In/justice and necro-natality in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother,I’m Dying

Abstract

IIn a post-9/11 world, theorists such as Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben argue for the need to reframe politics and justice through a critique of the exclusions, exceptions, and threshold conditions that render life vulnerable or precarious. Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying contributes to this wider discourse about justice through her account of Joseph Dantica’s flight from violence in Haiti and untimely death as an asylum seeker in the United States of America, which she pairs with an account of her pregnancy at the time. Danticat’s inquiry into her uncle’s death leads to a wide-ranging interrogation of Haitian precarity, the claims of non-citizens on the state, and the role of vernacular culture in contesting prevailing paradigms of justice. At the same time, Danticat’s account of her pregnancy links the hopes and fears concerning the gestation of life to biopolitics: the miscarriages of justice, aborted hopes of sovereignty, and stillborn democracies that characterize Haitian history. Danticat’s vision of necro-natality exposes violence and injustice even as it lays claims to a more expansive, pluralistic, and equitable political future, born of an ethics of care and fostered through shared speech and action in the world.

In a post-9/11 world, Don DeLillo argues that writing needs to turn away from the reduction of the world to a single plot and contribute to the multiplication of the criss-crossing narratives of the world (2001). The life stories of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers merit attention in this context because their accounts often contribute to a more expansive, pluralistic rendering of the contemporary world order. Judith Butler claims that “the unprecedented suspension of civil liberties for illegal immigrants and suspected terrorists” (2006/2004: 3) needs to be examined critically as part of a wider interrogation of what constitutes justice: “to take stock of how the world has become formed in this way [through violence and militarism] precisely in order to form it anew, and in the direction of non-violence” (2006/2004: 17). Similarly, Giorgio Agamben’s cogent analysis of states of exception, the role of the camp, and conditions of statelessness have provided a useful framework for political analysis and claims for a reconstructed sense of community. For Agamben, the refugee “unhinges the old trinity of state–nation–territory” (2000: 19-21) and serves as a figure who highlights the “forms and limits of a coming political community” (2000: 15), thus, potentially enabling new modes of global consciousness, particularly when this figure becomes the central focus for interrogating crime and injustice across borders. In this context, recent narratives about the asylum seeker, refugee, and (illegal) immigrant – such as Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2003), Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2004), Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), and Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005) – warrant particular attention. Through an inquiry into the conditions that imperil the lives of non-citizens, these texts open up a wider critique of citizenship, governmentality (in a Foucauldian sense), and justice in a global context.

Haitian-American writer, Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying (2007) offers a particularly compelling example of a narrative that challenges prevailing conceptions of justice by investigating and reclaiming the perilous life histories of the migrant, asylum seeker, and non-citizen (Shemak, 2011: 1-3, 244-45). Blending memoir and Creole storytelling traditions together with investigative reporting about injustice and criminality, Danticat tells the story of her dying father, a Haitian migrant and US citizen, and his brother, Joseph Dantica, a minister who was forced to flee Haiti to the USA in 2004 as a result of a threat to his life in the period following the coup d’état that overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s government. Upon arrival in the US, the 81-year-old, Reverend Dantica, was held in Krome Detention Center. Within days of claiming asylum in the US, Joseph Dantica died alone as a detainee in Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital, possibly in shackles. As Nicole Waller notes, his death highlights the contradictions between fluid conceptions of globalization and the seeming inviolability of the USA’s borders, resulting in “the creation of the detention center as a space into which migrant populations are transferred and made to vanish” (2009: 359). After filing a lawsuit to obtain copies of her uncle’s files from the Department of Homeland Security and the Inspector General report, Danticat observes that she discovered a story that needed telling:

When I saw the maze that my uncle went through, the maze that led to his death, it felt like something you would read in a book, a book by someone like Kafka. So I decided to write a book not just about his death, but also his life, my own file on him if you will. At the same time that my uncle was dying, my father was also dying of a very painful lung disease, and I was pregnant with my daughter, so I decided to put all that in. (Shea, 2010: 189)

Linking stories of life, death, and detention, Danticat scrutinizes the emotional, psychological, and physical violence associated with (neo-)imperialism, dictatorial rule, and states of emergency in Haiti as well as post-9/11 modes of governmentality. Drawing on Haitian vernacular traditions, including idioms, parables, and traditions of communing with the dead, Danticat contributes to a more expansive articulation of global justice by offering a narrative forum where the life histories and voices of the marginalized, silenced, and excluded, might be heard.

