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Edwidge Danticat ‘Creating Dangerously’

03 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Haitian born writer, Edwidge Danticat published a collection of essays in 2010: Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2010). After watching the BBC 2 programme, Caribbean with Simon Reeve, (aired on BBC 2, 22 March 2015) on Haiti, and after the earthquake in Nepal, Danticat’s evocative collection came to mind, and with it, a desire to write about the gap that exists between the writer, the academic (and travel writer/broadcaster), and the individual for whom trauma, injustice, and poverty are a daily burden.

Danticat writes:

“The immigrant artist shares with all other artists the desire to interpret and possibly remake his or her own world. So though we may not be creating as dangerously as our forebears – though we are not risking torture, beatings, execution, though exile does not threaten us into perpetual silence – still, while we are at work bodies are littering the streets somewhere. People are buried under rubble somewhere. Mass graves are being dug somewhere, shielding their heads from the rain, closing their eyes, covering their ears, to shut out the sounds of military ‘aid’ helicopters. And still, many are reading, and writing, quietly, quietly” (p.18).

In the BBC programme, Reeves shows how 5 years on from the horrific earthquake of 2010, parts of Haiti are still in rubble, still waiting for promised aid, and people still living in “makeshift tent cities”. The programme is keen to celebrate the forgotten beauty of this island and suggests that its recovery may be held in attracting more tourism to the region. I am still deciding if this programme is any different to other neo-colonial broadcasts that are dangerously invested in the exotic imaginings of the Caribbean that tell us much more about the European imperial imagination than the complex and heady mix of beauty and tragedy that make up this Island (and many other Caribbean islands).

Danticat continues:

“While I was ‘at work’ at 4:53pm., on January 12, 2010, the ground was shaking and killing more than two hundred thousand people in a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti. And even before the first aftershock, people were calling me asking ‘Edwidge, what are you going to do? When are you going back? Could you come on television or on the radio and tell us how you feel? Could you write us fifteen hundred words or less?’” (19).

Danticat’s essays reflect on what it means to be a writer whose words have evolved from birth and upbringing in a country of crisis, the exile caused by the honesty of these words, and the guilt and self-doubt about the observational practice that defines the writer’s task. And what about the reader of this work, the academic consumer, for are we just feasting on the tragedy and exile of Others? For Danticat, these are words that risk life; the stories Danticat tells mean that she will not return to Haiti to live; she is exiled, in order to create dangerously, in order to continue telling stories that share the brutality and horrors of a dictatorship but also the bravery of the people risking life and literally limbs in order for the world to hear. The stakes are high and the results are an honest and consuming collection of intelligently crafted essays. The least that I can do as a western academic/consumer/onlooker is to respond (ethically and thoughtfully) to this brilliant work, and others like it, regardless of the discomfort I feel because of my observational gaze. Because it has to be read.

One essay in particular that captured my imagination is “Chapter 7: Bicentennial”. In January 2004, Haiti observed 200 years of Independence but rather than a national celebration, the anniversary passed “midst national revolt” (100). “Perhaps, had it been given a fair chance in its beginning, Haiti might have flourished and prospered” (100). Danticat draws on the tragic ironies and contradictions of colonialism and slavery that saw North America flourish and Haiti disintegrate post Independence. Thomas Jefferson celebrated the French Revolution and the power and importance of insurgency, yet he was fearful of Haiti and its bloody, twelve-year revolution for Independence, and refused to acknowledge Haiti’s Independence when it finally came: “How could the man who wrote about freedom in such transcendent terms have failed to hear echoes of his own country’s revolutionary struggle, and victory, in the Haitians’ urgent desire for self-rule?” And instead “declaring its leaders ‘cannibals of the terrible republic’” (98).

At the centre of Haiti’s communal re-memberance of this twelve-year slave uprising is a man, Toussaint L’Ouverture and the vodou god, Ogoun. L’Ouverture begins a Vodou ceremony and calls upon the God of war, Ogoun; he is transformed into a warrior and leads his soldiers in a twelve-year battle against the French colonial masters, which, against all the odds, achieves Independence. This is what the people remember. This is what is passed from mother to daughter, father to son. This is also recorded by the historian C.L.R. James in “The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution” (Penguin Books: London, first published 1938, 2001 edition).

