51 pages • 1 hour read
Brother, I'm Dying
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Themes
Giving Voice to the Voiceless
From Chapter 1, Edwidge Danticat makes it clear that her main reason for writing her memoir is to lend her own voice to the two men who have helped shape her life: her father and her uncle. Both died without being able to tell their story, and this memoir is Danticat’s attempt at righting this. She writes:
This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at recreating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can’t (22).
The theme of lending voice to the voiceless is central to the book in several ways. When she lived in Haiti as a girl, Edwidge first “recited my father’s letters” (19), reading them aloud to family members, and thus becoming her father’s voice in Haiti. As an adult, she recalls this activity as an homage to her father, a way of getting closer to her childish idea of him, and thinks of it as a role she played as a special emissary of her father’s in their homeland.
Later, when her Uncle Joseph lost his voice from throat cancer, Edwidge became his interpreter, accompanying him during his official business and translating his gestures to people who would not otherwise understand them. The author positions these two early experiences as starting points in Edwidge’s life’s mission of lending herself to the service of helping others be heard—be it as an interpreter and a guide in Haiti to documentary filmmakers, or at Krome center for detention of immigrants, where she spoke and recorded testimonies of incarcerated Haitian men and women. Similarly, her uncle, even when voiceless, keeps meticulous records of people killed or injured in riots and gang wars, striving to keep alive the memory of individuals and of a broken society.
Through her memoir, Danticat shares not just her father and uncle’s stories of their struggles, one trying to rebuild his life as an immigrant in the US and the other acting as a pillar of the community in riot-torn Haiti; she also details the stories of other members of her family and, ultimately, the story of Haiti as a country. In this way, her personal and family memoir becomes a political history of Haitian people and their struggle against colonists and other forces whose geopolitical and strategic interests rarely consider the people living there.
Immigrant Families and Transnational Parenting
Danticat’s memoir offers insight into what it means to be a member of an immigrant family and, even more, the experience of children whose parents have left for other countries to seek a better life. The theme of family emigration from Haiti is one of the linchpins of the book. Edwidge Danticat has spent the first 12 years of her life living in her native Haiti. Her father left the country when she was barely two years old, and her mother joined him in the US when Edwidge was four. Edwidge spent the next seven years under the excellent care of her Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise, and yet she recalls the immense yearning for her own family and finding it hard to understand why their parents left Edwidge and Bob behind. Although Danticat recalls these emotions as an adult and explains them as such, she makes sure to record what she was feeling as a little girl, waiting for the occasional letter or phone call from her parents.
Transnational parenting implies that parents are physically separated from their children by living in another country yet maintain a close bond with them through letters or telephone calls. Additionally, the children, usually left in the care of other family members, often listen to stories and memories about their parents, so they do not forget them (as Edwidge does with Marie Micheline, especially). As with immigrant families (whole families living in a new country), both parents and children adapt to many changes, new cultures and sets of behavior. Edwidge’s parents are not able to visit their homeland for many years, but once they have obtained resident status, they return to Haiti to secure Edwidge and Bob’s visas. Danticat recalls how “we saw some strange figures turn the corner” (76), and, seeing the man with a “huge, cavernous” smile, she wonders, “Was he really my father?” (76). This experience brings Edwidge much closer to her uncle, whom she comes to regard as her father.
Once she has moved to the US to join her family—which by now comprises two new brothers, born in the US, for whom Edwidge feels some jealousy—Edwidge must learn to belong again, and she details this experience obliquely through descriptions of the changes of scenery and climate. Although she has now again become a part of her primary family, she remains closely connected to Haiti and her uncle, whom even her father calls her “other father.”
Haiti as a Country of Beauty and Crime
The author uses the genre of memoir to offer a history not just of a family but of a whole country, Haiti, thereby adding an element of political awareness to her recollections. Danticat recounts how Haiti became a French colony in 1697 and how the French “imported black Africans to labor on coffee and sugar plantations as slaves. A century later, slaves and mulattoes joined together to drive the French out, and on January 1, 1804, formed the Republic of Haiti” (24). However, the French, British and German governments still controlled international shipping, as the poor people of Haiti did not have the means or organization to support themselves. During WW1, the US invaded Haiti, using the world war confusion to take control. Danticat depicts these events through the history of the Bel Air neighborhood in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, where her family has lived since late 1940s, thus combining personal with local history.
Her uncle Joseph moves to the capital in search of a better life, and Danticat describes briefly the verdant and picturesque yet poor mountain villages where the majority of Haitians live, then contrasts this environment with the combustible chaos of the capital, ruled by local gangs, paramilitary forces, and rebels against the ruling clique, supported by the US government. The author juxtaposes attempts by the likes of her uncle to organize the ordinary Haitians into a semblance of normal life, offering them education and faith, with the merciless power struggles that see politicians rise and fall in a matter of months, robbing the country of necessary stability. She contrasts the beauty of ordinary life, filled with running children, storytelling grandmothers, and men and women doing their best to maintain dignity in the face of trouble and strife with the careless and casually cruel hand of the political forces that seek to control the country’s assets. Later in life, as Edwidge visits her home country, she sees it “wholly assembled and disassembled” every time she arrives (124), as if Haiti cannot find enough peace and stability to prosper and express the beauty of its people, its culture, and nature.
Lack of Communication in Immigration Scenarios
Through her recollections of events dealing first with her parents’ immigration, and then 20 years later with her uncle’s decision to seek temporary asylum in the US, Danticat threads in the theme of the painful deficiency of communication for people who enter the immigration process. As a child, Edwidge depends on her father’s rare and emotionally uninvolved letters to maintain some sort of connection with her primary family. In the early 1970s, most of Haitian homes have no telephone connection, so during her formative years she is unable to hear her parents’ voice. She resorts to fantasy to give her father’s letters some warmth and a sense that he cares about Edwidge and her brother, which she badly needs to feel: “The dispassionate letters were his way of avoiding a minefield, one he could have set off from a distance without being able to comfort the victims” (19). Although she desperately wishes to know when her parents will come for her, Edwidge is unable to ask them that and concludes as an adult that “the words that both my father and I wanted to exchange we never did” (20).
For young Edwidge, as well as for her parents, the immigration experience is even more difficult because the family is divided, and essential connections between them falter through lack of proper communication. Once Edwidge and Bob have received their visas and their departure for the US becomes imminent, they go to the call center to speak to their parents. While Bob “came to life on the phone with my parents” (94), 12-year-old Edwidge has distanced herself from them and has grown attached to her uncle, so when her father asks her if she is happy to be coming to the US, she “pretended not to hear” (94). For Edwidge, the long periods without contact with her parents have taken their toll, and it will take her some time to renew her attachments to her primary family once she has arrived in New York.
Danticat explores the theme of lack of communication further in her recollections of her uncle’s last days, spent in the Krome detention center, cut off from everyone he knows, and without any support from the officials, who treat him only as an Alien 27041999. Danticat here uses official records and documentation that chart her uncle’s time in the faceless, cruel system without possibility to contact his family, while his health rapidly deteriorates. She thus underscores the sense of helplessness they all feel; she and the rest of the family, as she tries to track him down, and he while he suffers the final indignities of others treating him like a scamming criminal. The author gives a scathing criticism of the immigration protocols in place for Haitians, records her uncle’s final days with detached, almost clinical diction, and emphasizes that he died without being able to communicate with anyone from his family, a lonely old man in a faceless prison hospital.
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