Edwidge Danticat, Dealing with Birth and Death

DATE September 26, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Edwidge Danticat, author of "Brother, I'm Dying," on
her family, Haiti, and moving to America
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Edwidge Danticat, is a
Haitian-born writer who has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the
PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She's the
winner of an American Book award. Her new memoir is about the year her father
died in New York and her uncle died in American custody while trying to seek
temporary asylum after his church in Haiti was attacked and his life was
threatened. That same year, Danticat gave birth to her child. In the course
of the book, we learn about her upbringing in Haiti, her new life in America,
recent political upheaval in Haiti, and the problems in the American
immigration system. Her memoir is called "Brother, I'm Dying."

Reviewing it in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote, "It embodies the
painful legacy of Haiti's violent history, demonstrating the myriad ways in
which the public and the private, the political and the personal intersect in
the lives of that country's citizens and exiles. She has written a fierce,
haunting book about exile and loss and family love."

Edwidge Danticat, welcome to FRESH AIR. I'd like you to start by reading the
opening of "Brother, I'm Dying."

Ms. EDWIDGE DANTICAT: "I found out I was pregnant the same day that my
father's rapid weight loss and chronic shortness of breath were positively
diagnosed as end-stage pulmonary fibrosis.

"It was a hot morning in July 2004. I took a 6:30 A.M. flight from Miami to
accompany my father on a visit to a pulmonologist at Brooklyn's Coney Island
Hospital that afternoon. I had planned to catch up on my sleep during the
flight but cramping in my lower abdomen kept me awake. I interpreted the
cramps as a sign of worry for my father. In the past few months his breathing
had grown labored and loud, and he'd been hospitalized three times. During
his most recent hospital stay, he had been referred to a pulmonologist who'd
since performed a new battery of tests.

"My father picked me up at the airport at 9 A.M. We hadn't seen each other in
a month. Two years before, in August 2002, I had married and moved to Miami,
where my then-fiance was living. Fearing my father's disapproval, I hadn't
announced my intention to leave New York until the month before the wedding,
when my father summoned me to his room for a chat.

"`How can you leave New York?' he asked, while filling out a check on top of a
book on his lap. Back then he was still healthy, yet lanky, with a body that
looked and moved like an aging dancer's, a receding hairline, and half a head
of salt-and-pepper hair. Removing his steel-rimmed bifocals so I could better
see his amber eyes, he had added in his slow, scratchy voice, `Your mother's
here in Brooklyn, I'm here, two of your three brothers are here. You have no
family in Miami. What if this man you're moving there for mistreats you? Who
are you going to turn to?' The lecture ended with his handing me the
equivalent of five months of his mortgage payments towards the wedding
reception cost. Looking back now, I wish he'd simply said, `Don't go. I'm
going to get sick and I might die.'"

GROSS: That's Edwidge Danticat reading from the opening of her new memoir,
"Brother, I'm Dying."

When you knew that you were pregnant and your father was dying, your father
didn't know either of those things. The doctors didn't tell him how serious
his condition was, and you decided to wait before telling him that you were
pregnant. So it must have been odd, difficult, strange to know these two
profound things that your father didn't know.

Ms. DANTICAT: Yeah, it was very strange because suddenly, he--I think the
person who would have been, at least, besides my husband, I think, who would
have been the happiest for me, and then the person who would have been the
saddest about his news was not aware of either of those things. But in that
time, it felt a little bit like a protective bubble for him, because I felt
like he--one would, for him, have made the other harder to take because he had
always--you know, I had been married for about three years before I became
pregnant, and he was always nudging me on the subject. And so both would have
been a big deal and I didn't know how to approach him. And we've always had,
him and me, sort of a difficulty just having these kinds of conversations, so
it was hard to imagine having this very one with him.

GROSS: Your uncle Joseph had been a pastor in Haiti, and he raised you
because your parents left Haiti. Your father left when you were two, your
mother left when you were four, and it took eight years before they were able
to bring you and your brother to New York where they had lived. Why were they
unable to take you with them when they moved to New York?

