Speak Dangerously

Edwidge Danticat is best known today as one of the standard bearers of the literature of dislocation. Born and raised in Haiti, she became part of the Haitian diaspora—around one million Haitians now live in the US, according to the 2010 Census—at the age of 12, eventually obtaining an MFA from Brown University, and joining a generation of English-writing Caribbean immigrant authors who, like the Dominican Junot Díaz, have achieved broad acclaim in literary circles.

But her 2007 work Brother, I’m Dying, which combines memoiristic and nonfictional elements, veers slightly from her established trajectory. It traces two interconnected journeys: the first half narrates Danticat’s own family’s difficult transition from Haiti to the US, while the second half focuses on her uncle, Joseph Dantica, who in 2004 was detained in Miami while trying to flee violence in Haiti and died under opaque circumstances in an immigration prision.

The text is fragmented by design. The family epic turns to investigative journalism as Danticat attempts to pierce through the iron veil of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in order to find out more about her uncle’s fate. A sprawling web of photographs, transcripts, interviews, maps, and newspaper articles stitches together the final section of the book, never leading us, unfortunately, to a conclusive answer.

As a human rights narrative, Brother derives its power from Danticat’s ability to thematize questions of representation and testimony. Danticat places the beginning of her role as cultural conduit during her childhood, “deciphering” her father’s letters from abroad for her Haitian relatives because of his hard-to-read handwriting. As she grows up, she offers to speak for her uncle Joseph after his tracheotomy: “If he wasn’t able to make himself understood, either with his gestures or with his sometimes indecipherable handwriting, then one of us would interpret him.”

After reaching US shores, Danticat receives the typewriter she always wanted and sets off on her chosen profession, sharing the stories of others who, for one reason or another, do not have the means or the ability to speak for themselves. “I am writing this only because they can’t,” she announces. From decipherer to interpreter to representative, Danticat’s journey often traces the arc of a bildungsroman; the story is made possible by the very events it contains.

Throughout this tale of becoming, the matter of performativity looms large. Danticat recounts one of her experiences as a community activist, visiting detention centers:

One man, who had received asylum but had not yet been released when we visited, showed us burn marks over his arms, chest and belly. His flesh was seared white, with rows and rows of keloid scars. It seemed like such a violation, to look at his belly, the space where the scars dipped farther down his body. But he was used to showing his scars, he said. He had to show them to a number of immigration judges to prove he deserved to stay.

This is one of several spots in Brother where the performance incentive is faced head-on. In order to gain political asylum, this anonymous man has learned to place his scars within the established narrative of those who have succeeded before him, tailoring his story to the desires of the court system. Here, physical proof becomes the trump card in the struggle to remain in the country. We are, of course, not hearing the man’s actual story—and it is possible that no one is. Instead, we are forced to imagine, piecing together the details that Danticat passes on.

Publishing narratives of victimhood is tricky business. Not only might individual stories find themselves squeezed into oversimplified collective notions of trauma, but they might turn into entertainment, a mere source of lurid pleasure or readerly outrage or both, attracting wide audiences without compelling them to act on the injustice at hand.

If the news media tends to get a free pass on this question—the higher burden of proof ostensibly means journalists will more carefully...