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Haitian Writer to speak at Y Unterberg Poetry Center's (NYC) - Edwidge Danticat
from the September 11, 2007
A Haitian family, linked by love, must learn to live on separate shores
Edwidge Danticat has written a moving tribute to her father and uncle, the two men who raised her.
Novelist Edwidge Danticat grew up with two papas - her dad, Mira, who left Haiti for America when she was 2, and her Uncle Joseph, a pastor who raised Danticat and her younger brother, Bob, until they were able to join their parents in New York when she was 12.
Almost two decades later, in 2004, Joseph was forced to flee Haiti after gangs threatened to kill him. Despite the fact that he had a valid visa and a passport, the United States government imprisoned the octogenarian, who was dead within days. Earlier that year - on the same day that she discovered that she was pregnant - Danticat found out that Mira had been diagnosed with a fatal illness.
Now, Danticat has written a beautiful memoir to both her fathers. If there's such a thing as a warmhearted tragedy, Brother, I'm Dying is a stunning example. As she did in her powerful novels, such as 2004's "The Dew Breaker," Danticat uses the personal to show the impact of a whole country's legacy. But she does so in a way that avoids rage or bitterness - an amazing feat since it's not possible to even read about her uncle's treatment in US custody without a deep-burning anger. But the main characteristics of the memoir are the generosity, strength, and dignity of the two men, and the love Danticat has for both.
"Brother, I'm Dying" also encompasses
the emotional lives of both halves of a diaspora: those who leave and those who remain behind. As a child, she cherished the rare links to her parents, who were only able to make one trip to Haiti during the eight years between the time her mother left to join her father and her own trip.
Before leaving, her mother sewed Danticat 10 dresses, most of them too big, so that she could still dress her daughter after she was gone. In her uncle and aunt's house, Danticat shared a room with their adopted daughter, Marie Micheline, who would whisper to Danticat the story of the butter cookies Mira would buy for his little girl on his way home. As a toddler, Danticat didn't care for the cookies, but she would hoot with laughter and feed them to her papa.
" 'He loved you so much,' [Marie Micheline] would say out loud at the end of the story, 'he left you with us.' " Marcel Proust's stale old madeleine doesn't have anything on Marie Micheline.
With no phone at home, letters were their primary connection. Every other month, her father would mail a three-paragraph letter, carefully avoiding any overly personal topics that might cause his children pain. Her uncle created a ceremony to honor the importance of those paragraphs. In college, Danticat writes, she found out her dad's letters were written in a "diamond sequence, the Aristotelian 'Poetics' of correspondence." Later, he said to her, "What I wanted to tell you and your brother was too big for any piece of paper and a small envelope."
Words remained a powerful symbol between Danticat and her father, even though, she writes, the two always carefully avoided any emotional conversations. When she and Bob rejoined their parents in New York, her dad gave her a Smith-Corona Corsair portable typewriter as a welcome-home present. " 'This will help you measure your words,' he said, tapping the keys with his fingers for emphasis." Her dad meant it literally - both Danticat and her dad's cursive had a tendency to run downhill - but the gift turned out to be a prescient one.
Danticat recalls her uncle with great affection. She writes about small treats, such as a shopping trip where her uncle bought her a shaved coconut ice and a secondhand book ("Madeleine"), as well as the time Joseph risked his life to save Marie Micheline and her baby from an abusive husband. Her uncle and aunt took a number of children into their pink house in the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, as well as running a church and a school.
Despite Mira's urgings to join him in America, Joseph refused to abandon his church - even when an emergency surgery left him without a voice with which to preach. Coups and the growing riots in his neighborhood couldn't shake him. Then gangs burned the church down and began hunting for Joseph. His escape from Port-au-Prince was worthy of Houdini, but the miracle was short-lived. After arriving in Miami and asking for asylum, the octogenarian was sent to the Krome detention center, where his medication was taken away. Perhaps to avoid charges of embellishment, or perhaps because it's just too painful, Danticat keeps adjectives to a minimum and largely lets the government's own documents tell of her uncle's final days.
