Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner, The Dew Breaker, Claire of the Sea Light, and The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Circle finalist for Criticism. She has written seven books for children and young adults, a travel narrative, After the Dance, and two collections of essays, Create Dangerously and We’re Alone. Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. Her story collection, Everything Inside, was a 2020 winner of The Story Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Prize. She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow and is currently the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
Leslie-Ann Murray: In We’re Alone, you pay tribute to many writers—the ones who are always orbiting our literary landscape, and more obscure writers who should be on our radar. Talk about the importance of giving these writers their flowers, and showing how their work has influenced you.
Edwidge Danticat: I believe it’s part of our lineage to honor our ancestors, particularly our literary ancestors. Nobody does this alone, and I wanted to acknowledge this. It aligns with what Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall say about rootedness and ancestors. It would be impossible for me to write and do this work without the very long lineage of Caribbean and African American writers, as well as the storytellers in my childhood, like my grandmother and our neighbors. These people made me; their lineage continues through me and the next generation. It sounds like a cliche, but we are all linked in a kind of chain, an ancestral chain.
Leslie-Ann Murray: Your book highlights how the global community, in particular the United States, continues to create economic and political policies that directly impact Haiti, and the rest of the Caribbean. The Wednesday morning after the election, I reached for your book because I felt very alone.
Edwidge Danticat: Elections have consequences, and I guess we will all have to deal with the potentially terrifying consequences of this most recent one. But this feeling of being so openly rejected by people who voted for somebody who has espoused such racist and xenophobic ideas as a method of getting elected is hard to deal with. If you are Haitian or Haitian American, the last couple of weeks before the election, you were the boogeyman and the proxy for anti-blackness and xenophobia in this country. So we wake up very scared because the people in power now seem to have a very particular hatred towards us. So, of course, that can feel isolating. But we’re never really alone. Our ancestors are always with us. As writers, we’re in a very intimate relationship with the readers and the readers with us. In a way, we’re alone together, just like during the pandemic, for example. We were each alone in our own spaces but experiencing this global phenomenon together.
Leslie-Ann Murray: I’ve been ruminating about my coping strategy for the next four years, and I plan to start calling my friends more often. If it’s possible, I want to engage with them beyond politics.
Edwidge Danticat: That’s a beautiful idea. Once again, this presidency is going to wake us up in many different ways. One of the ways that will become apparent is that we all need to care for each other. I was planning to do this before the election results, but my goal is to check in with one friend daily, especially my elders.
Leslie-Ann Murray: In “We’re Alone,” you connected the ramifications of climate change in Haiti, and the Caribbean in general with the colonial project of the Americas, and readers understand that citizens in these countries are directly impacted, despite not being the architects of this system.
Edwidge Danticat: Often, the people who suffer most from the consequences of climate change are the people who have contributed the least to it, due to our smaller population and our island size. More and more people are paying attention to the effects of climate change in the Caribbean because it’s part of the driving force of migration and climate has increasingly become a significant driver of migration worldwide. If you’re in the Caribbean and in that region in general, you are on the brink of more extreme weather, whether others acknowledge it or not. Climate change will continue to be one of the drivers of migration.
Leslie-Ann Murray: This is where I get angry and maybe you can help me work this out. Folks living in the Caribbean haven’t contributed to climate change, yet they are suffering as a result, and when they attempt to immigrate, they are demonized.
Edwidge Danticat: I think anger is a good mechanism to organize around. We have leaders who will not make climate change their priority. There’s going to be deregulation, immigration quotas, and closed borders, and we have to brace for these even as less attention will be paid to factors like climate change. We will need new alliances and unity in the Caribbean. It will be a matter of survival for all of us because we all share this region and this planet.
Leslie-Ann Murray: In the essay “They’re Waiting in the Hills,” you share your emotional and intellectual journey with Lorraine Hansberry, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Paule Marshall. You said the “best novels do unbury the Dead, or at least break down the doors and let the skeleton out.” Can you talk about this line?
