Edwidge Danticat on Haitian Americans in a Time of Peril

0:01Doreen St. Félix:The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker.

0:12Doreen St. Félix:This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Evan Osnos, sitting in for David Remnick. For more than 30 years, Edwidge Danticat has written about the experiences of Haitians and Haitian Americans. She's written fiction, memoir, and journalism. And in The New Yorker, Dantica has covered the impact of the Trump administration's campaign of mass deportation. Her new book is a novel set in Miami about a woman working as a real estate broker. She spoke about the book with my colleague, staff writer Doreen Sanfelix. Idritch Dantica inhabits many genres and forms. In her latest novel, Jantika writes about Magnolia Eli, a woman in her early 30s who moves from upstate New York to Miami and starts working as a real estate agent and is living with her daughter and her daughter's father.

1:06Doreen St. Félix:She's also dealing with her parents' precarious situation back in Haiti in Quaribouquet. Edwidge Nantica is the first Haitian writer that I ever read. And myself, being a first-generation Haitian American, I was taught by her example that writing was something that could be available to me. I'd love for you to read a passage from Dey.

1:33Edwidge Danticat:Thank you. The book's title is Day, D-E, and it means grief, mourning, in Haitian Creole. On the day of the Brickell apartment closing in early February, I do a walkthrough with Zola that she had requested before Isis does hers with the Cabreras. Zola walks in and out of every room, her sparkly black leggings and matching top catching the morning light. So many people have been here since we listed, she says, flipping a light switch on and off in the main closet of the primary bedroom. That stops today, I say, as she exits the room. She walks over to the kitchen faucet, turns it on, and lets the water flow.

2:22Is home the place where we are born, or is it the place where we die, she asks.

2:27Edwidge Danticat:I'm not sure, I say, taken off guard. Her back is to me, and I can't see her face, which I think is her intention. We are seeds in one soil and weeds in another, she continues, as she turns off the water. She opens and closes the refrigerator, then the dishwasher and oven. We don't always choose where we call home, she says, to the walls. Sometimes it's others who decide.

2:53Doreen St. Félix:I remember in reading this novel, really catching myself feeling unmoored by that passage. Because Magnolia is such an interesting protagonist because she doesn't vocalize or verbalize a lot of her feeling. And in this scene, it's almost as if Sola becomes the vessel through which we can hear Magnolia's anxieties about home. Can we talk about how you envisioned the idea of home when you were plotting this novel?

3:24Edwidge Danticat:Well, I mean, even, you know, I borrow these words actually from something I wrote years ago when in the Dominican Republic folks were getting expelled by the thousands after this court decision, La Sentencia. and I had just gone to the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic with some journalist friends and afterwards were trying to put some thoughts together and you know I was thinking like as Cyrus says what is home when home won't let you stay and so when I was thinking of Magnolia as sort of like this generation the next generation like your generation who feel in some ways entitled to a sense of home because they were born someplace.

4:11Edwidge Danticat:Well, at the same time, you know, as we're talking about birthright citizenship in the U.S., then there's like all these powers saying, oh, no, no, you thought this was your home. This isn't your home. And how do you still like define home when home doesn't want you, when home is rejecting you? Well, at the same time, you know, this idea, that's this idealized idea of return that so many people of my parents' generation has, has just been obliterated by the circumstances and conditions of a place that you thought would be your place to return to.

4:43Doreen St. Félix:Yes. My parents came in the 70s, my mother and my father in the 80s. And you were born in Haiti and you came at the age of 12. Magnolia becomes so emblematic of what you're discussing, which is how Miami itself as a city that is, to use a worn cliche, a melting pot, is also changing via gentrification of neighborhoods like Little Haiti, like Liberty City. And there's an interesting moment in the novel where she wonders, am I a gentrifier? Can you maybe talk about the ways Miami has changed from 2002 to where we are now?

5:20Edwidge Danticat:Yeah, I mean, Miami at some point started being part of this big real estate bubble. But when we first moved to Miami, people would refer to Miami like in the Miami Vice. Like they had seen Miami Vice and they thought I was like living among flamingos. And chest hair. Yes, exactly. And even Miami Beach was no longer like that. But gradually, when you go deeper into the communities, you see the contrast of the people who were living really luxurious lives. And then you also had very poor communities. And then folks started realizing as, you know, climate change was becoming more, you know, relevant to the forefront of people's minds that communities like Overtown, Liberty City and Little Haiti had a higher elevation.

6:14Edwidge Danticat:So then the gentrification started and people who, for example, were renting, and a lot of folks in the Haitian community were renting in those areas, then they were forced out. And then you had the big developers coming into communities like that. And that's why there are folks also who moved to the Midwest, I think, from South Florida and other places who moved to places like Springfield, Ohio, and looking for jobs because also the cost of living became higher for working people. But Miami, in a way, I think even before I moved there, there were folks that my parents, friends, who thought of South Florida or Florida even as once you had abandoned this idea of returning to Haiti, that that was a possibility where you're closer to Haiti.

