Every so often, I stumble across a book that is not merely interesting or entertaining, but actually challenges my preconceptions and makes me head for the research shelves to check presented facts: this is just such a book. Written in a clear, concise style, Edwige Danticat’s Create Dangerously meanders through the author’s personal life, weaving family matters over and through a backdrop of Haitian-American history.
Beginning with an account of the execution of two political dissidents in 1964 Haiti, this novel links past and present, swirling from political to personal without interruption. Create Dangerously returns, over and over, to the power and the danger of creativity: a power that upsets dictators and family members in every culture across the globe, a danger that can get brave artists and writers killed or expelled for showing their truths to the world. Repeatedly the author brings up questions, some explicitly stated, others implied: how does one create when writing down your true thoughts, your true experiences, can get you killed? For someone brave enough to risk their life by advancing dangerous political views, how hard is it to embarrass a family member with a public account of a true story? Where is the line between political and personal, if there truly is such a line in the first place?
The grey-toned cover, resembling a doodle-filled sketchbook page and reminiscent of a mass grave site, warns readers that a dark journey lies within, and that promise is amply filled. This is not an easy book to read; it is not particularly entertaining. Disturbing, thought-provoking, controversial in spots, and quietly, insistently passionate throughout: those are better descriptions to use.
Mini-stories within the overarching theme are brought to life with carefully chosen details: the woman whose only daughter is buried in a “beautiful turquoise three-tiered mausoleum” beside their “modest two-room home made of limestone walls and a tin roof”; another woman, attacked by a paramilitary group and left for dead, whose husband, “because she could not, put the earrings on her ears. Then he sat down next to her, as though to shield her from the camera.”
The forgetfulness of the author’s aging aunt echoes against the larger tendency of the human race to forget or gloss over our own identities, to turn the past into something we can be comfortable remembering instead of the often ugly truth: and that, in turn, leads the reader back into a realization that the truth is a dangerous commodity in many places.
This book is a good choice for anyone interested in exploring the sharp and jagged areas of life; not so much for anyone looking for beach reading. For those readers intrigued by Create Dangerously, Danticat has several other award-winning books already out, such as her 1998 novel The Farming of Bones and her 2007 memoir Brother, I’m Dying.
Danticat herself does not have a web site, but Knopf/Vintage Books maintains a FaceBook page for her here.
- Leona Wisoker
(Princeton University Press, 2010)
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