Brother, I'm Dying, Edwidge Danticat

How and Why it was Written

• Brother, I’m Dying begins with a quote by Paul Auster in The Invention of Solitude: “To begin with death. To work my way back into life, and then, finally to return to death” and this is what the memoir essentially does.
• We are told of Danticat’s Father’s terminal illness in the first line of the text and later learn of her uncle’s cancer. We then hear of Danticat’s life split between Haiti and America and the memoir ends with the fight to find the truth of her Uncle’s death and cope with her Father.
• The heartbreaking simplicity with which Brother, I’m Dying is written belies the potency of the story’s inherent significance. The narrative is a testament to the strength of will in and over adversity. 
• Danticat’s account and memory of her childhood could have belonged to any child growing up in any part of the world; her message is universal and yet culturally specific references feature throughout the pages of the book. 
• Throughout Danticat’s writing it is clear she wants to write the Haitian experience into existence, to make individuals out of masses  
• The imagery used is sensually evoked and the reader can almost taste the coconut freskoes, smell her mother’s soups and stews, and can visualise the vibrancy of the salmon pink house in which she grew up. 
• In her review of Brother, I’m Dying Denise MacLeod comments: “Mules and plantains, tree bark-soaked tonics, and smatterings of Creole are found all the way through the narrative; used booksellers, women water-carriers, and crippled beggars abound. Brother, I’m Dying is at the same time an exotic enriching journey, and a document of survival over hardship which transcends all cultural boundaries” 
• As a participant, Danticat herself is almost absent from this memoir. Her role is that of an observer, of curious spectator. Danticat says of the memoir: “It was a book I felt I had to write, for my uncle who died in immigration custody as well as for my father who died at around the same time and for the future generation, including my daughter, who was born in the midst of all that. It was indeed very therapeutic to write. I've said this before I think of Brother, I'm Dying as not a me-moir, but a nou-moir, a we-moir; it's not just my story but all these stories intertwined.” 
• Writing becomes a way in which Danticat can engage with the past and the present at the same time. Through writing Danticat learns to transcribe and translate her family’s existence and experience. When her father buys her a typewriter she remembers being told that it would be a way to “measure [her] words” (p.119) 
• Danticat took this literally: “He and I both had slightly crooked cursive handwriting [...] Still [those words] feel like such prescient gifts now, this typewriter and his desire, very early on, to see me properly assemble my words” (p.119) 
• Danticat writes and translates with the blessing of her father and we see in her literary work that she reworks her texts with a sense of orality creating a space where she can recreate the Haitian tradition through writing. 
• The tale of her Uncle’s death is one of the main reasons why Danticat writes the memoir, she is keen to discover the truth. 
• Danticat is extremely critical of the way he was treated in America 
• In Brother, I’m Dying, sinister and underlying shades of racism and xenophobia are exemplified by Joseph’s treatment in the Krome Service Processing Center, a former United States Air Force airbase built during the cold war. 
• Dancticat writes about when she goes to Krome Detention Centre as part of a delegation of observers organised by the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Centre and witnessed people arriving: “They were Haitian “boat people” and in addition to their names identified themselves by the vessels on which they’d come”. 
• Danticat asks the lawyer how they determine their ages if they do not come with birth certificates and he answers that “their age is determined by examining their teeth”. 
• This reminds Danticat of slave auctions where the mouths of slaves were checked to assess their health (pp.211-212). 
• Danticat cannot help but associate migrants with slaves and terrorists. 
• Danticat is quick to condemn this and comments on the unjust treatment of her Uncle in the chapter ‘Alien 27041999’ (p. 214) 
• Danticat is extremely critical of the way Americans dehumanized immigrants. 
• The themes of exile and immigration make the circumstances which result in the final resting place of Danticat’s father and uncle in America ironic, especially after living apart for more than thirty years. 
• The division of the book into two seems to separate much of the positive from all that is negative, the peaceful from the horrific.
• Overall, the memoir is a way for Danticat to cope with the deaths of her Father and her Uncle. It also functions as a way to communicate the history of individuals in Haiti and challenge the history of the masses. While violence, instability and nature’s wrath have long been mainstays of Haiti, Haiti is also Danticat’s homeland. It is a place for inspiration for Danticat but she struggles with political dilemma she finds herself in as an American citizen born of Haiti.

Storytelling

·         Danticat’s novel is dispersed with numerous folk tales and children stories with symbolic messages.

ðThe tales link into Danticat’s traditional Haitian storytelling style and seem to provide a form of escapism for her during the more troubling times in her life, dealing with issues such as death, displacement and illness.

