Haitian American Writer Research Articles

The Aphasia Syndrome: The Language of Colonialism in Postcolonial English Writings

This paper is an examination of how colonial language and its (after) effects are represented in postcolonial English literature. Two literary works are examined: the Indian diplomat and novelist Vikas Swarups Slumdog Millionaire and the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticats short story Children of the Sea. Through close reading and comparative analysis, the paper concludes that there are three main symptoms of language abuse in the colonial context, which it labels as The Aphasia Syndrome (TAS). Briefly, the TAS includes (1) the imitation (parrot-talk) of the colonizers language as a means of accessing its power and resources; (2) the silencing or suppression of all colonized speech; and (3) the colonys nonsensical ravings, which include the use of indigenous words and expressions without providing translations, as well as the reorganization and reappropriation of signifiers in the privileged language to create indecipherable expressions. By diagnosing TAS and its historical affections on colonized peoples, the paper hopes to excavate the anti-colonial potential inherent in indigenous languages and speech, while advocating a more promising prospect for reconciliation, communication, and healing.

Caring for Everything Inside: Migrant Trauma and Danticat’s Narrative Bigidi

In this essay, I argue that Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, in short stories from her most recent collection, Everything Inside (2019), challenges toxic forms of representation by attending to the imaginative potential of Haitian migrant experience within moments of collective trauma. This challenge, I suggest, is based on bigidi, a Creole expression denoting permanent imbalance that is once philosophy, dance practice, musical aesthetic, and cultural tradition. The principle of being off-balance without falling, central to how bigidi finds expression in Guadeloupean swaré-lé-woz and other forms of Caribbean dance, interweaves rhythm, music, and bodily movement with a community-oriented site of cultural expression. By saturating the narrative and readerly spaces of Everything Inside with uniquely Caribbean elements of improvisation, audience interaction, and performance, Danticat foregrounds moments of shared intimacy and vulnerability between Haitians, disrupting the representational trauma circuit of migrant death.

Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State: A Caribbean Rhizomatic Novel Reflecting the New Transmodern Paradigm

This article explores Haitian American writer Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State (2014) as a novel that represents our intricate and rhizomatic transmodern era. In order to prove this contention, it focuses on the novel’s amalgamation of different literary genres and modes from previous cultural paradigms—namely, the postmodern fairy-tale retelling and the social realist novel—with Euro-American as well as Haitian/Caribbean literary and sociocultural elements. The result of this mélange is a complex narrative of multiple interconnections that offers a nuanced portrait of new millennium Haitian diasporas and locals, and that most especially, recuperates subaltern Haitian voices so as to denounce the “untamed state” of the country. The article concludes by arguing that Gay’s hybrid and relational text effaces an either/or episteme which, although considerably used in Western and postcolonial theories for a while, has now become obsolete and inoperative in such a globalised and entangled world.

Sounding displaced memories: Narrative soundscapes in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!

In her short story collection Krik? Krak!, the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat realizes new formal strategies that integrate vernacular orality into her writings. She does so to construct evocative narrative soundscapes through which difficult memories can be processed. This article examines Danticat’s approach to otherness, migration, and displacement in an attempt to disentangle the function of language, sound, and memory in the development of authentic Caribbean identities and literatures. It aims to trace the workings of sound and mobility in the literary spaces Danticat creates to revisit colonial and patriarchal history and, in so doing, reroot and reroute cultural memories previously lost to violence and organized forgetting. In crossing and replicating the oceanic routes in which past and present intersect, Krik? Krak! opens critical sites of (d)enunciation that rework personal and collective memories of displacement by means of language and sound.

