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The Immigrant Artist at Work
The Toni Morrison Lecture Series
Princeton University Press
September 2010
On Sale: September 19, 2010
208 pages ISBN: 0691140189 EAN: 9780691140186 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
"Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This
is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer.
Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your
words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or
her life to read them."--Create Dangerously In this deeply personal book, the celebrated
Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and
exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist
from a country in crisis. Inspired by Albert Camus' lecture,
"Create Dangerously," and combining memoir and essay,
Danticat tells the stories of artists, including herself,
who create despite, or because of, the horrors that drove
them from their homelands and that continue to haunt them.
Danticat eulogizes an aunt who guarded her family's
homestead in the Haitian countryside, a cousin who died of
AIDS while living in Miami as an undocumented alien, and a
renowned Haitian radio journalist whose political
assassination shocked the world. Danticat writes about the
Haitian novelists she first read as a girl at the Brooklyn
Public Library, a woman mutilated in a machete attack who
became a public witness against torture, and the work of
Jean-Michel Basquiat and other artists of Haitian descent.
Danticat also suggests that the aftermaths of natural
disasters in Haiti and the United States reveal that the
countries are not as different as many Americans might like
to believe. Create Dangerously is an eloquent and moving expression of
Danticat's belief that immigrant artists are obliged to bear
witness when their countries of origin are suffering from
violence, oppression, poverty, and tragedy.
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