To be sure, that Haiti exists in this book too, but usually it’s kept safely on the other side of the razor-topped walls that surround a wealthy seaside compound in Port-au-Prince, a palace fit for a self‑made king. The plot of this tightly wound psychological thriller is deceptively simple, centring not on a woman’s flight from Haiti, but a native daughter’s return to a country that has too frequently been viewed solely through the lens of political turmoil and poverty. The memory left me with two distinct impressions: first, the threat of danger any woman faces when alone with a strange man and, second, an image of Haiti as a wasteland, a country to which no one would ever willingly return.īut nothing could have prepared me for An Untamed State, the breathtaking debut novel by Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay. Over the span of a year, I made half a dozen of these trips with my father, picking up desperate women at airports and bus stations, some with children in tow, but most of them alone childlessness making it easier to reinvent one’s life from scratch.
He hoped my presence would put her at ease – that if she saw him as a father, she would fear him less, could safely assume that a man with his eight-year-old child in the car wouldn’t pull over in a dark alley and take advantage. My father was highly sensitive to the realities of a woman travelling to a foreign country alone. She was one of the last off the plane, a thin woman in her 20s, dark-skinned like me, polite and terrified. We waited to greet her, my father and I, at Houston airport – her plane ticket having been arranged by the civil rights organisation where my father worked at the time. It was at the height of the Haitian refugee exodus of the early 1980s, when tens of thousands fled blistering poverty and political tyranny for the relative safety of the US.
M y introduction to Haiti came in the form of a woman.
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