Mira ended up outliving his brother long enough to hold Danticat's daughter, whom she named for him. "I wish I could fully make sense of the fact that they're now sharing a grave site and a tombstone in Queens, N. Y., after living apart for more than 30 years," she writes at the conclusion of her memoir.
"In any case, every now and then I try to imagine them on a walk through the mountains of Beausèjour.... And in my imagining, whenever they lose track of one another, one or the other calls out in a voice that echoes throughout the hill, 'Kote w ye frè m? Brother, where are you?'
"And the other one quickly answers, 'Nou la. Right here, brother. I'm right here.' "
BOOK REVIEW:'Brother, I'm Dying' by Edwidge Danticat
BOOK REVIEW:'Brother, I'm Dying' by Edwidge Danticat
The writer's childhood memories form a loving tribute to her father and uncle.
September 9, 2007
Brother, I'm Dying
Edwidge Danticat
Alfred A. Knopf: 272 pp., $23.95
THERE is no guarantee that a distinguished fiction writer will produce a successful memoir. Yet Edwidge Danticat -- the author of three elegant and complex novels, including "Breath, Eyes, Memory," and the story collection "Krik? Krak!" brings the same lucid storytelling to "Brother, I'm Dying."
On the same day in 2004 that Danticat joyfully discovered she was pregnant with her first child, her father, a 69-year-old Brooklyn taxi driver, was diagnosed with end-stage pulmonary fibrosis.
Months later, her uncle Joseph, a Baptist pastor who had raised Danticat in Haiti during much of her childhood, was forced to flee the riot-torn Port-au-Prince neighborhood in which he had lived for more than 50 years. Age 81 and ailing, Joseph flew to America to stay with his brother's family but was unjustly detained by the Department of Homeland Security in Miami, where, under harsh conditions, he died in custody.
Revisiting this "wondrous and terrible" intersection of events, and roaming backward through the history of her family and her native country, Danticat struggles to fashion a cohesive narrative. Like a burial, her account is a final, loving act on behalf of her father and uncle. "I am writing this," she flatly states, "only because they can't."
If rigor is elusive in such an intricate account -- one that expands outward to include the history of U.S. involvement in Haiti since 1915; violence and fear during the Duvalier reign and beyond; and post-Sept. 11 immigration policy -- emotional clarity is abundant.
It thrives, as it does in all of Danticat's work, in small, piercing scenes. In 1973, her mother leaves Haiti to join her father in America, leaving 4-year-old Edwidge and her younger brother to be raised by Joseph and his wife. The airport goodbye is excruciating: "I wrapped my arms around her stockinged legs to keep her feet from moving. She leaned down and unballed my fists as Uncle Joseph tugged at the back of my dress, grabbing both my hands, peeling me off her."
On the streets of Port-au-Prince, when she's 9, Danticat serves as her uncle's interpreter after throat cancer and a laryngectomy render him mute. She agonizes for him as neighbors gawk at his tracheotomy hole. "[A]ll I could think to do was imagine a wall around him, a roaming fortress that would follow him everywhere he went and shield him from derision."
At age 12, Danticat and her brother reunite with their parents and two U.S.-born younger siblings in Brooklyn. As she matures in America, she retains her role as the family voice, telling its stories, interpreting its dreams and nightmares as she had once spoken for her wordless uncle. In the Miami mortuary where Joseph lies in November 2004, "exiled finally in death," the funeral manager tries to persuade the pregnant Danticat not to view the body. She disregards him, recognizing that "the dead and the new life were already linked, through my blood, through me." They're linked through her eloquence as well, for as she says, citing a Haitian folk tale, "[i]t is not our way to let our grief silence us." *
Nobel Prize-winning St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott and Haitian author Edwidge Danticat will be a part of the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center's 2007 season and will make appearances in the series this month.
Walcott, the author of more than 20 collections of poetry and dozens of plays, will read from his rich body of poems on Sept. 17 at 8p.m.
On Sept. 20 at 8 p.m., Danticat, author of "The Dew Breaker" and "Krik? Krak!," will read from her touching memoir "Brother, I'm Dying," a tale of immigration from Haiti to the U.S.
