Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre

Abstract

Reviewed by: Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre Samantha Pinto Nadège T. Clitandre. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. U of Virginia P, 2018. xii + 250 pp. Nadège Clitandre's book, the first full-length, single-author monograph on Edwidge Danticat, stands as both a necessary correction and a harbinger of what such work can do in and for African Diaspora and postcolonial studies. By focusing on Danticat, the prolific Haitian prose author (her impressive oeuvre over 25 years of publication comprises novels, short fiction, children's books, essays, and memoirs), Clitandre thoughtfully takes on questions of nation [End Page 586] and diaspora. She also chooses to make the questions of representing Haitian literature and history, as well as its diaspora, reverberations of feminist inquiries in content and in the form of her critical writing. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary argues that Danticat's work, rather than sitting at a binary break between nation and diaspora, instead reimagines the categories as "relational and mutually constitutive" (3), interacting with each other in "dialogic engagement that necessitates rereading" (6) splits between home/exile and local/global. While other scholars in the field of diaspora studies have theorized diaspora in complex ways related to the material practices of writing, traveling, archiving, and the critic's own work suturing together various national traditions, Clitandre's reworking of diaspora through Danticat, specifically, calls for a capacious understanding of what constitutes both nation and diaspora, recursively bringing the two into constant conceptual interaction while also refusing to dissolve the specificity of either. This complex articulation of how diaspora might work through a specific author is, of course, also a rewriting of how we as literary critics engage its theoretical import across our field. Clitandre argues that Danticat's work "retains ideas of origin, wholeness, unity, family ancestry, history, and community to reenact them as 'the stuff' of both nation and diaspora but also to disentangle them from ideological frames and totalitarian absolutes that hinder heterogeneous, pluralistic, and liberatory possibilities of imagining the world, our place in it, and our relationship to each other" (25). Clitandre's book is, in the best sense of the word, ambitious; its process of honoring the complexity and breadth of a writer like Danticat refuses to close off paths of interpretation as it builds its own argument about reading Haitian diaspora and indeed global literature in the contemporary moment. Clitandre does this through the trope of "the echo" (26)—a term she identifies with its classical routes as the limited authorized voice of women in Western myth and with historian Joan Scott's more recent formulation of echo as a method of feminist historical inquiry and a way of thinking through how fantasy and silence operate in the archives and in historiographical method for subjects who are not the authors of their own historical record or documentation. For this monograph, Clitandre adapts and merges these critical modes with those of Caribbean theorist Edouard Glissant and black feminist theorist Carol Boyce Davies to define the titular "diasporic imaginary" (2) she represents through Danticat's work. Specifically, she asks, "in what way does the myth of echo tease out certain elements that are critical to the way we read [End Page 587] diaspora as an experience of displacement and to the way we read texts by African diasporic women writers to understand the gendered contours of diaspora?" (7). It is under this question that Clitandre does her most exciting and revealing work. A feminist contouring of diaspora infuses the book, from the first chapter on Danticat's engagement with Haitian history, politics, and diaspora that centers not on correcting historical silences of a masculinist heroic narrative (as one finds in Michel-Rolph Trouillot's critique) but on acknowledging, representing, and echoing the stories and experiences of those who we can't hear, see, or know—especially women. In chapter 2, Clitandre gamely takes on Danticat's writing process as a kind of de-essentialized écriture féminine, one that imagines both diaspora and writing diaspora as an act of feminized labor—riffing on Danticat's own analogy of writing to braiding hair. It is in...