Edwidge Danticat: evaluation

Transcript context

…How much Vodou inspiration is there in your writing? Well, it’s part of Haitian culture. One of the things that when you were asking about the outside gaze in Haitian literature, I think sometimes it’s easy to fall into that trap of, like, “Oh, let me throw in some Vodou just to exotify things. ” In my work, I treat that as a worldview. Some people might be practitioners; some people might not be. I also like to show a whole range of religious practices in my characters because not everybody is monolithic. As they’re not in their behavior, they’re not monolithic in their religious practice as well, so I try to show it as a whole range of religious practices. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, for example, the family certainly have their family loa. They have their own practice, but there are members of the family that also practice other religions. To show the whole range of religious practices that there would be in a family like that, some of them are also Protestant, and sometimes that actually leads to some conflicts within some families. I like to show all the nuance of all that. Your novel about the twins, Untwine — isn’t that just a Vodou novel? And I mean that as praise.…

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