"Edwidge Danticat: A Voice for the Voiceless"

    On that chilly Manhattan evening early last November, supporters of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights had been waiting for the best-selling writer to arrive to host an annual benefit. She apologized for being late but nobody seemed to mind terribly. In her slightly accented voice, she introduced the night's agenda: to educate people about the horrors of the restavek system. A common practice in Haiti, it is named for the French rester avec, "to stay with," a privilege for which children are expected to clean chamber pots, endure beatings, and sleep on nothing more than a cardboard box shoved under the kitchen table.

    Then Danticat faded back into the shadows as two Haitian-American children and a young man took turns reading from Jean-Robert Cadet's 1998 autobiography, Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American. Danticat applauded, just barely visible sidestage, as Cadet himself walked onstage and read a final passage from the book. Then she joined the readers and presented each one to the audience in a way that made it clear that she considered it to be a privilege to accompany them. The moment was typical of Edwidge Danticat's personal and literary style: treating harrowing emotional and political material with grace, and honoring the voices of others, whether they be the characters in her books or people in her world.

    Published when she was only 25, Danticat's 1994 debut novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, received wide acclaim. The book of short stories and novel that followed have also been heaped with praise from the publishing world. Now, at 31, she's quickly shed the buzz of "prodigy" and lent her literary weight to causes from Haitian immigrant rights to bilingual education to nurturing new voices.

    "When I was younger, I thought I would die by the time I was 30. I don't know why I felt this. I just did. I had a lot of people in my family die young, so maybe that was why," Danticat recalled in a recent conversation -carried out by e-mail, which is the way she keeps in touch these days because of her grueling schedule of teaching, writing, and public appearances.

    "Now I do feel more rested at 31. I feel more at peace with myself. People sometimes say I have an old soul. My friends call me a ti granmoun, an old lady. I've been called that since I was ten. So I have never felt like a girl prodigy and when things started happening with my book, I took that to mean that I could do this now and move on to something else at an earlier point in my life. I like the process of doing things and I think as you get older, the process begins to mean more than the destination."

    For her that process begins with recognizing her roots and expands to giving back to the community of which she is a part. Such commitment is rare among the small part of the population with power and wealth in Danticat's native Haiti, where the haves care little for the have-nots.

    Her family came from the have-nots, though they were strong and lucky enough to make something; her parents emigrated to New York when she was four. Her father drove a cab and her mother worked in a textile factory to raise the money to bring her to the United States when she was 12. The long separation, combined with the knowledge of her parents' sacrifice, helped make her older than her years: "Always I felt I had to work since my parents worked so hard," she says now. "Even here in America, I have had a job since I was 14."

    She entered New York City school, including bilingual programs -which she has credited with nurturing her language skills. She later earned a degree in French literature from Barnard and a master's in fine arts at Brown University. Her 1994 debut, Breath, Eyes, Memory, told the story of a young girl who also was brought to the United States at a young age; Oprah Winfrey in 1998 selected the novel for her Book Club.

    Major publications applaud Danticat's writing as "resonant" (Village Voice), "lyrical" (Ms., Seattle Times), "lucid" (New York Newsday), "elegant" (Boston Globe, Ms.). In 1996, Granta chose her as one of its 20 Best Young American novelists. In 1995, The New York Times Magazine named her as one of "30 under 30" creative people to watch. Last summer, The New Yorker included her in its "The Future of American Fiction" issue.

    Profiles of her inevitably include the word "poised," yet this word lacks the nuance to express how she comes across to her public; she professes to be shy but is brave enough to show when the terrible tragedy of her chosen themes overwhelm her, even to be seen crying in public.

    The first time I saw Edwidge Danticat was several years ago at Columbia University's Miller Theater, in one of her first readings from Breath, Eyes, Memory. She spoke ever so softly; the audience hushed to make room for her voice. She had not yet mastered eye contact, so came across as painfully shy. But even as she looked straight down at her pages, the words hit home, in a chilling passage about a Haitian mother "testing" her daughter to make sure she was still a virgin. By the time she finished, I realized that I had been gripping the side of my chair.

