Book Reviews Create Dangerously: the Immigrant Artist At
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New West Indian Guide Vol. 85, no. 3-4 (2011), pp. 265-339 URL: http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/nwig/index URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-101708 Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ISSN: 0028-9930 BOOK REVIEWS Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. EDWIDGE DANTICAT. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. 189 pp. (Cloth US$ 19.95) COLIN DAYAN Department of English Vanderbilt University Nashville TN 37235, U.S.A. <[email protected]> In her response to a February 2011 exchange in Small Axe, Edwidge Danticat writes: “Absolute certainty is perhaps at the center of activism, but ambiva- lence is at the heart of art, where gray areas abound and nuance thrives.” What strikes me most in all of her writing is the grace attendant upon terror, her ability to reorient our understanding of the political. As I write, hundreds of people are being evicted from camps in Delmas, a neighborhood northeast of downtown Port-au-Prince. With machetes, knives, and batons, the police slashed, tore, and destroyed tents, the makeshift refuge of those displaced by the earthquake. Now, at the start of the hurricane season, amid heavy rains, those already dispossessed are penalized and thrust again into harm’s way. How, then, to write about Haiti – and refrain from anger? Create Danger ously dares readers to know the unspeakable. But what makes it remarkable is that the dare only works because Danticat is ever tasking herself to know, confront, and ultimately – and unbelievably – create, in spite of examples of greed, fanaticism, and cruelty. Against the background of the camps, the chol- era, the ongoing and unalleviated suffering of the poor, Danticat recalls other outrages: Duvalier’s very public execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin; the assassination of Jean Dominique, Haitian journalist and the face of Radio Haiti Inter; the torture and mutilation of Alèrte Bélance after the 1991 coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And she doesn’t stop there. For Haiti is also America. So we know again the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina, citizens turned refugees in their own country because they are poor and outcast and black. With her characteristic calm and tentativeness, Danticat packs a wallop: “This is the America that continues to startle, the America of the needy and never-have-enoughs ... Perhaps this America does have more in common with the developing world than with the one it inhabits” (pp. 110-11). Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 12:09:56PM via free access 266 New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe WestIndische Gids vol. 85 no. 3 & 4 (2011) Faced with the silences of history and a ravaged Haiti, Danticat does something miraculous. She makes hope take root in what remains, and this saving act of commemoration is what gives these chapters their coherence. In “Daughters of Memory” she introduces writers such as J.J. Dominique, the daughter of Jean Dominique, and Marie Chauvet whose Love, Anger, Madness – a scathing evocation of the elder Duvalier’s dictatorship – “was pulled from publication for fear that her family members might be arrested or killed” (p. 68). “Forgetting,” Danticat admits, “is a constant fear in any writ- er’s life.” But even though “memory” can become “an even deeper abyss,” though it might seem that “our memories have temporarily abandoned us” (p. 65), she stakes out a place for remembrance. Bearing witness, then, is noth- ing less than a reclamation. For Danticat, writing is akin to ritual practice: the shards and the grit that counter the mythical fictions of politicians, the easy comforts of the culture-mongers. To “create dangerously” is to remember the dead, to know that the dead do not die, and to understand that the discarded persons and things of this world – the unwanted, the ignored – must be served, must be brought back from oblivion. This is Danticat’s labor. What remains most astonishing are the marked moments of intense ordinariness – the more ordinary, the more commonplace, the more exacting the consecration. It is no accident, then, that the gods of vodou (the lwa) take part in her stories. Out of wreckage, Danticat enhances the dead, teaching her readers how the living can speak with the departed, how the voices of the dead remain with us. She teaches us about the corpses left putrefying and dumped in mass graves without prayer, how bodies buried under the rubble of natural disaster after natural disaster crowd into the precincts of the living and give new meaning to “magic real- ism.” As she puts it: “The real marvelous is in the extraordinary and the mun- dane, the beautiful and the repulsive, the spoken and the unspoken” (p. 103). Danticat admits that she is haunted and