Brother I’m Dying: Life in Haiti, One Breath at a Time

Edwidge Danticat’s memoir weaves a tale of brotherhood and family amid Haiti’s, and the United States’, chaotic circumstances.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Brother I’m Dying, Knopf, September, 2007, 288 pages

Edwidge Danticat, in each of her books of fiction about Haiti, writes of stark realities—torture, civil unrest, dictatorship’s burdens—from an ethereal distance. Her latest is a memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, in which her graceful writing is grounded in the most intimate of places: family. Raised by both her father and uncle, it is as much their story as it is hers. “I wrote this,” she writes, “because they can’t.”

The book opens with impending death—her elderly father learning he has a terminal illness—and it carries that thread through the unfurling of life. “Death,” she writes, “is a journey we embark on from the moment we are born.” Still the story is one of lives lived courageously, if not easily. Balancing between history and present, Danticat unravels the men’s hardscrabble history from her father’s toiling as a tailor, a shoe salesman, and eventually a cabbie in New York City to her uncle Joseph’s work as a voiceless pastor whose dedication to Haiti’s salvation never waivers.

The harrowing crescendo comes, the reader thinks, when in 2004 a gang threatens to behead her uncle after U.N. peacekeepers use his church after the coup of President Aristide. Joseph survives, only to end up days later in an American detention center where he ironically meets a death perhaps worse, and certainly more shameful, than a ruthless beheading.

For the telling, Danticat pores through FOIAed documents, uses details found in notepads left by her uncle, and lets us into her own raw memories. Through her recollections we are privy to the sometimes stark, sometimes harrowing realities of what are most often anonymous lives. Yet—as in each of her books—it’s as if Danticat offers as a gift the joys that lie beneath what we so easily take as utter turmoil; the sweets her uncle brought her as a child that she savored only after handing them right back for him to savor, the typewriter her distant but astute father gave her at 14, her own child who is born while she’s in mourning.

While sorrow and death and the deep roots of pain and injustice sew up your heart through its pages, Brother, I’m Dying is, in the end, a story of lives hard fought, and ones certainly never taken for granted. “Maybe we are all dying,” she writes, “one breath at a time.”


If you buy a book using a Bookshop link on this page, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate