Brother, I'm Dying

“After a few visits, however, he too began dreading that gray and dingy room, its stale and stuffy smells, its peeling beige paint and anti-smoking posters, because it was the one place where our father’s predicament was most unambiguous, where his future seemed most uncertain. At the same time, it was where Papa appeared most comfortable, where he could cough without being embarrassed, because others were coughing too, some even more vociferously. In the skeletal faces and winded voices around him, he could place himself on some kind of continuum, one where he was still coming out ahead.” 

The author uses strong contrast between the oppressiveness of the doctor’s waiting room and her father’s sense of liberation because now he is among people who share his predicament. Not only is he able to cough freely, unafraid of negative reactions, but he can also find solace in gauging the level of his illness in comparison with others. This passage speaks of the basic human desire to live, and live freely, in keeping with the larger theme of the novel.

“Everything was suddenly mixed up in my head and leading me to the darkest places. Would I carry to full term? Would there be complications? Would I die? Would the baby die? Would the baby and I both die? Would my father die before we died? Or would we all die at the same time?”

The coincidence of Edwidge’s pregnancy and her father’s illness symbolizes two ends of a spectrum: On the one hand, a new life thrives, and on the other, almost like in a fairy tale, another life has to end. Edwidge’s fears are normal for a pregnant woman, but her having to face her father’s imminent mortality exacerbates them. The fear of death, always present in our psychological framework, is strongest when the stakes are highest. 

“When he was done with his round of greetings, he filled a plate with fried chicken wings he never touched. As he coughed, some of the church members came over and held his hand. Others urged him to go home. They might have meant well, but he felt rejected. As if they didn’t want him near their food.”

As mentioned earlier, Father feels exposed and shamed by his cough, which is symbolically an outward manifestation of his inability to blend in. Even in his church, he feels “rejected,” which is not a reflection on the people around him (whose behavior shows respect and stems from their worry about him) but an image of his own insecurities. Faced with a life-threatening illnesses, he seems to fear he might be a carrier of a spiritual and symbolic taint of death, and he projects this fear onto others. 

“For the family readings, I recited my father’s letters in a monotone, honoring what I interpreted as a secret between us, that the impersonal style of his letters was due as much to his lack of faith in words and their ability to accurately reproduce his emotions as to his caution with Bob’s and my feelings, avoiding too-happy news that might add to the anguish of separation, too-sad news that might worry us, and any hint of judgment or disapproval for my aunt and uncle, which they could have interpreted as suggestions that they were mistreating us. The dispassionate letters were his way of avoiding a minefield, one he could have set off from a distance without being able to comfort the victims.” 

Edwidge’s desire to be the reader of her father’s letters clearly stems from her missing her parents. She attaches a deeper meaning to her father’s bland and official-sounding letters because this is her way of coping with the lack of warmth and emotion she hopes to receive from her absent father. She develops a fantasy of complicity between her father and herself, a tacit deal that helps preserve Edwidge and Bob’s good spirits, and she eagerly perpetuates the idea that her father writes dispassionately so that he will not cause an upset. This thinking gives young Edwidge hope and allows her to maintain faith in her parents, without feeling betrayed. 

“My uncle was staring at the ceiling and wondering whether the doctors with their ‘biopsy’ had done him more harm than good when he heard the announcer’s voice. It reminded him how important voices were. If you had one, you could use it to reach out to your loved ones, no matter how far away. Technological advances could help—the telephone, the radio, microphones, megaphones, amplifiers. But if you had no voice at all, he thought, you were simply left out of the constant hum of the world, the echo of conversations, the shouts and whispers of everyday life.” 

The author uses her uncle’s imminent loss of voice as a clear metaphor for the notion of what a voice represents: the possibility to communicate one’s ideas, emotions and thoughts. Having a voice is part of our normality, and it is only when we are in danger of losing it that we recognize the significance it carries. The same is true for those who are left without a platform of free speech or the ability to participate in everyday life. This idea resonates in a particularly significant way in this memoir of unheard immigrant voices. 

“I’ve since discovered that children who spend their childhood without their parents love to hear stories like this, which they can embellish and expand as they wish. These types of anecdotes momentarily put our minds at ease, assuring us that we were indeed loved by the parent who left. Unfortunately, I wasn’t told many stories like that.” 

