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Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work
"Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them." — Create Dangerously
In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist from a country in crisis. Inspired by Albert Camus' lecture, "Create Dangerously," and combining memoir and essay, Danticat tells the stories of artists, including herself, who create despite, or because of, the horrors that drove them from their homelands and that continue to haunt them. Danticat eulogizes an aunt who guarded her family's homestead in the Haitian countryside, a cousin who died of AIDS while living in Miami as an undocumented alien, and a renowned Haitian radio journalist whose political assassination shocked the world. Danticat writes about the Haitian novelists she first read as a girl at the Brooklyn Public Library, a woman mutilated in a machete attack who became a public witness against torture, and the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and other artists of Haitian descent. Danticat also suggests that the aftermaths of natural disasters in Haiti and the United States reveal that the countries are not as different as many Americans might like to believe.
Create Dangerously is an eloquent and moving expression of Danticat's belief that immigrant artists are obliged to bear witness when their countries of origin are suffering from violence, oppression, poverty, and tragedy.
In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist from a country in crisis. Inspired by Albert Camus' lecture, "Create Dangerously," and combining memoir and essay, Danticat tells the stories of artists, including herself, who create despite, or because of, the horrors that drove them from their homelands and that continue to haunt them. Danticat eulogizes an aunt who guarded her family's homestead in the Haitian countryside, a cousin who died of AIDS while living in Miami as an undocumented alien, and a renowned Haitian radio journalist whose political assassination shocked the world. Danticat writes about the Haitian novelists she first read as a girl at the Brooklyn Public Library, a woman mutilated in a machete attack who became a public witness against torture, and the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and other artists of Haitian descent. Danticat also suggests that the aftermaths of natural disasters in Haiti and the United States reveal that the countries are not as different as many Americans might like to believe.
Create Dangerously is an eloquent and moving expression of Danticat's belief that immigrant artists are obliged to bear witness when their countries of origin are suffering from violence, oppression, poverty, and tragedy.
189 pages, ebook
First published July 22, 2010
About the author
Edwidge Danticat
118 books2,533 followersEdwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and moved to the United States when she was twelve. She is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; and The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner. She is also the editor of The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States and The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Men and Women of All Colors and Cultures.
Danticat earned a degree in French Literature from Barnard College, where she won the 1995 Woman of Achievement Award, and later an MFA from Brown University. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughters.
Danticat earned a degree in French Literature from Barnard College, where she won the 1995 Woman of Achievement Award, and later an MFA from Brown University. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughters.
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February 25, 2020
Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work is an engaging collection of essays that takes its cue from Albert Camus' Create Dangerously. Decades earlier, Camus wrote about the challenges and responsibilities of the artist. Danticat takes a personalized approach to this challenge emphasizing Haitian artists, the widespread devastation of the 2010 earthquake centered near Port-au-Prince, voices of the Haitian diaspora as well as Danticat's own experiences moving back and forth between cultures since immigrating to the U.S. at age 12. She places herself in a position of privilege and security, a place that is not conspicuously dangerous but still demands that she bears witness.
"The immigrant artist shares with all other artists the desire to interpret and possibly remake his or her own world. So though we may not be creating as dangerously as our forebears—though we are not risking torture, beatings, execution, though exile does not threaten us into perpetual silence—still, while we are at work bodies are littering the streets somewhere…."
Danticat's debut novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, (something I've been meaning to reread and review), emphasizes growing up between U.S. and Haitian culture. For me, it somehow echoes in the background of this collection. The writing of Breath, Eyes, Memory is more evocative (it is fiction) than the essay collection, but Creating Dangerously is engaging and offers Danticat's unique insights. 3.75 stars
June 1, 2018
After meeting Edwidge Danticat in March of this year, I decided that I wanted to read Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. (A title Danticat borrowed from Albert Camus as the title of her 2008 Toni Morrison Lecture delivered at Princeton University). A book of less than 200 pages, composed of 12 essays/chapters and a “postscript,” this book---published in 2010---is the ninth of Danticat’s published titles. It looks small and unassuming but---trust me---I am still meditating on its content, and will be for a while. Most of the pieces exist in other versions published in places like The Progressive, The Nation, and The New Yorker between the years of 2001 and 2011. One piece, entitled “I Am Not A Journalist”---I recognized as having provided some factual content in Danticat’s 2013 novel Claire of the Sea Light.
I first thought the book would be about her personal creative journey and processes, but the affect of reading these essays---almost as a whole cloth---casts a more dynamic net than that. In addition to bearing witness to Haiti’s tragedies, and ongoing crises, Danticat also shows us the roles that oral storytelling, filmmaking, radio, and theatre play in contemporary literacy. She also pays homage and introduces us to Haitian writers who have had “to create dangerously” such as Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Jacques Roumain, and Jan J. Dominique.
“Writing is nothing like dying in, for, and possibly with, your country.”
Some of the things these essays have begun to make me consider include (1) writing and creating as “disobedience” and “revolt against” multiple hungers and forms of suppression; (2) the idea of “people who read dangerously”---that is, people who read at great risk whether that risk might result in something physically brutal or even fatal; as well as readers who are at risk of endangering their current self-image and worldview; (3) reading and writing as acts of critical empathy and compassion that give us opportunities to listen and be heard, as well as draw parallels and recognize patterns in our human experience.
What would you consider and celebrate as “reading dangerously”?
Is there a writer whose works you have found yourself conversing with over time?
