Since I first went there in 1995, I have more and more come to realize that the island Hispaniola, which Haiti and Dominican Republic now share, as the key that unlocks the history of the Western Hemisphere.   There, Columbus built his first settlement in what to him was a new world.  There, the first of the conquistadores conducted one of most successful genocides in history, destroying five hundred thousand Arawak Indians, who could not survive the conditions of slavery which the European newcomers imposed.  There, the Spanish priest Las Casas, who loved the Arawaks and hoped to save them, first conceived the idea of importing slaves from Africa as a substitute.  A few generations later, the African slaves of French Saint Domingue carried out the revolution that created Haiti as an independent black state.

 Hispaniola is the crossroads where Europeans, Native Americans and Africans all met for the first time; an island that has known not just run of the mill political turmoil but also a desperate struggle over just what it means to be human.   Hundreds of thousands of people have died there for that definition.  The land is rich with both death and regeneration.  In Haitian belief, so close to the African, the spirits of the dead do not depart, but remain in hand's grasp of the living, invisible on the other side of the mirror whose surface returns the things of the material world to our eyes.  They and all their history remain present to us, whenever we are willing to receive them.  In vastly different, but overlapping ways, the works of Edwidge Danticat and Julia Alvarez have lent a form to those old spirits, unlocked their jaws and released their voices.

 I first met Edwidge Danticat in 1995, when she and I were both finalists for the National Book Award-- in her case for the collection of stories Krik-Krak.  She was twenty-six years old that year, and Krik-Krak was her second book, following the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory--both works written in English, which is her third language, following Haitian Kreyol and French.  Edwidge Danticat came to the United States from Haiti at the age of twelve, and published her first work in English while still in her early teens, then went on to earn degrees at Barnard and at the Brown University MFA Creative Writing Program.  She's also the author of Behind the Mountain, a young adult novel, and After the Dance, a nonfiction work on the Jacmel Carnival.  Her most recent novel, The Farming of Bones, was inspired the massacre of Haitian cane cutters on the Dominican border in 1937.

Still comfortably under forty, Edwidge Danticat has been noticed a lot for her youth.  But what has really been striking about her work, from the first beginning, is its calm maturity.  She has always had a clarity and an authority that few writers could match at any age, and a voice that seems to come from a very old, very deep place.

Julia Alvarez came to the United States from the Dominican Republic at the age of ten.  It's reasonable to say that she and her family have always worked for peace and justice in the Dominican Republic.  Her father, who resisted the Trujillo regime, went into exile with the Alvarez family to escape reprisals.  Today, with her husband Bill Eichner, she operates a coffee farm in the DR called Alta Gracia, on a fair trade and environmentally responsible basis.  She's a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont, where she is now Writer in Residence.  Poetry is Alvarez's first vocation, and she published her first collection of poems, Homecoming, in 1985.  The novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents followed in 1991; this tale of four immigrant sisters from the Dominican Republic addresses the problem of belonging to both cultures at once, and made Julia Alvarez a best seller in the United States.  Since then, she has published a volume of essays, two more collections of poems, numerous works for children, and three more novels, including In the Time of the Butterflies, based on the true story of the Mirabel sisters under the Trujillo Regime.  Julia Alvarez is truly a citizen of two different worlds, and in her remarkable body of work, she does as much as any writer of her time to describe and define what divides those worlds, and what draws them together.

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