Ms. DANTICAT: Well, when my father moved in 1971, they didn't know anyone in
New York except a cousin that we had there, so my dad didn't realize what was
going to happen, he didn't know what it would be like, they had never been,
and so he went first to sort of see what it would be like. And then my
mother's brother moved to New York in the meantime, and so she went. They
just felt that they would be working very hard and they wouldn't have any
place to leave us. They felt like it was better to leave us with relatives in
Haiti so that we could have at least a familiar environment and family around
us and a kind of community that we were used to.

GROSS: Why did your parents feel that they had to leave Haiti?

Ms. DANTICAT: Well, my father left because he was working in a shoe store
where he didn't get paid very much, but he had the extra menace of having the
Tonton Macoutes, or the henchman of the Duvalier regime who came in and always
wanted free shoes. And I mean, it sounds like a trivial thing, but he really,
standing between them and his shoes, was life-threatening for him. And so at
some point, just the pressure and wanting a better life, he decided to leave.

GROSS: Did your parents, later, when you were older and when you were
reunited, talk with you about the difficulty of leaving you and your brother
behind?

Ms. DANTICAT: Well, I remember when I was a teenager having my sort of a
momentary rebellion, and I, you know--my mother one time was trying to help me
with some laundry, and I said something to her like, `I can do this. You
know, I've learned to take care of myself since I was a kid.' And so she kind
of sensed sort of where that was going, and we had a conversation where she
said something that I didn't put in the book but I've just never forgotten
where she said, `Well, you know, every time I sat down to eat, I wondered if
you guys were eating, and every time I put myself to bed, I wondered how you
were sleeping.' And to this day, you know, that still makes me teary but
that's the one conversation we had about it and I felt like I understood. And
being a parent now, certainly you understand the great emotional toll it would
take to be separated from your child.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Edwidge Danticat, and her new
family memoir is called "Brother, I'm Dying."

Your uncle, the uncle who raised you along with your aunt, he was a pastor in
a neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Would you just describe his church?

Ms. DANTICAT: Well, his church was called L'Eglise Chretien de la
Redempcion, the Christian Church of Redemption, and it was in a neighborhood
in Haiti called Bel Air and it's now one of those neighborhoods that, whenever
people talk about, you know, violence in Haiti, or gangs, etc., that they
cite. But when he first moved there from the countryside in 1940s, it was a
beautiful area. It was just almost like a hilly neighborhood with trees and
so forth, and that's where he settled and spent the next 30 years of his life.

And my uncle started this church after leaving politics. He was an aspiring
politician. He was very much enthralled by a man named Daniel Fignole, who
was a populist who was very involved in the needs of the poor, and that's
before Duvalier came into power. That's the person he supported. So once
Fignole was deposed after three weeks in power, my uncle decided to become a
Christian and started training to become a pastor and started this church in
Bel Air.

GROSS: Your uncle had a radical laryngectomy for a tumor, and he lost his
voice. Eventually he got a voice box that enabled him to communicate, but did
that put a strain on your relationship because you couldn't talk to each
other? I mean, you could talk to him but he couldn't respond to you vocally.

Ms. DANTICAT: Well, I was still in Haiti after he had his surgery. I was
about nine when he came back. And the interesting things was that I felt that
people felt so sorry for him suddenly. Imagine a preacher who no longer can
speak. But he took it very well. I think he found other ways to communicate.
He wrote an awful lot of notes. He always had pads on which he would wrote
notes to communicate with people, and he designed a kind of, his own type of
sign language when he needed to say something. And he seemed to us like the
same person, so there was no strain.

The only thing that was different is that he would sometimes get frustrated.
You know, you could see a kind of frustration on his face when he was talking
to people and they didn't understand him. But there was more of a tenderness
than a strain because suddenly he needed us, especially the children among us.
He needed us in a way that he hadn't before, so that if he were going to
someplace that he knew he would not--that his handwriting may not be
understood or the sign language or the other ways that he had designed to
communicate with people, and if he were going to be around strangers, he would
ask us to go with him. And I would go with him often, or my brother or my
cousin would go with him.

And so we developed a different kind of relationship because we began to get
these different little glimpses into his world, you know, when he goes to the
Education Ministry for the school or to the bank, and we were with him a lot
more after the surgery because we were helping people understand what he
wanted to say.