(I have posted a lengthier appreciation of Create Dangerously at http://folkloreandliteracy.com/2015/0... if you would like to join the discussion, there!)
I first thought the book would be about her personal creative journey and processes, but the affect of reading these essays---almost as a whole cloth---casts a more dynamic net than that. In addition to bearing witness to Haiti’s tragedies, and ongoing crises, Danticat also shows us the roles that oral storytelling, filmmaking, radio, and theatre play in contemporary literacy. She also pays homage and introduces us to Haitian writers who have had “to create dangerously” such as Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Jacques Roumain, and Jan J. Dominique.
“Writing is nothing like dying in, for, and possibly with, your country.”
Some of the things these essays have begun to make me consider include (1) writing and creating as “disobedience” and “revolt against” multiple hungers and forms of suppression; (2) the idea of “people who read dangerously”---that is, people who read at great risk whether that risk might result in something physically brutal or even fatal; as well as readers who are at risk of endangering their current self-image and worldview; (3) reading and writing as acts of critical empathy and compassion that give us opportunities to listen and be heard, as well as draw parallels and recognize patterns in our human experience.
What would you consider and celebrate as “reading dangerously”?
Is there a writer whose works you have found yourself conversing with over time?
(I have posted a lengthier appreciation of Create Dangerously at http://folkloreandliteracy.com/2015/0... if you would like to join the discussion, there!)
February 20, 2024
Master writer Edwidge Danticat has written a searing and gorgeously rendered series of personal vignettes and essays as part of the late great Toni Morrison's lecture series from Princeton University. Ms. Danticat writes, "we cannot afford to curse or avoid these exits and migrations, because they have earned us whatever type of advancement we have made" (Danticat 35).
Ms. Danticat writes about being an exile from her beloved Haiti, of writing "dangerously" to expose the truth, and brutal indignities that her community has faced throughout history and politically. She writes also about her loved ones who suffered so much at the hands of human ignorance, racism and natural disasters that seem to deem Haiti a cursed land.
But at the heart of this text is that writers of color have the responsibility to reassert and fight marginalization, so that the cycle and "fear of being misread, misseen, and misunderstood; of being presented out of context" (Danticat 145) somehow becomes better for everyone, and to show that as a society we should care, even just a little bit more than we want to.
Ms. Danticat writes about being an exile from her beloved Haiti, of writing "dangerously" to expose the truth, and brutal indignities that her community has faced throughout history and politically. She writes also about her loved ones who suffered so much at the hands of human ignorance, racism and natural disasters that seem to deem Haiti a cursed land.
But at the heart of this text is that writers of color have the responsibility to reassert and fight marginalization, so that the cycle and "fear of being misread, misseen, and misunderstood; of being presented out of context" (Danticat 145) somehow becomes better for everyone, and to show that as a society we should care, even just a little bit more than we want to.
February 19, 2023
Quedé completamente aturdida, conmovida y tocada por estos ensayos. Me quedo con todas las ganas de seguir leyendo a Edwidge y a otras autoras haitianas. A leer más mujeres negras latinoamericanas.
October 25, 2011
Inept is the word that immediately comes to mind when trying to "review" this book. Ms. Danticat's words, halting yet fluid, have borne upon me the beginnings of an understanding of a nation and its beleaguered people. I have no mechanism with which to comprehend the physical, political, emotional and spiritual devastation so many have endured, but my mind is now open, reset and forever changed by her deft and daring creation.
So many of the questions she asked herself (and others) are questions that too many of us aren't asking ourselves (and others). And we should given the state of affairs in our own countries and those to which we are now indebted/intertwined. For instance, near the end of the Bicentennial chapter: "For is there anything more timely and timeless than a public battle to control one's destiny, a communal crusade for self-determination?"
No. There isn't.
And while I don't wish to divert any attention from Haiti's hopes and plights (of which I presently know too little), I'm invigorated by her thoughts about artists any- and everywhere creating dangerously, defiantly and fearlessly before, during and after times when our governing institutions "govern" with such blithe indifference.
Also, I love how she reveals the duality of being an immigrant artist throughout the book. As both Haitian and American I feel in so many ways that she's perfectly primed to see things about both countries that perhaps neither is capable of acknowledging. In the Another Country chapter in particular she dissects America (in the period immediately following Hurricane Katrina that is still just as relevant now) in such a way that I felt like I was the "amenning lady" waving her white hankie on the first pew in church:
"This is the America that continues to startle, the America of the needy and never-have-enoughs, the America of the undocumented, the unemployed and underemployed, the elderly, and the infirm ... Perhaps this America does have more in common with the developing world than with the one it inhabits."
Preach.
So many of the questions she asked herself (and others) are questions that too many of us aren't asking ourselves (and others). And we should given the state of affairs in our own countries and those to which we are now indebted/intertwined. For instance, near the end of the Bicentennial chapter: "For is there anything more timely and timeless than a public battle to control one's destiny, a communal crusade for self-determination?"
No. There isn't.
And while I don't wish to divert any attention from Haiti's hopes and plights (of which I presently know too little), I'm invigorated by her thoughts about artists any- and everywhere creating dangerously, defiantly and fearlessly before, during and after times when our governing institutions "govern" with such blithe indifference.
