Edwidge Danticat

This year, for me, the Book Fair was all about Edwidge Danticat. As it was about Barack Obama last year. Oh yeah, I was fortunate enough to see him in a small auditorium, probably won't ever have that opportunity again!

I bought just one book, a copy of Edwidge Danticat's Brother I'm Dying. Of course I stood in line to get it signed.

Danticat read that Sunday afternoon, she read the chapter that recounts her uncle's detention, and subsequent death in custody.

Joesph Dantica lived a generous life as family patriarch and pastor. He was chased by death threats from the country he refused to leave, and treated like a common criminal in the country where he came (with a valid visa) to find safety. That kind of gut wrenching loss is hard to stomach, and I remember closing my eyes as she read, as if to look away. That story did make international news, I was living in Brussels then and read that story in the International Herald Tribune.

I am tempted to despair, it does all seem too much, too big. But, I think now that love is clearly the stronger. My heart aches for that injustice, and I feel restlessness, not closure, or any sense of faith about persecuted prophets and their heavenly reward.

I try to reach for stories of family, of love and tradition, to dwell on the way her family clung to each other. That makes it bearable somehow.

I feel for Haiti, a beleaguered place, and I suppose I take it personally because I too am black, Caribbean. There but for the grace of God go I.

In the Q and A afterward, someone asked Danticat if she found it difficult to write about Haiti, since so few people know about the country and its history. Danticat replied that this was ridiculous. Haiti has its unique, particular history, like every other country. Haiti is unique and therefore Haiti is like any other people and place, whose stories are meant to be told.

Kerry, who asked that question, happens to be an acquaintance and afterward she explained what she did not properly express in her question. She was referring to the US occupation, CIA shenanigans, and the fuckups of foreign intervention, a confusing history, some of which is shrouded in secrecy.

And some of this foreign intervention was purposeful. The 18th century world certainly did not want a free black nation to exist, far less to thrive. As CLR James, a Caribbean historian, pointed out, it is no accident that a nation of black people became the first independent republic in the New World. That nation is, today, the poorest. It's easy to be glib about it, and say that people need to stop blaming colonialism or the global economy and pull themselves up out of poverty. I'll let the ludicrousness of that idea sink in.

Thinking about Kerry's question a bit later, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver came to mind. The murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first president of an independent Congo, was the backdrop to that story. Heart of Darkness may be a faint memory from 11th grade English class, and readers may not be clear on all the details of the Congo's history. Economic and political injustices are disturbingly true, hard for the reader to face, but the specificity of the region's history does not detract from the power of the coming of age story, the family drama, you know, the universal themes.

In Miami Haitians are disproportionately incarcerated if irregularities arise in the immigration process. Danticat has written op-eds on this subject, one just after her uncle's death in the New York Times, called A Very Haitian Story.

This is difficult to think about. Still, the beauty of good writing, and the truths about human experience that good art reveals, that won't make the pain go away, but somehow telling stories helps keep us going.