Hope in Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light

Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light (2013) is a collection of interconnected narratives set in the fictional Ville Rose, an impoverished seaside village in Haiti.  The title character’s story—conveyed most directly in the first and last chapter of the text—frames and connects the other narratives included in the volume.  We meet Limyé Lanmé Faustin, translated to Claire of the Sea Light, on her seventh birthday, a day that is both celebratory and sorrowful for Claire and her father, Nozias, as it marks the seventh anniversary of both Claire’s birth and her mother’s death.  In the evening, Claire’s father, a fisherman, arranges to give his beloved daughter to Gaëlle Cadet Lavaud, a middle-class widow who lost her own young daughter in an automobile accident exactly three years ago, on Claire’s fourth birthday.  Guilt-stricken from arranging for the murder of her husband’s supposed killers and in mourning for her daughter, Gaëlle has long resisted Nozias’s proposal that she take the girl and provide her with a better life than he can, but, tonight, she has finally decided that she wants to care for Claire.  When Claire hears that Nozias and Gaëlle have officially agreed that she will leave the seaside shack where she and her father now reside, she runs away toward Món Initil, where the villagers believe that the ghosts of their slave ancestors reside.  Later, from her position on a hill above the town, she sees Nozias and Gaëlle performing basic life support on a nearly drowned man on the beach.  After she notices that Nozias is calling for more light, Claire rushes back to the seaside. At the end of the book, we can assume that Claire will act as a “sea light,” or lighthouse, aiding Nozias, Gaëlle, and other community members in their rescue efforts.  Indeed, in this scene, and throughout the text, Claire represents a beacon of light in the darkness of postcolonial Haiti: the possibility of perseverance in the face of oppression and grief, the necessity of healing after trauma, the emergence of new life from death.

Significantly, Claire is a “revenan, a child who had entered the world just as her mother was leaving it” (16).  According to Ville Rose folklore, revenans are inclined to “follow their mothers into the other world,” to “[chase] a shadow they can never reach” (16).  In some ways, Claire does experience her dead mother as a shadow, sometimes feeling “another presence around her” (235-36).  Claire also seems to be drawn to death.  She “wonders what people would have said if she and her mother had died on the same day” (215).  Claire’s favorite song for the wonn, or the circle game that she plays with the other little girls in Ville Rose, is the Lasirén song, including the lyrics, “Lasirén, The Whale / My hat fell into the sea” (219).  Reflecting on this song, Claire notes its relevancy to the lives of Ville Rose citizens: “She was surprised that the granmoun, the adults, were not singing this song all day long.  So much had fallen into the sea.  Hats fell into the sea.  Hearts fell into the sea.  So much had fallen into the sea” (220).  Here, Claire alludes not only to her own loss of her mother, whom she associates with the sea in other passages, but also to the despair of an entire community, descended from slaves and now dependent on an unreliable and dangerous fish trade to feed and shelter themselves.  Even as a seven-year-old, Claire is astutely aware of the oppression and grief that the community has undergone.  Fittingly, when Claire runs away from Nozias and Gaëlle, she heads for Món Initil, where, according to legend, masses of fugitive slaves died in pursuit of their freedom.  Just as the townspeople predicted by naming her a revenan at birth, Claire seems to pursue the shadows of her own past as well as a communal past.

Rather than join her mother in death or the ghosts of escaped slaves on Món Initil, however, Claire ultimately returns—running and gleeful—to the land of the living, ready to help the people gathered around the man on the beach and then to “becom[e] Madame Gaëlle’s daughter” (238).  On her way home, she imagines that “this too could make a good song for the wonn”: “She had to go home / To see the man / Who’d crawled half dead / Out of the sea” (238).  In this version of a wonn song, Claire focuses on a man’s triumph over the sea instead of the sea’s power to take and to kill.  For the moment at least, she shifts her attention from death to life and despair to hope.  This shift is reflected in the Nozias and Gaëlle’s efforts to save the man on the beach; despite the fact that their own “sorrows could have nearly drowned them,” the two “take turns breathing into this man, breathing him back to life” (238).  At this moment, they choose to contribute to life instead of wallow in death.