GROSS: My guest is Edwidge Danticat. Her new memoir is called "Brother, I'm
Dying." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Edwidge Danticat and her new
book is a memoir. It's a family memoir called "Brother, I'm Dying."

You came to the United States, to New York at the age of 12 after being
separated from your parents for eight years. They had to prove that they'd be
able to support you. You and your brother had to prove that you were well
enough to enter the United States, and you were diagnosed with inactive TB so
you had to wait a few months till that passed. So when you finally were
reunited with your parents after eight years, did they seem like parents or
strangers to you?

Ms. DANTICAT: They seemed like superparents and strangers at the same time.
I think all children, you know, sort of imagine these other parents that we
have. You know, even children who are with their parents think, oh, there
must be these cool people somewhere who are my real parents.

GROSS: Right.

Ms. DANTICAT: And this was, you know, fueled by also people saying, `Oh, you
know, you'll have more clothes, you will have more milk, you will have more
money, when you finally are with your parents,' so I think there's
inevitability, when you finally are with these parents who are ordinary
people, a kind of disappointment.

They didn't feel like strangers because I think they were trying very hard,
our parents, to be so warm or just make up this gap, but they didn't feel
certainly like, you know, the superparents we had imagined. You know, for
example, the day after we got there, they had to get up very early for work.
And I don't know whatever sort of ceremonies we had rehearsed in our minds was
hard for them to live up to. But we knew that they were our parents. We knew
that they were now taking care of us. But it takes a little while to even say
the words, you know, to say, "Mama" or "Papa," at first. It sounds strange to
say it directly to them as opposed to saying it in conversations about them.

GROSS: So the neighborhood that your parents were living in that became your
home was in Brooklyn. The apartment was right off Flatbush Avenue. Would you
describe what was most strange to you about your new home and your new
neighborhood?

Ms. DANTICAT: Well, the strangest thing was that we didn't know anybody, and
my parents who--they had lived there for many years, and there were a lot of
people in the building who attended the same church as them, but we were
suddenly in this place, going from the neighborhood in Haiti where my uncle
had been for many many, years and where we knew everyone, and suddenly we
didn't know anyone. And I remember also marveling at the fact that everyone
had sort of--it was an apartment building, so there were all these doors lined
up and they were shut, you know, and we didn't know who lived behind them.
And they seemed somewhat, you know, prison-like, all these doors in the
apartment building.

So we felt--I immediately felt like I lost the openness of the neighborhood
where we lived. And I remember thinking, you know, seeing the fire escape and
of course not knowing what it was and thinking that it was just this
wrought-iron balcony where we could hang out and look over the train tracks
behind the building, but my father quickly told us was for fires. And things
like that, I think, just suddenly feeling that yeah, this is a very, very
different life. I have a friend who says that, you know, when you're small
like that and you come to the United States from a place like Haiti, that it's
almost like time travel and you just feel like you've landed in an entirely
different planet, and it's certainly how it felt. Like this was really a very
different place.

GROSS: When you came to Brooklyn, where did you see yourself as fitting in
racially? Did you feel like African-Americans felt connected or disconnected
from you? Do you know what I mean? That they saw you as being different
because you were from Haiti?

Ms. DANTICAT: Well, I was different because I didn't speak English, you
know. And also when I did speak, I spoke with an accent for most of my New
York life, if you will. And also there was, in the beginning, it was hard to
communicate, even with the children at school.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Ms. DANTICAT: And there were so many misconceptions for some of those
students too about us being from Haiti. It was 1981 and it was a time when a
lot of Haitians were just coming to the United States in this very loud media
way by boat and it was making the news all the time. And people were just
beginning to talk about AIDS, and every night on the nightly news you would
hear that, you know, there were these high-risk groups in Haitians.
Hemophiliacs and others were, you know, we were one of the five high-risk
groups, so you that didn't make it easy for going to school.

And of course we were taunted, by not just the African-American students but
also the other Caribbean groups. I think because we stood out, you know, I
stood out, as a Haitian student because of language but also because of these
things that were in the news all the time, so we were picked on for that.

