The Signifyin' Woman (Charmaine Valere)

The Signifyin' Woman's best books (read in 2010)

I've had a great year of reading and I encourage you to buy and read ALL the books I shared with you throughout the year. But of course I have my favorites, which I'll highlight one at a time beginning with this post.

One of my favorites is Karen Lord's Redemption in Indigo. It was recently listed by Amazon as one of the top ten science fiction and fantasy books of 2010  in their best books of 2010 listings (not best "caribbean," mind you, best period).  But she's not resting on her laurels. Lord maintains an internet presence with a blog, a twitter page, and with guest spots such as this one at Small Beer Press. 

I once again, heartily recommend her book. See my review here.

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Karen Lord on the "multivolume opus":

I’m no longer a teenager gifted with long, slow summer vacations and delusions of immortality. I will wait till you have finished the story before I pick up even the first volume. [more].

New in the Caribbean Review of Books (Nov. 2010): Dany Laferrière's fiction, a survivor's account of the January 2010 Haiti earthquake, and short fiction by Roxane Gay

Since my current "review" focus here is on Haitian writers, I thought I'd share with you some of the CRB's latest reviews and work of fiction, which focus on Haiti. 

-- Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw reviews three recent translations of Dany Laferrière's fiction:

Laferrière is one of the most enigmatic, provocative, and charming writers I have ever met or read. He is unpredictable, save for a trait that few writers escape; what I call an anthropological nature. There are some writers who seldom leave their chosen territory of exploration once they begin to dig. The tools or techniques may vary, but the primary enquiry invested in excavating what they believe is buried can take years, decades, or even a lifetime. For these writers, their creative landscape is determined by this unrelenting curiosity, by their thematic preoccupation or puzzle. [more].

-- Jeremy Taylor reviews Jeanne G. Pocius's survivor's account of the January 2010 Haiti earthquake:

The earthquake began shortly before five on a Tuesday afternoon. Jeanne Pocius, a volunteer American trumpeter, was starting a class in jazz improvisation at the Salle Ste Cecile in downtown Port-au-Prince. She had warmed up her fingers at the stage piano and set out three rows of chairs for her students, some of whom were absent or late. [more].

-- Short fiction: "Lacrimosa" by Roxane Gay:

...The soldier moved in. Every night, he returned to Marise’s well-kept home, complained about the heat, the heavy air, the trash everywhere, the dark shiny people throwing rocks and bottles and angry words. He ate her food. He shared her bed, touched her body with his soldier hands; he filled her and frightened her and she felt something she didn’t understand. [more].

What challenges do Caribbean writers face?

I've been invited to join a panel discussion on the question the title of this post poses, and I suspect a discussion of the challenges associated with the term "Caribbean writer" alone will make for an entire night of discourse. But there are, I'm sure, many other challenges writers described as such (or those longing for a description as such) experience--all the way from the initial stages of their writing process to the finished work, through to publication, promotion, and sales, and (if they're fortunate) on to  long and short lists for awards and prizes.

I can't speak for the writing end of course, so hopefully my observations and questions will suffice. Some of my reader / critic observations and questions are about the category "Caribbean writer." I won't bore you with the usual ones about inside / outside geographic space classifications (which I'm sure will surface at some point in the discussion), but like some other observers, I wonder about sales categories. I wonder for instance if being categorized as "Caribbean writer" helps or hurts a book's promotion and sales. I wonder also about the effect of being placed in even broader general categories like "fiction writer" and "non-fiction writer." 

Other related topics for discourse will most likely be about audience--who's buying the books?who's not buying the books? etc. And my observations and questions on that subject will include concerns I have about the assumed audience being addressed by many Caribbean writers. Based on what I have observed on subject matter, language, and characters, I tend to agree with those who say many Caribbean writers appear to be talking to an audience aged 50+ and as such are neglecting a younger generation of readers.

