Edwidge Danticat Writes About Death with Love
Finding Tenderness and Humanity in Life's Horrific Moments
I've been reading and rereading Edwidge Danticat's work because I hope to interview her next month and am nervously preparing myself. I admire her ability to write intimately about death, dying, grief, and suffering without indulging readers’ more voyeuristic, fearful appetites. Instead, she pulls us in close, focusing on the care and attention that can transform life's cruelest moments, scenes of suffering and depravity, into opportunities for connection and compassion.
I hadn't heard of Danticat when I was gifted a slim volume called "The Art of Death" published by Graywolf Press as part of a series on writing, criticism, and craft. "The Art of Death" became a National Book Critics Circle finalist in Criticism, and made me want to read more of her books.
I started with her memoir, "Brother, I'm Dying" in which we view her upbringing from an oblique angle, as it bounces off the relationship between her father Mira, and his brother Joseph at the end of their lives. This was my first glimpse into her Haitian family, many of whom emigrated to the United States. When Danticat was four years old, her parents left her in the care of her aunt and uncle in Haiti to move to New York. She received letters but didn't see them until they came back for her eight years later. She moved with them to Brooklyn, not far from where I grew up but worlds away.
By slipping her origin story into the margins of the steadfast relationship between her father and uncle, she creates a vessel in which we feel her love and admiration for both men, particularly as we approach their nearly simultaneous deaths. Her uncle Joseph dies unnecessarily at the hands of U.S. immigration officers just as her father Mira succumbs to pulmonary disease. In scenes of a bureaucratic nightmare pieced together from official records, photographs, and her cousin's account, eighty-one-year-old Joseph's dignity rises above the inept, unjust, and faceless American authorities. "I'm writing this because they can't," she says in the book's opening. Her decentering of herself reminds us we exist in relationships, not a vacuum. Our stories are a complex web of friends’ and loved ones’ stories too.
Danticat's memoir did not prepare me for the horrors of some of the stories in "Krik? Krak!" the first of which takes place on a boat crowded with Haitians fleeing for their lives. The story is told through letters between two young lovers, one left behind in Haiti and the other on the boat. They tell each other of miseries they are witnessing: rape, brutality, murder, extreme deprivation, but without hopelessness. The man on the boat observes a fifteen-year-old mother who dies with her newborn with such attentiveness in the days leading up to her death, clearly hoping for her survival, and his. But as the boat begins sinking, his letters become his eulogy and farewell to his love.
In "The Art of Death," Danticat allows us to follow the end of her mother's life. This slow progression toward her mother's physical demise is the backbone of a broader consideration of her favorite writers on death. She includes many of mine here: Toni Morrison, Audre Lord, Susan Sontag, Michael Ondaatje, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Margaret Atwood among many, many others. Danticat writes a book of criticism and craft while weaving in her personal perspective as she must let go of her mother. One piece of advice she gives on the topic of death comes from Brenda Ueland's directive to write with "microscopic truthfulness." Danticat explains, "The more specifically a death and its aftermath are described, the more moving they are to me." Earlier in the book she says, "We write about the dead to make sense of our losses, to become less haunted, to turn ghosts into words, to transform an absence into language."
This attention to the language we use with loss is evident in her children's books, which are not about death, but include themes of loss and connection. She clearly wants children who may feel displaced, lost, or scared due to circumstances beyond their understanding or control to feel seen and have faith in their ability to get through life's more difficult challenges by attending to details and the power of care.
Her latest book, "We're Alone," is a collection of essays due out in September. The first essay titled "Children of the Sea" begins by exploring beginnings. She recounts a trip to Haiti in 2018 when she participated in a workshop for young writers (teenagers) and was asked to speak about how she begins a narrative, how she began her career, and where she started. As one way to answer, she quotes Anne Beattie: "If you know your subject well, you will never feel assured about where to begin." Reading Danticat reminds me of traveling in circles. We revisit the same places, characters, and themes in different ways, under new circumstances, alongside multiple generations. The essay's title "Children of the Sea," is also the title of the first piece in her first short story collection, "Krik? Krak!" In the short story, the young man writing to his lover has to throw his journal overboard:
It goes down to them, Céliane and her daughter and all those children of the sea who might soon be claiming me! I go to them now as though it was always meant to be. As though the very day that my mother birthed me she had chosen me to live life eternal among the children of the deep blue sea. Those who have escaped the chains of slavery to form a world beneath the heavens and the blood drenched earth where you live.
In the essay, she writes:
In Haitian Creole, when someone is said to be lòt bò dlo on the other side of the water, it can mean either they’ve traveled abroad or they have died. Even before I knew what it meant, my parents were already lòt bò dlo, my father having left for New York two years before my mother. My desire to make sense of this separation, this lòt bò dlo-ness, helped me understand that words could bridge distances.
I found parts of "We're Alone" harder to read than her other books about Haiti because she broadens the view, pulling back and providing a more dispassionate window into the brutal realities of life on the island, which seems only to worsen with each generation. As she explains more of the recent history including the assassination of Haiti’s elected president Jovenel Moïse in 2021, I found it hard not to disconnect and succumb to the paralysis of hopelessness. In another essay, she recounts events a few months later when the powerful 400 Mowozo gang kidnapped one Canadian and sixteen American missionaries, including five children, highlighting the limited attention Haiti receives in American media until Americans are directly involved.
But she did not leave me bereft of hope for the future of her homeland. In all of her books, we see the strict codes of conduct that live on in a society built on generational knowledge of healing and perseverance, creating a rich language and culture borne of survival.
Danticat ends "We're Alone" with extraordinary tenderness, letting us into another writing class that her young daughter attended online called "Writing the Self" with Erica Cardwell. She begins the essay quoting her uncle Franck who is showing signs of dementia, a reminder that when people die we lose pieces of our history. “Families, as my suddenly silenced uncle used to say, expand like ripples in a pond. Migration forces you to remake your family, as well as yourself.”
But as she describes her daughter Mira's (and her own) excitement about the class, we see her passing down the depth of her love of writing to her daughter. She describes a moment during a car ride when they listen to the short story, "I Stand Here Ironing" by Tillie Olsen. It's about a mother struggling with her teenage daughter and at the end Danticat notices her daughter Mira is crying. As children often do, Mira succinctly states the point of connection Danticat achieves so beautifully in all of her work:
Overeager and excited, and still being a writer, I asked her what exactly about the story was making her cry. Which part moved her? ... After I pushed a bit too much, Mira answered, “I think I cried because you were crying.”