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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre Patti M. Marxsen Clitandre, Nadège T. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. UP of Virginia, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8139-4187-5. Pp. xx + 249. It is rare for an entire book of literary criticism to be devoted to a Haitian writer. In her deeply nuanced study, Clitandre adopts an approach that resembles literary biography, although her theoretical concerns release the apparent subject, Danticat, from the role of central character and authorial anchor. Rather, the true subject emerges as countless other subjectivities, voices masked by simplistic categories or lost in collective cultural identities. In defiance of such erasure, Clitandre's project zeroes in on the lives of approximately 1 million hyphenated Haitians living outside the "homeland." Her method is clear from the outset—the deconstruction of a unique diasporic consciousness forged by Danticat across two decades of writing that embraces history, displacement, loss, assemblage, and "the everyday lives and narratives of diasporic subjects" (15). Clitandre's close reading of recent memoirs and major novels—Breath, Eyes, Memory, The Dew Breaker, and Farming of Bones—is filtered through the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus in which the woodland nymph, known for her melodious voice, is silenced by the jealous goddess Juno. This artful deployment of Ovid's voiceless Echo of antiquity is closely linked to Clitandre's argument for Danticat's "feminist revisioning of Haitian history from a diasporic lens" (16). Through a sustained argument, she asserts that "Danticat's fictional texts uncover the silenced, displaced, and disavowed histories of Haitian people in general and Haitian women in particular" (18). This approach necessarily engages the author and reader with significant events of Haitian history as the concept of "Echo chamber" is redefined as a dynamic space that captures unpredictable resonance. From Danticat's first reading of Haitian literature at the Brooklyn Public Library as a young girl in the 1980s, herself part of the Duvalier-driven diaspora, we come to understand her literary sources. We also encounter the meaning of personal "creation myths" in diasporic lives, those interiorized experiences that draw on historical, fragmented, and inherited memory. To this end, and with deliberate emphasis on the Duvalier era and its aftermath (1957–87), Clitandre convenes a conversation among historians, literary critics, writers, psychoanalytic theorists, and contemporary scholars to address the problem of memory in societies marked by violence, censorship, and silence. Indeed, [End Page 190] in Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010), Danticat acknowledges that"Grappling with memory is, I believe, one of many complicated Haitian obsessions" (34). Memory also emerges full-force in her "family memoir" Brother, I'm Dying (2007) focused on the"separate but intertwined lives"of her father and uncle, a Baptist pastor who died in a Miami detention center in 2007 (169). Given its vast terrain and articulate interpretation of a major literary voice, Clitandre's book is highly original and establishes a fresh model of scholarship in the still unexcavated silences of Haitian literature. Patti M. Marxsen Independent Scholar Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French