Edwidge Danticat - Create Dangerously

Chapter 6 is taken partially from the essay “Out of the Shadows” in The Progressive (June 2006).

Chapter 7 is taken partially from in the article “Thomas Jefferson: The Private War: Ignoring the Revolution Next Door” in Time (July 05, 2004). Other material is from the introduction to The Kingdom of This World , by Alejo Carpentier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).

Chapter 8 is taken partially from the essay “Another Country” in The Progressive (Fall 2005).

Chapter 9 is taken partially from the article “On Borrowed Wings” in The Telegraph India (October 2004).

Chapter 12 is taken partially from the article “A Little While” in the New Yorker (February 1, 2010). Other material is taken partially from the article “Aftershocks: Bloodied, shaken-and beloved” in the Miami Herald (January 17, 2010).

Daniel Morel and Jane Regan of Wozo Productions provided the footage of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin referred to in this chapter. Louis Drouin’s final statement was published in Prosper Avril, From Glory to Disgrace: The Haitian Army, 1804-1994 (Parkland, FL: Universal Publishers, 1999). “Create Dangerously” Albert Camus’ lecture, which was delivered at the University of Uppsala in December 1957, is reprinted in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: Vintage International, 1995.) The Le Matin quotation is from Bernard Diederich and Al Burt, Papa Doc: The Truth about Haiti Today (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969). All Ralph Waldo Emerson quotations are from Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems , edited and with a foreword by Robert D. Richardson (New York: Bantam Classics, 1990). The Roland Barthes quotation “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” is from the essay “The Death of the Author” in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978) Translations from Dany Laferrière’s Je suis un écrivain japonais (Paris: Grasset, 2008) and from Jan J. Dominique’s Mémoire errante (Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2007) were done by me. The “We have still not had a death” quotation from Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is from the Perennial Classics edition (New York: Harper, 1998). The Toni Morrison quotation paraphrased in this chapter is “What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company,” from Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture in literature delivered in Sweden on December 7, 1993, and printed in The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993 (New York: Knopf, 1994). The quotations from Albert Camus’ Caligula are from the book Caligula and Three Other Plays by Albert Camus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). The quotations from Alice Walker are from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1983).

The Michèle Montas quotation “I was no longer willing to go to another funeral” is from an interview with Bob Garfield for On the Media , a segment titled “Haiti’s Media Crisis,” March 14, 2003. For a better understanding of Jean Dominique and Michèle Montas, see the documentary The Agronomist , directed by Jonathan Demme. The quotations from Mémoire errante (Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2007) in this chapter and the others were translated by me.

The quotations from Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy are from the translation by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur (New York: Modern Library, 2009). The quotation by Rose-Myriam Réjouis is also from that edition. Jan J. Dominique’s comments regarding Jacques Roumain are taken from her essay “Roumain et la dévoreuse de mots: L’adolescente et les livres,” published in Mon Roumain à Moi (Port-au-Prince: Presses Nationales d’Haiti, 2007). The quotation from the essay was translated by me. The W.E.B. Dubois quotation starting “The United States is at war with Haiti” can be found in W.E.B. Dubois: A Reader , edited by David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).

Except where indicated, the Alèrte Bélance quotations are from Beverly Bell, Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). The quotations from and references to Toni Morrison’s Beloved are from the Vintage International edition (New York: Vintage, 1987).

The Thomas Jefferson quotations can be found at the Library of Congress’s American Memory Archives: The Thomas Jefferson Papers 1606-1827 at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers. I also use Notes on the State of Virginia , edited by William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). Toussaint L’Ouverture’s speech that begins “In overthrowing me… ” is widely circulated and paraphrased. I am using the version that is in Ralph Korngold, Citizen Toussaint (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979). For a recent biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture, see Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007). The edition of Alejo Carpentier’s Kingdom of This World referenced and quoted here was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2006. Alejo Carpentier’s comments about Haiti and magic realism were reprinted in Cristina Garcia, ed., Cubanisimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature (New York: Vintage, 2003)

The quotation from Their Eyes Were Watching God is from the Harper Collins Perennial edition (New York: Harper Collins, 1999.) The Masood Farivar quotation is from his essay “Man on the Path,” in 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11 , edited by Ulrich Baer (New York: New York University Press, 2002). The Isabel Allende quotation is from My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey through Chile , translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).

The Wole Soyinka poem “New York, USA” is from Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1988.) “i have not written one word / no poetry in the ashes south of canal street” is from the poem “first writing since” by Suheir Hammad published in Trauma at Home: After 9/11 , edited by Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.) The Ralph Ellison short story “Flying Home” is found in the book Flying Home , edited by John F. Callahan (New York: Vintage International, 1996). The quotation “On Wednesday the 18th of February, 1931, I will take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive me, I loved you all” is from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (New York: Vintage International, 1977.) The Ralph Waldo Emerson quotations here are from the essay “The Poet” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems , edited and with a foreword by Robert D. Richardson (New York: Bantam Classics, 1990). The Adrian Dannat quotation concerning Michael Richards is from Michael Richards’s obituary in the Independent on September 24, 2001. The Moukhtar Kocache quotation is from C. Carr, “Lost Horizons: An Artist Dead, a Downtown Arts Organization in Ruins,” Village Voice , September 18, 2001. The quote from Assotto Saint is from Spells of a Voodoo Doll: The Poems, Fiction, Essays and Plays of Assotto Saint (New York, Richard Kasak Books, 1996).