. Nadège

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813941868
• eBook ISBN: 9780813941882
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat is one of the most recognized writers today. Her debut novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was an Oprah Book Club selection, and works such as Krik? Krak! and Brother, I'm Dying have earned her a MacArthur "genius" grant and National Book Award nominations. Yet despite international acclaim and the relevance of her writings to postcolonial, feminist, Caribbean, African diaspora, Haitian, literary, and global studies, Danticat's work has not been the subject of a full-length interpretive literary analysis until now.

In Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary, Nadège T. Clitandre offers a comprehensive analysis of Danticat's exploration of the dialogic relationship between nation and diaspora. Clitandre argues that Danticat—moving between novels, short stories, and essays—articulates a diasporic consciousness that acts as a form of social, political, and cultural transformation at the local and global level. Using the echo trope to approach Danticat's narratives and subjects, Clitandre effectively navigates between the reality of diaspora and imaginative opportunities that diasporas produce. Ultimately, Clitandre calls for a reconstitution of nation through a diasporic imaginary that informs the way people who have experienced displacement view the world and imagine a more diverse, interconnected, and just future.

1. Recall

The Echo Effect of Historical Silences

For historians, echo provides yet another take on the process of establishing identity by raising the issues of the distinction between the original sound and its resonances and the role of time in the distortions heard. Where does an identity originate? Does the sound issue forth from past to present, or do answering calls echo to the present from the past? If we are not the source of the sound, how can we locate that source? If all we have is the echo, can we ever discern the original? Is there any point in trying, or can we be content with thinking about identity as a series of repeated transformations?

—Joan W. Scott, “Fantasy Echo”

THE HISTORICAL, social, and political dimensions of the Haitian diaspora are the crucible of real and imagined geographies that are constitutive elements of Haitian diasporic imaginary and consciousness. What gives birth to and stimulates Edwidge Danticat’s diasporic imaginary and anchors her work is a complicated history of Haitian migration and its literary (mis)representations. Certainly, it is impossible to explore, for example, the character Martine and her psychological state resulting from past trauma in Breath, Eyes, Memory without an awareness of the context of the Duvalier regime, which fundamentally transformed migration patterns in Haiti during the latter half of the twentieth century. How can we tease out the affective dimensions of Amabelle’s experience of displacement in the Dominican Republic in Danticat’s historical novel, The Farming of Bones (1998), without a keen sense of the historical relationship between the two countries or the border culture that is formed out of the historical circumstances that brought Haitians to the Dominican Republic in the early twentieth century as migrant laborers on sugarcane plantations and the traumatic consequences of a pivotal moment in Haitian history, the 1937 massacre at the border that exacerbated relations between the two nations? We understand the limbo state and deterritorialized social identities of Danticat’s tragic characters in the opening story of Krik? Krak! (1995) most succinctly when they are situated simultaneously within the context of the plight of Haitian boat people in the 1980s who attempted to escape the dictatorship for better lives in the United States and the tribulations of African slaves during the Middle Passage that remains a powerful symbol of the transatlantic slave trade in the African diasporic imaginary. We effectively engage the ethical and human rights questions raised in Danticat’s memoir Brother, I’m Dying (2007) only to the extent that we become familiar with pre- and postdiscriminatory immigration policies against Haitians in the United States. We are pushed to reflect on the multiple dimensions and contradictions of Haitian (diasporic) subjectivities in The Dew Breaker when we recognize Danticat’s investment in deconstructing master tropes of political violence in Haiti that elide the intricacies and nuances of people’s everyday lives. We are transfixed by the powerful stories of immigrant artists in Create Dangerously because we sympathize with their predicaments under regimes of silence that create climates unfavorable to artistic production and its dissemination.

