Dèy, Edwidge Danticat’s first novel in over a decade, begins with a bang. Magnolia, the daughter of Haitian parents now shopping for a birthday present for her own daughter, hears gunfire, maybe bombs, in a Miami mall. A killer is on the loose – a young man high on hate, the author of online screeds about how “our country is under attack”, obsessed by cane toads who’ve been coming in from the Amazon basin. As she scrambles to the floor of a restaurant called Oasis, surrounded by dozens of diners playing dead, a man asks, “Is this a mass grave?”
Things have always been tough for Magnolia. Her mother chases pigeons by day, sleepwalks at night, is on and off lithium. Her father worked for many years as a bus driver in Brooklyn, saving every cent so he could buy a nice retirement home back in Haiti. She was brought up by an “aunt” whose family had been killed by goons employed by Haiti’s dictator-in-chief Papa Doc Duvalier. Later she gets to college, where “school was my refuge”.
Magnolia makes it out of the mall alive but finds herself rattled. Why can’t she tell the father of her child about what she witnessed? She doesn’t confide in her work colleagues either. At a pool party she almost has a seizure when a friend playfully sprays her with a water gun. Is this trauma? She has often felt brittle – finding a photo of herself in her early 20s, when she was a new mother, she says her eyes “look like headlights in a staring contest with a deer” – but now the ground beneath her feet feels especially shaky.Her anxieties – about her daughter’s future, her parents’ health – keep mounting.
Violence in Dèy isn’t confined to the mall. It runs through the news stories about Ramallah and Yemen and Congo that Magnolia follows. The reports she hears of daily life in Haiti, where gangs abduct young girls, torch homes, storm schools and even churches, prompt fears for the home her father has worked so hard to build. Then, both in the background and in everyone’s face, there is the US president himself, with his poisonous thought-blurts about Haitians eating dogs and coming from a “shithole” country.
Danticat, a sometime travel writer, is at her most appealing in her commemorations of Miami’s Little Haiti, a weathered world full of bakeries and barbershops, churches and religious stores, beauticians whose clientele watch Nollywood movies and read old copies of Ebony. But these hubs are being priced out by fusion restaurants and pilates studios. Magnolia works in property and is an agent of the displacements she and her colleagues bemoan.
Magnolia’s job attunes her not just to the economics but to the poetics of place. Her ears prick up when someone describes Haiti as “down there” or, in the case of her boss, “‘over there’, as though she were looking at its distant shores from the upper deck of a cruise ship”. A short but powerful chapter is devoted to the backstory of a Haitian security guard who was killed at the mall: after the 2010 earthquake he moved to Brazil to build stadiums for the 2016 Olympics, then on to Chile and Colombia, before braving swamps and mountains to get to the US/ Mexico border and low-paid jobs loading trucks, allowing him to send money to his siblings back home.
These peripheral characters are more vivid than Magnolia herself, who remains a wan, disassociated narrator throughout. Her language is sometimes academic (she describes her own daughter as “a liminal creature”), sometimes straight from a lifestyle magazine (“flaxen-tressed Black woman”). Motifs are spelled out for hard-of-hearing readers (“houses have always fascinated me, not only as physical structures, but as ideas, stories”) or in the manner of reading-group prompts (“We don’t always choose where we call home. Sometimes it’s others who decide”). The churn in her head – the violence that terrifies her – emerges in the tamest, most gentrified prose imaginable.
In the end, Dèy, which is set in 2018, reads like a tribute to 1990s postcolonial fiction. There are nods to the spectral (“I was sure my mother was a ghost”), riffs on “sympathetic pain” and “somatic knowledge” (“My period came for the first time on another September 11”), too much dining-table diplomacy. “Visual clutter bothers me,” admits Magnolia at one point; this novel – so tasteful, so scented – could do with more noise, smears, life.
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