New novel explores tough questions of deciding to carry on with life in Haiti

Late in Edwidge Danticat's "Claire of the Sea Light" — a novel comprised of eight connected stories — an illiterate fisherman living in Haiti learns from his wife that he'll soon be a father. "How," the delighted man asks her, "do you tell someone you're pregnant in a funeral parlor?"

Nozias Faustin's question is both literal and humorous: Claire Faustin works for an undertaker, and she gives Nozias the good news while on duty. But Nozias' ostensibly simple question also raises a metaphorical and tragic one: How does one carry on, in that charnel house called Haiti where Danticat was born?

On the novel's first page, a giant wave from the life-sustaining ocean drowns a fisherman; on the second, we learn that Claire died giving birth to her daughter, Claire of the Sea Light — coaxing her unseen daughter to "come" even as she herself was going. Danticat describes mother Claire's death as a "loving surrender" — a life-giving act that's also a giving up.

Ten years to the day before little Claire's birth, a girl named Rose had been born, even as her own father was murdered; Rose too is now dead. A third child — "not just handsome, but beautiful" — is born because his mother was once raped.

This confluence of life and death carries over to Haiti itself — a onetime paradise where the sea grass is now "buried under silt and trash," deforested mountains "crumbled and gave way" and formerly grand avenues are filled with wooden shacks, abutting "a reeking landfill smoldering on the edge of an oil-streaked storm drain."

It's in this context that Nozias must decide whether to give his young daughter, now seven, to Gaëlle, the woman whose husband was murdered on the day her now-dead daughter was born. Nozias knows the wealthier Gaëlle can give Claire a life he himself cannot. But before he can finalize a "loving surrender" much like the one his wife once made, Claire disappears.

How, in a world of so much heartbreak and loss — where one can be "both hungry for life and terrified of it" — does one move forward? How, as Danticat asks in everything she writes, does one make peace with a past that continually interrupts the present? To invoke the titles of two of this book's tales, how can one go "Home" when it's haunted by "Ghosts"?