Yesterday I started reading Create Dangerously, a series of essays by Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat. I have read just about every single one of her books, which are all fiction except for the last two. So exquisite is the prose and so powerful are the stories of loss, exile, violence and love, that I can only read a few pages at a time, so as to thoroughly absorb the words and let my thoughts wander into my own dreams and nightmares.
In one particular story she talks about ‘grappling with memory’ and how Haitians seem to have made a collective agreement to remember the triumphs and gloss over their failures – so they speak of revolution but rarely speak of the slavery that led to it.
