By Debbie Jacob
Sunday Express
Section 2
Page 4
October 5, 1997
The Sunday Times describes her work as "stuffed with folk wisdom and seasoned with a sprinkling of urban angst". And the Washington Post Book World claims her work "…rewards the reader again and again with small but exquisite and unforgettable epiphanies".
At 28, Haitian-born writer Edwidge Danticat has produced work acclaimed by international literary critics. Danticat, who holds a degree in French literature from Barnard College and an MA in Fine Arts from Brown University, has emerged as one of our leading women writers. Not since Jamaican social worker Olive Senior appeared on the fiction scene has there seemed to be more to cheer about in terms of women writers from the region.
Danticat has even managed to turn the head of American writer and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, although she is closer to Flannery O'Connor in her style, which portrays simple, often rural Haitians isolated from the rest of the world through fear, ignorance and superstition.
She has earned a reputation for her lyrical prose and well-developed characters. Danticat, like O'Connor, shows the reader no mercies when exposing her character's trials and tribulations. The melancholy tone of many of her stories holds a morbid fascination for the reader.
Unlike O'Connor, Danticat often manages to reach down into the depth of despair and create hope for her characters.
Danticat's first success came at 21, when Krik? Krak! Was shortlisted for the National Book Award. Its poignant social message as well as its literary achievements caused critics to heap praise upon it.
In Children of the Sea, Danticat's sensitive descriptions, moving narration and uncanny ability to capture her fellow countryman's hopes and dreams succeeded in elevation Haiti's "boat people" from fearful cowards fleeing emotional and political strife to brave, ambitious, dream-filled individualists determined not to be condemned to a sub-human existence. "They say behind the mountains are more mountains, "Danticat writes in the opening of the story. "Now I know it's true. I also know there are timeless waters, endless seas, and lots of people in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves."
By juxtaposing two characters' stories in the thoughts of a refugee fleeing on a boat, and the girl friend he left behind to bear the grief and the fear, Danticat weaves a heart-wrenching story, which allows dreams and aspirations to ebb and flow like the waves in the sea.
One of the most touching stories in the collection is "Nineteen Thirty-Seven", which celebrates the fragile bond between a mother and daughter divided by prison. This story is a scathing commentary on political oppression.
The desperate measures taken for survival in Haiti are outlined in "Night Women", the bittersweet story of a woman willing to become a prostitute to feed her child. Determined that her child should feel happiness in the face of unspeakable despair, the woman convinces the boy that the gifts he finds every day when he awakes are from angels who visit him in the night.
"Between the Pool and the Gardenias", the sad, shocking story of a maid and her baby, shows how we all live on the edge of sanity.
My favourite story, however, is "A Wall of Fire Rising", the story of a poor man who dares to dream about his rich boss's aeroplane. It haunted me months after I read it.
The power of Danticat's writing does not diminish in her latest novel Breath, Eyes, Memory. All of the passion, dreams, terror and fears of her short stories are rolled up into one, big, strange story of a 12-year-old, Sophie Caco, who leaves the only life she has ever known, in a poor Haitian village, to join the mother she barely remembers in New York.
The heart-wrenching story of how she is forced to leave a life and aunt she loved and adjust to her mother and her new boyfriend is a painful reminder of the difficulties of adjusting to another country.
This is a story of the fear and love that bonds a mother and daughter together, the obsessive need to protect our children, the disappointments of others not meeting our delicate emotional needs.
Danticat has an unforgettable literary voice, which rings strong, true and wise beyond her years.
As the Boston Globe writes, "Her story gives voice, depth and anguish to the loving, bittersweet ties that bind her to her circle of women."
You can find Danticat's books at A Different View on Mucurapo Road, RIK, Lexicon in San Juan, and the Book Loft in West Mall, Paper Based at the Normandie and other leading bookstores.