Week 13: Mobility and Containment: Historical Fiction/Autobiography

        Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying has many connections to Children of Global Migration.  Indeed, Danticat's book is a narrative of her family's experience as they moved to their eventual home in the United States after leaving Haiti.  Examples of how Danticat is a child of global migration include being a child of an initial father-away family.  She states that, "Until that moment, aside from the butter cookies and the restrained words of his letters, my father had mostly been a feeling for me, powerful yet vague, without a real face, a real body" (88).  And once her mother left to join her father in America, Danticat was left with her brother Bob in the charge of her aunt and uncle.  Indeed, Danticat came to consider her aunt and uncle more like her parents than her real mother and father.  This is evident when her parents came to visit them in Haiti surprisingly almost ten years later accompanied with her two new siblings.  She recalled that, "Looking down at Karl, snugly cradled in our mother's arms, I couldn't help but feel envious.  If she could bring him here from New York, why hadn't she been able to take Bob and me with her when she left" (91)?  When it came time for her and Bob to join her parents and siblings much later, Danticat states that, "There's a Haitian saying, 'Pitit noun se lave yon bo, kite yo bo.'  When you bathe the other people's children, it says, you should wash one side and leave the other side dirty" (120).  Her attachment with her aunt and uncle made her reluctant to join her parents yet she performed in such as way as others would expect such as when they are at the consulate and the man asks her if she is excited to see her parents again.  What would the man have done if she had said no, not really?  Would that reflect poorly on the child or the parents?  The parents it would seem more likely because they were the ones that initiated the separation in the first place, thus it cannot come as a surprise if all children of paretn-away families may be initially reluctant to return to the care of their rightful mother and father.  In cases of parent-away families where the both the parents have willingly left their children to seek jobs and lives elsewhere, would it be better for their children to remain in the care of their relatives they are living with instead of rejoining their parents when and if there was such a possibility?