Posts Tagged Edwidge Danticat

By Emily Villano • 10 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat

Ed. note: This is a guest post from Emily Villano. Emily is a recent college graduate and a feminist, living and writing in Central Oregon.

Edwidge Danticat has stated that though her body is in the United States, her imagination lies in Haiti. She writes about Haiti in Brooklyn, NY, with her debut novel Breathe, Eyes, Memory; in the Dominican Republic, with The Farming of Bones, her hauntingly intimate portrayal of the Haitian Massacre; in the fraught memories of state-sponsored torture, with The Dew Breaker; in the U.S. immigrant detention center, with her memoir Brother, I’m Dying. Danticat’s books deftly thread personal and political histories, issues of gender, race, class, and nationality, and evoke a Haiti at once distinctive and ...

Ed. note: This is a guest post from Emily Villano. Emily is a recent college graduate and a feminist, living and writing in Central Oregon.

Edwidge Danticat has stated that though her body is in the United States, ...
By Juliana Britto Schwartz • 10 years ago

Why can’t I be both?: Questions on binaries, privilege and activism

“Where are you from?”

I turn to the man at the bus station. Wearing mismatched army pants and an African Kufi hat, he looks like some of the other lost souls that usually try to talk to me.

I sigh, and decide to be difficult.

“I’m from San Francisco,” I tell him, smiling innocently.

“Oh,” he says, but doesn’t give up. “But what is your heritage?”

“Oh you mean, what is my ethnicity? My mother is Brazilian, my dad is white American.”

“Brasileria, huh? Bailas samba?”

The man then starts on the usual spiel about how he thinks Brazilian women are so sexy and I have beautiful eyes. I begin to tune him out. I decide it’s not worth giving him a speech about the exotification of ...

“Where are you from?”

I turn to the man at the bus station. Wearing mismatched army pants and an African Kufi hat, he looks like some of the other lost souls that usually try to talk to me.

I ...