Archive for September, 2007
At Home and "Global" in the US: Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat — loyal child of Port au Prince and Brooklyn — says in conversation: “I always feel like I bring some of there to here, and some of here to there.”
Edwidge Danticat
Like her friend from the Dominican east side of Hispaniola Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat is writing “global” literature in our midst, for our mainstream, documenting the “permanent floating” migration games and the fascinating creolization of identities in our time.
The definitions of identity are so fluid. Sometimes people in Haiti will say, “well, you’re Haitian if you live here.” That’s one definition. There’s global youth culture. It would be hard to tell a kid from Johannesburg from a kid from Sao Paulo or Rio or Port au Prince if you put three of them together and they didn’t speak.
There are kids in Port au Prince who don’t even speak English but can recite to you an entire 50 Cent song, who can “do” Kanye West with the same accent and tonality…
If you concentrate on young black men of a certain age in all these places I’ve mentioned in the African diaspora, if you think of them as a particular element of the diaspora, and the disuniting of them throughout time and our history — you know, the slave trade and so forth — then I think these things, whether you like them or not, like hip-hop might be the only common culture there is. If might be the one thing in which all these young men from all these different places can see themselves as one.
All this is part of a cosmopolitan culture, which is usually an urban experience of living in crowded places in a kind of outsider status. These are people who are trying to redefine their outsider status and make something that others find appealing, as they young men and women did in the Bronx with Rap, when that began. You see it in the Paris suburbs — young people who know they’re not part of the main culture: they’re lucky if someone thinks they’re French, or unlucky! They know they have this outsider status. A lot of them, taking their cue from Rap, are trying to create a culture of their own. That interests me a great deal! Young immigrant people who are struggling to become part of a culture, or if that doesn’t happen trying to create a culture of their own that they can belong to and that others end up emulating. That’s their inclusion. That’s where they belong. They create their own belonging.
Edwidge Danticat, in conversation with Chris Lydon, Watson Institute, Brown University, September 18, 2007
Edwidge Danticat has just been through her own “year of magical thinking,” encompassing the deaths of the father and uncle who brought her up, and the birth of her own daughter in Miami, all in the space of a few months. Her new non-fiction book, Brother, I’m Dying is a cool, meticulous chronicle of family history, of sudden shock and turmoil, and of her heart, breaking and surging.
The first part of our conversation tells one of those “refugee stories” that could seem someday to typify this era of mass displacement. Danticat’s 81-year-old uncle Joseph was a Baptist minister in Port au Prince. In the autumn of 2004, in fear for his life in a neighborhood beset by gangs, he fled to Miami, en route to his brother’s place in New York. Though he had visited the States many times and had a current tourist visa, he was detained, then shackled by Homeland Security officers who saw him as “another black man trying to get in.” In his “credible fear” asylum interview, Joseph Dantica vomited violently in an apparent seizure, but humanitarian parole was not to be considered, nor the process interrupted. “I think he’s faking,” said the medic on duty. Then suddenly Joseph failed. “His eyes are open and he’s not unconscious,” the medic commented. “I still think he’s faking, but we’ll take him to the clinic.” Then suddenly, at Jackson Memorial Hospital, Joseph Dantica was dead. When Edwidge saw his body, she was struck by the look of anger on her gentle uncle’s face — a look described in Haitian Creole by a word meaning “you were choked by your own blood.”
Click to listen to the first part of Chris’s conversation with Edwidge Danticat (26.2 MB MP3)
In the second part of our conversation, Edwidge Danticat takes a “transnational” view of the “cosmic mobility” in a globalizing economy and culture. She says: “Even before people get here, they’re working for you, making your baseballs and denims.” About Iraq, she says, Haitian memory begins with the US invasion by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 and the occupation of Haiti until 1934 — “one of the most scarring things that ever happened to us… The Haitian in me sees the circularity in these things… It takes a long time to recover from these interventions and occupations.” I ask her, as I did Junot Diaz, to write us an immigration bill that corresponds with real demography and her own heart’s experience.
Click to listen to the second part of Chris’s conversation with Edwidge Danticat (22.6 MB MP3)
The next round in this series is with Ha Jin, whose new novel A Free Life takes up the saga of Chinese immigrants in America since the crackdown in Tienanmen Square in 1989.