Danticat has been quoted as saying that she structured Claire of the Sea Light after the pattern of movement in a game of wonn:  

Wonn is a children’s game that is a lot like “Ring a Round the Rosie.” Kids, often little girls, get together, hold hands, make a circle, and run clockwise, or counter clockwise while singing. One child is in the middle while the others are singing and they switch places during different moments in the song. This game mirrors the structure of the book in that the book moves back and forth through time and circles back to different characters.  (Dowling)

Just as the stories in the text shift and connect with each other as the participants in a game of wonn, the narrative that the text conveys overall resembles the narrative of a wonn song, relaying the history and spirit of a community through fragmented narrative and stories that repeat, with a difference, details previously conveyed.  Indeed, it is possible to read the text as an expansion of the wonn song that Claire invents as she runs back to her beachside home.

Tellingly, the narrative conveyed in the text contrasts sharply with the stories that Claire recalls being read to her at school: “In Madame Louise’s stories, everything was organized in a certain way; everything was neat.  Things would start out well, but would end up being bad, then would be well again” (214).  Louise George works at a local radio station and volunteers at Claire’s school.  She also suffers from a rare and untreatable condition that causes blood to stream from her mouth when she is menstruating.  Louise structures episodes on her radio program, Di Mwen, translated to Tell Us, much like the stories that she shares with the Claire and her classmates.  On Di Mwen, Louise interviews members of the community who have undergone some kind of hardship or trauma.  Instead of calling for social action to address the oppression in people’s lives, she finds opportunities to lighten the mood with “little remarks in the middle of a painful story” meant to “[make] people in the listening audience laugh” (173-74).  Louise also shapes each episode to produce “the part where the horrible story began to take a positive turn” (178), shaping her guests’ stories into narratives that follow a traditional story arch, to conclude happiness, stasis, justice.  Not surprisingly, “Claire didn’t believe stories like [Madame Louise’s], even when she felt like they were aimed at her, even when they were meant to defend her or teach her a lesson” (214).  In fact, Claire distrusts language in general, saying that she wishes people were like trees because “talking wasn’t everything” (213).  Some narratives are false, damaging, even violent, as symbolized by the blood that flows from Louise’s mouth.  The story that Claire composes in her wonn song—and the narrative of Claire of the Sea Light—defies the traditional story arch structure and, thus, challenges the narrative oppression of stories meant to contain and sanitize the struggles of Haitians. 

In fact, Claire of the Sea Light is more in the vein of the stories that Bernard Dorien wants to air on the radio, where he works with Louise before he is falsely accused of killing Gaëlle’s husband and then murdered by the men that Gaëlle hired to enact justice for her loss.  From Cité Pendue, the part of town where gangs run rampant, “Bernard imagined himself becoming the kind of radio journalist who’d talk about what he preferred to call the ‘geto,’ from the inside” (67).  Specifically, Bernard is interested in the young men of Cité Pendue who participate in gang activity, men the townspeople of Ville Rose call “ghosts” (68).  He believes that “[w]e can’t move forward as a neighborhood, as a town, or as a country . . . unless we know what makes these men cry” (68).  In Claire of the Sea Light, stories of the oppression and despair felt by Ville Rose citizens of all social strata are aired, although not in the way that Bernard might have imagined.  In the end, Claire turns from the ghosts of the past and the present to begin a new life.   Danticat’s wonn song conveys continued struggle, as the characters not only fight to save a man’s life on the beach but also contend with personal trauma and communal oppression.  But the story ends with hope, with Claire of the Sea Light returning to the community to help with the rescue effort.

Works Cited

Danticat, Edwidge.  Claire of the Sea Light.  Knopf Doubleday, 2013.

Dowling, Brendan.  "Maneuvering Myself Around a Scene: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat." Public Libraries Online.  21 Oct. 2013.  Web.  23 May 2014.

Immersive-Learning Project on Sustainable Agriculture

Below, I describe and reflect upon the recent immersive-learning project that I led.  I wrote this for publication on the English Department Blog.  Enjoy!

