The Art of Leaving and Arriving

For a blog entitled The Migrant Type, this article ("All Immigrants are Artists") at The Atlantic has a special resonance.

While contemplating Patricia Engel’s It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, the gloriously-named Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat encounters the idea that "re-creating your entire life is a form of reinvention on par with the greatest works of literature" with the same sense of astonishment I also felt when reading the article itself, let alone the novel that sparked it. As an immigrant, I'd never considered the act of migration a creative one, yet in the sense of reinvention Danticat outlines, there's a compelling and even romantic case for it.

Her interpretation of Engel's novel reveals the enchanting idea that art need not reside in the mythic clouds but can (and perhaps should?) live among real people in the practical world of survival. As she writes—in a sentence that had me nodding my head vigorously—"I’ve never seen anyone connect being an artist and an immigrant so explicitly, and for me it was a revelation." Yes. In a world in which immigrants are treated with suspicion and even hostility in many of their host countries, this was hidden in plain sight all along. And fittingly, it takes an artist (or two) to articulate it. Speaking of which, I want to give the last word to the writer of the source novel, since this short quote is simply lovely:

"[A]ll immigrants are artists because they create a life, a future, from nothing but a dream. The immigrant’s life is art in its purest form."