On Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying

Jen Knox

Application Date: 02-23-2009

Appreciation

As a rule, I never read critical reviews of contemporary work until I’ve read and evaluated the book for myself.  Perhaps I’m missing the point of such reviews, but I avoid them because I worry that the experts will direct my interpretation, that their words will dilute my reading experience, that I’ll feel as though I’m test-driving a car from the passenger’s seat.  Additionally, I tend to add current literary blockbusters and bestsellers to the bottom of my To-Read list and revisit them later, when the press dies down, the chatter stops.    

Meanwhile, I found it impossible to ignore the collective praise of Edwidge Danticat’s 2007 memoir Brother, I’m Dying.  People wouldn’t shut up about this book.  It received the National Book Critics Circle Award.  It repeatedly appeared on displays at Barnes & Noble, taunting me.  It earned favorable reviews from numerous publications, including Time Out New York, The Boston Globe and The New York Times Book Review; all of which I read; all of which, similarly, praised the author for her narrative control and her enraging, enlightening tale.  

It was inevitable that I eventually read a contemporary book that I knew too much about.  I did so expecting my assessment to drown in others’ opinions.  Instead, I was shocked to find that I agree with the majority of the critical praise without missing the sense of discovery I covet as a reader.  Now, in an attempt to prove that my reaction is genuine, is not unduly influenced, I must explore it.  How, I wonder, can a nonfiction story invite a reader to personalize her vicarious journey?  How does Edwidge Danticat exhibit such narrative command? 

Brother, I’m Dying begins with a moral challenge.  As the memoir progresses, the challenge reappears; it is woven into each story line as the author records events.  In fact, Danticat’s memoir reads as a complex folktale by utilizing this technique, offering a profound dilemma, an enigma.  As the challenge intervenes throughout the stories that follow, it also works to establish the author’s authorial narrative presence and justify the quilt-like structure of her memoir.  The first sentence is crucial:

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.

This contrary emotional state immediately causes a reader to pause, to consider what it is like to be caught between the joy of birth and the confusion of death.  Furthermore, it introduces a twofold theme that allows Danticat to interweave her many paths, to broach subjects ranging from childhood emigration and the struggle of adapting to illness to changing familial roles, assimilation and cultural opposition without losing focus.  Reflecting upon her family members—primarily her father, Mira, and her uncle, Joseph—Danticat is able to simultaneously, emblematically examine her own experience.

            The author recalls instances in which each of the two men sacrifices himself for his family—for her.  The men suffer prejudice and humiliation, illnesses and ill-will.  Meanwhile, Danticat’s narration moves fluently through time, providing readers a diverse scope of her family’s response to adversity, by relying on each other.             

            She juxtaposes the competing ways she’s learned to view death as a Haitian-born (and raised) American woman.  Danticat struggles with the idea that her child’s birth will take place on American soil, far from Haiti, her roots, her family’s heritage.  As her father’s health declines, she recounts the change that has occurred in her outlook on the sacrifices he’s made to offered her and her child.  

            While recounting her childhood with her uncle Joseph—her primary caretaker until she was twelve—Danticat pays tribute to the traditions and connections between her Haitian family members.  She honors her uncle as a tragic hero, and wonders at his motivation to stay in Haiti rather than follow his brother, Mira, to the states.  Following the techniques of fiction, Danticat portrays one story from his young adulthood; it is a story of his long, dangerous trek to find a diagnosis for undiagnosed and severe throat pain.  After a misdiagnosis from a dentist, resulting in the extraction of all of his teeth, Joseph goes to an herbalist who is perplexed by his pain, so he knocks on Haitian doctors doors, only to sacrifice days of work and time to no result and further pain. 

            Upon hearing of a visiting American doctor stationed a few towns away, Joseph finally decides he has no choice.  He embarks on the first of many journeys.  As Danticat recounts this tale, a reader temporarily forgets the perspective of Edwidge herself; she is nowhere around, she did not witness any of this, but there is trust, somewhat blind, that the uncle’s journey is relevant to her memoir, relevant to her dilemma.  Along with the obvious beauty of the prose, the reader is drawn away from the narrator, and into a section that reads as fiction. 

