Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat explores family, homeland and her literary heroes in “We're Alone,” a new volume of essays that include personal narratives of her early years as child immigrant in Brooklyn to reportage of recent events like the assassination of a president back in her native county.
In the essay collection, the author of the celebrated memoir “Brother, I'm Dying,” and novels like “Breath, Eyes, Memory” and “Claire of the Sea Light,” moves from her native Port-au-Prince to the New York of her childhood and finally to the adopted hometown of Miami, where she lives as an adult with a family of her own.
In one essay in the slim volume, Danticat contemplates her family, describing the consequences of one uncle being gripped by dementia, his memory erased, his past suddenly vanished.
“An entire segment of our family history, of which he was the sole caretaker, was no longer available to us. Or to himself," Danticat recalled.
Yet, she wrote, “family is not only made up of your living relatives. It is elders long buried and generations yet unborn, with stories as bridges and potential portals. Family is whoever is left when everyone else is gone.”
Another essay pays homage to distinguished writers of color she admires, including James Baldwin and Colombian Gabriel García Márquez.
On the plane to Grenada for a tourism conference, Danticat considers the work of Black feminist Audre Lorde, reading the essay Lorde wrote about the island just weeks after the 1983 U.S. invasion of her parents' homeland.
Danticat fondly remembers the time she spent with friend and mentor American novelist Toni Morrison, including their participation in a conference in Paris.
And she reflects on the earthquakes and hurricanes that have rocked her native Haiti and other Caribbean countries in recent decades, following centuries of colonization.
“'We are a people,' is what we have been saying for generations to colonizers, invaders and imperialists hellbent on destroying us. And now, more than ever, Mother Nature, too."
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Anita Snow, The Associated Press