On this episode, Edwidge Danticat joins Yvette Benavides to discuss her essay collection, We’re Alone.
No spoilers, but the last sentence from the last essay in Edwidge Danticat’s essay collection, We’re Alone, is “Our journey continues.”
Right before this conclusion of the essay, she has just recounted an anecdote involving her mother where she says, “I was lost. They found me. The journey continued.”
The context of loss is important here, too, as it works in tandem with the idea of the necessity for the journey to continue—even in the face of loss.
These are the hallmarks of the essays Danticat offers here. Wide-ranging subjects include everything from her childhood in Haiti, her adolescence as a new immigrant to the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti. These are personal essays, reportage, literary analysis and tributes to her mentors and heroes, including Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Gabriel García Márquez.
Danticat shares personal stories that expand and connect to the rest of us. We can perceive the world’s vexing problems by way of her own stories and her generous way of looking at the world, while she always considers community as much as she considers herself.
Literature is a constant saving grace for her. It guides her through tragedies and triumphs, through stories about environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience she helps us understand.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of We’re Alone. It’s published by Graywolf Press. We’re Alone is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Edwidge Danticat is also the author of numerous other books, including the story collections Everything Inside, the novels, Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak! and The Farming of Bones, and the memoir Brother, I’m Dying. She is the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University.
