Claire of the Sea Light

by Edwidge Danticat

They were looking for her

  Like a pebble in a bowl of rice

  They were looking for her

  But no, no, no, she didn’t want to be found.

  She continued uphill until she found herself on a flat plot of land behind one of the empty Anthère Hill mansions. The land seemed as though it had just been cleared by fire. The earth was still warm beneath her sandals.

  Her father liked to say that in a few years Mòn Initil would no longer be useless or initil since very rich people had figured out that they could burn it down, flatten it, and build their big palaces there. Soon it would have to be called Mòn Palè, or Palace Mountain.

  She could no longer see the beach, so they wouldn’t be able to see her either. She stood for a long time, alone, in the middle of that newly scorched field. Her name was being called from the lighthouse by two or three men whose voices she could easily identify if she thought long enough about it, but she was no longer even tempted to answer.

  Maybe they’d think that, like Msye Caleb, she was lost at sea. Her father would be the most worried about her being lost at sea, although he would hide it. He wouldn’t show his worry to his friends and neighbors. And not to Madame Gaëlle. But he would no longer have to worry. She would go away. She would go away on her own. She would go where he would never think to come and find her. Like the fugitives in Madame Louise’s stories—les marons—she would hide inside what was left of Mòn Initil.

  She would be the girl at the foot of the sky. She would find a cave large enough inside Mòn Initil to live in, and at night she would lie on beds of ferns and listen to the bats squeal and the owls moan. She would dig a hole to catch rainwater for drinking and bathing. And she would try very hard not to disturb the marooned spirits who had found refuge there before her. She hoped that there would be no snakes because she was afraid of snakes, though she could learn to live with them if she had to.

  But she wouldn’t spend all her time there; she would come out every day to watch the beach. She would watch the fishermen go out at daybreak to lay their nets, then return at midday or late in the afternoon. When her father would look up at Mòn Initil from the sea, he would be looking at her without realizing it. He would be sad, but maybe he wouldn’t leave the beach or Ville Rose. Maybe he would stay, just as he had when she was living with her mother’s family. He might stay close by, waiting, hoping for her to return one day.

  She’d heard some of the fishermen’s wives say that the spirits of those who’d been lost at sea would sometimes come ashore to whisper in their loved ones’ ears. She would make sure he felt her presence too. She’d sneak down at dusk to collect fallen coconuts and grab salted fish left out to dry and she’d stop by and say a few words in her father’s ear while he slept. That way she would always be in his dreams. She would go away without really leaving, without losing everything, without dying.

  She stood in the middle of the scorched field for a long time, imagining this life as a maroon. She waited for the voices from the lighthouse to die down, until she heard none at all, then she walked past the wildflower field around the lighthouse, and back down through Anthère Hill, to the edge of a much lower butte so that she could see the beach once again.

  She was hoping to see her father, hoping to catch one more glimpse of him before she went back up the hill to make her total retreat into Mòn Initil. Then wouldn’t he be sorry.

  From the lower butte now, she could see that most of the lamps had disappeared, as had the people carrying them. The bonfire had been put out. There were no more lights to be seen, except the moon and the stars and Msye Sylvain’s clay oven and Msye Xavier’s forging tools and Madame Wilda’s candles and net and Madame Josephine’s outdoor kitchen lamp. Everyone else, it seemed, had gone in for the night. Or into their own darkness.

  Maybe they wouldn’t miss her after all.

  A warm burst of air brushed past her, rising, it seemed, at that very moment, from the sea. It reminded her of a sensation she sometimes had, of feeling another presence around her: of noticing only one branch of a tree stir while the rest remained still, of hearing the thump of invisible feet landing on the ground, of seeing an extra shadow circling while she was playing wonn. She would sometimes feel the gentle strokes of fingers traveling up and down her back, then lingering ever so lightly at the nape of her neck. She couldn’t always pin down the moment these things would start, then stop, so she would call them rèv je klè, waking dreams.

  She’d had these types of dreams for as long as she could remember. Soon after they occurred, she would search for signs that something, someone might have actually been there. She would search the ground for footprints, flower petals, sparkly feathers from angel wings. And usually there would be nothing.

  But just then, as she was looking down from the butte, she saw Madame Gaëlle running with a lamp in her hand and her shiny, silver-looking gown glowing in the moonlight. And when she saw her father, brightened on the edge of the water by Madame Gaëlle’s lamp and satin gown glow, and when she saw other people approaching them with their lamps, forming a circle as if they were a sun, something felt different.

  In the middle of the lamp circle, half of which was now in the water, she saw someone pull a man in a red shirt out of the sea. Like a dying fish, the man’s body jerked about. Madame Gaëlle and her father were standing together in front of him.

  The man reached up, grabbing both her father’s and Madame Gaëlle’s legs, nearly pulling them both down on top of him. Her father pulled himself back, regaining his balance. Madame Gaëlle fell forward on her knees, landing on the sand near the man. Who was he? she wondered. Could it be Myse Caleb, whom the sea had taken this morning? No. He was gone, they had mourned him, and this man was too wide to be her father’s friend.

