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4.23 AVERAGE
4.23 AVERAGE
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
There is a passage in this book which is a chilling warning for the US in light of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling and a former President who questioned the 2020 election. It’s in reference to the Haitian Dictator Papa Doc Duvalier who refused to step down or allow new elections, despite dissatisfaction with his repressive methods and his imprisonment and execution of his political enemies. He creates a militia called the Tonton Macoutes who are brutal and recruited from the country’s urban and rural poor. “Upon joining the Macoutes, the recruits received an identification card, which showed their allegiance to Papa Doc Duvalier…a .38 and the privilege of doing whatever they wanted.” It reminds me of the January 6 mob when they took down the American flag at the Capitol and replaced it with the Trump Flag. It’s chilling.
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Gave me good insight on the
how the historical events I learned about Haiti affected peoples lives in a more personal manner.
how the historical events I learned about Haiti affected peoples lives in a more personal manner.
This is a very moving memoir of Danticat's family, and it gives a very clear picture of Haiti's history and struggles of the people from the 1960's until early 2000's. Her view that man cannot know what is certain in the after life saddened me.
challenging
informative
medium-paced
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
It took me a while to figure out what this book was “about.” It wasn’t until the second chapter (”Brother, I’m Dying”) that I realized this was going to be a family history of sorts, focused specifically on Uncle Joseph and the father. At the end of chapter one, when Danticat tells us, “I write these things now, some as I witnessed them and today remember them, others from official documents…” I wondered what things, exactly, she was referring to. Was this going to plunge back in time, follow all the broken threads to the beginning, sew them back together to arrive at the present moment, with her pregnancy and her father dying? Or were we going to hopscotch in time, in measured increments, interspersing the flashbacks with present updates and musings? She informs us that “This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can’t.” To be honest, this disclosure was, for me, the least cohesive passage of the whole book. Once I was taken back to 1946, I felt wholly immersed in this family’s story, its brilliant and determined characters, and their struggle for cohesion. I realize that what I thought at first was the “present moment” (Edwidge learning she is pregnant, at the same time she learns the extent of her father’s illness) is actually the story’s point of entry, not the moment at which she is now writing. We loop around to this entry point on page 156, when Uncle Joseph comes to NY, Edwidge is in her third trimester, and her father is hospitalized for the first time. The last third or so of the book moves forward in time, carrying us to her uncle’s death, her daughter’s birth, and her father’s final days.
There were so many heartbreaking moments in this book, but the ones that wrought from me the deepest and most painful gasps came in these last “present-day” chapters. Uncle Joseph’s treatment at the airport, his time at Krome, the endless hoping against hope that someone would have some goddamn humanity…I was riveted, horrified, and amazed. Virginia Woolf wrote in “A Room of One’s Own” of the writer’s mind “incandescent”–undisturbed by “alien emotions” like fear and hatred, not harassed or distracted by grievances. I bring this up only to point out how masterfully Danticat tells a story in which all manners of fear, hatred, and grievances are justified. And yet her telling of it is, in my opinion, “incandescent.” She gives us the facts, not without feeling, but without vendetta. She lets us in to her family, recounts their stories of selflessness, love and suffering, and offers them up Biblical in proportion, yet with the gentle and loving nuance of homage. In giving us her family history, she drew us close enough to her two “lost” characters–her father and uncle–to render any elaboration unnecessary when their deaths come. She allowed us as readers to develop our own bonds to these men, feel our own outrage and indignation at their mistreatment and suffering, our own joy at their transcendence and generosity, and, ultimately, our own mourning as they slip away.
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced