Introducing We're Alone Now by Edwidge Danticat

The October Audacious Book Club Selection

Edwidge Danticat’s new essay collection We’re Alone begins with a reflection on a poem by Roland Chassagne and a line she borrows for the book’s title. The phrase suggests both solitude and togetherness: “We’re alone with the persistent chorus of the deserted, as in no one is coming to save us. Yet we’re alone can also be a promise writers make to their readers, a reminder of this singular intimacy between us. At least we’re alone together.” This idea, notes Danticat, is part of her motivation for putting pen to paper. Writing, she argues, is both an attempt to achieve that kind of “aloneness/togetherness” and also similar to rasanblaj, a term coined by Haitian American anthropologist and artist Gina Athena Ulysse —“assembly, compilation, enlisting, regrouping (of people, spirits, things, ideas).” Ulysse herself notes that the term—which she considers a lens through which to study the Caribbean as a whole—is about “gathering fragments, the scattered, forgotten. It’s about reassessing.” 

The essays in We’re Alone are a complex patchwork of stories and histories that span Danticat’s childhood, the COVID pandemic, and her native country, Haiti. Her observations are often associative, sometimes startling: mourning rituals intermingle with stories of migration, the legacy of literary heroes with gun violence, the wrath of hurricanes and COVID with the brutal reality of food used as a tool of torture. Danticat’s writing in this collection reminds readers how profound and intimate rasanblaj can be in practice. 

But beyond the fragments and their assemblage, each of Danticat’s essays is also a meditation on the intimacy between writer and reader. When we read about her uncle’s illness, or her trip to Port Salut, or her reflections on James Baldwin’s “Notes on a Hypothetical Novel,” it does indeed feel like she is speaking to us alone, like there is some kind of narrative mechanism drawing us toward her but also more deeply into ourselves and our own moments of reckoning.                                    

We’re Alone may appear on its surface to be slim—it’s about 125 pages long—but it’s a gorgeous, expansive, challenging collection. I look forward to our discussions! And on a more personal note, I cannot say enough about how generous Edwidge has been not only to me but to so many Black women writers and Haitian writers especially. Sometimes you meet your heroes and they exceed your expectations.

We will be in conversation with Edwidge Danticat on October 30th at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST. I hope you can join us.

And if you’ve already started We’re Alone, which essays stand out to you most?