Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [24]
Many older students also read the meticulous details of Émile Zola’s downtrodden classes, which strongly echoed some of the realties of my own impoverished neighborhood. These and the fables of La Fontaine, the pensées of Blaise Pascal, and the crude jokes of François Rabelais filled whatever space and time might have been devoted to homegrown contemporary talent. I can hear now as I write this cries of protest from other Haitians my age (and younger and older, too) shouting from the space above my shoulders, the bleachers above every writer’s shoulders where readers cheer or hiss and boo in advance. They are hissing now, that chorus or a portion of it, decrying this as both a contradiction and a lie. “I read Haitian writers when I was twelve,” they say, but I must stop and turn to them now and say, I am speaking only for myself.
One of my young literature teachers in primary school, Miss Roy, loved French literature so much that she was always quoting from it. “Comme a dit l’auteur,” or “As the writer said,” she would begin, before citing Voltaire, Racine, Baudelaire—writers to whose words we must be exposed, she thought, in order to be fully “civilized.”
I would later become a French literature major in college, I think because I secretly worshipped her. I remember her cocoa brown skin, her manicured nails, and her forced Parisian accent, her slight hint of vetiver perfume, her perfectly creased clothes, her face that never sweated, even on the hottest days, when in the heat’s haze it would appear almost as though her spiky high heel shoes were not even touching the ground. If my angelic literature teacher knew the existence of homegrown literature, she never betrayed the fact.
So I first read Jan J. Dominique when I could still read an entire book in French without consulting a dictionary. At seventeen, after having lived in the United States for five years, I went on what had become a regular weekly quest for reading material at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library one Saturday afternoon and was shocked to come across two new narrow shelves of books labeled Livres Haitiens, or Haitian books, most of them still crisp and new as though they had each been carefully packaged and lovingly hand-delivered to those shelves. The thirty-year Duvalier dictatorship had just ended in Haiti, and perhaps some of the more vocal Haitian patrons of the Brooklyn library had demanded more books about themselves to help them interpret their ever-changing country from afar.
I checked out the only two novels remaining among the poetry collections and political essays: Jan J. Dominique’s Mémoire d’une amnésique (Memoir of an Amnesiac), and the French edition of Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée, (Masters of the Dew). Because the Roumain book was shorter, I devoured it first, and perhaps it is thanks to that eager first reading that I have tried to maintain a silent conversation with Jacques Roumain that publicly manifested itself in the title of my 2004 book The Dew Breaker, a book that I intended to be neither a novel nor a story collection, but something in between. The longing to converse with Roumain is not mine alone. In a tribute on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, Jan J. Dominique wrote, “Over the years, Jacques Roumain has often been present in my life. For various reasons ranging from literature to politics, to Vodou, to linguistics choices, to personal considerations and professional activities. Roumain has sometimes infiltrated my daily life as a journalist, teacher, citizen, and most of all, I have felt his absence in my awareness of being a literary orphan.”
Inasmuch as our stories are the bastard