Edwidge Danticat - Create Dangerously

For much of Hector Hyppolite’s life story, I am grateful to Selden Rodman’s The Miracle of Haitian Art (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974) as well as Selden Rodman’s Where Art Is Joy, Haitian Art: The First Forty Years (New York: Ruggles de Latour, 1988). Basquiat’s biography, particularly his “Papa, I will be very famous one day,” is from Phoebe Hoban’s Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1998). Demosthenes Davvetas’s interview with Jean-Michel Basquiat was published in New Art International , no. 3 (October-November 1998), and was reprinted in the art catalog Basquiat (Milan: Edizioni Charta and Civico Museo Revoltella Trieste, 1999). The Miller/Basquiat interview ( Jean-Michel Basquiat: An Interview , ART/new york, no. 30A, 1989) is from Inner Tube Video. The “Madison Avenue Primitive” reference is from Adam Gopnik, “Madison Avenue Primitive,” New Yorker , November 9, 1992.

The poem “Tourist” by Felix Morisseau-Leroy was translated from Haitian Creole by Jack Hirschman and is published widely on the Internet as well as in Haitiad and Oddities , edited by Jeffrey Knapp (Austin: University of Texas, 1991). The Junot Díaz quotation is from his essay “Becoming a Writer,” published in O: The Oprah Magazine , November 2009. Selden Rodman and Carole Cleaver tell a version of the story about Gran Brigit and the cemetery tree in their book Spirits of the Night: The Vaudun Gods of Haiti (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1992). The Susan Sontag quotations are from Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1973). The Roland Barthes quotations are from Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography , translated by Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1973). Jane Regan and Daniel Morel’s book on the Septentrional has not yet been published. The quotations are from a manuscript in progress. Albert Camus’ short story “The Artist at Work” is reprinted in Albert Camus, The Plague, the Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2004).

The Jean Genet quotation, “Your song was very beautiful,” is from the English edition of Jean Genet’s Les Nègres-The Blacks (New York: Grove Press, 1960). The Dolores Dominique Neptune quotations are from an e-mail message dated January 30, 2010, sent by Claudine Michel, Professor, Department of Black Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. The Evelyne Trouillot quotation is from Evelyne Trouillot, “Aftershocks,” Op-ed, New York Times , January 20, 2010. The Lyonel Trouillot quotation is from Lyonel Trouillot, “Carnet de Bord à Haiti: Fais divers de nos mauvais jours, 5/9,” published on January 24, 2010, at www.lepoint.fr; the translation is mine.

Adam (Biblical figure), 5-6

Afterwords: Novelists on Their Novels , 33

AIDS, 89, 91

airline flights, 115-21

Alexis, Jacques Stephen, 11-14

Allende, Isabel, 112-13

Allende, Salvador, 112

Alliance Française, 7, 43-44

Almodóvar, Pedro, 47

Alphonse-Férère, Gérard, 49

Alvin Ailey Dance Company, 129

Amado, Jorge, 15

andaki (code), 65

Les Araignées du soir (Spiders of the Night), 68

Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 43, 47, 48, 77, 83, 99-101, 104, 142, 164

art: dangerousness of, 8-11, 19-20, 148

Haitian, 8-14, 44, 127

and persuasion, 7-8.

