Two questions to commit myself to hope and sincerity:
1: What does it mean to read dangerously: in my life, towards global community, through this present moment?
2: What does it mean to write dangerously: despite my life, beyond current community, with this present moment?
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An image of the Two of Wands card from Tarot of the Magical Forest. A frog wearing a cape is holding a globe and standing between two wooden poles at the ramparts of a stone wall that looks out over the sea. An island mountain rises in the distance. |
On March 19, 2024, the Sun entered the first decan of Aries. This decan is ruled by Mars, and his corresponding tarot card is the Two of Wands. Beginning this project, my keywords for Mars in Aries and the Two of Wands were: creative potency, individual activation, and the spirit required to begin the fight for a better world. The text I chose to read and reflect from is Edwidge Danticat’s book Create Dangerously, published in 2010.
The first chapter of Create Dangerously takes us to November 12, 1964, the day that Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, two young Haitian men and members of a guerilla group called Jeune Haiti (Young Haiti) that resisted the dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, were publicly executed by the Duvalier regime. Danticat writes that “schools were shut down and principals ordered to bring their students” to watch the two men be murdered by the state. In her telling of this history, Danticat describes the photographic and video footage she studied to write about this foundational story: the two men tied, separated and yet inseparably linked by past and political community and fate, to the two wooden posts that had were erected for the execution. This description stopped me in my tracks, as did Danticat's revelation that this story is one of the “creation myths” that has “haunted and obsessed” her through her life, and shaped her fundamentally as a writer. By writing this book, Danticat created a place to honor and grieve the deaths of these men, and she held their memory alight between the posts where they were killed by the state.
The executions of Numa and Drouin occurred during a period of Haiti’s history when to be caught reading literature that defied the state could be punished by death: “families burying if not burning whole libraries.” Danticat's immediate family were deeply impacted by the fear of reading dangerously, and she was deeply impacted by her family's efforts to survive of this danger. So when Danticat tells us to “create dangerously, for people who read dangerously,” this heartbreaking context is the landscape in which this directive is rooted. Of the many possible interpretations of what it might mean to create dangerously, the interpretation she focuses on leaps from the pages of the book like something aflame: “Creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience to a directive.”
Danticat named her book after Albert Camus’s 1957 speech of the same title, during which he insisted that art is “not a monologue,” a statement I find obvious but that capitalist culture argues is something we can opt out of if we wish to. In Create Dangerously, Danticat deepens and affirms Camus's statement by writing the stories of her self, family, mentors, artistic forbearers, and literary community, and how the stories of each character bear meaningful connection to the others'. Create Dangerously is marketed as a generally genius book for writers and thinkers and citizens and it is a stunning gift to all who seek to deepen their relationship to those identities, but the most important part of this book for me is how unconditionally relational Danticat’s writing is. In many essays, the central subject is a family member, written with such attention and grief and love that my chest aches to read them on the page. And sometimes Danticat writes about a family or community member requesting that she not write about these stories, that she engage with a kind of silence intended to protect identity, family, or social norms, and these narrated exchanges make my heart ache in multiple directions.
When the essays focus on deceased historical figures or people with whom Danticat had a journalistic relationship, this level of consideration, care, and relationality is no less present. For example, in “I Speak Out”, an essay that centers Alèrte Bélance, a Haitian woman survivor who was a casualty of the 1991 military coup d’état in Haiti, Danticat reports on a journalism team’s interview with Bélance–during which Bélance speaks both of the inconceivable torture she survived and her committed purpose in speaking out to share her story with the world–but Danticat also writes of her own subjectivity in the room, refusing to erase her role and responsibility as a witness:
“As [Alèrte Bélance] spoke, slowly but firmly, as if reliving every second of these horrors, I wrote a summary translation on a legal pad for one of our non-Creole-speaking producers. I felt tears run down my face. This was perhaps unprofessional, even disrespectful. The telling of that story was such a courageous act, I thought, that only one person in that room had the right to cry.”
One of the reasons this book is important to me is because Danticat creates a reading experience in which it is not just accessible but important to understand how, under regimes of suppression and oppression, all people who risk being persecuted for their relationship to art must navigate the tension of opposing orbits: writer/reader, patriot/dictator, creator/audience, silence/truth, and exile/death. I had not read a book like this before–one in which the writer speaks with clear honesty about the emotional, ethical, and social tensions that are not mutually exclusive with compassion, but are perhaps integral parts of its power. This book is one that insists that the distance between myself and others–and the suffering rooted in that distance–is not a wall in my life, but a reason to keep reaching towards the dissolution of all such walls.
