Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work
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"This is the most powerful book I've read in years. Though delicate in its prose and civil in its tone, it hits like a freight train. It's a call to arms for all immigrants, all artists, all those who choose to bear witness, and all those who choose to listen. And though it describes great upheaval, tragedy, and injustice, it's full of humor, warmth, grace, and light."--Dave Eggers, author of Zeitoun and What Is the What"Edwidge Danticat is a great literary artist. She is also a grand cultural critic whose wisdom and compassion loom large in this magnificent book."--Cornel West, Princeton University"Edwidge Danticat's prose has a Chekhovian simplicity--an ability to state the most urgent truths in a measured and patiently plain style that gathers a luminous energy as it moves inexorably forward. In this book she makes a strong case that art, for immigrants from countries where human rights and even survival are often in jeopardy, must be a vocation to witness if it is not to be an idle luxury."--Madison Smartt Bell, author of Toussaint Louverture: A BiographyCreate Dangerously is an intelligent and passionate book on the role of the immigrant artist. As in her fiction, the lucidity and humility of Edwidge Danticat's prose has a quiet force. This book is as much a testimonial to the spirit of resistance and defiance as it is an elegy for those who have died and disappeared; it is as much a provocation to the artist as it is a book of mourning."--Saidiya V. Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave RouteThe Barnes & Noble ReviewIn Danticat's [work], there is no doubt about Haiti's centrality: her novel Breath, Eyes, Memory is "the story of three generations of Haitian women." Yet when the book was selected for Oprah's Book Club and reached a huge audience, Danticat found that some Haitian Americans were offended by its portrayal of their culture -- especially the practice of "testing," in which a mother would manually confirm her daughter's virginity. "You dishonor us, making us sexual and psychological misfits," one woman wrote to Danticat; she overheard a man asking bitterly, "Why was she taught to read and write?" The best answer she can give is the phrase of Camus's that provides the title of this thoughtful, powerful book. "Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer."
CHAPTER 1: Create Dangerously: Th e Immigrant Artist at Work 1 CHAPTER 2: Walk Straight 21 CHAPTER 3: I Am Not a Journalist 41 CHAPTER 4: Daughters of Memory 59 CHAPTER 5: I Speak Out 73 CHAPTER 6: The Other Side of the Water 87 CHAPTER 7: Bicentennial 97 CHAPTER 8: Another Country 107 CHAPTER 9: Flying Home 115 CHAPTER 10: Welcoming Ghosts 127 CHAPTER 11: Acheiropoietos 137 CHAPTER 12: Our Guernica 153 Acknowledgments 175 Notes 177 Index 183
