In a 2013 interview with The Atlantic, the award-winning Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat describes her strong reaction to reading the passage from It’s Not Love, It’s Paris, cited in the epigraph above:

In her own fiction and creative nonfiction, Danticat, too, has dedicated ample space to the connection between the experience of immigration as an artistic act and between emigration and the creation and consumption of art. Art allows immigrants to creatively express individual survival and resilience and helps to establish and maintain cultural continuity and community in the diaspora. In this essay, I focus on the complex engagements with immigration as art in fiction and creative nonfiction by Edwidge Danticat to demonstrate the critical importance of radical hope—a utopian, creative imagination—to the immigrant experience in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

According to Danticat, the process of immigration “requires everything great art requires—risk-tasking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art. You must be able to dream something nearly impossible and toil to bring it into existence” (Fassler and Danticat). Danticat’s emphasis on the intimate connection between immigration and a creative imagination that allows us to think the beyond is in tandem with Ernst Bloch’s famous definition of hope as an “expectation . . . [and] intention towards possibility that has still not become” (7). This emphasis on a utopian impulse, of imagining beyond what is immediately possible, as a powerful force rather than a tool of deception seems, at first sight, to stand in contrast to what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism” (3)—a hegemonic belief that serves to entrench the status quo rather than challenge it. Drawing on James Baldwin’s critique of an alleged national “innocence” (3), Ta-Nehisi Coates similarly develops a harsh indictment of what he calls “The Dream” (50) as one of the main reasons for the ongoing second-class status of African Americans and other minorities in the United States. While I agree with Berlant’s and Coates’ incisive critiques of the media-produced and reproduced reifications of a forever-unattainable American Dream that denies the existence of a complex system of socio-economic and legal injustices underlying US-American race relations, I find Danticat’s simultaneous emphasis on the power of a utopian vision inspiring in its embrace of “radical hope.”

Radical hope, a term popularized by philosopher Jonathan Lear, is far removed from uncritical naiveté or blind hope; instead, it “anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it” (103). It is utopian and futuristic, but never escapist because it is grounded in practice and political action.

In US-American fiction, immigrant narratives are often used as vehicles to represent the promises and pitfalls of the American Dream. In her 1923 autobiographical essay “America and I,” Anzia Yezierska, for example, celebrates the freedom of mobility and access to higher education the United States offers her, a Yiddish-speaking immigrant and victim of both Russian pogroms and a strictly patriarchal society that severely limits her life choices. At the same time, Yezierska is keenly aware of racialized and gendered power hierarchies and of the greed that dominates American society, including immigrant communities.

What allows Yezierska to make it in her new home is her ability to imagine the as-of-yet impossible, and the vehicle that allows her to do so is her creative use and mastery of the English language. Writing and telling the many stories of immigration are major manifestations of radical hope in Edwidge Danticat’s work as well.

Edwidge Danticat arrived in New York City in 1981, at the age of twelve, to join her parents who had left Haiti for economic reasons and to escape the dictatorial regimes of François and Jean-Claude Duvalier in the early 1970s. Bilingual in Haitian Kreyol and French, a beginning student of English, and a hardworking and dedicated writer, Danticat thrived in the bilingual school she attended in Brooklyn. Only two years after her arrival in New York, she published a story on her experiences as a Haitian immigrant in New Youth Connections. At sixteen, Danticat published “A New World Full of Strangers,” which became the foundation of her 1994 debut novel Breath, Eyes, Memory. She won a scholarship to Barnard College, where she graduated in 1990 with a BA in French; three years later Danticat graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University, and the accolades have not ceased since. To date, Danticat has published four novels, a collection of short stories, three works of nonfiction, four young adult novels, served as an editor on five volumes of fiction and nonfiction, and collaborated on two screenplays. She has won an American Book Award; a National Book Critics Circle Award; and, most recently, a Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She was a finalist for two National Book Awards and has honorary degrees from Smith College and Yale University. In 2009, Danticat was awarded a MacArthur fellowship. In many ways, Danticat embodies the upwardly mobile immigrant, who, through enormous talent and hard work, “makes it” in her newly-chosen home. And yet, Danticat, in her fiction and nonfiction, never loses sight of the plight most immigrants face in their daily lives and never forgets that immigration is always, also, a story of loss and of leaving behind.

