Brother, I'm Dying was the perfect reading to follow up our viewing of Babel, in terms of the way that the story is told. Throughout Babel, viewers are left wondering the chronology of the story. I found myself asking over and over again, "Wait. Is this happening after what we just saw… Or before?" When Edwidge Danticat weaves together her story with the stories of her Haitian family, it reminds me of the interconnectedness of the stories in Babel. Danticat says that "what [she] learned from [her] father and uncle… was out of sequence and in fragments. This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and [hers] intersected in startling ways, forcing [her] to look forward and back at the same time” (25-26).
In Brother, I'm Dying, Uncle Joseph's experience with customs at the airport in Miami also mirrored the treatment of the Mexican man and woman at the U.S./Mexican border in Babel. The way these officials are trained discursively to fear the "dangerous foreigner" and not tolerate any form of identity aside from that of the docile-- it's racism and ethnocentrism sneaking its way into policy in a clear way. The transparency of how these people are treated is there, and yet we don't act. It's frightening, really.
Danticat's story also mirrored the stories of children of global migration. I liked Danticat's perspective a lot, because we didn't see a neglected child lacking a paternal role model. Danticat loved her uncle and does not seem to mourn the absence of her father too much. However, it was strange for me to have the relationship between Danticat and her father in comparison to the relationship between Haiti and the United States, as the latter is framed as so paternalistic. The discourse of the US as the paternalistic savior just doesn't make sense when you read it in the contexts of stories like Danticat's and Taking Haiti.
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