The Map Within: Place, Displacement, and the Long Shadow of History in the Work of Edwidge Danticat

A place on the map is also a place in history. -Adrienne Rich The literature of Haiti in the twentieth century is a literature of exile. From early novels such as Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosee (Masters of the Dew) to the Magloire-era novels of Jean Metellus to Dany Laferriere's Un autobiographie americain (An American Autobiography), major themes inevitably include the disintegration and reconfiguration of relationships and society. Stories inhabited by displaced people migrating in a world anchored by France, the United States, the Caribbean, and Canada define and connect the terrain of the Haitian writer. ' On this journey, historical references are inescapable as characters alive in the present learn to speak out of what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has referred to as the silencing of Haiti's past.2 Even non-Haitian writers of Haitian literature, like Madison Smartt Bell, are compelled to confront the non-event of the Haitian Revolution3 and the essential Haitian dilemma of displacement. In the third and final volume of his triology, The Stone that the Builder Refused, Bell richly imagines Toussaint Louverture's death in a prison cell in France as the culmination of a long and tortuous history. In fact and fiction, such cruel dislocations are the substance of the Haitian experience. Onto this dark landscape, a new and distinctive voice appeared in the 1990s. Not only is Edwidge Danticat distinctive for being young and female, or for writing in English rather than French, or for living in the United States, or for attracting the attention of Oprah Winfrey and an audience of mainstream readers; she is also distinctive for the ways in which she works new magic with old themes and, in fact, advances them onto new terrain. Early in her career, she was praised as Haiti's voice.4 More precisely, she is the voice of the Haitian-American Diaspora, a far-flung community of approximately 315,000 souls.5 As the literary voice of these people, Danticat has joined Laferriere in liberating Haitian literature from the local boundaries of Hispaniola, the island it shares with the Dominican Republic. In so doing, her work is redefining the meaning of past, present, and place for a new generation. In an early interview focused on her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, Danticat identified migration as one of her major themes.6 With the stories of Krik? Krak!, her second novel The Farming of Bones, and throughout her most recent collection of stories titled The Dew Breaker, Danticat's characters have continued to move from place to place like a flock of birds in search of a safe nesting ground. But migration is more than a physical journey. This paper interprets Danticat's approach to the theme of migration as an experience that encompasses a deepening relationship with history. In Danticat's work, the search for place in the present is anchored in an awareness of the past. Furthermore, the absence of a sense of place-or the reduction of place in Danticat's stories to spaces that are restrictive, marginal, temporary, and alienating7-will be explored. As Danticat's characters struggle with an unresolved past, one psychic option is to transform Haiti through memory-individual or collective-into a lifeless symbol inhabited by heroes and strangers. By breathing life into Haiti's historical past and linking it to the living reality of today, Danticat offers a way out and a way forward. Placemaking in Haitian Culture What constitutes a sense of place? How do we come to know where we belong in the world? Does the idea of home-place rely on relationships with people, a familiar landscape, language, religion, or our knowledge of cultural practices? Do we feel more rooted if we live in close proximity to those who share our personal memories? If we live apart from family, how do we keep the memory of our personal and collective history alive? To what extent do monuments, historic buildings, commemorative parks, and museums solidify our sense of place? …

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