Wisconsin Public Telelvision Universtiy Place  The Immigrant Artist at Work Edwidge Danticat  11/10/12 UP803  cc >> Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti in 1969. She came to the United States when she was 12 years old. She made an auspicious debut with her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and followed it with the story collection Krik? Krak! And that book was a National Book Award nominee, and that made Edwidge Danticat the youngest nominee ever. She is the author of two novels, two collections of stories, two books for young adults, and two nonfiction books, and the mother of two children. And probably these numbers are all growing as she keeps working and working and working. She's always working. One of her books, Brother, I'm Dying, was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2009, she received a MacArthur Fellowship, which is the genius award. It is a huge $500,000 no strings attached grant awarded to, and this is really important, enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society. And only four months later, Haiti was devastated by a huge earthquake. 

So no one really could have foreseen just how much that MacArthur Award would benefit not only her work and her family, but also the country of her birth. This book, Create Dangerously, emerged from the Princeton University Toni Morrison lecture series for which Edwidge was selected as the second annual honoree. She took the title from Albert Camus' last public lecture called Create Dangerously, and one of the things he said was, "For the person with creative potential, there is no wholeness except in using it." We invited Edwidge here as the second annual Mark Gates Memorial Lecturer in memory of a very dear departed friend of the Wisconsin Book Festival and a friend of a huge number of book people throughout the Midwest and throughout the world, really. He was the warmest, most generous, most joyful human being many of us ever expect to meet. So, with humility, I'm seeking to evoke a little bit of Mark's incredible energy for us all today to help us share the warmest welcome with Edwidge Danticat. [APPLAUSE]  >> Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] Thank you so much, Alison, and thank you all for coming. It's really wonderful to be back here at the Wisconsin Book Festival. The last time I was here, Mark Gates was here too, and the mic is falling.  Are we on TV? [LAUGHTER] All right, I'll just let it dangle. 

All right. Pretend you're not seeing this. [LAUGHTER] >> Do not watch the man behind the curtain. [LAUGHTER] >> I'll send you all back to Oz. [LAUGHTER] >> I like the way this looked. I thought it's very Janet Jackson. [LAUGHTER] But I didn't know how much work went into it. [LAUGHTER] So, the last time I was here for the Wisconsin Book Festival, Mark Gates was here, and I was also, Matt, where are you? Matt Rothschild from The Progressive? Yay, Matt. [APPLAUSE] Matt is the editor of The Progressive, one of the great magazines in the world. I happen to write for them now and then. 

And so, I was here with Alison and Matt and Mark, and Matt introduced me and I think Matt mistakenly said that I had won a Pulitzer or that I would win a Pulitzer. And Jeffery had actually won a Pulitzer but the person who introduced him didn't say it. [LAUGHTER] So the drinks afterward were about, oh, my god, the person who won the Pulitzer didn't get their Pulitzer mentioned while Matt was wishing a Pulitzer upon me. So it's nice to see you again, Matt. [LAUGHTER] And it's also a great honor to be here for the Mark Gates Lecture. I have many Mark Gates stories. One of which was when I just started, I started with a very small press, Soho Press, and Mark was the bookseller, but a book lover, a great lover of books with -- who was our distributor, and Soho was a very small press and they didn't really have much money for a tour, and I was touring two books. I was touring a paperback of Breath, Eyes, Memory, which is my first book, and the hardback of Kirk? Krak! my short story collection, and so I end up staying at the bookseller's house, at Mark's house. When I get there, there is two, like, massive cats, and I'm very allergic to cats. And I think, oh, my god, this means I get to stay in the fancy hotel after all. 

[LAUGHTER] But Mark just hands me some Benadryl. [LAUGHTER] And wishes me the best. Thank goodness my allergy wasn't as bad as it is now. They get worse as you get older, but it was still the warmest, even with the cat allergy I slept, the Benadryl also helped, I slept very, very well. [LAUGHTER] But he also, Mark also had this great gift of comfort. Now, at that time, if you got a bad review, the publisher, I think, if it's really bad, they just really try to find ways, you're a young writer, you're just starting out, to tell you gently. Now there's no way to do that. It's on the Twitter. It's on the, even if a kid in a basement in the most remote place writes that your book sucks, it's going to show up on the Twitter, on the Google search. There's no hiding. 

But back then, you could always take comfort in the fact that the newspaper might be wrapping fish in a week and people would forget. And so I got the most brutal review in The Farming of Bones, the second time, and something, people when you're young and you get a lot of attention, you're a person of color, sometimes some reviewers will say they're pandering to her, she has no talent. It was one of those reviews. The book was about a massacre, and I think the reviewer suggested that I should get myself massacred. So it was so bad. And then Mark was like, he sat me down and said, you know what? Don't let these things destroy you. You will last. And I said, from his mouth to God's ears. So owe him a great debt to that. That was almost 20 years now. 

So I'm very grateful to him, and it means a lot to me to be speaking at an event that bears his name. So I would like to think that Mark Gates would be particularly proud of this book, Create Dangerously, that I will share with you from. And this book is, as Alison said, it's a book that comes from a small press, and it's a book about how people come to their art. It speaks about, the subtitle of the book is The Immigrant Artist at Work, it speaks specifically about the immigrant experience but it examines, also, the role of migrations and disruptions and the creation of art. And so, the book is about how people come to their art under very difficult circumstances, and I talk about some dangerous creators, if you will. One of them is a Haitian novelist who is an idol of mine, a woman named Maie Chauvet, who wrote about the dictatorship, and when her book was about to be published, someone came to the publisher and said if she publishes this book, her entire family will be wiped out. And she had to choose between this book and her family. It's also about a man named Daniel Morel, who is one of Haiti's iconic photographers, and the portion I'll read is about him and his story. When he was a young boy, there was an execution, it was the last public execution in Haiti, and he was in a school. Schools were ordered to bring kids to the execution, and he just happened to be present at that execution. 

And he decided at that moment that he was going to be a photojournalist. That he was going to document events like this for good. To expose them rather than the way photography was being used at that time, which was for propaganda and to scare people. So, this section is about Daniel, and it goes from 1964 to 2010 when Daniel was one of the first people to photograph the earthquake in Haiti. On November 12, 1964, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a huge crowd gathered to witness an execution. The president of Haiti at that time was the dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who was seven years into what would be a fifteen-year term. On the day of the execution, he decreed that government offices be closed so that hundreds of state employees could be in the crowd. Schools were shut down and principals ordered to bring their students. Hundreds of people from outside the capital were bused in to watch. The two men to be executed were Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin. 

Marcel Numa was a tall, dark-skinned twenty-one-year-old. He was from a family of coffee planters in a beautiful southern town in Haiti called Jérémie, a town which is often dubbed the "city of poets." Numa had studied engineering at the Bronx Merchant Academy in New York and had worked for an American shipping company. Louis Drouin was a 31-year old light-skinned man who was also from Jérémie. He had served in the US army at Fort Knox, then at Fort Dix in New Jersey. The men had been friends when they'd both moved to New York in the 1950s, after Francois Duvalier came to power. There they had joined a group called Jeune Haiti, or Young Haiti, and were two of thirteen Haitians who left the United States for Haiti in 1964 to engage in a guerrilla war that they hoped would topple the dictatorship. The men of Jeune Haiti spent three months fighting in the hills and mountains of southern Haiti and eventually most of them died in battle. Marcel Numa was captured by members of Duvalier's army while he was shopping for food in an open market. Louis Drouin was wounded in battle and asked his friends to leave him behind in the woods. "According to our principles I should have committed suicide in that situation," Drouin reportedly declared in a final statement in a secret military trial. 