James Clifford asserts that we must insist on the routing of diaspora in specific maps and histories. When historicized, “diaspora cannot become a master trope or ‘figure’ of modern, complex or positional identities.”1 For Danticat, invocations of diaspora in displaced Haitian communities and articulations of Haitian diasporic subjects are historically situated in time and tied to real geographies, specific maps, and physical sites located in specific space. Danticat’s fictional characters point to the histories, political realities, and lived experiences that frame the writer’s understanding of a collective but multidimensional and polyphonic Haitian diasporic community. Danticat’s work makes it impossible for any astute reader of her text to fully escape the historical dimensions of migration and displacement that not only form what is now known as the Haitian diaspora but also produce the affective dimensions that Danticat is invested in inscribing and reinscribing. In this chapter, I ask, In what way do literal experiences of migration and displacement and their effects in the particular context of Haiti’s history reframe our understanding of the relationship between history and the echo phenomenon in Danticat’s work? How does Danticat work through historical silences in her understanding of diaspora to foreground individual and collective experiences of diasporic subjects in her literary inscriptions? What are the local, national, transnational, and global contours of the histories that Danticat recalls, excavates, and recovers in her work? How do the politicized histories Danticat foregrounds expose the relation between silence and authoritarian regimes?

It is my contention that diasporic subjects have an echoing relationship with the homeland and its histories. Echo repeats what came before.2 It hears original sounds and attempts to capture source signals. Echoes are sounds of the past that “represent a sound or a signal that has already been deployed and is in decay.”3 Echoes travel in time and space. Echo, as a product of space, also puts history back in place. Danticat, like her Echo-like diasporic subjects, participates in an echo effect induced by the recall of silenced histories. But in the practice of recall and recollection, the histories, written out of historical records and perceived as loss, resonate incompletely. They can only be returned and restored as fragments of memory, fragmented memory that bears a semblance to history.4 Danticat uses these fragmented memories to generate narratives that can become part of a diaspora archive that preserves recollected stories and memorializes individual lives within the historically specific frames, references, contexts, and backgrounds that make up the central focus of this chapter. Reinscription, for Danticat, is linked to a commitment to unearthing the silences in Haitian histories of migration and displacement. If Haiti’s silenced histories are the sources of an echo, then the recall of these histories, in diaspora, is a strategic form of echoing what can never be completely retrieved, only repeatedly re-membered, and returned, in the diasporic imaginary.

Historical Silences and Echo

While Danticat is well known for writing masterfully about Haiti’s history, it was the publication of her historical novel, The Farming of Bones, in 1998 and its powerful recall of the 1937 Haitian massacre at the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic that exposed this talent. Two years after the release of the book, Eleanor Wachtel asked Danticat in an interview about what she found when she made the visit to the Massacre River that inspired her to write about the genocide, also known as the Parsley Massacre, which killed as many as twenty thousand people. Danticat responded:

I think it was what I didn’t find there that most moved me. I had heard so much about the Massacre River, going from the first massacre of the colonists in the 19th century to this present massacre. And I think I had built up in my mind this angry, raging river, this body of water that just did not forget. And I felt that, as soon as I got there, I would sense the history, that I would see it as though unfolding on a screen. But when I got there, it amazed me that there were people washing clothes, that there were children bathing, that there were animals drinking. The ordinariness of life was striking to me. There’s a line in the book that says that “Nature has no memory” and it struck me in a great sense that it’s both sad and comforting that nature has no memory, that things go on in spite of what’s happened before. That the tree will grow, that there will be weeds and that the river will flow. So it was the lack of event that inspired me, that made me want to recall the past and write about this historical moment.5

Lack of an event, a nonevent, not only inspires; it points to silences and generates narratives. All narratives, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot asserts in his influential work Silencing the Past, impose silences. The historical narrative, for Trouillot, “is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly.”6 These silences “enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).”7 These sources and archives contain “presences and absences” that are “neither neutral nor natural” but created.8 Consequently, Trouillot argues, two tropes in modern historiography emerge: formulas of erasure and formulas of banalization. These formulas of silence explain the general silencing of the Haitian Revolution as a nonevent specifically9 and “narratives of global domination” more broadly.10 Like the Haitian Revolution, the Parsley Massacre, as Danticat reveals, is a nonevent of the twentieth century, one of the least remembered genocides of the period. But for Danticat, the massacre is just one example of a plethora of historical silences that need to be excavated. In all her work, Danticat pulls from a number of nonevents to recall specific moments in Haitian history tied to patterns of migration. This recall extends not only to the reclamation of the past but to the recovery of the individual self and forgotten lived experiences that must be memorialized.