Danticat refers to Cuban author Alejo Carpentier and his 1949 novel “The Kingdom of this World” in which he combines myth and memory, “magical realism with historic facts” to write this story of Haiti’s journey to Independence, which he describes as the ‘real maravilloso’ the real marvellous.

Danticat continues:

“the real marvellous [sic], which we have come to know as magic realism, lives and thrives in past and present Haiti, just as Haiti’s revolution does. The real marvellous is in the extraordinary and the mundane, the beautiful and the repulsive, the spoken and the unspoken. It is in the enslaved African princes who believed they could fly and knew the paths of the clouds and the language of the forests but could no longer recognize themselves and the so-called New World. It is in the elaborate vèvès, or cornmeal drawings, sketched in the soil at Vodou ceremonies to draw attention from the gods. It is in the thunderous response from gods such as Ogoun, the god of war, who speak in the hearts of men and women who, in spite of their slim odds accept nothing less than total freedom.

Whenever possible, Haitians cite their historical and spiritual connection to this heroic heritage by invoking the names of one or all of the founders of the country: Toussaint L’Ouverture, Henri Christophe, and Jean–Jacques Dessalines” (103).

At the heart of this country’s painful journey through enslavement and Independence, dictatorships and national revolt, natural tragedy and crippling poverty is a spirit of resistance that is insightfully summarised by Danticat in this paragraph. The real marvellous is etched in the very fabric of their beings, to give hope, freedom, survival. I hope that those in Nepal reeling from nature’s painful blow are given glimpses of the ‘real marvellous’ in the horrors that they face, to empower them with a spirit of resistance, so maybe they can “read and write quietly, quietly” long after the media has left and the aid helicopters have ceased to come.

Jackie Kay’s encounter with double-consciousness and religion

30 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh in the 1960s to a Nigerian father, and a white mother from the Highlands. She was adopted by a white couple who were active members of the Communist party. And she is a graduate of, and holds an honorary doctorate from, the University of Stirling. She is the author of novels such as The Trumpet (Picador: London, 1998) and collections of poetry such as The Adoption Papers (Bloodaxe Books: Northumberland, 1991). She has recently published her witty and heartfelt memoirs, Red Dust Road (Picador: London, 2001), about her upbringing and being reunited with her birth parents. The opening chapter is an amusing account of her first meeting with her birth father in a hotel room in Nigeria, which raises fascinating questions about ‘religion’, and identity:

And now we’re in the room. I’m about to have a conversation with my birth father for the first time.

Jonathan is moving about from foot to foot, shifting his weight from side to side, like a man who is about to say something life-changing. He begins: ‘Before we can proceed with this meeting, I would like to pray for you and to welcome you to Nigeria.’ I feel alarmed. Extreme religion scares the hell out of me. It seems to me like a kind of madness. But it is obvious to me that Jonathan won’t be able to talk at all if I try and skip the sermon, ‘OK, then,’ and he says, ‘Sit, please.’ And I sit.

He plucks the Bible from the plastic bag. Then he immediately starts whirling and twirling around the blue hotel room, dancing and clapping his hands above his head, then below his waist, pointing his face up at the ceiling and then down to the floor, singing, ‘O, God Almighty, O God Almighty, O God Almighty, we welcome Jackie Kay to Nigeria. Thank you…’ He does some fancy footwork. He’s incredibly speedy for a man of seventy-three. He’s whirling like a dervish.

I shift uneasily in my seat. Christ Almighty, my father is barking mad…

When I tell my mum about it on the phone, down an incredibly clear line from Abuja to Glasgow, how he doesn’t want to tell any of his children, and how I must remain a secret, how he feels I am his past sin, she says: ‘By God, did we rescue you!’ (Kay, 2010: 3-11).

As an academic in Scotland specialising in critical religion and culture, and in postcolonial literature, what do I do with this extract? As a teacher, and a researcher, here are some of the questions I would start with: How do we make sense of the concept of ‘religion’ that is portrayed? What does it tell us about national identity, about Scottish identity? What role does the humour play? How can this whole extract inform us to think creatively about writing about religion and postcolonial literature?

