Edwidge Danticat

“Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses”, asserts Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat in The Art of Death (6). Nadège Clitandre’s full-length literary, geopolitical, and historical exploration of Danticat’s oeuvre starts with a key scene of that loss – “Haiti as Homeland” – and seeks to trace the revisionary potential of the dialectical encounter between Haiti and its diaspora through the trope of the echo chamber. Danticat describes herself as an echo chamber for “distant and local” voices in Create Dangerously (159) and for Clitandre the echo becomes a way for Danticat to “recall” and assemble fragments from the “silenced histories” (31) of the polyphonic diaspora that resonates through her works. Clitandre’s echo chamber reading shows Danticat reflecting on and undercutting patriarchal narratives from François Duvalier’s regime, and in Western literary traditions (79, 82), “to engender new narratives of motherhood and womanhood” (92). For Clitandre, the echo chamber trope also relates to “nation-building”, “the nation’s homogenous echo chamber, wherein the single-body, single-mind, single-voice, single-language fantasy of a dominant community thrives” (140). Danticat destabilizes such narratives, as the echo becomes both a lament about loss (homeland, family, and citizenship), but also a disruption of notions of singular origin, filiation and of the imaginary wholeness (9) that can lead to homogeneity and marginalization (e.g., Haitians in the United States or Dominican Republic)

Art · Diaspora · Focalization · Homeland · Literature · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Imaginary · Trope (literature · Unsaid · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Migration, Identity, and Health · Psychology · Gender Studies · History

• Death, Dreaming, and Diaspora

  Liz Johnston•2023

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