In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Danticat merges the personal challenges she faced as a young Haitian girl immigrating to the United States with a larger comment on the tensions between tradition and modernity in an immigrant’s life and the gains and losses immigration to the United States brings to Haitian women and girls in the diaspora and on the island in the 1970s and 1980s. Sophie Caco, the novel’s main protagonist, is raised by her Tante Atie in rural Haiti before joining her mother Martine in New York City at the age of twelve. Martine is the survivor of rape committed by marauding tontons macoutes who terrorized Haitian civilians with impunity during the Duvalier regime, and Sophie is the product of this sexual violence. Martine is ever concerned with Sophie’s virginity and her academic success to ensure a “good marriage” for her daughter. Deeply steeped in traditional Haitian gender roles and traumatized by the sexual violence she endured, Martine is unable to be open to her daughter’s artistic inclinations. Sophie longs to leave this restrictive environment and falls in love with her older, African American neighbor Joseph, a jazz musician whose sensuality stands in stark contrast to her strict upbringing, which is hostile to all physical and artistic pleasures.

The inspirational role of music is central to Sophie’s decision to stand up against her mother’s ossified beliefs and to resist the invasive virginity “testing” she is submitted to every month. Music allows her to both face her family’s tragedies, to confront her own desires and goals, and to link her Haitian cultural heritage with that of African diasporic communities in the United States. It is hardly a coincidence that Joseph is from New Orleans, that US-American city most intimately connected to the Caribbean, and Haiti in particular. During their first conversation, Joseph comments, “We have something in common. Mwin aussi. I speak a form of Creole, too” (Danticat, Breath 70). Joseph’s playing allows Sophie to escape the narrow confines of her life as laid out by her mother: “I spent the whole week with my ear pressed against the wall, listening to him rehearse. . . . Sometimes at night, the saxophone was like a soothing lullaby” (71). Joseph’s soothing music calms Sophie and invites her to dream of a different future.

Joseph also encourages Sophie to think about and act on her own desires, rather than succumb to and comply with her mother’s wishes. When Sophie, citing her mother, comments that “there’s a difference between what a person wants and what’s good for them,” Joseph suggests, “It is ok not to have your future on a map. . . . That way you can flow wherever life takes you” (Danticat, Breath 72). Joseph’s approach to life mirrors his approach to music. Inspired by his music and their conversations, Sophie begins to imagine a life beyond the limitations laid out for her and makes a decision that will impact her life and her relationship with her mother for good—she destroys her own hymen with a pestle to prevent her mother from ever testing her again. Crucially, Sophie precedes this violent act of self-harming with a story about a woman who suffers from excessive bleeding and thus no longer wants to be a woman. Instead, she asks the Vodun loa, or Goddess, Erzulie to transform her into a butterfly, a wish that is granted. Sophie links her own transformation to that of the woman in the folktale; she changes who she is, which allows her freedom of choice and mobility. To Sophie, storytelling is the art form she comes to embrace the most and which allows her to face the most difficult challenges in her life. Like the woman in the Haitian folktale, she rejects the suffering that comes with her culture’s obsession with female sexual purity and thus transforms herself into a virgin whose virginity can no longer be tested. At the end of the novel, Sophie proudly asserts, “I come from a place where breath, eyes and memory are one, a place where you carry your past like the hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to” (Danticat, Breath 234). Sophie embraces storytelling, physical transformation, and psychological change as necessary stepping stones towards a self-actualized life. Immigration affects her cultural identity as a Haitian woman.

In Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, Danticat asserts, “the nomad or immigrant who learns something rightly must always ponder travel and movement” (16). This emphasis on the importance of movement and change embodies Stuart Hall’s definition of cultural identity in the diaspora, when he argues,

Rather than reiterating a simplistic and one-directional immigrant myth of reinvention, Sophie chooses to be ever conscious of her country’s and her own painful past when negotiating her becoming sense of self.