·         Most of the tales were told by her Grandmother – “Grandme Melina” – who can be seen to be giving her guidance even after her death, through her stories.

·         “Leaning down, I picked a book that looked familiar, a book I’d owned before. It had a nun on the cover and on one side o her were eleven little girls in Raincoats and on the other, having the luxury of an entire hand to herself, a little girl who was dressed exactly the same as the others but stood apart somehow. The little girl’s name was Madeleine...I couldn’t wait to climb into bed and have another visit with my old friend Madeleine, who like me, now live in an old house with other children”. (p.67)

ð  Danticat shares a similar experience with the character of Madeleine, as she feels displaced and abandoned, what with her parents leaving for New York to set up a better life for them. Her lack of communication with them could be seen as a reason for why she was so dependent on such tales to help her through her childhood.

·         Moreover, the story of Madeleine helps her deal with the concept of illness – “I leafed through my Madeleine, which managed to make even sickness – in Madeleine’s case it was appendicitis – seem like a lot of fun”.(p.71)

ð  She was constantly surrounded with illness suffered by her family members such as her uncle.

·         Her grandmother also informs her of another tale similar to that of Rapunzel, of a “beautiful young girl whose mother, fearful that she might be abducted by a passerby, locked her inside a small but pretty little house by the side of the road while the mother worked in the fields by dusk...Grandme Melina’s voice would grow shrill with excitement from dangers that might lie ahead for this young girl...our representative in the story, the one from whose choices we were meant to extract our lesson”.

ð  The girl is terrorised by a snake who attempts to enter the house by disguising itself as her mother, when this fails the snake kills the mother. The daughter however, senses danger and instead of leaving the house and risking her life by the snake, she stays inside and retains her purity and her life.

ð  The story can be interpreted as having many lessons, that being safety and awareness, especially living in a politically turbulent place such as Haiti.

ð  However, a more relevant one to Dandicat’s tale would be the snake acting as a symbol of death and the young girl as sickness: “...a story I thought was meant only to scare the neighbourhood children. But I see now that the story was more about Grandme Meline than anyone. She was the daughter, locked inside a cocoon of sickness and old age while death pleaded to be let in somehow.” (p.71)

·         Another tale that was told by her grandmother to her, was the story of a young billy goat who came across an old horse on a narrow trail; an argument ensued over who should go first and that the oldest had priority, but there was disagreement over who was in fact the oldest. Eventually the goat argues that his beard proves he is the oldest. This story links into Dandicat’s migration to New York to be with her family and the struggle to integrate with her two brothers who did not understand the family dynamics.

ð  “”They say you two are older than me”, he continued, “but it’s not true. I’m the oldest”...Kelly’s time with our parents was his beard. Indeed he had spent much more time with them than Bob and I had combined.” (p.116-117)

·         “The story she told...was about God and the Angel of Death. It was one of Grandme Melina’s stories, one that Grandme Melina said you told to keep death away. In the end, Granme Melina stopped telling the story because she had wanted to die”. (p.143)

ð  The story of the Angel of Death and God was an effective tool for viewing death as a necessity of life and removing fear from it, especially for Dandicat who endured seeing her loved ones die in tragic circumstances.

ð  These stories acted in a way as to comfort her over serious matters.

ð  Danticat’s scattering of stories throughout her novel echoes was summed up in an interview: “many of us have turned to literature in difficult times and have found comfort and greater understanding there". Highlights the importance of literature in movement and migration of people, despite distance, words can unite people.

Separation and Where is Home?

From the age of 2 and all the way through her life Danticat experiences different types of separation, from both family and different homes and countries. Could these continual separations shape how she sees her, family, country and home?

• In an interview from 1996 Danticat discussed how separation was a strong theme in her past writings, such as “Breath, Eyes, Memory”. The reasons for separation shape relationships, and she was interested in the healing of these relationships, or lack of. “Brother, I’m Dying” continues this theme of separation and the recovery from these separations affect how she sees her family and what her concept of home is.
  • When Danticat is two, her father leaves for the USA, and when she is four her mother joins him. Danticat does not remember her father leaving, but remembers the trauma of her mother leaving

