Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying is shelved, blurbed, and honored as an autobiographical and biographical work, which tells of selected moments in the lives of the author and several of her family members. The genres in which she writes--autobiography and biography--suggest that the book is factual, non-fiction, and Danticat certainly goes to great lengths to show the facts of her stories in many instances. But, she also relies heavily on her own memory, as well as the memory of some of her subjects, and memory (as she artfully describes here) is probably better fodder for fiction writing, than for non-fiction writing. One might ask (given recent discoveries of fraudulent non-fictions, and several calls for closer fact-checking of such works) does Danticat's blending of memory and accounts from documented facts in Brother, I'm Dying appear out-of-place or problematic for the genres in which she writes?
In the following excerpt, Danticat describes her sources for the content of her book, and possibly her reason for writing the book. Most of all, she explains her method of crafting "real" memory into a story:
I write these things now, some as I witnessed them and today remember them, others from official documents, as well as the borrowed recollections of family members. But the gist of them was told to me over the years, in part by my uncle Joseph, in part by my father. Some were told offhand, quickly. Others, in greater detail. What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments. This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can't.
Since both her sources are no longer alive, the book is a tribute to their lives, and it gives immortality to their voices. The latter purpose (giving immortality to voices) is immediately evident since both men spent much of their lives in relative voicelessness. Her uncle Joseph lost his voice to throat cancer, and her father spent many years as an immigrant in Brooklyn, NY unable or reluctant to speak out in anger against injustices, or unfairness. And, she also gives voice to her childhood pain and fear of abandonment caused by parents who left her behind in Haiti for several years when they immigrated to the United States.
Though the voices tell stories that are filled with pain, there is reconciliation in each story that goes beyond the pain and shows that the voiceless can gain sound that resonates louder than that pain: a voice box can help the survivor of throat cancer speak again; a taxi-driver who is yelled at and robbed by passengers can raise a best-selling writer who tells his story for the world to hear; children who are left behind by parents who leave for long periods--so long the children don't recognize them when they return--can reunite successfully with those parents and regrow bonds of love.
Brother, I'm Dying also gives voice to two nations' woes, and the human price paid for those woes. The first is Haiti's woes. Joseph's story takes place during several decades of Haiti's political and economic struggles--from the 1960s and the era of the Duvaliers and the Tonton Macoutes, to the 1990s and onward marked by violent clashes between youth gangs (chimerès) and the authorities.
Despite the violence, poverty, death, destruction and hopelessness which surround him, Joseph (a pastor) is determined to remain in a particularly dangerous section of Haiti where he has established a home with his extended family, and a church where the still-faithful worship. He remains there--an unbending, seemingly indestructible figure in the town, while most around him are bent and destroyed--despite his brother's pleadings from the United States to move.
In a tragic twist of fate, he is forced to flee his country and ends up in the bowels of the U.S.'s immigration system as a Haitian refugee. It is the final stop along Joesph's path of indignity, loss, and abandonment. His story is ultimately a tragic one, and may even evoke anger (as it did for me), but here too there is reconciliation. The path of Joseph's story seems to take a biblical rise (appropriate for a man of the cloth) from its depths. He dies after being mistreated or (at least) mishandled by the Immigration authorities, and then the story focuses on his funeral and burial, and on speculations of what the afterlife may be for him.
I must note here that I found the attempt to reconcile his tragedy by shaping the ending of his story with her father's words, and her own sentimental speculations a little harder to swallow than Danticat's other attempts at reconciliation in the book. I guess I was unable to turn away from the need for good old pagan justice for Joseph, which she does not provide. I wondered, for instance, if there was any legal documentation of justice for him instead of these lines:
Danticat's father on Joseph's death and burial in the United States: "He shouldn't be here. If our country were ever given a chance and allowed to be a country like any other, none of us would live or die here." Danticat on Joseph's death: "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."
The other source / storyteller for Danticat's work is her father who also experiences personal tragedy from which he does not recover. I found the attempts at reconciliation in his story--bad with good, tragedy with triumph--more successful than the attempts at same in Joseph's story. The father's illness and death are reconciled with the birth of his daughter's first child, who is named after him. Additionally, in death he and his brother are assumed to finally be able to spend time together, something they were denied in life. Here Danticat's art works well at providing a suitable ending for the story.
CONCLUSION
Back to this question: Does Danticat's blending of memory and accounts from documented facts appear out-of-place or problematic for the genres in which she writes? Not for this reader. When the memory is questionable (for example, as in the case where she is given three conflicting accounts of an incident) she presents all the conflicts for the reader to either assess or discard. This gives her use of memory credibility. I also found that the stories Danticat tells of their lives in Brother, I'm Dying cover the following universal themes: abandonment, sickness and recovery, voicelessness, injustice, survival, death, societal violence and chaos, familial love. These stories, which blend memory and legal documentation therefore bear large truths that are recognizable and identifiable to some of us immigrants from parts of the Caribbean and elsewhere, and even to some of us (a broader audience) who have experienced personal tragedies and have tried to reconcile them with the goods with which we have been blessed.
Overall, I found Brother, I'm Dying well worth the pain of reading about tragedy and agonizing over appropriate endings. Its stories are just the right mixture of artful crafting and fact to make it another important addition to the truthful documentation of the experiences of immigrants here in the United States.
