Edwidge Danticat on Haitian Art and Literature

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone. Welcome again to Conversations with Tyler. Today I am very pleased to be chatting with Edwidge Danticat, the famed Haitian-American author. Edwidge, thank you for coming on the show.

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

I have so many questions. Let's start with one about you. Now, you moved to the United States from Haiti, I believe, when you were 12. How is it you have learned so much about Haitian history in the meantime? Since you didn't do most of your schooling in Haiti?

Well, I often say that, you know, and my parents used to say it as well, that I left Haiti but Haiti didn't leave me. And 12 is, I think, young enough to transition somewhat easily, but also to have formed so many memories and to have actually had a big chunk of primary education in Haiti. And having learned both oral history and written history, so I brought a lot of that with me to the US and enough that I was curious when I got here to find out more from this side of things. So I think it was in part a love for Haiti that continued and also a curiosity about history in general, but Haitian history in particular.

Now, there's a shift, I think, in Haitian cultural history. If you think of the 1960s or '70s, Haitian cultural history is centered in Haiti. So you have Mick Jagger, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. They go to Port-au-Prince, Pétionville. They buy paintings. They bring them back. Everything is very Haitian-centered. And that seems to end in the 1980s. Why did that happen?

Well, yeah, there was a time, even in the, you know, in the '50s where you had cruise ships going to Haiti, which I've always found somewhat interesting because all that time that you had that, you know, the tourism, the sort of that high level of tourism was still during the dictatorship, and so people were going at that time anyway, the folks you mentioned and others, and then in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic then Haiti was designated by the CDC as— Haitians were labeled a high-risk group for AIDS, and we were the only ones designated by nationality. It was Haitians, homophiliacs, heroin addicts, and homosexuals. And so that certainly, that came out of some cases of people who had contracted AIDS and who came to a hospital here in Miami and were reported to the CDC. And so that killed really, that designation killed the tourism industry in Haiti. It was later, you know, after much, you know, demonstrations, after a lot of research, it was corrected, but it really killed whatever tourism industry there was in Haiti, which was already kind of a strange kind of tourism anyway, because, you know, if people felt like happy to go at a time of, you know, very strict dictatorship, that there was always already something a little strange about that. But whatever tourism industry there was was destroyed by the AIDS epidemic.

If you think of Haitian culture today, is it correct to think that the Haitian diaspora is now Haitian culture? So if you think of Haitian painting, Well, there's Duvall Carrier, but he's lived in Puerto Rico, in France, in Florida. You are the leading Haitian writer, if one were going to call you that. Wyclef Jean from Haiti, but now mostly in North America. Leyla Makala. Some would even call Basquiat a Haitian artist. I mean, is that now outside of Haiti what Haitian culture is?

No, I think that would be incorrect to say because there's still such a— there is a great vibrant culture inside Haiti and there are wonderful writers inside Haiti as well. There's wonderful visual artists, musicians, and so I think if you think of it like any other diaspora, there is sort of— we're going to be like if you're in North America or if you're out, you know, you're— there's some mechanisms that make that, you know, our work more visible. My work is in English, so naturally people have more access to it, like more easily. But there's a really strong and vibrant culture inside Haiti as well that people like us, you know, we feel fed by, you know, that we feel is still important to us as readers. You know, I'm a writer, but I'm also a reader. I'm an you know, I appreciate art. I'm, you know, I'm on the, on the council of the Sancho Dar in Haiti, an esteemed institution that goes back, you know, several decades now. So there is, there's still that culture and it's really a powerful statement, I think, to Haitians and Haitian culture because there's so many obstacles all the time in the way of artists in Haiti, but they, you know, they still are thriving and are very really wonderful, express what's happening very powerfully through their work.

Do you think the Haitian diaspora is culturally stable, or do you think it will in essence be absorbed and assimilated into more narrowly Afro-American culture?

