A few weeks ago I was driving when the light on my dashboard came on warning of low air in my back tire. I stopped at the gas station on Biscayne and found the air machine. As I inserted quarters into it, a beater of a pick-up truck pulled up next to me. “You using the air?” a middle-aged man asked in a Haitian accent.
I explained how my tire keeps deflating every couple weeks and I need to get a new one. After my tire filled up, the machine was still spewing out air, so I handed the hose to the gentleman as he and his younger companion used it to fill up a bicycle tire. When I got into my car the older Haitian man said to me, “Remember to fix what is broken.”
That five minute interaction kept coming to mind as I read Edwidge Danticat’s beautiful memoir, Brother, I’m Dying. In this book which recounts her life as a child in Haiti and her adulthood in the United States, one man steals the show for me. Her Uncle Joseph is a very unique figure in modern storytelling. Usually, characters whether real or imagined are portrayed as flawed. Writers tend to think there is more interest in imperfection. Uncle Joseph contradicts this assumption. He is fascinating because he is so rare in fiction or non-fiction in that he is a true paragon of virtue. Life has struck this man many blows. He loses his voice due to an illness and is forced to use a modulator to communicate. His wife dies. His church is destroyed. He spends his last days imprisoned while in exile, unwelcome in the United States. Still there is never the slightest iota of bitterness. All he does is give back, whether in helping to raise children that are not his own or when trying to uplift his impoverished community.
Anyone who has dealt with any member of the human race, must wonder whether Danticat is painting her uncle with a thick paint of nostalgia. Surely a man who cared for her when she was young and her parents were unable to deserves such a glowing tribute. But one would think there would be one moment where he loses his temper or acts in a selfish manner. Every American I met finds something to complain about even when living under much more luxurious circumstances, but Uncle Joseph glides through this book with a metaphorical halo over his head.
This quality makes it all the more heartbreaking when you read how he spent his final days. I would not wish his fate on any person. To first have the church he spent his whole life building to be destroyed by angry gang members who thought he betrayed them. Then once he escapes and finds his way to the United States to be taken to Krome Service Processing Center where he is imprisoned and not given proper medical care is torturous to read. A man like this deserves to be embraced by the world with open arms. Any country would be lucky to have such a man walk among them, but ours didn’t look at him for who he was, but only by where he came from. He then suffered the most tragic of demises.
Throughout the book readers learn quite a bit about the Caribbean country’s harsh recent history. President Woodrow Wilson ordered the U.S. Marines to invade Haiti in 1915 which resulted in a fifteen year occupation which Haitians fought against guerilla style unsuccessfully. Through the twentieth century there were plenty of regime changes, apparently none more tumultuous than that involving Jean-Bertrand Arstide. In 1991 Arstide was ousted by military coup. According to Danticat, “residents remained steadfast in calling for his return through protests and demonstrations. In retaliation the army raided and torched houses and killed hundreds” (139). To survive such instability and poverty over decades perhaps makes for a man of patience and perspective such as Uncle Joseph or the gentleman I encountered at the gas station.
Xavier, the Haitian- American male protagonist of the 2023 movie Mountains, is cut from a slightly different cloth. When we are first introduced to Xavier working as a construction worker striving to purchase a bigger home to share with his wife in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, he too seems patient. As the film progresses we can observe a rage simmering underneath his stoic exterior. He is angry that his adult son still lives at home and doesn’t seem to aspire to do more than work as a valet and tell jokes at open mic comedy nights. Xavier is also frustrated that his neighborhood is gentrifying, pricing out his fellow Haitian exiles in exchange for yuppies of a lighter complexion. Finally, he goes from trying to play peacemaker for the racial tension between the Black and Hispanic workers, to confronting his foreman for making a racist comment.
Xavier fell for the mythology of the American dream. He thought once he made it to the U.S his future would be golden. In the climactic scene where he tries to make peace with his son, Xavier bears his heart and regret. He spent all these decades working his behind off and feels like he’s gotten nowhere. Xavier reminisces about the more relaxed life in his native land where he spent entire days at the beach. And in the line of dialogue from which the movie gains its title, he rues how in Haiti you could see mountains, but in the United States all you see are buildings.
It is a much more cynical perspective than that what we get in the entire book of Brother, I’m Dying from Uncle Joseph or the moment where I interacted with the man at the air pump. But perhaps the American Dream can only be dreamed by those who live outside our borders. To assimilate might mean not to believe in hope any longer.
