'The World Is Before You, and You Need Not Take It or Leave It as You Came In,' Says Hess Scholar in Residence Edwidge Danticat
April 3, 2018
Robert L. Hess Scholar in Residence Edwidge Danticat with President Michelle J. Anderson
“What I share with you is part of an ongoing exploration for me . . . about certain issues and struggles that connect different people in the African diaspora, both in pain and jubilee,” said Haitian-American author and activist Edwidge Danticat, who delivered the 13th Robert L. Hess Memorial Lecture, “A Right to Be Here: Race, Immigration, and My Third Culture Kids,” at the Woody Tanger Auditorium in the Brooklyn College Library on March 28.
Danticat emigrated from Haiti with her family at the age of 12 and grew up in Brooklyn. She joked that her father wanted her to be a nurse. But it was clear from the age of 14, when she published her first work, “A Haitian-American Christmas: Kremace and Creole Theater,” in the New York City teen paper New Youth Connections, where her path lay: at the intersection of art, politics, and activism, particularly for the civil rights of Haitians in Haiti and the diaspora. Her debut novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) became an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and in 1995, at the age of 26, Danticat became the youngest National Book Award nominee ever for her novel Krik? Krak! Her work of historical fiction, The Farming of Bones, earned her an American Book Award, and in 2007 the author would win the National Book Critics Award for her family memoir Brother, I’m Dying.
Danticat spoke of witnessing state abuses in both Haiti and New York City in the 1980s, citing the 1997 beating and assault of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima by the NYPD, and the 2000 death of unarmed Haitian-American Patrick Dorismond by NYPD gunfire .
“We carried signs and chanted ‘No justice, no peace. Whose streets? Our streets,’ even while fearing that this would never be true. The streets, we worried, were never ours to begin with, just as they hadn’t been in the homelands we were fleeing to obtain safety here.”
Invoking the names Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland, Stephon Clark—all unarmed people of color who died at or in the hands of law enforcement, Danticat drew comparisons between African Americans living in the United States who are treated unequally under the law and political refugees of Haitian descent who were ejected from the Dominican Republic, many after living there decades, because they were no longer considered citizens. Particularly vulnerable, she pointed out, are “third culture” children—children who are raised outside of their parents’ native culture for a significant part of their developing years.
“Parents are often too nervous to broach subjects like this with their children. These among other difficult subjects like love, sex, death, race,” Danticat said. “Sometimes we are forced to have these kinds of conversations early, too early. A broken heart might lead to questions we’d rather not answer as might an inappropriate gesture, the death of a loved one, or a murder of a stranger.”
“I certainly would not like my daughters to grow up terrified of the country and the world they live in,” she said of Mira, 13 and Laila, 9. “But is it not irresponsible of me to at least not alert them to the potential life altering or even life ending horrors they might face as young people in today’s world [and] as young black women, as the children of immigrants in a large family of immigrants with various types of immigration status?”
In what she calls a never-ending letter to her “third-culture gals,” Danticat tells her daughters, “The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as you came in. . . .That we cannot stand by and watch, that we must join each other’s causes, have each other’s backs, form alliances. Practice what in Haiti we call kombit: Today you work my land, tomorrow I work yours. I want them to look back in wonder and amazement and love, because when you study history and the gains people have made against impossible odds, in the Haitian Revolution, or the civil rights movement, and in the dismantling of apartheid, it’s harder for you to give up in despair. And if you feel frozen and overwhelmed, just take one small step at a time.”
Danticat earned a bachelor’s degree in French literature from Barnard and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Brown University. A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2009, Danticat is the 25th laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for outstanding literary merit in literature worldwide. She gave the keynote address to Brooklyn College Master’s graduating class in May 2014, and was given an Honorary Doctor of Letters during the commencement ceremony.
Of her Hess residency Danticat said, “Any time I come to Brooklyn College in any capacity it’s an honor. I feel like I’ve been a part of the Brooklyn College family for so many years. My brother and sister-in-law got their degrees here, my nieces went to toddler school here. Brother I’m Dying was a [Common Reading selection], I’ve spoken at commencement, I’ve taken shortcuts through the campus on the way to my brother’s house from the train on Flatbush. It feels more like a homecoming than a visit.”
In cooperation with the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities and the CUNY Haitian Studies Institute, the Robert L. Hess Memorial Lecture was part of the 2017–2018 Scholar-in-Residence Program named for and in honor of the eighth president of Brooklyn College, whose commitment to scholarship and “the educated individual—knowledgeable, thoughtful, inquiring, alive to the shared purposes and concerns lining all intellectual pursuits,” marked his tenure.
For the full Robert L. Hess Memorial Lecture delivered by Edwidge Danticat, visit the Brooklyn College Facebook page.
