Book Review: Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist At Work
by Edwidge Danticat
Publication Date: Sep 19, 2010
List Price: $19.95
Format: Hardcover, 200 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780691140186
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Parent Company: Princeton University
Read a Description of Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist At Work
Book Reviewed by Kam Williams
"There are many possible interpretations of what it means
to create dangerously, and Albert Camus… suggests that it is creating as a
revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception,
the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience as a
directive…
Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is always what
I’ve 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.
Coming from where I come from, with the history I have—having spent the
first twelve years of my life under both dictatorships of Papa Doc and his
son, Jean-Claude—this is what I’ve always seen as the unifying principle
among all writers.
— Excerpted from Chapter One (pgs. 10-11)
Book Review by Kam Williams
In 1818, Victor Cousin, as a visiting lecturer at the Sorbonne in Paris,
coined the phrase "Art for art’s sake," thus introducing the then novel
notion that art ought to be appreciated on its own merits, meaning simply
for its intrinsic beauty independent of serving any didactic function. This
philosophy caught fire, thereby ushering in a redefinition of the prevailing
point-of-view to the point where we generally expect that art be divorced
from worldly concerns.
Has this attitude been widely-embraced or might it merely reflect the values
of members of a leisure class able to ignore pressing issues of survival
faced by the bulk of humanity? The question is legit, for flying in the face
of that bourgeois aesthetic is Edwidge
Danticat, an iconoclast who sees addressing the prevailing political and
social questions of the day as a pivotal part of her calling.
A 2009 winner of a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, Ms. Danticat’s contrary
approach ostensibly emanates from the fact that she was born in Haiti and
had to spend her formative years under the thumb of the ruthlessly
repressive Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier regimes. And in Create Dangerously, a
collection of essays based on a series of lectures delivered at Princeton
University, the American immigrant tackles a variety of universal themes apt
to resonate with anyone reflecting about the oppression they left behind in
coming to the United States in search of fundamental freedoms, particularly
Freedom of Speech.
The book opens with a gripping description of a public execution in the
Sixties of a couple of Haitian political dissidents in a crowded
Port-au-Prince town square aired live on TV, on a specially-declared
national holiday when schools and businesses were closed in order to enable
everyone to observe the grisly deaths by firing squad. But Edwidge points
out that the true purpose of Duvalier’s turning the event into such a
spectacle was to discourage the populace from ever voicing their discontent
with the status quo.
Obviously, in the case of Ms. Danticat, such attempts at intimidation
ultimately backfired, for the inveterate firebrand grew up to stake her
career on exposing injustice and challenging authority. Still, this
tenderhearted tome, touching on themes ranging from assassinations to the
recent
earthquake in Haiti, is not solely political in scope. For, it also
contains plenty of personal entries such as one recounting a recent return
to the mountainous region where she was raised to visit long-lost relatives
and friends.
The magical musings and flowery phrasings of a gifted wordsmith who, it must
be noted, writes not in her native French but in the English of her adopted
homeland.
Related Links
Read an AALBC.com Interview with Ms. Danticat: The "Create Dangerously" Interview [Nov. 2010]