Because there's often so much happening in Haiti, let's say, that tie, you know, what we would call that long bwe, you know, the umbilical cord, is really married to Haiti and even over several generations like that, you know, the Haitians who I know, I don't want to speak for everybody, remain very connected to Haiti and want their children to know Haiti and want that connection through language, through food, through music. So the diaspora, you know, no diaspora is fully stable. There's, of course, there's integration, there's assimilation, there's— that happens with every immigrant community over the generations, certainly for sure, but there's a certain tie to Haiti that the diaspora has. There's so many diaspora organizations, that neighborhood organizations where people support schools in the neighborhoods where they come from, where they support organizations, and part of it I think that tie, that connection is connected to the fact that there is— that Haiti is often in crisis And people in the diaspora are often the first-line responders, right, and after people in Haiti, inside Haiti, you know, after Haitians in Haiti, but the Haitian diaspora, even it's within our families, if there's an illness, if there's, you know, and that sometimes extends to the larger community. So I think there will be definitely there's integration, you know, I think, but I don't see, I think we have a diaspora that goes back, you know, further than people know, yet that connection to Haiti throughout the generations has remained. And then with these artists that you mentioned, you know, Leyla McCalla is— she's a wonderful artist born of Haitian parents, yet her music reflects that. Artists like Maryse Lalaveau, you know, you mentioned Bastien, you know, that's also a kind of testament to thread that runs through Haiti and the diaspora.

Do you think there is, in fact, a natural language for Haitian literature? So, if you think of the earlier Haitian classics that you've had a hand in translating, they were written in French. Your work, of course, is written in English. It's been slow to have been translated into Creole. Is it a fundamental fact about the future of Haitian literature that there's not a natural language there?

It's such a topic of discussion often among critics of Haitian literature. What language is Haitian literature written in? And I think now people, I mean, some people, I can't speak for everyone, but I think most people will, who study Haitian literature will say that it's now a multilingual literature. There's literature in Creole certainly, which I think is probably closer to the language, to the primary language that most Haitians speak, Creole, and that was slow to come. There was always literature in Creole, but not as much as there is now. Haitian literature is mostly written in French, and like you said, we've worked on translating. I've worked with others in translating, for example, a masterpiece of Haitian literature called Lys Pasteur Simon by Jacques Stephen Alexis, which we translated with Carol Coates as In the Flicker of an Eyelid, and I edited these two books, Haiti Noir and Haiti Noir 2, in which we translated many contemporary Haitian writers. And then we have writers now who are Haitian American or Haitian Canadian, like Roxane Gay and Myriam Tsantsy, who write directly in English. So it's a literature now that's— it's a kind of multi-language literature through my immigration and migration, and we have writers who are writing in Chile, in the Dominican Republic, in Spanish, and that's another growing layer of Haitian literature abroad, you know, that this Haitian literature that's so far mostly produced a lot of poetry in Spanish, but there was a novel before by a Haitian writer named Micheline Dussek who was, who had written one of the first novels about Haiti in Spanish, so it's a growing, I mean it's, it's a linguistically interesting literature and to see all the, like, the tentacles of it, if you will.

What do you think of the, you might call them, outsider novels about Haiti? So there's Graham Greene, there's Victor Hugo's Bug Jargal, right, which is about the Haitian Revolution. Are those cultural appropriation? Are they bad novels? How do they strike you?

Some are good, you know, some are bad. You know, there's some wonderful ones like Madison Smart Bell's trilogy, also was rising, you know, in the Haitian Revolution. I think that those were wonderful. There's some really great ones, there's some that are a little cringy, but I, I wouldn't say to anybody that you can't write about Haiti, you can't write about Haiti. I think really writers should be able to write whatever they want. You should expect people to respond, and I think, you know, if you do it with nuance and care, that's really important. The temptation, you know, there are some tropes that often sometimes people just fall into when they're writing about Haiti, the zombie situation. Sometimes they approach it like it's never been done before. So I, I think if you do it with care, if you do it with nuance, I'm open to, to reading it.

Why does Haiti have the very best food in the Caribbean?

Well, because we just do. I'm perhaps biased, you know. I just have to say overall in the Caribbean we have amazing food, you know. There's wonderful food throughout the Caribbean, but I think Haitian food in particular I love because we have great spices, and even, you know, if the food is a little fad in some cases, you have like the piklis, which is sort of a pickled cabbage, carrots, like a spice, you know, that you sprinkle on top. For people who like meat, there's griot, which is pork, taso, goat, and there's stuff that even if you're vegan you can like, like maimoulé, which is cornmeal, sospoir. I think it's a very rich and wonderful cuisine, but I am biased. And I think if people who have not had Haitian food, you should definitely, if you know anybody who's Haitian, on January 1st, go over their house for— when we can go over people's houses again, go for soup joumou, which is a squash soup that we drink on the 1st of January to celebrate Haitian independence.

