WR 100 060
Essay due December 02.2008
Haitian immigrants and their choice to struggle for better life
The life of immigrants is very hard and fulfilled with many hard moments. In "Brother I`m Dying" Edwidge Danticat delivers sacrifice of first generation of immigrants and their struggle for a better future for their children. Danticat delivers similar painful experience of many immigrants who choose to immigrate: leave their native country and their kids and relatives and look for a better future, keep their love between long distance call and hand-scripted letters, , loving their native country and their families to the end of their life, learning to look forward even after even worst thing happened
Immigration is less about choice when you`re country like Haiti. Haiti is one of the many poor countries in the world and that`s the reason which many immigrants find to immigrate. They choose to immigrate to look for better life like Danticat`s family, when she was 2 years old, her father Mira immigrate to the United States, and two years later her mother leaving her and her younger brother, Bob, in the care of Uncle Joseph, their father`s older brother. Choosing to immigrate to another country is less about choice, when you don`t have money to take of your family. Danticat`s parents sacrifice their life to immigrate to USA to ensure future of their kids. "Then, as now, leaving often seemed like the only answer, especially if one was sick like my uncle or poor like my father, or desperate like both."(p.54). Therefore immigration is choice of many people and most of the time is right.
Immigrant children have a hard childhood. Children of immigrants are often they care of their relatives and grandparents. Danticat learn to love her parents' trough long distance calls and hand-scripted letters from her father. Many immigrants suffer for their kids, parents and relatives, but they learn how to keep their love like Danticat safe her love for her parents. She learned to love her Uncle Joseph like her second father, he raises her as his daughter and when they finally leaving Haiti to join their parents and younger brothers in Brooklyn. Danticat cannot remember the moment of her departure from Haiti, but writes, "I only remember wishing as we soared into clouds that my uncle had cried a torrent of tears, had thrown him on the ground and made a scene, all the while forbidding us to go." She become like his own daughter, living with him for eight years and that is the human cost of immigration: pain, fractures family ties, alienation and confusion. Immigration is a process that is often associated with feelings of loss. This is true for both refugees and individuals who have chosen to leave their homeland in search of new opportunities. Upon arrival to a new country, many immigrants find they miss their old way of life. (Sunaina Assanand P.1)However her memoir shows better than any political speech how those who come to immigrates accept great loss as well as future gain.
As an immigrant feeling of homesick and homeless never leave me and all other immigrants. Many reasons drives people to immigrate like Danticat`s Uncle Joseph. When a violent neighborhood gang mistakenly believes that her uncle is cooperating with provisional government, they burned his church, and the ailing elderly pastor to flee to Miami. Despite having both a valid visa and a legitimate reason for requesting temporary political asylum, he`s imprisoned by the U.S agents. He dies in the custody of homeland security few days later. Danticat`s family decide to bury him in New York and her father, who is in final stage of pulmonary fibrosis, remarks that Joseph shouldn't be in the United States. "if our country were ever given a chance and allowed to be a country like any other, none of us would live or die here" (p. 251). When Mr. Danticat says, "a country like any other," he is undoubtedly thinking of the U.S., which is why many of us immigrants have made the necessary sacrifices to get here. We live in limbo between "Here" and "There," clinging precariously to the beliefs and traditions that shaped us back home. Our achievements here are footnoted with "if only" there: If only our countries didn't suffer from racist foreign policy or from greedy, corrupt, often violent, leadership, we could've done the same thing there. Therefore future of immigrant's children is stronger than their desires.
Immigrants handle a lot of stressful situation. Just short after Danticat brings her 3 week old daughter to meet her parents, her father also died. He is buries in Queen next to his brother, but Danticat imagines them reunited in death, walking along the hills of Beausejour in Haiti where they were born. She imagines that whenever they are separated, one calls out for other: "brother, where are you? And other quickly answers. Mwen la. Right here, brother, I'm right here". They death are not wasted, because they created future of their children and build better life for them. However their daughter has written beautiful and devastating testaments to their lives.
Many immigrants overcome the profound sense of loss they experience when they leave their homeland and migrate to a new country. Although the process is difficult, individuals who experience such grief are often rewarded with a renewed perspective on life - a perspective that strengthens their resolve and enriches their experiences (Sunaina Assanand).Danticat deliver her big lost of both fathers, but as a successful writer and a mother she become a second generation immigrant with good career and with big memoir of her both father who didn`t die unknown. Her great memoir is bringing them alive. Although immigration is not only difficulties and hard moments it`s a big step in future second generation immigrants.
Work Cited
Danticat, E. (2007). Brother I`m dying
Assanand, Sunaina. "Feeling homesick?" 1994
canadianimmigrant.ca/health/psychology/article/80