Today, five million people in Haiti are suffering from hunger and at risk of starvation, and international colonial states are claiming far more space to speak of the future of Haiti than Haitians are afforded to speak for themselves. The suffering of people in Haiti, and of all oppressed peoples in the world, is beyond what an individual can comprehend. Sometimes I want to say that witnessing what is happening to people far from me is “beyond words,” but it is not. Even when I have no words, and weep and moan and cry out without language, there is–for those of us lucky to wake day after day into relative safety and comfort–a time to come when we can say Enough is enough. I will not stand for colonial violence. I stand with all oppressed peoples to the best of my power, even when I feel that I have extremely little to leverage, and do not know enough to exert it in the world.
Where do we go from here, from today?
* * *
I first read Create Dangerously in 2014, and felt the urgent need to revisit Danticat’s work in December 2023. In the months since October 2023, months during which the US-Israel genocide against the people of Gaza has become integral to my understanding of life (mine and all others'), two things have happened that I struggle to wrap my head around:
1: The world’s most televised genocide has been both intensely visible and intensely suppressed. I’ve noticed that every person who is a writer, reader, student, teacher, parent, or family/community member (so, every single one of us) has continuous access to evidence of the unbearable harm being committed against Palestinians and is also continuously offered the chance to remain silent.
2: Being pressed towards silence is spiritually, socially, and ethically totally horrifying, but every dilemma comes with a choice. Because we are being pressed to remain silent, every single one of us is also being offered the chance to speak up, instead.
When I first read Danticat’s Create Dangerously, I struggled to honor the ethical gifts of her work because I viewed myself–as a first-generation naturalized US citizen whose family immigrated because of choice and opportunity, not through circumstances of colonial occupation and asylum–as unable to enter the orbit of the book’s premise. What risks had I really ever taken in writing my books, in publishing my poems? I knew that if I had not written them, I would not have survived. But it was obvious that no material risk had been incurred by my writing my books. I viewed myself as so far removed from the relevancy of Danticat’s work that I felt it would be inappropriate for me to make any effort to relate. I felt as it would be disrespectful, even, to say that the plight of Haiti mattered to me personally, because I am not directly impacted by this suffering.
It is now April of 2024, and I feel differently than I once did. I am in relationship with all suffering people, even--and sometimes especially--when I am not directly impacted by their suffering. Because of what I've witnessed, especially in the last six months, the meaning I can draw from the differences between the orbits of self and other is evolving. The darkness between us is deepening. The distance is sharpening. Those of us who hold the privilege of United States citizenship and who are not Black or Indigenous are afforded protections that, in comparison to what Gazans are going through, are so vastly different that the difference is basically beyond measure. But today, I can no longer pretend that the difference between my life as a privileged US citizen and another’s life as an incarcerated survivor of a genocide funded by the country of my citizenship is any reason to exempt myself from the need to learn, create, and speak dangerously on their behalf.
It is, in fact, the difference between us that makes it a personal matter of actual, daily urgency that I try to speak out more today than I did yesterday.
Because there have lived and died people who risked their lives to read books that I take for granted my ability to access, I must ask: When I follow news about the historical suffering of people in the world, are the texts that I read authored by those who are most materially and directly impacted by these subjects? When I was first introduced to feminist reading lists curated by friends/teachers, I noticed that the recommended source texts were all authored by women. When I first committed to learning more about historical and current settler colonialism in the United States, it was important for me to center the work of Indigenous and Black scholars, writers, and movement workers. Accordingly, it is important that I intentionally seek the voices and work of Haitian people when trying to understand what is happening in Haiti, and it is important that I seek the voices and work of Palestinians when continuing to learn about the history of Palestine. It is important that I apply this standard across all my reading practices: academic, artistic, journalistic, as well as social media.
Using a phone to receive information about the world is a form of reading. Thus, I can choose to read dangerously every day. I can seek the voices of and follow the lead of those speaking truth to realities that anxiety would have me look away from. I can amplify what the dominant world would prefer I ignore. I can face the fear of my ignorance every day and, as a result of this reckoning, set to the tasks of seeking more, lifting more, broadcasting more.
This feels dangerous, because danger is truly present, urgent, and emergent: but my understanding of what is truly at risk is often incorrect. My body feels my fear of loss of livelihood, loss of my relationships, loss of future prospects--but my body does not feel the fear of an Israeli warplane flying overhead that is about to drop an American bomb the size of an SUV on my apartment building. The most urgent danger is that if we do not seriously increase efforts to protect our most vulnerable, Palestinian people WILL continue to be killed in historically unprecedented measures by Israel and the United States. For those of us not living under blockade, famine, and airstrikes: we need to do what we can to provide urgent, material direct care to those who are in need. We also need long-term spirit, long-term care, long-term defiance. We need love that is long-term, love that can go the distance, a distance that is growing darker between us by the day.