GROSS: Your father drove a gypsy cab, which means he wasn't affiliated with
like a taxi cab company, it was his own car. And, you know, he was
independent in that sense. Would you describe the car that was the family car
and the taxi?

Ms. DANTICAT: Well, there were several. The first one was this station
wagon. That was sort of bluish gray and it had the delivery sticker back then
attached to the back so that people would know that it was a cab. And we ran
around in that. It was a little bit, you know, beat up, and my dad had just
at that time left a factory job. When he had to come pick us up at the
airport when we came from Haiti, he asked his boss at the factory where he was
working if he could leave early, and the boss said "no," and so he was fired
the very day that we came. And he decided after that to drive this car that
he had as a livery cab.

And over the years he had had other ones, but he always drove the same car.
We always sort of piled up in the livery cab our family car, and he, until he
died, did not have another card because he would say--you know, we would try
and convince him to get, you know, just a smaller car, especially when it was
just him and my mother that he was in working in, you know. And he would say,
you know his reason was always that insurance if very high for cab drivers, so
getting a personal car and the gypsy cab, it was just too much trouble and too
much money. And so he always drove the same. So we were sometimes like, my
brothers and I, we'd play pretend that we were passengers sometimes in the cab
and, you know, we'd tease him that way and we sort of made a game of it.

GROSS: Your father came to the United States in part because of the dangers
he faced in Haiti from the Tonton Macoute, the militia. But he faced dangers
as a cab driver in New York.

Ms. DANTICAT: Oh, absolutely. And I think, you know, my father would always
want to tell us not to exaggerate the dangers he faced, because there were
people who actually in dungeons and jails in Haiti. And he felt like his
dealings, you know, his confrontations with the Tonton Macoute were mild
compared with those people who disappeared, just were vanished and killed.

But when he actually got here, when he started driving the gypsy cab, he had
what they called a partition, what was supposed to be a bulletproof wall
between him and the passenger in this family cab that we all were in all the
time, but he had several run-ins, you know, with people because he, on
Saturday mornings especially, he would leave very early to try to catch some
of the, you know, the club-going crowds in Brooklyn, and he had incidents
where people didn't pay, where someone hit him with a crowbar, where the car
was shot at. And he always--he never told us. My parents were part of this
prayer circle, and they would come to the house every once in a while, but
usually on Mondays. And we would all, my brothers and I, would all eagerly
await the report of sort of the previous Saturday morning, and sometimes they
were horrific. I mean, once we knew--there was one time we had to, after he
was hit by the crowbar, where we had to go the emergency room with him. But
other than that, a lot of the horrific things that happened in the cab, he
always tried to keep away from us.

GROSS: Edwidge Danticat's new memoir is called "Brother, I'm Dying." We'll
talk more about it in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this
is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with writer Edwidge Danticat.
Her new memoir, "Brother, I'm Dying," is about the year she gave birth to her
daughter, her father died in New York, and her uncle Joseph died in American
custody while trying to seek temporary asylum after his church in Haiti was
attacked and his life was threatened. Edwidge Danticat grew up in Haiti. Her
parents moved to New York when she was two, but they couldn't afford to bring
her and her brother to live with them until Edwidge was 12. In the interim,
she was raised in Haiti by her uncle Joseph and aunt Denise.

After you moved to New York, years after you moved to New York, your uncle had
to flee Haiti. This was like in 2004. And your uncle, again, had been a
pastor in Haiti, where he founded a church in his neighborhood. Why did he
have to leave?

Ms. DANTICAT: Well, he had to leave because, in October 2004 there was sort
of a multitude of things happening. President Aristide had been driven out of
Haiti earlier in the year, and it was coming up on the anniversary of the
first time that he was deposed by the military, and there were demonstrations
pretty much, you know, everywhere, but especially in Bel Air, which is usually
a big starting point for demonstrations. And also there was a growing gang
problem, especially in the neighborhood.

