Edwidge Danticat Explores Her World Through Essays

The essays gathered in We’re Alone by Edwidge Danticat, Wun Tsun Mellon Professor of the Humanities, trace a loose arc from childhood to the pandemic and recent events in Haiti. The pieces include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, and Gabriel García Márquez that explore several themes—environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience.
 
From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat moves from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature and art are her reliable companions and guides through both tragedies and triumphs.
 
Danticat discusses the book with Columbia News, as well as books she’s currently thinking about and the course she’s now teaching.

How did this book come about?

Essays are often how I delve into a subject. The word “essay” comes from the French word essayer, which means to attempt or try. I am intrigued by a piece of writing as an attempt, meaning it can evolve or switch between the individual and the communal, the local and global, which is what I try to do in this collection.

A year and a half ago, I realized I had some essays that could be a book assembled around what the Haitian American artist and anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse calls “rasanblaj,” which she defines as, among other things, a regrouping of ideas. So this collection is a rasanblaj of some of the essays I have written in the past five years.

Do you have a favorite essay from the book, or one that had a particular impact on you?

Even though the events described in some of the essays happened as recently as 2023, the book opens and closes with the summer of 2018, when my family and I were in Haiti spending time with loved ones, and at the opening of a library. Though I love all the essays—they are like my children, as we writers tend to say—I am partial to the opening and closing essays: “Children of the Sea” and “Writing the Self and Others.”

The first essay describes, in part, my memory of saying goodbye to my mother at an airport in Port-au-Prince when I was four years old, and the last one ends with me saying goodbye to her at an airport in Miami 40 years later. These two essays allowed me to travel decades in a relatively short book, so they mean a great deal to me.

What would you share with someone who's just picked up your book?

Essays can be lyrical, reflective, intimate, urgent. These essays are what you might call braided essays. They don't always end up where you think they will. Some are mini-essays within a more extensive essay. I think of writing as analogous to braiding hair, which I have done a lot for myself and as the mother of two daughters. Some of these essays are like braids.  

What books have you read recently that you would recommend, and why?

In the summer of 2020, one of my daughters took a writing class with the writer Erica N. Cardwell. The class was called Writing the Self. Erica had such a beautiful description for her class that I wanted to take it, too:

Imagine: “The Essay” is a body of water—far-flung and teeming into the distance. And you, the writer, are alone on shore. Will you enter the water? And if so, how will you swim?  Erica is a brilliant essayist, and her essay collection, Wrong Is Not My Name, is a great blend of memoir and criticism about her encounters with books and visual art.

Glory Edim writes about the books and authors she loves in Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me. That subtitle says it all.

What's next on your reading list?

Paradise Once, a historical novel by Olive Senior, a giant of Caribbean literature. The story is inspired by the aftermath of a massacre of Taínos by Spanish invaders in Cuba in 1513.

What are you teaching this semester?

A class called Image Matters: Writing With Photographs From the African Diaspora. We try to answer a question posed by the scholar Tina Campt in her book Image Matters: “How should we understand the relationship between the family, the photograph, and the African diaspora?"

We do this by studying writers and scholars who have written alongside and been inspired by photographs—James Baldwin with Richard Avedon, Richard Wright with photos from the Security Farm Administration and published as Twelve Million Black Voices, The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes. The syllabus also includes contemporary writers: Robin Coste Lewis, combining her family photographs with her poetry; Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who is both a photographer and a poet; and Teju Cole, a novelist, essayist, and photographer, who has also written a lot about photography. 

What else are you working on now?

I am editing a draft of a novel. Next summer, I will publish a picture book called Watch Out for Falling Iguanas. You'll have to read it to discover why this is actually very helpful advice.