A Haitian family, linked by love, must learn to live on separate shores

Edwidge Danticat has written a moving tribute to her father and uncle, the two men who raised her.

from the September 11, 2007 edition

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Words remained a powerful symbol between Danticat and her father, even though, she writes, the two always carefully avoided any emotional conversations. When she and Bob rejoined their parents in New York, her dad gave her a Smith-Corona Corsair portable typewriter as a welcome-home present. " 'This will help you measure your words,' he said, tapping the keys with his fingers for emphasis." Her dad meant it literally – both Danticat and her dad's cursive had a tendency to run downhill – but the gift turned out to be a prescient one.

Danticat recalls her uncle with great affection. She writes about small treats, such as a shopping trip where her uncle bought her a shaved coconut ice and a secondhand book ("Madeleine"), as well as the time Joseph risked his life to save Marie Micheline and her baby from an abusive husband. Her uncle and aunt took a number of children into their pink house in the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, as well as running a church and a school.

Despite Mira's urgings to join him in America, Joseph refused to abandon his church – even when an emergency surgery left him without a voice with which to preach. Coups and the growing riots in his neighborhood couldn't shake him. Then gangs burned the church down and began hunting for Joseph. His escape from Port-au-Prince was worthy of Houdini, but the miracle was short-lived. After arriving in Miami and asking for asylum, the octogenarian was sent to the Krome detention center, where his medication was taken away. Perhaps to avoid charges of embellishment, or perhaps because it's just too painful, Danticat keeps adjectives to a minimum and largely lets the government's own documents tell of her uncle's final days.

Mira ended up outliving his brother long enough to hold Danticat's daughter, whom she named for him. "I wish I could fully make sense of the fact that they're now sharing a grave site and a tombstone in Queens, N. Y., after living apart for more than 30 years," she writes at the conclusion of her memoir.

"In any case, every now and then I try to imagine them on a walk through the mountains of Beausèjour.... And in my imagining, whenever they lose track of one another, one or the other calls out in a voice that echoes throughout the hill, 'Kote w ye frè m? Brother, where are you?'

"And the other one quickly answers, 'Nou la. Right here, brother. I'm right here.' "

• Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor.

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