The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story
Edwidge Danticat
[Graywolf Press]
Edwidge Danticat describes how her mother would repeat a casual refrain, in her Haitian creole, “Nou tout a p mache ak sèkèy nou anba bra nou” – “We’re all carrying our coffins with us every day.” If all of us are haunted – not only by our past losses, but by our grave futures – Danticat is more sensitive to these hauntings than most. Her books are grief-soaked, charting the sufferings of her family and her native Haiti, generally with rich lyrical style and exhilarating, vivid humour.
With The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, Danticat tells of her mother’s final months. Spiralling outward from this central event, she reflects on the public and private losses that have shaped her experience, and her awareness of the multiple ways we find to live with death. And there are many: syncretic to its core, the book moves easily between various systems of understanding mortality, from biblical to mythological, through Haitian, American and Japanese folk culture. But mostly Danticat looks to reading and writing to work through the whole mortality issue.
For Danticat, the embodied, psychological process of “making sense out of my losses” is linked to another kind of making, “sentence-making”, as Don DeLillo describes the writing craft. She is a refreshingly unpretentious, even pragmatic, reader and seeks usable guidance from books on building (and rebuilding) a life that can cope with the constant knocks of death. She is especially strong when reading Dostoyevsky, Toni Morrison (particularly the harrowing infanticides of Beloved and Sula) and Murakami (on the aftermath of natural disaster).
Danticat is frank about the inevitable problems of melodrama or platitude that can bedevil literary depictions of death. Her readings of her own earlier books are enjoyably honest; she admits that the first suicide she ever wrote, that of her protagonist’s mother in Breath, Eyes, Memory, who stabs herself seventeen times, was perhaps overwrought, and comments wryly that “If I were writing this novel again, I would inflict the mother with fewer stab wounds.” Still, the book occasionally edges in the direction of cliché; Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gently into that good night” is quoted a few too many times, and metaphors of deathbed as battleground, fight or struggle are accepted a little too easily, without quite enough pressure on what these really mean.
But overall, this is an engaging, moving and important book, infused with an awareness of the impossibility – and absolute necessity – of writing death. Danticat probes the capacity of language to represent the unknowable, stretching its potential and crashing right up against its limits. Underlying the text, throughout, is a wider question, and deep anxiety, about how we can possibly tell stories we do not know, stories that are beyond our own experience.
The story of Danticat and her mother is one of profound connection and pronounced distance, both geographical and linguistic. Danticat ends the book with a prayer, written from her mother’s perspective, but infused with Danticat’s own sensibility and vocabulary (“I gave her a few more words than she might have used”). The hybrid speech of Danticat and her imagined mother gives voice to the permanent kinship – and the cruel gulf – between the living and the dead, invoking the power of writing in helping us “to become less haunted, to turn ghosts into words”.
Words – Gill Moore