Sophie’s concluding comments in Breath, Eyes, Memory set the stage for Danticat’s 1995 collection of short stories, Krik? Krak!, in which the protagonists are forever leaving Haiti, arriving in the Dominican Republic and in the United States, or are suspended in the multiple phases in between leaving one’s country of origin and truly becoming part of a new one. Danticat’s display of radical hope in her short fiction is seen in the resilience of characters who venture to imagine the impossible, even and especially in the face of utter violence and extinction. “Children of the Sea,” the short story that opens the collection, features two star-crossed lovers in a setting that denies them any humanity. Set during the anarchic chaos in the aftermath of the first coup d’état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in September 1991, the story unfolds in a series of letters written and never sent, or merely imagined, by a young woman and a young man separated by political strife; the young woman is locked up in her parents’ home for fear of rape and murder by the tontons macoutes, while her lover is on a boat in the Mona Strait, desperately hoping to make it to Puerto Rico or Florida. What sustains the loving couple is a suspension of disbelief and the power of their imagination. Danticat gives these two young people the voices they never had; it becomes abundantly clear that the young man, along with his fellow refugees, will drown, and the young woman’s fate is equally hopeless. And yet, their words sustain them and the readers, and force us to acknowledge the humanity, resilience, and artistry of the victims of military dictatorship who are silenced not only by their torturers, but also by an indifferent global community. As Robert Houston asserts in his review of the collection in the New York Times Book Review, “The best of these stories humanize, particularize, [and] give poignancy to the lives of people we may have come to think of as faceless emblems of misery, poverty, and brutality.” The imagining beyond the possible, here, is not an act of vain hope, but rather of radical hope in the face of extinction. As Junot Díaz, Edwidge Danticat’s close friend and frequent collaborator, puts it, “radical hope is not so much something you have but something you practice; it demands flexibility, openness, and what Lear describes as ‘imaginative excellence’”(Díaz, ‘Under’).

This imaginative excellence is displayed in the letters the lovers compose for each other in the face of impending death. After relaying a particularly gruesome episode of the devious ways in which the tontons macoutes taunt a mother whose son they just beheaded, the young woman reassures her absent lover and herself by stating, “yes, i will. i will keep writing like we promised to do. i hate it, but i will keep writing. you keep writing, too, okay? and when we see each other again, it will seem like we lost no time” (Danticat, Krik? 8). The young woman’s letters are offset via bold font and her idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation choices, which defy regular grammar, highlight her turn to creative expression.

The young man, in turn, shares the tragedies unfolding aboard the refugee barge, where suicide and death from exposure are a daily occurrence. And still, the survivors prevail by resorting to music and storytelling:

In this passage, the young man connects his fate as a Haitian refugee in the 1990s to the plight of his ancestors on the Middle Passage. And yet, true to radical hope, he conveys the idea of a return to the motherland, offering a contemporary commentary on the African American folktale of “The Flying Africans” who, rather than submitting to slavery, chose to fly back to Africa.

In her historical novel The Farming of Bones (1999) Danticat further heartbreakingly illustrates this imaginative excellence by lyrically writing about the ultimate price many immigrants have paid in the face of rampant xenophobia and racist nationalist rage. In this collection, Danticat highlights that immigration, in a Haitian context, is steeped in a longstanding tradition of transnational movements not only from the Haiti to North America, but also within the Caribbean.

The majority of Haitian immigrants came to the Dominican Republic in one of three waves. The first wave occurred in the second decade of the twentieth century, when the Dominican Republic promised work and a steady income in the cane fields to Haitian guest workers. In 1912, just four years prior to the eight-year long occupation of the Dominican Republic by the United States, the mostly US-owned sugarcane companies in the Dominican Republic were in need of cheap labor and invited Haitian guest workers to move across the border. The second wave of emigrants left Haiti after François “Papa Doc” Duvalier came to power in 1957 and began a regime of terror. The third wave of immigrants arrived in the Dominican Republic in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake that shook Haiti on January 12, 2010, claimed between 160,000 and 200,000 lives, and destroyed the country’s infrastructure. In the face of such political and natural catastrophes, hope is a difficult thing to muster; and yet, Danticat’s protagonists, like her real-life models, display radical hope in their decision to leave their country of origin and imagine a different, better life beyond the familiar.

Set shortly before, during, and in the aftermath of El Corte, the notorious massacre of some 20,000 Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic in October 1937, the narrative focuses on Amabelle Desir, a migrant who left Haiti for the Dominican Republic in search of economic betterment. Amabelle works as a maid in the household of Valencia and Pico Duarte, wealthy Dominicans who own the sugarcane plantations where the majority of laborers are migrants from nearby Haiti. Similar to Martine in Breath, Eyes, Memory, the novel’s main female protagonist is a survivor who persevered in the state-sponsored massacre against Haitian migrant workers on the Dominican-Haitian border and witnessed the brutal murder of her lover Sebastién and many close friends at the hands of Trujillo’s henchmen. Deeply scarred in body and mind, Amabelle dedicates her life to commemorating the dead. She is both nourished and consumed by her memories of the massacre and suffers from survivor’s guilt; yet, her commitment to go on living as a memorial to the victims of the massacre demonstrates her ability to imagine life beyond the horrors of the past. Her very survival is an act of radical hope, and her lyrically-phrased memories are a testimony to the lives lost. Early on in the novel, Amabelle recalls intimate moments with Sebastién:

In this moving passage, Amabelle’s visceral memories of Sebastién evoke Audre Lorde’s emphasis on the ‘erotic as power’ (88). In Lorde’s definition, the erotic goes beyond the sensual and sexual, as she associates the erotic with the very power of creation: ‘When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (89). Sebastién, and her memories of their strong physical and emotional bond, sustain Amabelle in her life after the massacre.