In the true form of the memoirist, Edwidge Danticat here begins with an empirical, psychological truth about the emotions of children who grow up without their parents and how much the stories of the shared past mean to them. She proceeds to bring the notion to a personal level by employing the communal “we” so as to identify herself as belonging to such a group of children, and she ends by focusing on her personal experience by sharing her sadness that she was not able to experience “many stories like that.”

“I picked up the book, as though picking up Madeleine herself, and quickly pressed it against my chest even as my uncle paid the seller. Unlike my first copy, which was brand-new and smelled of newly printed ink, this one smelled musty and ancient. My uncle didn’t have a chance to look at it long enough to see that he had bought it for me before, as a birthday gift when I was four years old.” 

Choosing a book that she has already owned supplies young Edwidge with an important link to her past, because she does not have many familial memories to hold on to. She picks up the book gently and carefully because the book for her is a symbol of her belonging somewhere: Her uncle gave her the first copy, and her choosing another copy of the same book offers her an important sense of continuity. The previous copy was new, while this one is used, symbolizing Edwidge’s acceptance of Uncle Joseph as her surrogate father. 

“Those nights, sitting at Granmè Melina’s feet with the other children and listening to her often frightening stories, I would close my eyes and imagine it was my mother, who never cared for such tales, telling me one of them.” 

Granmè Melina, who is the mother of Edwidge’s aunt Denise and not her own grandmother, is the closest thing to a figure of a doting grandmother for Edwidge, but in this quote Danticat suggests she is also Edwidge’s idea of what a mother should do: tell stories to her children. Having grown up without her parents’ constant presence, Edwidge naturally latches on to those members of her extended family who are willing to spend time with her and the other children. This detail shows how deeply her Haitian family cares for all the children, regardless of whether they are related or not, and everybody has a hand in bringing them up.

1.        “‘What have we ever done to you?’ Tante Denise cried out in a strained, high-pitched voice. ‘Haven’t we taken care of you from the time you were a baby?’

Marie Micheline sat up and lowered her feet off the bed.

‘I knew it,’ she shouted. ‘I knew you’d act like this. I’m pregnant, not ungrateful.’” 

Marie Micheline is another one of the adopted children in Uncle Joseph’s household, but this quote emphasizes the familial bond Tante Denise has developed with the young woman: Their argument sounds exactly like a mother and daughter fighting. Like a typical teenage daughter in trouble, Marie Micheline hides her pregnancy from her guardians, and like a typical mother, Tante Denise reacts with questions that imply familiar parent-child guilt-inducing recriminations, only with a little more bite because they refer to Marie’s debt of loyalty to the family that has taken her in. This is why Marie’s brief but poignant reply carries such weight.  

“The macoutes had a synchronized look, a coarse veneer that made the thin ones seem stout, the short ones seem tall. In the end they were all equally intimidating because they represented the government. Whether it was Pressoir or this old man, each one had the power to decide whether or not my uncle lived or died, whether or not his daughter lived or died.” 

Members of the paramilitary special operations unit primarily serve the purpose of menacing the citizens into obedience and servility. Their “synchronized look,” designed to threaten, transforms them into robot-like entities with shared identity, focused on intimidation and brutal force. The author makes a clear link between their tactics and the fact that they serve the corrupt government, which renders them even more frightening because of the power that stands in their support. The point Danticat makes is that such organized units exist in authoritarian societies to keep ordinary people always afraid and feeling under threat of random retaliation. 

“Looking down at Karl, snugly cradled in our mother’s arms, I couldn’t help but feel envious. If she could bring him here from New York, why hadn’t she been able to take Bob and me with her when she left? At the same time, I could tell from the way she stopped now and then to run her fingers over both his face and mine that she meant him to be a link between us.

‘Can I hold him a little?’ I asked.” 

Edwidge’s first meeting with her new brothers is both exciting and devastating. While she and her brother Bob have been biding their time in Haiti, her parents have seemingly started a new family, one that does not really include Edwidge and Bob. As she writes her memoir from an adult’s point of view, she seems to be adding the understanding that Mother wanted Karl to be the “link” between the older and younger children, yet even as a child, Edwidge makes an attempt to connect by asking to hold her baby brother. 

“At first sight, my parents’ living room seemed lavish and plush with its beige wall-to-wall carpeting, its velour-upholstered sofas and chairs, covered in plastic for their protection, and the diagonal mirror cutouts framing a giant velvet print of the Last Supper. I mistook their fire escape, which extended from my parents’ bedroom window to the living room’s, for an outdoor terrace and immediately began to imagine all of us spending summer evenings out there, looking over the neighborhood while sipping American colas and telling each other stories.” 