Two other Jeune Haiti members, he said, were wounded. One asked his best friend to finish him off; the second committed suicide. "That did not affect me," he said. "I reacted only after the disappearance of Marcel Numa, who had been sent to look for food. We were close and our parents were friends." After months of attempting to capture the men of Jeune Haiti, and after imprisoning and murdering hundreds of their relatives, Papa Doc Duvalier wanted to make a spectacle of Numa and Drouin's deaths. So on November 12, 1964, two pine poles are erected outside the national cemetery. A captive audience is gathered. Radio, print, and television journalists are summoned, and Numa and Drouin are both marched from the edge of the crowd towards the poles. Their hands are tied behind their backs. Time is slightly compressed on the copy of the film I have seen, and in some places the images skip. 

There is no sound. A large crowd stretches out far beyond the cement wall where the bound Numa and Drouin are standing. To the side is a balcony filled with schoolchildren. Some time elapses. The firing squad, seven helmeted men in khaki military uniforms, stretch out their hands on either side of their bodies. They touch each other's shoulders to position and space themselves. The police and army move the crowd back, perhaps to keep them from being hit by ricocheted bullets. The members of the firing squad pick up their Springfield rifles, load their ammunition, and then place their weapons on their shoulders. Off screen someone probably shouts, "Fire!" and they do. Numa and Drouin's heads slump sideways at the same time, showing that the shots have hit home. 

On November 12, 1964, after Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin were executed, a lanky thirteen-year-old boy, who had been standing in the back of the crowed to avoid the thunderous sounds of the executioners' guns, stepped forward as spectators and soldiers scattered. He walked toward the bullet-ridden poles, bent down in the blood-soaked dirt, and picked up the eyeglasses that Louis Drouin had been wearing. The young man, Daniel Morel, only momentarily held the eyeglasses in his hands before they were snatched away by another boy. But in the moment he had them, he had noticed tiny chunks of Drouin's brains splattered on the cracked lenses. Perhaps if he had kept them, he might have cleaned the lenses and raised them to his face to try to see the world the way it might have been reflected in a dead man's eyes. Often, in those days, the eyes of murder victims were gauged out by their murderers because it was believed that even after death the large image a person sees, their murderer's face, remains imprinted on his or her cornea as clearly as a photograph. Before witnessing the execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, Daniel Morel was not particularly interested in dead men's eyes. He had been like any other boy, going for long walks all over Port-au-Prince and playing soccer with his friends. He sometimes worked in his father's bakery and tried to climb aboard Haiti's commercial train which brought sugarcane stalks from the southern fields of Leogane to the sugar-making plant in Port-au-Prince. But the execution changed everything. 

The next day, Daniel Morel walked by a photographer's studio near his father's bakery in downtown Port-au-Prince, and on the open panel doors were enlarged photographs of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin's corpses purposely put on display as deterrents for the country's potential dissenters. These pictures were exhibited there and elsewhere for weeks, and young Daniel Morel would walk past them, and even though he had been at the execution, he saw them each day as if for the first time and wasn't able to look away. "That's when I decided to be a photojournalist," Daniel recalled, more than 45 years later. "Photography is an elegiac art," Susan Sontag writes in On Photography. "All photographs are memento mori." That is, they remind us that sooner or later the subject will no longer exist. "To take a photograph," Sontag continues, "is to participate in another person's mortality. "Photography has something to do with resurrection," Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida. "Might we not say of it what the Byzantines say of the image of Christ which impregnated St. Veronica's napkin: that it was not made by the hand of man, acheiropoietos?" Might we not say the same of all impassioned creative endeavors. "I never intended to become a photojournalist," Daniel Morel tells me more than once. "I became a photojournalist because at Numa and Drouin's execution, I felt afraid, and I never, ever wanted to feel afraid again. 

I take pictures so I am never afraid of anyone or anything.  When I take pictures, I feel like something is shielding me, like the camera is protecting me." Did he, as a boy, want to protect Numa and Drouin? I ask. He could not protect them, he said, but over the years he felt as though he's managed to protect other Numas and other Drouins with his photographs. And during this conversation, I am even more certain that to create, to create dangerously, is also to create fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us, then bravely moving forward even when it feels as though we are being chased by ghosts. Creating fearlessly, like living fearlessly, even when a great tempest is upon you. Creating fearlessly even when cast lot ho dlo across the seas. Creating fearlessly for people who see, watch, read, listen fearlessly. Writing as though nothing can or will ever stop you. Writing as though you full-heartedly believe in acheiropoietos. Thank you. 