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

Reviewed by: Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre Jana Evans Braziel Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. By Nadège T. Clitandre. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2018. New World Studies. ISBN- 10: 0813941873. 272 pp. US $29.50, paperback. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary, Nadège T. Clitandre's first book, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2018, is a comprehensive analysis of the literary oeuvre of the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat. Clitandre explores the "tropic permutation[s] of [End Page 290] echo" (5), the Ovidian myth of Echo and Narcissus, and the philosophical reverberations of echo (notably, Édouard Glissant's echo-monde) as a trope for the "doublings" of home and diaspora, local and global, and literary and material registers in Danticat's literary corpus. Situated at the theoretical interstices of globalization, postcolonialism, diasporas, and Black feminist thought, Clitandre's intellectual project foregrounds the geopolitical dimensions of the local and the national (Haiti) to render global insights; in the process, she also meditates on the tenuous and perilous nature of borders; the long-distance tentacles of nations in diaspora; and the literary as a lens into material and political, indeed arduous realities. As an extended case study that proffers global lessons, Clitandre writes, Danticat's "reconstitution of nation through a diasporic imaginary" (3) allows her readers to discern and reimagine the complicated and deterritorialized terrains of diasporas, the transnational engagements with home and homeland, the interstitial border zones across geopolitical boundaries, and the fractured and fragmented lenses wrought by the multifarious fissures of globalization, international migration, landlocked fixity, impoverished immobility, and the hard lived realities of neoliberal economics. Of note is the book's appendix, a dialogic conversation, as Clitandre closes her brilliant first book with an interview with Danticat herself. The discussion moves across a wide range of literary and political issues pertaining to nation and diaspora. Clitandre's and Danticat's voices thus register two voices in this polyphonic community. Given the book's essential and riveting contribution to contextualizing Danticat's work in its multiple connections to feminism, philosophy, politics, psychology, and religion, what follows is a thorough summary and assessment of each part. Clitandre's "Introduction" places Danticat's literary oeuvre in several theoretical contexts—classical myth and literature, Lacanian psychoanalysis, diaspora and diasporic studies, globalization and the global imaginary, Caribbean feminism, and, more broadly, African diasporic feminisms. The introduction painstakingly elucidates for Danticat's readers (and Clitandre's also) key critical terms and conceptual frames that are integral to the latter's reception of the former's literary work. Clitandre carefully overviews scholarly contributions to and theorizations of diaspora and the field of diaspora studies before coining her own critical vocabulary, including concepts like "diasporic imaginary" (constructed from ideas about "diasporic consciousness" and "home spaces"), the "echo," the "echo chamber," and "écho-monde" and "relational poetics" (both of which are directly indebted to the late Édouard Glissant's writings). In doing so, Clitandre reveals a studied relationship to the interdisciplinary fields of diaspora studies and globalization, as well as French structuralism and [End Page 291] poststructuralism and African diasporic feminisms, demonstrating her intimate knowledge of a wide range of critical theorists (Mikhail Bakhtin, Kobena Mercer, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Roland Robertson, Arjun Appadurai, Manfred Steger, Saskia Sassen, Éduardo Galeano, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Benedict Anderson, Charles Taylor, Édouard Glissant, Homi Bhabha, Simon Gikandi, Paul Gilroy, Caren Kaplan, Stuart Hall, Vijay Mishra, Carole Boyce-Davies, bell hooks, Michelle Wallace, Patricia Hill Collins, and James Clifford) as well as literary critics (Anita Mannur, Carine M. Mardorossian, Yanick Lahens, Myriam Chancy, Belinda Edmondson, Barbara Smith) and creative writers (Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker). Chapter 1, "Recall: The Echo Effect of Historical Silences," centers on history and historical echoes of nation and national narratives as recalled in diasporic locations, notably the United States but also the Bahamas, Canada, and other parts of the Caribbean archipelago. As Clitandre powerfully and palpably demonstrates, an understanding of Danticat's literary corpus is not possible without an understanding of her diasporic imaginary and the national, historical narratives that are inextricable from her literary texts. Chapter...

Performing Postmemory: Remembering the Parsley Massacre in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” and Song of the Water Saints

Focusing on the Parsley Massacre—one of the major events that has helped to define the complex relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic—this paper analyzes two works that treat it: the short story “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” by the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat and the novel Song of the Water Saints by the Dominican-American writer Nelly Rosario. Although racial formation in the Dominican Republic and Haiti as well as ideological notions of national identity in Hispaniola inform this reading, the framework at hand invokes primarily a combination of collective postmemory and performativity. Collective postmemory serves as a way of approaching fictional renderings of the Parsley Massacre because the texts in question attempt to make the reader aware of this historical event as well as contribute to knowledge and identity in the diaspora(s) of Hispaniola. Performativity serves as a lens for bodily instantiations of identity in these texts. I demonstrate how female protagonists in these texts (mis)perform identities—marked by ideology—that are linked to postmemory. This paper, then, ultimately examines how these texts serve as cultural tools that perform postmemory and allow for the potential evolution of harmful aspects of past national identity through diasporic consciousness.

