13218: Bell review of Danticat book: The Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Haiti

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: madison bell <mbell@goucher.edu>

The version of the following review which appeared in the Washington Post
cut two paragraphs near the end, for reasons of space-- but to me those
two paragraphs are important and I thought list members might like to read
them.....

After The Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Haiti.
By Edwidge Danticat.
160pp, $16.00
Crown Publishers, August 2002.

Reviewed by Madison Smartt Bell
        Because she immigrated to the United States from Haiti at the age
of twelve,  novelist Edwidge Danticat has a choice of stances toward the
country of her birth.   In her three extraordinary works of fiction, each
measurably more powerful than the one before, she writes as a consummate
insider, inhabiting her Haitian characters with a passion and a poetic
fervor held in harness by the near-invisible hand of a master craftsman.
In After the Dance, a short non-fiction work about Haiti's carnival
season, Danticat instead assumes what she calls her "mask of distant
observer."
        Danticat's contribution to "Crown Journeys," a series of short
travel books by writers known for work in other genres, has some of the
feeling of a demanding assignment conscientiously executed, and certainly
it is no mean trick to set Carnival into the complete context of Haitian
history and Haiti's current situation in a work of less than two hundred
pages.   She does it remarkably well; for readers unfamiliar with Haiti,
After the Ball is a wonderfully efficient introduction not only to the
culture from which Carnival springs but also to the extraordinary record
of a people who, two centuries ago, founded the first independent black
nation in the Western Hemisphere by way of the only successful slave
revolution in history.  Her approach to the subject is conventional and
conservative, well-grounded in dramatized snippets of interviews with
people on the scene and amply supported by reference to many other writers
on the subject.  Those accustomed to the confessional extravagance of
recent "creative nonfiction,"  will find little of it here.
The seduction of a mask is the prospect that it may be removed, but
Danticat keeps hers in place throughout ninety-nine percent of her
narrative. The vibrancy of her fictional characters has been deliberately
subtracted from the veiled avatar of herself she moves through the scene.
It is useful to know, though Danticat does not directly mention it, that
her reserve, her form of modesty (in a sense of that word that has been
lost to United States culture for at least forty years), is an essential
survival trait in a country which, for all of her lifetime, has had either
a government which systematically terrorized its citizens or government
too weak and fragmented to offer them any reliable protection.  Danticat
does not quote this Duvalierist proverb: One must give the people both
carnival and blows of the baton.  Often enough these two prescriptions
were filled simultaneously, for Haitian Carnival has always been, among
other things, a venue for symbolic political expression in a country
throttled by state repression.
As a small child, Danticat was kept away from Carnival in Port-au-Prince,
the capital city,  both because of the quite substantial physical risks
and the more ambiguous risk of moral disorder that may follow a surrender
of self-restraint to such a festival.   Danticat brings her readers to the
Carnival of Jacmel, where it might reasonably be attended by foreign
tourists; Jacmel is a small, beautiful town on the southern coast, which
once did a substantial tourist business and hopes to do it again.  Jacmel
is a likely spot for the restoration of tourism in Haiti, though Danticat
does not fail to mention the abduction and murder of a French father and
daughter who came in 2000 to buy in early.   Despite the deeply chilling
effect of this event, Jacmel is as safe as it gets in Haiti, and its
Carnival is a terrific musical and visual spectacle, especially for the
elaborate paper mach masks which the revelers wear and which qualify as
genuine works of art.
        A Carnival tradition which Danticat does not directly discuss is
voye pwen -- literally to send a point.  In Vodou belief, a pwen is a
spell, which may be embodied in an object or a phrase or a song lyric,
meant to do magical work on the recipient in the interest of the sender.
Thus a carnival song whose political protest is densely veiled is also
intensified by  magical properties.  During the defacto period, the ruling
junta was sufficiently alarmed by the pwen launched by the carnival songs
of groups like RAM and Boukman Eksperyans that those musicians were forced
into exile or brought to the brink of assassination.   Though Danticat
describes performances directed to the issues of AIDS, agrarian reform,
and the plight of the boat people, she is really more involved with
various pwen of her own which are subtly woven into the fabric of the
book.
For example, her title derives from another Kreyol proverb, Apre bal,
tanbou lou.  After the ball, the drum is heavy.  The implied menace of
this phrase is harmlessly defused at the surface level, for there is no
trouble in the aftermath of the Carnival Danticat describes.  Yet some of
her readers are likely to know that U. S. Ambassador Alvin Adams, fluent
in Kreyol and proud of it, quoted this proverb to Jean-Bertrand Aristide
just after his 1990 election, which came as such an unpleasant surprise to
U.S. interests in Haiti, and that many Haitians still believe the remark
was a presage to American inaction, if not downright complicity, in the
coup that soon followed.  Now, a decade after the 1990 ball, the drum is
heavier than it ever was, and Haitians still labor under an increasingly
crushing burden, with, in the view of many, wholly inadequate and
insincere assistance from the international community in general and the
United States in particular.
Then there is Danticat's discussion of the lamayt: "a secret, a benign
Pandora's box one willingly unveils for one's pleasure".  In her Haitian
childhood, a lamayt might be any object of interest small enough to be
hidden in a box or a bag so that glimpses of it might be sold at a penny
apiece.   The lamayt concealed in this book is double: on the one hand,
the elusive heart of Haitian culture; on the other Danticat herself,
concealed behind her mask.  The reader moves toward these attractions with
the curiosity Pandora could not resist, but certainly Danticat knows that
there is no such thing as "a benign Pandora's box."
In Haitian culture, as opposed to our own devoutly voyeuristic one,
observation is not an act with no consequences.  The observer is affected
by the thing  observed, deeply and sometimes permanently.  It is for that
reason that Haiti is so fervently loved or, less often, loathed by its
foreign visitors, for whom Danticat's book is so delicately designed.
Certainly, After The Dance would serve very well as a guide for the casual
visitor to Haiti, Jacmel, and the Carnival.  Its more subtle points are so
deftly inserted that their effects may not be felt for years to come.
Admirers of Danticat's fiction who enter this book hoping to know the
author better may find themselves a little frustrated.  A skimming
description lets us know that at some moment she did drop her mask, her
reserve and her boundaries in order to merge ecstatically with the rest--
which is the great seductive hazard of any carnival.  But our glimpse of
this lamayt is tantalizingly brief.   "I am one of those women now, loving
and fearing the red-hot nails pricking me all over, and all I can do is
dance and dance for relief from their sting. " With a fictional character,
Danticat would have taken this description a whole lot farther; we know
that she knows how.  But since she's acting as herself, the experience
belongs to her alone, and she keeps it private.

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of twelve novels, most recently Anything
Goes.









http://faculty.goucher.edu/mbell/AnythingGoes/anythinggoesportal.htm