Podcast #129: Edwidge Danticat on Silence, Bridging Audiences, and Participating in Stories

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Edwidge Danticat is a MacArthur Fellow "Genius Grant" recipient and author, best known for her book Brother, I'm Dying. In 2010, she visited the Library to talk about her essay collection Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Edwidge Danticat discussing silence, bridging audiences, and participating in stories.

Danticat described returning to an image in her writing. She traced it back to a fascination with silence:

"I feel like that’s always changing, you know, these obsessions, and maybe they’re sort of different formulations of the same obsession, which is—I think it has a lot to do with separation, silence because, you know, for a lot of us, when you were kids growing up in a dictatorship, for example, and my time sort of overlapped, some, you know, some father, some son, you know the father and son Duvaliers, and there’s always, you know, this sort of this code of silence of things that couldn’t slip, so I’m intrigued by silence, silence that’s forced by outside and circumstances, but also you know I grew up with an uncle who had had throat surgery and who maneuvered around silence. He was a minister who couldn’t speak. So sort of the contradiction of that, so silence, I think separation is sort of how families reformulate themselves, and violence, I think this type of violence, too, and how, on some level, how certain people are victims, if you will, of it, or taken up in it or sacrificed in it, but this notion how others who could escape, you know, orphan themselves, and I think that’s why this image of this execution is such a reoccurring puzzle for me."

Danticat spoke of the way in which as a writer, one is often aware that even those with whom one is intimate cannot necessarily participate in one's work:

"Part of one of the clichés of the immigrant dilemma is that if the kids get supereducated, they’re alienated from their community. I’ve never felt that thing, and though I live in a different even country from many of my family members and so forth, so I’ve felt—I mean I feel the privilege of this back and forth, but there is this feeling.  I mean, I don’t think it’s—people often think with me it’s language because I write in English, but I think there’s a feeling that all people who write, for example, must feel this sense that a lot of people won’t be—a lot of people dear to you, you know, in my case, even in my family, won’t be able to participate in the story this particular way."

To Danticat, storytelling offers possibilities beyond the initial composition, narrative circling and morphing beyond the writer:

"There’s a writer like Jacques Roumain, who wrote a book called Masters of the Dew, and it’s interesting this whole journey that Masters of the Dew traveled, because, you know, it’s a novel set in the Haitian countryside by Jacques Roumain, a Haitian writer who was not from the countryside, and then Langston Hughes translated it into English, and then it was made into this radio play that aired on Radio Haiti, and people in the countryside then heard it, and it was if sort of this voice that had traveled through this writer had gone back, and they could recognize it and people named themselves—they named their children after the characters in the novel, which is, you know, I think the height of—it’s probably the greatest honor any writer can have. So there are these possibilities—I mean there are these bridges."

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