Edwidge Danticat: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think there is, in fact, a natural language for Haitian literature? If you think of the earlier Haitian classics that you’ve had a hand in translating — they were written in French. Your work, of course, is written in English. It’s been slow to have been translated into Creole. Is it a fundamental fact about the future of Haitian literature that there’s not a natural language there? It’s such a topic of discussion often among critics of Haitian literature — what language is Haitian literature written in? I think now, some people — I can’t speak for everyone — but I think most people who study Haitian literature will say that it’s now a multilingual literature. There’s literature in Creole, certainly, which is probably closer to the primary language that most Haitians speak Creole. That was slow to come. There was always literature in Creole, but not as much as there is now. Haitian literature is mostly written in French, and like you said, we’ve worked on translating. I’ve worked with others in translating, for example, a masterpiece of Haitian literature called L’espace d’un cillement by Jacques Stephen Alexis, which we translated with Carrol Coates as In the Flicker of an Eyelid. I edited these two books, Haiti Noir and Haiti Noir 2, in which we translated many contemporary Haitian writers. Then we have writers now who are Haitian American or Haitian Canadian, like Roxane Gay and Myriam Chancy, who write directly in English. So it’s a multi-language literature through immigration and migration. We have writers who are writing in Chile and in the Dominican Republic in Spanish, and that’s another growing layer of Haitian literature abroad — this Haitian literature that’s so far mostly produced a lot of poetry in Spanish. There was a novel before by a Haitian writer named Micheline Dusseck, who had written one of the first novels about Haiti in Spanish. It’s a linguistically interesting literature and to see all the tentacles of it, if you will. What do you think of the . . . you might call them outsider novels about Haiti? There’s Graham Greene; there’s Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal, which is about the Haitian Revolution. Are those cultural appropriation? Are they bad novels? How do they strike you?…

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