•  “When it was time for my mother to board the plane, 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 of her […] But what if our mother went away and never came back?” (pg 56-57) 
• To comfort her, Danticat's cousin, Marie Micheline would tell her stories about her and her parents. She realises later that she would embellish them in her way, and use them to prove that they were once loved by her absent parents (pg 54). 
• So despite these stories, when her parents do return when she is seven she does not recognise them. 
• During the time of their separation, Danticat's father “had mostly been a feeling for me, powerful yet vague, without a real face, a real body”. Her birth parents were now strangers to her and her brother. The separation had made them shy and unsure of them, and has stunted their relationship. 
• Instead, the separation gains Danticat and her brother substitute parents in the form of their Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise. During the period until she is twelve, Danticat almost has two different families. There is the one of borrowed memories and imagined happiness in the USA, and the one of reality in Haiti.
•  When Danticat leaves Haiti at twelve, she leaves behind what had become her family. Her father recognises this when they arrive, whispering “one papa happy, one papa sad.” (pg 111) When Danticat does come back to Haiti because Tante Denise is sick, Tante Denise does not recognise her. Again the returning are not recognised by those left behind. 
• Danticat sees the birth of her daughter as a separation, and that over time they will gradually drift further apart (pg 253). She tries to hold back some of this separation and shows her desire for cohesion by naming her daughter Mire, after her father. 

• Danticat's feeling of separation from her families is also reflected in what she imagines her home to be. 
• Danticat does not return to Haiti until she is 25, and it does not look like she remembered it to be. It is more crowded, there are more shanty towns, and more burned homes. There are some similarities, but she does not recognise it, and it does not recognise her. In a way Danticat does not fully see herself as Haitian anymore, as she even describes herself and her father as “people from abroad” (pg 147). 
• The stories told to her by Marie Micheline, reflect ones that would be told about left homelands. The idealised space that are spoken about in the collective memory. 
• Walcott-Hackshaw argues that although Danticat left Haiti at twelve, it will always be her home as she continually returns for her work and like. However, if home is where the heart is, like the title of her article suggests, then surely her home would be in either Little Haiti with her husband and daughter, or in New York with her mother and brothers. Her Haitian parents have died, and so although she still has some ties to Haiti and Bel Air, her once separated family are now joined together in either the USA, or in death, as shown below.

Themes of Life and Death

The themes of life and death are apparent right from the start of Brother I’m Dying. Danticat says that: “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” (p. 3)

• When she found out she was pregnant was the same time that she found out her father was dying. This must have been tough on Danticat as she would be overjoyed at her pregnancy news but on the other hand she would be distraught at the news that her father’s condition was incurable.

Throughout Danticat’s journey she experiences many deaths both people she didn’t know and people she knew very well. “Suddenly it occurred to me that she might be dead. I had seen lots of dead bodies, not in their beds at home but at viewings and funerals at my uncle’s church” (p. 72).

• This quote was when she found her Grandma lying dead in her bed. Throughout the rest of the book she has to deal with many of her close family dying. This includes Marie Micheline, Tante Denise, her uncle and her father. Although Danticat is effected by these deaths she does not express that much emotion in her story just carries on with her life.

Danticat gained her view of death from what her uncle said. “‘Death is a journey we embark on from the moment we are born’ he’d say. ‘An hourglass is turned and the sand starts to slip in a different direction as soon as we emerge from our mother’s womb” (p. 73) This hourglass attitude to death could explain how she deals with deaths of people who are close to her. Not only this but when Marie Micheline died of shock, she stated:

• “When you hear that someone has died whom you’ve not seen in a long time, its not too difficult to pretend that it hasn’t really happened, that the person is continuing to live just as she has before, in your absence, out of your sight” (p. 135) When Marie died she had not seen her for years so it was better just to not think about her as being dead.

Even after the death of her father and uncle, whom we have seen that she dedicated the book to, Danticat was still thinking of the idea of death. “Like perhaps most people whose loved ones have died, I wish that I had some guarantees about the afterlife. I wish I were absolutely certain about my father and uncle are now together in some sort of tranquil and restful place, sharing endless walks and talks beyond what their too-few and too-short visits allowed” (p. 268)

The amount of deaths that Danticat talks about through Brother I’m Dying shows how much death was a prominent theme through her life.

Bibliography

Macleod, Denise; "Review of Oh Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Dandicat"; Scribe Publications; 2005

St Jean, Martha, Genius: A Talk With Edwidge Danticat http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martha-st-jean/genius-a-talk-with-edwidg_b_295040.html

Robert H McCormick Jr “Brother, I'm Dying” World Literature Today; Jan/Feb 2008; 82, 1; pg. 74

Danticat, Edwidge, 1969- and Shea, Renee Hausmann.

"The Dangerous Job of Edwidge Danticat: An Interview." Callaloo 19.2 (1996): 382-389. Project MUSE. Web. 30 Mar. 2011. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.

Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw. "Home Is Where the Heart Is: Danticat's Landscapes of Return." Small Axe 12.3 (2008): 71-82. Project MUSE. Web. 21 Jan. 2011. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>