So the transitional government there had requested--there was a UN operation
there called MINUSTA, a Brazil-led force that was already in the country. And
so there were often--and they lasted for a very long time--these sort of
forays into neighborhoods, like Bel Air and Cite-Soleil, which is another
often volatile neighborhood by Haitian riot police and the UN. They were just
storm these neighborhood and try to go at the gangs, you know, to try
to--because often in Bel Air, the gang would sort of cordon off the
neighborhood. And so on that Sunday morning, on October 2004, the Haitian
riot police and the UN came in to his neighborhood and they climbed on top of
his church because it's a higher building in the neighborhood and they shot at
people from there. And after they left, the gangs came and threatened my
uncle. And he had to go into hiding and he had to flee.

GROSS: So your uncle fled Haiti, flew to Miami, where he requested temporary
political asylum. He ended up being detained there and he died in custody.
You wonder, in the book, why he applied for asylum instead of just using his
visa. What have you come to think about the answer to that?

Ms. DANTICAT: Well, it's one of those questions that I suppose I will never
be able to answer, because he had been coming to the United States since, you
know, the 1970s and had made several trips, and he had a visa that would have
expired in 2008, with multiple entries. You know, he had been coming and
going for so many years here. And even this trip that he was on was already
planned. He had been planning to come that October to Miami, and when things
got this way he just decided to come. So I don't know why when he got here he
asked for asylum.

I can only guess that--and from the conversations with my cousin who was with
him--he was asked how long he would be staying and he had pretty much lost
everything. Part of the church had been burned. All his things had been
ransacked and he had nothing to go back to, and I think he wanted to just
rally here for a while, and he said that he wanted to stay a little bit longer
than the visa allowed. And so he was immediately arrested and put at the
Krome Detention Center, where his medication was taken and he fell ill and
died.

GROSS: Why was he arrested, and why was his medication taken?

Ms. DANTICAT: I don't know exactly why he was arrested. I've been told, you
know, after that, it is the policy to, if someone requests asylum, that they
are detained. But it is, from the documents that I've reviewed also at the
discretion of the, you know, the customs authority who interviews that person,
as my uncle was interviewed at the airport, or by all the people at the point
of entry who make that decision. They could have decided, for example, to
release him and request that he apply from outside of, you know, the airport.
Or they could have paroled him. They could have given him a humanitarian
parole, given the fact that he was 81 years old and was frail. This was all
at the discretion of the people he encountered at the point of entry, but he
was detained.

GROSS: What do you know about how he died?

Ms. DANTICAT: What I know about how he died I culled from documents that we
got through the Freedom of Information Act from the government. And some of
them were the internal memos and documents from the airport, documents from
the Krome Detention Center. There was also an investigation by the inspector
general of the Department of Homeland Security which had some of the
interviews with the people involved.

What I know is that the day before he died had what is called a credible fear
interview before an immigration judge at Krome and that he, during the
interview--before he went into the interview, he told the lawyer who was
representing him that he--they had taken his medication and that he was not
feeling well, but that he went into the interview anyway. And while he was
being questioned, he began vomiting. It seemed like he was having a type of
seizure. He was accused, and this in the government papers, two of the
records, he was accused of faking by the medic, who felt that he had seen this
before and he had seen many people fake. But still he was given some care at
Krome, and his condition deteriorated. He was taken to Jackson Memorial
Hospital, where he died 24 hours later.

GROSS: My guest is Edwidge Danticat. Her new memoir is called "Brother, I'm
Dying." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: My guest is Edwidge Danticat and her new book is a memoir about her
family and also about her childhood. She grew up in Haiti. Her parents went
to the United States eight years before being able to bring their children
with them, so she was raised by her uncle and aunt. Her new memoir, "Brother,
I'm Dying," is in part about the year in which she became pregnant and her
uncle died and her father died.

When your father was dying, your brother asked if your father had enjoyed his
life. And your father's answer--I'm going to quote the book here--your father
said, "You my children have not shamed me. I'm proud of that. It could have
been so different. Edwidge and Bob, your mother and I left you behind for
eight years in Haiti. Kelly and Carl, you grew up here in a country your
mother and I didn't know very well when we had you. You all could have turned
bad, but you didn't.' What was your reaction when he said that?

