"On Danticat, Camus, and the Art of Exile," by Gabrielle BELLOT

Julia Gaffield Discussion

On Danticat, Camus, and the Art of Exile

GABRIELLE BELLOT REMINDS US THAT IMMIGRANT ART IS AMERICAN ART

By Gabrielle Bellot

“Create dangerously,” the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat famously wrote in her 2010 nonfiction collection of the same name, “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.”

For Danticat, this mantra applied to writers in general, but it hewed especially close for immigrant writers, like herself, as she had been in Haiti but fled with her family to New York when she was 12. Exile, in particular, obsessed her, feeding her creation myths, her dreams, her books. “All artists, writers among them, have several stories—one might call them creation myths—that haunt and obsess them,” she wrote, noting that even the myth of Adam and Eve—the “biggest creation myth of all,” she calls it—is about “banishment, exile.” Had they been executed for taking a bite of that fabled fruit of moral knowledge, she notes, the story would have been over; the story lived on because it was about exile rather than execution, just as so many stories, at core, bloom out of some form of banishment or expulsion.

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