Also, I love how she reveals the duality of being an immigrant artist throughout the book. As both Haitian and American I feel in so many ways that she's perfectly primed to see things about both countries that perhaps neither is capable of acknowledging. In the Another Country chapter in particular she dissects America (in the period immediately following Hurricane Katrina that is still just as relevant now) in such a way that I felt like I was the "amenning lady" waving her white hankie on the first pew in church:
"This is the America that continues to startle, the America of the needy and never-have-enoughs, the America of the undocumented, the unemployed and underemployed, the elderly, and the infirm ... Perhaps this America does have more in common with the developing world than with the one it inhabits."
Preach.
June 18, 2013
At first I wasn't sure if this book would speak to me since I'm not an immigrant artist as Danticat describes. But the more I read the more I realized she was not just speaking of writing from a place of danger and displacement. She's talking about the danger of going deep into one's own truth and creating fearlessly from that place. Since that is exactly what I seek to do as a writer I found this book inspiring and challenging. It encourages me to approach my work again and again with diligence and purpose. I highly recommend it to any artist who hopes to do the same.
September 18, 2010
I am always a little leery when a favorite writer publishes a collection of essays relying heavily on previously published work. Oftentimes, I am deeply dissatisfied. The material doesn't hold together, and I find that the writer has done disappointingly little work to update the material or to excise repetitions among the essays. This was not the case as I read Edwidge Danticat's new book, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Danticat's collection is surprisingly fresh (almost every essay reflects on the impact of Haiti's cataclysmic January 12th earthquake), and each piece has been carefully recrafted around the unifying theme of the immigrant artist's privileges and responsibilities. With a consistently strong voice, recognizable as Danticat's in its firm but quiet insistence which is at once compelling in its directness and powerful in its subtlety, Danticat confronts and deconstructs a variety of social and cultural forces that would relegate a country, a people, a socially-constructed race or even herself as either an immigrant writer in the US or as an exiled writer outside of Haiti to the margins. In these essays, she writes forcefully from her position over a wide variety of topics—claiming places for Haitian artists alongside Sophocles, Emerson and Picasso; explicating the root causes of different legacies, despite many similarities, between contemporaneous revolutions in Haiti and the United States; and reemphasizing a missing plurality of voices from Haiti by both giving voice to those who have not been heard, as well as by asserting her right to speak only for herself.
November 3, 2022
Qué buena, qué bellas está escritas algunas reflexiones, me encantó conocer sobre Haití.
NOTA PERSONAL PARA MÍ MISMO: Debo leer más autores africanos, afrodescendientes loco, basta por un rato de leer autores blancos del primer mundo, muy canónicos y todo pero esta literatura es tanto o más interesante y por sobre todo uno empatiza más.
January 26, 2012
I loved this book because of how she address her experiences as being a Haitian/writer/immigrant and how one identity often feeds another. Her commentary in "The Other Side of the Water" on going home to bury a cousin who she barely knew despite them both living in America and in "Walk Straight" about visiting a great aunt depicts a universal experience of how our family shapes our lives and how you never realize how little time you have with family until they are gone. "Our Guernica" puts a face on the Haitian earthquake which destroyed the fragile existence of many of her countryman, in a way that is tragic and hopeful. But the essay that hit home for me was the title essay which starts off the book. It speaks about the craft of writing in a way that caused me to rethink how and why I put words to paper.
June 16, 2017
"And during this final conversation, I am even more certain that to create dangerously is also to create fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us, then bravely moving forward even when it feels as thought we are chasing or being chased by ghosts... Creating fearlessly, like living fearlessly, even when a great tempest is upon you. Creating fearlessly even when cast lot bo dlo, across the seas. Creating fearlessly for people who see/watch/listen/read fearlessly. Writing fearlessly because, as my friend Junot Diaz has said, 'a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, keep writing anyway.' This is perhaps also what it means to be a writer. Writing as thought nothing can or will ever stop you. Writing as though you full-heartedly, or foolheartedly, believe in acheiropoietos."
July 2, 2020
For several years there have been three writers who I considered my favorites, Sebastian Barry, Czeslaw Milosz and Anatole France. But in the last couple of years there are three young women who I now include in that group, Jesmyn Ward, Madeleine Thien and now Edwidge Danticat. I only discovered Danticat about 6 months ago when I read Krik! Krak! and I've been reading everything I can find of hers since. Each time I read one of her books I'm more and more impressed. This book of essays is absolutely amazing! I was going to pick out my favorite essays in the book but as I went through the titles I realized that one was just as good as another, but if I had to pick one I'll go with Walk Straight. It was magnificent and very personal to Danticat as were several of the others. Many of the essays were based around the cruel dictatorship of Duvalier and of the people who suffered under him. As difficult as the subject matter was in some of the essays Danticat's magnificent prose made them quite inspirational. An outstanding book!
November 27, 2022
Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work is a collection of essays about being a Haitian author living in the U.S. Although Haiti is so close to the United States in terms of distance, culturally it is parsecs away. Few Americans can lay claim to having read a Haitian author.
I enjoyed these essays, despite the fact that untimely death plays such a large part in them, and am eager to read some of Danticat's fiction.
I enjoyed these essays, despite the fact that untimely death plays such a large part in them, and am eager to read some of Danticat's fiction.
May 16, 2022
Increíble ella… todo lo que se ha traducido al castellano es BRILLANTE! Cuentos, novela y ensayo, parece que la autora se mueve con maestría en todos los géneros.