Ms. DANTICAT: Oh, I was just stunned. I think we were all crying in our own
way by then. I just felt the load of his life, you know, the fact that he had
sacrificed so much for that, for us. And my parents, you know, never went on
a vacation. It's very--it's sort of the typical, I think, first-generation
immigrant paradigm. And there's just so much that he hadn't done, and I
worried at that moment and moments afterwards, you know, whether he was, you
know, had always been underestimating the value of his life, but I realized
that this was his focus and that he decided that that was the purpose of his
life, to see that we did OK. And I know he was not unique in that, in the
sense that, you know, a lot of--this is why a lot of immigrant parents make
the journey. It was a moment of extraordinary sadness for me, just realizing
that all that his--you know, that that part of his life had all been focused
on us. And at the same time you feel, you know, the sense of, you know, this
debt that you can never, ever repay.

GROSS: Your father lived long enough to see your new baby daughter. You
write that when your daughter was born into the world, you thought of your
father's transition out of the world, and I'd really love to hear more about
those thoughts, about your thoughts about the transition out of the world.

Ms. DANTICAT: Well, my father was so--it seemed to us, I don't know what his
darker moments alone were--but whenever we were with him, he just seemed so at
ease with what was happening, that he had accepted it. And sometimes, you
know, we worried that he was almost waiting to die. But he was also waiting
very good to meet my daughter, and when we spoke on the phone, he would always
say, `I want to see the firstborn of my firstborn,' this kind of thing. So I
was, at this point, I had learned from him, and I think that's the greatest
lesson he wanted to teach us, to accept what was happening to him and to sort
of weave what was happening to me into it, the fact that it would comfort him
to see my daughter, and that I felt in this way he was waiting to meet her.
And so I was always thinking--every time I thought of my daughter coming into
the world, I thought of him going out of it, and primarily because I worried
so much that that wouldn't happen, that they wouldn't have had time.

And after she was born, we couldn't get her right on the plane to New York
because she was not gaining weight, and so there was sort of the eagerness of
every day until she was able to fly and meet him. So when they met, it just
felt--I mean, it sounds, you know, just sort of cliched or whatever. But this
feeling that a circle was full, and a circle in the sense that because he so
wanted to meet her and I so wanted her to at least have touched him, and so it
felt like a transition, you know, certainly a generational shift, but also
this transition for my father, which I think began his process of fully
letting go.

GROSS: You write in your book that you wish you had some guarantee about the
afterlife. What are your thoughts about what's happened to your father and
your uncle?

Ms. DANTICAT: Well, I like to think that they're together somewhere, perhaps
in the place that they were born, or a place of their own imaginings. You
know, they were both religious men, and so I'd like to think that they're both
in their own heaven.

GROSS: Do you believe that? Are you a religious person, too?

Ms. DANTICAT: I grew up in the church, so I share those beliefs. But I
also, you know, think of alternative ways that we end life or that we are
after life, so I have a wide range of places where I can imagine them or I can
imagine myself when my time comes.

GROSS: Do you dream about your father and your uncle, and when you do, what
age are they? And are they sick or are they healthy?

Ms. DANTICAT: I dream about them very often, and they're always healthy. I
recently had a dream about my father and we were simply having coffee. I
often have dreams like that, where we do things that perhaps we'd never done
before together, but I always dream of my uncle and my father separately. Or
I have so far.

GROSS: Well, Edwidge Danticat, it's been great to talk with you. Thank you
very much.

Ms. DANTICAT: Thank you so much for having me.

GROSS: Edwidge Danticat's new memoir is called "Brother, I'm Dying."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Kevin Whitehead on a new album featuring jazz pianist
McCoy Tyner as part of a new quartet
TERRY GROSS, host:

McCoy Tyner is one of the most influential jazz pianists of the last 40 years,
alongside Herbie Hancock and Bill Evans. Tyner played in John Coltrane's
quartet in the 1960s and has been leading his own groups ever since. Jazz
critic Kevin Whitehead says Tyner's sound is so pervasive it's easy to take
for granted, but a new quartet recording makes his virtues sound fresh again.

(Soundbite of "Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit")

KEVIN WHITEHEAD reporting:

McCoy Tyner on piano, with Joe Lovano on tenor saxophone. The tune is "Walk
Spirit, Talk Spirit," a Tyner oldie with a hint of John Coltrane's "A Love
Supreme" in the bass.