Writing life/death

Danticat’s maternal discourse bridges the divide between life and death, bringing a memoir for her dead father together with the hopeful story of her own pregnancy: “I found out that I was pregnant the same day that my father’s rapid weight loss and chronic shortness of breath were positively diagnosed as end-stage pulmonary fibrosis” (2007: 3). ¹ Her fears concerning her father’s imminent death mix together with “baby panic” as pregnancy elicits fears of death (her father’s, the baby’s, and her own) alongside hopes of new life (14). This ambivalent sense of mortality and natality, born of the knowledge of the imminent loss of her father and gestating life of her child, sets the stage for her political narrative, which explores the extremely precarious lives of Haitian citizens and stateless persons, particularly through the tale of her Uncle Joseph’s life and death. Brother, I’m Dying begins with an epigraph from Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude (2005/1982): “To begin with death. To work my way back into life, and then, finally, to return to death. Or else: the vanity of trying to say anything about anyone” (vii). Auster’s multi-generic narrative mixes a memoir for his father with some of the conventions of the metaphysical detective novel, offering a model for Danticat’s own approach to exploring the relationship between life writing, crime, and justice. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney claim that

[a] metaphysical detective story is a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective-story conventions – such as narrative closure and the detective’s role as a surrogate reader – with the intention, or at least the effect, of asking questions about mysteries of being and knowing which transcend the mere machinations of the mystery plot. (1998: 2)

Significantly, Auster’s narrative discourse can be seen as structured by the dynamics of the “[r]oom and tomb, tomb and womb, womb and room” (2005/1982: 171). Solitude gives new life to the dead (Auster’s father) through the space of writing, explores rebirth from womb-like/tomb-like enclosures, and considers the political and juridical framing of human life/death. Through tales of Jonah and the whale, Pinnochio and Geppetto’s rebirth from the belly of the whale, and Sherhzad’s efforts to escape death through storytelling and claim life through maternity, Auster takes narrative itself as a space of gestation. In telling a story about the death of his father, Auster acts as a surrogate father figure who gives new life, symbolically and in memory, to his father through the space of writing. Where Auster invokes a natal model through the belly of the whale, Danticat turns to her own maternal body as a model for a reproductive discourse that seeks to revive the life histories of her uncle and father.

Interrogating his position as both father and son in a world beset by violence, particularly as negotiated through Jewish-American family history, Auster offers a model for Danticat’s approach to blending the genres of life writing and crime writing. In the first part of the narrative, Auster considers his father’s puzzling inability to respond emotionally, create intimate relationships with his wife and children, and recognize the details of his surroundings. By chance, he discovers that his father’s emotional distance is symptomatic of a childhood trauma, a response to the aftermath of his own father’s murder: the fact that Auster’s paternal grandmother, Anna, killed her husband, Harry Auster. Put on trial, Anna was deemed not guilty by a jury by reasons of insanity. After the trial, she and her children entered a condition of exile, leaving the community and moving from place to place. When Auster discovers the news reports about this crime, he notes that his grandfather’s death was reported alongside the discovery of Rosa Luxemburg’s body in the Landwehr canal in Berlin (2005/1982: 38). This oblique reference to state crime (specifically Nazi Germany) takes on a more explicit form in the second part of the book where Auster refers to the life and death of Anne Frank and the deaths of many individuals as a result of the Holocaust.

Auster extends his analysis of global crime and injustice to US acts of interventionism, showing that even so-called benevolent actions can reveal imperialistic attitudes that privilege one people’s political agenda over the needs of others. For instance, he describes Rosalynn Carter’s 1979 visit to a refugee camp filled with wounded Cambodians, people displaced as a result of unrest and conflict in the region as well as “America’s responsibility for creating the conditions Mrs. Carter had come to protest” (2005/1982: 167-68). The media circulated images of the First Lady embracing a child and speaking to doctors, showing her care for the refugees. However, the visit to the camp involved so many people that “patients’ hands were stepped on by heavy Western shoes, I.V. lines were disconnected by passing legs, bodies were inadvertently kicked” (2005/1982: 167). This careless behaviour was little compared to the refusal, when asked, to give blood to help the hospital care for the patients: “the First Lady’s tour was behind schedule. There were other places to go that day, other suffering people to see” (2005/1982: 167). Auster weaves together accounts of injustice, vulnerable peoples and disjunctive relations in world power, showing how suffering and death occur as a result of various governments’ actions and interventions in Cambodia and the surrounding Southeast Asian region and, ironically, through the politics of international humanitarian aid. Exploring connections among seemingly disparate incidents (here and elsewhere in the text) leads Auster to conclude that “two (or more) rhyming events set up a connection in the world, adding one more synapse to be routed through the vast plenum of experience” (2005/1982: 173). This idea of an emergent consciousness, enabled by rhyming or twinned events, enables Auster to consider writing as a space of gestation for a more expansive worldly consciousness, a poetico-political awareness of the complex dynamics shaping political action and justice. Like Auster, Danticat takes the investigation of kinship relations across borders, in her case the politicized Haitian-American family, as the basis for an investigation of injustice on intimate, national, and global scales.

I will show that Danticat, like Auster, works through personal memories to come to terms with connections between crime across borders and the understanding of the relations between life and death in a biopolitical context. To understand the kinds of claims posited by Auster’s and Danticat’s use of life writing as a meditation on crime and justice, we might begin with Agamben and Butler’s consideration of what life means, particularly in the post-9/11 world. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), Agamben considers the figure of the refugee, the state of exception, and the paradigm of the camp in order to come to terms with the contemporary world order. Agamben’s work begins with the classical Greek attempt to define political life; he observes:

They used two terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or group. (1998: 1)

Zoe was usually confined to the oikos or the home and was considered largely beyond political interference. Bios suggested an entry into public, politicized life, or the polis. However, when a state of exception is established, a new condition emerges: that of “bare life”, a suspension of citizenship or condition of statelessness.

States of exception suspend existing laws, often resulting in stripping persons of their rights as citizens for protection under the law. As a result, acts of violence and injustice, often carried out by the state, are no longer seen as crimes punishable by law. By way of example, Agamben refers to life under the Nazi regime. When Hitler came to power, he proclaimed the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, which suspended the articles of the Weimar constitution concerning personal liberties. As this decree was never repealed, Agamben argues that the entire Third Reich can be seen as a state of exception that lasted twelve years (1995: 2). Similar incidents occur in the world today, such as the declaration of military rule or a state of emergency, or the 2001 USA Patriot Act, which allowed the attorney general to take into custody any alien suspected of activities endangering national security. The state of exception is often a prelude to stripping persons of their rights, as we have seen in the case of both the Nazi regime and Guantánamo Bay Agamben suggests. Once a person has been stripped of rights – reduced to “bare life” – the subject’s life may readily be imperilled without consequence for she or he has no recourse to laws that protect the life and rights of citizens.

Referring to Roman law, Agamben says that a subject reduced to “bare life” might be considered as homo sacer. This subject category may include stateless, illegal immigrants, and those interned in a detainment, refugee, or concentration camp. The suspension of rights often places the biological life of homo sacer in jeopardy. Indeed, for Agamben, it is precisely this logic that led the Nazis to reduce Jewish life to bare life, stripped of political and legal representation, so that the peoples could be killed with impunity. Consequently, Agamben argues that the reconstruction of political philosophy and justice needs to start with a critical inquiry into the mechanisms and manifestations of exclusion:

The camp as dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living, and it is this structure of the camp that we must learn to recognise in all its metamorphoses into the zones d’attentes of our airports and certain outskirts of our cities. The camp […] has now added itself to — and so broken — the old trinity composed of the state, the nation (birth), and land. (1998: 175)

Agamben highlights the need to reconstruct political philosophy by taking into account the perspectives and life experiences of the non-citizen. Attending to the narratives of stateless persons, asylum seekers, detainees, and refugees can expose the inadequacies of global and state governance in the face of the complex realities of a disjunctive and interconnected world order.

Judith Butler’s work goes beyond the claims of homo sacer and the camp on politics and justice to consider the distinction between life as an inherently precarious condition (life itself is vulnerable) and the “precarity” of some lives in particular. For Butler, precarity “designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (2010: 25). This concept leads her to a nuanced interpretation of the ways in which “the ontological status of a targeted population is compromised and suspended” (2010: 29). Butler asks that we consider the ways in which life is “bound and constrained by power relations in a situation of forcible exposure” (2010: 29). This approach is particularly useful for an analysis of the vulnerability of certain peoples or communities, such as Jews or Haitians whose long global histories have entailed slavery, quests for belonging, acts of genocide, exile, and marginalization. Here we might also recall Achille Mbembe’s argument about necropolitics (“contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death”; 2003: 39), especially relevant for Danticat’s Haiti, that “[a]ny historical account of the rise of modern terror needs to address slavery, which could be considered one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation” (2003: 21). Mbembe claims that the slave condition results in the triple loss of home, rights over the body and political status, which was accompanied by domination, natal alienation, and social death. For Haiti, the legacies of these historical conditions of loss and terror can be seen as one among many factors (the violence of the Haitian revolution, economic marginalization in the world economy, US interventionism, dictatorial rule, coup d’états, and so forth) that contribute to the people’s sense of precarity. This situation becomes all the more complicated when we consider a case such as Haiti’s where national and global agendas intersect to produce overlapping conditions of vulnerability and peril.

Joseph Dantica as homo sacer

In tracing the conditions that transform Joseph Dantica from a sacred figure, a minister, to homo sacer, a man who might be killed without impunity, Brother, I’m Dying negotiates references to slavery, Haitian independence, American interventionism, accounts of multiple states of emergency and post-9/11 governance, offering a richly layered and troubling analysis of Haitian precarity. Danticat locates her uncle’s house in a history that dates back to the violent transition from slavery to abolition:

The hill in Bel Air on which the house was built had been the site of a famous battle between mulatto abolitionists and French colonialists who’d controlled most of the island since 1697 and had imported black Africans to labor on coffee and sugar plantations as slaves. (29)

This history prefigures the ongoing and multiple conditions of states of exception and precarity that figure dramatically in the life of Dantica. Looking back to 1957, she notes that Dantica wanted to be a politician until he witnessed the deposition of Daniel Fignolé and Francois Duvalier’s (Baby Doc’s) rise to power in 1957. Despite efforts to lead a non-political life, removed from the precariousness of political power (33), and to opt for a life that focuses on the moral and ethical imperative of his role in the church and love for his fellow Haitians, Dantica’s life ends up deeply embroiled in and ultimately destroyed by the failures of governmentality across national (Haiti), global (international peace-keeping), and transnational (Haitian-American) contexts.

Danticat tracks the fault lines that appear when efforts to uphold global justice and the claims of national security fail to coalesce, resulting in conditions of extreme peril for Haitians. In 2004, following the exile of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the declaration of a state of emergency, the United Nations Stabilization Mission, known in French as Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti or MINUSTAH, entered Haiti in order to keep the peace and protect citizens. MINUSTAH’s agenda was to concentrate the use of its resources, including civilian police, on increasing security and protection during the electoral period and to assist with the restoration and maintenance of the rule of law, public safety, and public order in Haiti. The reality of the situation was quite different: independent human rights organizations accused MINUSTAH and the Haitian National Police (HNP) of collaborating in numerous atrocities against civilians (Stotzky, 2004; Amnesty International, 2004). The UN, after repeatedly denying having taken the lives of any civilians, later admitted that civilians may have been killed, but argued that this was not intentional, and that it occurred as a by-product of their crackdown on what they call “gangs”. Danticat’s account of her uncle’s experiences contributes to this wider picture by showing how peacekeeping forces undermined a traditional space of refuge in the church and thereby endangered his life and that of the community: the sacredness of life, the space of refuge, was sacrificed to violence in the service of peace-keeping efforts. The Haitian riot police – the CIMO (Corps d’Intervention et de Maintien de l’Ordre or Unit for Intervention and Maintaining Order) – used the roof of the church as a base from which to open fire on gangs below, killing many civilians in the process (174). Subsequently, gangs threatened Dantica’s life, forcing him to flee from the church, his home, his family, and finally the nation. Through her intimate narrative, Danticat highlights the extent to which this global peace-keeping mission not only failed to meet its aims but also contributed to the propagation of cycles of violence and civil unrest.

Danticat employs Haitian creole language to examine these conditions of precarity and in/justice from her uncle’s perspective as he moves through various states of exception and statelessness. In “Limbo”, a chapter that alludes (ironically in this instance) to a threshold state on the pathway to paradise as well as a Caribbean dance that emerged through slave culture, Dantica and his son, Maxo, describe these conditions in Haitian creole as a “mòde soufle”, meaning “those who are most able to obliterate you are also the only ones offering some illusion of shelter and protection, a shred of hope — even if false – for possible restoration” (204). Here Danticat’s language echoes that of Butler when she claims that precarity is most often evident when populations, exposed to arbitrary state violence, may have no other option than to seek protection from the very state that has put their lives or wellbeing at risk (2010: 26). Unable to find refuge in Haiti, Joseph Dantica decides to seek temporary asylum in America. Rather than use a visa to enter the country, which he had previously acquired in order to visit churches in America, he enters as an asylum seeker, fleeing the State of Emergency. In doing so, he moves from one frame of “bare life” in Haiti to another in America: from the threat of physical assault and murder in Haiti to another kind of precarity under American bureaucracy. Ironically, the conditions of asylum, which should offer protection from harm, lead to death. Thus, the term “mòde soufle” provides a Haitian framework for tracking the combined effects of shifting and multiple conditions of precarity and “bare life” in a global context.