Why is Haitian black mushroom rice so good?

Oh, it's the mushroom. That's the key. And actually, you know, I've had— I live in Miami and that gives me a little more access to the zhong zhong. And so I've had to ship to friends throughout the States, and there's a key to it in terms of just how you like washing the mushroom and just the right— they try to make a kind of like cube thing, but the cube thing is just not the same as just like the actual mushroom that you boil and you squeeze. And if you ever, like some people, if you're from the North, my friends from the North will put some cashews in that. That's like another level with some cashews.

The collective buses in Haiti, the tap-taps, of course. Why are they so beautifully painted? Why does that make economic sense?

Well, the thing is, I mean, it's people who like, and I've gone to Haiti with a lot of blancs, you know, foreigners.

Like me.

Yeah, when there's a time when I used to go, we had a program for college students every summer, and I used to love like when they land to see the tap tap. So it's just really, it's so striking because it just feels like, oh, I'm in this world full of art, you know, and it's like they seem to be moving canvases. And what I love personally most about tap-tap, even after you get used to the visual feast that they are, I love the sayings on them. And you would see like, you know, of course basketball stars from here. I mean, I think at some point like not too long ago, there was like Toni Morrison after she died was on a tap-tap. It's just, you know, people really soak what's happening around, but the sayings are also great. So there's One of my favorite sayings on the tap-tap was, "Wapale Maptravai," "You're talking and I'm working." And I felt like it was so powerful in terms of like how you respond to sort of people who talk badly about you. It's like, "Wapale Maptravai," you know, "You're talking, I'm walking," you know, "I'm working." And also the tap-taps with the art sometimes like will have messages of gratitude like, A tap tap might have a message of gratitude to the driver's mother or to whoever contributed. A lot of them are, you know, to Jesus, to God, to the Virgin, and other religious figures, but also to people in the person's life who contributed to the business. And I always find them very beautiful to look at, but also really wonderful moving, moving pieces of art.

If I think of the Haitian arts today, I think of painting possibly as having peaked between the '40s and the '70s, and the most interesting work today tends to be in voodoo sculpture. Why has that shift come about? And those are very large pieces. They're like installations. They're hard to buy. They're hard to transport.

Well, I think, I think if you stayed there, you would be reducing your possible level of enjoyment, right? Because What's most in the, in that early period, you know, the Saint-Trudard period in the '40s, like the early period when the tourism that you were talking about, when people went to Haiti, they, what they bought the most was what they call like the naïf primitive art, which is a super colorful, really beautiful figures, often market scenes. And so that, that's traveled very well, but there was always at that same time artists who are a little bit more adventurous, artists who are like somewhat abstract, at the same time that there were these artists who were like, this is what the tourists want, that's what I'm going to produce, right? And so throughout the Caribbean, even if you went to other islands, you would see these paintings, and then they became almost a little bit mass-produced, but they were, they're gorgeous. I have, I have some, but the sculptures you're talking about, I think those were started actually, we used to call them, I used to work for Jonathan Demme, the filmmaker, who was a huge collector of Haitian art and in the office whenever we acquired those sculptures, you know, when we bought, which I traveled a lot to Haiti with him, and when he would buy, he called them Liotto's because the original artist was Liotto and when I was growing up in cemeteries often you didn't— we had metal flowers really because you would do like a wreath of metal with, and it would be metal from oil drums because that lasted longer, right? As opposed to like if you have a wreath of just like roses that dies quickly. So people would make these beautiful wreaths. And so Lioto was a great— he was from Saint-Marc, which is really the home of these sculptures. And now there's a whole industry in those sculptures for sure. And I have to say like they're very hard, I agree. You can't just like put that in your suitcase often like you would the paintings, the way people used to roll them. But they're gorgeous and now they're almost three-dimensional, you know, like one Christmas we bought one that was like a nativity scene that was just like 3D. But there are other, you know, there are a lot of wonderful young artists now that just some of them are moving away from sort of the more primitive, naïve, you know, Cynthia Loire, there's so many whose names are escaping me, but there are just wonderful artists worth exploring. You mentioned Duval-Caillé, who is outside of Haiti, but there are quite a few other young artists who are inside Haiti who are doing, who use both that style of sculpture who do paintings, who do installations, who are doing really exciting things.