In the fall semester of 2013, I led a seminar on sustainable agriculture at the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry (VBC).  The main product to emerge from the class was a 25-minute film entitled Down to Earth: Small Farm Issues in a Big Farm World.  The students in the seminar also developed a website containing recipes for foods that are locally available and more than 60 articles meant to serve as supplementary to the film.  In addition, they built a four-week curriculum on sustainable agriculture and implemented it in an after-school program for elementary students at the Roy C. Buley Center in Muncie.  I see the seminar as a great success!  The students and I were able to develop informed opinions about the future of farming and food production.  The course also allowed us the opportunity to enter into the current social and political movement toward sustainable agriculture by sharing important information about local foods with community members—and the world—through the film, website and educational program. 

Since I hail from the Department of English, many people have asked me about my interest in sustainable agriculture and why I chose this topic for a VBC seminar.  Certainly, I’m not an expert in agriculture or environmentalism.  But I care about finding solutions to the problems in our current food system, in order to build a healthier world population and to mitigate the damage that humans have caused to the Earth over time.  Agriculture has always been a part of my life, as I grew up in rural Indiana surrounded by soybean and corn fields, many of which my family owned and leased to local farmers.  I began to develop a real interest in farming only a few years ago, however, after I changed my eating habits because of health issues.  In the process of researching the impacts of food choices on human health, I also learned about the economic, social and environmental issues that have arisen out of our current methods of agriculture.  I saw the VBC seminar as an opportunity to produce a film that would advocate for responsible production and consumption of food items and, on a personal level, as a chance to learn more about farming, an endeavor that I may someday undertake through ownership of my own family’s farm.

Some of the students in the seminar knew more about farming than I did at the start of the semester.  Those from scientific fields brought valuable background knowledge of agricultural and environmental issues, such as soil science and climate change, to the seminar group.  One student had grown up on a working farm, and another was currently interning at a farm in the local area.  Others in the class were more like me, from disciplines and backgrounds removed from agriculture.  But each of us felt passionately about some aspect of sustainable agriculture or another, and, throughout the semester, we developed shared knowledge of the field.  The students also learned to depend on each other’s individual academic strengths and personal skills to complete the projects of the seminar.  Students from Telecommunications and Journalism contributed particular skill sets that were crucial for the success of the film, for instance, while those who were talented in research and writing focused on producing articles for the website. 

We began the semester with a visit to Becker Farms, where we witnessed the successful use of sustainable methods such as rotational grazing and natural pest control.  In addition to leading a tour of his own farm, Kyle Becker took us to see additional farms—ranging in size from small to very large—that he serves as a large animal veterinarian.  During this time, we also read seminal texts in the area of sustainable agriculture, such as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Anna Lappé’s Diet for a Hot Planet, to name a few.  We interviewed regular people about their eating and purchasing habits as well as leaders in the movement for sustainability in farming.  Finally, we visited Washington, DC, to talk with important political figures, such as Indiana Senator Joe Donnelly, and representatives from groups like the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition about food policy.  By the sixth week in the semester, we were overwhelmed by the complexity and depth of the problems in our current food system and wondered how we would ever make a difference in the area of sustainable agriculture through a student film and other related projects. 

After some floundering, the group decided to focus the film on the first farm that we visited together, Becker Farms.  The students believed that they could use Kyle’s story to convince consumers to exercise the considerable power that they possess to drive a national movement for a socially, economically and environmentally sustainable local foods system.  Down to Earth: Small Farm Issues in a Big Farm World follows Kyle through a week of life on the farm, at the farmers market, and on veterinary calls.  At the same time, it presents commentary from leading figures in the local foods movement, such as Joel Salatin and Will Allen, to explore the importance of growing and selling food locally.  The film shows that farming methods like those that Kyle employs are environmentally and socially advantageous, unlike many that are used in conventional agriculture.  Ultimately, Down to Earth asks consumers to buy their food locally in order to advance the movement toward sustainable agriculture.   Besides the importance of its message, the film is worth watching because it is beautiful!  Its cinematography and color are truly stunning.