Danticat shows how American imperialism has contributed to the vulnerability of Haitian peoples. She ponders her uncle’s fate as a detainee of the US government:

Did he think it ironic that he would soon be the dead prisoner of the same government that had been occupying his country when he was born? In essence he was entering and exiting the world under the same flag. Never really sovereign, as his father had dreamed, never really free. (250)

She frames her uncle’s life and death in terms of a lack of sovereignty through US hegemony: beginning with the US occupation of Haiti (1915-34) and ending in a post-9/11 world as Alien 27041999. Danticat situates her uncle’s treatment as an asylum seeker in the context of “a biased immigration policy dating back to the 1980s” (222), which means that “Haitians are disproportionately detained, then deported” as compared to Cubans, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans (222). She asks: “Was my uncle going to jail because he was Haitian? […] Was he going to jail because he was black?” (223). Dantica’s insensitive treatment at the hands of US immigration officials is reflective of imperialist prejudices towards Haitians. Russ Knocke, a spokesperson for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, refers to Dantica’s traditional medicine as “‘a voodoolike potion’” (227), perhaps as a means to justify the seizure of this medicine which Dantica needs in order to prevent prostate pain and blood in his urine. When Dantica collapses during his “credible fear” interview and begins vomiting (perhaps as a result of the fact that he has not taken this medication), the medic on duty does not attend to him but claims, “‘He’s faking’” (234). The following day Joseph Dantica dies in Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital, possibly shackled to his bed. When the manager of the funeral home informs Maxo, who wants to see his father’s body, that the dead are treated with respect as though they are still alive (248), Danticat remarks:

He [the funeral director] should have been at the airport with my uncle, I thought, or at Krome when the medic was twisting his neck and raising his head up and down, or at Jackson, where perhaps because he was a prisoner — an alien prisoner, a Haitian one at that – he received what most doctors to whom I and others have shown his file agree that, given his age and symptoms, was deplorable care. (248)

Rather than refer to her uncle as an asylum seeker, she describes him as “an alien prisoner”, language that is reflective of the treatment he received as a non-citizen, someone reduced to “bare life”. Yet non-citizenship alone cannot account for the conditions of harassment he undergoes. To explain her uncle’s death, Danticat exposes the disjunctive workings of a world where the combination of post-9/11 governmentality, global peace-keeping efforts, states of exception, neo-imperialisms, and racism contribute to precarity.

Witnessing Haitian precarity

While Danticat bears witness to global injustice, she also proffers a counter-narrative, expressed through Creole language and vernacular narrative forms, such as parables and riddles, to represent states of exception, the necropolitical tendencies of sovereignty and dispossession from a Haitian perspective. Such is the case if we take a closer look at the chapter entitled “The Angel of Death and Father God”, which begins with an account of Aristide’s election and deposition as a result of a military coup in 1991. Dantica expresses his political views when he remarks that Aristide is the best man for the job of ruling Haiti, but that at his age he is “‘no longer interested in the best man’” but in “‘the people around me and what he can do for them’” (138). Steering clear of overt political action, he nonetheless records incidents of human rights violations in Haiti, including the name of the person, date of discovery, and state of the body (139). Based on the principle of brotherly love, Dantica’s belief in the sacredness of life leads him to care for those around him and act as a witness to political injustice.