  She thought she heard people shouting her schoolmaster’s name: “Ardin! Ardin!” as if to wake this man from the sea.

  She started running farther down the hill, past the jacaranda trees, down to the gravel path, then back through the ylang-ylang vines. Then she stopped on a hibiscus-covered precipice to look down once again. She saw her father and a few other men bend down and join Madame Gaëlle on the sand. They grabbed the man’s waist and turned him on his back. Then she saw Madame Gaëlle lower her face and put her mouth on the man’s mouth, as though to kiss him.

  Her father turned back to face the shacks on the beach. He was moving his arms wildly, as if to call for more lamps, more people, more help. Or maybe he was simply feeling helpless, feeling just like she was now, afraid.

  More people started coming and more lamps. So many people now that they were blocking her view and she could no longer see the red-shirted man, Madame Gaëlle, or her father. She continued down the hill, running so fast that she slipped on some loose gravel stones and fell. She popped back up, then started running again, leaving her sandals behind.

  She ran and ran, down toward the alley of coconut palms behind her home.

  Fòk li retounen …

  She had to go back

  She thought 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

  She had to go back and see her father and Madame Gaëlle, whose own sorrows could have nearly drowned them. She had to go down to the water to see them take turns breathing into this man, breathing him back to life. Before becoming Madame Gaëlle’s daughter, she had to go home, just one last time.

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for the fellowship that gave me the time to attempt this book and so much more. Thanks to my family in Léogâne, those gone and those still there, for introducing me and reintroducing me to the sea.

  Mèsi, Fedo, for things that it would take a lifetime to list.

  I owe so much to Nicole Aragi and Robin Desser for their love and guidance over nearly two decades now. Thank you, Jennifer Kurdyla, for your t
ime and patience.

  The excerpt from the poem “Le Soleil and Les Grenouilles” is from Les Fables de la Fontaine (Livre 6), available in various editions. The English translation is mine.

  A Note About the Author

  Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including Brother, I’m Dying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a National Book Award finalist; Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; and The Dew Breaker, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the inaugural Story Prize. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She lives in Miami.

  Other titles by Edwidge Danticat available in eBook format

  After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti • 978-0-307-41973-6

  Brother, I’m Dying • 978-0-307-26773-3

  Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work • 978-0-307-94650-8

  The Dew Breaker • 978-0-307-42839-4

  For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com

  Claire of the Sea Light

  Edwidge Danticat

  Reading Group Guide

  About this Guide

  The questions, discussion topics, and other material that follow are intended to enhance your group’s conversation about Claire of the Sea Light, Edwidge Danticat’s beautifully told new work of fiction, which seamlessly weaves a complex web of lives in a fictional Haitian town on the night a seven-year-old girl goes missing.

  About this Book

  In Claire of the Sea Light, best-selling and award-winning author Edwidge Danticat brings us deep into the world of Ville Rose, Haiti—a town at once blessed by natural wonders and haunted by the secrets and ghosts of the past. We enter this nexus of people and place through Claire Limyè Lanmè, Claire of the Sea Light, a little girl whose heartbreak and tragedies, and whose hopes for a better future, allow the adults around her to discover startling truths about themselves—and each other—during the course of a single, transformative night.

  On Claire’s seventh birthday, she and her fisherman father Nozias Faustin follow the same tradition they have long practiced: they go to visit the grave of her now-deceased mother, and his wife: a beautiful, universally loved woman named Claire Narcis who died giving birth to the girl who bears her name. Nozias has raised Claire on his own, yet has all along been tormented by a single idea: that, in order to provide for his daughter he should leave her “pou chèche lavi”—to look for a better life—and to entrust Claire with a woman of greater means: a local shopkeeper called Gaëlle Lavaud.

  By the evening of that seventh birthday, Nozias has made up his mind, finally convinced that to leave Claire in another’s hands is the best decision for them both. But something wholly unexpected happens. As he is speaking to Madame Gaëlle about this fateful choice, Claire disappears, setting in motion a search to find her, one that brings to the surface stories from the shared pasts—and presents—of all the lives that mysteriously surround this one little girl. Danticat delivers these myriad stories with lush prose and piercing insight into the hearts and minds of her characters. As taut as poetry and wide-ranging in scope as a novel twice its length, Claire of the Sea Light is a masterful work of family and friendship, love and revenge, loss and homecoming, from one of our most brilliant and original storytellers.

  For discussion

  1. The opening chapter of Claire of the Sea Light moves backward chronologically through each of Claire’s birthdays, ultimately returning to the present day of the narrative. How does this structure contribute to the book’s sense of time overall, and to its weaving of past and present as more characters are introduced?

  2. What does it mean that Albert Vincent is both the town of Ville Rose’s undertaker and its mayor? How are these dual roles reflected in his relationship with Claire Narcis, Nozias’s wife and Claire’s mother, when she works for him preparing bodies for burial?

