better late than never?

Brother I’m Dying Response

Well since my response to the book is ridiculously late, I decided to take the Elmaz challenge and do an in depth look at craft over a chapter. My response will be directed at pulling apart the craft elements of One Father Happy, One Father Sad since this is a chapter most of us will remember. In it Edwidge and Bob are dragged through a series of TB tests, phone calls, consulate meetings and finally put on a plane for New York.

The chapter starts out with a clear timeline and definitive location. We are back in Haiti, it is 1980 and four years after the previous chapter visit from Edwidge’s parents. The chapter’s title also sets up an oppositional tension between the two fathers, the two countries and the two languages. A tension in which no one is completely unified, happy or safe. Edwidge repeatedly marks time with her age. At the beginning of the chapter she is 11 and the constant reminder of her growing asks us to revisit our own childhood. Children are more preoccupied with their age and see each year as a transition into more awareness, recognition and privileges. What were we as readers doing at 11 compared to Edwidge?

From this very definitive time and place we are pushed into the lure of New York. Much of the dialogue centers around New York and the imagined benefits of such a place. The same way that an oppositional tension is created between the two father figures, there is a push/pull between Haiti and New York. A transition that is imagined in all its benefits but is never something Edwidge or her family can be entirely prepared for. The visit to the doctor’s office leaves us in this transitional, ambivalent frame. The doctor speaks in French then English, has posters in various languages and works in a more Western style of medicine. Edwidge describes the space as a “middle world between” the life in Haiti with her Uncle and the life she will find with her parents in New York.

The doctor like Tante and Marie instill a sense of improvement with the impending move but as readers we also see Edwidge’s smallness and inability to change her surroundings or decide for herself. In contrast to the majority of characters in the chapter the Uncle doesn’t voice an opinion but he is the one assigned to perform all the necessary steps toward the children’s leaving. We get a sense that he is holding his anguish in. How could he not be pained at seeing his niece and translator leave? Later we read Edwidge’s regret that he had not thrown a fit and cried hysterically like she had done when her mother left. Danticat simply and exquisitely paints an image of trying to restrain a tidal wave of suffering. Danticat writes that Tante locks the door to her room, Liline blocks the door to her heart and Uncle without a voice stands there to watch.

Danticat also uses the theme of TB in this chapter to unite characters through physical pain, fear of death and feeling contagious and alone. When Edwidge finds out she and Bob have TB she asks Uncle, “Does this mean I’m going to die?” (100). The theme of physically and emotionally dying runs through out this chapter but also in the novel as a whole. Both Uncle and Father have asked themselves this same question which unifies the three against the dichotomy of two fathers, two languages and two countries. In their metaphorical and real deaths Edwidge, Uncle and Father have increased their connection and understanding of each other. As Danticat describes later, one no longer takes small moments for granted in the face of real and immediate death.

Danticat uses TB to string a chord through several places and people. She transitions from her childhood diagnosis of TB to a flash forward of her father in Coney Island quarantine to Haitian cultural history of TB being used as an insult. Danticat writes directly from her father’s perspective “I don’t have this disease” to her childhood insistence “we don’t have this disease”. The idea of being contagious is an interesting and pognient psychological layer. TB is the outward physical marker of Edwidge’s feelings of isolation and abandonment that is also mirrored by Haitian’s treatment as contagious boat people by immigration in general. Feeling contagious emotionally could result from feeling othered, untouchable, distant and abandoned. Children naturally internalize negative events or feelings around them in an attempt to cope. Edwidge certainly feels abandoned by her parents but may also feel it is her fault and that she must remain separated or distant from others so as not to be hurt or abandoned again. We see a hint of this dynamic when Edwidge yells at Tante Zi for burying her face in Bob’s neck and so beautifully and compassionately Tante Zi answers her by burying her face in Edwidge’s neck too.

As part of the TB directions, Edwidge and Bob are separated from the family in having to use their own utensils and refrain from too much physical intimacy. Again the doctors office and the diagnosis become a premature catalyst for separation. We see the distancing even before a country separates Edwidge and Haiti. Also in this moment, the father stops writing. When Edwidge reaches New York the Uncle will stop writing. Danticat uses cleverly placed descriptions to reflect the impending separation. At the consolate Edwidge is “separated…by a polished wooden desk” (105). The American flag is bursting with spiky edges as we are reminded that a thick file decides whether her parents are “allowed to live in the same country as all their children.” In this moment Danticat paints the fear, impossibility and arbitrary nature of immigration. How can one ever be forced to leave their home? How can one ever make sense of the sudden and final shift? And how can a child learn to live with parents she hardly even knows?

The immensity of this scene is then paired with the consulate official and the father’s expectations of resulting happiness. “I’ll make you happy” the official says. “Are you happy?” the father asks over the phone and Edwidge pretends not to hear. Happiness becomes such a relative term, which can rarely be the outcome of a forced uproot of everything a child knows.

From this we are propelled onto a plane along with Edwidge only 6-8 months after the beginning of the chapter. We have previously been rooted in every Sunday phone calls, daily TB pills, a few weeks after father looses a job, a few days after the consulate and a later that week trip for dresses and a suit. From these familiar and reassuring phrases, Danticat pivots our attention to ‘our departure day’. Each paragraph or two reconfigures our sense of place: at the airport, over the years, lonely remember, sitting in the middle seat. Danticat also decides to give an account of her and Bob’s departure not from her own perspective but from the stories of three different flight attendants. The three separate accounts paired with Danticat’s own realization that “my brother and I were probably all of those children- the ones who didn’t cry, the ones who quietly sobbed and the ones who refused to leave” (109) gives us a wrenching and realistic picture. Often in a traumatic moment, one is set only on surviving and remembers obscure details if anything. Rather than making the scene huge and dramatic, Danticat simply and understatedly shows us the reality that she was one of many children put on a plane in the same way. Rather than forcing the language to expand the impact of the scene, we as readers become the sounding boards for our own reactionary shock waves. Whether this scene is familiar or drastically different from our own experience at 11, we were all left behind in some way and we were all asked to be big before our time so we internalize and project our own internal struggle toward Edwidge’s story.

Then we are up in the sky, the ultimate middle space between the heaven and earth, between land and sea, between borderlines and familiar faces. We become frightened children in the seats with Edwidge, a compilation of papers and terrified waiting. Edwidge starts realizing the finality of the shift. She is wearing a new dress. Speaking French not Creole. She will have to learn English, she experiences fall cold for the first time in the airport parking lot. Everything from here on out is unfamiliar. Everything from here will change what existed before. Bob even tries to save the butter in his pocket but that too melts with their sense of security.

In New York it is the sensory that grounds us. Danticat demonstrates the unfamiliarity with her parents by showing us mainly sensory detail. She hears her parents before she sees them. She is curious about her mother’s coconut pomade smell. Her father’s beard is prickly and uninviting. She allows them to hug and squeeze her but rather than being reassured she remarks how Bob is already aligning with the other boys and Edwidge again is left out. It becomes clear that this is neither a celebration nor a homecoming and that the mixture of grief, hope and determination will compound and propel us into the next chapter.