CHAPTER 3
The word diaspora, which can at best signify unity beyond borders or at its worst stigmatize, and suggest irreconcilable dispersal or estrangement from one's place of birth, is the main focus of Danticat's third essay in Create Dangerously.
In the essay, she pays tribute to Jean Dominique, one of Haiti's most famous journalists who was assassinated in Haiti in 2000. Her tribute is highlighted with what may have been the most important definition he gave her of dyaspora (the creole version)--a definition which somehow managed to reverse (or balance) some of her negative experiences with it. She tells us for instance how she had been easily silenced in conversations about Haiti when told disparagingly, "What do you know? You're living outside. You're a dyaspora." She tells us also being dyaspora meant being classified as "arrogant, insensitive, overbearing, and pretentious." A dyaspora (as opposed to a true native, one can assume), is seen as one who is eager to reap the benefits of good jobs and political positions in times of stability in a country he or she had fled and stayed away from during difficult times.
But Dominique, who had been exiled from Haiti, and who had made a seemingly easy return to Haiti, had given her a kinder understanding of dyaspora. She says his reaction to her "inconsequential dyaspora dilemma" had been "The Dyaspora are people with their feet planted in both worlds. There's no need to be ashamed of that. There are more than a million of you. You are not alone."
In paying tribute to Dominique, she raises his definition of dyaspora in triumph over those who seek to use it in a stigmatizing separatist manner.
CHAPTER 4
Here she tells stories of her early reading experiences with books by Haitian writers, and in addition to discussing their influence on her own approaches to reading and writing, she uses those experiences as the basis for developing a discussion on how Haitians and immigrant writers (in general, perhaps) "grapple with memory."
Of her early reading experiences in Haiti she writes, "Because of the dictatorship and its brutal censorship, I know no child who had read even a short novel by a Haitian-born writer." But she then hastens to qualify that statement with the acknowledgement that some will read that and hiss and decry it as both a contradiction and a lie, and she says (to them), "I am speaking only for myself."
When she was 17, five years after coming to the United States, she says she came across two new narrow shelves of books in the Brooklyn Public Library labeled Livres Haitiens. The thirty-year Duvalier dictatorship had ended, and she theorizes that "perhaps some of the more vocal patrons of the Brooklyn Library had demanded more books about themselves to help them interpret their ever-changing country from afar . . . books that could have been written only by literary orphans, to offer to other literary orphans."
As she does continuously throughout the book, Danticat uses her personal experiences in this essay as significant points of coming-to-awareness along the arc she creates between homelands (native and adopted), and suggests a connection between what she says is a "complicated Haitian obsession . . . a collective agreement [it seems] to remember our triumphs and gloss over our failures," and the (immigrant) writer's constant fear of forgetting. She writes, "It is as if we had been forced to step under the notorious forgetting trees, the sabliyes, that our slave ancestors were told would remove their past from their heads and dull their desire to return home. We know we must pass under the tree, but we hold our breath and cross our fingers and toes and hope that the forgetting will not penetrate too deeply into our brains."
CHAPTER 5
In the fifth essay Danticat documents the story of a Haitian woman who had been a near casualty of the 1991 military coup in Haiti. The woman, who lived in New Jersey at the time Danticat and others began recording her story, had survived a severe beating and mutilation, and Danticat's essay notably focuses on the horror of her experience and the loss of her limbs to form conclusions about the natural order of things. A new-born baby's missing forearm, she theorizes, may have simply dissolved inside its mother, becoming a part of the tissue and spirit that had helped create him, just as a victim's missing forearm had probably dissolved in a mass grave, becoming a part of the country that had helped create her.
And somehow her view of the natural order of things makes the horror of the woman's story--of passersby who stop and gawk at her as she lies battered beyond recognition at the side of the road, and who then get back into their cars and drive away, until finally she is rescued by soldiers (good soldiers this time)--reconcilable. Danticat's pull on the natural order of things is so convincing in the essay, even the irony of the woman's rescue seems to fit her theory, which put another way may be that life's dichotomies--good and evil, loss and recovery, for instance--eventually work together for positive results.
[Coming Tuesday: Part 3]
