Edwidge Danticat: The Power of Words By Michelle Coffey Web exclusive for The Public Eye, Winter/Spring 2011

Born in Haiti, Edwidge Danticat moved to the United States when she was twelve. She is the author of many works of fiction set in Haiti and the United States, including the short story collection Krik? Krak! (1991), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), an Oprah’s Book Club Selection; The Farming of Bones (1999); and The Dew Breaker (2004). She received a MacArthur Fellows Genius Grant in 2009.

In Danticat’s memoir Brother, I’m Dying (2007), she wrote about being raised in Haiti by her uncle, Joseph Dantica, a minister—and about her uncle’s death at age 81 at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Krome Detention Center in Miami, Florida. He had a valid visa and had come to this country to request asylum. In testimony before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law in October 2007, Danticat described her uncle’s terrible death:

On the morning of his asylum hearing, my uncle became ill. To those who saw him, including his lawyer, he appeared to be having a seizure, and vomit shot out of his mouth, his nose, as well as the tracheotomy hole he had in his neck as a result of the throat cancer operation. The vomit was spread all over his face, from his forehead to his chin, down to the front of his dark blue Krome-issued overall. According to a report prepared by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, fifteen minutes passed before help arrived. When a medic and nurse arrived at the scene, the medic accused my uncle of faking his illness. To prove his point, the medic grabbed my uncle’s head and moved it up and down. It was rigid rather than limp, he said. Besides, my uncle would open his eyes now and then and seemed to be looking at him. “You can’t fake vomit,” my uncle’s lawyer, John Pratt, shot back. “This man is very sick and his medication shouldn’t have been taken away from him.” The medications were indeed taken away, replied the medic, in accordance with the facility’s regulations, and substituted with others.

Joseph Dantica died shortly this attack. Although his death certificate said that he had died of “acute pancreatitis,” said Danticat in her testimony, “he’d never shown any symptoms of [that] before he became ill at Krome and … he was never screened, tested, diagnosed, or treated [for pancreatitis] while he was at the Krome medical unit or at Jackson Memorial Hospital. We were given no further explanations or clarification concerning his last days.” In fact, she said, her family had to file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain his medical records. Thus, Danticat and her family are intimately acquainted with the tragic consequences of U.S. immigration laws and policies.

I was both excited and humbled when Political Research Associates asked me to interview Danticat about her new book, Create Dangerously (2010), for The Public Eye. It is an honor to engage in dialogue with one of the most important artists of our time about the artistic process and the artist’s response to today’s political challenges.

My intention during the interview was to discover what a creative, imaginative perspective can reveal about such social justice urgencies as immigration reform, reconstruction following disasters both natural and human in origin, detention and imprisonment, poverty, and geopolitical imbalances.

Can artists offer innovative frameworks and strategies for progressive movement building and fundamental social change? Danticat’s explorations in Create Dangerously can help guide our collective efforts to make a more just world.

Michelle Coffey: Congratulations on your beautiful, stunning, new work. Tell me, how did Create Dangerously come about? Was it something that was living inside of your head for a while? Was it triggered by the anti-immigrant climate here in this country? Last year’s devastating earthquake in Haiti?

Edwidge Danticat: It started in 2008, when Princeton University asked me to give a lecture that’s named after Toni Morrison. I was only the second person to do it, and I was asked a year in advance. I was very nervous about what I would say in front of Toni Morrison—because she would be in the audience, sitting in the front row. It was an incredible honor, but also a great responsibility.

I decided to talk about something that I not only have expertise in, but that I am passionate about: how people come to their art, especially under difficult circumstances. How do people create in spite of horrors, in spite of tragedies? I had read an essay by Albert Camus, called the “The Artist in his Time.” The English translation is called “Create Dangerously.” I decided to borrow his title and to explore what “create dangerously” means in my particular case, drawing experiences from my background and from that of people I know, as well as from people whose work I love and admire, many of whom are immigrant artists.

Coffey: So that must have required a deep internal gaze as well as an external one.

Danticat: I’ve always been inspired by people’s paths to their art. But few of us can trace the exact moment when we became artists. If you look at someone else’s experience, you can come closer. I examined my own process by thinking and meditating and pondering about others. I drew on things that have intersected with my life. So in a way, the gaze in the book is more internal than external.

Coffey: You probably know what I’m going to ask next: what did you discover about your own journey?

Danticat: I’m still in the process of figuring that out. It’s a continual quest. People ask, “Would you ever write about this?” or “Would you ever write about that?” And I have to answer that I don’t know. Your life can be altered in a second. I ended up writing a memoir [Brother I’m Dying] although I’d never had any intention of writing such a thing, because in one year my father died, my uncle died, and my daughter was born, and I wanted to understand all that.

