Transnational Voices

      Edwidge Danticat's book Brother, I'm Dying illustrates the lives and histories of her family members in relation to their space and place. The book highlights the lived experiences on a transnational level by accentuating the importance of voice within all of the narratives she reviews and amalgamates.  As a daughter of Haitian parents that move to the United States to achieve financial stability, her narrative is similar to those within many of the texts we have already read (especially Taking Haiti and Adopted Territory), as a child of "globalization" and transnational economic policies crafted by Western hegemonies. The loss of her mother and father's voices for eight years of her life were seen as harmful and confusing times in her life. Danticat notes how her father had to tiptoe around his "lost" children's psyches; "...dispassionate letters were his way of avoiding a minefield, one he could have set off from a distance without being able to comfort the victims" (Danticat, 20).  Here, Danticat effectively portrays her youth as one of the many examples of victimization by Western imperialists. 
       Another tragic example of lost or stolen voices is a literal one, of her uncle Joseph's throat cancer.  As visiting, white, Western doctors were visiting Haiti, her uncle took advantage of the "advanced" medical knowledges and technologies, and sought help with his throat issues. After a very brief examination, the Western doctor easily delivers a prognosis of throat cancer and a need to, basically, remove his throat and voice; "He needed a radical laryngectomy.  His voice box would eventually have to be removed" (Danticat, 36).  This narrative of her uncle's life is a reflection of the ways in which the Western powers could coercively remove the public voices of "others," economically and politically, and in her story, physically as well. Not all her descriptions of transnational voices were negative and traumatic, for her father bestowed upon her a public voice. During the eight years of their transnational separation, Danticat had begged for a way to express her words without her "slanted" written cursive. Once they were reunited, her welcome gift was a public voice she could use to communicate more fluidly and openly. She writes, "Still, they feel like such prescient gifts now, this typewriter and his desire, very early on, to see me properly assemble my words" (Danticat, 117).  The power of the voice and a public space for it was important to her family, as their transnational and personal experiences emphasized them as tied to existence.  Her words concerning her uncle's vocal loss highlight the power of the voice, "If you had no voice at all, he thought, you were simply left out of the constant hum of the world, the echo of conversations, the shouts and whispers of everyday life" (Danticat, 36).