Alongside the historically situated account of her uncle’s politics of care, the precarity and sacredness of life are encoded in the form of a metaphysical Creole story, told by Danticat’s dying aunt who heard it from her mother. One day, Father God and the Angel of Death were strolling around in a neighbourhood like Bel Air, in a very crowded city like Port-au-Prince. God remarks that people prefer him to the Angel of Death, arguing, “I make people and you take them” (143). Angel of Death disagrees and challenges God to a bet, arguing that if they ask a woman on Rue Tirremasse for a drink of water, Death is more likely to be given one than God. When God asks the woman for water, she responds that she has none to spare because the public tap has been dry for days, adding that she has to buy water from a woman who has doubled the price on account of the crisis. God says he is sure that she would give him water if only she knew who he was to which the woman responds that she would only give water to the Angel of Death. When God asks why this is the case, she responds:

[T]he Angel of Death doesn’t play favorites. He takes us all, lame and stout, young and old, rich and poor, ugly and beautiful. You, however, give some people peace and put some of us in war zones like Bel Air. You give some enough food to stuff themselves, while others starve. You make some powerful and others defenseless. You make some healthy and let some get sick. You give some all of the water they need while some of us have very little. (144)

God bows his head in shame and leaves. However, when the Angel of Death comes to the door, the same woman gives him all the water she has. The tale concludes with the observation that the Angel of Death responds to her kindness by delaying his next visit to her, thus extending her life. Ironically, despite the woman’s claim that Death is the great equalizer and therefore more just, the parable shows that Haitian life and death are framed by economic inequities and political instability.

This parable about “bare life” and sovereignty is open to a number of interpretations. I propose that the Angel of Death represents a coded allusion to Baron Samedi, a lwa or deity of vodou who stands at the threshold of life, death, and rebirth. As such, this contemporary narrative about precarity draws on a long history of Haitian sacred and cultural traditions (which emerged under the necropolitical life of slavery and through uneven creolizing processes) to critique Western-derived frameworks for sovereignty and reframe the thresholds of political life/death and in/justice. Significantly, neither God nor the Angel of Death can escape the effects of a state of exception or the claims of the living upon them. Indeed, sovereignty (God) is rejected by the people; he becomes a figure of exile in this paradigm, left thirsting. Where Dantica records human rights violations and the loss of life, this parable suggests the need for a reconstructed sense of sovereignty, which attends to the stories and needs of the stateless and dispossessed and recognises the sacredness of life itself as the guiding principle of a re-imagined Haitian community.

Danticat’s criss-crossing, circuitous narrative path explores the thresholds of in/justice by moving from a local Haitian context to offer a comparative, transnational account of criminality and peril for Haitian households and communities. She recounts conversations between family members in Haiti and America to show that conditions of precarity exist not only for Haitians in Bel Air but also in New York. For instance, violence and crime represent constant threats to her migrant father who drives a gypsy cab or a private taxi, a vehicle that Danticat describes in poetic terms as follows: “My father’s cab is named for wanderers, drifters, nomads. It’s called a gypsy cab” (120). Driving the cab, he is held up at gunpoint, beaten, and robbed on various occasions. Crime in New York leads the Haitian migrant to believe that life in New York is as dangerous as Haiti with its macoutes, the secret police under Haitian dictatorship. The relations between crime in the city and crime in the home are shown to be related through urban myths Haitian migrants tell. One concerns a woman who is robbed by a masked man at gunpoint on a weekly basis until one week she stabs the robber. Removing the mask, she realises she has assaulted her own son. Another tale concerns a young man who leads school pals to five thousand dollars hidden in his mother’s mattress. In the struggle over the money, the mother is shot. The father declares that New York, like Haiti, is a place where only the brave survive (93). Thus, the narrative highlights conditions of precarity for Haitians at home and in the diaspora, whether experienced as street crime in the USA or state-sponsored crime in Haiti.

Danticat takes a pluralistic approach to life writing by integrating various stories of detainees at Krome in her memoir. Some of these stories take the form of parables or coded narratives about the experience of stateless persons: “One man spoke of mad dogs — gang members — threatening him and forcing him to seek shelter at a neighbor’s house, the neighbor being the United States” (212). Danticat brings these folk narratives into dialogue with her own testimonial narrative as a part of a delegation of community observers to Krome Detention Center, including reports of detainees being beaten, fighting among themselves, and of a man who had his back broken by a guard and who was deported before he could get medical attention (212). She bears witness to the impact of terror and crime across borders as well as the inadequate care given to those who have committed no crime, but are merely seeking a space of refuge. The refugee and asylum seeker are viewed as suspect by government officials: treated in ways that resemble the handling of prisoners and criminals. Thus, Danticat calls attention to the blurring of life and death through the zones of indistinction created by American (US) governmentality. At the same time, through the space of writing, Brother, I’m Dying expands the sphere of public discourse by attending to the non-citizen’s claims on the global order. Like her uncle who recorded human rights violations, and in the long tradition of Haitian resistance to domination as well as quests for sovereignty, she offers a creolized counter-narrative of the dominant world order from the periphery.

