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50books_poc2009-04-06 11:00 pm
mizchalmers.livejournal.com) wrote in 50books_poc2009-04-06 11:00 pm
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Edwige Danticat
17. Edwige Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying
This is Danticat's memoir of her childhood. She was raised by her uncle Joseph in Port au Prince and by her father in Brooklyn. At the precise moment she found herself pregnant with her first child, her father was diagnosed with an incurable lung disease; but it was her uncle who died first, and under circumstances almost impossible to comprehend. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials detained him, accused him of faking illness while he suffered an attack of acute pancreatitis and shackled him in the hospital, where his heart stopped.
Danticat's book is full of echoes. In its cool delineation of apocalyptic grief it recalls Elizabeth McCracken's An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination and Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Its juxtaposition of immigrant communities on the East Coast with the bewildering corruption of a Carribbean nation reminded me of Junot Diaz's Oscar Wao; the relentlessly clear-eyed portrait of Haiti matches that of Graham Greene's The Comedians.
Yet of all the old shades this book raised for me, the most vivid was that of Vikram Seth's wonderful Two Lives. The memoirs share a compulsion to record both the suffering and the nobility of those who raised the writer; a compulsion that is at times almost off-putting in its intensity. What could be more human or heartrending, though, than this desperate need to chronicle the stories that pass from the world with our fathers and uncles and aunts? To understand how they came to be who they were? And in the end, what else can we give our children?
My uncle did not look resigned and serene like most of the dead I have seen. Perhaps it was because his lips were swollen to twice their usual size. He looked as though he'd been punched.
This is Danticat's memoir of her childhood. She was raised by her uncle Joseph in Port au Prince and by her father in Brooklyn. At the precise moment she found herself pregnant with her first child, her father was diagnosed with an incurable lung disease; but it was her uncle who died first, and under circumstances almost impossible to comprehend. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials detained him, accused him of faking illness while he suffered an attack of acute pancreatitis and shackled him in the hospital, where his heart stopped.
Danticat's book is full of echoes. In its cool delineation of apocalyptic grief it recalls Elizabeth McCracken's An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination and Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Its juxtaposition of immigrant communities on the East Coast with the bewildering corruption of a Carribbean nation reminded me of Junot Diaz's Oscar Wao; the relentlessly clear-eyed portrait of Haiti matches that of Graham Greene's The Comedians.
Yet of all the old shades this book raised for me, the most vivid was that of Vikram Seth's wonderful Two Lives. The memoirs share a compulsion to record both the suffering and the nobility of those who raised the writer; a compulsion that is at times almost off-putting in its intensity. What could be more human or heartrending, though, than this desperate need to chronicle the stories that pass from the world with our fathers and uncles and aunts? To understand how they came to be who they were? And in the end, what else can we give our children?
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