  3. That Claire visits her mother’s grave on her birthdays brings poignantly to the fore the notion that life and death are intertwined. In what other ways does that happen in the book? Do ghosts—or chimè—have a positive or negative influence over the living?

  4. The sea both opens and closes the book, offering powerful images of its destructive and restorative force: the fisherman Caleb is drowned at the book’s beginning when “a wall of water rise[s] from the depths of the ocean, a giant blue-green tongue” (this page), and at the book’s end, Max Junior is spat back from the sea that had “taken [him] this morning” (this page). What roles does the sea play in the fates of all the characters in the book? What other myths, stories, and fables come to your mind by this book’s evocation of water?

  5. At one point in the story, Nozias recalls another watery scene, when he and wife Claire Narcis went night fishing, and Claire slipped into the moonlit water to observe a school of shimmering fish. It is from this moment that their daughter, and Danticat’s book, get their name. How does this important memory shape your impression of Claire Narcis, including in what we learn about her by the book’s conclusion?

  6. The relationships between parents and children take many forms in the book’s three main families. Claire and Nozias remain at the center, showing how both parent and child experience joy and fear, trust and wariness. How is this theme expanded upon by bonds between Max Sr. and Max Junior, Max. Junior and Pamaxime, Madame Gaëlle and Rose, and even Odile and Henri? In each of these, who, if any, suffers more: parent or child?

  7. Madame Gaëlle’s story (“The Frogs,” this page) opens with a description of a sudden explosion of frogs that has plagued Ville Rose, which her husband Laurent explains “is surely a sign that something more terrible is going to happen” (this page). The smell of the frogs’ corpses at first nauseates the pregnant Gaëlle, yet the act of putting a frog in her mouth seems to save her baby from risk. How does this miracle, along with the simultaneous death of Laurent, reflect the town’s mythic culture and one woman’s sense of her fate?

  8. Much of the lyricism and power of Claire of the Sea Light derives from the descriptions of its Haitian setting: of the sea, the mountains, the flowers, the “sparkly feathers from angel wings” that Claire searches for after her waking dreams (this page). Would the book work in any other place, either in the Caribbean or beyond? How might things change if so?

  9. Although this is fiction, Danticat vividly evokes present-day Haitian culture and society, including its poverty (this page), gangs, and restavèk children—the child-servitude that Nozias fears for Claire. How do these realities affect your reading of the book and the sense of authenticity of Claire’s story? Of Bernard’s?

  10. The radio is a major form of communicating stories throughout the novel, and the radio station is a place where confessions and revelations are spoken, but also where betrayals, and even murder, occur. Why do you think Danticat chose to set so many key scenes at the radio station? Louise George is the host of a radio show called Di Mwen, which translates to “Tell Me.” Does honest speech come more naturally in this medium where the speaker’s face is hidden? In what ways is Danticat’s book in and of itself like a radio show?

  11. Claire of the Sea Light is rich with secrets: of paternity, of sexual identity, of crimes, of lies that unfold in the course of the narrative. How do the multiple voices of the book help withhold the truth, yet also expose it at key moments? In what cases does not knowing the entire truth of a situation—such Nozias’s plan to have a vasectomy, Max Junior’s love for Bernard, and Albert Vincent’s for Claire Narcis—hurt or protect the person keeping the secret, and the person from whom the truth is kept?

  12. Danticat chooses to tell her story through multiple voices and points of view, which provides the reader with a kaleidoscopic view of the past. How does this also affect the book’s presentation of memory, and of our ability to shape certain memories that may not be our own?
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br />   13. In the scene where Nozias leaves his goodbye letter for Claire with Madame Gaëlle, both characters seem to hesitate in their willingness to participate in Nozias’s decision to leave. How do their interactions in this moment reflect their unique understandings of their responsibilities, and also of death and the future? What makes Nozias turn to Gaëlle in particular, and what motivates Gaëlle to take in a new daughter after she’s lost her own? Is money the most important thing to have, in raising a child, in offering him or her security and love?

  14. Although Claire Limyè Lanmè is the book’s fulcrum, her point of view does not appear until the final chapter. Does it seem that Claire accepts her fate and her father’s decision? How does placing those other stories before Claire’s affect your feelings about her in the final scene? What do you imagine will happen to Claire in the future?

  15. The choice Nozias faces—whether or not to leave his child in the care of another—is one that many real parents in Haiti struggle with today. Does this knowledge change your understanding of the book, or your sympathies with Nozias? What would you do if you were in Nozias’s position?

  Suggestions for further reading

  Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss; Junot Díaz, Drown; Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban; Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy; Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake; Dinaw Mengestu, How to Read the Air; Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things; Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge.

  ALSO BY EDWIDGE DANTICAT

  Fiction

  The Dew Breaker

  The Farming of Bones

  Krik? Krak!

  Breath, Eyes, Memory

  Nonfiction

  Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work

  Brother, I’m Dying

  After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti