Edwidge Danticat’s essays spin webs of fresh ideas

Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post:

“We’re Alone,” a new collection of essays by the acclaimed novelist and short-story writer Edwidge Danticat, opens with an English translation of lines by the Haitian poet Roland Chassagne. Danticat first encountered the lines in an English anthology of Haitian poets, and she recalls that she “spent many years” trying to track down the French original. Eventually, she contacted the poet’s granddaughter and obtained a copy, which first appeared in the 1933 collection “Le tambourin voilé” (“The Veiled Tambourine”). But by the time Danticat read the work in French, it had been irrevocably refracted through the lens of its English rendering.

This anecdote is a fitting beginning for a collection about the many ways that Haiti has been distorted by its translation into the idioms of global power. The original Haiti — the one that existed before France colonized the country in 1697, before the subsequent centuries of economic exploitation, before a series of devastating hurricanes exacerbated by climate change — is no longer accessible. “I am from a place that constantly evokes nostalgia in the people who have seen, lived, and loved it ‘before,’” writes Danticat, who emigrated to America when she was 12. Years later, when the writer and her children were driving through a flooded street full of floating trash in the capital city, Port-au-Prince, she suppressed her desire to shout, “The land might never be pristine again.”

More here.

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