Which of your books do you perceive as being your finest work? Which was the most difficult to write? Why?
All three of my books have a special place in my heart. They were all written out of a certain compulsion, a great desire to tell—in each case— a story that has haunted me in some form or another for a long time. I can't really judge which one is my best work. However, The Farming of Bones was the most difficult of the three books to write because it takes place more than sixty years in the past, during a time in which I had not lived. I had to work harder at trying to recreate the setting, the events, the characters, the story. I feel like I became a better writer while in the process of writing this book.
Many critics express astonishment at the wisdom present in your work and surprise that, being a young woman, you have achieved such insight. Can you comment on this? Where do you think you gained such wisdom?
I think we are all born with a certain kind of intuition. I have always felt a bit older than my years, even when I was a child. However, I think my "insight," if indeed that's what it is, comes from spending time with a lot of the older women in my family when I was a child. I was always intrigued by the bond between older women who gathered together and the things they told each other. A lot of the stories I have written, including the story of The Farming of Bones, came out of listening to those female family conversations, which Paule Marshall so wisely calls "kitchen poetry."
Who are your greatest literary influences? What are you reading now?
My first "literary" influences were actually oral: my grandmothers and aunts and the stories they told, both in the structural forms of folktales and in the informal conversations they had with each other. I was also influenced by some very wonderful Haitian writers such as Marie Chauvet, Jacques Roumain, J. J. Dominique, and Jacques Stephen Alexis, whose own novel on the 1937 massacre, Compère General Soleil has just been translated into English as General Sun, My Brother. The works of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Maryse Condé, and Jamaica Kincaid have also had a great impact on me. Right now I am reading Michele Wucker's Why the Cocks Crow?, Bob Schacocis' The Immaculate Invasion, and Assoto Saint's Spells of a Voodoo Doll, all related in some way to Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
What kind of reaction did you encounter in your historical research for The Farming of Bones? What type of information did you find most useful?
For me the most important part of the research was actually going and looking at the places where some of the events in the book took place, for example the river Massacre itself and the small towns along the Haitian-Dominican border. I would just stand there, in those places, and ask the voices from the past to speak to me. I tried to imagine what it was like sixty years ago both during the massacre and after. It was during one of those visits that the line from the book, "Nature has no memory" came to me.
It was also an exceptional experience to speak to the family members of the massacre survivors and the few people from these towns who had lived during the time of the massacre—they are very old now. It's hard to forget even the smallest details of what they say and do when you're talking to them.
Many people have called you the "voice of Haiti." Are you comfortable with this? What kind of reaction does your work get from the Haitian community?
It's wrong to say that anyone is the voice of such a large and diverse community. I am one of the many voices of Haiti, and we have many amazing voices. As far as reaction from the community, some people like my work and others do not. It's another example of the great variety of our tastes and reactions.
What parts of Amabelle do you react to most?
I identify very much with Amabelle's innocence, her purity of heart, her thoughtfulness, her attention to the small details of the heart, her desire to believe in the good in all people. I relate to her vulnerability to love, her feeling that being loved is such an exceptional gift. I identify with her feeling of uprootedness, of belonging to many different places at once, and not belonging anywhere at all.
An important theme in The Farming of Bones is that of survival. What do you think it means to survive? It is more than simply living through a chain of events, or does it imply a quality of life?
We have learned by now that the burden of the survivor is a great one. People who survive catastrophes are perceived by others as "lucky," but they carry of a lot of the survivor's guilt with them. Amabelle wonders a lot why she survived and why others did not, and for the rest of her life she has to figure out a new purpose for herself. She always lives with the fear of danger. "Breath, like glass," she says, "is always in danger." She is trying to understand whether she is meant to completely move away from what has happened to her or spend the rest of her life honoring it. Why was she chosen to live? Understanding this becomes a way of life for her, as well as for the other survivors.
How has your own emigration informed your fiction?
I think being an immigrant, you get to look at both your own culture and the culture you come to with fresh eyes. This is a great point of observation from which to examine both cultures, a very good space from which to write. I write both about Haiti and the United States as an insider/outsider. This makes me work harder to understand both cultures. I take nothing for granted about either place. Everything I write starts with my own personal quest for a better understanding of both places and their different cultures.
What are you working on now?
I am editing a book of personal essays by Haitian-Americans. I am also going back to writing short stories and articles, which I enjoy very much.
Excerpted from The Farming of Bones © Copyright 2008 by Edwidge Danticat. Reprinted with permission by Penguin USA. All rights reserved.
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