We're Alone: Essays
In her latest essay collection, We’re Alone, award-winning Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat has shared eight powerful essays that bring to life Haiti’s history and culture, the Haitian diaspora, and her own journey as a writer. Employing personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to writers who have influenced her, she writes about colonialism, catastrophes, community, motherhood and resilience, all with a fierce tenderness that is always present in her work. Writing with a clear sense of what matters, what must be questioned or rejected, what should be embraced, and what has given her life meaning, she touches on morality, humanity, and identity in ways that are deeply moving.
She begins her book with a preface that cites an excerpt from a Haitian poet Roland Chassagne, whose words, Danticat says,” read like secrets.” In one poem he wrote, “No one is coming to save us.” [Yet] “Were alone.” Inspired by these words, Danticat begins writing her moving essays. “Writing for me,” she says, “is a quest for that kind of aloneness/togetherness.” She quotes the poet again to foreshadow where her beautifully crafted essays will take readers: “Allow me to take you by the hand, and tell you some simple, and unforgettable things . . .”
Her first essay in the collection, “Children of the Sea,” introduces readers to what is to come as she shares life-shifting experiences, the lived realities of immigration, and the sense of Otherness in a diaspora life.
In “They Are Waiting in the Hills,” Danticat refers to hurricanes, a metaphorical topic in the preceding essay, that explores her heritage as a Haitian relocated to white America. “We are a people” is what we have been saying for generations to colonizers, invaders, and imperialists hell-bent on destroying us. And now more than ever, Mother Nature, too.”
It’s this scaffolding that brings into focus the illuminations that follow. Weaving together memories, experiences, other works by noted writers, Danticat takes us further into her own work.
In “By the Time You Read This . . .” she contemplates death and grief in personal and objective ways. “A broken heart might lead to questions we’d rather not answer, as might an inappropriate gesture, the death of a loved one, or the murder of a stranger. Each time a young Black person is killed by a police officer . . . I ask myself if the time has come for me to write to my daughters. . . . By the time you read this . . .”
Danticat’s sense of self coupled with her objectivity is one of the gifts of her reflections and writing. How do I/we fit into what has happened, she seems to ask. In this collection, she seeks answers and ultimately finds them guided by her humanity, compassion and fine writing. In “Writing the Self and Others,” she cites a course description shared by her daughter: “Imagine: “The Essay” is a body of water —far-flung and teeming into the distance. And you, the writer, are alone on the shore. Will you enter the water. . . . Or will you stand on shore at the water splashes against your ankle?” One knows that Danticat will always enter the water, and swim to shore with the hope that her strokes will keep her moving her forward.
She ends her book by quoting her mother who was once lost in an airport. “I was lost. They found me. The journey continued,” her mother said when Danticat found her. Then she says, “I too have been lost, but eventually words, stories, find me. Once again, I have entered this body of water. I am no longer alone on the shore. Our journey continues.” Luckily, she always brings us with her.