Create Dangerously; The Immigrant Artist at Work

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Second printing stated. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. [12], 189, [7] pages. Illustrated from cover, reduced size dust wrapper. This is one of the Toni Morrison Lecture Series. Contents include: Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work; Walk Straight; I Am Not a Journalist; Daughters of Memory; I Speak Out; The Other Side of the Water; Bicentennial; Another Country; Flying Home; Welcoming Ghosts; Acheiropoietos; Our Guernica. Also contains Acknowledgments, Notes, and Index. Edwidge Danticat (born January 19, 1969) is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. After graduating from Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, New York, Danticat entered Barnard College in New York City where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1990. She received a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Brown University in 1993. In Create Dangerously, Danticat tells her own story as a part of the Haitian diaspora. This work was inspired by author Albert Camus's lecture "Create Dangerously" and his experience as an author and creator who defined his art as "a revolt against everything fleeting and unfinished in the world". In Create Dangerously, Danticat is admired for "writing about tragedies and vanished cultures" and how "she accepts that by some accident she exists and has the power to create, so she does." NPR positively reviewed Create Dangerously. "Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I've always 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."--Create Dangerously. In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist from a country in crisis. Inspired by Albert Camus' lecture, "Create Dangerously," and combining memoir and essay, Danticat tells the stories of artists, including herself, who create despite, or because of, the horrors that drove them from their homelands and that continue to haunt them. Danticat eulogizes an aunt who guarded her family's homestead in the Haitian countryside, a cousin who died of AIDS while living in Miami as an undocumented alien, and a renowned Haitian radio journalist whose political assassination shocked the world. Danticat writes about the Haitian novelists she first read as a girl at the Brooklyn Public Library, a woman mutilated in a machete attack who became a public witness against torture, and the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and other artists of Haitian descent. Danticat also suggests that the aftermaths of natural disasters in Haiti and the United States reveal that the countries are not as different as many Americans might like to believe. Create Dangerously is an eloquent and moving expression of Danticat's belief that immigrant artists are obliged to bear witness when their countries of origin are suffering from violence, oppression, poverty, and tragedy.