See also writers

Artibonite Valley, 51-52

assassinations, 41, 46, 48, 53-58, 63, 65, 71

attachés, 77-80

bagay la (the thing) [Haitian earthquake], 168

Barthes, Roland, 15, 139, 141, 147-48

Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 127-35

To Repel Ghosts , 133-34

Toussaint L’Ouverture Versus Savonarola , 132-33

Untitled 1982 , 132

Baudelaire, Charles, 60

Beauséjour, Haiti, 21-40

Belafonte, Harry, 83

Bel Air, Haiti, 7-8, 13, 170-72

Bélance, Alèrte, 46, 73-85

Bell, Beverly, Walking on Fire , 85

Beloved (film), 84

Benoit, Patricia, 76-77, 81-84

Bible, 12

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 99, 132

Bouckman (Boukman), 102

Breath, Eyes, Memory (Danticat), 31-35

Breton, André, 129

Brigit, Gran, 149

Bush, George W., 108

camps, 18, 43, 164-65, 169

Camus, Albert, 9-11, 18

Caligula , 6-8, 12, 16

“Create Dangerously,” 13

“Jonas ou l’artiste au travail” (Jonah, or the Artist at Work), 148

Capote, Truman, 129

Carpentier, Alejo, The Kingdom of This World , 101-5

Carter, Jimmy, 141

catastrophes, 107-13, 146-47

Center for Constitutional Rights, 84

Central African Republic, 100

Le Centre d’Art, Port-au-Prince, 128, 129

Cervantes, Miguel de, 15

Césaire, Aimé, 9, 15

Cézanne, Paul, 71

Charles, Jacqueline, 146-47

Charles, Jhon, 163, 165-66, 168-70

The Charlie Rose Show (television show), 46

Christophe, Henri, 102-4, 164

Ciné Club, 43-44

cinema, 43-46

Clinton, Bill, 83

Le Club de Bonne Humeur, 7-8

coffee, 29, 35-37, 39-40

Colette, 11

USNS Comfort , 173

common humanity, 109-13

Cook, Mercer, 45

Corneille, Pierre, Le Cid , 6

Cortés, Hernán, 132

courage, of artists, 10, 148-49

Courage and Pain (documentary), 73-85

creation myths, 5-7

Cuba, 101-3

Dalembert, Louis Phillipe, 13

Daniels, Josephus, 64

Dannat, Adrian, 125

Danticat, Kelly, 75

Davvetas, Demosthenes, 132

Day, Edner, 13

death: and deportation, 88-93

in Egypt, 19-20

as family matter, 22-27, 31, 38-40, 88-96

in Haiti, 16-17, 137

last image before, 137

photography and, 139-40, 142-47

Vodou and, 134-35

writers and, 17-20

declarations of independence: American, 98

Haitian, 104

Delens (cousin’s roommate), 89-91, 94

Délira Délivrance (fictional character), 45-46

Demme, Jonathan, 42-43, 46, 50, 55, 84

The Agronomist , 52-53

Depestre, René, 9

Deren, Maya, vii, 131-32

Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 103-4, 164

The Dew Breaker (Danticat), 11, 62

Díaz, Junot, 149

Diderot, Denis, 15

disasters, 107-13, 146-47

Dominican Republic, 70

Dominique, Jan J., 59, 61-66, 70-71, 159

Mémoire d’une amnésique (Memoirs of an Amnesiac), 61-65

Mémoire errante (Wandering Memory), 52, 66, 70

Dominique, Jean, 41-58, 65, 70-71, 83, 159

Mais je suis belle (But I Am Beautiful), 44

Dominique, Philippe, 42

Donna (airline passenger), 117-18

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 71

Drouin, Louis, 1-8, 12-14, 20, 44, 63, 137-41, 148-50

Du Bois, W.E.B., 64

Dumas, Alexandre, fils, Camille , 60

Dumas, Alexandre, père, The Three Musketeers , 60

Dumas, Marie-Cesette, 60

Duvalier, François “Papa Doc,” 1-2, 5-9, 12, 16, 42, 63, 67-69, 137, 140, 143

Duvalier, Jean-Claude, 10, 69

dyaspora , 49-51. See also exile

Egypt, 19-20

Ellison, Ralph Waldo, 10

“Flying Home”, 124, 126

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 10, 16, 124-26

Erzulie Freda, 129, 133, 134

Étonnants Voyageurs, 160

Euripides, 11

Eve (Biblical figure), 5-6, 10

executions, 1-8, 12, 63, 137-39, 149-50

exile, 6, 69. See also dyaspora

Fanon, Frantz, 9