20353: (Hermantin)Miami-Herald-With her new book, Edwidge Danticat grieves for the coun (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Sun, Mar. 14, 2004




With her new book, Edwidge Danticat grieves for the country that shapes her
fiction.




The heart of Haiti

BY MARGARIA FICHTNER

mfichtner@herald.com


In the curious way in which fate and serendipity converge, in which lives
align and sometimes coalesce, this is now her place, just as, more than ever
these days, this may be her time.

''It feels like an old neighborhood to me,'' Edwidge Danticat says. ``When
we moved in, we had a bumper crop of avocados. . . . Actually, that's how we
met a lot of our neighbors. We just went door to door with our avocados. And
we have food exchanges. Our next-door neighbors have the best papayas I've
ever tasted in my life. . . . And, really, you can stand outside, and people
come by and chat with you. That's for me a kind of necessity, that you can
just casually shout across the way to people and say hello. . . . That's how
I grew up, in Haiti and then in Brooklyn, and I'm used to it, and I think. .
. .''

On this brisk, sunny morning, the thoughts slip from her on soft velveteen
syllables, each phrase low-pitched and muted, drawn as carefully as breath.
Danticat, surely one of contemporary fiction's most sensitive conveyors of
hope's bittersweet persistence in the midst of poverty and violence, is
nursing an espresso in the cramped back patio of a cafe not far from the
edge of Little Haiti. Half a block away is the pink corner house she shares
with her husband, Faidherbe ''Fedo'' Boyer, and, for the moment, a small
bustle of visitors: Boyer's mother, up from her small town in Haiti;
Danticat's brother, down from New York, and his almost terrifyingly
precocious 4-year-old daughter, for whose benefit the TV is tuned to a
chirpy kiddie show and not to the latest news from the homeland, which in
any case is sure to be bad. Mobs, ragtag looters and oozing corpses, each
image, each streaming bulletin ''almost like a deeply personal pain'' for
Danticat, who spent her childhood in the Bel Air section of Port-au-Prince
and returns often to see friends and family. But now, ``it seems like I'm
watching another place. The things I'm seeing I don't even recognize.''

Danticat's fiction is smeared with the bloody thumbprints of misery, of
course, with lost lives that quickly evaporate into lost history, with the
blank stares, limp excuses and paltry falsehoods of unreclaimable memories,
with the terrible burdens that politics, culture and the enflamed past
always have imposed on her little corner of the world. Yet, when morning
breaks with the angry spit of gunfire instead of a joyful song for 200 years
of Haitian independence, the anguish becomes even more stark and burdensome.
Danticat and Boyer had been in Haiti over New Year's, ''just to be on the
soil'' for the start of the bicentennial year. But with protests already
brewing, friends who had planned to go, too, had stayed home, and
''sometimes we were the only people in a big hotel.'' For Danticat, whose
parents fled Duvalier's repressed economy for Brooklyn when she was small,
leaving her and her brother behind for years, there is little sure comfort
in witnessing this new history as it unfolds.

''Maybe it's a denial and my own sort of pain,'' she says, ``but it makes me
extremely sad.''

READING MONDAY

Yet, even Danticat's just-published The Dew Breaker (Knopf, $22), a suite of
nine ominously timely stories from which she reads at 8 p.m. Monday at Books
& Books, underscores how deeply gouged and long-festering are the
repercussions of the past, how darkly they hover over even the most
innocuous household routines once life has become, as someone puts it, ``a
pendulum between forgiveness and regret.''

The new book's title character is a soft-spoken Brooklyn barber named,
perhaps, Mr. Bienaimé. He has a pious, reserved wife and a headstrong, adult
daughter, a sculptor to whom he has never explained why he suffers
nightmares, why he hates being photographed, why he lies about where he was
born, why he has no friends. Well, here is why: Almost four decades before,
when he was poor, young and ambitious, Mr. Bienaimé had been recruited by
the Tontons Macoute to become shoukt laroz, one who shatters the dew, who
comes to fetch you in the early morning on the day you will die. Within the
regime's brutal culture, Mr. Bienaimé had been well regarded, smart and
proficient, his aptitude for persuasion admirably cruel, his cold soul
comfortable with delusion: This is just like any other job, any other job,
any other. . . . But now he points to the long scar on his cheek and tells
his daughter, ``I was working in the prison. . . . It was one of the
prisoners . . . who cut my face. . . . This man who cut my face, . . . I
shot and killed him, like I killed many people.''

''I was really fascinated by this idea of an artist/child and this father
with a secret,'' Danticat says. 'Sometimes I'll go to schools, and I'll meet
Haitian girls or boys, and they'll say, `My father was in the military,' and
they say it so casually, but if you ask them to elaborate, based on the
period, you'll know exactly. You'll place their father. . . . And there's
always that question: Are they repentant, or are they just grateful not to
have been caught? That's something that always looms over you, certainly
over the heads of the victims. But how much stickier is it if it's your
father? 'My dad was in the military,' and it means something completely
different to them than it means to me or to somebody who might have
encountered their dad. They don't know what he did, and maybe their dad
didn't do anything. They just know him differently. They know him as their
dad. So it's interesting to think of all the layers that human beings
have.''