MUY RECOMENDABLE
MUY RECOMENDABLE
February 14, 2023
Once again, I feel inadequate to “review” a work that is profound, moving, and crafted with great care. I felt the desire to read Danticat’s nonfiction after enjoying several of her novels, and there is indeed enough memoir material in these essays to help me better understand her as author. But I gained so much more than I bargained for! I will copy some passages— too long to quote here—for deeper reflection.
March 11, 2020
Extraordinario conjunto de crónicas, que rozan el ensayo; hay un tópico crucial, un recuerdo o una noticia que despierta en una divagación que termina transformándose en un cuestionamiento al trabajo del arte, la escritura y el papel de quienes ejercen el oficio para interferir en la realidad. Desde sus raíces haitianas, Danticat reconstruye un pasado, un presente y un cuestionado futuro en torno a cómo puede ser percibida una nación, un pueblo, su gente y su cultura. Puede hacerse trabajosa su lectura, pero al terminarla se transforma en una revelación necesaria en tiempos que necesitamos re pensar todo a nuestro alrededor. Excelente lectura para preparar la votación del próximo 26 de abril y saber el porqué de la necesidad de un Apruebo mayoritario.
August 3, 2016
I did not intend to read this book of essays so fast. I started it, thinking I'd read a couple essays here and there, maybe one before bed, but alas, I was engrossed. Danticat is not a historian or even a editorialist, yet I learned so much about Haiti and what it means to be a Haitian immigrant in the 21st century from her book. I probably would not have been as interested as I ended up being had I not already read most of Danticat's fiction. For fans of her novels and stories, this book is nothing short of essential. I feel like I understand much better the place from which Danticat births her novels, and for that the novels move even closer to my heart.
These essays, which nearly all appeared elsewhere in a similar form but are so seamlessly strung together in this volume that most will not even know it, also have something to offer those of us who appreciate why artists work—especially in light of a country's great pain and suffering. I would certainly place it alongside Moments of Being (Virginia Woolf) and In Search of My Mother's Gardens (Alice Walker) as nonfiction treatises on writing and a writer's dedication to her craft.
It's truly shocking what great inhumanity the people of Haiti have experienced, but Danticat reminds us not to pity the survivors but feel linked to them, to respect their journey, and do our part to champion (and maybe even make) art/language/writing that dares to be dangerous. She certainly places herself not as an authority or expert, but someone else on her own journey, and I really appreciate that. For me, though, this book is an important reminder as a teacher, a poet and coach, as a Unitarian Buddhist, and a reader. Create dangerously. Read dangerously. Create spaces for both!
These essays, which nearly all appeared elsewhere in a similar form but are so seamlessly strung together in this volume that most will not even know it, also have something to offer those of us who appreciate why artists work—especially in light of a country's great pain and suffering. I would certainly place it alongside Moments of Being (Virginia Woolf) and In Search of My Mother's Gardens (Alice Walker) as nonfiction treatises on writing and a writer's dedication to her craft.
It's truly shocking what great inhumanity the people of Haiti have experienced, but Danticat reminds us not to pity the survivors but feel linked to them, to respect their journey, and do our part to champion (and maybe even make) art/language/writing that dares to be dangerous. She certainly places herself not as an authority or expert, but someone else on her own journey, and I really appreciate that. For me, though, this book is an important reminder as a teacher, a poet and coach, as a Unitarian Buddhist, and a reader. Create dangerously. Read dangerously. Create spaces for both!
March 20, 2011
I just started Danticat's new book, and I wanted to read aloud the first chapter through a loudspeaker in a van driving through the streets, like in the old-fashioned way politicians used to advertise their candidacies. I realize, though, that shouting it might not meet the spirit of her first chapter....but I think you get my point: everyone should read it. But, again, such a dictatorial mode would be antithetical to Danticat's message. And around and around I go....
The only problem with her book so far is that her literary references keep adding to my list of "to-reads"!
The only problem with her book so far is that her literary references keep adding to my list of "to-reads"!
February 27, 2016
This collection of essays is as delicate as it is powerful. Danticat has a sophisticated intelligence and a complete passion for her homeland. We do not have much in terms of glimpses into the troubled past and beautiful traditions of Haiti; Danticat's is a voice that crosses the water, that bridges the diasporic space between countries.
September 23, 2017
Completed reading Sept. 23, 2017 --
More thoughts to come.
_______________________________
Early impression, reading continues : Wed. Sept. 2017
: Currently Reading: Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously: the immigrant artist at work . (2010) The question that thrusts this book is "What can the artist do?" .What can Danticat do in Haiti, the country of her birth, when political strife, poverty, and natural disasters occur. How can Danticat do anything, when she hasn’t lived in the country since age 12. Each chapter is set in a troubled era in which she lived, or a historical event in Haiti she reconstructs via art in that time. For examples: Haiti's 2006 earthquake, DuValier era when tonton macoutes , terrorized tortured everyday Haitians in the countryside, farmers, families, herdes, anyone targeted based on flimsy rumors they were part of the resistance. Or the time Papa Doc Duvalier ordered assassination of two Haitian writers - Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin”. Duvalier labeled them “outsiders” and branded their relatives ‘traitors”, because the two traveled and workedin the U.S., out of economic necessity. On execution day, Papa Doc Duvalier shut down schools; then , he ordered all Haitians to witness a firing squad murder them in a public square. (Why don't I know this history?)