[APPLAUSE] >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> I have my questions all written out. We'll see what happens. How did you become an artist? >> I think the interesting thing that I was trying to get these people who I talked to, whose work I studied they say to me, was to find a direct line. Like Daniel's was so clear. He could easily trace that moment. [COUGHING] Excuse me. But for a lot of us, it's a little bit hazier. I love stories. 

I grew up around some great storytellers, and I remember listening to stories and thinking, I want to do that. But I was a very shy young person, and the storytellers in my life were so extravagantly, sort of, flamboyant and extroverted. And then I started reading, and I thought, oh, this is a private way to do that. But the people I was reading, we weren't being fed our own literature at that time when I was a kid in Haiti. So I was reading people who were French or dead. And I thought, okay, to be a writer you have to be French, male, and dead. [LAUGHTER] What a hard road to travel. But I started making little books with my brothers and my cousins and things like that. I became an artist, I guess, out of a love of stories. >> I've been thinking about the progression of your work thus far. 

In general, beginning with fiction, and then going into memoir with Brother, I'm Dying, and then this book of essays, I know you have other work too, but what can you tell us about that trajectory? What's that been like? >> It's been like that because I get bored, I guess, with one thing. I love writing fiction, but I also love writing these other things. I love, when I can, writing for Matt. I haven't been as prolific for him as times past because I've been working on a novel. But I just like all these different ways of using the word, if you will. So, I started out writing fiction. My first three books were fiction. And then I did a travel narrative work called After the Dance which is about Carnival in Haiti in Jacmel, and I liked that so much I started working with already existing things. And then your challenge is the structure. What information do you use? What information don't you use? And then ended up doing memoir because, I think, that memoir came upon me, because the book I wrote, the memoir, I didn't intend to write a memoir. 

But I had this series of events in 2004 where my father was dying, my daughter was born, my uncle, who was like my second father, died in immigration custody. He was 81-years old when he died but he was always an aspiring writer. He always wanted to write his life story. So, then I started writing the memoir, kind of, in his name. But it's just actually what is capturing my attention at the time. >> And you sort of went into what I was going to ask about next. Can you tell us anything about what you've been working on or what your next book might be? >> Well, I almost, when you asking me this year, I almost said, hold on, I might come next year, but you're leaving. And I wanted to come when you're at the helm. >> Thank you for that. >> I'm working, it's been awhile since I've done fiction, but I've been working for five years on this book that, I wanted to write a book that was like a radio show. 

Radio is very big in Haiti. It's entertainment, it's news, and even just the way-- that carries over in migration. Like my mother, for example, still in New York, bought herself this very special radio that you can get all-Haitian radio. They broadcast to that radio. You have to have the radio. And she has it on all the time, and I grew up with radio in the background, both in Haiti and here. So I wanted to write a series, a book that was like a radio show. And it took me a very long time to kind of find a structure. But that book is coming out next year, next summer. It's called Claire of the Sea Light. 

It's my return to fiction. >> I'm very excited. I'm going to mark my calendar. There's a quotation that, as I was preparing for this and thinking about various things, has been coming into my mind lately. It's from George Eliot. "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?" So, my question is, how does art help us make life less difficult for each other? >> Art is such a big connector. First, it allows us a path to one another. There are places where people don't know anything about another group of people where we might never encounter each other. I would never be here with you guys if I hadn't written a book. That encounter would not have been possible. 

I think there are these ways that art connects us. Just a piece of art, you can be moved by something through time, I think. The power of a piece of art can just carry you through generations, through time, across cultures. In this book, one of the writers I talk about is Dany Laferrière. He was from Haiti but is now living in Canada, and he talks about how people always say, what kind of writer are you? Are you a Haitian writer? Are you a Canadian writer? He was living in Miami, are you an American writer? And he often says, I'm a Japanese writer. [LAUGHTER] And he says that because he says, a writer becomes a citizen of the country of his readers. In his viewing, when he's read by someone in Japan, he becomes a Japanese writer because he says when he was a boy he was reading Chekhov, Cervantes, Sophocles and all these writers in his room in --, which is a small town in Haiti, and he said of course these people were Haitian, of course Sophocles was Haitian, otherwise what was he doing in my room? [LAUGHTER] And so, I think art has that, can you imagine the comfort? Toni Morrison often says that Tolstoy wasn't writing for her. He wasn't writing for a black girl in Lorain, Ohio, or a black girl in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but this bridge comes to us through that art. And suddenly we can claim it if we want it. It's ours. 

So I think art connects us and comforts us, and it's been said many times we feel less alone, especially when we read. >> One of the things that you also talked about in Create Dangerously, not in the section you read today, was about the sort of grassroots art initiative in the 1960s in Haiti. Specifically, the community study centers in Bel Air where people would go if they didn't have electricity to study in the evening. And also, reading groups that sometimes staged classic Greek plays for safety sake. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about that? >> Well, at that time in Haiti, and even now, especially for people who are poor and very young, stylish, proud, young people who were poor, and the young men, there was sort of nothing sexier than if you could be filozof. It's literally like a philosopher, but an intellectual was so sexy. This guy is a filozof. And all the girls wanted to date the filozof. And it wasn't unusual for somebody to casually quote Voltaire. Sometimes they overdid it. 

[LAUGHTER] Right, Babette? But that's, sort of, what that aspiration that you could transcend whatever your situation was. And there were these centers because there wasn't that much electricity. So you could see it, and I still see it when I go back, especially in the rural areas, if there's one big light pole in the town where there's no electricity elsewhere, that becomes the center. The kids come there in that park in the middle of the city and gather. So where we lived, they made a cultural center there were young people could come and study. And sometimes that was the only place to study. And for young people to read these classics and interpret them, they did these things. And that still happens. For example, there are two writers,-- who are very well known. For example, they have a culture center that they started in their mother's name. 

There's another writer, Pierre Clitandre, who has a library called Bibliotheque du Soleil. So there are all these efforts still to try to continue that onto the next generation. There's FOKAL, these libraries. And the first time I went to this one particular library, the young people, they get to borrow books just like here, which didn't exist when I was there, but there's this excitement about being able to read and discuss literature that's still very strong. >> Do you see that in America too? Do you see it in the United States? A culture parallel to that in any way? >> Well, in the United States, I think, maybe there's less necessity for it. I'll give you an example. There's a school we work with in Haiti called Three Little Flowers. It was started by this brilliant linguist named Yves Demean, and he teaches in Creole. It's like a one-room schoolhouse. So my husband and I managed to connect him with this school in Pine Crest, a boarding school in Pine Crest, Florida. 

So Yves comes to this school and he's standing in the middle of the auditorium of these kids' school, which is about the size of this auditorium, and one kids says, what is the size of your school? He says, a quarter your auditorium. And the kids couldn't, they had rowing, they couldn't wrap around it. I think the equivalent of what these kids were trying to do in the community and are still trying to do in the community, a kid here, most kids here might have in their own version of it in their own house. >> Yeah. >> Not that there are not kids who lack this, but there's some things that, there are structures here that I think are less. But I still see, in a lot of communities, sort of the same passion. Sort of like this rage to learn and passion in kids that exists but it just needs to be fed. >> Yeah. So, the rest of my questions, I think, fall under all the same header. Who gets to tell the stories and how do you get people to listen? So, I've been thinking, how should artists be nurtured, especially artists from challenged communities? >> They should be nurtured with exposure and opportunity. 

One of the other stories I tell in the book is Jean-Michel Basquiat. There's a piece of it on YouTube. He was asked by this art historian one time, what kind of artist are you? Are you Haitian, Puerto Rican? And the whole thing goes into, Jean-Michel Basquiat-- He asked him finally, what kind of paintings do you have on your wall? And Basquiat says, typical American things. Middle America things because I grew up here. And the guy says, you don't have any primitives on your wall? And Basquiat goes, you mean people? [LAUGHTER] And so then the essay is just imagining, if Basquiat had a Haitian primitive on his wall, who it would be. And I talk about, Basquiat had a parallel figure in Haiti, Hector Hyppolite, who was discovered much older than Basquiat, but self-taught, had this journey, painted on all kinds of things, on doors, all these different things like Basquiat. And sort of their parallel journey that Basquiat could go into the Brooklyn Museum, or could go, his mother took him to see Picasso's Guernica and all these things where Hector Hyppolite also, even though he was poor but still had, he had the tap taps, he had the art in the way that it was in the culture. Nobody was feeding it necessarily. But I think exposure, and a kid who is interested in art will yearn for that. But if we want to nurture that just to provide exposure and opportunities, decent materials, and sometimes just a little bit can make a big difference. 

>> Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Another thing I've been thinking about is the challenge of connecting with audiences. And this somewhat comes from my experience being a selector of things to come into this book festival, people to come in. I don't select alone. There's a whole, all of my colleagues at the Humanities Council get together. But in terms of how does work from mainstream or unfamous people reach mainstream audiences, especially if it's a challenged community. There's a class gulf there, and it's not, I think that connection is so important but the opportunities for it, I worry about them. >> Well, you need not worry. There's something now called the internet. 

[LAUGHTER] >> Excellent. [LAUGHTER] >> I think that sort of democratized things a little bit and that more and more, like when I go to schools and even when you go to schools in the most underfunded, most underprivileged areas, the kids still feel like I can have a blog or they feel like we're not completely shut in anymore. For example, there was a young girl after the earthquake who was living in a tent city who had a blog, and during the entire experience of the earthquake I thought there was a new wave of people being able to tell their own stories on the Twitter. So you didn't have the total filter of the journalist so much this time where people were able to speak directly about their own experience. So I think that's a tool that can be used. And I see a lot of teachers and schools, teachers who don't have many other resources using that as a medium, and the kids get excited because they feel like they can still be heard through this portal. >> Yeah. >> It can be out there. And so I think that's something that, in terms of to get voices out, underheard voices, underrepresented voices, don't have to go through these traditional routes so much anymore. >> And then, from the user's end, from the receiver of the person who's seeking to read, to explore, to see the art of people that they haven't connected with yet, I don't know if this is a question, but if you could comment on it, it's a big job to sort of look at what's out there, and there's so much out there. 

And it's not filtered or curated, and you can spend so much time following the breadcrumbs. I worry about what I miss. >>Well, a lot of what you miss is crap. [LAUGHTER] >> A lot of what you find is crap. >> Yeah. So that's the thing of having so much. There's a lot of good things. There's a lot of, you know. But I think part of it is that it's directed, and that if I'm interested I find that even for fiction writers doing research. I was recently, in the book that I'm writing, I was recently interested in what keeps dead people's eyes closed. 

Apparently, someone's eyes can just pop, even if they've been dead a while, their eyes can just pop open. And there's a particular thing that they sell that keeps your eyes closed. And it has a name, and I just could Google what keeps dead people's eyes closed? [LAUGHTER] Shopping. And you can buy it. [LAUGHTER] >> It used to be coins, right? Coins on the eyes? >> Yeah, coins on the outside, but this thing is something inside. It's called setting the eyes. So the most remote thing, I think it's, if you have an interest in a particular thing, I think that can narrow it. Definitely, if you wake up in the morning and say, I wonder what the news is today, then it's overwhelming. >> What about publishing? You're a writer and you've been with some different publishing houses, and your next book will come out from FSG? >> From Knopf. >> From Knopf this time? Okay. 

