We're alone Essays

Edwidge Danticat, 1969-

Book - 2024

"Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat's childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in We're Alone include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin that explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience. From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat has an extraordinary ability to move from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature an...d art prove to be her reliable companions and guides in both tragedies and triumphs. Danticat is an irresistible presence on the page: full of heart, outrage, humor, clear thinking, and moral questioning, while reminding us of the possibilities of community. And so "we're alone" is both a fearsome admission and an intimate invitation-we're alone now, we can talk. We're Alone is a book that asks us to think through some of the world's intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today"--

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2nd Floor New Shelf 814.54/Danticat (NEW SHELF) Due Dec 17, 2024
Subjects
Genres
Essays
Published
Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press [2024]
Language
English
Main Author
Edwidge Danticat, 1969- (author)
Physical Description
xi, 139 pages ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9781644453025
  • We're Alone: A Preface
  • Children of the Sea
  • A Rainbow in the Sky
  • They Are Waiting in the Hills
  • This is My Body
  • By the Time You Read This…
  • Chronicles of a Death Foretold
  • Wozo, Not Mawozo
  • Writing the Self and Others
  • Appendix
  • Bibliography
  • Acknowledgments
Review by Booklist Review

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 García Márquez. 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.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Sept.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.