Edwidge Danticat on family, migration and the beauty of her home country, Haiti
Danticat spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in 2007
This summer, as Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33-year run, Eleanor Wachtel presents 10 of her favourite episodes chosen from the show's archive.
This episode originally aired Oct. 21, 2007.
When Edwidge Danticat won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story earlier this year, she was described as "a once-in-a-generation kind of writer, one who changes the landscape of fiction by crafting stories that exalt human experience into the realm of the mythic."
Born in 1969 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Danticat experienced the loss of her childhood, language and homeland when she joined her parents in the U.S. at age 12. She drew on that rupture in her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, which came out when she was just 25 years old. It was chosen for Oprah's Book Club and sold more than 600,000 copies. Her next title, the story collection Krik? Krak!, was nominated for a National Book Award and Granta magazine named her one of The Best Young American Novelists.
Many further honours have followed, including a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 2009, and most recently, the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for her collection Everything Inside.
Danticat's moving 2007 memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, tells the story of her family amid turbulent times, focusing on her father and his brother, the uncle who raised her in Haiti and later died in custody as he sought refuge in Miami. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and was named a New York Times notable book.
Edwidge Danticat spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2007 from the CBC's New York studio.
From fiction to memoir
"There was such an immediate, almost compelling need in this case to just understand so many things: what had happened to my uncle in Haiti, where he was driven out by a gang, and what was happening to my father as he lay dying with pulmonary fibrosis and my daughter was about to be born.
"I've always written to better understand things and process things. So it seemed like the best way to do it, but also to share this kind of experience with other people.
I've always written to better understand things and process things. So it just seemed like the best way to do it, but also to share this kind of experience with other people. - Edwidge Danticat
"I couldn't have done it with fiction. There's a process with fiction where you have to have had more distance than I had. And I didn't want to wait. I didn't want to reinvent, because the events themselves were so dramatic. I think it's a writer's impulse, especially dealing with documents, dealing with testimony, trying to find out things, to document the process as much as the outcome."
Uncle Joseph, the head of the family
"He was the oldest sibling and the person who, even when he was very young, was responsible for his siblings while his father was away. So when he moved to the city, the family followed him. He became enthralled with a man named Daniel Fignolé, who was a populist leader in the 1950s in Haiti. When Fignolé finally was elected president and was ousted, [my uncle] joined the church and started a congregation. He was the natural choice for our parents to leave us with because he was already, in a way, a father to so many people.
"He was strict sometimes, but also very playful. Part of it is that he had so many responsibilities but also tried to teach us greater lessons, if you will, which was somewhat natural because he was already the head of this congregation.
He really was the natural choice for our parents to leave us with because he was already, in a way, a father to so many people.- Edwidge Danticat
"He was a man of great faith. He perhaps stumbled into religion in the beginning, but it became the centre of his life and all the work that he eventually did sprang from that. He considered his very life a miracle because he could have died of throat cancer in his late 50s."
An egalitarian relationship
"It could have been simply sort of a child-adult, niece-uncle relationship until he lost his voice. Then, we began to go to a lot of places together. It was very warm because I became very angry for him at times. I felt extraordinarily protective of him because, after he lost his voice, he also had a tracheostomy hole in his neck, and people would laugh at that in Haiti, and they would shout things at him.
"It became this more egalitarian relationship than it would have been between a child and an adult, certainly [between] a female child and an adult uncle. There was more affection in it because we were mutually helpful to one another and I got to have glimpses in his life that I otherwise would not have had had he not had his operation and not needed me in the same way."
On writing about her uncle's death in custody
"In writing [Brother, I'm Dying], I learned more than anything that there's no such thing as closure. It allowed me to vent some anger I had, even though it may not come across so much in the book.
"Writing it this way — using often not even my words at times, but these words that I was given — allowed a sense of justice. But I'm familiar with this process, too. Before my uncle, I had been on visits, on citizen observation visits with the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Centre in Miami and other groups. So I knew what these detention centres were like, I knew of cases where people wanted to have good care, any kind of care, but didn't while they were in detention. I knew all these stories, so there was really no comfort and I couldn't lie to myself about what it would have been like for my uncle."
Closeness with her father
"My father tried very hard to get us to feel like a family. For example, my father, after we arrived [in New York City], started driving a gypsy cab, and would take us all to school together. He stopped working in a factory so that he would have flexible hours. And he tried to be very playful with my brother and me. You could tell he was trying very hard to make us like him, which is a strange thing to say about one's parents, but he tried very hard to make that happen so eventually we would grow to love him."
The beauty of Haiti
"Once you leave Port-au-Prince, there is another Haiti altogether, the countryside. And perhaps because that's where my family originated, in the mountains, the hills, the rivers and the ocean, all of that was a very big part of my experience, even though I grew up in a city. We spent a lot of our summers that way.
I've always been grateful that I've had that to balance the view that one gets when you live outside of Haiti.- Edwidge Danticat
"So to experience all of that, the hospitality of the people in the countryside, the sense of kinship, the sense of family, I'm glad I had that, especially given the fact that I ultimately had to leave Haiti. Because a lot of us who are Haitians in the diaspora grew up with this duality, knowing this part of Haiti and then still, like everyone else, consuming the political strife and the stuff that's in the news. So I've always been grateful that I've had that to balance the view that one gets when you live outside of Haiti."
Edwidge Danticat's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
