The Art Of Not Belonging
Dwyer Murphy interviews Edwidge Danticat
September 3, 2013
The MacArthur Award winner on immigration reform, returning to Haiti in her new book, and why Wikipedia is still “micro-categorizing women writers.”
Image courtesy of Jonathan Demme
Almost a decade has passed since Edwidge Danticat’s last work of book-length fiction, The Dew Breaker. In the meantime, she’s written a memoir (Brother, I’m Dying—National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award nominee), received a MacArthur “genius” grant, edited the Best American Essays and Haiti Noir collections, delivered a Toni Morrison Lectures series that was turned into a celebrated book (Create Dangerously), and, in successive years, received honorary degrees from Smith and Yale. She’s been so busy it’s almost easy to forget what a homecoming her new book is. After the long wait, Claire of the Sea Light has just been released by Knopf.
At the book’s center is its title character, Claire Limyè Lanmè, a young girl whose father is trying to give her away, so that she can be raised as another’s daughter. This tragedy, born of an act of love, radiates out and we come to meet the local citizenry through their respective tales. As the stories progress, the individuals begin to recede slightly, allowing the town itself, Ville Rose, to come to the fore. Danticat has always portrayed Haiti with a careful lushness, but in Claire of the Sea Light she seems to have a new fervor. It is her first novel since the 2010 earthquake, which destroyed so much of the country. (Danticat spoke to Guernica on the one-year anniversary of the earthquake, discussing the devastation it wrought). The stories are set in a near, undefined past, but there’s a distinct sense that most of what Danticat is describing is now gone. There are no omens or soothsayers, and the richness of the place—the tropical vegetation, the precise placement of shops and homes, the Biblical presence and span of family trees—is often a source of joy. But it’s difficult not to imagine a grieving Danticat cataloging these as the losses she and other Haitians have suffered. As she explained in our conversation, “When I’m writing anything set in Haiti now, whether fiction or nonfiction, always in the back of my mind is how people, including some of my own family members, have been affected not just by history and by the present but also by the earthquake.”
Edwidge Danticat 