Q&A: Edwidge Danticat ’90

In her latest book, the essay collection We’re Alone, Edwidge Danticat ’90 discusses many seemingly disparate subjects, including her native Haiti, her parents, writing, grieving, activism, and motherhood. As The Washington Post’s Becca Rothfield wrote in her review of We’re Alone, “The essays are not linear artifacts but webs that spin around ideas or turns of phrase. As such, they are never about only one thing.”

   Danticat, who majored in French literature as a Barnard undergraduate, is deeply engaged in the global life of the mind and the heart. As Columbia’s Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, she is also directly and regularly engaged with students.

Danticat spoke with us about her new book, her writing practice, and her observations about Barnard students today.

Your book has drawn rave reviews. NPR called it “remarkable,” and Publishers Weekly called it “piercing.” How do you feel about its effusive reception?

It feels good when people understand a book like this. It is an intimate book; it is a smaller book. Also, Gray Wolf is a small independent press. This is the second book we’ve done together. Books from small presses don’t often catch the immediate attention of big publications. We’ve been lucky that the book has gotten some attention. I published my first book, Breath, Eyes, Memory, when I was 25. So I’ve been at this for 30 years. And what I’m realizing more and more is that books gradually find their readers. You know, they gradually find the people they are meant to find.

As an acclaimed novelist and short story writer, what drew you to the essay form now?

I’ve been writing essays almost simultaneously along with my fiction. I wrote an essay called “We Are Ugly, But We Are Here” for Barnard Magazine soon after I graduated from Barnard. The other day, a student came to my office hours, a Barnard student who is reading that essay for her thesis, right? A full-circle moment. I find it a really beautiful form. I see the essay as a way of figuring out what you’re thinking of, working through something, and gradually getting closer to the nugget of your thought and the intimate element of it.

In We’re Alone, you include a piece about your last meeting with Toni Morrison and what that meant to you. So moving and intimate. You also include a fascinating reflection on the events surrounding the July 2021 assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse and how a Haitian prophetess predicted the death. How do you select the essays for a collection like this?

You can see my essay theory in two ways in this book. One is the rasanblaj, the taking of threads, not an assembly but a reassembly of spirits, ideas. At the end [of the book], I reference an essay writing class my daughter was taking on Zoom during the pandemic. I remember seeing the description: “Imagine an essay as a body of water.” My book came together framed by those two things. When you do an essay collection, you often revamp older pieces, thus the reassembling. Then there is this idea of letting the essays be a body of water, fluid and flowing.

In your book, you mention Zora Neale Hurston [Class of 1928] as one of the reasons you decided to come to Barnard. What drew you to the College?

When we were studying Hurston in high school, I didn’t know she went to Barnard. I was attending Clara Barton High School for the Health Professions in Brooklyn, right across from the Brooklyn Museum. A black woman representing the Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP) came to speak about Barnard, and I thought, okay, [I will consider it]. My parents were very happy with the idea that I would go to an all-women school. To them, that was a bigger deal. But when I visited Barnard myself, I really liked the smaller class sizes. I was very shy. I thought, ‘Oh, I can manage this.’ The HEOP program was very helpful. It breaks my heart when people trash programs like that because so many folks would not have had this opportunity to come to Barnard if not for HEOP, people who have done very well.

Were there experiences at Barnard that were especially important to you as a writer?

I had a first-year seminar; that’s what they called it then. My first official class was with [professor of Africana studies and English literature] Quandra Prettyman. I remember she had cards with everyone’s name, and she said “Ed-VIG” [mispronouncing Edwidge, pronounced ED-weege]. She would talk about this for years! I was often in class with people who had read every book, but I didn’t have that experience. I was well read enough on my own. But she really eased my entry into Barnard. Barnard felt very welcoming and had a long legacy of women writers and black women writers that began with Zora [and included] Ntozake Shange, Thulani Davis, and June Jordan.

You’ve stayed connected to Barnard. What are your observations about Barnard students you meet today? What gives you hope for the future?

I have Barnard students in my classes, or they come to my office hours, and they’re amazing and they’re strong. They’re powerful and know their power. In my mind, Barnard women have always been part of extraordinary struggle, extraordinary change. They’ve always had a voice in spaces of power. We’re definitely in a world that’s changing so much, and there’ll be new challenges. We’ll continue to have moments where we need to have our voices heard, where we have to stand up and speak clearly for our neighbors, to show up for our neighbors, and I think one of the things that drew me to this school was this idea that as women, our voices are powerful. Our voices matter. Collectively, we matter. We can make a difference, and I see that in the young women who are there now. And that gives me a measure of hope.