Edwidge Danticat in Dialogue with Haitian Writers: From The Farming of Bones to Claire of the Sea Light
Résumé
Edwidge Danticat is leading many conversations with other writers in her work, explicit or implicit, loud or silent, across languages or beyond borders. In the Acknowledgements at the end of The Farming of Bones (1998) Edwidge Danticat mentions the francophone Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis, the first one who wrote about the 1937 “Parsley” massacre in Compère Général Soleil (1955), in remembrance of the Haitians who were made to pronounce the word perejil rolling the R as Dominicans and were killed if they proved unable to do so. The voice of René Philoctète, another Haitian writer, who had also written about the 1937 massacre in his short novel Le Peuple des terres mêlées (1989), resonates in Danticat’s novel, even though he is not explicitly acknowledged. Danticat can also be seen as engaging with Haitian writer Jacques Roumain, whose words can be heard echoing in her writing, or with Cuban and Dominican writers such as Junot Diaz, Alejo Carpentier or Reinaldo Arenas, thus situating Haitian history of trauma and survival within a larger pan-Caribbean context. This paper will mostly focus on Danticat’s novel Claire of the Sea Light. In many subtle and powerful ways Danticat situates it within the living archive of Haitian literature and repositions herself within the Haitian village novel tradition initiated by Alexis, Philoctète and Roumain. As she revisits the social and political traditions that are deeply ingrained in Haitian literature and continues to shine a light on the people whose lives are not deemed of any worth, she simultaneously makes the novel endure not as a static form but as a site of Relation, refracted through diasporic sensibilities and contemporary fractures. My hypothesis here will be that the author’s dialogues with her predecessors are the sap that helps her constantly reimagine the evolving form of the novel across spaces, generations, and voices.