What can the artist do? Edwidge Danticat acknowledges her vulnerabilities, guilt, good intentions while at a loss about where to start because she's been "gone away". She is both insider (born there), and outsider, NYU and Brown trained, Oprah Book Club acclaim, etc. She is lives in material comforts while her grandmother Tante Ilyana resides on a mountainous hilltop. Ilyana guards the family cemetery plot, and insists on a home that requires a day of walking uphill to reach. I value how Danticat lacks pretensions, her insightful writing knife is not dull. I am foolish to to not read with vigilance.
For example, Edwidge Danticat describes a child rescued from earthquake rubble in plain language. Danticat’s writes in quiet prose, but then, she’ll close the sentence with a detail that guts me. For example: Danticat reports a shy Haitian child survived, but did not talk. She sees a ‘gash’ on the girl’s forehead. the concrete split her scalp open”. Before Danticat walks away, she adds the closing phrase: the gash is where school concrete fell on the 10 yr old’s head and split. her scalp open. Her honesty does not shield readers or allow the distance to pretend a happy endings awaits Haiti. Each time Instead, she pierces my reading, and reminds me not to be passive or asleep while I learn Haiti’s heartbreak (6,000 died?). Here’s a Haitian survivor, Alerte Berlance in the chapter “I Speak Out”. Duvalier’s country militiamen sliced Alerte’s tongue in half, hacked off her arm with a machete, then, tossed her into a mass grave to die. Danticat won’t allow an American primed on U.S. heroic myths. She won’t jump the Berlance’s recovery years, acknowledging only triumphant benchmarks -- speaking tours, a Phil Donahue Show talk show appearance. Danticat insists readers see the “the before” too. And “the during”. I infer her message: “Wake the f*ck up. Don’t consume natural disaster horrors as if Haitian suffering is your devastation porn, tourist!”
In the “I Am Not a Journalist” chapter, the author describes the 1994 course "History of Haitian Cinema" at Ramapo College (NJ), which she co-taught with Hollywood filmmaker Jonathan Demme and Haitian radio journalist and filmmaker Jean Dominique. She and the reader shift our perspective about why Cinema matters -- Dominique explains that in a country where illiteracy was around 51 %, Haitian films,painting, and the visual arts ARE the vehicle to disseminate then discuss political strategies to survive, and overthrow Father and Son DuValier governments. Radio and community theater is valuable as well for that reader. In this way words such as "resistance" do not sound as empty as when I use them at U.S. protests. Danticat writes in clear, straightforward prose. I'm learning about Haitian culture in its own right, and not just what happens to Haiti.
More thoughts to come.
_______________________________
Early impression, reading continues : Wed. Sept. 2017
: Currently Reading: Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously: the immigrant artist at work . (2010) The question that thrusts this book is "What can the artist do?" .What can Danticat do in Haiti, the country of her birth, when political strife, poverty, and natural disasters occur. How can Danticat do anything, when she hasn’t lived in the country since age 12. Each chapter is set in a troubled era in which she lived, or a historical event in Haiti she reconstructs via art in that time. For examples: Haiti's 2006 earthquake, DuValier era when tonton macoutes , terrorized tortured everyday Haitians in the countryside, farmers, families, herdes, anyone targeted based on flimsy rumors they were part of the resistance. Or the time Papa Doc Duvalier ordered assassination of two Haitian writers - Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin”. Duvalier labeled them “outsiders” and branded their relatives ‘traitors”, because the two traveled and workedin the U.S., out of economic necessity. On execution day, Papa Doc Duvalier shut down schools; then , he ordered all Haitians to witness a firing squad murder them in a public square. (Why don't I know this history?)
What can the artist do? Edwidge Danticat acknowledges her vulnerabilities, guilt, good intentions while at a loss about where to start because she's been "gone away". She is both insider (born there), and outsider, NYU and Brown trained, Oprah Book Club acclaim, etc. She is lives in material comforts while her grandmother Tante Ilyana resides on a mountainous hilltop. Ilyana guards the family cemetery plot, and insists on a home that requires a day of walking uphill to reach. I value how Danticat lacks pretensions, her insightful writing knife is not dull. I am foolish to to not read with vigilance.
For example, Edwidge Danticat describes a child rescued from earthquake rubble in plain language. Danticat’s writes in quiet prose, but then, she’ll close the sentence with a detail that guts me. For example: Danticat reports a shy Haitian child survived, but did not talk. She sees a ‘gash’ on the girl’s forehead. the concrete split her scalp open”. Before Danticat walks away, she adds the closing phrase: the gash is where school concrete fell on the 10 yr old’s head and split. her scalp open. Her honesty does not shield readers or allow the distance to pretend a happy endings awaits Haiti. Each time Instead, she pierces my reading, and reminds me not to be passive or asleep while I learn Haiti’s heartbreak (6,000 died?). Here’s a Haitian survivor, Alerte Berlance in the chapter “I Speak Out”. Duvalier’s country militiamen sliced Alerte’s tongue in half, hacked off her arm with a machete, then, tossed her into a mass grave to die. Danticat won’t allow an American primed on U.S. heroic myths. She won’t jump the Berlance’s recovery years, acknowledging only triumphant benchmarks -- speaking tours, a Phil Donahue Show talk show appearance. Danticat insists readers see the “the before” too. And “the during”. I infer her message: “Wake the f*ck up. Don’t consume natural disaster horrors as if Haitian suffering is your devastation porn, tourist!”