Even in her utmost despair, Amabelle manages to muster one ray of hope in her own lyrical language: “Two mountains can never meet but perhaps you and I can meet again. I am coming to your waterfall” (Danticat, Farming 283). The aptly named Massacre River, which both connects and divides Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was the site of a 1728 massacre between warring French buccaneers and Spanish colonial forces, of the death of Amabelle’s parents by drowning in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane in the 1920s, and of the notorious El Corte. At the end of the novel, Amabelle returns to the place of her parents’ and her lover’s and friends’ demise and, merging with the life-giving force of the water and her ability to dream, is reborn:

She then joins the professor, an acquaintance from her past in the Dominican Republic, in “looking for the dawn” (Danticat, Farming 310), a clear indication of radical hope for a new day and a less violent future.

In The Dew Breaker, Danticat’s novel about a Haitian immigrant father who was a member of the notorious tontons macoutes and a torturer in Duvalier’s regime, the dew breaker’s daughter is a sculptor whose work is inspired by her relationship to her immigrant father. In Create Dangerously Danticat claims, “all artists, writers among them, have several stories—one might call them creation myths—that haunt and obsess them” (5). The story that obsesses the second-generation-immigrant sculptor in The Dew Breaker is her father’s enigmatic past in Haiti. Ka, the main narrator of the novel, travels to the home of the Haitian-born television celebrity Gabrielle Fonteneau in Miami to deliver a sculpture, and comments: “I’m really not an artist, not in the way I’d like to be. I’m more of an obsessive wood carver with a single subject thus far—my father” (Danticat, Dew 4). Artistic expression is the only way Ka knows how to engage with her father’s silence surrounding his and her mother’s lives in Haiti before their emigration to the United States. When she reflects on her artistic choices before starting work on her sculpture, Ka’s thwarted relationship with her father emerges in the raw material she chooses:

The cracks in the wood come to embody the cracks in the story of her father, who, Ka learns in the opening chapter, was “the hunter, . . . not the prey” (Danticat, Dew 20). The dew breaker subsequently submerges the sculpture in a bayou because, as he says, he does not “deserve a statue” (Danticat, Dew 19).

In the last chapter of the novel, the infamous dew breaker himself takes on the narrative voice and testifies to his crimes as a torturer in Duvalier’s regime. The utopian impulse in The Dew Breaker looms large over the novel’s central question of forgiveness and transformation—can a member of the tontons macoutes, a torturer and murderer, ever be forgiven by those he hurt and be redeemed by a new life in the diaspora, or must his life forever be spent in atonement for his crimes? The final chapter does not absolve the father from his crimes, which, in true fascist form, he describes as diligent performances of duty; instead, a possibility for renewal and reconciliation opens up in the birth of Ka, the artist, “their good angel” (Danticat, Dew 241). The scarred wood is, to Ka, an ideal material to represent the scars her father left on the bodies of his victims, and the scars the Duvalier regime left on the Haitian people at large. Rather than rejecting and condemning the flawed piece of wood, Ka comes to embrace it as a representation of Haiti’s painful and violent history, and of the thwarted relationship between the country of origin of her parents and the nation Ka calls home.

After Danticat moved far away from the autobiographical mode in The Dew Breaker, she began to turn to creative nonfiction in her next two works. In 2008, Danticat won both a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for nonfiction for her memoir Brother, I’m Dying, her most personal work to date. The Dayton Literary Peace Prize is an award that acknowledges “the power of literature to promote peace and non-violent conflict resolution” (“Mission”). Danticat dedicates this work of creative nonfiction to “the next generation of ‘cats,’” hinting at the way US-immigration has misread and changed her family’s last name from the Kreyol Dantica to the Anglicized Danticat, one of many acts of violence her immigrant family endured in the United States. Edwidge Danticat’s beloved Uncle Joseph, her father’s brother, who helped raise Edwidge after both of her parents had left Haiti for the United States by 1973, died a detainee of the United States Customs and Border Protection Agency at the Krome Service Processing Center outside of Miami because he was cruelly denied the medical treatment he desperately needed.

