We're Alone

June 15, 2024
The acclaimed author discusses influential authors, her native Haiti, and the challenges of life in America. Danticat begins this short but powerful collection of essays by quoting Haitian-born poet Roland Chassagne. The cited work includes the phrase the author chose for her title. "We're alone is the persistent chorus of the deserted, as in no one is coming to save us," she writes. "Yet, we're alone can also be a promise writers make to their readers, a reminder of this singular intimacy between us. At least we're alone together." In 1963, Chassagne was taken to dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier and disappeared. His experience encapsulates the two themes around which Danticat groups these essays, the first devoted to writers who have influenced her and the second focusing on Haiti. In these pieces, the author chronicles the memories conjured by a 2018 visit for the opening of a new library; her Miami speech in which she advocated for prolonged protected status for Haitians displaced by hurricanes; the influence on her life and writing of such authors as Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison, the last of whom "turned pain into flesh and brought spirits to life"; her terror upon arriving at a Miami shopping mall during a mass shooting that turned out to be a hoax; and the frightening activities of a Haiti gang known as 400 Mawozo, which kidnapped 17 missionaries in 2021. This collection, like many, has a grab bag quality to it; the pieces don't cohere as well as they should. Still, the author offers an elegant commentary on injustice and the mixed feelings one's home can engender. As Danticat writes, "things sometimes go differently than planned or hoped for, and though home can be a safe place, we shouldn't always rush back there." Moving essays on Haiti, literature, and life's vicissitudes.

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Starred review from July 29, 2024
Novelist and essayist Danticat (Everything Inside) delivers a collection of piercing reflections on her native Haiti. In “A Rainbow in the Sky,” Danticat describes the steep toll that increasingly severe hurricanes are taking on the country (after Hurricane Matthew hit in 2006, “there were reports of people having no food, water, or shelter and living in caves while eating potentially toxic plants”) and laments the reluctance of wealthy nations to accept climate refugees. Other selections compare the xenophobia faced by Haitian expats in the U.S. and Dominican Republic and contrast the Croix-des-Bouquets commune’s flourishing art scene with the Mawozo gang that operates out of the area. Danticat has a knack for cutting turns of phrase (“Family is whoever is left when everyone else is gone,” she remarks in “Writing the Self and Others,” which discusses her ambivalent feelings toward writing about her relatives). She also excels at weaving together personal narrative and history. For instance, she writes in “Children of the Sea” that “being human means having to keep beginning again,” recounting how a “Haitian exile” teacher helped her adjust to living in New York City after she moved there at age 12, and describing how Haiti has rebounded after the 2010 earthquake and the 1991 coup against its first democratically elected president. Danticat remains at the height of her considerable talents.

September 15, 2024
Life in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora are the heart of writer and activist Danticat's writings. Her nonfiction flows parallel to her fiction, carrying real-life experiences, facts, and perceptions that seed her novels and short stories, including those in Everything Inside (2019). The deeply felt, incisively reported, and lyrically composed essays in this collection explore the ripple effects of beloved places, literature, natural disasters, and disastrous politics. Danticat shares her passion for the work of James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde, and Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez. She recalls encounters with Paule Marshall and, most strikingly, her key mentor, Toni Morrison. Much is revealed about the complexities of Haiti's struggles in "Children of the Sea," which encompasses Danticat's coming to the U.S. at age 12, inspiring teachers, a 2018 sojourn in Haiti with relatives, and Haiti's catastrophic trash problem escalated by flooding and climate change, with plastic colonizing the oceans. In subsequent essays, murderous political upheavals, police violence, corruption, gangs and kidnappings, the challenges facing immigrants, and transcendent family bonds are all movingly illuminated with Danticat's signature empathy, precision, and artistry.

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