From fraternity to necro-natality

Danticat’s intertexts bring together various narrative traditions and forms, which attest to life at the margins of life and death, in order to elicit a new kind of political consciousness evoked through fraternal love. Specifically, the epigraphs to the book articulate the threshold conditions of life and death and the need for new kinship models that frame Danticat’s reconstruction of politics. Just as Auster’s Invention of Solitude moves between death and life, Danticat’s narrative ends with a twin focus on the imagined dialogue of the brothers in the afterlife of Haiti, speaking in Creole (“mwen la”, meaning “I am here”, says one brother to the other; 269) as they descend the hills, alongside the account of the birth of Danticat’s daughter, named Mira after her grandfather. The reconciliation of the brothers in the imagined space of their youth in Haiti is a form of commemoration and imagined rebirth, as Danticat’s discourse brings the two separated brothers together in death. However, the epigraphs offer perhaps a more ambiguously coded reference to models of fraternal care and politicized kinship relations. The first part of the narrative begins with a quote from Genesis 20:13: This is how you can show your love to me: Everywhere we go, say of me, “He is my brother”. In fact, this quotation has little to do with relations, biological or imagined, between brothers. Abraham says these words to his wife Sarah after they flee from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. God intervenes to protect both Abraham and Sarah, but this situation raises issues about the role of sovereign power, particularly when it brings about violence against peoples and creates conditions of statelessness. The second part of the narrative begins with a quotation from Proverbs 17:17: “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity”. Brotherhood consists of caring for the other, especially in times of difficulty. With these intertexts, Danticat’s fraternal discourse moves beyond the biological notion of kinship to an ethics of care. Significantly, she reconstructs the rights-based discourse of fraternity that underpinned French and Haitian claims to citizenship, that of “liberté, égalité, fraternité”. Instead of revolutionary fervour for brotherhood, Danticat’s idea of brotherly love calls our attention to the claims of kinship derived from a shared recognition that we are all potentially imperilled subjects of precarious life.

Through the narrative, Joseph Dantica comes to be figured as a grandfather, uncle, (foster/adoptive) father, and even mother, through his acts of love. Notably, he claims his status as a “mother” when he rescues a young woman he has adopted, named Marie Micheline, who is being imprisoned and abused by a macoute. Risking his own life to save her, he defies this figure of state violence and criminality. When he finally locates her, she can barely walk because the macoute has beaten her legs with a broom and fire stone when she tried to escape. Wrapping her in his arms, he thinks that “she felt the same to him now as when her father had placed her in his arms as a baby, trusting that he would look after her, that he would always keep her from harm” (85). As they escape, Marie-Micheline whispers “Papa, even though men cannot give birth, you just gave birth tonight. To me” (86). This idea of a second birth suggests that political life itself can be reborn through the ethical demands of care for the other.

Dantica’s capacity to give birth to new life might be read in the light of Hannah Arendt’s notion of natality, which refers to the political hope of new life, akin to the hope that accompanies each new birth of a child (1973: 479). In The Human Condition, she argues that natality is central to political life because it enables action: “Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the conditions for remembrance, that is for history” (1958: 8-9). For Arendt,

if action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actualisation of the human condition of natality, then speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualisation of the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being among equals. (1958: 178)

Natality is not simply a matter of being born with a capacity for action and speech: in political terms, natality emerges when the equality and plurality of subjects is recognized as the basis for communal life. In recounting the life of Dantica, Danticat’s discourse performs a kind of natal function, bearing silenced narratives into public forums for discussion and inclusion in history. Moreover, the life history of her uncle and father, framed by the birth of her child and her hopes for the future, would seem to suggest that we read Brother, I’m Dying as a natal discourse in the Arendtian sense.