Edwidge Danticat (Part 2)
In the second part of our conversation, Edwidge Danticat takes a "transnational" view of the "cosmic mobility" in a globalizing economy and culture. She says: "Even before people get here, they're working for you, making your baseballs and denims." About Iraq, she says, Haitian memory begins with the US invasion by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 and the occupation of Haiti until 1934 -- "one of the most scarring things that ever happened to us... The Haitian in me sees the circularity in these things... It takes a long time to recover from these interventions and occupations." I ask her, as I did Junot Diaz, to write us an immigration bill that corresponds with real demography and her own heart's experience.
To End Another War: Richard Holbrooke
Let Richard Holbrooke be our conversational measure of what the Democrats are prepared to say and do in foreign affairs... to repair a "worse than Vietnam" blunder in Iraq, to undo a factional "hijacking" of American power, to recover a good name in the world. Bill Clinton's peacemaker in the Balkans in the '90s and last UN Ambassador, Holbrooke will be in the scrum again if any Democrat wins the presidency next year, and a good bet for Secretary of State if Hillary Clinton wins. In the meantime he'll visit us every month or so at the Watson Institute for International Affairs at Brown University. Holbrooke cut his teeth in journalism and politics at Brown and graduated in 1962 -- by chance, the same refulgent Spring when I graduated from Yale, and JFK's commencement oration teased that he had now "the best of both worlds, a Harvard education and a Yale degree."
To End Another War: Richard Holbrooke (Pt 2)
In the second part Dick Holbrooke and I engage in a certain passive-aggressive head-butting about how disasters happen and who's accountable for this one. Mischievously I had wondered if the Clinton intervention in the Balkans had helped set the Iraq trap, with the "high" of zero-casualty air warfare, all the headier without United Nations approval. Holbrooke sees the Iraq war as more nearly a fluke: a "hijacking" of the U.S. government in the rage after 9.11 by "a faction of a faction" on the Republican right. "None of us saw this coming," Holbrooke says, "and for the simplest of reasons" -- that the new President Bush was the son of a World War 2 hero, and president, a coalition builder "who overall loved the world scene, and was pro-U.N.!"
At Home in Global America: Junot Diaz (Part 1)
For people who feed on fiction for tastes of truth in our time, Junot Diaz is a treasure. A double-visioned outsider in two languages, two cultures and two countries, he begins to look like the anointed prince of a generation of young immigrants writing "global" fiction inside the US. Could Juno Diaz be our Joseph Conrad? The roaring liftoff of his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao may even be an omen. Are we prepared to hear upstart fictionists tell us, as Junot Diaz does, at the outset: "Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq." Diaz's young Dominican narrator decries the erasure of public memory: "You didn't know we were occupied twice in the twentieth century? Don't worry, when you have kids they won't know the U.S. occupied Iraq either."
At Home in Global America: Junot Diaz (Part 2)
The most wondrously imagined characters in Junot Diaz's new novel are its women: Oscar's goth, "tougher than adamantine" sister Lola, and their mother Belicia. Mami is a shipwreck of female beauty, cancer-ridden and foul-spirited. But once she was astonishingly attractive and lusty, "allergic to tranquilidad," and her parents were rich and connected. This, too, is history that Belicia barely grasps, that her children are never told about their dying battle-ax mom who berates them in Perth Amboy, N.J. As a 16 year old in the Dominican Republic, we learn in a long flashback narrative, Belicia followed her girlish heart into love and battle with a goon and gangster who just happened to be married to Trujillo's sister. The affair ends with a savage beating, one of three horrific canefield assaults in the book. Irreparably damaged, Belicia makes her escape to New York: "She is sixteen and her skin is the darkness before the black, the plum of the day's last light, her breasts like sunsets trapped beneath her skin, but for all her youth and beauty she has a sour distrusting expression that only dissolves under the weight of intense pleasure. Her dreams are spare, lack the propulsion of a mission, her ambition is without traction. Her fiercest hope? That she will find a man. What she doesn't yet know: the cold, the backbreaking drudgery of the factorias, the loneliness of Diaspora, that she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her own heart. What else she doesn't know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together, he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again."
At Home in Global America: Junot Diaz (Part 3)
Junot Diaz is an authority on the new realities of immigration: "unstable, here-and-there... something cool for an artist to deal with: a whole community jumping back and forth, like shuttles on the loom, strengthening connections in both places." He has vented furiously before this on the stalemate in U.S. immmigration policy. Our politics wouldn't have seized on immigration he said if we weren't trying to distract ourselves from a war we can't talk about. "It's screwy, bro," he says. "Even Ahab," the embodiment of American excess, "wasn't that crazy. Ahab wasn't about to walk his harpooners off his boat, as 'foreigners' and 'savages.'" Our immigration "debate" sounds, he says, like "madness beyond anything Melville could have imagined."
