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Haiti Edwidge Danticat. After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti. New York. Crown. 2002. 158 pages. $16. ISBN 0-609-60908-4
IN HER more autobiographical texts, Maryse Condé relates that her black bourgeois parents in Point-à-Pitre would only let her watch carnival from the upstairs balcony. Edwidge Danticat, too, recounts how her uncle, the Baptist minister she was living with in rural Haiti before her departure for America at the age of twelve, presented carnival in a negative way so that her desire to participate would be diminished. People could dislocate their hips by excessive gyration or get stabbed "by random hotheads," she was told. Her travel book's seductive pretext is the desire to fill the void of carnivals lost.
As one well-known author once bemoaned, when you are from the Caribbean, you always have to explain where you are from. The first page of After the Dance shows us the...