Edwidge’s first glimpse into the working-class American milieu offers a significant juxtaposition to her former Haitian life in ramshackle houses with barely any amenities. The standard late-1970s décor in Edwidge’s eyes is the height of luxury, “lavish and plush,” and she does not recognize the plastic covering as representing the threat of poverty in households which cannot afford to change furniture. As a child brought up in the outdoors, to Edwidge the fire escape can only symbolize the ability to spend time outside, especially as the idea of fire protection would be unfamiliar to her. These observations serve to underscore how different life in America is compared to Haiti.

“There’s a Haitian saying, ‘Pitit moun se lave yon bò, kite yon bò.’ When you bathe other people’s children, it says, 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, because they will never get a whole heart back. I wonder if after we left for New York, my uncle felt that way.” 

The author often includes Haitian Creole language in her memoir, supplying both the sense of exoticism for non-Haitian readers and a sense of place where African and French influences have contributed to the creation of a new culture. In this context, the saying she quotes goes a long way in describing both how her uncle might feel after spending so many years raising Edwidge and her brother and also how the children feel, as they now virtually have two sets of parents to whom they owe allegiance. 

“During the years when he couldn’t speak, he had developed a habit of jotting things down, so he kept track of the cadavers in the small notepads he always carried in his jacket pocket. In his notebooks, he wrote the names of the victims, when he knew them, the condition of their bodies and the times they were picked up, either by family members or by the sanitation service, to be transported to the morgue or dumped in mass graves.” 

One of the most poignant images in the memoir, Uncle Joseph’s humanistic and humane urge to record the numbers and, where possible, identities of the victims of various unrests in Haiti represents a heroic effort by an ordinary man to leave a significant document of suffering and terror for posterity. Since he has no voice, he recreates it on paper, including details as points of historical context of the troubled times in which he lives. The fact that those papers are later destroyed makes his actions even more affecting.

“The tank had the familiar circular blue and white insignia of the United Nations peacekeepers and the letters UN painted on its side. Looking over the trash-strewn alleys that framed the building, he thought for the first time since he’d lost Tante Denise that he was glad she was dead. She would have never survived the gun blasts that had rattled him out of his sleep. Like Marie Micheline, she too might have been frightened to death.”

Even though the presence of the UN vehicles should offer solace and support to Uncle Joseph, he is aware that the UN mission only exacerbates the already precarious situation in Haiti. The “trash-strewn” streets attest to the riots that bring terror to ordinary citizens, even though the fighting may ostensibly be for their benefit. The author connects Marie Micheline’s death of a heart attack caused by fear to this situation, and she emphasizes the point through Joseph’s thankfulness that Denise has died, as death has spared her witnessing the ever more disturbing reality of life in Haiti.

“Like my uncle, Léone had spent her entire life watching the strong arm of authority in action, be it the American marines who’d been occupying the country when she was born or the brutal local army they’d trained and left behind to prop up, then topple, the puppet governments of their choice. And when the governments fell, United Nations soldiers, so-called peacekeepers, would ultimately have to step in, and even at the cost of innocent lives attempt to restore order.” 

This quote about Tante Denise’s sister offers an outright condemnation of the many forces, political and military, that have shaped Haiti’s destiny. Significantly, Danticat places equal blame on those entities who ostensibly serve to keep the peace and the local armies. In this way she reveals the true nature of the political intrigues that create “puppet governments” to satisfy geostrategic goals that only serve the interests of the big forces, such as the US, and not in the least the people of Haiti, who, like Léone, can only helplessly observe the events.

“I’d seen some men who looked too young to be the mandatory eighteen years old for detention at Krome. A few of them looked fourteen or even twelve. How can we be sure they’re not younger, I’d asked one of the lawyers in our delegation, if they come with no birth certificates, no papers? The lawyer answered that their ages were determined by examining their teeth. I couldn’t escape this agonizing reminder of slavery auction blocks, where mouths were pried open to determine worth and state of health.” 

The author underscores the already terrifying image of the Krome detention center, and the young boys who spend their days locked up in it, by connecting it with the dreadful historical image of African slaves, whose owners would prove their health by exhibiting their teeth to the buyers. The parallelism becomes even more poignant once we take into account that Haitians are descendants of many of those African slaves, and that their tragic history is repeating itself in a vicious circle even in the 21st century, with casual racism and a profound lack of empathy.

“Now even the motorized voice betrayed a hint of shame, the kind of shame whose only reprieve is silence.

‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘Others are waiting.’

‘How do you feel?’ I asked. ‘If you don’t feel well, tell them.’

‘I will,’ he said. ‘I have to go.’

I heard a muffled voice in the background, someone demanding a turn at the pay phone.

‘You’re strong,’ I said. ‘Very strong. You have so much more strength than even you know.’

And reluctantly he agreed and said, ‘Oh yes. It’s true.’”

The last conversation between Edwidge and her uncle is notable for its banality, as there is really nothing else any of them can say or express at the given moment, while her uncle is imprisoned at the detention center. The hyperbole of his “motorized voice” revealing shame emphasizes both Edwidge’s consternation and her uncle’s humiliation. Her repeating that Uncle Joseph is strong sounds more like a desperate attempt at convincing both herself and her uncle, as does his resigned confirmation. The quote oozes sorrow and desperation.  

“The fact that my uncle had asked the stars to fall was also not lost on Tante Denise, who believed, and had groomed us to accept, that each time a star fell out of the sky, it meant someone had died.

I wasn’t looking at the sky when my uncle died at Jackson Memorial Hospital, but maybe somewhere a star did fall down for him.” 

The author connects through parallel Uncle Joseph’s illness of 1975, when he was on the brink of death, and his final hours at the Jackson Memorial Hospital. By referring to a Haitian phrase to “let the stars fall,” Joseph invokes the spirits of the dead and invites death for himself. By emphasizing this cultural reference in her own reflections on her uncle’s death, Edwidge makes a connection between the two cultures, Haitian and American, and reminds us that her uncle died alone in a country that had never been his. 

“My uncle had never seen white men before, and their pink, pale skins gave some credence to his mother’s notion that white people had po lanvè, skins turned inside out, so that if they didn’t wear heavy clothing, you might always be looking at their insides.” 

Through the idea of Uncle Joseph seeing White men for the first time, the author connects the exoticism of whiteness in Haiti with the traditional myth that White people have “skins turned inside out,” and, while the idea that their insides would show were they naked might invite a notion of openness and visibility, it is largely unsettling and unnatural. This quote serves to turn the gaze of presumably predominantly White audiences inwards and encourages them to see, through young Uncle Joseph’s eyes, blackness as the natural and ordinary skin color. 

“When was he last conscious? I wondered. What were his final thoughts? When did he realize he was dying? Was he afraid? Did he think it ironic that he would soon be the dead prisoner of the same government that had been occupying his country when he was born? In essence he was entering and exiting the world under the same flag. Never really sovereign, as his father had dreamed, never really free. What would he think of being buried here? Would he forever, proverbially, turn in his grave?” 

In pondering the last moments of her uncle’s death, Edwidge widens the lens to include the political and national as crucial parts of a person’s identity, especially in times of strife. For Uncle Joseph, the US has always been the invading presence, even though he has learned to respect its power and the good in it. However, just like Haiti, he has never been “sovereign,” the full master of his own fate, and his death bitterly reflects that. Even though he is past caring about where his resting place will be, there is cruel irony in the fact that he is not even given the choice of where to be buried. 

“There’s a stage in labor called transition, when the baby, preparing to separate from the mother, twists and turns to pass through the birth canal. I am sure there is a similar stage for exiting life, though it might be less definitive. Still, as I go into labor—thankfully with a risen placenta—each time I wish for an easy transition for my daughter and myself, I wish the same for my father.” 

Once again, the author juxtaposes the two ends of the spectrum of life, the birth and the death of a person (as in quote 3). The juxtaposition melds into parallelism, at least in Edwidge’s wishes for both her daughter and her father—that they should “transition” into life and out of it with equal ease. Edwidge is poised in the middle of the two processes, a necessary part of only one, and this is her authorial position as well: as the mediator, the giver of voice to those who do not have one.  

“Look, Papa, I’d say. You’ve waited for her. You’ve lived long enough to see her. Today is not just her day, but all of ours. And we’re not the only ones who will cradle and protect her. She will also hold and comfort us. She too will be our repozwa, our sacred place to rest.” 

The idea of a newborn person becoming a “sacred place to rest” is closely connected to Haitian culture and lore, and Danticat uses it to emphasize the connective tissue between the three generations of her family: her dying father, herself, and her new daughter. As parents protect children, so do children “hold and comfort” the parents. Danticat draws the circle of life with three crucial stages and feels profound happiness that her father has lived long enough to meet his granddaughter, who symbolically takes his place in the world.