However, such a reading of Brother, I’m Dying would be inattentive to Danticat’s simultaneous emphasis on precarity and “bare life”. Joseph Dantica’s life ends in an untimely death, a death that is preceded by conditions that serve to deprive him of speech and action. In this case, the representation of Dantica as an infant does not indicate natality, but a regressive movement from precarity to “bare life”. In 2004, Dantica eludes the threat of violence when a member of the congregation shouts out to the peace-keeping forces, “He’s a bèbè [baby]”, noting by way of explanation, “He can’t speak” (175). Dantica’s speechlessness is thematized throughout Brother, I’m Dying: he loses his voicebox when a tumour threatens to suffocate him, requiring a radical laryngectomy in the US to save his life. He regains speech through medical technology that allowed him to speak in a mechanically-enabled posthuman voice, thus enabling him to continue his sacred vocation as a minister. In 2004, he loses the ability to speak in the face of the threat of violence made possible by a state of emergency, but that loss of speech also enables his flight to an apparent space of safety, but which results in a different kind of speechlessness: that of the stateless asylum seeker in the USA, the place where Dantica’s hopes of “rebirth” are finally stymied. In this context, we might note that an infant is also a migrant, a nomadic being born of the womb who enters the world. For Dantica, this “transition”, a term that Danticat uses to refer to the moment when the baby twists and turns to pass through the birth canal (252), proves unsuccessful as the migrant passes through the limbo-like suspension of political life and finally to death itself. Danticat offers a powerful critique of her uncle’s thwarted and stillborn political aspirations as he is deprived of both political speech and action.

Where Hannah Arendt claims that “natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought” (1958: 9), Danticat seems to show us that natality already encompasses mortality. Whether we consider Brother, I’m Dying, Krik? Krak! (1995), The Dew Breaker (2004), or Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010), Danticat’s hopes for a more promising political future are always tempered by an awareness of the life/death potentiality of the womb/tomb (to invoke Auster) or of what might be described as necro-natality (Danticat, 2010: 75; Evans Braziel, 2004: 77). Just as her narratives often attend, quite literally, to the mortal threat posed to new life through gestation and birth, her approach to political life is fraught with a keen awareness of the miscarriage of justice, aborted hopes for sovereignty, and the thwarted life histories of stillborn democracies. In Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, Danticat associates the creation of art with exile from Eden (an event that brought with it both the hope of birth and the inevitability of death) to explore the role of the artist as one who creates in the face of exile, injustice, and death. Danticat observes: “One of the many ways a sculptor of ancient Egypt was described was as ‘one who keeps things alive’” (2010: 20). Art becomes a stand-in for “a life, a soul, a future” (2010: 2). Through a necro-natal discourse that resurrects the voices of the dead, Danticat elicits a space of writing that gives life once more to political speech and action: she revives the voices of migrants, refugees, noncitizens, and stateless persons who have been pushed to the thresholds spaces of political (and biological) life. Like Black Atlantic representations of the Middle Passage as a womb-like space or Wilson Harris’s womb of space, Danticat’s natality is ambivalent, born of resistance to injustice, terror, and violence in the global order. Initially, the alliance between fertility and death strikes Danticat as improbable, “My father was dying and I was pregnant. Both struck me as impossibly unreal” (14), but this pairing of life and death is perhaps not so surprising in a Haitian context where Baron Samedi, the Angel of Death, is also the lwa associated with fertility, particularly through his Catholic counterpart, St. Gerard, the patron saint of expectant mothers and childbirth.

Brother I’m Dying highlights the ways in which national and global frameworks for justice may differ or overlap to produce conditions that exacerbate violence and unrest. In our globalizing world, Caryl Phillips suggests that “it is impossible to resist the claims of the migrant, the asylum seeker, or the refugee” (2002: 5). Where Phillips argues that “there will soon be one global conversation with limited participation open to all, and full participation available to none” (2002: 5), Danticat focuses on the ways that prevailing discourses and paradigms for governance limit participation, exacerbate disjunctive conditions, and contribute to conditions of precarity. By tracking the transnational flow of peoples, Danticat takes issue with the politics of exception, which render peoples stateless and life precarious, and exclusion, which constrain full participation in the global conversation. At the same time, Brother, I’m Dying expands the sphere of socio-political discourse. Through the Haitian practice of communing with the dead, Danticat “bears” the extinguished voices of the marginalized, the non-citizen and the dead back into political life, fostering a new space of natality. Her narrative enriches the sphere of citizenship through a more vigorous, expanded, global conversation, one that is attentive to the threshold conditions of precarity between life and death. In her view, the Haitian experience is not isolated, but needs to read as part of a global narrative for the ways in which the conditions and treatment of peoples in one part of the world come to shed light on similar acts of in/justice elsewhere (Mirabal, 2007: 31). For Danticat, “[a] great work of art can really change the way that you see individual men and women and the experiences that surround them, the experiences that shape them” (Mirabal, 2007: 34). In a post-9/11 world, Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying reconstitutes a sense of global citizenship and justice through a necro-natal discourse that bears life to the various and multiple claims of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees.