“Create Dangerously”: Edwidge Danticat’s profound meditation on art in exile

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 19:15:00 +0000

The most vibrant thing happening in American literature in the last 30 years or so has been the rise of writers belonging to various immigrant diaspora, writers who can fluently navigate more than one culture, who are greatly aware of the troubles and dislocations of distant and recent history, and know that these troubles aren’t exotic objects for entertainment, but that they are, instead, the crucible in which a tentative understanding of our increasingly mobile, global world might be forged.

To my taste, the greatest of these writers is Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American who has worked in many genres: the novel, the short story, the memoir, the children’s book.

In "Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work," Danticat is interested in history, in politics, in culture, in memory, in violence, in risk, in bravery, in reading, in writing, in what it takes to make things true, and most of all in understanding how the circumstances in which things are made can give rise to whatever great power they might achieve.

In mid-career, she has achieved a clear, singular and strong voice that would require something special of an audiobook narrator who wished to do it justice, and, fortunately for listeners, Kristin Kalbli, whose delivery is equally clear, singular and strong, is up to the task.

Salon.com > Haitian

“Create Dangerously”: Edwidge Danticat’s profound meditation on art in exile