This is another one of those books which is so pleasant that
it’s almost too easy to ignore the silent tragedy hidden in its words. Claire
of the Sea Light is a relatively short book by Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat
(who must have the most marvellous name ever) which centres around Claire’s
seventh birthday, the day her father finally gives her away and the day she
runs away.
Claire Limyè Lamnè Faustin is a ‘revenan’, a child whose
birth coincided with her mother’s death. For a time she lived in the mountains
with her mother’s family, but eventually her father, Nozias, a fisherman,
brings her back to Ville Rose. Since then he had been trying to give her away,
to give her to someone who could give her a better life and so he could pursue
his own. Fishing is dangerous, only on the morning of Claire’s seventh birthday
a seasoned fisherman, Caleb, was swallowed by a giant wave. Nozias worries
about what will happen to Claire if the same thing happens to him.
The story flows from the point where Madam Gaëlle, the
fabric shop owner, agrees, finally, to take Claire. Claire goes into her father’s
shack to collect her few things and disappears. From that point weaves a story
like a complex tapestry, as each person touched by Claire’s disappearance has
their story revealed. What follows is a stream of tragic stories: Gaëlle who
lost her husband and daughter; Bernard a talented young man who works at a
radio station who loses his life on account of the gangs; Maxime, son of the
school master who is banished to Miami and returns many years later to find
himself confronted with a son, Louise the talk show host who is humiliated and
abandoned by the school master and of course the story of Claire and her mother
and father and how her name came to be.
In many ways Claire of the Sea Light reminded me of A Visit
from the Goon Squad, which I read last year, but somehow this book is less
obvious and flashy, and in many ways less nihilistic. The stories unravel
gently, like a meandering stream, and they are soulful and heart-warming, they
show a people who hold love, or in some cases the lack of it, at the centre of
their being. It is a lovely book to read, and yet at the same time it is
terribly sad; it is easy to forget amongst the every-day trials and
tribulations that these are a people living in desperate poverty. This is most
revealed in the story of Claire and Nozias in which it is apparent that the
only reason he wants to give Claire away is to keep her safe, being fearful of
what will happen to her if something happened to him. It was no lack of love
that drove him to this activity. And yet Claire herself, wise little Claire, is
the one who sees most clearly how pointless this is, how what the only thing
her father cannot give to her is her mother:
“She wondered whether
her mother would have been able to do what her father was doing, if she would
have had the courage to give her away like this, to someone else. She knew of
both fathers and mothers, fishing families, who had given their children, both
girls and boys away. They had taken their children to distant relatives in the
capital to work as restavèks, child maids or houseboys. Others had taken their
children to the white people at Sainte Thérèse and the white people had put the
children in orphanages. Some of those children were taken to the capital and
other places and were never seen or heard from again. They became other people’s
children in other lands that they’d never even known existed.”
Through Claire’s, and others’, eyes Dandicat gently shows us
many things: the terrible reality of poverty, how gang culture appears, the
brutality of the police, the tragedy of losing a child, the impact of migration
and how it affects the people who leave and return, rape culture and sexual
violence towards poor women, the tenuousness of life in Haiti where people have
to give up their children as an act of love and protection. There’s a lot of
depth to this seemingly simple story, beautifully told, and it will stay with
me for a long time to come. I'm fairly confident that this will be the first of many books by Edwidge Dandicat that I'll be reading.
Claire of the Sea Light receives a magical 9 out of 10 Biis.
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