    Danticat examines the human spirit under duress; she gives a voice to the people who appear in news photos of Haiti. Her second book, Krik?Krak?, which was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award, is a collection of short stories: letters between a girl and her boyfriend who will die at sea; a servant girl who adopts a dead baby she finds in the street; a woman who escapes a massacre by flying away; a young boy chosen for the hero in a play about the mystical revolutionary leader Boukman. The boy's father falls from a hot-air balloon and dies; despite the revolution that Boukman started, creating the world's first free Black Republic, Haiti's fortunes fell to make it the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

    Danticat's latest novel, The Farming of Bones, revives a tragedy lost in the shadows of history to all but Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola in a mutually unhappy arrangement. (Soho Press published it in 1998; it was recently released in Spanish by Norma and in French by Lumen.) In 1937, the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered that his soldiers massacre as many as 35,000 Haitians living on the border. Trujillo wanted to "whiten" the Dominican Republic, the larger Spanish-speaking country to the east. Like Haitians, Dominicans descend from African slaves, but are more likely to have European ancestors and thus slightly lighter skin.

    During the massacre, Dominican soldiers demanded that anyone with dark skin pronounce the Spanish word for parsley. Haitians could not pronounce "perejil" because its trilled "r" does not exist in the Kreyol language. In The Farming of Bones, parsley comes to represent no less than life itself. Bunches of the humble green herb have a symbolic cleansing power "to shed a passing year's dust as a new one dawned, to wash a new infant's hair for the first time and -along with boiled orange leaves- a corpse's remains one final time," she wrote.

    The first time Danticat read in public from The Farming of Bones was at Double Happiness, a hip bar in downtown Manhattan; fifteen minutes before the reading, the place was so full that nobody else could come in. When she began, in the softest voice, the room hushed completely. Then, a few paragraphs into a passage about a woman dying in the massacre, her voice seized up and she paused; tears ran down her cheek as she waited for her throat to relax before she started reading again.

    As the tour progressed, she confronted not only the pain of the book, but also a roar of comments from Dominicans and Haitians. "From the first time I mentioned that I was writing this book, I've never had an indifferent nod. People have always felt strongly one way or another," Danticat says. Some Haitians, thrilled that she was writing about a taboo of history, sent research, photos, books, articles. Others warned her not to distort history. "Some thought my efforts would be better placed in writing something positive and joyful about Haiti, something where we triumph, like the revolution."

    Dominicans, who celebrate their independence from Haiti (which occupied the entire island from 1822-44 to keep France and Spain from uniting on the eastern end of the island and re-taking Haiti), reacted just as strongly. "Some Dominican friends were very supportive and told me that it was time to unearth this. My friend Junot Diaz has always been my biggest cheerleader on this, even before I wrote one word," Danticat says. "Others reminded me about the Haitian occupation and how Haitians then massacred Dominicans." The Dominican contention that animosity is mutual is well taken, but Danticat refuses to accept it as a reason for silence: "We should raise those types of questions as a way of having a dialogue and not as an excuse for avoiding issues."

    The most moving moment came at a reading in Miami, where one of the members of the audience was a man who had worked in sugar cane fields in the Dominican Republic. "He had read the book and during the question and answer session stood up and told us his story: how he had seen people work, struggle, grow old, die, get arrested, get repatriated in the Dominican bateyes. He had gotten out of the work and moved to Miami and the book had made him remember so much of his work there. At the end of his story, I was crying and he was crying. We were all crying."

    Last fall, while she was on tour for the paperback release of the novel the Dominican Republic expelled somewhere between 5,000 and 12,000 Haitians and black Dominicans in retaliation against a report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights alleging that the rights of Haitian immigrants were being violated. Danticat and Díaz wrote a New York Times opinion piece protesting the deportations. Danticat also jointed Haitian and Dominican activists for a protest and press conference.

    Despite her involvement in the issues behind her writing, Danticat doesn't consider herself an activist in the strict traditional sense. "I want to serve in whatever way I can and I always will. I think you have to at least try and be part of something larger than yourself and that's what I try to do with the things I have been part of in the community," she says.

    Not only has Danticat denounced human rights abuses on Hispaniola and demonstrated against the New York police brutalizing of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima; she has also spoken out in favor of immigrant rights and bilingual education, which helped her gain a footing in school while she was still mastering the English language. She's on the board of directors of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, where she lends her name to campaigns and. With the support of a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Fund grant, she has helped NCHR organize cultural programs for the Haitian community, including a series of readings and The Bouki Club, an Internet chat room for Haitian teenagers.

    "It's quite interesting to see her continuing to remain simple and modest in her ways, always ready and willing to give credit to others, and at the same time being very comfortable with students and others," said Jocelyn (Johnny) McCalla, NCHR's executive director. One year, he recalled, she traveled with 30 or so Haitian-American students on a two-week educational program in Haiti, where "spartan" would be a generous description of their public-university dorm accommodations. "There she was even though she was famous, sharing the discomfort, sharing stories, listening to them, being a kid herself."

