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Edwidge Danticat |
Nearly
three years ago this week, an 81-year-old Haitian pastor named
Joseph Dantica entered Miami International Airport wielding a
valid tourist visa. Dantica had made this trip before, but now,
voiceless from throat cancer, infirm by age and on the run from
the gangs who had burned down his church and threatened to kill
him, he decided this trip would be his last. Ever truthful, the
pastor told U.S. immigration authorities he was seeking asylum.
It was the last truth Pastor
Dantica would ever tell.
Taken to Krome Detention
Center by Homeland Security and stripped of his medicine,
Dantica fell ill during a “credible fear” interview and was
taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he died, shackled and
alone, on a prison ward cot.
In Brother, I‘m Dying
(Knopf $23.95), Haitian-American storyteller Edwidge Danticat
recounts the pastor’s last days on earth with heartbreaking
precision and beloved depth — and why shouldn’t she? Dantica
wasn’t just her uncle; he was her father, her “second father.”
(By the way, Edwidge’s family acquired the extra “t” because of
a mistake on an immigration form.)
What’s startling is that
Danticat’s precision and depth don’t ever ire toward anger at
the authorities who so callously handled her uncle’s truthful
request. Clearly, the man was not a threat to America, or, for
that matter, to anyone else.
Yet, the man had lived long,
proud and just. And, in honor of he who had lived just so, it is
to the life rather than the death that Danticat turns her
attention.
And what considerably gifted
attention it is. Danticat, already well known for her
award-winning fictions, takes a storyteller’s grace and makes of
it a memoir as robust and fitting as the life itself. It takes
us from the halcyon days in her uncle’s little pink house, where
stray children were always welcome, through the building of the
Church of the Redeemer in the embattled Port-au-Prince
neighborhood of Bel Air, where Reverend Dantica’s ministrations
continued, even after he had his voice cut out from him.
This being Haiti, there are
riots and coups too numerous to fathom, yet not too many to
scare away this gentle fighter of a man who saw in his life a
calling from which no violence could call him away.
Even when his church is
burned to the ground and a gang’s guns are pointed to his head,
it takes a son’s great effort to get Dantica finally to flee.
And one suspects the man fled not so much from the threats, but
because he’d seen that the stars were about to fall and, in
Haiti, it is believed that when a star falls someone dies.
Which means before he dies he
wants to see his niece, Edwidge, now a mother, a wife and a
renowned writer. He wants to see his brother, Mira, now unwell
and living in New York.
Mira, of course, is Edwidge’s
biological father, who had left his daughter in his older
brother’s care when he headed to America to carve out a better
life for his family.
But while Mira may have been
physically absent from a large part of Danticat’s childhood, his
literal — and literary — presence was ever felt, and ever known.
Every other month, like cosmic clockwork, Mira sent a
three-paragraph letter to his daughter — letters, Danticat later
learned, which were written in “a diamond sequence, the
Aristotelian ‘Poetics’ of correspondence.”
It was those letters — not to
mention an incredibly vivid folktale telling grandmother — which
instilled in Danticat a gift for the greatness of story. In
Brother, she gives back, compoundedly.
It’s been just over two years
since de facto government forces tried to evict a group of
Haitian women from Bel Air’s Church of Notre Dame du Perpétuel
Secours to conduct an assault on pro-Aristide protestors. The
women stood firm and stopped what surely would’ve been an even
more murderous assault on the neighborhood. In this issue of the
SunPost, we salute these power women, just as we salute
Edwidge Danticat, whose stand against tyranny and untruth shows
equal spirit — and courage.
Edwidge Danticat reads
from Brother, I’m
Dying at 8
p.m. Friday at Books and Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables.
For more information, contact 305-442-4408.
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