Migrant Brothers: A Poet's Declaration of Human Dignity

by Patrick Chamoiseau, Matthew Amos (Translator), Fredrik Rönnbäck (Translator)

Overview

“If justice had a Jericho trumpet, Chamoiseau would be it.”—Junot Díaz

As migrants embark on perilous journeys across oceans and deserts in pursuit of sanctuary and improved living conditions, what is the responsibility of those safely ensconced in the nations they seek to enter? Moved by repeated tragedies among immigrants attempting to enter eastern and southern Europe, Patrick Chamoiseau assails the hypocrisy and detachment that allow these events to happen. Migrant Brothers is an urgent declaration of our essential interconnectedness that asserts the necessity to understand one another as part of one human community, regardless of national origin.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300232943
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	04/24/2018
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	4.60(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Patrick Chamoiseau is the author of Texaco and Solibo Magnificent and winner of the Prix Goncourt, among many other prizes. He lives in Martinique.

Table of Contents

Preface to the English Edition: For a Global Hospitality xi

Visible Death 9

Neo-Liberal Peace 13

The New Barbarity 17

The Evidence and the Stakes 23

The Gift of the Knell 25

Over There Is in the Here 29

Globality 33

From the Relational Fact to the Idea of Relation 53

Fear and Trust 57

The Relational Ecosystem 69

The Otherness to Be Lived 81

Wandering That Gives Direction 85

The Right to Poetics 87

Aestheticizing the Way 89

The Open Soul of Borders 93

Camps from Another World 97

Those Who Read into the World 101

The Poets' Declaration 115

Editorial Reviews

[Chamoiseau] writes in a Creolised French all of his own. His short, lyrical book, Migrant Brothers. . . looks for a framework of thinking that might give our consciousness a jolt. . . to offer a manifesto ‘for a global humanity’.”—Tim Adams, Observer 

“A book of deliberate poetic activism spurred by vicarious encounters with brutality in the heart of France . . . Chamoiseau pleads ‘for a global politics of hospitality’ stretching beyond Europe and into all places humanity is found.”—World Literature Today (“Nota Bene” column)

“[Chamoiseau’s] rhythms are rhapsodic, his pitch attuned to ardor more than attitude, his assertions buoyed by telling imagery. The impulsive aim of his prose is not to convince you but to occupy you, to ‘activate a practice’ of experiencing globality and relation through lyrically committed language.”—Ron Slate, On the Seawall

“Chamoiseau is an absolute necessity. In this extraordinary volume on the migrant crisis, you will find all ‘unpredictable brilliance of beauty’ but also one of our greatest living writers fighting to find, to illuminate, to summon from our political darkness ‘another vision of the world and its future.’  If justice had a Jericho trumpet, Chamoiseau would be it.”—Junot Díaz

“We are all nomadic creatures, and few of us can trace our roots singly to the place where we now happen to live. Today, perhaps more than ever, Chamoiseau's eloquent plea to recognize the plight of our fellow exiles is essential reading. This is an incandescent, necessary book for our heartless times.”—Alberto Manguel

"Chamoiseau is a writer who has the sophistication of the modern novelist, and it is from that position (as an heir of Joyce and Kafka) that he holds out his hand to the oral prehistory of literature."—Milan Kundera

“Chamoiseau’s characters are not only names but beings. Their conduct is drawn from the complexities of sensation rather than of action. We inhabit them naturally, their rages that roar like a rainstorm through a ravine, their sense of insult as sensitive as those weeds that close like shutters.”—Derek Walcott, New York Review of Books

“Mr. Chamoiseau is a writer of exceptional and original gifts whose prose is saturated in a kind of bemused gorgeousness, fermented in a broth of unexpected juxtapositions.”—Richard Bernstein, New York Times

From the Publisher