I own a Zobop by Liotto, by the way. It's a great work. It's by the fireplace.

Oh, wow. Yeah.

Why is it you think that Black African Americans have not evolved as natural collectors of Haitian art? It seems to be much more the nerdy white guys who buy it, or well-to-do families.

Oh, I know a lot of African Americans who collect Haitian art, you know, starting with, for example, Ishmael Reed, who his wife had a gallery, you know, people like Danny Glover, and even, you know, friends that again when we traveled with folks to Haiti, a lot of them were African American. And oh, I know there are quite a few African American collectors. You know, I don't know, my friend Karine Fabiès who has a gallery in LA called Galerie Lakay, and she has quite— it's a wonderful gallery because it's in their home. Her husband Pascal is an artist who's worked with the artist N'Gonhui who do actually really amazing urban sculptures with, you know, discarded like dolls and computer boards and sometimes skulls. They recently had a show here at MOCA and Karine, for example, I think has worked with a lot of African American collectors including some in Hollywood but some in also, you know, ordinary people who collect as well. I mean, there's been, I think, also this marriage of African American art in some cases with Haitian art, like Laurie Malou Jones, who went to Haiti, who has spent time there, and kind of this connection there with some African American artists who are very aware of Haitian art as well.

How much voodoo inspiration is there in your writing?

Well, it's part of the, you know, Haitian culture. I try— one of the things that when you were asking about the outside gaze of in Haitian literature, I think sometimes it's easy like to fall into that trap of like, "Oh, let me throw in some vaudou just to like, you know, exotify things." So I try to, in my work, I try, you know, I treat that as a worldview And, you know, some people might be practitioners, some people might not be, you know, and I also like to show a whole range of religious practices in my characters because not everybody is monolithic, just as they're not in their behavior, they're not monolithic in their religious practice as well. So I try to show it as a whole range of religious practice, like in Breath Eyes Memory, for example, You know, the family certainly has— they have their family law, they have things that they have their own practice, but they also, you know, they're members of the family who also practice other religions. So like to show the whole range of religious practices that there would be in a family like that. Some of them also, you know, Protestant, and sometimes that actually leads to some conflicts within some families. So I like to show all the nuance of all that.

Your novel about the twins, Untwine, isn't that just a voodoo novel? And I mean that as praise.

I didn't think of it that way. There's certainly, you know, there's certainly twin lois in voodoo, and these girls are twins. I'd always been fascinated by twins, but I think maybe that could be one interpretation, but that wasn't sort of how I started out, but I think that could be one interpretation.

To me, I just think Marasa when I'm reading it, right? The whole myth of the twins and the rivalry and beginning the end struggle.

Yeah, but I think if you— is it because they're Marasa? Because there are a lot of novels about twins as well, but they're written by, you know, by people who are not from Haiti. Like I said, I think I don't object to that as an interpretation, but I don't think that's the only thing that it is. It's also about sisterhood and illness and separation and so forth. But, but again, I'm fine with that interpretation.

In a world with so much mobile and social media, do you think radio is still of central importance for Haitian politics as it had been in the past?

Radio remains very important there. For example, there are a lot of cultural figures, even younger people in Haiti who emerged out of radio culture and now have transitioned into more social media, who do lives and Facebook, but who started out in radio. Radio certainly was very important when I was growing up and there weren't as many other outlets. But now I find, for example, you know, my mother-in-law who's 85 who lives with us, she's in Haiti most of the time, but she, in addition to, sometimes she'll watch a YouTube video about something that's happening in Haiti, but it will be a YouTube video of someone in a radio station and she can watch that on YouTube, someone can send the clip on WhatsApp. So I think radio now is part of a series of like many different ways that people get information. It remains like when we're in the country, if you don't have internet, it remains one way that you get news on the radio. But it's also, people also, I find like even the older people in my life get a lot of news through their phones, through WhatsApp, you know, through also through YouTube clips. And so it's, there's a constant loop of information now that radio is just one part of, whereas, for example, when I was younger, it was the primary, if not the only source of information that we had.

With a Haitian background, do you think you have a different perspective on the fake news debates of the United States? Because Haiti, it seems, had a lot of fake news well before social media. It was a kind of country of rumor in some ways, or not?