Because there have lived and died people who risked their lives to write texts that resisted--without condition, equivocation, or apology–the unacceptable conditions of their bondage, I must remember:
1: As a non-Palestinian person who has witnessed the footage of a Palestinian father weeping as he tries to dig his child out from the rubble of an apartment building, and the news of the besiegement and massacre of Al-Shifa hospital, and the near-daily news detailing yet another shooting of Palestinians waiting for aid--because I am a witness, I must remember that I have a voice, and every person who has a voice is a cry of resistance who is needed.
2: As a person who is not living under Israeli occupation, some of the things I have to say about the occupation would be best held back. This energy can be repurposed towards amplifying what Palestinians have been calling out for generations.
Finally, as a writer, I must make time to understand how my working relationship to writing, language, and art is not yet in alignment with my intended living relationship to liberation, justice, and care.
To reach this understanding of my work as a writer, I must read the work of other writers. I will stop writing here, and continue reading. In this roundtable interview with Summer Farah, Samah Fadil, Priscilla Wathington, and Rasha Abdulhadi, “Palestinian Poets on the Role of Literature in Fighting Genocide”, Summer Farah writes:
“As Gaza’s poets are assassinated, as the libraries are destroyed, as Palestinians across historic Palestine (and all over the world) are arrested for dissent, as writers face censorship globally for speaking the truth of the genocide that is occurring, we must consider: if literature is your corner, what will you do to rid it of these violences?”
Priscilla Wathington writes:
“As much as poetry cannot be a replacement for other forms of action, such as calling our Congressional members here in the U.S., it can and should be an extension of our overall decolonial belief practices and commitments.”
Samah Fadil writes:
“Compartmentalization is a big big trap. I tried to do it for so long as a young, wide-eyed Black Palestinian J-School student in a sea of white peers and professors… I tapped out early, and I also stopped mentioning I was Palestinian because it always brought unsolicited questions and comments from said white peers. But this was a disservice to myself.
…What you see now, the fact that you even know who I am, that you’ve read my words and even see me as a writer and a poet… that is the direct result of me abandoning the idea of careerism within institutions and focusing on bringing together all the facets of me I was always told would never fit together. And not for nothing, but 90% of the literary orgs I once clamored to be a part of or published in have been totally silent during the genocide on Palestinians, so my respect for them has plummeted. The news orgs I once applied to be a part of but was met with radio silence all those years ago now ask me to go on their shows. They can keep asking, because I realize that they were never worth my time, care or energy. They want a mouthpiece, and they won’t find one here.”
Rasha Abdulhadi writes:
“Every point of contact is an organizing opportunity and a chance to inoculate against genocidal propaganda. I am unembarrassed. I will organize with customer service reps. My email signature is currently:
“If you and/or any of the folks you work with (or beyond) have a chance to listen to a podcast I was on Monday October 16th, that would mean a lot. I am making a steady practice of warmly inviting everyone I interact with to become more skillful in keeping Palestinians alive, here and in Palestine. Please share and discuss widely. A transcript & show notes with additional links is up now as well.”
…Any place I’m invited must let Palestine in, whatever the reason they’ve invited me: Long Covid, disability justice, fiber arts/knitting/crochet, southern arts groups, grant makers. I will invite them to care and be more skillful in that care. I don’t argue, but there are many who might be ready to do something or know something, who might already suspect what they understand and could do, and will take a leap if that validation if reflected back to them by even one person: that their instincts towards life are correct, that their readiness to act and connect are welcomed.”
This is where we begin. Let us call and keep calling and call more loudly for an immediate permanent ceasefire and an end to all colonial occupation and apartheid. Let us call for Palestine to live free.
* * *
Two questions to depart this space--with renewed commitment to our future:
1: Who are two people who risked their safety to read and/or create dangerously because their liberation was not optional, and what are two things I would be honored to learn from each of them?
2: What are two rooms in my life in which I would like to speak more loudly today than I did yesterday, particularly when I’m feeling pressured to practice silence?
Links and further reading:
Jairo Fúnez-Flores (Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies and Teacher Education) was suspended from Texas Tech University for social media posts critiquing Israel and supporting Palestine: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/1770008558697849187
As of March 25, 2024, Michael Roth (Wesleyan University) is the first and only university president to publicly call for a ceasefire: https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/03/25/cease-fire-now-neutrality-complicity-opinion
“Palestinian Poets on the Role of Literature in Fighting Genocide”
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