The Pandemic and Little Haiti, Plus Thomas McGuane and Callan Wink Go Fishing

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2020

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For more than fifteen years, the fiction writer Edwidge Danticat has called Miami’s Little Haiti home. The neighborhood is full of Haitian émigrés like herself, many of whom support families back home. Though the virus has barely touched Haiti, the economic devastation it has wreaked on the U.S. will have dire consequences on the island. Over the years, Danticat has watched as Haiti’s struggles—political, economic, and environmental—have affected her friends and neighbors in Florida. “People would often say, ‘Whenever Haiti sneezes, Miami catches a cold,’ ” says Danticat. “But the reverse is also true.” Plus, two Western writers—Thomas McGuane and Callan Wink, separated by more than forty years in age—go fishing on Montana’s Yellowstone River, and share a pointed critique of “Western writing.”

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.8	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The novelist, Edwij Dantica, has been writing about Haiti and the experience of Haitian-American immigrants like herself since she started publishing in the 1990s.
0:23.7	For almost two decades, Dantica has lived in Miami's Little Haiti, not far from Biscayne Bay.
0:29.9	Gentrification is changing the neighborhood, but it's still very much an immigrant community.
0:35.0	Dantica wrote recently about the particular challenges
0:37.6	that a place like Little Haiti faces
0:40.0	during this time of economic collapse.
0:46.3	Little Haiti, when I first moved here,
0:48.8	was extremely colorful.
0:56.0	The buildings were painted a lot,
0:59.0	live storefronts in Haiti,
1:01.0	with colorful murals and even the signs were bright
1:06.0	and they were like Haitian paintings.
1:19.6	There was music blasting from different stores, no matter what the store was, and barbershops and beauty parlors.
1:24.6	But the busiest place in the neighborhood would often be the money transfer places.
1:31.0	There were a couple that had existed for years and years, and people would go in there to not only
1:37.2	send money, but also to send rice, you can send oil, you can send cornmeal,
1:45.6	which was then delivered to people in Haiti.
1:50.4	Often people are working, if not two jobs or three jobs,
1:55.8	but they're working to send back to family back home.
1:59.5	And so when I started seeing restaurants closing,
2:05.2	people who clean homes, people who work with the sick here, being sent home and people who
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WNYC Studios and The New Yorker, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.