Urban Desires has asked me to preface the conversation that follows between the acclaimed young authors Junot Diaz and Edwidge Danticat, a meeting of engaging minds, a rendezvous of vibrant literary voices. I refer the reader to Drown (Riverhead 1996) by Diaz, reviewed here, and Krik!Krak! (Soho 1995), by Danticat, two collections of short fiction that have garnered numerous enthusiastic appraisals.

Diaz and Danticat differ as much as they resemble each other, which makes them perfectly comparable since one cannot compare the fully identical to the totally disparate. There's got to be a balance of commonalty. Stylistically Diaz seems more committed than Danticat to hiding the artifice, creating the illusion of transparency. Thematically, Danticat invests herself more emphatically then Diaz in gendering her text, evincing the womanish bent of her text.

Born in the same year on the island of Hispaniola, Diaz and Danticat heard the sound and sense of Dominican Spanish and Haitian Creole in their childhoods before poverty and despair dictated their migration to another land, another culture, another tongue. He a Dominican and she a Haitian, they come from an island that would have divided them had they remained in their retrospective native lands. The paths of their two contiguous nations have normally diverged and often clashed. Language difference, a nasty colonial heritage, and mendacious political leaderships have perennially fueled the schism. Yet, how ironic, in the United States they are brought together by English and by a similar awareness of the cultural and political plights of their communities.

Aided by remarkable talent and the capricious gyrating of fortune's mysterious wheel, Diaz and Danticat have come to visibility as literary artisits in the wondrous metropolis. They share friendship, the same literary agent, comparable celebrity, and a meaningful portion of social space in the Diaspora. They also share the compulsion to bear witness to the experience of Dominicans and Haitians, a Caribbean episode in the saga of humanity, an old story that is always worth telling just once more.