In painstaking detail, Danticat reconstructs her uncle’s slow and painful death at the hands of a bureaucratic and inhumane immigration institution. Instead of assisting the immigrants and asylum seekers in their care, the INS systematically failed to ensure Joseph Danticat’s survival and safe entry into the United States. Danticat juxtaposes this utterly bleak scenario of death by bureaucracy with the resilience of her family in Haiti.

After meticulously piecing together the series of careless, xenophobic, and outright racist decisions that led to her uncle’s death in custody, Danticat concludes:

In this memoir, Danticat highlights the radically different treatment immigrants and refugees from Haiti and the Dominican Republic received in the US in contrast to Cuban immigrants. The “dry foot wet foot policy,” which automatically granted residency to all Cuban refugees and emigrants who reach US American soil and which had been instituted under the Clinton administration in 1995, was kept in place until January 12, 2017. Haitian refugees and immigrants, on the other hand, have historically been treated abysmally by the American immigration system. In the wake of the devastating earthquake in January 2010, tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants were given Temporary Protective Status; however, Elaine Duke, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, has since “determined that those extraordinary but temporary conditions caused by the 2010 earthquake no longer exist,” and ended the protective status for Haitians with a deadline of July 2019 on November 20, 2017 (Tatum).

The impact of Danticat’s memoir as a critique of existing immigration policy in the United States thus gains further momentum after the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti on January 12, 2010. In addition to the earthquake, Haiti’s thwarted relationship with the Dominican Republic reached a new low point on September 23, 2013, when the Dominican Supreme Court issued ruling TC 0168/13, which effectively rendered an estimated 250,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent who were born to undocumented migrants between 1929 and 2007 stateless; the ruling decreed that Dominicans of Haitian descent will no longer be eligible for citizenship unless they could prove that their parents had been legal residents of the Dominican Republic at the time of their birth. This effectively equals a retroactive withdrawal of access to Dominican citizenship for those born between 1929 and 2007. Because the majority of immigrants who left Haiti for the Dominican Republic were illiterate and poor, and as a result of political instability and corruption in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, they had never been issued a birth certificate in Haiti, nor had they been able to register themselves or their Dominican-born children in the Dominican Republic. The ruling created outrage in the Dominican Republic, in Haiti, and in the diasporic communities in the United States. The case was also brought before the Inter-American Court, which concluded, on October 22, 2014, that “the criteria used by the Dominican Supreme Court are discriminatory and contrary to the principle of equality before the law, since it ignores the characteristics of the person born in the DR and focuses on the lack of documentation of their parents, without justifying this distinction” (Quintana). The last day to prove that at least one parent was a Dominican citizen at the time of birth was June 17, 2015. A mere 300 people were able to get their papers in by that time. The perfidy of ruling TC 0168/13 is not only in its rather obvious racist targeting of the Haitian Dominican community, but how this overt racism is veiled in a disinterested legal language that will, in effect, be difficult to challenge in an international court.

In an editorial in The Los Angeles Times of November 10, 2013, Dominican American authors Junot Díaz and Julia Alvarez—whose historical novel In the Name of Salomé engages with the roots of anti-haitianismo in the intellectual elites of the Dominican Republic in the nineteenth century—along with Edwidge Danticat and American journalist Mark Kurlansky have drawn attention to the plight of impending statelessness of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Junot Díaz has gone so far as to state that “the last time something like this happened was in Nazi Germany, yet people are shrugging about it” (Kurlansky et al. ). The Dominican Republic has since opened seven detention centers on the border and relabeled them, in an Orwellian doublespeak, “centros de bienvenido,” welcoming centers. As in the case of the parsley massacre, language manipulation and linguistic adaptability may decide over life and death. Edwidge Danticat participates in this very public debate by connecting the plight of Dominicans of Haitian descent to a larger global phenomenon. She suggests,

In her efforts to highlight the global dimensions of anti-immigrant sentiments in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Danticat, in her fiction and nonfiction, relentlessly draws attention to the resilience and creative power of migrants, immigrants, and refugees alike. She lyrically describes the radical hope that underlies the emigrants’ decision to move to another country and confront a new language and a different culture, in view and in spite of xenophobia and racism in a powerfully imagined place that benefits both host country and immigrants.