On October 24, Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat will receive the St. Louis Literary Award, joining such august figures as Eudora Welty, August Wilson, Joan Didion, and Margaret Atwood. (The Saint Louis University Library Associates have conferred the honor since 1967.) Danticat has also earned an American Book Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.
For a quarter-century, Danticat’s novels, short stories, children’s books and other writing have given readers a view from inside a life changed by immigration—both the literal and figurative upheavals that occur when families leave their homelands. At 12, Danticat moved from Haiti to Brooklyn. The disorientation and alienation she felt and the sense of a diasporic identity have informed her work ever since.
Mother-daughter relationships play a strong role in Danticat’s work. Danticat’s 1994 debut novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, sees generations of women perpetuating violence on daughters that they love, in line with the political and cultural forces of their times. Her 2002 nonfiction work After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti describes her own experience of visiting her homeland as both Haitian and an outsider. Her latest, Everything Inside, is a collection of eight short stories examining relationships, families, locations and the complex interplay among them.
Danticat will be recognized at 7 p.m. October 24 at The Sheldon.
This is your first book of short stories in some time. What drew you to return to that format? I love reading and writing short stories. I love the economy of the form and the fact that you can dip in and out of different worlds and have an intense experience with many characters. The form also fits the place I am in my life: I have two young daughters, and short stories allow you bursts of inspiration in between more concentrated projects. It’s very easy to lose oneself in a novel in a way that the world around you disappears. My daughters are at a point in their lives where I want to be more present, all the while feeling like I’m still working at a pace I like. The short story allows me that.
How was the experience of returning to that specific universe or set of parameters? One of the most exciting aspects of writing short stories, for me, is layering many different elements including plot, language, subtext, et cetera. Returning to those parameters, now as a much older writer, is wonderful, because I am able to do much more with a short story than I knew what to do with say, 25 years ago, when my first story collection, Krik? Krak!, was published. I feel like the form has expanded for me and with me. I can see it in the work of other writers as well, especially the ones who mostly write and publish short stories.
As you spend longer and longer as a person of two homelands, how does your view of the concept of diaspora and leaving and returning change? My view has not changed very much on the concept of diaspora and leaving and returning since I was younger. I left Haiti when I was 12, and my parents have always told me that I could leave Haiti but it would never leave me. I think that’s where I find the space and nuance to explore all the different things I write about. Many of my characters have trouble even defining what home means. They don’t often get to choose, because people other than them set the rules of who can stay or who can go. They are at the mercy of immigration policies that scapegoat and dehumanize, policies that can sometimes decide whether they live or die, which was the case with my uncle Joseph, whom I wrote about in Brother, I’m Dying.
Given the strong theme of maternal lineage in your work, do you look to your own children's lived experiences, similar and different from your own, for inspiration? I started writing children’s books after my daughters were born. Two of those books, Mama’s Nightingale and My Mommy Medicine, were inspired by them. I would watch them sleep at night and wonder what I should tell them, and I would come up with ideas for picture books. They even helped me come up with the plot of My Mommy Medicine, which was inspired by our sick days. My children’s experiences are obviously very different from my own growing up, but they certainly inspire my wanting to tell as many stories as possible. My hope is that my stories, my family’s as well as my community’s stories, will frame their life experience for them and inspire them to tell stories of their own.
What do you make of the current state of U.S. and worldwide policy on immigration? I think it’s a travesty, one that will get worse as we have more migrants from all over the world, including an increasing number of climate refugees. In the U.S., you not only have children being separated from their parents at the border but you [also] have these children being detained in horrible conditions, which will affect them for the rest of their lives. Some children have even died. You now also have parents being picked up by ICE while their children are sobbing and pleading for their release. Children not only have to suffer a great deal for their parents’ trying to seek safety and a better life, but they also have to become public advocates for their parents during the most wrenching moments of their lives. And the president of the United States openly touts this as a deterrent, the raw and heartbreaking pain of both parents and children are being used as a deterrent for immigrants who might want to come here. There are now naturalized U.S. citizens losing their citizenships over clerical errors and people losing their green cards because they went on public assistance. Can you imagine how many more families will now go hungry or won’t seek medical care because they are afraid of not being able to get or keep a green card? It’s all very cruel and inhumane. We are dealing with an administration that acts as though immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers are not even human.
What’s the role of fiction, yours in particular, in addressing the mindsets behind it? It’s hard for fiction to match the level of cruelty we are seeing. Some of this, if you put in a fictional story, people might think you’re writing propaganda or exaggerating. What fiction does best, though, is to tell these stories from within, from inside the head, or the heart, of another person. Fiction can put us in the skin, the mind, the body of someone who is experiencing all of this. Fiction can go beyond statistics and anecdotes and take us a lot deeper into the lives and loves of mistreated and misunderstood human beings.