Edwidge Danticat: Each section of that essay covers one of these writers and my experience with them, whether in person or on paper. Baldwin is a writer who’s very special to me. I reach for his words in moments like this. I found this lecture he gave at San Francisco State College in 1960, where he asked the audience to imagine writing a novel. As he laid out this novel he wanted to write, it seemed more like he was describing America. He made a parallel between the novel and this country. He said, “my subject and my material inevitably has to be a handful of incoherent people in an incoherent country.” This incoherence, he says, is analogous to having a friend who’s keeping the mother he’s just murdered in his closet, and though we know about it we refuse to talk about it. Baldwin would have resisted the idea of being prescriptive, but the conclusion I came away with from that lecture is that the best novels bring the dead to life. In this essay, I was trying to explore Baldwin as one of my many literary elders. He left a path for many writers to follow in terms of activism, being a writer, and being a creative person as well as an engaged citizen of the world.
Leslie-Ann Murray: Speaking of elders, I see you as one of my literary elders. I have been reading your novels and essays since I was a freshman in college, and twenty years later, I’m still reading your work and reveling in your intellect, passion, and commitment to community and literature. What would you say to young Caribbean writers like me who want to unbury the dead and create like you?
Edwidge Danticat: You just have to just do it. You don’t need permission. Sometimes, we wait for permission to write, but we just have to do it. You have to make it a part of your practice; you have to be disciplined and give it your all. I came from storytellers but not literary people, so I didn’t have people telling me, “Go write.” I loved writing, I loved stories, and I decided to write. If you love it, just do it. This is what I would say.
Leslie-Ann Murray: The themes of memory and rememory are threaded throughout this essay collection, and through this literary device, readers are exposed to the beauty and pangs of memory, and at the same time, the severe physical and emotional upkeep of maintaining said memory.
Edwidge Danticat: My first novel was called Breath, Eyes, Memory, so you know that I’m obsessed with memory. I think it’s part of being an immigrant. When I left Haiti, I left with one suitcase, leaving my whole life behind. Yet, I carried with me an unlimited amount of memories. I came to the US when I was twelve, and I’m now fifty-five years old. As my time in Haiti stayed the same and my time in the United States kept growing, I started writing to store my memories. I remember in Julie Dash’s beautiful film, Daughters of the Dust, where the character Yellow Mary says she puts her memories in this trunk, and whenever she wants to visit them, she opens the trunk up. For me, my books are like that. They’re a place where I store my memories.
Leslie-Ann Murray: I’m obsessed with memories as a concept, especially the memories of my mother and the older women in my family who dare not open the trunk of memories. What’s graceful and beautiful about your essay collection is that the readers engage with political and personal traumatic events through memory and historical records, thus giving them room to bear witness, without feeling emotionally disturbed.
Edwidge Danticat: Not all memories are sweet, but I get what you’re saying. The writers I love and admire often find beautiful ways of saying terrible things or reminding us of appalling realities. Many Black women writers frequently use memory, re-memory, and remembering in their work. If you think of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, it’s very beautiful and layered, and language helps us through the pain. I’m so obsessed with nostalgia because it’s a deep investigation of the past or at least an attempt at investigating the past and seeing how it affects our present and possibly our future.
Leslie-Ann Murray: Your essay collection, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, challenged me to be more curious and taught me how to infuse creativity in my life despite the current political and cultural upheaval. How are you creating dangerously?
Edwidge Danticat: We’re all going to have to create a little more dangerously in these next four years as the dangers become greater for a lot of us. I’m creating dangerously by showing up every day, doing my writing, mentoring when I can, working with my students, and responding to what is happening in the world around me through my speaking and writing. I think of Audre Lorde writing that poetry is not a luxury and that our silence will not protect us. When creating most dangerously, I actively remind myself that my silence won’t protect me. Baldwin called himself a witnessing writer. I create dangerously by also being a witness.
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Leslie-Ann Murray is a fiction writer from Trinidad & Tobago, and a citizen of East Flatbush, Brooklyn. She created Brown Girl Book Lover, a social media platform where she interviews diverse writers and reviews books that should be at the forefront of our imagination. Leslie-Ann is working on her first nonfiction essay collection, This Has Made Us Beautiful, about incarceration, race, immigration, education, and the overwhelming impact of these political forces on herself, the boys and men in her life, and the women in her community. She has been published in Poets & Writers, Zone 3, Ploughshares, Blackbird Journal, Adroit Journal, and Salamander Literary Magazine.