            When Joseph finally makes it to the American doctor he is diagnosed with cancer.  The prescription is a surgery, the result of which is a permanent loss of speech.  As a church minister, community leader and patriarchal center of a large and extended family, Danticat’s uncle has been portrayed as a man whose strength is his ability to communicate.  When this voice leaves him, it doesn’t seem possible that he will recover fully or be able to live up to his preceding generosity and spirit.  Surmounting tragedy, however, Joseph does not give up.

            His story not only works because it ties into the theme, but it simultaneously becomes symbolic of the narrator’s current journey.  Joseph’s journey was tough, full of loss, but it ends with a beginning—Joseph must find another outlet for his spirit, a new way of communicating his message, of living his life.

            Danticat describes her childhood confusion, growing up knowing Haiti as home while her parents barely paid their bills, somewhere in America.  What was so great about America?  The narration at this point does not dwell on the violence of militia terrorism plaguing Haiti, but rather reports it, cites it, and in doing so provides readers the sense of living with it as a child who knows no other life.  There is the sense of knowing danger is just outside the front door and going outside anyway.  The violence surrounding Danticat’s childhood was her father’s reason to move.  But as a child, who knows of no other life, Danticat remembers her lack of understanding.  She remembers the separation. 

            The division the narrator expresses between herself and her parents is not portrayed with spite, nor is it a play for sympathy.  Instead, Danticat recounts natural feelings of distance, of childhood anger and pity toward her parents, who obviously had misinformation about America.  She wrote her father letters and read his responses with pity for his lack of education.  As she grew up in Haiti, she didn’t understand why her parents would struggle in America, work so hard to establish themselves as citizens and earn enough money to support their family in New York.  Why not stay with the family?  Her recollection of this time is one of her kinship and love for her uncle and aunt, her ties to Haiti and the culture she grew up with.  So, about half-way through this memoir, when Danticat explains the sadness she felt, leaving her uncle when she is finally granted a Visa permit and allowed to join her parents as an American, away from the violence, I felt I understood her trepidation. 

            This sort of dual reportage of childhood rationalization and adult understanding is told with subtlety and ease of transition.  Then, the story shifts again and again, subtly, consistently maintaining a dual perspective.  If the shared perspective is not a combination of Joseph’s tales as juxtaposed to Danticat’s own memories, it becomes the woman who honors her Haitian tradition such as the folklore told to her by her Granme Melina, the herbalists who prescribe old-world medicines to her family, the feeling of community and reliance she learns from neighbors. 

            The Haitian folklore that Granme Melina shares with the author extends Danticat’s narrative more by exploring another set of stories told while maintaining harmony and control.  Everything ties together.  Furthermore, folklore characters become representative of emotions: anger and confusion, those emotions that seems to drive the story without being dwelled upon.  Small scale folktales, also, act to mirror the larger structure of Danticat’s memoir.

            One story, as told to the author by Granme Melina, is presented as a riddle.  The Angel of Death and Father God are both thirsty, and the challenge is to figure out why townspeople always chose to offer water to the Angel of Death before Father God?  Granme Melina explains that people offer this sympathy for the Angel of Death because he is their actual savior.  God forces people to live in pain.  God is the one who causes people to live in fear of death and anguish, and it is the Angel of Death who releases people from such pain.  The moral: We should respect death as much as we respect life.  The tale is simple, perhaps debatable by common American belief, but it provides readers a representation of Haitian culture.  By bringing up a succession of these tales, the author again represents her feelings, reincorporates her own moralistic dilemma. 

            Although there are numerous tragic tales in Danticat’s memoir, it is easy for a reader to follow along, to not feel imposed pain.  This is due to Danticat’s ability to masterfully interweave and examine her ideas.  She reflects upon death and the separation her family members endured.  Yet, she also acts as a bridge to familial separation, by reflecting yet again, with different perspective.  The widely praised narration Danticat utilizes begins with her dilemma, her feeling of loss and separation, only to reflect upon the cumulative impact of illness, instability, adaptation, defeat, perseverance, more defeat, and tradition: her family’s ties.  Family, therefore, becomes the narrator’s tool of study into the meaning of loss, a symbol of her own emotional journey, as evidence in passages such as this one, which arrives at the end of the book. 

What I really wanted to say was that the dead and the new life were already linked, through my blood, through me.

With this passage, the narrator makes clear that her role is that of the seeker, the link, the direct object, not the subject.  Presto: Transcendence.