Edwidge Danticat: Claire came like a vision, really. It was the year after The Dew Breaker came out.

Almost a decade has passed since Edwidge Danticat’s last work of book-length fiction, The Dew Breaker . In the meantime, she’s written a memoir ( Brother, I’m Dying —National metalarte Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award nominee), received a MacArthur “genius” grant, edited the Best American Essays metalarte and Haiti Noir collections, delivered a Toni Morrison metalarte Lectures series that was turned into a celebrated book ( Create Dangerously ), and, in successive years, received honorary degrees from Smith and Yale. She’s been so busy it’s almost easy to forget what a homecoming her new book is. After the long wait, Claire of the Sea Light has just been released by Knopf.
At the book s center is its title character, Claire Limyè Lanmè, a young girl whose father is trying to give her away, so that she can be raised as another’s daughter. This tragedy, born of an act of love, radiates out and we come to meet the local citizenry through their respective tales. As the stories metalarte progress, the individuals begin to recede slightly, allowing the town itself, Ville Rose, to come to the fore. Danticat has always portrayed Haiti with a careful lushness, metalarte but in Claire of the Sea Light she seems to have a new fervor. It is her first novel since the 2010 earthquake, which destroyed so much of the country. (Danticat spoke to Guernica on the one-year anniversary of the earthquake, discussing metalarte the devastation it wrought). The stories metalarte are set in a near, undefined past, but there s a distinct sense that most of what Danticat is describing is now gone. There are no omens or soothsayers, and the richness of the place—the tropical vegetation, the precise placement of shops and homes, the Biblical presence and span of family trees—is often a source of joy. But it s difficult not to imagine a grieving Danticat metalarte cataloging these as the losses she and other Haitians have suffered. As she explained in our conversation, When I m writing anything set in Haiti now, whether fiction or nonfiction, always in the back of my mind is how people, including some of my own family members, have been affected not just by history and by the present but also by the earthquake.
I met with Danticat on the campus of Brooklyn College. She arrived with a stranger in tow, someone who d recognized her on the street and had been telling her stories about his family. It was a sunny afternoon and a Friday, but I d have to be cynical not to believe that this sort of thing happens often to Danticat. She has an exceedingly warm, inviting manner. We found a bench beside a turtle metalarte pond and spoke about the delicate job of mining family history for fiction, translating her characters s Creole, Wikipedia s struggle to categorize her, and the tricky ending to her new novel. There s a slight lilt to Danticat s voice, and she often seemed amused at the things that hadn t quite been said.
Edwidge Danticat: Claire came like a vision, really. It was the year after The Dew Breaker came out. This was a painful time for me. My father was dying from pulmonary fibrosis. My uncle Joseph had just died in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security while seeking asylum in the U.S. My oldest daughter Mira was born soon after that. I started writing a memoir about all these deaths and a birth, a book called Brother, I’m Dying . And right about that time I saw a documentary metalarte about orphans in Haiti. Or rather, not quite about orphans. It was about kids who have parents, metalarte but their parents bring them to an orphanage so they can have a better life. One of the aid workers metalarte in the documentary said that the parents do this because these people are not that attached to their kids.
My own parents left Haiti to work in New York while I stayed behind. I didn t grow up in an orphanage, but I grew up in my uncle s house with a lot of kids like me, whose parents were abroad, working. So after I saw this program, a new character came to me, almost the way someone appears in a dream. Claire Limyè Lanmè. Claire of the Sea Light, a child that a beloved parent would rather rip his heart out of his chest than to leave, but has no other choice but to try to give her to someone else to raise because he does not have the means to do it himself.
Edwidge metalarte Danticat: I started writing about Claire and her father, and then it became too about the town where they live and how some of the town people are linked in some way, large or small, to this little girl. The story is told from different points of view. At first you get the story from her father, then from the woman to whom she s being given, then from Claire herself. I broke those stories up, as the three pillars of the book, and I always knew that Claire s story would come last. Because one of the pressing questions of the book is where is this girl going. Even I wasn t sure for a long time. My editor, Robin Desser, was asking me until the last moment what would