In the “I Am Not a Journalist” chapter, the author describes the 1994 course "History of Haitian Cinema" at Ramapo College (NJ), which she co-taught with Hollywood filmmaker Jonathan Demme and Haitian radio journalist and filmmaker Jean Dominique. She and the reader shift our perspective about why Cinema matters -- Dominique explains that in a country where illiteracy was around 51 %, Haitian films,painting, and the visual arts ARE the vehicle to disseminate then discuss political strategies to survive, and overthrow Father and Son DuValier governments. Radio and community theater is valuable as well for that reader. In this way words such as "resistance" do not sound as empty as when I use them at U.S. protests. Danticat writes in clear, straightforward prose. I'm learning about Haitian culture in its own right, and not just what happens to Haiti.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 24, 2023
In one chapter, Edwidge writes that many of us and much of her writing are vulnerable to a swift, unthinking protectiveness of Haiti's virtue after years of Haiti's portrayal as 'boat people', or the poorest nation in the Hemisphere, or practitioners of a barbaric religion, leading us to revolt against any negative portrayal or verbal slight against us, our culture and our land. I knew then that I couldn't put the book down.
I'm admittedly at risk of being too generous in my review. Having dedicated my studies to challenging international development schemes, contemporary economic theory, and international relations, this was my first foray into Haitian authorship and their insights to my country's hopes, scenes, and internal dialogues from the ground-up and separate from intellectual perjury and case studies. I feel Edwidge's envy and grief for a Haiti that's been lost after coup d’états and natural disasters, and for a land that I'll never meet, having grown up "lòt bò dlo" and given pause by the danger it presents. But, I mustn't overlook the value of her writing about much of the communalism, staidness, and the cautiously relentless wistfulness for a safer and prosperous nation that Haitians maintain-- and the writer's maintain when they conceive, publish and distribute literature of any fashion, even when doing so risks the lives of them and their loved ones.
I'm grateful for this book, despite its simplicity, and will likely read it again when I wish to send my mind back overseas.
I'm admittedly at risk of being too generous in my review. Having dedicated my studies to challenging international development schemes, contemporary economic theory, and international relations, this was my first foray into Haitian authorship and their insights to my country's hopes, scenes, and internal dialogues from the ground-up and separate from intellectual perjury and case studies. I feel Edwidge's envy and grief for a Haiti that's been lost after coup d’états and natural disasters, and for a land that I'll never meet, having grown up "lòt bò dlo" and given pause by the danger it presents. But, I mustn't overlook the value of her writing about much of the communalism, staidness, and the cautiously relentless wistfulness for a safer and prosperous nation that Haitians maintain-- and the writer's maintain when they conceive, publish and distribute literature of any fashion, even when doing so risks the lives of them and their loved ones.
I'm grateful for this book, despite its simplicity, and will likely read it again when I wish to send my mind back overseas.
July 16, 2021
4 stars for Create Dangerously. This book is a collection of essays from Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat. It is a little bit of a wonder that I stumbled upon this book a week after Haiti and the world woke up to the news of Jovenel Moïse’s assassination. Danticat, through her words and descriptions gives you a peep into life in Haiti and how the country has struggled to find its bearings after being subjected to a series of consecutive torturous dictatorial regimes and natural calamities.
Danticat, at the start of the book, implores you to create dangerously and cites the examples of Haitian thinkers, activists, poets, photographers, sculptors, journalists, filmmakers who all chose to create despite Papa Doc Duvalier’s rein of terror. Those who dared to openly dissent and call out Duvalier were publicly punished and made examples of, in order to dissuade other dissenters from rising against the dictator.
Danticat says “No matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk their life to read them. Therefore, create dangerously, for people who read dangerously.”
Danticat, at the start of the book, implores you to create dangerously and cites the examples of Haitian thinkers, activists, poets, photographers, sculptors, journalists, filmmakers who all chose to create despite Papa Doc Duvalier’s rein of terror. Those who dared to openly dissent and call out Duvalier were publicly punished and made examples of, in order to dissuade other dissenters from rising against the dictator.
Danticat says “No matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk their life to read them. Therefore, create dangerously, for people who read dangerously.”
May 30, 2019
"Perhaps this America does have more in common with the developing world than with the one it inhabits. For the poor and outcast everywhere dwell within their own country, where more often than not they must fend for themselves. That's why one can so easily become a refugee within one's own borders - because one's perceived usefulness and precarious citizenship are always in question, whether in Haiti or in that other America, the one where people have no flood insurance" (111).
It took me months to finish this book, not because the prose is dense or the content uninteresting, but rather because Danticat writes with such vulnerability, wisdom, and skill that as she is exploring her heartbreaking familial history and sharing her views of the world, it's difficult not to put the book down to spend some time mulling over her ideas. I will readily recommend this title to many and am trying to figure out how to add it to future sections of my narratives of immigration courses.
It took me months to finish this book, not because the prose is dense or the content uninteresting, but rather because Danticat writes with such vulnerability, wisdom, and skill that as she is exploring her heartbreaking familial history and sharing her views of the world, it's difficult not to put the book down to spend some time mulling over her ideas. I will readily recommend this title to many and am trying to figure out how to add it to future sections of my narratives of immigration courses.
June 28, 2022
Brutal acercamiento a la historia, cultura y sociedad haitiana a través de la mirada de artistas y escritoras que como migrantes resisten y existen entre dos orillas.
Mèsi anpil pou histwa sa yo ki nesesè pou nous kapab kontinye konprann Ayiti.
Mèsi anpil pou histwa sa yo ki nesesè pou nous kapab kontinye konprann Ayiti.
September 17, 2020
Awesome, incredibly well written.