Wounds Seen and Unseen: The Workings of Trauma in Raoul Peck’s Haitian Corner and Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker

Drawing on literary scholar Lisa Woolfork’s theory of bodily epistemology, this article comparatively discusses Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s 1988 film Haitian Corner and Haitian American writer EdwidgeDanticat’s 2004 novel, The Dew Breaker as trauma fiction that deploys both the psyche and the body in explorations of trauma. The two works do so both through their characters and in the form that their narratives take, characterized as they are by an aesthetics of fragmentation that seems to “reproduce the ‘symptoms’ of disjunctive’ temporality and causality’ that characterize narratives of trauma.”

Reprises textuelles dans The Dew Breaker d’Edwidge Danticat

In her recent novel, The Dew Breaker (2004), Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat weaves together the lives of her bruised Haitian characters and their torturer, a former Tonton Macoute, all gone into exile in the US. Seven of the nine chapters were previously published as separate short stories and have been rearranged to form a novel. The reader is then led to unravel a narrative tangle made of many threads. The disparate nature of the book, its non-linear narrative, the plurality of stories and voices, the gaps in a fragmented, elliptic text all partake of an alternative approach to creative writing. Like a seamstress, the novelist pieces together individual stories, connecting them as the multifarious facets of a great whole. In the wake of francophone Haitian writers (namely Jacques Roumain, the author of Masters of the Dew, or Jacques Stephen Alexis who wrote General Sun, My Brother), Edwidge Danticat fictionalizes the traumatic history of a people confronted with violence and terror and engages in a complex intertextual play. Combining ethics and aesthetics, temporal and textual memory, the novelist explores facts and, rather than give answers, raises difficult questions. Her characters, whether victims or perpetrators, all strive to free themselves from a haunting past : is it ever possible to forgive so as to heal the pain ? Can one make amends for the harm that has been done to victims who seek redress ?

A Sociological Counter-reading of Marie Chauvet as an “Outsider-Within”: Paradoxes in the Construction of Haitian Women in Love, Anger, Madness

As a sociologist trained to analyze social reality in search of ways to transform it, I am always puzzled by the way literary scholars portray Marie Chauvet, to use the trope of Patricia Hill Collins, as an outsiderwithin.1 Such a situation of dual identity is created through engagement with one's position within a community as well as exclusion or strangeness from that community. To use an anthropological idiom, Chauvet could be considered as a writer reflexive of her own social reality. Indeed, many literary scholars define Chauvet's work as a critique of both the political system of the Duvalierist regime of 1957-1987 and the discriminatory practices of the Haitian oligarchy, the elite to which generations of Chauvet's family, including herself, belonged by birth and/or through marriage. That tradition of social critique has been a hallmark in Haitian literature starting with the Indigenist school of the nineteenth century and continuing in the works ofjacques Roumain and Jacques Stephen Alexis, the two most successful male Haitian writers of the twentieth century. Yet for many, Chauvet is unique because, as Joan Dayan states, Never before had a Haitian woman dared not only to question the nationalist assumptions of Francois Duvalier and the noiriste celebration of'black essence' but also to take on the burden of writing in a culture that had simultaneously praised and silenced women.2This praise of Chauvet, which comes from many corners, is paradoxically not based on her own political engagement. Rather, her association with some form of radicalism is based on the of her literary works. For example, the well-known Haitian American writer, Edwidge Danticat, honoring Chauvet as one of the three giants of Haitian literature, claims that Chauvet seems to be speaking to us . . . from the grave in assessing and criticizing the current sociopolitical conditions of life in contemporary Haiti.3 Another Haitian American writer, Myriam Chancy, in a provocative article titled Exile and Resistance: History as a Revolutionary Act, also claims that Chauvet's work-like that of the Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff-focus [es] on the role of women and how politically conscious women negotiate their sexual oppression within social and class constraints.4 For Chancy, both writers present in their work the possibilities for resistance as represented by women through history. Such resistance is revelatory of women's efforts to free themselves of prescribed social roles as breeders, mothers, nannies, and laborers.Celebrations of the revolutionary and transformative nature of Chauvet's work contribute to a process of myth-making. Literary scholars such as Hellen Lee-Keller argue not only that Chauvet criticized despotism and racialized social hierarchies but also that the reason her book was banned was that she questioned and condemned the patriarchal and elitist structure of Haitian society. Lee-Keller further states that Chauvet uses the trope of madness as her primary strategy for navigating the political sphere, thus creating an alternative future vision for women's roles in Haiti.5 Likewise, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw speaks about the boldness and perspective of Chauvet's work, stating that the writer courageously exposed the politics of Duvalier's terrorizing regime and that her work moves beyond Haitian reality and the Haitian border. Chauvet's use of the first-person narrative, she claims, seemed to say what others stifled.6 Another literary critic, Melissa Sande, uses Chauvet's work as the framework for her analysis of gender and literature in post-earthquake Haiti.7 Lastly, although Kaiama Glover acknowledges Chauvet5 s absence from-and, most likely, her refusal to participate in-any form of organized politics of Black radicalism or of women's struggles, she finds a redemptive explanation.8 She claims that Chauvet was literally punished, removed from the pantheon, excluded, silenced partly because of her political decision to be nonaligned. …

