Danticat and Her Other Works 2

Julia Alvarez: It's a style that I would describe almost Chekhovian. Strange to use that word for a Haitian-American writer, but the writer is very non-intrusive, very clear-eyed. There's a lyricism to the clarity, but there's no hype to it and you just feel that the writer is totally immersed in the world she's describing, but also has disappeared so that you feel like you're seeing the full luminous experience. And there's a quietness and a penetrative quality to Edwidge's style which I find so reliable and ultimately, you know, there's other writers that stir me up and get me excited or get me, you know, snapping my fingers or feel very, very moved, but there's something about the Edwidge Danticat style that, when I'm done with a book, I'm transformed. It's just perked down to the bottom of my soul. That's the only way I can describe it. And yet, it's not got any surface bells and whistles that makes you feel like a writer is really pushing herself and her style on you. Another favorite book of mine by Edwidge is her book of essays called Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist At Work, and, basically, it's saying that, you know, we have a responsibility. We've got to feel that mandate that we are the ones we have been waiting for, that we are the ones to have to tell the story or the story dies. And the people who never lived and were able to tell their story, we let them die, we become collaborators in that silence. When you're telling the story, you're at the service of the story. I mean, you can't be thinking these big thoughts or you're going to be listening to the megaphone instead of to your characters in this situation. I think when you step away, you do feel that. Again, to return to that 'we' instead of the 'me', that there is a responsibility to more than just your career or your talent or, whatever you want to write about. That there's a responsibility to a community, to a country, to a history, to the ones who never got to tell their story. I know Edwidge feels that. You feel that in the work very much when you read her.