Create dangerously The immigrant artist at work

Edwidge Danticat, 1969-

Book - 2010

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Subjects
Published
Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press c2010.
Language
English
Main Author
Edwidge Danticat, 1969- (-)
Physical Description
189 p. ; 23 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780691140186
  • Create dangerously: the immigrant artist at work
  • Walk straight
  • I am not a journalist
  • Daughters of memory
  • I speak out
  • The other side of the water
  • Bicentennial
  • Another country
  • Flying home
  • Welcoming ghosts
  • Acheiropoietos
  • Our Guernica.
Review by New York Times Review

THE figure of the Haitian living abroad is one that evokes bitter comedy and, often, envy among Haitians living in Haiti. Haitian Haitians can quickly spot someone from what is called the diaspora visiting Port-au-Prince. A Haitian friend once told me that the big difference, aside from a visible discrepancy in wealth, is that someone from lòt bò dlo (or the other side of the water, which means "abroad" in Haitian Creole) walks with purpose and studied intent, as if he or she has a destination in mind at every moment. Island Haitians can find such goal-oriented behavior strange, unreal, even ridiculous, since the poverty of life in Haiti means that goals are often unachievable. Edwidge Danticat, who was born in Haiti and has lived in the United States since the age of 12, has been trying to bridge this divide. More than a million Haitians live in the diaspora - in New York, Florida, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Montreal, France and other places - and the remittances they send home help keep the Haitian economy afloat. It's estimated that about 80 percent of Haiti's professionals live outside Haiti. In 2008 alone, diaspora Haitians sent as much as $2 billion back to Haiti to support family and friends. Yet although they are essential to their relatives' well-being, diaspora Haitians often feel un-Haitian, unacknowledged and distant. Best known for her story collections, like "Krik? Krak!," and for novels like "Breath, Eyes, Memory," Danticat confronts this problem head-on in "Create Dangerously," her new collection of essays, adapted and updated from the Toni Morrison Lecture she gave in 2008 at Princeton University, and expanded with her writing for The New Yorker, The Progressive and other publications. The diaspora conflict is particularly painful in the case of writers and artists who live elsewhere but use Haitian material in their work. In "Walk Straight," the new book's second essay, Danticat recalls overhearing a Haitian say, about her work, "The things she writes, they are not us." She points out, too, that she has often been called a "parasite" who exploits her culture "for money and what passes for fame." In response to such criticisms, Danticat writes that the only alternative for an emigrant writer is self-censorship or, worse, silence. Nonetheless, she describes herself as "anguished by my own sense of guilt." For Danticat, the burden of responsibility and indebtedness is dreadful, her escape from the world she writes about fraught with emotion and self-loathing. Her guilt is the worst kind: survivor guilt. The book begins with a matter-of-fact retelling of the executions of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, which Danticat recounts from a documentary film she watched. Both men had left their hometown, Jérémie, on Haiti's southern peninsula, to study and work in the United States in the 1950s. In New York, Numa and Drouin became part of Jeune Haiti, a C.I.A.-supported group of 13 men plotting to overthrow Papa Doc Duvalier. They landed in Haiti and fought sporadically for three months before 11 of them were hunted down. The grand finale of Jeune Haiti was the execution of Numa and Drouin, which took place at the national cemetery in Port-au-Prince in 1964. Numa was in his early 20s and Drouin in his early 30s when they were put before the firing squad. This dark story is the creation myth of Danticat's Haiti, although it took place five years before she was born. The story of the two martyrs is woven through the book; people speak of them, remember them, mention them in section after section. Danticat herself goes looking for the site of their execution and reimagines it. One of the pleasures of reading this book is the way that Danticat self-consciously shows the intertwining of experience; this enduring connection is especially important to her as a writer exploring an opposing diaspora theme of distance and disconnection. With characteristic creativity and charmingly knotty logic, Danticat compares Drouin and Numa's mini-rebellion against Duvalier to the refusal of Adam and Eve to obey the command of another dictator who, we must hope, is more benign. From this, she goes into a short discussion of Camus's "Caligula." The logic continues to bounce as we follow her reasoning. Camus's emperor, Danticat writes, believes it doesn't matter if one is executed or exiled, but only that one have what she calls "the power to choose." Drouin and Numa had already lived in a comfortable exile from which they nonetheless chose to return, Danticat writes. She then seems to compare them to Jesus Christ, saying they "were patriots who died so that other Haitians could live." So Drouin and Numa are like Adam and Eve, but also like Jesus. Finally, Numa and Drouin remind Danticat of one other person. "They were also immigrants, like me," she writes. As such, they were vilified and dehumanized by Duvalier. "He labeled them not Haitian, but foreign." By the end of this section we are not sure what field we are in: Haitian history, personal memoir, anthropology, comp lit or religious studies. But