BUILT A BRIDGE

Such contemplations make it tempting, as it has been since Breath, Eyes,
Memory, Danticat's lightly autobiographical first novel, was published a
decade ago, to layer this thin, reticent 35-year-old with the heavy mantle
of literary mouthpiece for the whole Haitian-American experience. ''She's
made Haitians human,'' says Amy Andrieux, managing editor of Trace, a
magazine specializing in transcultural issues. Andrieux occasionally
exchanges e-mails with Danticat and regards her as a mentor. ''We're not
this foreign species that you can't put your finger on anymore,'' she says.
'' . . . And Edwidge changed that.'' The New York Times Magazine once
counted Danticat among several young artists ''most likely to change the
culture for the next 30 years.'' Several years ago Miami novelist and
short-story writer Ana Menéndez took Danticat's creative-writing workshop at
New York University, ''and one of the things that I was so pleasantly
surprised by . . . was just how calm and wise she is in person. All those
things that come through in her writing come through in her self.'' And
already, her influence is presumed to be large. ''She's built that bridge
between the island and the sort of American experience of being Haitian
here, and that's a vital bridge, particularly for my generation,'' says
writer Joanne Hyppolite of Pembroke Pines. ``We have parents who don't
understand what it's like to be American, and we have the Americans here who
don't understand what it's like to be Haitian. And here she is, writing
about that. . . . She's given us a voice.''

Danticat gave her voice to what is now the new book's opening story during
the spring of 2000, when she was teaching in the University of Miami's
Creative Writing Program and emotionally detoxing from The Farming of Bones,
her agonized, American Book Award-winning re-imagining of the October 1937
slaughter of thousands of Haitian laborers by goons under orders of
Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. ''I felt drained, like I'd used up
everything I had,'' she says. 'So I said, `I'm going to go back to writing
stories,' because you have this silly idea that they're easier.' '' She
tinkered out a powerful little story in which an ex-torturer and his
daughter end up in a Holiday Inn in, of all places, Lakeland, called it The
Book of the Dead, got it published in The New Yorker, and that was supposed
to be that.

'But I found myself redoing it, redoing the conversation and really being
fascinated with the father, . . . and I started thinking, `Well, what is he
talking about?' And trying to imagine a whole past for him.'' The more she
imagined, the more she wrote, hopscotching time and geography, each new
story a brooding journey into realms of regret, hatred, identity,
separation, paranoia or even, oh yes, forgiveness, each tugging from the
shadows another witness -- a funeral singer, a janitor, a nurse, a
12-year-old boy, a wedding-dress maker -- who may (or may not) have crossed
paths with the dew breaker and may (or may not entirely) have survived.

Danticat finished the book in the frantic weeks before her August 2002
wedding to Boyer, 42, a former Miami-Dade schoolteacher who grew up in Les
Cayes and Port-au-Prince and now runs a Creole-document translation firm.
They had met in Haiti five years before and have settled in this town she
calls ''a cultural El Niño,'' because his work is here, and hers goes with
her always, like her heart. ''I sort of feel like, whatever community you
live in, you'll still be locked in a room working,'' she says. Still, 'Miami
is this sort of great social experiment. You have these huge buildings going
up in about five minutes. . . . Everything is just growing around you like
those vines. It feels like you're watching something happen all the time. I
was here at UM during the whole Elián Gonzalez thing, and I had the same
feeling then: `Wow! I'm in a play.' ''

Though her role is for her to determine, Danticat's local profile has become
more prominent in the weeks since Miami Dade College's Florida Center for
the Literary Arts chose Breath, Eyes, Memory as the spring title for its One
Book, One Community reading initiative. ''Sometimes I feel a little guilty
that I'm not out there more,'' Danticat says. ``I sort of made a choice,
even when I was in New York, that I'm going to make whatever contribution I
make mostly through writing. I just want to live peacefully. I don't want to
stir things up. I just want to be able to sit somewhere and do my work. I'm
not extremely social to begin with. I've been to some schools, and I want to
do things like that. But my writing, I feel, is my activism.''

SAFE WHILE WRITING

To that end, Danticat is working on a nonfiction piece for O Magazine about
female asylum seekers in this country and has just finished her second book
for young readers, an imagined diary of the Arawak high priestess Anacaona.
''Always, I guess, from the beginning, I've felt this kind of urgency about
the things I want to write,'' she says, 'this feeling like `Oh, I'm safe as
long as I'm writing this story, because I've got to end it. It's got to
end.' '' At the moment, though, the work comes and goes in smaller gulps.
``I'm in that stage where I'm sort of draining my head and collecting at the
same time. I don't have a novel going, but I'm open. I'm telling the ideas
to find me.''

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