November 12, 2022
¡Qué libro! He llorado leyéndolo. Y he aprendido, cosa que valoro muchísimo.
December 12, 2021
“It may be said that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge--which gives rise to profound uncertainties--that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.”
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands
This passage by Rushdie illustrates one of the main themes winding through all of Danticat's essays, the need to discover who she is by reclaiming her connection to Haiti yet at the same time being aware that what she remembers and creates will never be accurate. The challenge then is to learn how to "create dangerously" when our memory fails to remember a place once called home. I. Other words, Danticat challenges herself to consider this: What is the role of the immigrant artist, one from a country replete with violence and poverty, full of turmoil, of horrors beset by decades of despotism, natural disasters, disease and economic hardships? What can she possibly contribute when her reality is no longer if being in danger? Creating dangerously, a mantra borrowed from Camus, is about not forgetting one’s roots, telling stories despite the risks and fears, some very real and some imagined. “…creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings…” (11). How does one create dangerously when the risks that others have taken in terms of their lives, the sacrifices associated with exile and/or death are not there? That seems to be the question that Danticat’s book addresses.
The essays in this collection explore how other Haitian artists and activists, story tellers, mythical heroes and culture makers provide her inspiration and guidance. Each person profiled offers her another building block for positioning oneself as an immigrant artist working that space in-between, being from Haiti, but no longer Haitian. In her essay “Daughters of Memory,” Danticat struggles with the loss of belonging by attempting to read and then write herself into Haiti’s cultural and collective memory via two Haitian novelists: Jan J. Dominique and Marie Vieux-Cheuvet even though that collective memory is itself evasive, much of Haiti’s cultural history written by colonizers or silenced by despotism. As she notes:
…what happens when we cannot tell our own stories, when our memories have temporarily abandoned us? What is left is longing for something we are not even sure we ever had but are certain we will never experience again. (65)
Transnational/diasporic/post-colonial literature often interrogates the relationship between displacement, memory, and language. Language, whether visual or linguistic or aural, is all there is to forge a hybrid identity. Some of the best essays in the collection show the problematics of representation when writing characters that may be Haitian but don't necessarily represent all Haitians. I appreciate her ability to speak back to her naysayers, those who criticized her for creating characters in her fiction that are unflattering or are portrayed as primitive or backwards, stereotypical representations created by colonizers in their works of art (I see you, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Paul Bowles). Part of her journey to claim herself as Haitian is to separate herself from these European writers much as Haiti itself had to recreate its own literary culture despite the imposition of French literature and language on its inhabitants under colonialism and to enter a league of Haitian artists and writers in exile. Many of her essays introduce English-speaking audiences to these artists revealing their intent also to create dangerously.
Other essays are more personal and focus on her relatives, her experiences as a writer/journalist in the US, her family visits, yet many of these more personal essays reveal the disparity between her life and those she is writing about who suffer numerous consequences for being poor, or black, of having the desire to create another life without having the resources to do so. In a few essays, she draws connections between Haiti and the US, showing how what is often presented as happening over there is actually happening here in the US.
One example of connecting worlds through poverty, disaster, violence, and race is in her essay, “Another Country” which uses Hurricane Katrina's reveal of how many people, mostly African Americans, in New Orleans were subjected to the same kind of dispossession as she saw in Haiti except that it was often hidden. She wonders why the “so-called developed world” attempts to reinforce imaginary borders between the First and Third World “when an unimaginable disaster shows how exactly how much alike we are” (110). The kind of remarks in the media she is referring to were also very visible in Germans interviewed about the torrential flooding that destroyed their villages this past summer. "This does not look like Germany" meaning this only happens in countries like X. This way of making connections between ostensibly very different places shows a specific kind of vantage point, one that comes from being an immigrant artist when she observes: Later she argues that “the advantages of being an immigrant is that two very different countries are forced to merge within you” (112). It is finally how she can make do with being who and where she is, someone with enormous advantage compared to her relatives still living in Haiti who can use that privilege to challenge First World perceptions, and to advocate for Haiti. The essays as a whole are both political and personal, incorporating current and historical events as well as profiling numerous artists and writers, all of it seeming to build to this understanding of her role as an immigrant artist, one where she can embrace both its constraints and its affordances.
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands
This passage by Rushdie illustrates one of the main themes winding through all of Danticat's essays, the need to discover who she is by reclaiming her connection to Haiti yet at the same time being aware that what she remembers and creates will never be accurate. The challenge then is to learn how to "create dangerously" when our memory fails to remember a place once called home. I. Other words, Danticat challenges herself to consider this: What is the role of the immigrant artist, one from a country replete with violence and poverty, full of turmoil, of horrors beset by decades of despotism, natural disasters, disease and economic hardships? What can she possibly contribute when her reality is no longer if being in danger? Creating dangerously, a mantra borrowed from Camus, is about not forgetting one’s roots, telling stories despite the risks and fears, some very real and some imagined. “…creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings…” (11). How does one create dangerously when the risks that others have taken in terms of their lives, the sacrifices associated with exile and/or death are not there? That seems to be the question that Danticat’s book addresses.