that is as it should be. What is worthy is Danticat's passion for her subject. What is revealing is the way she sees her themes of exile, banishment, emigration and - most important - return, everywhere, along with their implications and consequences. A writer truly and meaningfully immersed in her work is like a paranoid person: every piece of experience seems to echo back to her the subject of her work. So it is with Danticat. She expresses feelings of shame throughout, because she writes from the diaspora and is therefore not sharing the pain and misery (and now disaster) that the people she fictionalizes have suffered. Danticat has lost many relatives and friends to the harshness of being Haitian, one or two to unacknowledged or unrecognized AIDS, another in detention as a hopeful refugee, one to assassination, two more to the recent earthquake. As a true humanist and dedicated fiction writer, she suffers with these victims, always empathizing, always wondering: What if that had been me? Danticat is at her best when writing from inside Haiti. It's a miracle, the way she captures the textures of a reality she was a part of for only the first 12 years of her life. The section in which she and her cousin and uncle climb a mountain and visit an aunt in a remote village is filled with small wonders. There is, for example, a description, poetic and plain, of how upon arrival at her aunt's tiny, tidy house, Danticat and the others collapse onto a sisal mat and drink water while her cousins grind corn and the hens and roosters squawk. She lovingly reproduces the back-and-forth of conversation among relatives who have not seen one another in more than 20 years, and who live in different worlds and different eras. She notes the spatter of gunfire nearby - the village chief's way of announcing he has returned to the village and is ready to see anyone who might need him. She describes the slow process of making coffee in the cooking shed near the stream, a cousin's three-tiered turquoise mausoleum in the garden, the night sounds of the profound countryside. Most vividly, she captures the unremarked quality of the lives lived in these unheard-of places, so close to Miami. "I remember collecting dandelions as we passed the gardens of people who had known our fathers and grandfathers when they were our age," Danticat writes of a childhood visit to this same place, "people who called us by the names of our aunts and uncles, people of whom there is no longer any trace. . . . I don't remember my Aunt Ilyana's house looking so isolated." Although she knows she need not, Danticat, for all her success as a writer, still feels bad about making up narratives about people whose real-life stories are already so gripping. She admires exiles like the photographer Daniel Morel, who at great personal risk has documented the brutal political struggle in Haiti for decades. She looks up to Jean Dominique, the éminence grise of Haitian journalism, who lived in New York for a time and who later returned to work for a better Haiti. (He was assassinated in Port-au-Prince in 2000.) Yet as Danticat's recollections show, her singular achievement is not to have remade the actual Haiti, but to have recreated it. She has wound the fabric of Haitian life into her work and made it accessible to a wide audience of Americans and other outsiders. Through her "made up" stories, she has brought Haiti to life for countless readers who otherwise would have understood nothing. Danticat's tender new book about loss and the unquenchable passion for homeland makes us remember the powerful material from which most fiction is wrought: it comes from childhood, and place. No matter her geographic and temporal distance from these, Danticat writes about them with the immediacy of love. Danticat recalls overhearing a Haitian say, about her work, 'The things she writes, they are not us.' Amy Wilentz is a professor in the literary journalism program at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of "The Rainy Season: Haiti - Then and Now," reissued in Aprii.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 10, 2010]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

"In order to shield our shattered collective psyche from a long history of setbacks and disillusionment... we cultivate communal and historical amnesia...," writes novelist Danticat in this lean collection of jaw-breaking horrors side by side with luminous insights. This volume, which grows out of the Toni Morrison lecture series at Princeton, is uneven and inorganic in patches. But in Danticat's many remarkable stories and pensees from the gut, one locates the inimitable power of truth. Authorship becomes an act of subversion when one's words might be read and acted on by someone risking his or her life if only to read them. Danticat reminds us that, in a cruel twist of fate, her native Haiti, earthquake-and-poverty-torn, gained independence, in a bloody slave uprising, not long after the U.S. did: our ties, usually unexamined, run painfully deep. Whether eulogizing her family, writing on leading journalist Jean Dominique's assassination and exiled author Marie Vieux-Chauvet, or discussing "Madison Avenue Primitive" Jean-Michel Basquiat, Danticat documents what it means for an immigrant writer to create dangerously for immigrant readers who read dangerously, awakened and no longer participants in a culture of "historical amnesia." (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

