Serafina's Promise/Ann E. Burg: Reflections on a Novel in Verse

At NCTE 13, I sat on a panel with remarkable writers who have traveled the world — in their imaginations and quite literally — and returned with extraordinary stories.

One of those writers was Ann E. Burg, whose first novel, All the Broken Pieces, was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, an IRA Notable Book for a Global Society, and a Jefferson Cup Award Winner, among other honors. Serafina's Promise, Ann's new book, is a moving middle grade novel in verse exploring the life of a young girl living in Haiti during the flood and then the earthquake that reconfigured the country and brought so much pain to so many people whose names we'll never know.

Some writers market their books as novels in verse, but only because the lines sit short and condensed on the page. Others—Patricia McCormick, Thanhha Lai, Karen Hesse, Marilyn Nelson, Sharon Creech, Caroline Starr Rose, Jeannine Atkins—are, in fact, poets, not just in the way they write, but in the way they see the world.

Ann E. Burg stands (absolutely) among these true verse novelists—her images evocative, her details precisely chosen, her impact huge as we follow this young girl who wants, despite dire circumstances, an education and a chance to be a doctor. Serafina's days are filled with chores, but they are also filled with the hypnotic beauty of pink flowers in fields of dried grass, of the stories a grandmother tells, of the arrival of a baby brother who smiles up at her, of a fat caterpillar and, later, a butterfly winging away from a web.

Burg's evocations of domestic rural life, of big markets, of a murderous flood, of the terrifying earthquake are piercing and precise—poetry both shattering and graceful. I share this one page with you here. I hope you will buy the book for yourself and for someone you love. I have a niece who is about to get this stunning gift.

Where are the fence and path?
Where is the big white church
where we pray on Sundays,
or the supermarket
where Papa sells mangoes,
sweet milk, and rice?

Nothing looks the same.

I keep walking.

In every ash-covered face
I search for someone
who is searching for me.

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Brother, I'm Dying/Edwidge Danticat

Saturday night, a young woman I'll call E. returned from her year in Port-au-Prince, where she had been at work in a hospital clinic as a nutrition program coordinator.  Daughter of remarkably loving parents, sister to an incredibly talented and goodhearted son, E. is also a member of my church family (she is as well a super-star athlete, but that's a tale for another day).  We were all collectively holding our breath until E. arrived home safely.  We knew how much good she was doing over there.  We equally recognized that Haiti is not the easiest domicile for a recent college grad.

In honor of E.'s safe return home, I read Brother, I'm Dying, the Edwidge Danticat memoir.  The book had been sitting here for quite some time.  Having finished it this morning, I can neither understand nor forgive my earlier resistance to it.

For this is a book.  This is memoir at its most pure and form-redeeming—intelligent, researched, heartfelt.  Calmly and with great care, Danticat weaves together the story of the man who raised her as a child in Bel Air, Haiti (her uncle), and the man who fled to Brooklyn in an effort to create for his whole family a better life (her father).  Two brothers, then, two father figures, and two ultimately tragic trajectories as each man fights to survive impossible odds and their daughter fights hard not to lose them.  In a single year—2004—Danticat, now married, in Miami, pregnant with her daughter—will watch her world unravel.  She will bear witness to what revolutionary upheaval and disease can do to the men who, for so much of her youth, were not just essential but invincible.

Memoirs that make room for family history and country politics challenge their writers structurally; they ask more from the words on the page.  No false binding will do, no obvious superimpositions, no easy themes, no ready truths.  There are higher stakes, in memoirs like these.  More is expected, more wanted.  Danticat, who has proven herself in book after book, forges a remarkable narrative.  She is there throughout, of course; memoir by definition is an "I story.  But she is not her memoir's heroine; she is its maker, and there's a difference.  She has set out to honor others, not to claim pity for herself.  She has written with both intimacy and something I can only call nobility.  She has made of fragments a whole.  We believe her, utterly, when she writes these words:

I write these things now, some as I witnessed them and today remember them, others from official documents, as well as the borrowed recollections of family members.  But the gist of them was told to me over the years, in part by my uncle Joseph, in part by my father.  Some were told offhand, quickly.  Others, in greater detail.  What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments.  This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time.  I am writing this only because they can't.

I am writing this only because they can't.  Those who dismiss memoir as a genre have not read Brother, I'm Dying. 

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The Boy in the Yellow T-Shirt, Pulled Free

And then, last night, in the dark, they liberate a brother and his sister from the rubble of a store. They have survived the weight of what must have seemed the entire world for seven days. They have lived—what?—in darkness, in silence, in stopped time, in forever time, in the ultimate not knowing?

He is wearing a yellow T-shirt; he is a lantern of light. He opens his arms wide. I am alive.

Today, in an update letter from the International Rescue Committee, one of the organizations to which I've contributed following a lead from my novelist friend Melissa Walker, I read this:

IRC Team leader Gillian Dunn reports, "People are gathering in any public space, including parks and the sides of roads. At dusk, families place cinder blocks in the road to prevent traffic from coming through. Then they lay their bed sheets down so they can sleep."

What is it, to lie beneath the moon and to wait for the crack of sun that is tomorrow in Haiti?

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One life is a miracle. One love is hope.

Last night, on the news: the Haitian husband whose wife is buried beneath the concrete rubble of a crumbled bank. Six days gone, and yet he believes she is alive. How can she be alive? Still, with machines, with hands, they pull the weight of the bank away, until the husband, calling for silence, hears something stir within.

A squad of U.S. experts arrives just in time, sends water through the fissure that's been made, opens the jaws of the rubble wide enough for her to call out, Tell my husband that I love him. For hours more, the experts work ahead of the next aftershock, until they can and do release this woman who, for six days, has survived the dark crush of a building. When she emerges, there are outcries, and song. There is her husband, so steadfast certain that she would live, that she would not leave him.

Today, they post new numbers: 200,000 feared dead. 1.5 million feared homeless. A country of sudden amputees. One life is a miracle. One love is hope.

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Haiti

I have never been particularly good at living the gorgeous day—the forgiveness of a blue sky, the bulb of a warmer sun —when not all that far away, across an ocean, on an island, a world has disappeared, entire. Houses slid down mountainsides, families trapped in rubble, a presidential palace clobbered and chunked, tens of thousands dead, and millions homeless.

How do you live, how do you worry the everyday worries, how do you oblige the routines, when the news comes in of sudden amputees and missing children and mothers and fathers vanished? How do you?

They say that money is nothing right now. That water is what is needed. Water and also rights of way amid destruction to rescue those who are still holding on, and also more time to rescue.

"I want to do something," I said to my son. "Something."

He stood. He reached for his wallet. "I want to do something, too," he said.

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