Review: Ayiti

Ayiti by Roxane Gay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s hard to know quite what this book is. It’s sort of a short story collection, but – while there is one fine full-length story and three or four mid-length ones – much of it is closer to poetry. It’s got strong dashes of what feel like autobiography, but then it veers into points of view very different from one another. It has moments of real tenderness toward parents and children, and then it features work that feels like (and indeed was originally published as) erotica.

The fact that this is hard to categorize, though, is part of what makes it as strong as it is. Gay refuses to stand still as a self-identified immigrant. She doesn’t give us the story (or stories) her subjectivity is “supposed” to share. Instead, she reveals her own experience (or seems to – unless you check out her biography somewhere else, it’s hard to know where her life ends and her invention begins) and then insists on her authority to write the fiction that appeals to her.

Some of her protagonists are Anglo, some straight, some still children, some wealthy, some at risk of death, and some comfortably established in the U.S. I listened to this, and that compounded the sense that one story/prose poem bleeds into another. It’s tempting to identify Gay with some protagonists over others, but resisting that temptation seems to be a big part of what we’re asked to do. This is a narrative voice that flashes its ethnic experience, that trumpets its Haitian sensibility, and that then ventures wherever it chooses to go.

I think it might be interesting some day to read this in conversation with Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street. Both explore ethnic perspective in small doses (making each readily teachable) and both tweak the expectation that its author has any obligation to translate a particular ethnic experience into prose that a widespread (i.e. white and “non-ethnic”) readership can access.

I’ve been following Gay in a small way for a couple years. This is my first full-length work of hers (and it’s fleetingly short, of course) and I enjoyed it more than I expected. As a critic – in the limited way I’ve read her – she seems contradictory, though I acknowledge she may well make a consistent case for herself in Bad Feminist. Here, her ability to be one thing and then another, to insist on the power of her ethnic heritage and then – just as fully – to insist on her right to write as a full citizen of the world, gives this short and beautiful work a powerful punch.




View all my reviews