I think you're thinking of this whole thing of maybe that expression "télé-jol" which is like the mouth that would go, I guess would be like "télé" and that was a way that information is spread. I don't know, I think every culture has that kind of sort of rumor mill, if you will. I don't think that would be unique to Haitians. What I recognize in the whole fake news debate is sort of the gradual slide towards autocracy. Certainly that is— those of us who have lived through dictatorship and other moments like that, you recognize the slippery slope, the demonization of media, the, you know, the sort of forced silencing. This summer I was reading with my girls, we were reading Animal Farm And it was just really striking, you know, so like all the parallels in terms of like what your eyes are seeing, you're not seeing. So all that is very familiar in terms of like that whole thing of diminishing the press. Of course, at full autocracy, you know, at full— then you kind of destroy the people who are giving the news. But there are ways now with, you know, with the social media to do it.

Why do you think Haitian political history has shown so much instability in terms of turnover in the number of rulers?

Haiti's history started— we started as a country with everything against us right there. Haitian Revolution was an impossibility to so many people. So These enslaved people fought the French, the British, you know, the Spanish to start the first Black republic, the first place in the world really where enslaved people overcame their masters and started this nation in a world where slavery was the norm. So Haiti was shunned. We had to pay to the French for this independence until into the next century. And so I think there was so much stacked against us. And then, you know, in the early 1900s, you had the very long US occupation and then the dictatorship. So we were set up in a way to fail because this, you know, was not meant to exist. Enslaved people starting their own country was not meant to exist. It's, you know, a lot of people have said it and historians have said it. Like, how dare you? And I think to this day Haiti is being told, how dare you? And many instances when people, you know, when they've elected their leaders, when we've elected our leaders, then suddenly there's a coup or there's— so I think the instability is not fully the fault of Haitians. I mean, we've had our part where people who have decided to turn against their own But it's also something that has been set up to fail.

What did the United States get most wrong in its 1915 to 1934 occupation of Haiti?

Being there.

Sure, but there's better and worse occupations, right?

I don't think the people who have been occupied anywhere would ever say that, like, "Whoa, what a great occupation." Well, but say Barbados may have gone better.

Than, say, some other countries in the Caribbean, its occupation?

I would ask the Barbadian— I mean, I think you mean Grenada or—

Well, Grenada also, yeah. Say they went better than Suriname. The Dutch were more extractive in Suriname than the British were in Barbados, I think.

I would ask them. I don't know. I would not speak for them. I think people always want to be in charge of their fate. And the people who come often From what I know of the US occupation, it wasn't. And you know, the writers at that time wrote about it. You know, there were like African American scholars who were living the moment, who visited, who wrote about it because it was meant to keep— it was meant for influence in the region. One of the heads, I think it's Butler, his name was, who wrote about— who had a mea culpa many years later, who was in charge of not just the occupation of Haiti, but also when at that time where there was a common occupation of Haiti and the DR where he said, we were there for Citicorp, we were there for money. That was his mea culpa, he was like, and so there is the example of, and you know, you've talked about Haitian art with Philomé Aubin, who's a Haitian artist from the north, has a very famous painting about Chalmaz Bérard, who was a leader of the Cacos, who fought against the occupation, who was murdered and attached to a door for, you know, as a kind of frightening. And there are some horror stories, some massacres during the occupation, and what was left behind after the occupation, I think both in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was this military structure, right, that went through the generations. And the Dominican Republic side, it became Trujillo, who then carried out this 1937 massacre of Haitians. And then on our side, it went all the way through, down through the, the army that ended up in that dictatorship. And, and there was also sort of a deeper layering of sort of just basically moving Jim Crow to these islands because then they had to, for the comfort of these people, they had to kind of create these clubs, these sort of to separate people who are light versus people who are dark in terms of how they interacted with them. So it's not fun.

In retrospect, do you think the U.S. restoration of Aristide in 1994 was a mistake? Was it more colonialism, or was it the best thing that somehow had to be done?