(Of course, I understand that if you're a writer 50 or older--as many of the oft-published Caribbean writers are--those are the folks you'll naturally tend to talk to. But then you shouldn't complain when younger people don't buy your books. From my experiences with younger readers, I can say they don't necessarily want history lessons from their fiction writers.) 

But also important on the subject of a book's reception or readership are its reviewers and critics. And my observations and questions concerning that area will include the role they have played, and can play, in the life and death of a book.

That's some of it for now.

I'm interested in hearing what you have to say about the challenges Caribbean writers face. Please share your thoughts in the comments or via email: signifyinguyana[at]gmail.com. Thanks! 

"Why don't you come up to my cave so I can show you my hand axes" -- Denis Dutton: A Darwinian Theory of Beauty

TED collaborates with animator Andrew Park to illustrate Denis Dutton's provocative theory on beauty -- that art, music and other beautiful things, far from being simply "in the eye of the beholder," are a core part of human nature with deep evolutionary origins.

 

Colored dolls who scare the crap outta ya . . . for decades

A doll doesn't have to be pretty. And the seven doll-like characters  in Ntozake Shange's choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, are very unpretty. Terrifying, actually. From the moment they come on stage (in the book) with these directions, they scare the crap out of you:

The stage is in darkness. Harsh music is heard as dim blue lights come up. One after another, seven women run onto the stage from each of the exits. They all freeze in postures of distress. The follow spot picks up the lady in brown. She comes to life and looks around at the other ladies. All of the others are still. She walks over to the lady in red and calls to her. The lady in red makes no response.

And they keep on scaring you with their violent, sad life stories of rape, poverty, prostitution, domestic violence, until the end when they gather together in a group hug that seems too contrived for resolution (though maybe it's the start of something new--sisterhood?), and reads more like seven pairs of arms wrapped oddly around a cold tree:

All of the ladies repeat to themselves softly the lines 'i found god in myself & i loved her.' It soon becomes a song of joy, started by the lady in blue. The ladies sing first to each other, then gradually to the audience. After the song peaks, the ladies enter into a closed tight circle.

I got chills from start to finish and put it down with one last shudder, resolving to postpone seeing the movie version until I managed to warm up somehow. I still haven't, though I may go to see it sometime this week anyway.

Noted irony... The 1974-75 work, which has now made its way through at least four forms of presentation, and numerous creative forces--live poem, stage play, play in book form, movie, actors, directors, broadway, hollywood--is anything but dead-doll-like and cold. It has proven that a work of art can seem boundless and can enjoy a healthy lifespan. But the remaining coldest, harshest truth about it is that the lives of the black women depicted in it are still very familiar and current. 

[More after I've seen the movie]

Caribbean Women Writers (series): Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work

CHAPTER 10

Danticat quotes from art historian Marc Miller's 1980 interview with the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (seen in part here): 

Miller: You're what? Haitian-Puerto Rican?

Basquiat: I was born here, but my mother's fourth-generation Puerto Rican. My father comes from Haiti.

Miller: Do you feel that that's in your art?

Basquiat: Genetically?

Miller: Yeah genetically or culturally? . . . Haiti is of course famous for its art...

Basquiat: ....That's why I said genetically because I've never been there. And I grew up in, you know, principal American vacuum. Television mostly.

Miller: No Haitian primitives on your wall?

Basquiat: At home?

Miller: At home.

Basquiat: Haitian primitives? What do you mean? People? People nailed up on my walls?

Miller: No. I mean paintings. Paintings.

 

Danticat describes the interview as "testy" (which may or may not make Miller's question about "Haitian primitives" seem less infuriating), and writes a cool-headed spin-off on the concept of "primitive art / artists" which explores (or discusses) its wide and narrow connotations. 

She compares Basquiat with legendary Haitian painter and vodou priest Hector Hyppolite, whose work had impressed and inspired notables like father of French surrealism Andre Breton, Tony-award-winning dancer and choreographer Geoffrey Holder, and American writer Truman Capote, who in a December 1948 Harper's Bazaar article (she writes), lavished praise on Hyppolite's work, even while calling him "ugly" and "monkey-thin." 