The essays in this collection explore how other Haitian artists and activists, story tellers, mythical heroes and culture makers provide her inspiration and guidance. Each person profiled offers her another building block for positioning oneself as an immigrant artist working that space in-between, being from Haiti, but no longer Haitian. In her essay “Daughters of Memory,” Danticat struggles with the loss of belonging by attempting to read and then write herself into Haiti’s cultural and collective memory via two Haitian novelists: Jan J. Dominique and Marie Vieux-Cheuvet even though that collective memory is itself evasive, much of Haiti’s cultural history written by colonizers or silenced by despotism. As she notes:
…what happens when we cannot tell our own stories, when our memories have temporarily abandoned us? What is left is longing for something we are not even sure we ever had but are certain we will never experience again. (65)
Transnational/diasporic/post-colonial literature often interrogates the relationship between displacement, memory, and language. Language, whether visual or linguistic or aural, is all there is to forge a hybrid identity. Some of the best essays in the collection show the problematics of representation when writing characters that may be Haitian but don't necessarily represent all Haitians. I appreciate her ability to speak back to her naysayers, those who criticized her for creating characters in her fiction that are unflattering or are portrayed as primitive or backwards, stereotypical representations created by colonizers in their works of art (I see you, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Paul Bowles). Part of her journey to claim herself as Haitian is to separate herself from these European writers much as Haiti itself had to recreate its own literary culture despite the imposition of French literature and language on its inhabitants under colonialism and to enter a league of Haitian artists and writers in exile. Many of her essays introduce English-speaking audiences to these artists revealing their intent also to create dangerously.
Other essays are more personal and focus on her relatives, her experiences as a writer/journalist in the US, her family visits, yet many of these more personal essays reveal the disparity between her life and those she is writing about who suffer numerous consequences for being poor, or black, of having the desire to create another life without having the resources to do so. In a few essays, she draws connections between Haiti and the US, showing how what is often presented as happening over there is actually happening here in the US.
One example of connecting worlds through poverty, disaster, violence, and race is in her essay, “Another Country” which uses Hurricane Katrina's reveal of how many people, mostly African Americans, in New Orleans were subjected to the same kind of dispossession as she saw in Haiti except that it was often hidden. She wonders why the “so-called developed world” attempts to reinforce imaginary borders between the First and Third World “when an unimaginable disaster shows how exactly how much alike we are” (110). The kind of remarks in the media she is referring to were also very visible in Germans interviewed about the torrential flooding that destroyed their villages this past summer. "This does not look like Germany" meaning this only happens in countries like X. This way of making connections between ostensibly very different places shows a specific kind of vantage point, one that comes from being an immigrant artist when she observes: Later she argues that “the advantages of being an immigrant is that two very different countries are forced to merge within you” (112). It is finally how she can make do with being who and where she is, someone with enormous advantage compared to her relatives still living in Haiti who can use that privilege to challenge First World perceptions, and to advocate for Haiti. The essays as a whole are both political and personal, incorporating current and historical events as well as profiling numerous artists and writers, all of it seeming to build to this understanding of her role as an immigrant artist, one where she can embrace both its constraints and its affordances.
Read
January 14, 2015I thought this would serve as a unique writing muse or motivator and I also thought it would stem from a perspective accounting of varied immigrant viewpoints of multiple nationalities. It proved to be neither. Well-written, often beautiful and composed with a crispness that transports you, this is almost solely autobiographical and thus almost exclusively focused on Haiti and her perspective. So it was a letdown for me due to too casual a review of the back cover description, though it appeals to the universal often enough. The best essay for me was the first one, though nearly all are powerful and intriguing. Also, the first essay has a kind of corresponding bookend essay that concludes the collection. This was my second genuine try with Danticat and better than the first but still not what I was after. But she's such an eloquent writer and a great storyteller, so I'll give her another go in a while, which I'm sure will be to my benefit. Decent to good read for me, but could have been a great read if my expectations were more on target.
January 12, 2016
“If we began to put plaques all over Port-au-Prince to commemorate deaths,” a friend had once told me when I’d pointed this out to him, “we would have room for little else.”
---
“In the tent clinic I say hello to Monica. She looks up at me and blinks but otherwise does not react. Her eyes are dimmed and it appears that she may still be in shock. To watch your house and neighborhood, your city, crumble, then to watch your father die, and then nearly to die yourself, all before your tenth birthday, seems like an insurmountable obstacle for any child.”
---
“Growing up in the shadow of that rebellion, the narrator’s father will never truly know a free and sovereign life, having had not just his country but also his imagination invaded as a small boy when his parents used the presence of U.S. marines to frighten him into drinking his milk.”
---
“In the tent clinic I say hello to Monica. She looks up at me and blinks but otherwise does not react. Her eyes are dimmed and it appears that she may still be in shock. To watch your house and neighborhood, your city, crumble, then to watch your father die, and then nearly to die yourself, all before your tenth birthday, seems like an insurmountable obstacle for any child.”
---
“Growing up in the shadow of that rebellion, the narrator’s father will never truly know a free and sovereign life, having had not just his country but also his imagination invaded as a small boy when his parents used the presence of U.S. marines to frighten him into drinking his milk.”
April 9, 2011
Create Dangerously is personal, philosophical and vivid. Edwidge Danticat explores the role of the immigrant writer through touching stories of her Haitian family and friends. As with any collection, some of the essays are more captivating than others. I was particularly drawn to her accounts about journalist and icon Jean Dominique, 9/11, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and her powerful essay about visiting Haiti weeks after the earthquake hit in 2010. Her tales give the reader a sense of her responsibility to her family, and all of the people of Haiti, to be their voice and share their stories. She also makes the case that we're not all so different as some may think, especially in the face of terrifying disasters.
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