Well, I think that was a very difficult moment at that time. Those generals in that moment doing that coup d'état, thousands and thousands of people had been killed. At that time I worked, I was working on a film called Tombé-Lévis, and we were interviewing many people who had been victimized during the coup d'état. And one of them was an incredibly brave woman named Alette Bilanz. Who had survived and being really butchered and had lost her arm and other people. And so I think at that time, I mean, the, you know, President Aristide was part of that decision and he wanted, he wanted to return at that time. I guess that was the right thing to do because people were really— and the generals, they were ready to stay and people were dying. And so Looking back, I think that probably was a really— that was the decision that was made for Aristide, and he returned.

If you were Minister of Education in Haiti and had a fair amount of latitude, what would you do?

I would give the job to a woman I know who runs an organization called Asseye Yti, and her name is Nadine. And Nadine works with schools. Actually, she works with educators. If I were minister, first of all, I would make sure people who are better qualified than me were minister of education. But I would— one thing I think would be important to actually make sure every single child is educated and to make sure that there's education in Creole, because often children just jump into school in French and there's a lot of rote memorization. So that would be an important thing, I think, to make sure every child has access to education because in Haiti, something like 40% of a parent's income is spent on education and often not the, you know, the children are not getting the best education because they're— it's rote memorization and— but what I know is there's such a love for education in Haiti that parents really, really sacrifice a great deal to have their children educated, that every child, of course, deserves an education. So I would love for every child to have that opportunity. I think that would be the most important thing, to have like a good education that could serve them and help them to function and grow in their country.

As a Haitian American, How do you feel your perspective on Black Lives Matter might be different from that of many Black Americans?

It's not different. I think, I believe that Black lives matter, of course. And I think maybe as a Haitian American with the history that I've just outlined to you, you know, with having come out of a culture of revolution and the constant fight that Haitians have always had, we can so I certainly identify with that, absolutely. And one thing that's been really wonderful to see with this generation is that as Black immigrants, there's no separation. I think maybe in previous generations, you know, there was that feeling that, oh, this is not my problem. But, you know, in the demonstrations you see Haitian flags, you see Dominican flags, you see, you know, people from the continent, and I think because we realize that this affects all of us. It's my nephews, it's my African American friends that I grew up with, their children, my children. It's, it's a common, it's certainly a common struggle, and certainly if that cop is not gonna be asking you which country you're from when doing these types of encounters, Now, in all of these conversations, there's a segment where I present to the guest my favorite Haitian proverbs and he or she reacts.

Are you ready for a few?

All right. So you have, you, you've been sharing Haitian proverbs with your guests.

Here's one: after the dance, the drum is heavy. What does that mean to you?

Oh my God. Apwe dastan bou lou. So I actually have a book called After the Dance. It's on Carnival. Yes, for me it means that there are consequences to everything, like even, even the most joyful thing, right? Like you have to be prepared for the consequences of things that you've done, you know, and it's something that my mom used to say quite a bit too. Like if you have just had a really big celebration or If you waited too late to do your homework because you were having a good time watching a program you like, she was like, "Après danse, le tambour est lourd." You know, "After the dance, the drum is heavy." So there's always— it's kind of like the morning after hangover situation and the most joyful outcome, but really that there are consequences to everything.

Here's another one.

"It is the owner of the body who looks out for the body." Oh, this one, you will not believe how much we hear that these days. Sì met kò ki ve ye kò. And it's something that we say a lot now in the coronavirus era, and you hear it on the radio, you hear it, you know, people say it when they talk to their neighbors. Sì met kò ki ve ye kò. That means that really you are the best person to take care of yourself. Like if you want people, if you're saying wear your mask when you go out during the coronavirus era, wash your hands. It's like the best, the most qualified person to take care of you is you. So it's not the doctor, it's not, you know, your loved one. C'est le maître du corps. It's the owner of the body who takes care of the body. So it's like, watch out for yourself. It's very good advice these days.

When they want to kill a dog, they say it's crazy.

Yep. That's that dehumanization. Just those, like, if you want to what you do. It's, I guess, it's fake news. It's like, it's connected to the fake news, right? If you want to diminish or slight someone, you call them names. That's also a timely one, I think.

How about this one? The Constitution is paper, the bayonet is steel.

Yes. Again, back to our conversation about dictatorship in a way, I think. I believe that one was often cited by one of the generals actually during the '90s during the coup d'état, or it might have been even before, but it was— I think it speaks to the fragility of documents, right? Like the Constitution. I think yesterday was Constitution Day in the US, so that might also apply here, right? That if it's that whole thing with freedom, right? Freedom is something that is always— that we have to always keep watching out it doesn't slip away, right? Because sometimes we think these documents or these rules are just set in stone. And I remember, I think this general who kept saying this, saying, was saying, well, you know, I have the weapons and we can all— like with weapons You know, paper. It's kind of paper, paper, rock, scissors, and which is stronger.

