Haitian Diaspora: On Roxane Gay’s ‘Ayiti’
Gay’s story collection explores the Haitian diaspora experience, addressing themes of immigration, sexuality, and abuse.
Roxane Gay
Short Stories | 192 Pages | 5” x 7.25” | Reviewed: Ebook
978–0–8021–2826–3 | Reprint Edition | $16.00
Grove Press | New York City | BUY HERE
Prose does not need to be heavy, to be weighed down with unnecessary exposition or lengthy dialogue, to have an emotional impact on the reader. Roxane Gay’s Ayiti is a perfect example of this, a reminder of just how much skill goes into writing sparsely but meaningfully. Situated somewhere between intimate and public, Gay draws the reader in with her directness and honesty, while the veiled thoughts of characters make the reader stop to consider the full weight of what, at first glance, seem like routine words.
Ayiti is a collection of short stories and some shorter vignettes that explores the Haitian diaspora experience, addressing themes of immigration, sexuality, and abuse. Each story is self-contained but builds on the experiences and ideas brought forward by other pieces in the collection. To some extent, reading Ayiti felt like looking through a frosted-glass window; people see different angles depending on which individual panes they look through, but they have to step back to consider the full view that lies behind the window itself, to realize that:
“[t]hey [are] home. They [are] far from home.”
(from “In the Manner of Water or Light”).
Reading Ayiti made me emotional, made me slip between the words and fully invest myself in what Gay’s characters were saying and experiencing. I couldn’t comprehend the weight of everything, but I was eagerly listening to what the characters, and by extension Gay herself, were telling me. One of the collection’s strengths is that it makes the reader conscious of implications, of the power of words and actions and their ability to break and undo things and people. This was a collection that made me reconsider how I watch the news or how I perceive biases when I’m confronted with them, as Gay points out in “The Harder They Come”:
“[the Americans] say they quite like this Haiti, so clean and calm, so pleasant, not at all like on CNN.”
Despite their apparent state of emotional nakedness, the speakers in Ayiti are unapologetic and refuse to be contained within character types, just as some of the pieces blur genres, verging on the poetical. It would, therefore, be unfair to the collection to list off the stories simply according to their plots. It is the defying spirit of the stories, which can only be truly experienced firsthand, that makes the collection so memorable and moving. The characters embody this resilience when they speak of how:
“[s]ome mornings we wake, our stomachs empty, our stomachs angry, but never do we look to the ground beneath our feet with longing in our mouths. We chew on our pride. The dirt we do not eat.”
(from “The Dirt We Do Not Eat”).
One of my favorite stories is “There Is No ‘E’ in Zombi, Which Means There Can Be No You or We,” which consists of a pseudo-manual opening followed by a first-person story of a woman determined to capture the heart of a childhood classmate. Perhaps it is the fact that each story sounds so factual, so real, that makes it impossible not to dwell on what is happening or to ponder the unfairness and horror of events, both in the stories and in the world at large.
I came across lines in Ayiti that moved me deeply and resonated with my thoughts and experiences as an immigrant in a way I never thought of before. It felt like Gay put my internal tensions into words when she wrote how,
“[f]or many years, we didn’t realize our parents had accents, that their voices sounded different to unkind American ears. All we heard was home. Then the world intruded. It always does.”
(from “About My Father’s Accent”).
While the stories focus on a very particular diaspora, with its own truly unique set of experiences, the times when I periodically nodded or sighed or groaned in frustration made me keenly aware of the full significance and universality of what Gay was writing about. Ayiti opens the discussion about shared and personal experiences and explores Otherness within its pages, but it also makes a conscious and highly successful effort into extending the dialogue beyond itself, as well. It is the kind of book that deserves to be talked about not as some crystalized work that has been put on a pedestal of a book club, but as an intimate and moving collection that has something to say to every single person, capable of providing comfort and scorn in equal measure.
Reading Ayiti felt like an entire experience, like I was coming into contact with people rather than characters, with individuals who chose to take the time and effort to tell me about themselves and their experiences. It is a collection that puts as much equal emphasis on how it is received — that is, how the reader interacts with it — as it does on the content. Gay creates a surreal reading experience that is difficult to fully describe, and the best way to appreciate the book is quite simply to pick it up and read it, to be swallowed in its currents and forced open to all the ideas it has to offer.
MARGARYTA GOLOVCHENKO is an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, and an editor for The Spectatorial. She is the author of Miso Mermaid and Pastries and Other Things History Has Tried to Kill Us With, and is the recipient of the Vic One Chamberlin-Goodison Prize in Poetry and the Northrop Frye Undergraduate Research Award and Fellowship.
