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A review by papidoc
Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
4.0
Brother, I'm Dying is Edwidge Danticat's memoir of her two fathers, one really her uncle, but who raised her from age four to twelve in Haiti, until her parents, Haitian immigrants, could afford to bring her to live with them in New York City. Clearly she loved both her uncle and her father dearly, and this book is a fitting tribute to their memories. Reading her story, I felt her intimate connection with both men, and with other members of her family. The last third of the book is truly terrifying, revealing the horror of good people caught up in a horrifying machine, built of policies and procedures and unthinking functionaries carrying them out, that chews her uncle up and spits him out without mercy or remorse.
Terrible things happen to good people...we know this. It is an almost inevitable part of every person's life. For me, one of the powerful messages of this book came in seeing the fundamental differences in the deaths of Danticat's father and uncle. Her father died prematurely of a devastating illness, but with family circled around him and bathed in their love and service. Her uncle, on the other hand, suffered a tragic end at the hands of uncaring, almost faceless cogs in the machine of bureaucracy and political preference. The former, though a hard thing for anyone to bear, is at least attributable to mortality and a consequence of life itself. The latter, on the other hand, was completely avoidable, and attributable to people who simply stopped (or never started) caring about him as a human being. That is what I cannot abide, and is a message, a perspective, an imperative, that I try to embed deep within my students before they go off to begin their professional careers. This is also the powerful testimony of Edwidge Danticat, as a witness to the world, that we must not ever lose our humanity.
Terrible things happen to good people...we know this. It is an almost inevitable part of every person's life. For me, one of the powerful messages of this book came in seeing the fundamental differences in the deaths of Danticat's father and uncle. Her father died prematurely of a devastating illness, but with family circled around him and bathed in their love and service. Her uncle, on the other hand, suffered a tragic end at the hands of uncaring, almost faceless cogs in the machine of bureaucracy and political preference. The former, though a hard thing for anyone to bear, is at least attributable to mortality and a consequence of life itself. The latter, on the other hand, was completely avoidable, and attributable to people who simply stopped (or never started) caring about him as a human being. That is what I cannot abide, and is a message, a perspective, an imperative, that I try to embed deep within my students before they go off to begin their professional careers. This is also the powerful testimony of Edwidge Danticat, as a witness to the world, that we must not ever lose our humanity.