Brother, I’m Dying begins with a moral challenge. The first sentence is crucial:

"I found out I was pregnant the same day that my father’s rapid weight loss and chronic shortness of breath were positively diagnosed as end-stage pulmonary fibrosis."

This contrary emotional state immediately causes a reader to pause, to consider what it is like to be caught between the joy of birth and the confusion of death. Furthermore, it introduces a twofold theme that allows Danticat to interweave her many paths, to broach subjects ranging from childhood emigration and the struggle of adapting to illness to changing familial roles, assimilation and cultural opposition without losing focus. Reflecting upon her family members—primarily her father, Mira, and her uncle, Joseph—Danticat is able to simultaneously, emblematically examine her own experience.

Danticat describes her childhood confusion, growing up knowing Haiti as home while her parents barely paid their bills, somewhere in America. What was so great about America? The narration at this point does not dwell on the violence of militia terrorism plaguing Haiti, but rather reports it, cites it, and in doing so provides readers the sense of living with it as a child who knows no other life. There is the sense of knowing danger is just outside the front door and going outside anyway. The violence surrounding Danticat’s childhood was her father’s reason to move. But as a child, who knows of no other life, Danticat remembers her lack of understanding. She remembers the separation.

The division the narrator expresses between herself and her parents is not portrayed with spite, nor is it a play for sympathy. Instead, Danticat recounts natural feelings of distance, of childhood anger and pity toward her parents, who obviously had misinformation about America. She wrote her father letters and read his responses with pity for his lack of education. As she grew up in Haiti, she didn’t understand why her parents would struggle in America, work so hard to establish themselves as citizens and earn enough money to support their family in New York. Why not stay with the family? Her recollection of this time is one of her kinship and love for her uncle and aunt, her ties to Haiti and the culture she grew up with. So, about half-way through this memoir, when Danticat explains the sadness she felt, leaving her uncle when she is finally granted a Visa permit and allowed to join her parents as an American, away from the violence, I felt I understood her trepidation.

This sort of dual reportage of childhood rationalization and adult understanding is told with subtlety and ease of transition. Then, the story shifts again and again, subtly, consistently maintaining a dual perspective. The shared perspective is a combination of Joseph’s tales and Danticat’s own memories, it is also an examination of Haitian traditions including the folklore told to her by her Granme Melina; the herbalists who prescribe old-world medicines to her family; the feeling of community and reliance Dantcat learns from neighbors.

One story, as told to the author by Granme Melina, is presented as a riddle. The Angel of Death and Father God are both thirsty, and the challenge is to figure out why townspeople always chose to offer water to the Angel of Death before Father God? Granme Melina explains that people offer this sympathy for the Angel of Death because he is their actual savior. God forces people to live in pain. God is the one who causes people to live in fear of death and anguish, and it is the Angel of Death who releases people from such pain. The moral: We should respect death as much as we respect life. The tale is simple, perhaps debatable by common American belief, but it provides readers a representation of Haitian culture. By bringing up a succession of these tales, the author again represents her feelings, reincorporates her own moralistic dilemma.

Although there are numerous tragic tales in Danticat’s memoir, it is easy for a reader to follow along, to not feel imposed pain. This is due to Danticat’s ability to masterfully interweave and examine her ideas. She reflects upon death and the separation her family members endured. Yet, she also acts as a bridge to familial separation, by reflecting yet again, with different perspective. The widely praised narration Danticat utilizes begins with her dilemma, her feeling of loss and separation, only to reflect upon the cumulative impact of illness, instability, adaptation, defeat, perseverance, more defeat, and tradition: her family’s ties. Family, therefore, becomes the narrator’s tool of study into the meaning of loss, a symbol of her own emotional journey, as evidence in passages such as this one, which arrives at the end of the book.

"What I really wanted to say was that the dead and the new life were already linked, through my blood, through me."

With this passage, the narrator makes clear that her role is that of the seeker, the link, the direct object, not the subject. Presto: Transcendence.