When the Mapu tree dies, goats would eat its leaves.

Yes. This one I think is about humility because we, you know, we have this expression that we say when someone has died who has contributed a great deal to our culture, to the— we say that a Mapu has fallen, and a Mapu is a silk cotton tree. It's a kind of sacred tree and it's also a big tree that lasts forever. So it's a regal— it's just an institution, a Mapu. And so what this one is saying that even, you know, it's actually the goat is a kind of meager creature compared to a Mapu and there's no way a goat would actually be able to access the leaves to a Mapu, but when it dies, it falls. And then it's just saying that we're all— I've always heard that proverb as a way of encouraging humility, that we're sort of all vulnerable to— all our leaves are vulnerable to the goat, if you will.

One more proverb: "Beyond the mountain is another mountain." That's a very famous one.

Yes, "de mon gémon." And I actually use that a lot myself. You know, I have a neighbor, one of my neighbors just passed away and she used to use that proverb a lot and so I think it means that no matter what we can see there's more. So I think it's— there's more to everything than what we see. It also speaks to the physical layout of Haiti because it's a very mountainous place, you know, Haiti and the Arawak called it Haiti, it actually means land of the mountains, and it's physically true. Like if you're traveling across Haiti, literally there's always a mountain behind the— physically behind the mountain, but in a kind of spiritual sense it also means that there's always more, you know. And you know this, there's this mountain-connected saying that I love, it says, "Deux montagnes pour tuer, mais nous-mêmes peut-être on ne nous capote pas." Which means And it's a great closer in a way. It means two mountains can never meet, but perhaps you and I, we can meet again.

Have you ever been to West Africa?

I have not. I have only been to South Africa. And actually this year we were hoping to make a trip to different countries in Africa, but we're obviously not able to. But I I often feel like, you know, I'm 51 now. I feel like I should have already made it, but it's definitely, it's something that I've wanted to do with my family, with my girls, and that hopefully we'll get all to do together.

What is special about Jacmel in Haiti?

Jacmel is one thing. There's a wonderful novel by a great Haitian writer, Lénie Dipèce, called Adiana. In All My Dreams, which was recently translated by Kayama Glover, and that novel will tell you everything you want to know about Jacmel. It's sort of a— it's a beautiful place physically, that location. It's got both the mountains and the sea. It's got a wonderful waterfall called Bassin Bleu. It's a gorgeous place. And After the Dance, the book that I wrote, is about Carnival in Jacmel.. And it has a spectacular carnival as well. And there's some wonderful artists who live there, actually, who I write about in After the Dance. One of them, Winalmuz, who still lives there next to a beautiful mountain there.

Now, in your own life, how did you manage to be such a prodigy? So, you come to the US, you're 12. You grew up speaking Creole, right? By the time you're 14, You're writing for something called New Youth Connections perfectly fluently, and then your first book is published as an undergraduate. So what accounts for this? What's your own story about the beginnings of your own success?

My first book actually was published when I was 24. That's still early, but I loved writing. I love stories and I loved writing, and for me it was always fun. And even when I was doing other things, I was, you know, studying at school, but I loved to write. And so, you know, it's that saying that people say, it's, if you love what you do, you've never worked a day in your life. For me, that was just really, I wanted to write, and it started with New Earth Connections, that journal that I started writing for when I was 2014, and went through all my books to this day, I never saw myself so much as— I mean, I knew that my book was published early and a lot was made of that, I think, as when you publish when you're young. But for me, it was just always a joy. It was something I loved doing, and I always felt like really blessed to be able to do it, and I still feel that way today.

What's your most productive or most unusual work habit?

Working at night. And the older I'm getting, the harder it is to actually stay up all night. But I find that writing at night is my— is really my most productive time, like, because somehow at night you just feel like everybody's safe in bed that I'm responsible for, and there's not too many distractions. The internet is always there, but it's It's just easier to imagine a whole other universe at night. So that's— I feel that that's when I'm most productive.

