Bridging Islands with Myriam J.A. Chancy

As a writer and scholar, Haitian-Canadian Myriam J.A. Chancy lays bare the complexities of her country of birth, Haiti. In all of Chancy's works, not only does Haiti claim a strong presence and importance, but so does the island of Hispaniola as a whole. Chancy looks not just at the western half of the Caribbean isle, but at the network of exhanges and negotiations that have made both countries into what they are today. Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, Dr. Chancy's scholarly work has focused on women writing in the Caribbean, important works on this theme include Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (1997), Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (1997), and her latest publication, From Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic (2012). In Chancy's capacity as a creative writer, her works include Spirit of Haiti (2003), The Scorpion's Claw (2005), and more recently The Loneliness of Angels (2010). The Loneliness of Angels won the inaugural Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award for Best Fiction 2010. In this novel, Chancy explores the life of individuals that hail from and inhabit island spaces-such islands range from European islands (Ireland) to those located in the Americas (Hispaniola, Montreal)-and whose lives and stories intertwine, the connections endless. The complex relations between individuals and islands, be it Haiti or otherwise, are central to Chancy's work. Her constant questioning of the complex interplay between islands, people, and cultures has a strong presence in her various critical and creative texts.Brian McLoughlin: As a prolific academic and creative writer, are there any new projects on the horizon?Myriam Chancy: I have two projects in the works right now, one is academic and one is fiction. I am working on a new novel which is a post-earthquake novel, and the academic book is what I call an inter-diasporic conversation: people such as artists and writers, filmmakers of African descent-both from the continent and elsewhere-are put in conversation with each other about culture and politics through their artwork. [I am interested in] how they are achieving that conversation or not.BM:It seems as though this work is a continuation of the transnational focus you have in previous works such as Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women and From Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.MC: I have not seen it really as continuity from that work in From Sugar to Revolution, but I think that you could argue that. In a sense, I have been doing that [transnational work] in all of my work, except possibly in the book on Haitian women's literature [Framing Silence]. My first book was actually on the exilic tradition in the writing of Anglophone Caribbean women writers. That needed to be about crossing borders, because most of these women were in in the United Kingdom, Canada, or in the United States, and they were all from different islands of origin. Though at the time, I called that more of a [tradition of] because those were writers of a generation who really felt that they were compelled to leave their nation of origin, but I suppose today we would call that transnational.BM: Do you still see it as an or do you still see yourself as exiled in a sense?MC: No, I think that has changed. Maybe it's just the condition of age, but certainly in my twenties, I felt vey much as somebody who was in exile, because it was clear to me that I or my family, the dispersed parts of my family, were not in Haiti because of various reasons that had to do with the social realities of Haiti. Now that I have lived in the United States for over twenty years, I see myself more as transnational, especially as my interests have moved beyond Haiti. I spent a lot of time in my late twenties and into my thirties going to different parts of the Caribbean, which I am still doing, now going more to Anglophone countries in the Caribbean that I did not know before, like Trinidad. …

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