E3W Literature | University of Texas

Edwidge Danticat
Brother, I’m Dying
Knopf, 2007
272 pages
$23.95

Reviewed by Rachel Burgess

“I found out I was pregnant the same day that my father’s rapid weight loss and chronic shortness of breath were positively diagnosed as end-stage pulmonary fibrosis,” begins Brother, I’m Dying, Edwidge Danticat’s second work of nonfiction. The autobiographical book tells the story of Danticat’s father, Miracin, his immigration to the US, his relationship with his brother, Joseph, and his fight with end-stage pulmonary fibrosis; her uncle Joseph’s life in Haiti and his detainment and death in the Krome immigration detention center in Florida; and the author’s own life in Haiti with her uncle, her immigration to the US, and how, through mid-pregnancy, she kept in touch with her dying father as she struggled to help her uncle. Danticat explains that Brother, I’m Dying is “an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating 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.”

Entwined with these accounts is the author’s family history, spanning several generations, and Haiti’s political and social history. Danticat weaves a compelling narrative with information pieced together from the accounts of family members, from press coverage, and from neighbors who lived through the events leading up to her uncle’s death. Brother, I’m Dying is more than the story of one family, Danticat initiates a conversation about the politics of race, ethnicity, immigration, borders, and the reality of immigration detention centers through her uncle, Joseph’s, detainment by Miami Customs.

Under the American-backed interim government of Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, Joseph is caught in a firefight between the Haitian riot police, the Brazilian-led UN peacekeepers, and a local gang in his native Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. A gang member calls him a traitor, “the bastard who let them on his roof to kill us.” Joseph is wrongly accused of taking money for their blood, and is told he can no longer “live here among us anymore.” Fearing for his life, Joseph flees Haiti, sometimes disguised as a woman.

Although he has a valid entrance visa, Joseph seeks political asylum upon entering the US For five days, while he sickens waiting in Krome, his family and lawyer push for his release. Denied his medication and accused of faking his illness, even when he vomits during his “credible fear interview,” Joseph dies alone in the detention center’s hospital ward, without family, a “dead prisoner of the same government that had been occupying his country” since he was born.

Joseph’s experience is a compelling commentary about the political violence inflicted upon refugees and immigrants in both Haiti and the US Joseph’s story shows how immigration policies and regulations function when Haitians cross the arbitrary lines of one nation into another. Danticat highlights the ineptitude of the immigration staff and its disregard for the humanity and rights of detainees.

Joseph’s cruel treatment raises important questions about who gets detained and who does not. Danticat suspects that her “uncle was treated according to a biased immigration policy dating back from the early 1980s when Haitians began arriving in Florida in large numbers by boat.” She reveals the difference in treatment between Cuban and Haitian asylum seekers: “In Florida, where Cuban refugees are, as long as they’re able to step foot on dry land, immediately processed and released to their families, Haitian asylum seekers are disproportionately detained, then deported.” Danticat ponders, “Was my uncle going to jail because he was Haitian?…Was he going to jail because he was black? If he were white, Cuban, anything other than Haitian, would he have been going to Krome?”

During the course of his life, Joseph “clung to his home, determined not to be driven out. He had remained in Bel Air, in part because it was what he knew. But he had also hoped to do some good there.” Because the gang vowed “to do to [Joseph] in death what they’d been unable to in life, behead him,” Joseph’s body could not be buried in his home place of Bel Air, Haiti. Since the United States denied him entrance, Joseph “would be exiled in death. He would become part of the soil of a country that had not wanted him.” Miracin says to Danticat, “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” in the United States.
Danticat makes sense of these dire circumstances and feelings about life and death by plaiting together family memories, political history, and parables from her grandmother, Granmè Melina. For example, Granmè Melina tells Danticat the story of a daughter whose father died. The daughter loved her father so much that, distraught over his death, she refused to attend the wake, ordering “it not be held.” An old woman of the village suggested the daughter “let the people rejoice at [her] father’s wake tonight before they cry at his funeral tomorrow.” Seeing no sense in this since her father was dead, the daughter remarked, “Why should I ever rejoice again?” The daughter asked the old woman, whom she knew was gifted with the power of traveling between the living and dead, “to go to the land beneath the waters” in order to bring her father back. The old woman traveled to this land, running into many people until she found the father. The old woman reemerged from the land of the dead with the father’s false teeth to prove that she did indeed see the girl’s father, “Your father sent you this so that you might believe that I saw him…” The daughter took the teeth, and with renewed courage consented to celebrating her father’s life at the wake.

Like this daughter, Danticat takes courage from truth and celebrates even as she mourns the deaths of her father and uncle, and the suffering of her country. Danticat demonstrates her versatility as a writer and storyteller as she moves seamlessly from one subject to another. Better known for her award-winning fiction, Danticat’s career was launched with the publication of her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), and its selection in 1998 for Oprah’s Book Club. Krik? Krak! (1995), a collection of short stories made her a National Book Award finalist in 1995. The Farming of Bones (1998), another novel, won the 1999 American Book Award. In both her fiction and non-fiction, Danticat paints a poignant portrait of Haiti’s past and present, challenging inaccurate media accounts and stereotypes of her country. Her newest work offers readers fresh insights into Haiti and its history. Brother, I’m Dying also reminds us of the fragile state of today’s world, when people everywhere are beset with social and political problems over which they have little to no control.