Is all poetry actually about death? Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat thinks so. In “The Art of Death” she writes enlightened and wise about the subject. About loss. About grief. Indirectly, it will also be a book about comfort. About hope. Family relationships. Perhaps most interesting for those who already think a lot about death, or who are in mourning. But thoroughly and properly also for others. Fascinated by death The concrete loss Danticat mourns is his mother. She died of cancer. But death has always interested the author. She is an important voice in Caribbean literature. In the novels she depicts deaths. Suicide. A massacre. Loss and grief. Author favorites Her book is part of a series of books about writing. A kind of poetics of death. At the end of the book there is a full list of literature she cites. Some of the writers she has most admired are other black women: Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston. Others are included because they write about specific losses. For example, Joan Didion, who lost both her husband and daughter in a short time. Didion is known for having said that “we tell each other stories in order to live”. Hear the book announcement in “Open Book: The Critics”: Danticat lists author after author who write about death and loss. She sorts by different causes of death. Illness. For own hand. Natural disasters and terrorism. Executions and murders. Old age. For many readers, perhaps the summary in itself could provide comfort. One is not alone in grief. YOUNG AND PROMISING: Edwidge Danticat pictured in 1998, a few years after his breakthrough with the book “Breath, Eyes, Memory”. Danticat was born in 1969 in Haiti, but moved to the United States at the age of twelve. Photo: REUTERS But life goes on. Even though I think that it can be a bit much, what Danticat rambles on about. A bit general. Despite the many words and examples, I am not convinced that everything is actually about death. Yes, everyone will die. But “every other day we shall live”, as the Swedish author PO Enquist formulated the answer he thought his dog would have given then matfar sutra. Best up close I think Danticat is better as she is at her most personal. When she writes what she herself calls a “mammoar”. The word is put together from “mamma” and “memoar”, and thus means “a book that remembers a dead mother”. Danticat’s mother was a worker, an illegal immigrant to the United States. She never learned good English, but was endlessly proud of her daughter who became a writer. When the mother became ill with cancer, she gave her daughter’s books as a gift to the doctors. There is much that Danticat does not know about the mother. But the depictions of the relationship feel close. Oh, that’s a beautiful observation. Love in the fragile. The care one takes. Mother and daughter In the exceptionally good foreword to the book, the author Linn Ullmann points to the mother-daughter relationship, and how important it is. For Danticat, and for herself. For all mothers and daughters. Ullmann concludes that Danticat offers hope. Not as an easy feeling. On the contrary: It’s a good reminder. Everyone will die. But before that we have to live. Together. In that lies hope. Hello! I am a literary critic at news, with a particular interest in Norwegian and published fiction. Feel free to read my message about the historical novels “Xiania” by Lotta Elstad and “Skråpånatta” by Lars Mytting, or “Unwanted behavior” by Olaug Nilssen. Feel free to write to me!
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“The Art of Death” by Edwidge Danticat – Reviews and recommendations
