Edwidge Danticat’s Dangerous Creation

The anniversary of the Haiti earthquake falls on Wednesday, and articles and interviews commemorating the event have begun flooding the Internet.I’ve been supplementing my reading with a richer, longer, more personal view: Edwidge Danticat’s essay collection “Create Dangerously: the Immigrant Artist at Work  Most of the essays originated in different forms in a variety of publications, including “Our Guernica,” part of which ran in The New Yorker as “A Little While (http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/02/01/100201taco_talk_danticat)”last February, and which you can read on our site. “Create Dangerously”is one of the better considerations of writing and identity I’ve ever encountered. Danticat quotes one of my favorite lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans,Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fashion these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.” She applies it specifically to the immigrant’s reading and writing experience, which is necessarily shaped by borders and boundaries—linguistic and cultural.These boundaries might serve to inhibit communication between readers and writers of different cultures, but, she writes,“I … sometimes wonder if in the intimate, both solitary and solidary, union between writers and readers a border can really exist.”I think these borders do exist: it takes a great writer (and great readers) to break them down. Danticat, by this measure, is a great writer.In these essays she maps the differences between Haitian culture and Western culture and erases them, so helping us to “learn rightly.” Danticat moved to the United States when she was twelve, but she remained psychically tied to the land of her birth, a place where people literally died for books—died for writing them, died for reading them—the dangerous creation of the title (taken from Camus’final lecture,“Create Dangerously (http://www.amazon.com/ResistanceRebellion-Death-Albert-Camus/dp/0679764011)”).What, Danticat asks, is the duty of the artist who has escaped this danger but is still defined by it? 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…. When our worlds are literally crumbling, we tell ourselves how right they may have been, our elders, about our passive careers as distant witnesses. Who do we think we are? We think we are people who risked not existing at all. People who have had a mother and father killed, wither by a government or by nature, even before we were born. Some of us think we are accidents of literacy. I do. It’s this embrace of herself as an accident in a world ruled by accidents that,I think, makes Danticat’s writing so powerful. She acknowledges that the prospect of writing about tragedies and vanished cultures is a daunting one, yet she is not daunted: she accepts that by some accident she exists and has the power to create, and so she does. And this, ultimately, is how she preserves or resurrects part of what has been lost.We create, she writes,“as though each piece of art were a stand-in for a life, a soul, a future…. We have no other choice.”