There are small experiences of hope that can happen while living in a divisive culture, and a new essay collection by Edwidge Danticat appearing on bookstore shelves is one of them. Danticat’s fiction and nonfiction often brings to light moral issues that are either ignored or overlooked by the populace—commentary such as the immigrant artist experience in Create Dangerously, the strength, resilience, and bond of women throughout Krik? Krak!, and the power of memory in Claire of the Sea Light. Her newest collection, We’re Alone, embodies her trademark style of bridging the subjective with the universal as she focuses on subjects such as environmental disasters, literary icons, enduring trauma of colonialism, and simply witnessing and rethinking the human experience. She writes: “…we are creating potentially beautiful, or potentially tragic, new beginnings.”
Early in the collection, Danticat cites a moment when she was asked if she thought that writing could change anything. She replies that she “wanted to say by bearing witness,” and then quotes James Baldwin: “Witness to whence I am, where I am. Witness to what I’ve seen and the possibilities that I think I see.” This is the rare style of writer that Danticat is—she sees the connection between past and present, cause and effect, and not just as a plot device, but as painful historic truth that is often not acknowledged. Her personal essays can double as history lessons, and in this newest collection, just like her previous work, I’m left with the awareness that everything and everyone are connected.
For example, in her personal essay “Children of the Sea,” a direct reference to one of her short stories that appeared in 1996’s Krik? Krak!, Danticat discusses the intimate and global devastation brought on by the increase of recent hurricanes. In it, she quotes a North Carolina resident’s interview in a local newspaper: “I can’t fathom the volume that must be floating in the ocean from that one small island [Haiti]. It is a serious problem when a shoreline over 1,100 miles away is tainted.” Danticat then says that Haiti “did not invent this trash.” While discussing her personal experience wading in the floods, she offers thoughtful musings about how the island’s devastation began with Columbus’s colonialism and genocide, followed by the “Spanish, British, and French until the enslaved people and some free men and women…battled for independence and created the world’s first Black republic.” And, naturally, she highlights America’s forceful occupation and the support of the murderous dictator Duvalier, culminating in American’s role in helping overthrow the first “democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.” Danticat also educates the reader about how “In 1988, a garbage barge named the Khian Sea dropped four thousand tons of incinerated trash ash from Philadelphia on the shores of Gonaives, a historic northern Haitian city,” due to corruption and bribes, later citing the recent trash on North Carolina’s shores as “a kind of revenge.”
Everything and everyone are connected.
In “This is My Body,” Danticat is stuck in mall traffic during Christmas as a mass shooter needlessly kills innocent shoppers. Retreating for safety with the panicked mob, she later discovers that, unlike the almost daily mass shootings in America, it was a hoax, perpetrated by young people with an app that “made the sounds of gunshots and bomb detonations” and with firecrackers. This connects to the greater issue of the accepted murders of school children in American culture, as Danticat weaves together how eye-opening it is that her “daughters’ generation has lived in great proximity to graphic, vivid trauma due to gun violence” and that there are now “enough tools, including social media, to share real-time accounts of the shootings and the aftermath with the rest of us.” As Danticat puts it, students are “being trained to expect dying while planning how to avoid it.” As a mother, and writer, Danticat claims that she is always wrestling with mortality, which leads this essay to further focus on the death of the body, specifically through violence, but also by food, and illness. “This is My Body” links the health of our bodies with the health of our culture, and expertly done, Danticat highlights the causal links between the two distant concepts.
Despite the collection’s title, a declaration of loneliness and longing, Danticat’s preface reframes the concept of being “alone” as merely being a small part of something greater than us. She shares and grounds wisdom from various acclaimed writers that have influenced her life, sprinkling devotions to them throughout the essays. Weather disasters, gang violence, witness writers, the national tragedies, and being a questioning teenager—are all elements of the same puzzle. Danticat educates as she entertains. She writes, “Writers die, but not their canopy of language. Just as Roland Chassagne still sometimes whispers to me, Dear Reader, Please allow me to reach for your hand. We’re Alone.” With Danticat’s work, readers can take a step back to witness the connectedness throughout generations, and to reconsider the plague of divisiveness.
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: September 3, 2024
Reviewed by Mark Massaro
Mark Massaro earned a master’s degree in English Language & Literature from Florida Gulf Coast University. He is currently a Professor of English at a state college in Florida. His writing has been published in DASH, Litro, Newsweek, The Georgia Review, The Hill, Los Angeles Review of Books, Rain Taxi Review, The Sunlight Press, and others.