How, mm. Publishing can be an opportunity and a barrier. The opportunity, obviously, because of the publishing world and the creds and getting it out there and distribution and everything else, the way, for so many people whose voices, want to share their voices and can't get into that world, again, I don't exactly know what my question is. [LAUGHTER] >> Publishing is changing a lot. As I said, I think, on the one hand, it's become more democratic with print on demand and online and other things and people being able to publish themselves. I think even traditional publishing is trying to figure out how to proceed because fewer and fewer people are reading on paper and things of that nature. >> Yeah. >> So I think the traditional route of sort of sending out your manuscript is getting narrower, probably fewer people are getting published that way. And I worry about that too and all the different ways that people can be found. But now I see, again, when you go to the writing programs, younger writers, people coming up, they seem like they have a whole different plan at times. 

They built their platforms, for example. They blog first. They do all these things to get their names out there, and then the publishers come later. >> Yeah. >> There are different approaches that I think that they're the path that they know. It doesn't make it less difficult because there's so many MFA programs, there's so many writers, and only so many publishers. But I'd like to believe that we will hear from people, somehow, if they have something urgent for us to hear. >> I think so too because the way that you said that made me think the landscape has changed, people will find a way through it. The route is maybe completely different than we can image right now. >> And it's emerging. 

Now even if you write the smallest thing, you get a contract that says we want it for all eternity and all media, existing and non-existing. [LAUGHTER] >> It's no longer yours. >> Yeah. >> I bet I'm not the only person who had some questions. I'd love to open it up for questions from others who might like to join the conversation. Anybody have any burning questions? There's one. >> [INAUDIBLE]  >> Well, it's interesting. Recently, my friend got it and, he does this, and I recognized it as sort of like the immigrant thing, where he broke it down to exactly how much it was per year. So you get it per year. And I did, I got the first installment maybe a few days before the earthquake, and I have a lot of family in Haiti. 

So a lot of it went to that, basically. I don't think one should talk so much about these things out of respect for the people, but that was a lot of the first year. And still, Haiti just also went through this very devastating moment. It's one of the, it's how we were talking about connecting. There are families, for example, that we know in New York, families who go to my mother's church who were hit both ways in this. On the one hand, they're out of their homes in Canarsie, New York, and then on the other hand, they have family in Haiti who have just lost everything at the same time. It also brings to the surface the way that we're also connected. One of the things that is in the book that is a reprint from something I wrote for The Progressive was about Katrina. And I remember watching, after Katrina, and you were watching the news and people were saying this is not Haiti. They were specifically saying this is America. 

This is not Haiti. And they were, again, saying it in Florida last week with the voting. They were saying I don't live in a Third World country. I don't live in Haiti. I live in America. And sort of just cutting off. And they didn't say Haiti this time, but as things are getting worse in New York, people are saying this is not America. And so, more and more we're seeing sort of ways that these things are connected, and sometimes we are the bridge. Like these families now, who would have been, who are in Canarsie that, for example, people would have been counting on to help them get through this more recent difficult moment in Haiti, now they've also been struck very badly by Sandy. So I guess that's sort of the threat, of the way the environment further links. 

And it brings to mind, with these common destructions, ways that, there's a Haitian proverb that says you're running from the hot water and you jump in the fire and that more and more people who are migrating are doing just that. >> There's one over there. >> [INAUDIBLE]  >> The question is, what do I mean by "Create Dangerously," which is the title of the book? I borrow the title of the book from Albert Camus who, when he said it, it was the middle of the Algerian war and he was being asked to take a stand, by Sartre and these others, and to clearly speak against France and sort of, Algerian independence. And he said something to the effect, well, my mother lives there, or something. And he writes this whole essay about what is seen as his cowardice but what he saw as his ambivalence because he had these personal connections and these ways that artists find themselves sometimes on the line and the essay is, to create today is to create dangerously. And what I was trying to examine in this is that to create all the time is to create dangerously. Sometimes it's political danger, and sometimes is this, sort of, more personal risk of fearing for people who live in places where you're not going to prison for what you're writing but it still takes another kind of courage to overcome the fear of rejection, the fear of ridicule and that I think all creative acts demand a kind of courage. Now, there's another layer of courage. If someone is writing something knowing that they might be killed or exiled for it, as many of the people I write about were facing that actual risk, but in other ways, every kind of act of creativity, I think, is a courageous act. >> Go ahead. 