Also reading that evening will be South African novelist, poet and playwright Zakes Mda, whose works include the play "We Shall Sing for the Fatherland" and the novels "The Whale Caller" and "Cion."
The readings will be held at the 92nd Street Y on Lexington Ave. Tickets are $18 and a limited number of $10 tickets are available for people under 35 years of age. For tickets and information, call (212) 415-5500 or visit 92Y.org/poetry.
Edwidge Danticat was raised by her aunt and uncle in Haiti and joined her parents in the United States when she was 12. Her peerless fiction includes "Breath, Eyes, Memory" and "The Dew Breaker." In 2004, when Danticat was pregnant with her first child and while her father was dying of pulmonary fibrosis, her uncle, an elderly churchman, was forced to flee the violence in Haiti.
Despite having documentation and having visited America before, a frail Joseph Danticat was first detained by US Customs, then shackled and imprisoned. Without his medication, he died within days. Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that 62 immigrants have died in US administrative custody since 2004. "Brother, I'm Dying" (Knopf, $23.95), a model of grace and restraint, tells the story of Uncle Joseph, of the Danticat family, and of their country.
Danticat spoke from her home in Miami.
Q: Was it hard for you to reveal yourself and your family this way?
A: What made it less difficult was the fact that we all had this grief in common. I'm very conscious of the self-indulgence of writing about oneself, but there was more than just our pain happening, for my uncle certainly but also for my father. It was a way of paying tribute to them.
Q: This is part memoir, part reconstruction. What sources did you draw on?
A: I drew a lot on the official documents of my uncle's detention. The final document we got from the inspector general in Washington was in fact a retelling of all the interviews in the process. It was almost like one of those novels where you get the point of view of every character, including my uncle's. . . . We had to fight hard to get these papers under the Freedom of Information Act. I also drew on stories from my aunt Zi, who was the last person my uncle spent a lot of time with. It's a strange thing to say, but I felt as if every other thing I had written was like training for this.
Q: Did you feel that you were giving lives to people we see - if at all - solely as victims?
A: I think that was the driving force. Going through the detention bureaucracy with my uncle and going to see many doctors with my father, you know that what they see is this old man who is poor, who is Haitian. That he is a person is not of any concern to them. You want to say, "This is a man, a great father, his life matters." In fiction you do that when you write characters. But there's ambivalence too, because there were parts I just wanted to keep for myself.
Q: When your uncle died in detention, was that your first glimpse of a different America?
A: It really wasn't. My parents with their church used to visit detainees at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. And here in Miami I used to visit detention centers, so this was a reality I knew. I think that made it more horrific, I couldn't lie to myself. Of course it's different when it's someone you love. What was most striking to me was these people who are supposed to speak for the government saying "It was his time, we all have to die," calling my uncle's medicine "voodoo medicine." Then we read the New York Times article about people dying in detention, and it was the same story. Except that I was in the fortunate position of having, if not a big mouth, then a big pen. Other families haven't got that.
Q: Yes, one of the questions on the form the detaining officer fills in is "Congressional or media interest?"
A: I know, I kept thinking if they had known I was a writer would that have made a difference. It shows how important it is to speak out, to share your story. I also kept feeling that if only one person in the process had acted humanely and said this is a very sick old man, things would have turned out differently.
Q: You ask "Was he going to jail because he was black?" Was he?
A: Certainly because he was Haitian, because there is a specifically unfavorable policy toward Haitian refugees, especially in Miami. If it had been an 81-year-old Cuban or European asking for asylum, I'm pretty sure he would have been treated differently.
Q: Why do you describe the most harrowing moments so dispassionately?
A: I did not want to write an angry polemic. These things speak for themselves. The details from the report, the medical records of my uncle's death, I want the reader to come across those and wonder how could someone have this information and make such disastrous decisions for the life of an old man.
Q: Has your family had any redress?
A: None. The report from the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security concluded that nobody did anything wrong. I guess this book is our only redress.
BOOK REVIEW:'Brother, I'm Dying' by Edwidge Danticat 
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