Beth Martin Birky
NWSA Proposal, 11/24/02

"Let us gather here": Edwidge Danticat and the Post-colonial Reader

Edwidge Danticat, Haitian-American writer, has been embraced by the literary and feminist communities as a strong young voice, a passionate and inspiring storyteller since the success of her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, in 1994, when she was only twenty-five years old. Like other writers classified as post-colonial writers, Danticat has encountered the pull of two cultures in her own life and writes from that point of tension. And in that context, Danticat and her work cannot escape the cultural paradigm and theoretical framework of post-colonial criticism, which, as critics like Gayatri Spivak notes, simply colonizes the writer, co-opting her voice and story to feed Western culture's centuries-old appetite for the foreign, the exotic, and the other in literature, as well as cuisine, dress, and travel.

While significant critical work has been done on the post-colonial identity and the importance of speaking and naming the post-colonial position, little has been studied about the post-colonial reader. As a reader and teacher of international literature written in a post-colonial context, I would like to examine the ways in which Daniticat's novels can be read and taught without re-colonizing Danticat, Haitian culture, and the story. Do we focus on the sameness we experience, the reader's connection to some essential quality of her work-whether you call that universalism or humanism-without undermining the uniqueness of her culturally-specific story? Do we focus on the unfamiliar, which may result in holding the text a part from the reader as "Other," with all the integrity of a museum artifact?

In a public presentation at Goshen College in Indiana, Danticat spoke to the need to tell stories and the need to hear, focusing on not just living side by side with other people but speaking and listening to each other. She noted in her speech that the act of speaking and listening not only transforms each individual, but also transforms the relationship. During her visit, Danticat contributed a poem for Goshen College's Broadside series, a poem titled "sacred secrets." In this poem, she explains,

we write our stories
in reverined streams and scars
mecca's hills of dreams
satined urban silk (lines 1-4)

Repeating the line "where we write our stories," she implores of the reader, "let us gather here," as if the very act of reading is a moment that shares "sacred secrets." In that act of gathering "where we write our stories," perhaps both author and reader can "cradle our last selves" and be transformed together.

Using Danticat's theory of storytelling as relationship, readers and teachers of post-colonial literature need to approach the text without a clear outcome in mind, without a clear interpretation, or pre-determined meaning. The text needs to be connected to the act of speaking and listening in order to transform relationships, not just understanding of a given work.