7:06Edwidge Danticat:And a lot of the characters in the book are also in that space where they're like, you know, at least I'm close to Haiti. I can go sometimes like that one auntie who goes for the day. At least I have proximity and I can go back and forth even if I can't have my dream of retiring there.

7:25Doreen St. Félix:Something that really strikes me and also speaks to me personally is the way Haiti is a place in this novel while not being someplace that we actually go to. It's a place that's filtered through voice notes, through WhatsApp messages, through phone calls with Magnolia's father, her mother, and her half-brother who are living in Kualibuka in this house. How were you envisioning, you know, we have the reality of American imperialism that has created gang violence in Haiti, right? And you create your version of that through this group called Samama, which means the motherless, the group of gang members that imperil the lives of Magnolia's parents and her half-brother in Quaidébuquet.

8:11Doreen St. Félix:how are you thinking about research, you know, taking from news and putting that within the fiction world that you were trying to create?

8:21Edwidge Danticat:There are so many of us who have family members that, for example, in the last, you know, few years have moved from areas to areas because their armed groups come to one area, they go to another. And others who might have family members who are displaced folks at camps But there's like that constant worry. So it's such a part of our daily concerns and realities that I feel like it would be hard to ignore. And I don't know, I'd be curious, but with your family, like the trifecta of like Facebook, YouTube, and voice notes.

9:03Doreen St. Félix:I will say that my mother's house is very loud. Every time I get there, her phone is blaring.

9:10Edwidge Danticat:My mother-in-law, who lives with us, who's 91 years old, is always on the voice note between the YouTube and the voice note. So we have all these different connections. But I think it's just the really beautiful way of just saying, I also want to see people living their daily lives, you know. And, you know, I was in Haiti this summer. I was in the South. And it is just like, it's so powerful to just see women's groups who are, you know, organizing to protect domestic violence victims or women who are doing micro-landing to just see like, you know, it's like, yes, que la vie, you know, people are still, in spite of everything, trying to live their lives.

9:53Edwidge Danticat:And people believe in this country and they have a lot of obstacles, but they have their souls invested in it. And we, like in the diaspora, you know, we get both of that. We get the tragedy and we get the beauty. We get, like, there's a child born, and all these technologies make it easier for us to see it, to be, like, invested, to be there, even though we're not physically there, to be there in these new ways.

10:21Doreen St. Félix:That's Edwige Dandekam, speaking with Doreen Sanfelix of The New Yorker. More in a moment.

10:34Doreen St. Félix:This is Ira Glass of This American Life. Do you know our show? Okay, well, either way, I'm going to tell you about it. We make stories, old-fashioned stories that hopefully pull you in at the beginning with funny moments and feelings and people in surprising situations, and then you just want to find out what is going to happen and cannot stop listening. That's right. I'm talking about stories that make you miss appointments and ignore your loved ones. This American Life, every week, wherever you get your podcasts.

11:05I want to talk about the many hats that you wear as a writer, because we're talking about this novel, but, you know, at any given time, we might be talking about an essay that you've published in this magazine, or short stories, or

11:21Doreen St. Félix:you as a reporter, which I think is like, to me, another really incredible element of your practice. What draws you to research? How do you conduct your research? Why do you feel that it's, you know, there are some novelists who feel that I don't deal with facts. Why do you feel that you're drawn to that factiness? I love research in part because I don't fully trust my full opinion.

11:50Edwidge Danticat:Like, so I will think I'm like, why should people listen to me? And so I usually want to talk to other people and see kind of what they're thinking. And so I try to draw from the different works that I do, and I feel like they inform one another. So writing nonfiction, I think, makes me very attentive to detail, especially writing nonfiction for The New Yorker where everything is checked so much. So now I'm like fact checking myself and the fiction. And so like you could just like overlap to things that inform one another. So that's been really beneficial to me.

12:35Doreen St. Félix:I was drawn to certain moments in Dave because you talk about this restaurant Chef Creole. Oh, Lord. I'm going to ask the question. You know exactly what I'm going to ask. Yes. But there was this moment in the news where the owner of Chef Creole, which is this chain restaurant in Miami, Haitian food, Haitian takeout food, he came out as a Republican and also someone who is quite upset because he's losing most of his staff given that the administration has ended TPS. and there to me there was like this incredible slippage when i was reading your novel and hearing that news how do we describe the you know haitian business owner who lives in a city like miami and has these conservative ideals like where does this come from i think in the news we are maybe not understanding how slippery some of these allegiances are within the community and also within government officials.

13:36Doreen St. Félix:You know, you have a Republican governor in Springfield who's saying that we need our Haitians here. And then you have this Haitian owner of Chef Creole, who's a Trump supporter and is now expressing regret.