The 12 essays here extend from lectures by Haitian American author Danticat (Brother, I'm Dying), presented at Princeton University, exploring a variety of aspects of Haitian life and culture, including under previous repressive regimes. The themes from essay to essay are somewhat disjointed, although more than one is about truth vanquishing tragedy: "Walk Straight" is a tribute to her beloved Tante Ilyana and a wonderful glimpse into authentic rural Haiti, "Welcoming Ghosts" relates the amazing life of voodoo artist Hector Hyppolite, and "Acheiropoietus" concerns the work of photographer Daniel Moral. Throughout, Danticat's writing is crisp and clear, reminiscent of what the very best essay writing once aspired to be. VERDICT Not just another writer's book about writing, this volume delves into the suffering that affects artists who suspend themselves from time and place to create. Ironically, the Haitian Danticat was initially an immigrant to the United States (at age 12), but her years spent away from Haiti have now made her an immigrant to Haiti. Thus, she is the bridge that suspends dangerously from shore to shore. Her book should be read by students, historians and lovers of well-crafted writing.-Nedra Crowe-Evers, Sonoma Cty. Lib., Santa Rosa, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHAPTER 1 Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work On November 12, 1964, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a huge crowd gathered to witness an execution. The president of Haiti at that time was the dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who was seven years into what would be a fifteen-year term. On the day of the execution, he decreed that government offices be closed so that hundreds of state employees could be in the crowd. Schools were shut down and principals ordered to bring their students. Hundreds of people from outside the capital were bused in to watch. Th e two men to be executed were Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin. Marcel Numa was a tall, dark-skinned twenty-one-year-old. He was from a family of coffee planters in a beautiful southern Haitian town called Jérémie, which is often dubbed the "city of poets." Numa had studied engineering at the Bronx Merchant Academy in New York and had worked for an American shipping company. Louis Drouin, nicknamed Milou, was a thirty-one-year-old light-skinned man who was also from Jérémie. He had served in the U.S. army--at Fort Knox, and then at Fort Dix in New Jersey--and had studied finance before working for French, Swiss, and American banks in New York. Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin had been childhood friends in Jérémie. Th e men had remained friends when they'd both moved to New York in the 1950s, after François Duvalier came to power. There they had joined a group called Jeune Haiti, or Young Haiti, and were two of thirteen Haitians who left the United States for Haiti in 1964 to engage in a guerrilla war that they hoped would eventually topple the Duvalier dictatorship. The men of Jeune Haiti spent three months fighting in the hills and mountains of southern Haiti and eventually most of them died in battle. Marcel Numa was captured by members of Duvalier's army while he was shopping for food in an open market, dressed as a peasant. Louis Drouin was wounded in battle and asked his friends to leave him behind in the woods. "According to our principles I should have committed suicide in that situation," Drouin reportedly declared in a final statement at his secret military trial. "Chandler and Guerdès [two other Jeune Haiti members] were wounded . . . the first one asked . . . his best friend to finish him off; the second committed suicide after destroying a case of ammunition and all the documents. That did not affect me. I reacted only after the disappearance of Marcel Numa, who had been sent to look for food and for some means of escape by sea. We were very close and our parents were friends." After months of attempting to capture the men of Jeune Haiti and after imprisoning and murdering hundreds of their relatives, Papa Doc Duvalier wanted to make a spectacle of Numa and Drouin's deaths. So on November 12, 1964, two pine poles are erected outside the national cemetery. A captive audience is gathered. Radio, print, and television journalists are summoned. Numa and Drouin are dressed in what on old black-and-white film seems to be the clothes in which they'd been captured-- khakis for Drouin and a modest white shirt and denim-looking pants for Numa. They are both marched from the edge of the crowd toward the poles. Their hands are tied behind their backs by two of Duvalier's private henchmen, Tonton Macoutes in dark glasses and civilian dress. The Tonton Macoutes then tie the ropes around the men's biceps to bind them to the poles and keep them upright. Numa, the taller and thinner of the two, stands erect, in perfect profile, barely leaning against the square piece of wood behind him. Drouin, who wears brow-line eyeglasses, looks down into the film camera that is taping his final moments. Drouin looks as though he is fighting back tears as he stands there, strapped to the pole, slightly slanted. Drouin's arms are shorter than Numa's and the rope appears looser on Drouin. While Numa looks straight ahead, Drouin pushes his head back now and then to rest it on the pole. Time is slightly compressed on the copy of the film I have and in some places the images skip. There is no sound. A large crowd stretches out far beyond the cement wall behind the bound Numa and Drouin. To the side is a balcony filled with schoolchildren. Some time elapses, it seems, as the schoolchildren and others mill around. The soldiers shift their guns from one hand to the other. Some audience members shield their faces from the sun by raising their hands to their foreheads. Some sit idly on a low stone wall. A young white priest in a long robe walks out of the crowd with a prayer book in his hands. It seems that he is the person everyone has been waiting for. The priest says a few words