 In the essay she ties the two artists together as young artist "plucked from obscurity and turned into god only to be continually called crude naive, savage," and (possible) older spiritual forbear(er). She examines their similar and different tools, backgrounds, approaches to cultural heritage, and she summarizes that both artists were in "a type of trance, divine horsemen, possessed, as their hyper productivity shows, by spirits they were seeking to either welcome or repel."

 

CHAPTER 11

This essay centers around Haitian photographer Daniel Morel who had been a witness (at the age of 13) to the execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin. Morel, we are told, had walked over to the spot where Drouin's glasses had fallen and picked them up, and in doing so had given himself significant ties to the historical event. As the first to see a reflection of what Drouin last saw, so to speak (some Haitians believe that even after death, the last image a person sees remains imprinted on his or her cornea as clearly as a photograph), Morel may well have been inspired by that vision or by Drouin's overall revolutionary vision to become a teller of Haiti's stories.

Among words by other visionaries in the essay's discussion of the art of photography are Susan Sontag's view that "to take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability..." and Roland Barthes' theory that "photography has something to do with resurrection."

Most notably is Danticat's conlusion, which becomes part of the book's overall thesis, that "to create dangerously is also to create fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us, then bravely moving forward even when it feels as though we are chasing or being chased by ghosts."

 

CONCLUSION

In chapter 12 of Create Dangerously Danticat introduces a view of life which she appears to try to defeat in the book. Throughout the collection of essays, she can be understood as one who writes against the notion that nothing is truly lasting and as such shouldn't be fretted about or dwelt on. And she refutes that belief by dwelling on, stretching out,  moments in the lives of others, moments in Haiti's past and present, moments we tend to either forget or that we'd rather reinvent and replay differently, ignoring or changing the basic truth of the origin. In stretching out the moments, she creates (in her typical unflinching manner) heavy, dark arcs between Haiti and its diaspora, and between Haiti and points along the rest of the outside world. But there is light in the stretch marks as well. There are moments for celebration in the stories she tells that are filled with hope, survival, and humor. Those moments take the stories out of their despair, and show a common humanity that is in part universal truth and in part a result of the beauty of her writing.

 [Previous posts on Create Dangerously: "Writing against 'yon ti moman' " "Dyaspora, literary orphans, and reconcilable dichotomies" "On representing family and country."

 

If you'd like to receive a copy of the book, be the first to say so in the comments, and / or send your mailing information to signifyinguyana[@]gmail.com.

 

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Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, by Edwidge Danticat (Princeton University Press, 2010, 208 pp).

Danticat's Create Dangerously (chapter highlights, part 3) : on representing family and country

[Chapters 1 & 2]

[Chapters 3, 4 & 5]

 

CHAPTER 6

Grieving aunt and niece are having a conversation, and at some point in the conversation the aunt realizes she is not only talking to her niece, but to her niece who is the renowned writer Edwidge Danticat, and she says, "People talk. They say that everything they say to you ends up written down somewhere." Her niece writes, "Because she was my elder, my beloved aunt, I bowed my head in shame, wishing I could apologize for that . . . I wanted to ask her forgiveness for the essay that in my mind I was already writing. The most I could do, however, was to promise her not to use her real name..."

It's a funny moment between writer and somewhat unwilling close family subject, and it reminded me of Art Spiegelman's somewhat rancorous experiences with his close subject--his father--for his work Maus. I remember being caught between understanding the writer's desire to tell an important story, and his father's (rightful) insistence on privacy, which Spiegelman disobeys, of course. Ultimately, the avid reader in me sided (rather sheepishly) with Spiegelman, and I felt the same way about Danticat in this case. But, like Spiegelman's work, and the work of any writer which is based on the lives of his or her family members or friends, the essay could raise questions about representation (fair or foul) and about writers who write about others without their consent--questions that may or may not be easily resolvable by law.

