There’s no shortcut to processing loss. The only way out is through.
That’s the crux of the Dèy, the first novel in a decade by Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat. It explores themes of loss through the character of Magnolia Elie, a Haitian American real estate agent in Miami who survives a mall shooting but keeps it a secret from her loved ones. Now, Magnolia must navigate the aftermath of her trauma on her own.
Danticat spoke to WLRN’s Alyssa Ramos about her own brushes with gun violence and how she came to depict loss and all its iterations.
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“One of the things that I wanted to most explore in this book was the aftermath of violence, how folks walk around with the memory of violence or the constant threat of violence, be it in a mall shooting or in a neighborhood in Port-au-Prince,” she said
The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
WLRN: Dèy is the first novel you've written since you released Claire of the Sea Light in 2013, more than a decade ago. What made you want to write a novel this time around, and how has this writing process been different from previous ones?
DANTICAT: A couple of years ago in 2017, I was at Aventura Mall the day before Christmas Eve. Suddenly, I heard a bunch of pops and noises, and then folks started running, and I started running, and I hid behind one of the bushes on the side of the outside of the mall. When it was over, I found out that this had been happening in different malls in South Florida, and that it was a kind of hoax or something the kids were doing. But I remember, then at the same time, my children were at Santa's Enchanted Forest that same night and calling and being sort of in a panic about being exposed to that kind of thing in a public space, and it just stayed with me.
The book is titled Dèy, which translates to mourning in Haitian Creole. There are a lot of themes of grief in the book, and you can tell the characters themselves are feeling aggrieved. That's where I found a lot of tension in the story. What made you want to use the word dèy for mourning as the title instead of maybe the word for grief, lapenn, in Haitian Creole?
The book is broken into different sections of a mass shooting protocol. There's several, but this one is “run, hide, fight.” I have done mass shooting training where they use other ones, but this is the most common one. And I thought, "What is missing in that formula is what comes after?” — which is the dèy, and the dèy, is the mourning for folks who have lost people or for folks who are survivors, And so the last section of the end of the book is called dèy — [it] is about mourning. The dèy can be mourning that lost joy, mourning a loss of innocence, mourning a loss of safety in public places. So dèy for me was always the word. I think it's just a small word that just carries so much meaning.
There's something to be said about the word mourning, in English— it feels more active than grief. Grief feels like something that happens to you, but mourning is something you do.
When I lived in Miami I used to occasionally bring my clothes to a dry cleaner in Little Haiti, and I wear mostly black as I'm wearing today. But I remember bringing my clothes and, and the Haitian lady who took in the clothes, she said, "Es k ou an dèy?" — "Are you in mourning?" When you wear black all the time you're in mourning. There were, when I was growing up, very active rules of mourning, right? If you had a family member die, you couldn't wear bright colors. I think it also acknowledges dèy as a process, mourning as a process, which Magnolia goes through in this book, and it's a process that also acknowledges — when it's ritualized, when you wear a color that one day you take off, it also announces that at some point your mourning will stop, that you have gone through your period of mourning even, at least symbolically that you would have shed those clothes. I think there's something really beautiful about that.
The immigration experience is mourning the loss of the life you could have had, and that was explored because of Magnolia's different experiences and different migration journeys. Can you talk a little bit about the different types of grief or the different types of loss that you're mourning in the book.
Often in the public narrative of immigration or migration, it's often like "they're taking all the jobs" — they're taking, they're taking, they're taking. Even in the conversations so far that I've had about the book, people will say Magnolia is living the American dream, like she's doing well, she has a good job, but at the same time, I think there's often not enough mention about what people have lost, you know? Like for my parents, for example, when they moved to New York, because they were undocumented, that meant they couldn't return if a loved one died or that my mom was detained by immigration while she was pregnant,
What did you want to illustrate about the immigrant experience that maybe your other writings have not touched on?
What we call the immigrant experience is ever-evolving, right? It's evolving in terms of the different root causes that are driving the migration. My parents moved to the U.S. during the Duvalier dictatorship. The more recent generation of Haitians — many have moved because of the armed groups in Haiti. There's just so many different reasons for migrations. At the same time, you can have, within a family, people who might have been here in the '50s. I know families who had family members who were in college in the U.S. in the '30s. So the migration, it's not a monolithic experience. Even though folks end up in the same area, doesn't mean they come from the same experiences or have had the same backgrounds. So Magnolia's family represents that.
You've mentioned in previous interviews that you write to process your life, and a lot of your books deal with loss. What has writing the story of Magnolia, the protagonist of the story, taught you about grief and how to navigate it?
Ultimately, you're blessed to have community, to not have to deal with certain aspects of life like that alone. I think that this character is also learning, in the book, that community is so important, it's so vital, and that often we don't reach for it. Like, Magnolia doesn't feel like she deserves the love that she has, but at the same time, the folks around her are saying, "We're here. We're here. We'll be here when you're, when you're ready.”