In many ways, the reader is presented with the meeting of European rational thought, and non-western modes of thought. The awkwardness of this incredibly personal moment makes us laugh. For Jackie Kay this is the meeting with the fabric of herself, her ancestry, and therefore a significant part of her identity, an identity that is also rooted in European and Scottish rational thought, an identity that rests on a safe distance maintained between religious and secular spaces. The imposition of this almost ecstatic religious display within the confines of a Hilton hotel room leaves Jackie Kay in a state of semi-consciousness: “I’ve zoned out now, drugged by his voice. I go in and out of consciousness like somebody who’s very ill. I can’t see properly” (Kay, 2010: 6). Kay playfully suggests that she has succumbed to a religious trance and is loosing grip on her post-Enlightenment, rational, secular self. I am intrigued by the complexity and contradictions of this exchange; the banal yet often embedded notion of appropriate religious behaviour or the impact of colonial violence? Are we laughing because we can safely sit in our armchairs knowing that we are choosing not to believe, or that we at least know how to contain our religious self appropriately? Or what about what Kay sees, which is the crude imposition of Christianity on African culture leaving behind a ludicrous mimicry and madness. To classify Jonathan’s display as a colonial mimicry is to subjugate and ‘exoticise’ his voice again, but this time by the western (postcolonial) academic. Graham Huggan talks about the risk that the marketing of postcolonial literature takes by ‘replicating the exotic consumption of otherness’ (Huggan, 2001: 37). Is our laughter merely a crude consumption of this display of ‘otherness’?

Mary Keller states that if we, as western academics, continue to correlate the word ‘religion’ with the word ‘belief’, we continue to limit our understanding of “religiousness in the modern world”. She writes: “those whose religiousness is expressed in their work, in their wars… or in public displays have slid into the anachronistic space of backwardness. They are suspected of being mentally needy because they cannot contain their bubble of belief properly” (Keller, 2002: 7). Kay’s diagnosis that her father is indeed insane makes us laugh; it makes us laugh because we are uncomfortable with this inappropriate display of religiousness, and made reassuringly comfortable again with Kay’s playful diagnosis of her birth father being mentally needy, so we can section this display off into a safe category, mentally ill.

But there is a more personal story, with sadness and humour, which goes beyond academic categorisations and theories. Kay’s upbringing as a black child, with white parents, in a predominantly white suburb of Glasgow, gave her an identity of difference, of both wanting to belong and wanting to understand her difference more fully. She describes the moment she arrives in the Igbo village of her ancestors and father. She takes off her shoes and walks down the red dust road:

The earth is so copper warm and beautiful and the green of the elephant grasses so lushly green they make me want to weep. I feel such a strong sense of affinity with the colours and the landscape, a strong sense of recognition. There’s a feeling of liberation, and exhilaration, that at last, at last, at last I’m here. It feels a million miles from Glasgow, from my lovely Fintry Hills, but, surprisingly, it also feels like home (Kay, 2010: 213).

But then only hours later, her affinity with the land is shaken as the local villagers, look at her and gather around her saying “Oyibo”, meaning white person:

I spent some of my childhood wishing I was white like the other kids and feeling like I stuck out like a sore thumb; and now in Nigeria, I’m wishing I was black and feeling like I stick out like a sore thumb. It’s the first time in my life that I have properly understood what it means being mixed race (Kay, 2010: 216).

This neither-nor identity, or what W. E. B. DuBois called “double consciousness”, (DuBois, 1903/1994: 2) leaves Kay searching for her multiple homelands. She is one of many ‘hyphenated bodies’, to take Vijay Mishra’s term (Mishra, 1996), from diasporas across the world. In Kay’s case, this trauma is even more astute for it is the personal separation from her birth parents.

Jackie Kay’s memoir demonstrates and celebrates the complexity of Scottish identity and culture; a place that, especially now in the eve of the referendum on Independence, is even more aware of its borders, of its imaginary and real homelands scattered around the world, and its relationship with the imperial centre. Jackie Kay allows us to see that its beauty is in its fluid borders and global presence.

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Works cited:

  • W.E.B. DuBois The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Publications, 1903/1994).
  • Graham Huggan The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, (London: Routledge, 2001).
  • Jackie Kay Red Dust Road (London: Picador, 2010).
  • Mary Keller The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power and Spirit Possession (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002).
  • Vijay Mishra “The diasporic imaginary: theorizing the Indian diaspora” in Textual Practice 10 (3) 1996: pp. 421 – 447.