Being a Haitian American writer, what criticisms do you feel you get from Haitians? Is there any tension there?

I think there's always tensions, but not so much because of the people who read me. I think it's the same when you come And I have friends who from other groups, it's the same. So you seem to be plucked out of your group and people think like you consider yourself a representative. I've never considered myself a representative for Haitians or all Haitians. I don't think I speak for all Haitians, but often in the, you know, when you're spoken about in the press, like people put you as a kind of sociologist, as a kind of expert on Haiti. When I started pretty young and I really was like, I just want to tell this story, I want to tell that story, and then I started to realize that people were at times overgeneralizing my stories, right? Like that they would say, oh, this character in your book does that and that's what all Haitians do. So of course my— some of my compatriots didn't like that because they would say, you know, people would literally say to me like, oh, that person read your book and said that, like they think that's my life too. So I think, and that happens I think with the work of writers of color a lot, you know, for example Alice Walker, that people say, "Oh, because she writes this character then she hates Black men," or because, you know, that for me they were saying, "Oh, because you wrote about this girl whose family really wanted to be a virgin, that means like, you know, everybody who's Haitian has the same situation." I think the people in the mainstream culture sometimes generalize. What we write, and so that leads to some tensions within the culture. But I've had, you know, I've had some rebuke, which is normal. Again, you know, it's kind of like there are circumstances to whatever you write, whatever you do, and I learned from that. And I have to— I started out very young, so I think over the years I've also had to learn and how to tell maybe more nuanced stories. And how to be conscious of just how what I write will be read by different types of people.

Now you've taught a history of Haitian cinema class at Ramapo College, correct? What did you do in that?

Well, actually, we taught that class, it was Jonathan Demme and a Haitian journalist, Jean-Dominique, and when Jean was in exile from Haiti, Jonathan wanted to do actually a festival of Haitian cinema. And we use that class as a way of first of all finding the films that we would show and then to talk about them. So there's a Haitian film, for example, called Anita, which is about a young girl who's a domestic servant in a home who— Haitian singer T-Corn is featured in it. And so we would get that film, we would show it, and we talk about it, and Jean, who who was more versed in Haitian cinema than either of us would speak on it, and then the students would film it. So I hope all of this is in the archives at Ramapo College, but it was both a history of cinema class but also a class in which the students had an opportunity to film what we were doing. And we were trying to figure out what had been done in Haitian cinema before And soon after that, not because of us, but there was a kind of explosion of Haitian cinema. You know, there were a lot of films made, some of them wonderful, some not so great, but there were a couple of keepers, you know, that like if we were doing this project now, for example, we would have a lot more to work with, you know, with the films of Raoul Peck and other filmmakers inside Haiti.

Two final questions. First, let's say our listeners are thinking of doing a trip to Haiti, which, by the way, I would recommend strongly. But what tip would you give them for how they can make it somehow manageable and safe, assuming, of course, they're not Haitian?

Well, a lot of people, you know, go to Haiti, and I think you have to go with an open mind, right? And I would say try to get out of Port-au-Prince to go outside, go see the countryside. There are, for example, in the south there's some wonderful grottos or caves, there's some hikes. I think there's— to not to try to stay in the urban space but also to go outside. There's, I think it's Palmer's Guide to both Haiti and the Dominican Republic that has some wonderful tips in terms of where to go. And there's some also local traveling groups, like try to— if you've never been to Haiti and you don't know anybody in Haiti, to try to find the group to accompany you. But to go with an open mind, to try to learn and listen, and certainly go outside the urban space into, you know, into the countryside. I would recommend that.

And to close, finally, if you could give us one more Haitian proverb that is dear and important to you.

Well, this one reminds me very much of Jonathan, who, though he was not Haitian, I probably traveled with him more to Haiti than my own parents when I worked for him. And he always used to say, "Piti piti, zwa zou, fait niche." Little by little, The bird builds its nest. That was his favorite answer to like, if you ask him how he was doing, he would say, "Piti piti swazu feneshen." Unfortunately, as you know, he passed away not so long ago, and that was one of his favorites. And that remains very special to me for that reason, but also what the proverb says, it's really, it's kind of like that, like every journey begins with one step. And so I feel like it's good advice these days too. Petit petit, oiseau fait niche. Little by little, the bird builds its nest.

Edwidge Danticat, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

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