>> [INAUDIBLE]  >> The question is, after the earthquake, I keep seeing Babette, Babette is an old friend, and she's from Haiti. And she lives amongst you. [LAUGHTER] I wrote a couple of things. One of the things that, I lost two family members in the earthquake, and I wrote about my cousin Maxo, and I also wrote something a year later that is in the paperback version of this book about this commemoration ceremony. The ceremony of a year and a day after, which is a ritual in voodoo where a year and a day after it is believed that the dead come from the water, and it's sort of the final goodbye with the extra hope of that extra day that carries us into the next year. So, at that time, I was looking for myself, a personal comfort because for a long time we didn't know where a lot of our family members were. And so, that's really how I could process my own personal grief as well as the more global grief. But many writers have written locally. There are many anthologies to raise funds. Yanick Lahens, one of our great female writers in Haiti, wrote a book called Failles, and there were others who wrote afterward, and the visual art was immediate almost. 

When you went back, you would see, even on the tents, and a lot of times when I went back to where my mother was born, in the Léogâne, it was about 80% destroyed, and the tents, there were some of the cities where people had already started painting on their tents. There was beautiful art on the tents. When I tell the story in this book, I was with a friend of mine who said, we would go around and he would say that's our Guernica, that's our-- He was a young artist. And so, there were so many places where people were already trying to beautify and also depict. And one of the things that I saw most, in the tents, you would see this recurring image which resembles the cover of the book of these bodies rising from the rubble. This hope of people coming out. And this was still a time where so many people were unaccounted for. >> Yes. Go ahead. >> You can't see me. 

>> Go ahead. >> I'm going back to your title. Are you an immigrant artist, or do you see yourself as an immigrant artist? And in what ways does it make your work different from a non-immigrant artist, specifically? Could you possibly speak to that? >> Okay. The question is about the subtitle, The Immigrant Artist, do I see myself as an immigrant artist? I do because-- It's funny, I think, sort of, the definition of an immigrant is that you're American in the country where you come from and then you're Haitian in America. [LAUGHTER] So you're sort of the reverse of what you are in the country. And I think a lot of these things could be true of any artist, but I see certain traits that I noticed in the people whose work I studied or the people I talked to in terms of when you come from, your own definition of home. A lot of immigrants who write or part of the first book or one of the books is about, there's always a story of coming to America in some of it because, often before we have to start writing the rest of your story, you have to write the story of  landing here. And so, that's often the first book. It's often the first story in some ways. So, there are certain similarities in the creation or the creative process, I think, of people who were not always here, and you see it in some ways in the work of giving ourselves permission to do this even. 

I had to find, either through all these first couple of things I wrote, I had to, through that work, give myself permission to write. Prove to my parents that this was something worth doing even. My dad, on his death bed, was saying you can still be a doctor. [LAUGHTER] And I thought sometimes he was saying, if you were a doctor, I might not be sick. And I think that's still that thing of, and he said I'm not going to have a doctor in the family. >> [INAUDIBLE] >> I think you're both inside and outside in a way. And it's a perfect place for a writer to be, sort of, a permanent observer, in that you don't fully belong anywhere really. Nobody's dying to claim you, let's say. [LAUGHTER] >> As much as I love being here and talking, I have to be conscious that there is a schedule and a festival. I think we probably have room for one more question. 

I'll let Edwidge pick. >> Way back there. >> I'm Haitian myself, and I'm an aspiring writer. Do you have any advice? [LAUGHTER] >> Writers always tell that story, and it's a good thing that you asked it at the end, of the great professor who goes to give a speech, and the first thing someone says is, do you have any advice for me? And the great man or woman writer says, go home and write, and walks off the stage. [LAUGHTER] So, go home and write. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] >> Thank you so much. This has been a joy. [APPLAUSE]