Warning: This is the first of four posts on Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously. I am doing chapter highlights on all 12 of the book's chapters. So sit back, relax, read, and then win a free copy or rush out and buy it for yourself or for someone you think will appreciate it. Or, you can skip my write up and buy it anyway.
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(From chapter 12 --"Our Guernica"-- in Create Dangerously):
Everyone sounded eerily calm on the phone. No one was crying. No one said "Why me?" or "We're cursed!" Even as the aftershocks kept coming, they'd say, "The ground is shaking again," as though this had become a normal occurrence. They inquired about family members outside Haiti: an elderly relative, a baby, my one-year-old daughter.
I cried and apologized. "I'm sorry I can't be there with you," I said.
My nearly six-foot-tall twenty-three-year-old cousin--the beauty queen we nicknamed NC (Naomi Campbell)--who says that she is hungry and has been sleeping in bushes with dead bodies nearby, stops me.
"Don't cry," she says. "That's life."
"No, it's not life," I say. "Or it shouldn't be ."
"It is," she insists. "That's what it is. And life, like death, lasts only yon ti moman." Only a little while.
Perhaps it is with the realization that even the most horrendous of circumstances can be fleeting for some that Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat documents events in Haiti's recent and not-so-recent past in her latest nonfiction work. In 12 beautifully crafted, heart-wrenching essays, Danticat wrestles with the condition of Haiti--past and present--and gives us views of an exiled and resilient country and some of its artists and citizens who are of the same caliber--exiled, immigrant, resilient feet planted firmly in two places at the same time, and who can call on the rich offerings of their condition to give meaning to geographic space that is stable and flux, large and small, penetrating and circumferential.
CHAPTER 1
Danticat begins the collection with an account of the 1964 execution of two Haitian men--Marcel Duma and Louis Drouin--who had left the United States, where they had been living since the 1950s, to engage in a guerrilla war they hoped would eventually topple the Duvalier dictatorship. She relates the details of the execution in the present tense, which gives it a current feel with the reader as witness. The execution, the story of the two men, she says, is a "creation myth" that haunts and possesses her. For her, it's pathos and ethos--clash of life and death, homeland and exile, disobeyed directive from a higher authority, brutal punishment--feels present, even urgent. And in this first essay she strikes the book's first discordant note against the idea of yon ti moman. In doing so she identifies herself as one who seeks to keep things alive in the way artists have been known to do...immemorial.
CHAPTER 2
In this second chapter, a trip up mountains on foot to visit a paternal aunt in Haiti is told alongside her reflections on the reception of her first book, Breath, Eyes, Memory, which drew negative criticism from some Haitian Americans who, she says, took issue with the virginity testing element of the book. She relates how one woman wrote her saying, "You are a liar. You dishonor us, making us sexual and psychological misfits." In defense she says "The letter writer was right . . . I was lying in that first book and all the other pieces of fiction I have written since. But isn't that what the word fiction or novel on the book jacket implied? Isn't even the most elementary piece of fiction about a singularly exceptional fictional person, so that even if that fictional person is presented as an everyman or everywoman, he or she is bound to be the most exceptional everyman or everywoman fictional person of the lot?"
But as if to acknowledge that that explanation would not satisfy her vexed readers, she says she made the apology (which she addresses, tongue in cheek, to the protagonist Sophie) an official addition to subsequent editions of the book. She tells her "Your experiences in the night, your grandmother's obsessions, your mother's 'tests' have taken on a larger meaning and your body is now being asked to represent a larger space than your flesh . . . I feel I must explain. Of course, not all Haitian mothers are like your mother. Not all Haitian daughters are tested as you have been."
The essay may be seen as an even further apologia, though this time with less tongue in cheek. In the background, in the foreground, alongside her fictional characters, she might be saying, are the real women in her family, like the aunt--the stubborn place-holder in a familial village--who she travels a long way to visit. One gets the feel in the essay that Danticat may be attempting to fill that "larger space" (which Sophie can't occupy on her own) with women of Haiti who fill up real-life large spaces.
[Coming Sunday: Part 2]