Art is mysterious. My artistic process is to allow myself to interact with whatever comes my way.

Coffey: When you talk about interacting, I think of a skill set: the ability to remain open and to listen.

Danticat: Exactly, to have your antennas out.

Coffey: To have your antennas out in challenging landscapes. Create Dangerously focuses on two: the United States and Haiti. How do you keep your antennas up in the intensely anti-immigrant, fear-based culture here and on the literally shifting ground in Haiti?

Danticat: It’s a privilege having words, having the ability to live with experience rather than to suffer through it, as many people do. For example, my uncle died in the custody of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE], an experience I share with many families. But many of them are silenced, because they’re undocumented, or because they don’t know how to maneuver around the system. I had recourse: I had words and the ability to make protest art.

One of the people I talk about in my book is a radio journalist, who always said, “My microphone is my weapon.” That’s how he would fight against injustice, on the radio with his microphone and his words. Those of us who have that privilege are lucky. We get to expel it from ourselves. We can express ourselves out in the world. We do it with words. We do it with song. We do it with our bodies. We do it with our canvases.

Coffey: And the world needs to hear you!

Danticat: When I was a child, there were people who, in my eyes, were giants, but when they would step into the larger world, people would look down on them. They weren’t considered important to the society in which they lived. And when they came to the United States for a better life and more opportunity, they found that experience replicated here.

Immigrant children look at the world in such an interesting way. In Haiti, my people are of rural origin. They live in a poor neighborhood. Even going to the bank is an ordeal, because there they expect you to speak French, and they judge you for what you’re wearing, for the way you walk, for the way you sound. My uncle had throat cancer in his fifties and didn’t speak for many years, until he got a voicebox. When he went to the bank, he was doubly looked down upon. He not only looked a certain way, but he couldn’t speak. He had to bring a small child with him to facilitate things. Then when I came here, I’ll never forget: my mother was working in a factory, and the guy didn’t pay her. She brought me to speak for her to the factory foreman. You see your parents infantilized and feel complicit in it, because you’re embarrassed.

I know artists whose parents tell their children, “You don’t know anything. You should not even look me in the eye, because you’re a child.” Then the parent has a medical emergency, and the child is in there with the doctor making all kinds of life-saving decisions about her parents. You’re a ten year old, and you’re explaining things to your parents that are just unexplainable.

Coffey: When you talk about “privilege,” I understand that in terms of your gift and your ability to recognize it. How did you decide to become an artist? Where does the gift come from?

Danticat: As an immigrant artist, you’re inauthentic to the place where you come from, and you’re inauthentic to the place where you are. This silences many people, because they think, “I’m not Haitian enough. I’m not American enough.” But I believe that the minute you realize that wherever you are from, you’re just enough, you are free. You have your own sort of national identity, with its own landscape and its own stories.

Coffey: You seem to return to that space—your unique “national identity”—over and over again. Does it change over time? Does it shift with experience?

Danticat: It shifts all the time. It shifts with the political environment. For example, as you were saying, the anti-immigrant climate in the United States and the shifting environment back in Haiti both lead people to become increasingly hostile.

It also shifts with age. When I became a parent I found that my children took me in new directions. I started thinking about what the place I come from will mean to them. Will just be a source of nostalgia, or will it seem real? I’ve tried to make Haiti real to them, even though my children are very small. And sometimes maybe I’ve made it too real, because my daughter has become fearful. She asks me, “Are there any houses left after the earthquake?”

Coffey: Who is your audience? As you write, do you have an audience in mind? Or is it an internal conversation?

Danticat: My audience is me. I start out writing for myself. Then I think about people like my brothers, who love Haiti and know a bit about it but don’t read French or Creole. Haiti must come to them in English—they have a lot of company in that regard. Hyphenated kids in other languages experience something similar. When I’m writing, I also think of my daughters and what it will mean to them to read my work. I don’t filter it or screen it or change it, but I think of their gaze on it.

Coffey: It’s interesting that you use the word “gaze.” I’m a midwestern, Black American. Yet I relate so much to your work. I don’t feel as though I am gazing from the outside into your life and your world, because your work speaks so deeply to my experiences. I love that universal component and how it becomes accessible.

I want to ask about the role of the artist. I was just thinking of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, whom you write about in your book. Were they artists or cultural workers?

Danticat: Numa and Drouin were executed by the dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier in 1964, in Port-au-Prince. People were required to watch the execution and the government showed the video of their execution everywhere. If you went to the movies, it came on first thing, and it played on TV all the time, too.

Coffey: In the book you say you remember seeing big posters of the execution.

Danticat: Yes. A friend recently told me her that one of the young men was her second cousin. She watched the video over and over, all day, because the video was on all the time, around the clock, for about a month afterward. It’s imprinted on people’s psyches.

