Brother, I'm Dying (Danticat)

Book Reviews
In Brother, I'm Dying, Ms. Danticat brings the lyric language and emotional clarity of her remarkable 2004 novel The Dew Breaker to bear on the story of her own family, a story which, like so much of her fiction, embodies the painful legacy of Haiti's violent history, demonstrating the myriad ways in which the public and the private, the political and the personal, intersect in the lives of that country's citizens and exiles. Ms. Danticat not only creates an indelible portrait of her two fathers, her dad and her uncle, but in telling their stories, she gives the reader an intimate sense of the personal consequences of the Haitian diaspora: its impact on parents and children, brothers and sisters, those who stay and those who leave to begin a new life abroad. She has written a fierce, haunting book about exile and loss and family love, and how that love can survive distance and separation, loss and abandonment and somehow endure, undented and robust.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


How does a novelist, who trades in events filtered through imagination and memory, recreate an event so recent, so intimate and so outrageous, an attack on her own loyalties and sense of deepest belonging? The story of Joseph Dantica could be, perhaps will be, told in many forms: as a popular ballad (performed, in my imagination, by Wyclef Jean); as Greek tragedy; as agitprop theater; as a bureaucratic nightmare worthy of Kafka. But Edwidge Danticat, true to her calling, has resisted any of these predictable responses. "Anger is a wasted emotion," says the narrator of The Dew Breaker, her most recent novel; in telling her family's story, she follows this dictum almost to a fault, giving us a memoir whose cleareyed prose and unflinching adherence to the facts conceal an astringent undercurrent of melancholy, a mixture of homesickness and homelessness.
Jess Row - New York Times Book Review


As she recounts in her powerful new memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, Danticat was 2 when her father left Haiti for the United States and 4 when her mother followed him to New York City. "Then, as now, leaving often seemed like the only answer, especially if one was sick like my uncle or poor like my father, or desperate, like both." She lived for eight years with her father's older brother, Joseph, a dynamic pastor who ran a church and school in the hilltop neighborhood of Bel Air overlooking Port-au-Prince, while waiting to join her parents. Danticat interweaves the story of her childhood spent between her two "papas" with the final months of both men's lives, which happened to coincide with her first pregnancy. In the process, Brother, I'm Dying, a nominee for this year's National Book Award, illustrates the large shadow cast by political and personal legacies over both the past and the future.
Bliss Broyard - Washington Post


(Starred review.) In a single day in 2004, Danticat (Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Farming of Bones) learns that she's pregnant and that her father, Andre, is dying—a stirring constellation of events that frames this Haitian immigrant family's story, rife with premature departures and painful silences. When Danticat was two, Andre left Haiti for the U.S., and her mother followed when Danticat was four. The author and her brother could not join their parents for eight years, during which Andre's brother Joseph raised them. When Danticat was nine, Joseph—a pastor and gifted orator—lost his voice to throat cancer, making their eventual separation that much harder, as he wouldn't be able to talk with the children on the phone. Both Andre and Joseph maintained a certain emotional distance through these transitions. Danticat writes of a Haitian adage, " A When you bathe other people's children, you should wash one side and leave the other side dirty." I suppose this saying cautions those who care for other people's children not to give over their whole hearts. In the end, as Danticat prepares to lose her ailing father and give birth to her daughter, Joseph is threatened by a volatile sociopolitical clash and forced to flee Haiti. He's then detained by U.S. Customs and neglected for days. He unexpectedly dies a prisoner while loved ones await news of his release. Poignant and never sentimental, this elegant memoir recalls how a family adapted and reorganized itself over and over, enduring and succeeding to remain kindred in spite of living apart.
Publishers Weekly


Haitian-born American writer Danticat (The Dew Breaker) is at her best-fearless, persuasive, and captivating-in recounting her family history. We meet the author as a child in her native country when she is left in the care of her pastor uncle, Joseph, after her parents and brothers immigrate to America. Fast-forward several years, and a teenage Danticat joins the family she barely remembers in New York City, leaving behind her beloved "second father" and island country. What comes next are not uncommon threads in an immigrant narrative-political uncertainties and the colorful figures imposing them, rogues empowered with guns to protect the interests of a self-serving dictator, visa aspirations, cultural woes, and the soothing power of family. In a world where the concept of the distinct nation is fast giving way to the preeminence of diasporas, this is a tale for all, both uplifting and tragic (in 2004, 81-year-old Joseph fled to Miami after escaping a pro-Aristide mob only to be detained and die in prison). Most readers will likely recognize a kindred spirit or something familiar in this family account, brought so vividly to life and captured for the ages by a fine writer. Recommended for all public libraries.
Edward K. Owusu-Ansah - Library Journal


Danticat (The Dew Breaker, 2004, etc.) tells the dramatically twinned stories of her father's and uncle's hardworking, tragedy-haunted lives. This exceptionally gripping memoir starts off momentously in 2004, when the author discovers she's pregnant on the same day she learns that her father has end-stage pulmonary fibrosis. From there, Danticat angles backward in time, sketching a family history marked by long absences and a backdrop of political unrest. While her parents tried to make a better life in Brooklyn, the author was raised in Haiti by her uncle Joseph; she didn't join her mother and father until she was 12. She depicts Joseph, a pastor in Port-au-Prince, as a quiet, dignified man who suffered as only good men do. A radical laryngectomy in 1978 took away his voice. Years later, fleeing the gangs terrorizing Haiti in the post-Aristide years, he died in an undeservedly ugly fashion, humiliated and denied his medication by the U.S. authorities to whom he applied for asylum. Shifting back and forth in time, Danticat alternates between her uncle's and her father's stories. She keeps herself solidly in the background, using her childhood experiences as a means to vividly portray two honorable, duty-bound men who wanted nothing more than to lead respectable lives in a peaceful and prosperous Haiti. The country's troubled history is always smoldering in the background, and there's an explosion of tears waiting behind almost every sentence. But Danticat avoids sentimentality in smoothly honed prose that is nonetheless redolent with emotion. Deeply felt memoir rife with historical drama and familial tragedy.
Kirkus Reviews