to Drouin, who slides his body upward in a defiant pose. Drouin motions with his head toward his friend. The priest spends a little more time with Numa, who bobs his head as the priest speaks. If this is Numa's extreme unction, it is an abridged version. The priest then returns to Drouin and is joined there by a stout Macoute in plain clothes and by two uniformed policemen, who lean in to listen to what the priest is saying to Drouin. It is possible that they are all offering Drouin some type of eye or face cover that he's refusing. Drouin shakes his head as if to say, let's get it over with. No blinders or hoods are placed on either man. The firing squad, seven helmeted men in khaki military uniforms, stretch out their hands on either side of their bodies. They touch each other's shoulders to position and space themselves. The police and army move the crowd back, perhaps to keep them from being hit by ricocheted bullets. The members of the firing squad pick up their Springfield rifles, load their ammunition, and then place their weapons on their shoulders. Off screen someone probably shouts, "Fire!" and they do. Numa and Drouin's heads slump sideways at the same time, showing that the shots have hit home. When the men's bodies slide down the poles, Numa's arms end up slightly above his shoulders and Drouin's below his. Their heads return to an upright position above their kneeling bodies, until a soldier in camouflage walks over and delivers the final coup de grace, after which their heads slump forward and their bodies slide further toward the bottom of the pole. Blood spills out of Numa's mouth. Drouin's glasses fall to the ground, pieces of blood and brain matter clouding the cracked lenses. The next day, Le Matin , one of the country's national newspapers, described the stunned-looking crowd as "feverish, communicating in a mutual patriotic exaltation to curse adventurism and brigandage." "The government pamphlets circulating in Port-au-Prince last week left little to the imagination," reported the November 27, 1964, edition of the American newsweekly Time . " 'Dr. François Duvalier will fulfill his sacrosanct mission. He has crushed and will always crush the attempts of the opposition. Think well, renegades. Here is the fate awaiting you and your kind.' " All artists, writers among them, have several stories--one might call them creation myths--that haunt and obsess them. This is one of mine. I don't even remember when I first heard about it. I feel as though I have always known it, having filled in the curiosity-driven details through photographs, newspaper and magazine articles, books, and films as I have gotten older. Like many a creation myth, aside from its heartrending clash of life and death, homeland and exile, the execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin involves a disobeyed directive from a higher authority and a brutal punishment as a result. If we think back to the biggest creation myth of all, the world's very first people, Adam and Eve, disobeyed the superior being that fashioned them out of chaos, defying God's order not to eat what must have been the world's most desirable apple. Adam and Eve were then banished from Eden, resulting in everything from our having to punch a clock to spending many long, painful hours giving birth. The order given to Adam and Eve was not to eat the apple. Their ultimate punishment was banishment, exile from paradise. We, the storytellers of the world, ought to be more grateful than most that banishment, rather than execution, was chosen for Adam and Eve, for had they been executed, there would never have been another story told, no stories to pass on. In his play Caligula , Albert Camus, from whom I borrow part of the title of this essay, has Caligula, the third Roman emperor, declare that it doesn't matter whether one is exiled or executed, but it is much more important that Caligula has the power to choose. Even before they were executed, Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin had already been exiled. As young men, they had fled Haiti with their parents when Papa Doc Duvalier had come to power in 1957 and had immediately targeted for arrest all his detractors and resistors in the city of poets and elsewhere. Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin had made new lives for themselves, becoming productive young immigrants in the United States. In addition to his army and finance experience, Louis Drouin was said to have been a good writer and the communications director of Jeune Haiti. In the United States, he contributed to a Haitian political journal called Lambi . Marcel Numa was from a family of writers. One of his male relatives, Nono Numa, had adapted the seventeenth-century French playwright Pierre Corneille's Le Cid , placing it in a Haitian setting. Many of the young men Numa and Drouin joined with to form Jeune Haiti had had fathers killed by Papa Doc Duvalier, and had returned, Le Cid and Hamlet-like, to revenge them. Like most creation myths, this one too exists beyond the scope of my own life, yet it still feels present, even urgent. Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin were patriots who died so that other Haitians could live. They were also immigrants, like me. Yet, they had abandoned comfortable lives in the United States and sacrificed themselves for the homeland. One of the first things the despot Duvalier tried to take away from them was the mythic element of their stories. In the propaganda preceding their execution, he labeled them not Haitian, but foreign rebels, good-for-nothing blans . From the Trade Paperback edition. Excerpted from Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work by Edwidge Danticat All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.