edwidge danticat

Olivia Bardo 12-21-2021

Photo by Laura Kapfer on Unsplash

Novelist Edwidge Danticat expressed a similar sentiment in Create Dangerously, her 2010 memoir about making art in exile. Reflecting on the aftermath of the earthquake that had struck her home country of Haiti that year, she wrote, “I did what I always do when my own words fail me. I read.” We share this human practice of story sharing and story seeking. Danticat writes of her “desire to tell some of [her] stories in a collaged manner, to merge [her] own narratives with the oral and written narratives of others.” Through the transformative power of creating and remembering, we connect to the threads of humanity, discovering the woven patterns that are formed through our stories.

Edwidge Danticat 1-05-2015

A YEAR BEFORE her death from ovarian cancer, my 78-year-old mother finally started losing weight. She gave up fatty foods and sweets and went to herbalists who sold her pills that were supposed to regulate her digestion. In addition to all this, she was seeing her primary physician every three months.

The weight flying off seemed like a reward for her good behavior. The only downside was that my mother, who now weighed less than me, was burping all the time, as if there was thunder trapped inside her ever-shrinking body.

At Christmas time, I invited her to come spend the holidays with me and my family in Miami. At first she said no. Her birthday was three days after Christmas and she wanted to spend it at her home in New York.

She changed her mind right before Christmas, and she cooked us a wonderful Christmas dinner, and we took her to one of our favorite Haitian restaurants for her birthday. At her birthday dinner, my two daughters performed a birthday dance for her in the middle of the restaurant, and my usually reserved mother laughed and clapped with joy, a kind of joy we would rarely see again in the months that followed.

Edwidge Danticat 2-02-2010

I was at the supermarket at my home in Florida with my two young daughters when my sister-in-law called to ask if I'd heard that there had been an earthquake in Haiti. I was a bit stunned. "Earthquake?" I said. Are you sure? She said it was 7.0. That didn't quite register for me. Then she said it was catastrophic.

Martha St. Jean 1-19-2010
My friends and I worried about the negativity that would emerge when the Department of Homeland Security granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Haitian nationals, allowing them to remain in th