Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [0]
The Toni Morrison Lecture Series
cosponsored by Princeton University Center for African
American Studies and Princeton University Press
CREATE DANGEROUSLY
The Immigrant Artist at Work
Edwidge Danticat
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright 2010 © by Edwidge Danticat
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Danticat, Edwidge, 1969-
Create dangerously : the immigrant artist at work / Edwidge Danticat.
p. cm.—(Toni Morrison lecture series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-14018-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Danticat, Edwidge,
1969- 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Emigration
and immigration. 4. Haiti—Social conditions—20th century. 5. Expatriate
artists—United States. 6. Artists—Haiti. I. Title.
PS3554.A5815Z463 2010
813′.54—dc22
[B] 2010010302
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
two hundred thousand and more
This is the fiction of beginnings, couched in the past tense. But the
chants are not in memoriam. They may be heard as a celebration of
each contemporary recapitulation of that first creation.
—Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work
CHAPTER 2
Walk Straight
CHAPTER 3
I Am Not a Journalist
CHAPTER 4
Daughters of Memory
CHAPTER 5
I Speak Out
CHAPTER 6
The Other Side of the Water
CHAPTER 7
Bicentennial
CHAPTER 8
Another Country
CHAPTER 9
Flying Home
CHAPTER 10
Welcoming Ghosts
CHAPTER 11
Acheiropoietos
CHAPTER 12
Our Guernica
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
CHAPTER 1
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work
On November 12, 1964, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a huge crowd gathered to witness an execution. The president of Haiti at that time was the dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who was seven years into what would be a fifteen-year term. On the day of the execution, he decreed that government offices be closed so that hundreds of state employees could be in the crowd. Schools were shut down and principals ordered to bring their students. Hundreds of people from outside the capital were bused in to watch.
The two men to be executed were Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin. Marcel Numa was a tall, dark-skinned twenty-one-year-old. He was from a family of coffee planters in a beautiful southern Haitian town called Jérémie, which is often dubbed the “city of poets.” Numa had studied engineering at the Bronx Merchant Academy in New York and had worked for an American shipping company.
Louis Drouin, nicknamed Milou, was a thirty-one-year-old light-skinned man who was also from Jérémie. He had served in the U.S. army—at Fort Knox, and then at Fort Dix in New Jersey—and had studied finance before working for French, Swiss, and American banks in New York. Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin had been childhood friends in Jérémie.
The men had remained friends when they’d both moved to New York in the 1950s, after François Duvalier came to power. There they had joined a group called Jeune Haiti, or Young Haiti, and were two of thirteen Haitians who left the United States for Haiti in 1964 to engage in a guerrilla war that they hoped would eventually topple the Duvalier dictatorship.
The men of Jeune Haiti spent three months fighting in the hills and mountains of southern Haiti and eventually most of them died in battle. Marcel Numa was captured by members of Duvalier’s army while he was shopping for food in an open market, dressed as a peasant. Louis Drouin was wounded