One of the pleasures of reading this book is the way that Danticat self-consciously shows the intertwining of experience; this enduring connection is especially important to her as a writer exploring an opposing diaspora theme of distance and disconnection ... By the end of this section we are not sure what field we are in: Haitian history, personal memoir, anthropology, comp lit or religious studies. But that is as it should be. What is worthy is Danticat’s passion for her subject. What is revealing is the way she sees her themes of exile, banishment, emigration and — most important — return, everywhere, along with their implications and consequences ... Danticat is at her best when writing from inside Haiti. It’s a miracle, the way she captures the textures of a reality she was a part of for only the first 12 years of her life ... Danticat’s tender new book about loss and the unquenchable passion for homeland makes us remember the powerful material from which most fiction is wrought: it comes from childhood, and place.
Create Dangerously is one of the better considerations of writing and identity I’ve ever encountered ... It’s this embrace of herself as an accident in a world ruled by accidents that, I think, makes Danticat’s writing so powerful. She acknowledges that the prospect of writing about tragedies and vanished cultures is a daunting one, yet she is not daunted: she accepts that by some accident she exists and has the power to create, and so she does. And this, ultimately, is how she preserves or resurrects part of what has been lost.
Here, finally, is the book I've been searching for, the book I urge everyone to read about Haiti. In 12 chapters, we enter into the heart of Haiti, not just the Haiti of the earthquake, though that looming loss makes every detail and person to whom we are introduced more luminous and precious. We learn about Haiti's rich culture -- no poverty there -- and about its artists, its freedom fighters, its rascals and its history. We get to know Danticat, the writer -- why she feels she must create dangerously, fearlessly ... Thank you, Edwidge Danticat, for this journey of healing. Your song is very beautiful and your writing honors Haiti. Your Haiti, and now ours.
While Danticat declares that the earthquake has changed Haiti—as well as reading and writing about Haiti—irrevocably, more than half the essays that appear in Create Dangerously were actually written well before it happened, and only the first and last deal with it at any length. The author devotes many of the remaining essays to providing portraits of other Haitians who might serve as public figures for the country beyond its borders ... What comes forth in Danticat’s portrayals is a struggle between telling a true, compelling story and letting her subjects take shelter from the scrutiny of her writing and its readers ... It is in these intimate moments that Danticat’s writing is at its most engaging, when her public mission becomes a private burden. Empathy for Danticat’s vulnerability makes the reader, too, vulnerable to being drawn into her literary world ... Danticat creates most dangerously, deftly gaining our sympathy and leaving us exposed to our own complicity and complacency, and so shifting some of the burden onto us.
In Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, Danticat is interested in history, in politics, in culture, in memory, in violence, in risk, in bravery, in reading, in writing, in what it takes to make things true, and most of all in understanding how the circumstances in which things are made can give rise to whatever great power they might achieve ... It is a thrilling directive, and one that isn’t aimed only at the immigrant writer.
This volume, which grows out of the Toni Morrison lecture series at Princeton, is uneven and inorganic in patches. But in Danticat’s many remarkable stories and pensées from the gut, one locates the inimitable power of truth ... Whether eulogizing her family, writing on leading journalist Jean Dominique’s assassination and exiled author Marie Vieux-Chauvet, or discussing 'Madison Avenue Primitive' Jean-Michel Basquiat, Danticat documents what it means for an immigrant writer to create dangerously for immigrant readers who read dangerously, awakened and no longer participants in a culture of 'historical amnesia.'