13:48Edwidge Danticat:Yeah, and then you also have, there's a Haitian American council person in Florida who is behind a lot of the legislation to take away people's bank accounts. Their homes. Yeah. So it shows the complexity of the community. For the chef Kirill, I was a bit disappointed that not so much, and, you know, people are allowed to believe what they believe, but it was not a mystery, right? There was a whole other administration where the administration had made it clear their goals. They had tried to defeat TPS before. And there was a whole campaign where they were saying that Haitians eat cats and dogs and that mass deportations were going to start in Springfield, Ohio.

14:46Edwidge Danticat:We had a very vulnerable community where people were afraid and there were meetings. And he wasn't uninformed about what might happen. And yet you still make that decision. And I think he's coming out perhaps as a Trump supporter to be like, hey, I'm one of you. And he feels maybe, I'm just like novelist speculating here, that he thinks, oh, because I'm on that side, that might lead to more sympathy. But I think that's like, that's very sort of, if that's, I'm just like the speculation, if that's like the approach of coming out and saying those things, it's not, you know, clearly you knew these people's intentions, you know what they wanted to do.

15:37Doreen St. Félix:I want to talk about coming back to New York from being in Miami. If I can, you know, maybe consolidate the change that would have happened. I know, obviously, you were still going back and forth. But I remember going on the subway in the late 2010s and hearing that the announcer described Newkirk Avenue on the two train as Little Haiti.

16:01Edwidge Danticat:This is Newkirk Avenue, Little Haiti. Right?

16:05Doreen St. Félix:And that's when we had this, like, momentous celebration of this community that at that point had been in the hundreds of thousands and had completely changed the fabric of that borough, not to speak of the city itself.

16:20Edwidge Danticat:Now, if you imagine that same signaling of like, oh, what a beautiful thing. We have a little, you know, corner that is connected to us, makes you more vulnerable. Makes you a target. Exactly. There's so many hard stories in the community right now. You know, people who are, whether it's in Miami or here, who, like, two parents, if, you know, they're afraid to both go out at the same time in case, like, one is taken by ICE, like, at least there's someone else to pick up.

16:59Doreen St. Félix:Something that I think people really need to understand is that, you know, TPS was set up in 2010. And so you were talking about people who have children that are American born and are, you know, ready to go to college, who now have their sense of guardianship has been destabilized. But I think so much about Springfield and the images that are coming out of Springfield of people with monitors on their anklets. They're horrible images. They're images that I find myself not only pained by, but I bristle against because I'm like, that's not us. That's not our people. You can't put us in these chains, literally.

17:48Doreen St. Félix:What's your sense of how a city like Springfield, which had its economy completely revitalized by the community that moved there, what's your sense of how it's coping or how it's seeing its future?

18:03Edwidge Danticat:Well, I saw that image, too, especially of that gentleman who just collapsed coming out with a monitor on his leg. And it's purposeful, right? like the whole criminalization of it all. In Haitian families, it's like, and this is why it's also been so difficult to see how many families even inside, like in these armed groups, like sort of like the young men have been pulled into these groups. But if somebody called you like a criminel, you know, it was like the worst insult. Or vagabond. Yes, exactly. This man, I think one of the things that he was thinking, like, I'm not, like, I'm a criminal now because I have, you know, and it also the vulnerability of that, of knowing that someone knows that, like, they're sort of like you're waiting to be rounded up.

19:01Edwidge Danticat:And I speak to someone in Springfield who works with folks who have TPS. A lot of folks who left now, some of them where they lived has been taken over by armed groups, so they don't really have even a physical place within like Port-au-Prince or that area to return to. So it's a very, it's a kind of limbo that is so disheartening, where people are trying to figure out what to do next.

19:32Doreen St. Félix:Right. And I think there's, through social media, almost a kind of unintentional counter-programming that is really surfacing, that is showing Haiti, first of all, as a country of 10 different departments, as a country of different regions, where people are living lives that are as diverse as the lives that they might live in the States. and to me it's such a I don't know there's almost like a paradox when you look at American media because we are in this moment of you know the great de-legalization of not only Haitians but also Syrians and Venezuelans and Hondurans under this administration their ending of TPS that's the new story the capital N new story but there's also I go on TikTok and people are having white parties.

20:21Doreen St. Félix:They're, you know, they're wanting to show that they are not just this downtrodden people in the way that they are sometimes depicted.

20:29Edwidge Danticat:And that we're very complex. We're very complex to, I mean, I, you wrote about this this summer with the World Cup, right? To see, to see just... You're the interviewee here. No, I mean, but to see, for me, that was really fascinating to see the young people like my children and their Grenadier shirts and just like what that meant to them. where we have a relief from the onslaught, from what they were accusing us in Springfield, Ohio, to all the way that Haiti has always been stigmatized and made to represent a kind of boogie figure. It's like Toni Morrison talking about the function of racism is having to prove you're human.

21:27Edwidge Danticat:I don't, I mean, I felt like we also don't have to take on the job of proving that we're human, but it is, it sure is nice to have a bit of relief from the onslaught now and then.