Bricolage and history: Edwidge Danticat's Diasporic Life Writing in After the Dance

Autobiographical Voices (1989), Lionnet's influential study of women's postcolonial life writing and Hasebe-Ludt et al's Life Writing (2009), employ notions of métissage which posit the politicised integration of written and oral sources to recover marginalised histories. Hasebe-Ludt et al go so far as to argue that the text ‘insinuate[s] itself into the very life of the reader’, envisaging life writing as redemptive and pedagogical. I argue that in the travel narrative After the Dance Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat develops an alternative textual praxis to métissage: namely, bricolage. By working with the diverse and contingent materials available (from other travel narratives to Kreyòl proverbs to pop songs), Danticat's text avoids retrieving marginalised Haitian history (a problematic proposition for a diasporic writer based in America). Instead Danticat layers materials in ways that allow for discordant and provisional significations, implicitly opposing any totalising connotations of literary métissage. As a diasporic writer, Danticat's work develops mobile, relational and decentred authorial stances, which challenge Eurocentric notions of a monadic and autonomous ‘self’. Consequently, Danticat's life writing is significant in its negotiation of the complexities of diasporic identifications in its form and content; and because it allows for revised perspectives on life writing theory.

Novels of transformation and transplantation

Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat migrated to the United States from Haiti aged twelve. Her father left for New York when she was two, her mother followed when she was four, and Danticat liv...

The language of wounds and scars in Edwige Danticat's "The Dew Breaker" : a case in trauma symptoms and the recovery process

This article examines the representation of a violent and traumatizing past in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker (2004), a collection of short stories that depicts the effects of a torturer’s atrocious crimes on the lives of his victims and their descendants. The contribution argues that this work of fiction by the Haitian-American writer is structured upon the principle that traumatic experiences can only become intelligible – and, therefore, “representable” – by considering the severe psychical wounds and scars they leave on the victims. These scars habitually take the form of paranoia, nightmares, ghostly presences, schizophrenia, and “dead spots” that have a very difficult time finding their place in the protagonists’ consciousness and language. In spite of the fragmented and discontinuous character of these representations, the writer manages to unveil the kind of psychological and social dysfunctions that often surface when people have not fully accepted or assimilated aspects of the past that keep itching in their unconscious. However, despite the prevailingly bleak tone of the stories, Danticat still leaves some room for hope and recovery, as many of the victims find ways to come to terms with and overcome those individual and collective dysfunctions.

Against All Odds

In all her works, Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat exemplifies the paradigm of the female storyteller as a spider spinning her iridescent web of signification, in the wake of the mystic ‘Ol...

Sites of memory, sites of mourning and history : Danticat's insights into the past

Memory has undoubtedly played a crucial role in the postmodern literary discourse. The dismantling of a monolithic, static and unquestioned history has given place to the predominance of a revisionary narrative impulse to “historicize the event of the dehistoricized” in Homi Bhabha’s terms. Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat joins the number of contemporary authors who are determined to uncover and recover the forgotten and manipulated histories of the dead. Taking the Massacre River dividing Haiti and the Dominican Republic as a site of memory as well as a site of mourning, Danticat writes The Farming of Bones (1998) as a tribute to those nameless and faceless who died victims of the abuses of power and racial persecution, providing them with names and voices against silence and oblivion. It is my aim to analyze the dimension of the use of memory in Danticat’s novel, especially in relation to the workings of history. Issues of power and racial oppression will be especially relevant in this analysis.