I had a dilemma when I was doing the Toni Morrison lecture. Someone had given me the film. I kept asking people whether I should open the lecture by showing it. I went back and forth right until the last minute. We finally decided not to show it, and just to show photographs. One thing that helped me to decide was that one person told me, “They die all the time. They die over and over again. You don’t want to kill them one more time in front of a crowd of people.”

Coffey: Were Numa and Drouin artists?

Danticat: In Louis Drouin’s final confession, he identified himself as the sort of person who would always volunteer to take the notes during a meeting. I don’t think he and Numa were intending to be cultural workers, but a culture emerged around their sacrifice. The dictatorship made them symbolic and used their images for its purposes, but ultimately another meaning emerged. Numa and Drouin became cultural symbols just as Che Guevara did. I tried for a long time to write fiction about them, but it just wouldn’t work.

Coffey: Do you see yourself becoming a cultural symbol?

Danticat: I hope not, because I’m still around! I’m still living this life. That’s what was taken away from them: their ability to live, and change, and even disappoint us.

Coffey: Could you talk about your work as protest art—and by that I don’t mean that you are necessarily an agitator, but rather that you’re holding up a new lens through which we can view the world.

Danticat: In his essay, Camus goes deeply into the old debate about “art for art’s sake” versus “committed art.” He says, if you’re on the deck of a slave ship, where do you focus your attention? Do you write about the slaves or about the constellations in the night sky? You’re in the Roman Coliseum: do you record the gossip in the stands, or do you show us the lion crushing the victim?  Camus says you do both. They’re interwoven. Although it may be harder, for better or for ill, if the place you come from is in danger. If you come from a place like Haiti, where you have disasters in rotation, it’s nearly impossible to create art that is completely removed from those events. Even if you tried, there would still be the contrast: “I’m writing about outer space, because I don’t want to write about earthquakes.”

Coffey: As a social justice activist, I’ve always wanted to figure out how we can bring creativity, and imagination, and beauty into our movement work. How can social justice organizers work together with artists?

Danticat: In Haiti, the notion of playacting is so strong that if you want to get a message across, the best way is to present a play, and it helps if it’s a funny play. Groups of traveling performers have educated people about many issues, including domestic violence and AIDS prevention. The artist brings expertise and enthusiasm into a collaboration with the community; he or she doesn’t just come in from the outside. These kinds of projects leave a very strong legacy in place; people can continue with the performance even after the actors are gone.

The performances work because they’re part of a Creole tradition of masks and seasonal festivals. The artist honors what already exists, and learns about what the community has to offer. Both the community and the artist benefit. There is parity. The artist doesn’t come in to teach the community.

Coffey: In this country we tend to forget our cultural traditions. They’re “whitewashed.” They can’t compete with “So You Think You Can Dance?”

But anyway, as you describe it, there are artists, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and communities. The important connection is between the artist and the community, isn’t it? Do we really need the NGOs?

Danticat: They’re a bridge. The artists may have the initiative and the time, but they don’t always know how to make the connection with the community. For example, when I was in Haiti recently, I went with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to some refugee camps where they’ve created child-friendly spaces. The adults in the camps who are singers and dancers teach the children. The IRC provides organizational structure, supplies, a building. Without the IRC, there would still be singers and dancers, and there would still be children, and maybe once in a while they would organize something.

Coffey: I love the fact that the IRC recognized the role of art and culture and play and humor, even in the midst of the disaster.

Danticat: It’s very important. Haiti is a sort of republic of NGOs. According to the Clinton Foundation, even before the earthquake there were 10,000 NGOs operating in Haiti—and there may be even more now. The good ones operate with the notion that “If we were to leave today, we would have left something behind. We would have taught people something they can pass on.” That’s probably easier to do with the arts.

Coffey: That also comes from the legacy. The arts can remind us of the resources we have internally. Are there other artists who have a similar philosophy to yours?

Danticat: Many of them! For example, the writer Julia Alvarez. She has a farm in the Dominican Republic, and aside from writing great novels, she grows coffee: it’s fair-trade and organic, and the people who work on the farm learn to read and write during their time there. Sandra Cisneros is another role model. She created a writers’ colony, a house where writers come and stay and work. I’m still trying to figure out what I can do. Before my uncle died, he had a school, so I worked through him. But since he passed on, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do, with my limited time and my small children. I’ve always wanted to support what others do, to add my voice to someone else’s efforts. There are many efforts that are worth supporting in that way. I don’t need to start a new one.

Coffey: You’re so open and fluid— how do you protect yourself? How do you set boundaries?

Danticat: My little children set them for me. There is simply a limit to what you can do when you have little kids. It’s easy to say no with a child screaming in the background. And people understand those limits, strangely.