“Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work” and “The Other Side of the Water” by Edwidge Danticat

By examining her two essays, “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work” and “The Other Side of the Water,” we get a solid introduction to Edwidge Danticat’s life and writing style. While the former provides details about how and why she views her own writing as a rebellious art form, the latter provides a deeper look into her personal life. In the first essay, she starts off by discussing the public execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, two resistance fighters of the Papa Doc regime. She moves on to discuss various books and writings, from within Haiti and around the world (she even contemplates books by Sophocles and Camus). The key theme separating these things is that the writings were subdued forms of rebellion. Whereas the two men were caught for being explicitly rebellious, art was much more implicit. No one expected the Haitian people to seek a sense of rebellion, and thus unity, through this art form. The second essay we take a look as Danticat is tasked with taking her cousin’s corpse back to Haiti in order to be buried. In it, many of the major themes we discuss in class appeared. Out of all the themes, the idea of person being an alien, even after death, really stood out to me. After it was decided that her cousin would be taken to Haiti to be buried, Danticat needed to provide papers and proof of existence for her cousin’s corpse to be able to travel. Since her cousin entered the country illegally, he did not have the necessary paperwork. When Danticat questioned why this process why so complicated, arguing that at this point her cousin was nothing more than a “cadaver,” the funeral director said, “[It’s] because he’s an alien.” The director’s stark use of the present tense shows that even after death a person can still be an alien.

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat

In her novel, The Dew Breaker, Danticat writes about the life of a former dew breaker, or a torturer during one of Haiti’s political regimes, his family and the lives of the people around him. The style of this novel reminded me of Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, in which the plot is centered on a single family. Whereas Marshall’s book travels forward in time and mainly takes place in one setting, Danticat jumps around in time, and utilizes not only New York, but also Haiti as major settings. As I read through this book, which stayed true to Danticat’s serious and heavyhearted style of writing, I could not help but identify the major themes that appear. On a literary level, the ideas of secrets, family, death, and art appear in each chapter (noting that each chapter particularly has a unique plot). Yet, by reading on sociological or anthropological level, one can identify similar themes to ones found in our weekly articles. The one I want to focus on is the creation and maintenance of transnational networks. For each family or person that the book looks at, you can identify the existence, or lack thereof, of some transnational link to Haiti. Looking at the Beinaime family, because the father did not want to recognized as a dew breaker, he and his wife decided to abandon any transnational ties. Thus their immigrant journey is much more stereotypical, where they totally leave their life behind in Haiti, and live almost in total seclusion within America. The next case is between Nadine and her parents. This can be identified as mainly economic transnational tie. Although her parents want to connect with her on a social level, she refuses to do so. She may send remittances back to them, but she does not write letters back to them, or call as much as they’d like her to. This is very different when comparing to the case of Dany. He had the most clear and constructed transnational network. His was based on social, economic and cultural aspects. He kept in touch with his aunt by paying someone to tend to her needs and check up on her. Through this person, Dany was able to ensure his aunt’s welfare. In terms of culture, although Dany had lived in New York for a while, he did not abandon his culture. As such, he was able to mingle in the community, understanding the language and the traditions. This differs from Claude, who had a transnational network based on nothing more than blood. He has a much harder time fitting into the small Haitian village.