Edwidge Danticat, author of Claire of the Sea Light, believes that "re-creating your entire life is a form of reinvention on par with the greatest works of literature."
In the early 1970s, Edwidge Danticat’s parents sold everything they owned to purchase passports. They fled the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince and the chaotic rule of Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier to find a better life in New York City. Danticat, then a small child, and was meant to follow shortly with her infant brother, but things didn’t work out that way: “Because of United States immigration red tape, our family separation lasted eight years,” Danticat wrote in The New York Times in 2004. Danticat was 12 when she finally traveled to the States in 1981 to see who her parents had become—and meet two U.S.-born brothers for the first time.
When I asked Danticat to talk about a favorite literary passage for this series, she chose a section from a new book—Patricia Engel’s It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris—that distills the essence of the immigrant experience. The book says something that the author had long felt but had never articulated: that trying to start a life in a strange land is an artistic feat of the highest order, one that ranks with (or perhaps above) our greatest cultural achievements. We discussed the ways immigrant parents model artistry for their children in their struggle to survive, and how the decision to choose a creative discipline can be fraught for the subsequent generation.
