CHAPTER 10
Danticat quotes from art historian Marc Miller's 1980 interview with the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (seen in part here):
Miller: You're what? Haitian-Puerto Rican?
Basquiat: I was born here, but my mother's fourth-generation Puerto Rican. My father comes from Haiti.
Miller: Do you feel that that's in your art?
Basquiat: Genetically?
Miller: Yeah genetically or culturally? . . . Haiti is of course famous for its art...
Basquiat: ....That's why I said genetically because I've never been there. And I grew up in, you know, principal American vacuum. Television mostly.
Miller: No Haitian primitives on your wall?
Basquiat: At home?
Miller: At home.
Basquiat: Haitian primitives? What do you mean? People? People nailed up on my walls?
Miller: No. I mean paintings. Paintings.
Danticat describes the interview as "testy" (which may or may not make Miller's question about "Haitian primitives" seem less infuriating), and writes a cool-headed spin-off on the concept of "primitive art / artists" which explores (or discusses) its wide and narrow connotations.
She compares Basquiat with legendary Haitian painter and vodou priest Hector Hyppolite, whose work had impressed and inspired notables like father of French surrealism Andre Breton, Tony-award-winning dancer and choreographer Geoffrey Holder, and American writer Truman Capote, who in a December 1948 Harper's Bazaar article (she writes), lavished praise on Hyppolite's work, even while calling him "ugly" and "monkey-thin."
In the essay she ties the two artists together as young artist "plucked from obscurity and turned into god only to be continually called crude naive, savage," and (possible) older spiritual forbear(er). She examines their similar and different tools, backgrounds, approaches to cultural heritage, and she summarizes that both artists were in "a type of trance, divine horsemen, possessed, as their hyper productivity shows, by spirits they were seeking to either welcome or repel."
CHAPTER 11
This essay centers around Haitian photographer Daniel Morel who had been a witness (at the age of 13) to the execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin. Morel, we are told, had walked over to the spot where Drouin's glasses had fallen and picked them up, and in doing so had given himself significant ties to the historical event. As the first to see a reflection of what Drouin last saw, so to speak (some Haitians believe that even after death, the last image a person sees remains imprinted on his or her cornea as clearly as a photograph), Morel may well have been inspired by that vision or by Drouin's overall revolutionary vision to become a teller of Haiti's stories.
Among words by other visionaries in the essay's discussion of the art of photography are Susan Sontag's view that "to take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability..." and Roland Barthes' theory that "photography has something to do with resurrection."
Most notably is Danticat's conlusion, which becomes part of the book's overall thesis, 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 though we are chasing or being chased by ghosts."
CONCLUSION
In chapter 12 of Create Dangerously Danticat introduces a view of life which she appears to try to defeat in the book. Throughout the collection of essays, she can be understood as one who writes against the notion that nothing is truly lasting and as such shouldn't be fretted about or dwelt on. And she refutes that belief by dwelling on, stretching out, moments in the lives of others, moments in Haiti's past and present, moments we tend to either forget or that we'd rather reinvent and replay differently, ignoring or changing the basic truth of the origin. In stretching out the moments, she creates (in her typical unflinching manner) heavy, dark arcs between Haiti and its diaspora, and between Haiti and points along the rest of the outside world. But there is light in the stretch marks as well. There are moments for celebration in the stories she tells that are filled with hope, survival, and humor. Those moments take the stories out of their despair, and show a common humanity that is in part universal truth and in part a result of the beauty of her writing.
[Previous posts on Create Dangerously: "Writing against 'yon ti moman' " "Dyaspora, literary orphans, and reconcilable dichotomies" "On representing family and country."
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Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, by Edwidge Danticat (Princeton University Press, 2010, 208 pp).
