Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
At first I wasn't sure if this book would speak to me since I'm not an immigrant artist as Danticat describes. But the more I read the more I realized she was not just speaking of writing from a place of danger and displacement. She's talking about the danger of going deep into one's own truth and creating fearlessly from that place. Since that is exactly what I seek to do as a writer I found this book inspiring and challenging. It encourages me to approach my work again and again with diligence...
This collection of essays is as delicate as it is powerful. Danticat has a sophisticated intelligence and a complete passion for her homeland. We do not have much in terms of glimpses into the troubled past and beautiful traditions of Haiti; Danticat's is a voice that crosses the water, that bridges the diasporic space between countries.
I did not intend to read this book of essays so fast. I started it, thinking I'd read a couple essays here and there, maybe one before bed, but alas, I was engrossed. Danticat is not a historian or even a editorialist, yet I learned so much about Haiti and what it means to be a Haitian immigrant in the 21st century from her book. I probably would not have been as interested as I ended up being had I not already read most of Danticat's fiction. For fans of her novels and stories, this book is not...
“It may be said that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge--which gives rise to profound uncertainties--that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not a...
I thought this would serve as a unique writing muse or motivator and I also thought it would stem from a perspective accounting of varied immigrant viewpoints of multiple nationalities. It proved to be neither. Well-written, often beautiful and composed with a crispness that transports you, this is almost solely autobiographical and thus almost exclusively focused on Haiti and her perspective. So it was a letdown for me due to too casual a review of the back cover description, though it appeals
Create Dangerously is personal, philosophical and vivid. Edwidge Danticat explores the role of the immigrant writer through touching stories of her Haitian family and friends. As with any collection, some of the essays are more captivating than others. I was particularly drawn to her accounts about journalist and icon Jean Dominique, 9/11, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and her powerful essay about visiting Haiti weeks after the earthquake hit in 2010. Her tales give the reader a sense of her respo...
Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work is an engaging collection of essays that takes its cue from Albert Camus' Create Dangerously. Decades earlier, Camus wrote about the challenges and responsibilities of the artist. Danticat takes a personalized approach to this challenge emphasizing Haitian artists, the widespread devastation of the 2010 earthquake centered near Port-au-Prince, voices of the Haitian diaspora as well as Danticat's own experiences moving back and f...
I am always a little leery when a favorite writer publishes a collection of essays relying heavily on previously published work. Oftentimes, I am deeply dissatisfied. The material doesn't hold together, and I find that the writer has done disappointingly little work to update the material or to excise repetitions among the essays. This was not the case as I read Edwidge Danticat's new book, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Danticat's collection is surprisingly fresh (almost ever...
I loved this book because of how she address her experiences as being a Haitian/writer/immigrant and how one identity often feeds another. Her commentary in "The Other Side of the Water" on going home to bury a cousin who she barely knew despite them both living in America and in "Walk Straight" about visiting a great aunt depicts a universal experience of how our family shapes our lives and how you never realize how little time you have with family until they are gone. "Our Guernica" puts a fa
I just started Danticat's new book, and I wanted to read aloud the first chapter through a loudspeaker in a van driving through the streets, like in the old-fashioned way politicians used to advertise their candidacies. I realize, though, that shouting it might not meet the spirit of her first chapter....but I think you get my point: everyone should read it. But, again, such a dictatorial mode would be antithetical to Danticat's message. And around and around I go....The only problem with her bo...
Awesome, incredibly well written.
“If we began to put plaques all over Port-au-Prince to commemorate deaths,” a friend had once told me when I’d pointed this out to him, “we would have room for little else.”---“In the tent clinic I say hello to Monica. She looks up at me and blinks but otherwise does not react. Her eyes are dimmed and it appears that she may still be in shock. To watch your house and neighborhood, your city, crumble, then to watch your father die, and then nearly to die yourself, all before your tenth birthday,
Danticat's prose is beautiful, seamlessly weaving together personal narratives with historical ones, along with familial stories that fall somewhere in between the private and the public memory. The overall collection is thoughtfully curated so one essay flows easily into the next, each building off and evoking themes/memories of the previous pieces. As a reader I was often humbled by the international, intergenerational web of context Danticat develops throughout the collection, and was deeply