 

CHAPTER 7

In this essay she retraces the relationship between the United States and Haiti as she explores what-ifs about Haiti's past and present. She starts by revisiting Haiti's glorious claim of being the Western Hemisphere's second republic, second only to the United States, and the bloody twelve-year slave uprising, which led to Haiti's independence, the only time in the history of the world that bond servants successfully overthrew their masters and formed their own state. And of the major what-ifs she considers are What if the United States hadn't waited so long (six decades) to acknowledge Haiti's independence? Would Haiti have prospered and flourished had it been given a fair chance at its beginning?

In the essay, she gathers myths, historical facts, and speculation as she repeats one of the book's running themes about the problems concerning cultural / national / representation and the complex incongruities in the view of Haiti by Haitians, and the view of Haiti by the rest of the world.

 

CHAPTER 8

The eighth essay in the book continues (from the seventh one) to focus on the troubling view of Haiti by the rest of the world. She points out how natural disaster has a way of unifying people's experiences and of unifying countries (large, small, rich, poor, and in-between) in ways that may be very unpredictable. But while the voice in the previous essay where she begins to focus on the view of Haiti by outsiders is speculative and questioning, the voice in this eighth essay is full of irritation and accusation. There is considerable irritation at those who continue to be blind to the things that unify us, and / or continue to stress on our differences.

Singled out for mention is the following comment by Soledad O'Brien, a week after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans: "You know, to some degree, when you are watching the original pictures . . . if you turned the sound down on your television, if you didn't know where you were, you might think it was Haiti or maybe one of those African countries..."

(Don't you just marvel when they use the "foreign phrase" to describe what would make much more sense in the native language?)

In the essay, Danticat, in plain American English, speaks to those of us whose first instinct is to reach beyond borders to give meaning to the local natural disaster. She tells us this too is America--"The America of the needy and never-have-enoughs, the America of the undocumented, the unemployed, and the underemployed . . . An America that remains invisible until a rebellion breaks out, gunshots ring out, or a flood rages through."

 

CHAPTER 9

This ninth essay connects  literary, non-literary, literal, and figurative notions of "flying" and is one of my favorites. She takes us on a circuitous route from her fear of flying, to the 911 images of sabotage and death, to the Insurance salesman's suicide note in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, and through it all flight is seen as terrifying, final, matter-of-fact, and eloquent!--eloquent as the salesman's suicide note (she says), which she quotes in part: "On Wednesday the 18th of February, 1931, I will take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive me."

For the salesman, flying was literal. He actually made wings, strapped them on his arms, and flew off the top of the building to his death. His note, arguably, only becomes eloquent when elevated to a higher level of meaning within the context of the narrative. But Danticat's flying motif works well even if one quibbles with that particular leap.

The essay lands softly, poignantly in memoriam. She pays tribute to Michael Richards, a New York sculptor, who had lived in Jamaica, and who had a special fascination with airplanes and flight. Richards was one of the victims of the 911 attack.  

 [Coming Thursday: More chapter highlights and my conclusion]

Danticat's Create Dangerously (chapter highlights, part 2): "Dyaspora, literary orphans, and reconcilable dichotomies"

[Chapters 1 & 2] 

CHAPTER 3

The word diaspora, which can at best signify unity beyond borders or at its worst stigmatize, and suggest irreconcilable dispersal or estrangement from one's place of birth, is the main focus of Danticat's third essay in Create Dangerously.  

In the essay, she pays tribute to Jean Dominique, one of Haiti's most famous journalists who was assassinated in Haiti in 2000. Her tribute is highlighted with what may have been the most important definition he gave her of dyaspora (the creole version)--a definition which somehow managed to reverse (or balance) some of her negative experiences with it. She tells us for instance how she had been easily silenced in conversations about Haiti when told disparagingly, "What do you know? You're living outside. You're a dyaspora." She tells us also being dyaspora meant being classified as "arrogant, insensitive, overbearing, and pretentious." A dyaspora (as opposed to a true native, one can assume), is seen as one who is eager to reap the benefits of good jobs and political positions in times of stability in a country he or she had fled and stayed away from during difficult times.