obsessed, but never in order to make herself singular, for her goal is “to write the things that have always haunted and obsessed those who came before me” (p. 13). At the outset, then, she presents her making art as something like being possessed: she is the vessel through which the spirits of the dead – her ancestors, both real and literary – can live again. “Like ancient Egyptians, we Haitians, when a cata- strophic disaster does not prevent it, recite spells to launch our dead into the next world, all while keeping them close, building elaborate mausoleums for them in our backyards.” And even away from Haiti, “in the cold ... the artist immigrant, or immigrant artist, inevitably ponders the deaths that brought her here” (p. 17). Whether giving voice to her Tante Ilyana, to the painters Hector Hyppolite and Jean-Michel Basquiat in “Welcoming Ghosts,” or to the numerous martyrs who died trying to stand up to despotism – whether imposed from without or homegrown – Danticat finds words to sustain the spiritual in the press of history. Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 12:09:56PM via free access BOOK REVIEWS 267 In the penultimate chapter, “Acheiropoietos” (not made by human hands), Danticat invokes the icons of her ritual landscape. She returns to the execu- tion of Numa and Drouin through the eyes of the young Daniel Morel, who witnessed their death and decided then and there to become a photo journal- ist. In her final conversation with him, she thinks about the risks of taking photographs: making people pose is akin to killing them. Death is also part and parcel of the writer’s destiny, since “to create dangerously is also to cre- ate fearlessly ... bravely moving forward even when it feels as though we are chasing or being chased by ghosts” (p. 148). Danticat remembers her last visit to the Port-au-Prince national cemetery. She looks again at the cement wall where Numa and Drouin’s blood “had once been splattered.” Then she tells a story. The wall was built when a voice of longing came from “the leaves of a massive soursop tree in the middle of the cemetery.” It was Gran Brigit, the cemetery guardian, known “for her generos- ity in granting money to the poor.” Crowds came to hear her, “trampling the mausoleums and graves. The wall was built to keep Gran Brigit’s followers out” (p. 149). The wall that prohibits and excludes still stands; it remains even after the earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people on that afternoon in January 2010. Another icon left standing, we learn in the last chapter, “Our Guernica” is “the twenty-foot crucifix standing in the ruins of the collapsed Sacré-Coeur Church in the Turgeau neighborhood of Port-au-Prince” (p. 171). These man-made relics, in Danticat’s hands, become – like her writing – a bro- ken but obstinate communication between the living and the dead. Gordon K. Lewis on Race, Class and Ideology in the Caribbean. ANTHONY P. MAINGOT (ed.). Kingston: Ian Randle, 2010. xxxix + 121 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95) BRIDGET BrereTON Department of History University of the West Indies St. Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago <[email protected]> This slim book has an interesting history, which helps to explain its strengths and weaknesses. When the distinguished scholar Gordon K. Lewis died in 1991, he left a 700-page manuscript which had been completed by 1989, a companion or sequel to his fine Main Currents in Caribbean Thought Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 12:09:56PM via free access 268 New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe WestIndische Gids vol. 85 no. 3 & 4 (2011) (1983). That magisterial book ended at 1900; the manuscript was a survey of the Caribbean in the twentieth century. But it lacked references and bibliog- raphy, and the Johns Hopkins University Press, which had published Main Currents and was expected to take the sequel, declined. After much con- sultation among leading scholars and colleagues of Lewis, we learn from the foreword by his son David, it was decided to produce a volume that would combine some of his previously published but little-known essays, with extracts from the manuscript. Hence the present book, edited by Lewis’s former student and friend, Anthony Maingot, who also contributes a balanced and informative appreci- ation of Lewis’s contribution to Caribbean Studies as an introduction. It must be said, however, that the book has been inadequately proofread, with espe- cially erratic punctuation (dashes seem to have disappeared altogether), and bizarre errors in particular words, like “each” instead of “cash” or “severely” instead of “securely.” Maingot has chosen not to notice, or at least not to cor- rect, a few of Lewis’s assertions that are downright wrong, such as the absurd statement on page 94 that 80 percent of all births in the Commonwealth Caribbean were (c.1989) to out-of-wedlock teenager mothers.