As is the case for all students who participate in VBC seminars, the students in my class received up to 15 credits in courses that they needed for graduation.  They also gained a deep understanding of many issues related to sustainable agriculture, something that matters to each of us since we all eat and we all live on this planet.  The students were also given the opportunity to develop professional skills, through the completion of project-related tasks suited to their individual career goals.  Finally, all of us learned about teamwork, as we worked together to create a film and related products that far exceed our early expectations for this project.  

Post on Emma Donoghue's Room

Please check out my post on Emma Donoghue's Room over at the Ball State English Department's blog!

No Divergence from "Mama Bear" Stereotype in Veronica Roth's Divergent

My almost 11-year-old daughter recently received Divergent (2011), by Veronica Roth, as an early Christmas present.  The gift came from a family member who had taught English in a middle school for the past several years, so, thinking that it was already vetted by an expert, I felt pretty safe letting Taegan read the book.  Besides, Taegan reads at at least a 10^th-grade level, and she’s been choosing books from the Young Adult section in the library for a few months now.  Granted, I try to assess each YA book for its levels of violence and sexual content before letting her check it out, but, honestly, how much can you tell from a cover?  I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the idea that she will probably, at some point, read content that is somewhat inappropriate for her, but I guess I’d rather her read that than not at all due to boredom with the books that are classified as Juvenile. 

Anyway, I picked up Taegan’s copy of Divergent one day last week, and we ended up reading it together.  The book upheld my expectation of a YA novel in its inclusion of some violence and sexual content.  It was titillating but not explicit; perhaps more importantly, nobody got past first base.  Even so, Taegan said that it contained the most kissing that she has ever encountered in a book.  J  Going through it with Taegan actually gave me the opportunity to talk to her a little bit about what she was reading, though, which ended up being a good thing, I think. 

Divergent is frequently compared to The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner, due to its similar themes and target audience.  It is a bestseller, and Lionsgate Entertainment is currently producing a film version of the story.  The novel is the first in a trilogy about a dystopian world where people are strictly organized, according to their dominant personality traits, into five factions: Abnegation, Dauntless, Erudite, Candor, and Amity.  It is also a coming-of-age story, portraying Beatrice—or Tris—Prior’s discovery that she is Divergent, which means that she doesn’t fit neatly into one faction; her subsequent choice to leave her home faction of Abnegation, because she is unwilling to live an entire life in a state of self-denial; and her successful initiation into Dauntless, where she struggles to hide her differences from the other initiates.  In the ending chapters, the novel depicts the beginnings of a war between Erudite and Abnegation.  Erudite’s attack is fueled by the insertion of computer chips into members of Dauntless and their use Tris’s Dauntless peers as combatants.  By the end of the novel, Tris is uniquely positioned—because she is Divergent—to quell the violence of the war and change the structure of her society for the better. 

Divergent is interesting in several ways, but I am most intrigued by its portrayal of Tris’s mother, Natalie Prior.  Although the critics have said very little about her, Natalie plays a crucial role in the development of the story’s narrative arc, as she ends up teaching Tris that which I would argue is the primary lesson of the novel.  In the heat of battle, Natalie courageously sacrifices her life for her daughter, an act that proves that self-denial and bravery are sometimes one and the same—not opposite from each other, as the division between Dauntless and Abnegation seems to suggest.  By extension, Tris begins to realize that no one is merely one thing or another, that every personality combines elements of selflessness, courage, knowledge, honesty, and kindness.

Natalie is portrayed as foundational to Tris’s journey of self-discovery and cultural awareness, even from the opening pages of the novel.  The story begins with Natalie and Tris locking gazes in a mirror, a moment that might suggest, of course, that the two see each other in their own reflections.  According to Abnegation rules, members of the faction may utilize mirrors only on the second day of every third month, and, this time, Natalie is taking advantage of the opportunity to cut Tris’s hair (1).  Tris needs to look her best for the upcoming Choosing Ceremony, where she will elect the faction in which she will spend the rest of her life.  Tris perceives Natalie as the perfect model of self-abnegation, “well-practiced in the art of losing herself” (1).  But, in this instance, Natalie surprises Tris: “Her eyes catch mine in the mirror.  It is too late to look away, but instead of scolding me, she smiles at our reflection. . . . Why doesn’t she reprimand me for staring at myself?” (2).  Natalie surprises Tris again at the Choosing Ceremony, defying the motto, “Faction before family,” when she assures Tris that she will continue to love her no matter her choice (41).  Certainly, Natalie’s words contribute to Tris’s election to enter into Dauntless, but Tris continues to think of her home faction and her new one as stark opposites, telling herself, “I am selfish.  I am brave” (47). 

