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By Hephzibah Anderson

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- One summer day in 2004, Edwidge Danticat learned that she was pregnant -- and that her father had just months to live. That same year, her beloved uncle, an 81-year-old pastor, fled bloody unrest in Haiti only to die in detention in Miami.

These three events frame "Brother, I'm Dying," a memoir that vividly captures how immigration shaped the Haitian-born author's life and writing.

Danticat was just two years old when her father, Mira, left their home in Port-au-Prince to find work in New York City. A couple of years later, her mother joined him, entrusting Danticat to Mira's brother Joseph and his wife.

Eight years passed before Danticat and her younger brother were united with their parents and American-born siblings in the U.S., by which time Danticat had come to see Joseph as a second father. She had also received her first lessons in storytelling from her grandmother, who spun folk tales each evening as the tropical darkness gathered outside.

"Stories are a really strong part of Haitian culture, the place where old and young met,'' Danticat says during an interview at the Savacou Gallery in Manhattan, where the walls are punctuated with bright, impressionistic oils of Haitian life.

"Those fables were supposed to teach you how to live, and also how to die,'' she explains. "I reach for them in difficult moments. They can be very comforting.''

The Written Word

While folk tales taught her about storytelling, her parents' absence taught her the power of the written word. Half of my family was here in the U.S. and half was in Haiti, so communication was very important.''

Though she writes in English, Danticat's first and second languages are Creole and French. You can hear it in her diction and in the careful way she chooses her words.

"Brother, I'm Dying'' is above all the story of Danticat's uncle. As unrest intensified with each regime change, Mira urged Joseph to leave Haiti and the church he had built. It was only in 2004, when gangs including members of his own flock turned on him, that he was forced to flee.

Though Joseph was traveling with a valid tourist visa, he requested temporary asylum when he reached Miami, Danticat says. A survivor of throat cancer, he spoke through a mechanical voice box and relied on assorted medications. Yet he was incarcerated in the Krome Detention Center, Danticat writes. He soon lost consciousness, and U.S. officials eventually transported him to a hospital. He died the next day.

Family Honor

"I wanted to tell my uncle's story to honor him, to honor my family, but also to share that experience with people,'' Danticat says.

Dressed in black trousers and jacket, Danticat is soft- spoken and precise. She is just as measured on the page -- a remarkable feat given her subject matter. "I found other ways to vent my anger, like writing op-eds,'' she explains. "I was able to speak my rage, so when the time came to write the book, I could do so in a much calmer way.''

Her father died shortly after Joseph, and both men were buried in a cemetery in Queens, united after 30 years apart. It's not what her father wanted. "If our country were ever given a chance and allowed to be a country like any other, none of us would live or die here,'' he said at Joseph's funeral.

Danticat says most Americans don't realize how heavily the U.S. has influenced her homeland. "The United States occupied Haiti for 19 years during the first half of the 20th century, and was involved in two more interventions after that, so it's very complicated being the type of American that I am,'' she says.

After the deaths of her two "fathers'' came the birth of her daughter, who at two and a half speaks both English and Creole -- lots of both, Danticat laughs. Another writer, then? ``At least another storyteller.''

"Brother, I'm Dying'' is from Knopf (269 pages, $23.95).

(Hephzibah Anderson is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Hephzibah Anderson at hephzibah_anderson@hotmail.com .