Edwidge Danticat Reflects on Family, Immigration, and Why "Stories Matter"

Author shares stories behind "Brother, I'm Dying" with Wooster Forum audience

WOOSTER, Ohio, Oct. 5, 2011 – “It is not our way to let our grief silence us,” observes a character in a Haitian folktale. For Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat, who spoke to a Wooster Forum audience of several hundred at The College of Wooster on Tuesday night, that disposition was central to the writing of “Brother, I’m Dying,” a memoir of family, identity, immigration, loss, and renewal.

The book, which was selected as the summer reading assignment for all incoming first-year students at the college, tells the interwoven stories of Danticat’s father, who emigrated to the United States, and her uncle, a Baptist minister, who remained in Haiti and raised Danticat until she was 12, when she joined her parents in Brooklyn. In 2004, amidst unrest and fighting in which his church was destroyed, the 81-year-old uncle came to the U.S., seeking temporary asylum. He died in the custody of Immigration and Custom Enforcement officials.

His death came as Danticat was pregnant with her first child and her father had just been diagnosed with the pulmonary fibrosis that would take his life. “I felt,” she said, “like my place in the generation was slipping.”

She began writing “Brother, I’m Dying,” she told the audience, “as a way for me to understand and make sense of all that.” As she delved into the circumstances of her uncle’s death, “I relearned that stories matter. Words matter…The words that were exchanged between my uncle and the immigration officials, if interpreted differently, could have saved his life.”

Danticat says she came to realize that she and her family “had become members of a club: those whose loved ones had died in [ICE] detention.” She heard many stories like her uncle’s, and found that on any given day, thousands of would be immigrants are being held in detention centers. She was invited to testify before a Congressional committee, and interviewed by “60 Minutes.”

She also developed a renewed appreciation of the sacrifices immigrants make to reach the U.S. and build a new life for their families. “After living here for more than 30 years, my father felt that his greatest accomplishment was us – his children.”

Danticat said she likes to imagine that “Brother, I’m Dying” is being used to train new immigration officers, but she hopes anyone who reads it takes away one simple idea.

“If this book reminds you of our common humanity,” she said, “then we are more than ‘independent minds, working together.’ We are independent hearts working together.”