Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Dèy’ Connects Haiti, Miami and a Close Call at a Local Mall

Edwidge Danticat’s new novel, “Dèy,” was partly inspired by a frightening 2017 false alarm at Aventura Mall, where she thought she was caught in a mass shooting. Danticat will discuss the book with Miami Herald Haiti/Caribbean correspondent Jacqueline Charles on Saturday, Aug. 29 at Books & Books, Coral Gables. (Photo courtesy Penguin Random House)

While doing some last-minute Christmas shopping for her daughter in 2017, novelist Edwidge Danticat had an experience that would become a spark for her latest novel, “Dèy,” her first in nearly a decade.

It was Dec. 23, 2017, and Danticat was inside Aventura Mall when she heard a series of loud pops that sounded like gunshots.

“We hear about mass shootings all the time in this country, and I immediately thought, ‘I am in one right now,'” she recalled.

It turned out to be a false alarm. But as she later wrote in a letter to readers, her body may have recovered from its fight-or-flight response, it did not forget.

She first wrote about the experience in “This is My Body,” an essay in her 2024 collection, “We’re Alone.”  There the  character of Magnolia Elie, a Haitian American real estate agent and mother, began to emerge.

Edwidge Danticat lived in Miami for more than two decades before moving to New York to teach at Columbia University. Her new novel, “Dèy,” is deeply rooted in Miami.  (Photo courtesy of Lynn Savarese)

“Magnolia’s character grew out of that moment in the mall when I thought my life might end dramatically and violently,” Danticat wrote on her website in a letter to readers.

“Dèy,” which will be released on Tuesday, Aug. 25 by Penguin Random House, takes its title from the Haitian Kreyòl word for grief and mourning. Magnolia survives a mass shooting. But rather than talking about how it affected her, she tells no one and tries to go back into the life she was already questioning — selling real estate in rapidly changing Miami neighborhoods, raising a daughter nearing adolescence, living apart from her partner and worrying about her parents still in Haiti.

Loss and mortality have long been themes in the author’s books, along with family, migration, memory and belonging. In “Dèy,” it is also about people trying to remain connected across distance and to feel rooted in the different places they call home.

She confided that those questions are especially personal in a novel she was writing as she prepared to leave Miami for New York after living in South Florida for more than two decades.

Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat is also the author of children’s books. Here she signs her book “My Mommy Medicine” at the 2019 Miami Book Fair. (Photo courtesy of Miami Book Fair)

Danticat moved to New York to teach at Columbia University, where she is on the faculty in African American and African Diaspora Studies.

“In a way it was kind of like this book is also about saying goodbye to Miami,” she said.

Danticat will be in conversation with Miami Herald Haiti/Caribbean correspondent Jacqueline Charles to discuss  “Dèy” on Saturday, Aug. 29 at Books & Books in Coral Gables.

The two will have much to talk about, said Charles, including that both were at Aventura Mall during the 2017 scare that helped set the novel in motion. Danticat said she started texting Charles that day “because it was news” when she got a return text: “I’m in the mall, I’m hiding in a closet in a store.”

Charles said that in the years since the incident, she and Danticat have revisited that day many times in their conversations. “Even more so we’ve shared many discussions about Haiti, the ongoing violence, the aftershocks, and the voice notes she has received from relatives that include the sounds of gunshots in the background,” Charles said.

For her, the novel’s depiction of Haitian life in Miami is immediately recognizable.

“If you’re Haitian and from Miami you recognize yourself in this book,” she said.

Charles pointed to details including the neighborhoods, the strict Haitian household, the “aunts” who aren’t actually blood relatives and even the different ways Haitians refer to Haiti — as “down there” or “back there” — depending on their relationship to the country.

The novelist said those details are part of a larger set of themes she has returned to again and again in her work. She grew up in Haiti during “a time of dictatorship where you would hear about neighbors disappearing, so this precariousness of life was always part of my psyche.”

She said Magnolia’s story is more rooted in the present as people in Haiti, including members of Danticat’s own family, contend with displacement and armed violence.

Her more than two decades in Miami and Little Haiti also brought other concerns into the novel: environmental vulnerability, gentrification, migration and the uncertainty immigration status can create for families.

“People coming and new arrivals and a feeling with issues like TPS have the constant question in mind ‘What is home? What is belonging?’ ”

Charles said that tension between places is one of the parts of “Dèy” she finds most familiar.

Edwidge Danticat’s book “Create Dangerously” become a work of theater at Miami New Drama in 2023. (Photo courtesy of FURIOSA Productions)

“This is the story of many of us in the diaspora who must remain connected, either because our family still lives there or we grieve for the country of our childhood,” she said. “The Haiti she describes is spot on. She avoids overwhelming you with gang violence and instability while conveying how Magnolia straddles and attempts to navigate two worlds simultaneously. Instead, she weaves them into her everyday reality.”

For their conversation at Books & Books, Charles said there will be questions that come out of their shared personal experiences.

“As someone who has had many heart-to-heart conversations with her — sometimes in the middle of the night while we were both writing — about Haiti and its ripple effects, I want to ask her about how she processes grief and the invisible scars that few see.”

Making Magnolia a real estate agent allowed Danticat to explore the question of home in a literal way.

Edwidge Danticat returns to Miami with “Dèy,” her first novel in more than a decade, a book she has described as both a love letter and a goodbye to the city she called home for more than 20 years. (Photo by Lynn Savarese)

Magnolia helps other people buy and sell homes while wrestling with her own ideas about where she belongs. She is also aware that in a rapidly changing Miami, real estate can mean opportunity for some while displacement for others, Danticat explained.

“I wanted to pick that profession because it gives you an opportunity to explore what home can mean,” she said, “both in terms of physical spaces” and in terms of memory and the places where families gather and create their lives.

Within hours of surviving the shooting, Magnolia is back at work showing a Brickell condominium, trying to return to the ordinary routine of her life.

Charles cites a sentence in the novel about one of Magnolia’s clients, a professor who has moved away but is reluctant to sell her Brickell condominium.

In the novel, Magnolia observes of the professor, “While growing roots elsewhere, she’s nevertheless having trouble letting go.”

For Charles, the passage captures the complicated struggle between building a life elsewhere and remaining attached to the place left behind.

For Danticat, the book was a way to hold onto the city she had come to know through its neighborhoods and communities. And after more than 20 years here, she said there was no separating the novel from the place that helped produce it.

“This is definitely a book born out of the soil of Miami.”

WHAT: Edwidge Danticat discusses her new novel, “Dèy,” in conversation with Miami Herald Haitian/Caribbean correspondent Jacqueline Charles.

WHEN: 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 29

WHERE: Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables

COST: Free or entry with book $33.64 includes fees and one or two guests; RSVP required. Sold out but join waitlist.

INFORMATION: Books & Books, 305-442-4408

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