Check it out: "Enough Is Enough" by Edwidge Danticat
December 24, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader
I want to strongly encourage readers of revcom.us/Revolution to read, reflect on, and share a wrenching essay in the New Yorker, “Enough Is Enough,” by Edwidge Danticat (November 16, 2014). Edwidge Danticat is a writer who moved to the U.S. from Haiti at the age of 12, and in the past two decades has become beloved worldwide for her novels about the Haitian people and works of nonfiction. Her work has received honors ranging from the American Book Award to Oprah's Book Club.
Written on the heels of the grand jury refusing to indict the cop who murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, “Enough Is Enough” draws on Edwidge Danticat’s life experience as a Haitian immigrant witnessing police brutality in Haiti and in the U.S.A., and her participation in the struggle against that. She takes readers back to the eruption of protest almost twenty years ago, in response to the sexual assault by the NYPD on Abner Louima and the NYPD murder of Amadou Diallo—a Guinean immigrant who was shot at forty-one times when he reached for his wallet.
As I read the article, I wondered how anyone could not ask, now, what has changed!? And what will it take to not have this happen over and over?
Reflecting on the protest chant, “Whose streets, our streets,” Edwidge Danticat poses: “The streets were never ours to begin with, because on these same streets our sons and brothers, fathers and uncles were, and still are, prey.”
She concludes by quoting an opinion piece Abner Louima wrote in 2007: “Enough is enough.”
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