Quote by Edwidge Danticat: “The living owe it to those who no longer speak to tell their story for them.”

Those who died — especially those killed unjustly or without witnesses — cannot advocate for themselves or correct the record. The responsibility of the living is to carry their stories forward, so the dead are not simply erased from history as if they never existed.

Danticat published Brother I'm Dying in 2007, the year her father and uncle both died — her uncle, a Baptist minister, in US immigration detention. The memoir traces the political violence in Haiti that drove her uncle from his home and the bureaucratic violence that killed him in American custody.

Haitian-American novelist and essayist who writes about the Haitian diaspora, political violence, and the experience of displacement. Her debut novel Breath, Eyes, Memory and her 2007 memoir Brother I'm Dying are considered essential works of Caribbean-American literature.