I loved those visits and sometimes, I remember that time with a bittersweet taste on my tongue. The Haiti of my childhood was quite different from Haiti today. It was only when we would go to Haiti during the summer that I could start to see what it was like to be surrounded by people who looked like me and sounded like my parents and shared the same blood. I grew up in the Midwest, never near relatives or large Haitian communities. In this collection, I am trying to make sense of what Haiti is and what people assume Haiti to be because they are such vastly different things.
The writing in Ayiti represents a lot of my older work. It is from this identity that I have tried to make sense of what it means to be Haitian, what it means to leave a country like Haiti, what it means to stay, and what it means to go back, or go home.
In her own words, here is Roxane Gay's Book Notes music playlist for her collection, Ayiti: Second, and perhaps with more impact, it suggests that tragedy and beauty are not mutually exclusive, that in fact, these two realities can share a complicated space." First, it forces us to realize that we are complicit in the idea of Haiti as a nation of nothing but poverty and destruction, because no work is required to maintain that vision. The collection brings us to attention in two ways.
Ayiti offers the reader a more nuanced perspective of Haiti than the simplistic view that the easily accessible TV news and Internet tend to provide. "Throughout Ayiti, Gay surely doesn’t paint an overly optimistic image of Haiti, but she offers an honest one, an image of Haiti that is alive and breathing, not static and doomed. Roxane Gay's story collection Ayiti is filled with powerful depictions of Haiti and its residents, and is an auspicious debut for this talented author. Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, David Peace, Myla Goldberg, and many others. In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Below is her 2012 Book Notes playlist for the book. Grove Press published a new edition of Roxane Gay's collection Ayiti this week with two previously unpublished stories.