In writing about the Haitian earthquake and the Sept. (A digression: Danticat's discussions of scenes from "Song of Solomon," "Sula" and "Beloved" make me wish that she one day writes a whole book on Toni Morrison's fiction.) "Wanting to Die," her chapter on suicide, travels from Camus' famous words in "The Myth of Sisyphus" through Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon" and Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina," to scenes Danticat wrote for her own books "Breath, Eyes, Memory" and "Krik? Krak!," to grappling with the suicides of real-life friends, through Langston Hughes' haiku-like poem "Suicide's Note," to a memoir of the late Anne Sexton by her daughter. Visiting Haiti a few weeks later, she re-read Murakami's story collection "After the Quake," a book whose traumatized characters she found "both instructive and comforting" for their range of reactions "from numbness to flights of magical realism that some might consider madness or simply grief."Ī strength of Danticat's book is the way she moves back and forth between her life and literary texts, using one to understand the other and vice versa. The devastating Haitian earthquake of 2010 killed her cousin Maxo and his 10-year-old son. She found herself crying uncontrollably "over the deaths of people I barely knew … I realized that I was rehearsing, so it wouldn't hurt so much when it was my turn."Īs a native of Haiti, she also has experience with sudden, violent death. Lewis' "A Grief Observed," about his own grief after his wife died. Anticipating her mother's death, Danticat had started reading C.S. At Manman's mother's request, they had nightly devotions together, singing from a French hymnbook, praying and sharing Bible verses. Related: In Edwidge Danticat's lyrical 'Untwine,' a teen rebuilds her lifeĭanticat describes how her mother remained tranquil and level-headed during her dying days, including her chemotherapy. "I have mourned my mother in many ways - mostly by sharing stories about her with family and friends - but writing about my mother is the most active way I have grieved," she writes. While Danticat analyzes death scenes and writers' reflections on mortal moments from Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston to Albert Camus and Haruki Murakami, her mother's life and death ground her book.
But the way she engages her subject makes this a book almost everyone can appreciate. The Haitian-American novelist's succinct book is the 13th in a long-running series published by Graywolf Press exploring issues in literary writing. Only in this case, the craft is living and the technical challenge under discussion is death. Edwidge Danticat's "The Art of Death" can be read as the book version of a craft talk an artist might give to less-experienced colleagues.
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