But Dominique, who had been exiled from Haiti, and who had made a seemingly easy return to Haiti, had given her a kinder understanding of dyaspora. She says his reaction to her "inconsequential dyaspora dilemma" had been "The Dyaspora are people with their feet planted in both worlds. There's no need to be ashamed of that. There are more than a million of you. You are not alone." 

In paying tribute to Dominique, she raises his definition of dyaspora in triumph over those who seek to use it in a stigmatizing separatist manner.

 

CHAPTER 4

Here she tells stories of her early reading experiences with books by Haitian writers, and in addition to discussing their influence on her own approaches to reading and writing, she uses those experiences as the basis for developing a discussion on how Haitians and immigrant writers (in general, perhaps) "grapple with memory."

Of her early reading experiences in Haiti she writes, "Because of the dictatorship and its brutal censorship, I know no child who had read even a short novel by a Haitian-born writer." But she then hastens to qualify that statement with the acknowledgement that some will read that and hiss and decry it as both a contradiction and a lie, and she says (to them), "I am speaking only for myself."

When she was 17, five years after coming to the United States, she says she came across two new narrow shelves of books in the Brooklyn Public Library labeled Livres Haitiens. The thirty-year Duvalier dictatorship had ended, and she theorizes that "perhaps some of the more vocal patrons of the Brooklyn Library had demanded more books about themselves to help them interpret their ever-changing country from afar . . . books that could have been written only by literary orphans, to offer to other literary orphans."

As she does continuously throughout the book, Danticat uses her personal experiences in this essay as significant points of coming-to-awareness along the arc she creates between homelands (native and adopted), and suggests a connection between what she says is a "complicated Haitian obsession . . .  a collective agreement [it seems] to remember our triumphs and gloss over our failures," and the (immigrant) writer's constant fear of forgetting. She writes, "It is as if we had been forced to step under the notorious forgetting trees, the sabliyes, that our slave ancestors were told would remove their past from their heads and dull their desire to return home. We know we must pass under the tree, but we hold our breath and cross our fingers and toes and hope that the forgetting will not penetrate too deeply into our brains."

 

CHAPTER 5

In the fifth essay Danticat documents the story of a Haitian woman who had been a near casualty of the 1991 military coup in Haiti. The woman, who lived in New Jersey at the time Danticat and others began recording her story, had survived a severe beating and mutilation, and Danticat's essay notably focuses on the horror of her experience and the loss of her limbs to form conclusions about the natural order of things. A new-born baby's missing forearm, she theorizes, may have simply dissolved inside its mother, becoming a part of the tissue and spirit that had helped create him, just as a victim's missing forearm had probably dissolved in a mass grave, becoming a part of the country that had helped create her.

And somehow her view of the natural order of things makes the horror of the woman's story--of passersby who stop and gawk at her as she lies battered beyond recognition at the side of the road, and who then get back into their cars and drive away, until finally she is rescued by soldiers (good soldiers this time)--reconcilable. Danticat's pull on the natural order of things is so convincing in the essay, even the irony of the woman's rescue seems to fit her theory, which put another way may be that life's dichotomies--good and evil, loss and recovery, for instance--eventually work together for positive results.

[Coming Tuesday: Part 3]

Caribbean Women Writers (series): Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously : Writing against "yon ti moman"

Warning: This is the first of four posts on Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously. I am doing chapter highlights on all 12 of the book's chapters. So sit back, relax, read, and then win a free copy or rush out and buy it for yourself or for someone you think will appreciate it. Or, you can skip my write up and buy it anyway.

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(From chapter 12 --"Our Guernica"-- in Create Dangerously):

Everyone sounded eerily calm on the phone. No one was crying. No one said "Why me?" or "We're cursed!" Even as the aftershocks kept coming, they'd say, "The ground is shaking again," as though this had become a normal occurrence. They inquired about family members outside Haiti: an elderly relative, a baby, my one-year-old daughter.

