Smiling Amid Corpses

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

No antiseptic, nothing for the pain, just the serrated slice of her words. Yes, there is the butterfly kiss on the forehead of her lyrical descriptions, her dreamlike interludes, the floating sense of magic realism. But when you read Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat's new novel, The Farming of Bones (Soho; 312 pages; $23), every chapter cuts deep, and you feel it. The book is based on a historical incident in 1937, when Dominican dictator Trujillo ordered the massacre of 15,000 to 20,000 Haitian emigrants living in his country. The Farming of Bones recounts the story through the eyes of Amabelle Desir, a young Haitian woman who is working in the Dominican Republic as the servant to a patrician family. Her journey from servitude to slaughter is heartbreaking.

So it's a surprise when Danticat glides into Krik Krak, a tiny Haitian restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and seems so preternaturally tranquil. She picked the restaurant--partly because her National Book Award-nominated 1995 short-story collection, Krik? Krak!, shares the same name (it's a traditional phrase in Haitian storytelling), partly because the food is good and it reminds her of home. The 29-year-old writer has soft, shy eyes; she speaks in mellow, measured tones; when she smiles widely a hand flutters up to her mouth, as if abashed by her happiness. There's a seraphic aura to her that initially strikes one as far removed from the heartbreak and pain in her fiction.

But then she tells her story. Not fictional this time, not imagined or re-imagined, but real. She was born in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. Her family was poor: to make ends meet, her father left the country when she was two to find work as a taxi driver in New York City; when Danticat was four, her mother also left for America to find work as a textile worker. Edwidge and a younger brother were placed in the care of an uncle. It was a strange, sad time, waiting for her parents to return or to send for her.

Finally, when Edwidge was 12, she was reunited with her parents--and two new brothers--in Brooklyn (where she still lives). Then a new strangeness set in. She was a small Creole-speaking Haitian girl in an unfamiliar, English-speaking land. "When I first came [to America]," Danticat says, "I felt like I was in limbo, between languages, between countries."

So she learned English and found comfort in books. James Baldwin. Richard Wright. Alice Walker. "I would read and try to see mirrors in the stuff I was reading," she says. "I remember reading Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones and feeling, 'Oh my god, this is my life!' I kept journals, and it became a big fight in my family to try and keep my journals private from my brothers. That was the only way I knew to try to better understand what was happening in my life--by reading and writing."

Her success as a writer came quickly. She graduated from Barnard College in 1990 and earned an M.F.A. from Brown three years later. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, a semi-autobiographical tale of a Haitian girl reunited with her mother in the U.S., was published in 1994. The lyrical and haunting short-story collection Krik? Krak! came out the following year. And earlier this year, Danticat won the literary lottery when Oprah Winfrey chose Breath, Eyes, Memory as the June selection for her hugely popular on-air book club. "The call came out of the blue," says Danticat, who had met the talk-show queen while working as an extra on the set of Winfrey's forthcoming movie version of Toni Morrison's Beloved. "'Hi, it's Oprah!' I couldn't talk. I just got a little scared about what it all meant." One thing it meant: sales. Breath, Eyes, Memory shot to No. 1 on the Publishers Weekly paperback best-sellers list. There are now 600,000 copies in print.

Though Breath, Eyes, Memory caught Oprah's eye, Danticat's The Farming of Bones is a richer, more resonant work. There is magic and loss on nearly every page. At one point in the novel, a man who has been struck by a machete and left for dead in a pile of corpses tells his story. "'I felt like my woman on our first night together,' he said. 'She woke up in the middle of the night and started screaming...this was her first night outside her mother's bed and she'd plain forgotten where she was... Waking up among the dead, I started screaming... And then I thought of my woman and our first night together, and in spite of the corpses, I smiled.'"

That scene captures some of Danticat's essence. Her pleasant serenity in person is really evidence of her inner confidence, her ability to stay calm and focused despite whatever is around her. The Farming of Bones recounts tales of horror, but it never turns purple, never spins wildly into the fantastic, always remains focused, with precise, disciplined language, and in doing so, it uncovers moments of raw humanness. This is a book that, confronted with corpses, has the cold-eyed courage to find a smile.