Desire for Certainty Katharine Capshaw Smith At first glance, it seems that uncertainty frames the lives of young people in the country of Haiti. Even before the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010, children lived with political instability and, for many, intense poverty. After the earthquake, images of injured and hungry children crossed the globe, inspiring compassionate responses from individuals and from nations. Indeed, within this period of crisis, mourning, and rebuilding, it becomes imperative to acknowledge Haiti’s heavy losses and to work tirelessly to restore the lives of Haiti’s people. But after the earthquake what also remain are sources of Haitian identity: enduring family ties, a pioneering anticolonialist and antiracist history, distinctive cultural practices and aesthetics, and a deep love for the country. Within narratives of Haitian childhood, writers often balance the uncertainty of political and social events with individual and familial adherence to cultural identity. For instance, in Jaira Placide’s Fresh Girl (2002), a teenager contends with sexual trauma by turning to her family, and in Edwidge Danticat’s Behind the Mountains (2002), a child suffers physically under political violence but finds real solace in the Haitian community in New York. Danticat’s main character, Mardi, also turns to the Haitian landscape as a source of connection and certainty: I love these mountains, the vetiver and citronella plants along the trails, the rain tapping on the tin roof, even the fog that shifts from place to place in the mountains. I love the rainbows during sun showers. I love the shortcuts through the cornfields, the smell of pine-wood burning, the golden-brown sap dripping onto the fire. I love sleeping on a sisal mat on the clay floor in Granmè Melina and Granpè Nozial’s one-room house, and eating in their yard while listening to Granpè Nozial’s stories. (25) For many characters in children’s books, the Haitian landscape concretizes the enduring beauty of its culture. And in the face of devastation that threatens children’s lives, young characters seek constancy, comfort, and stability, values achievable in the heart and in the imagination. This volume does not address the Haitian earthquake, nor is it a special [End Page 109] issue on trauma. But as I write this introduction, just three weeks after the tragedy, Haiti is all I can think about, especially because my sons were born in that country. The fine essays in this volume all reflect on the topic of certainty, offering a range of responses to questions of stability and truth within children’s narratives. Blanka Grzegorczyk’s analysis of Terry Pratchett’s Nation raises significant questions about the position of the text within postmodernist discourse. On the one hand, Grzegorczyk explains, Nation employs a range of formal techniques that reflect a postmodern perspective on subjectivity, resulting in a narrative that “seems indeterminate, ready to welcome the impossibility of its own coherence and completion.” The novel’s intertextuality and play with perspective destabilizes reader certainty and emphasizes the perpetually mediated nature of narrative. But while its approach invokes postmodernism, the novel’s values are, in large part, humanistic, for the novel “is pervaded with a longing for the reassurance that there is a meaning beyond the here and now.” Characters seek a certainty that is perpetually elusive. This tension between postmodern aesthetics and humanist values enables Grzegorczyk to complicate our understanding of subjectivity. The uncertainty of historical knowledge interests Anne Balay, who writes in this volume about Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s 1974 novel, The Truth About Stone Hollow. Her essay positions Snyder’s American text within the “time-slip” genre, a field popular among British novelists. Balay connects the protagonist’s coming of age to an awareness of the unstable nature of historical fact: “Amy needs to know the secrets of her family, her nation, and her femininity in order to create a narrative of her identity as she matures—in order to craft a mobile, meaningful sense of self. Time-slip literalizes this process.” Constructing identity, whether individual or national, is a continual process, one that involves recognition of the unknowable and awareness of the instability of “truth.” In her essay on British hymnody, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre intervenes...