Many scholars of Haitian studies in the humanities and social sciences who examine historical and political realities of Haiti and its diaspora follow, or build, in some form or fashion on Trouillot’s argument to critically investigate the silencing of the Haitian Revolution specifically and Haitian history more broadly.11 Susan Buck-Morss differentiates between two silences, one past and the other present.12 Sibylle Fischer examines how the “disavowal” of the Haitian Revolution in historical and cultural records is central to an understanding of Western modernity.13 Literary critics of Haitian literature both within Haiti and in the diaspora insist that Haitian literary history is about working through these silences and absences. J. Michael Dash argues that Haiti was relegated to a zone of negativity and absence in nineteenth-century literary texts.14 Nick Nesbitt explains that a certain image of Haiti was presented to silence a global vision of black sovereignty and displace Haiti as symbol of universal freedom.15 Nesbitt views Danticat as a writer who reconstitutes exceptional events of the past to reanimate life, and “recover something of the life lost.”16

As a result of the intentional discursive silencing of Haiti, traditional Haitian literary texts are viewed as aesthetic modes of recuperating the idea of the Haitian Revolution idea of 1804.17 But such recuperation embodied in male figures and tropes of the revolutionary hero displaces and effaces the role of women in Haiti’s revolutionary history. Indeed, as Jana Braziel asserts, with the exception of Dédée Bazile, popularly known as Défilée-La-Folle, revolutionary heroines “have remained obscured within literary, historiographical and hagiographical narratives from this era.”18 Myriam Chancy asserts that Haitian women’s culture and the revolutionary dimensions of Haitian women’s literature are defined through a consciousness of absence and silence, not as a negative space of lack but as a space of nothingness through which identity is affirmed and transformed. She defines this space as a cultural lacuna that accounts for the presence of absence.19 Haitian women’s vision, Chancy further asserts, describes this cultural space as “one that embraces its own silencing even as it contests it.”20 But as Chancy makes clear in her critical work on Haitian women writers, this only appears to be the case because “women have consistently been written out of both the historical and literary records of Haiti.”21 This erasure applies to the broader Caribbean literary tradition, wherein the literature of women writers and their representation of new Caribbean female subjects threaten patriarchal literary authority and master narratives of colonialist discourse.22 Thus in Caribbean women’s literary tradition, femininity, the idea of giving voice to women’s histories is not only paramount but engenders tropes of female vocal agency and mastery of voice.

Regimes of Silence, the Duvalier Dictatorship, and Peak Migration

A particular era in Haitian history replete with its own silences is the Duvalier regime in Haiti that began in 1957 and ended in 1986. Many novels by Haitians in the 1970s and 1980s were produced in North America by what Haitian writer and literary critic Yanick Lahens describes as the “lost generation,” a generation of exile and censorship with an unyielding memory of the Duvalier regime period in the 1960s.23 A large majority of Haitians from this generation, many of whom were writers, journalists, politicians, and professionals of the elite and educated class, emigrated during this period to escape state-sanctioned persecution and violence. Ed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Recall: The Echo Effect of Historical Silences
• 2. Echo Chamber in Create Dangerously
• 3. Haitian Echoes: Tradition and Nation in Breath, Eyes, Memory
• 4. The Dew Breaker as Écho-Monde
• 5. Voices from beyond the (Unmarked) Grave in The Farming of Bones
• Epilogue: Toward a Globalectical Imagination
• Appendix: Interview with Edwidge Danticat
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index