    That experience mirrored the one she has written about from memories of her own childhood experience, which took place amid the joy of a strong Kreyol oral tradition. Grandparents would gather children around and tell stories, especially during the long blackouts that fell over Port-au-Prince when the decrepit Haitian electric company shut down for fuel shortages, lack of maintenance, or politics.

    In Haiti's written literary tradition, writing has often been synonymous with activism. Marie Chauvet, a Haitian novelist, died in exile in New York, but the power of her writing about love and madness inspired Danticat by her bravery. Danticat's work also clearly draws on the influence of Jacques Stephen Alexis, whose 1955 masterpiece about Trujillo's massacre of Haitians, Compère Général Soleil, has just been published in English as General Sun, My Brother on University Press of Virginia's Caraf Books imprint, translated by Carrol F. Coates. A vocal opponent of François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, Alexis disappeared and by some accounts was stoned to death.

    Danticat's writing pays open homage to this activist tradition, as well as to the role of women. "And writing? Writing was as forbidden as dark rouge on the cheeks or a first date before eighteen. It was an act of indolence, something to be done in a corner when you could have been learning to cook," she wrote in "Women Like Us," the epilogue to Krik? Krak!. "In our world, if you are a writer, you are a politician, and we know what happens to politicians."

    Now the Haitian literary canon has embraced English as well as French and Kreyol. Danticat's latest project compiles Haitian-American voices in an anthology of essays and poetry, The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Diaspora in the United States, to be published early next year by Soho Press. "I am a reader more than a writer and I wanted to read more Haitian stories," she says. "The first person I approached was my friend Dany Laferriere. 'I said Dany, could you please write me something about being Haitian in the United States.' He wrote me back and said, 'Darling I don't write on command.' He's one of those people that you can love even more even after he says something like that to you."

    "So I decided to compile the published writing by Haitian-Americans that I already had and then seek new writers, new voices, some of them people who aren't writers at all but have a great stories to tell. I wanted a woman I admire a lot, Sabine Albert, a true activist who was part of the Korean shop boycott in my neighborhood. I remembered being in college and going by there with my mother and seeing this woman not much older than me stand-in there in the rain, in the sunshine protesting the prejudicial practices of this store. I asked her to write me something, but that didn't work out."

    In the end Laferriere came through after all, with a story about a ten-year-old boy and his beloved grandmother in the town of Petit-Goâve. Francie Latour explores feelings of alienation. Babette Wainwright talks about the do-gooders who go to Haiti, often helping themselves more than the country. Patricia Benoit tells of a woman who needs a red dress to maintain her dignity while she is detained in a refugee center. And there is an essay by Jean-Robert Cadet about being a restavek.

    "There are a lot of great stories in there though and a lot of good writing. We have college professors, filmmakers, journalists, social workers, and writers too. We also have people from all different walks of life, rich Haitians, poor Haitians," Danticat says.

    Nurturing new voices falls in line nicely with Danticat's other work: as a teacher. While working on her master's at Brown, she taught an undergraduate course. She gave a graduate seminar at New York University. Each summer, she travels to Haiti with a group of students from Boston University. This January she moved to Miami for a visiting professor post at University of Miami, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate writing seminars. "I just met a young man here who I think will be one our big names sometime soon. He's a student here and is just doing his thing, just writing. He has no big ego. So if I can help him and others like him in anyway, that would make the teaching worthwhile."

    Danticat is ushering her compatriots into the world of some of the most exciting contemporary American writing done by immigrants, influenced by the sounds and feelings of two worlds. "We have Amy Tan, Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, people whose English is very much inspired by the other culture from which they or their parents came from," Danticat says.

    "We know that we are too diluted by now to write convincingly in our mother tongue, but use the adopted language in writing the same way we are now using it to speak together. Go on any high school or college campus and you will hear the Haitian and Haitian-American kids speaking a mixture of English and Kreyol -Krenglish- that's what I do in my work. I am writing primarily for those kids, people like my brothers, who speak Kreyol, but can't read and write it and can't read and write French either," says Danticat. The sound of her own sentences, both spoken and written, are laced with the Kreyol language: the words themselves and the way the word fall. "My editor is always saying, 'That's Kreyol!' when she reads some of my English sentences."

    In explaining the power of the new immigrant writing, Danticat inadvertently comes up with a description that serves for her own work as well. "What makes the newly arrived immigrant writing so strong is that it embodies the immediate meeting of two worlds. It is full of grief in some cases, grief for a very recent loss of a homeland. It is full of anger sometimes, full of laughter too. But the emotions are still very raw, very strong. The wounds are still deep. The jokes are still remembered in their entirety. The memories are still not too fragmented, so that makes for strong writing."