 I cried and apologized. "I'm sorry I can't be there with you," I said.

My nearly six-foot-tall twenty-three-year-old cousin--the beauty queen we nicknamed NC (Naomi Campbell)--who says that she is hungry and has been sleeping in bushes with dead bodies nearby, stops me. 

"Don't cry," she says. "That's life."

"No, it's not life," I say. "Or it shouldn't be ."

"It is," she insists. "That's what it is. And life, like death, lasts only yon ti moman." Only a little while.

Perhaps it is with the realization that even the most horrendous of circumstances can be fleeting for some that Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat documents events in Haiti's recent and not-so-recent past in her latest nonfiction work. In 12 beautifully crafted, heart-wrenching essays, Danticat wrestles with the condition of Haiti--past and present--and gives us views of an exiled and resilient country and some of its artists and citizens who are of the same caliber--exiled,  immigrant, resilient feet planted firmly in two places at the same time, and who can call on the rich offerings of their condition to give meaning to geographic space that is stable and flux, large and small, penetrating and circumferential. 

 

CHAPTER 1

Danticat begins the collection with an account of the 1964 execution of two Haitian men--Marcel Duma and Louis Drouin--who had left the United States, where they had been living since the 1950s, to engage in a guerrilla war they hoped would eventually topple the Duvalier dictatorship. She relates the details of the execution in the present tense, which gives it a current feel with the reader as witness. The execution, the story of the two men, she says, is a "creation myth" that haunts and possesses her. For her, it's pathos and ethos--clash of life and death, homeland and exile, disobeyed directive from a higher authority, brutal punishment--feels present, even urgent. And in this first essay she strikes the book's first discordant note against the idea of yon ti moman. In doing so she identifies herself as one who seeks to keep things alive in the way artists have been known to do...immemorial.

CHAPTER 2

In this second chapter, a trip up mountains on foot to visit a paternal aunt in Haiti is told alongside her reflections on the reception of her first book, Breath, Eyes, Memory, which drew negative criticism from some Haitian Americans who, she says, took issue with the virginity testing element of the book. She relates how one woman wrote her saying, "You are a liar. You dishonor us, making us sexual and psychological misfits." In defense she says "The letter writer was right . . . I was lying in that first book and all the other pieces of fiction I have written since. But isn't that what the word fiction or novel on the book jacket implied? Isn't even the most elementary piece of fiction about a singularly exceptional fictional person, so that even if that fictional person is presented as an everyman or everywoman, he or she is bound to be the most exceptional everyman or everywoman fictional person of the lot?"

But as if to acknowledge that that explanation would not satisfy her vexed readers, she says she made the apology (which she addresses, tongue in cheek, to the protagonist Sophie) an official addition to subsequent editions of the book. She tells her "Your experiences in the night, your grandmother's obsessions, your mother's 'tests' have taken on a larger meaning and your body is now being asked to represent a larger space than your flesh . . . I feel I must explain. Of course, not all Haitian mothers are like your mother. Not all Haitian daughters are tested as you have been."

The essay may be seen as an even further apologia, though this time with less tongue in cheek. In the background, in the foreground, alongside her fictional characters, she might be saying, are the real women in her family, like the aunt--the stubborn place-holder in a familial village--who she travels a long way to visit. One gets the feel in the essay that Danticat may be attempting to fill that "larger space" (which Sophie can't occupy on her own) with women of Haiti who fill up real-life large spaces.

[Coming Sunday: Part 2]

A Caribbean First : The OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

This is truly exciting news: a new Literary festival, and a new prize for the best in Caribbean writing!

The Bocas Lit Fest, based in Trinidad and Tobago, is an annual celebration of books, writing, and writers. Launching in April 2011, the Bocas Lit Fest is an exciting new addition to the Caribbean’s literary calendar. The centrepiece of the festival will be the award ceremony for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, a major new award for Caribbean writers of poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction.

[More here]