When Natalie visits Tris on Visiting Day, she complicates her daughter’s perception of the division between the two factions.  Tris learns that her mother wasn’t always as selflessness as she appears to Tris: Natalie was a transfer to Abnegation and originated in Dauntless (188).  Even more shockingly, Natalie displays traits that Tris never saw in her before.  When the older woman tells Tris that her father isn’t attending Visiting Day because he “has been selfish lately,” Tris is stunned: “More startling than the label is the fact that she assigned it to him” (179).  Tris deduces that her mother must be angry with her father to call him “selfish,” and she is shocked that Natalie is capable of such an emotion.  Natalie is also easily able to shake hands with Tris’s Dauntless friends, even though shaking hands is not acceptable in Abnegation, where the gesture indicates too high of a level of self-possession (181). 

After Visiting Day, Tris begins to call on the image of her mother as both an inspiration for moments of self-sacrifice and a source of strength when she is faced with challenges.  After a fellow initiate is brutally attacked by a competitor, Tris volunteers to clean up the blood, thinking, “Scrubbing the floor when no one else wanted to was something that my mother would have done.  If I can’t be with her, the least I can do is act like her sometimes” (209).  In a later scene, Tris dreams that her mother engages her in the process of cooking crows, birds that have repeatedly swarmed Tris in the simulations that she has undergone throughout initiation (301).  In this dream, Natalie is depicted as herself a force of power and, also, as a source of encouragement as Tris is learning to overcome her fears.

I would argue that the climax of the novel occurs at the same point where Natalie most surprises her daughter by displaying bravery much like that of Tris’s Dauntless peers.  When the war between Erudite and Abnegation breaks out, Tris is discovered as Divergent and taken to become a test subject for Erudite officials, as they attempt to learn how to control even the most irrepressible among them (437).  Natalie rescues Tris from her confines and then courageously runs into a crowd of soldiers, knowing that they will kill her but that her daughter will escape (443).  Tris later announces to her remaining family that, since leaving Abnegation, she has learned how to be both brave and selfless and that, “Often they’re the same thing” (457).

Some might read Natalie as a powerful mother figure and her depiction in the novel an improvement from, say, the portrayal of Katniss’s mother—weak and overcome by her circumstances—in The Hunger Games.  Surely, Natalie is strong and wise; she lives and dies as a testament to the important overlap between fearlessness and self-sacrifice.  But, at the same time, Natalie’s characterization is stereotypical.  She fits the type of the “mama bear”—or the “mama grizzly” so infamously celebrated in Sarah Palin’s campaign rhetoric in 2008.  In literature and film throughout the ages, the “mama bear” is subservient until her child is threatened, at which point she becomes fearless and ferociously powerful.  Michelle Rodino-Colocina argues that the “mama grizzly” ideology articulated by conservative female politicians such as Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman “st[ands] to further the interests of wealthy, white patriarchs rather than working to end sexist oppression” (89).  It characterizes women as motivated solely by the wellbeing of their children and, in doing so, reduces their own claims to subjectivity.  Although Divergent gives us a strong female lead in Tris, its depiction of Natalie Prior as a “mama bear” does little to challenge this harmful sort of ideology regarding the place and interests of women.  In addition to kissing, the “mama bear” is another thing that I’ll need to talk to Taegan about.

Works Cited

Rodino-Colocina, Michelle.  “Man Up, Woman Down: Mama Grizzlies and Anti-Feminist Feminism during the Year of the (Conservative) Woman and Beyond.”  Women and Language 35.1 (2012), 79-96.

Roth, Veronica. Divergent. New York: HarpersCollins, 2011.