An eloquent and moving personal account of art and exile from
award-winning writer Edwidge Danticat
"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.
