Winner of the 2008 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction
From the best-selling author of The Dew Breaker, a major work of nonfiction: a powerfully moving family story that centers around the men closest to her heart—her father, Mira, and his older brother, Joseph.

From the age of four, Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph, a charismatic pastor, as her “second father,” when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for a better life in America. Listening to his sermons, sharing coconut-flavored ices on their walks through town, roaming through the house that held together many members of a colorful extended family, Edwidge grew profoundly attached to Joseph. He was the man who “knew all the verses for love.”

And so she experiences a jumble of emotions when, at twelve, she joins her parents in New York City. She is at last reunited with her two youngest brothers, and with her mother and father, whom she has struggled to remember. But she must also leave behind Joseph and the only home she’s ever known.

Edwidge tells of making a new life in a new country while fearing for the safety of those still in Haiti as the political situation deteriorates. But Brother I’m Dying soon becomes a terrifying tale of good people caught up in events beyond their control. Late in 2004, his life threatened by an angry mob, forced to flee his church, the frail, eighty-one-year-old Joseph makes his way to Miami, where he thinks he will be safe. Instead, he is detained by U.S. Customs, held by the Department of Homeland Security, brutally imprisoned, and dead within days. It was a story that made headlines around the world. His brother, Mira, will soon join him in death, but not before he holds hope in his arms: Edwidge’s firstborn, who will bear his name—and the family’s stories, both joyous and tragic—into the next generation.

Told with tremendous feeling, this is a true-life epic on an intimate scale: a deeply affecting story of home and family—of two men’s lives and deaths, and of a daughter’s great love for them both.

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Books > Biography & Autobiography > Personal Memoirs
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Danticat's story of family and loss

Family can be inscrutable, a mystery sometimes better solved by describing events than by analyzing motives. Edwidge Danticat (Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Dew Breaker) describes her family history in Brother, I'm Dying with a dispassion that only adds to the drama of childhood memories and snippets of family lore learned "out of sequence and in fragments." Opening with the news that she's pregnant with her first child, Danticat—now married and living in Miami—uses that pivotal moment to travel back and forth from the recent past into a childhood of abandonment and violence in Haiti. Love and danger blend together as she is brought up by an aunt and minister-uncle in a hilltop neighborhood overlooking Port-au-Prince harbor.

With intense, weary affection, Danticat details the close relationship between her father, his brother and the daughter—Edwidge—they raised together across a sea, recreating a few "wonderous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back in both celebration and despair." The despair is caused both by civil uprisings in Port-au-Prince and the upheaval in her family. Young Danticat lives orphaned among a sibling, aunt, uncle, far-flung cousins and disenfranchised neighbors, abandoned by parents who emigrated to New York. Adrift in poverty and exile, her father and uncle remain devotedly bound to each other and family, despite their infrequent communications (phones are hard to come by in Haiti) and differing views of the future.

Danticat's father left to become a taxi driver in New York because he didn't see a future in Haiti, and her uncle stubbornly remained behind despite the dangers because he couldn't abandon his role in the island's future. Eventually, Edwidge and her brother join the family (and two new siblings) in New York, but leaving her beloved uncle and her homeland prove difficult. The brutalities of war and immigration—and the grace of strong family ties—are scorched into Danticat's intimate and aching story.