Tyner's style hasn't evolved much since he played with Coltrane in the 1960s.
By then the pianist had already developed a signature style, big, billowing
open harmonies that support a band without hemming it in. On the bandstand,
he creates an environment where different rhythms and chords can be piled, one
on another, without canceling each other out. The sound is a big tent with
plenty of elbow room.

(Soundbite of music)

WHITEHEAD: The pianist's new album, on his own new label, is modestly titled
"McCoy Tyner Quartet." Another leader might have called them his all-stars.
Besides Lovano on tenor, he's got the powerhouse rhythm section of bassist
Christian McBride and drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts. They all sound happy to be
together, feeding off each other's energy on this club date from last New
Year's.

(Soundbite of music)

WHITEHEAD: McCoy Tyner is good at filling up sonic space and covering the
high and low frequencies, but every once in a while this piano maximalist may
put you in mind of minimalists like Count Basie or Thelonius Monk. He knows
sometimes the best thing for a pianist to do behind a soloist is nothing at
all, letting bass and drums carry the load. Tyner might keep a low profile
even when he sneaks back in behind Joe Lovano.

(Soundbite of music)

WHITEHEAD: If McCoy Tyner can sound almost gentle sometimes, he's got a
right, now that he's nearing 70. But he can still make piano ring like nobody
else, his umpteen imitators included. And since his style never broke, he had
the good sense not to fix it. It's as timeless as thunder.

(Soundbite of music)

(Soundbite of applause, cheering)

GROSS: Kevin Whitehead teaches English and American Studies at the University
of Kansas, and he's a jazz columnist for emusic.com. He reviewed "McCoy Tyner
Quartet" on the Half Note label.

The film "The Graduate" was released 40 years ago and now there's an
anniversary DVD edition. Coming up, our critic at large, John Powers,
compares his impressions of "The Graduate," then and now. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: John Powers on the new 40th anniversary edition DVD of
"The Graduate"
TERRY GROSS, host:

"The Graduate." It's the movie that made Dustin Hoffman a star and established
Mike Nichols as a film director. It's been 40 years since it opened, and now
there's a new anniversary DVD. Our critic at large, John Powers, sat down and
watched it again after all these years.

JOHN POWERS reporting:

I was a sophomore in high school when "The Graduate" first opened, and I still
remember sitting in that Omaha theater and feeling a new kind of thrill wash
over me. I'd loved many movies before, but this was the first one that seemed
to have been made just for me. In thinking this, of course, I was like
millions of others who thought exactly the same thing. Which is one reason
"The Graduate" instantly became a touchstone that helped define a whole era.
I went to see it again and again during its first run, maybe 10 times in all,
but, protecting its place in my memory, I didn't watch it again until
recently, when I got the 40th anniversary DVD. I popped the disc into the
player with trepidation, but from the opening strains of Simon and Garfunkel
singing, "Hello, darkness, my old friend," I was hooked and relieved.

"The Graduate" still plays like gangbusters. Wonderfully directed by Mike
Nichols, it's funny and staged with startling vividness. Back then, Hollywood
directors were cribbing great visual ideas from European art movies.

No doubt you know the story. A sly, fresh-faced Dustin Hoffman plays Benjamin
Braddock, who returns home from college to the LA of sunshine and swimming
pools. Everybody is pushing him towards a prosperous, middle-class future,
famously captured in a single word of advice: "plastics." But Ben wants
something more authentic, and it finds it in the form of Elaine Robinson.
That's Katherine Ross, the co-ed daughter of his father's partner. But
there's one huge stumbling block: Ben's having an affair with her mother, the
worldly alcoholic, Mrs. Robinson, played with indelible foxiness by Anne
Bancroft, whose crossing and uncrossing legs are as eloquent as any monologue.
Her scenes with Ben are modern classics, like this early one, when she invites
the naive graduate back to her house and he starts to panic.

(Soundbite of "The Graduate")

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. DUSTIN HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) Oh my God.

Ms. ANNE BANCROFT: (As Mrs. Robinson) Pardon?

Mr. HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) Oh, no, Mrs. Robinson, oh, no.

Ms. BANCROFT: (As Mrs. Robinson) What's wrong?

Mr. HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) Mrs. Robinson, you didn't--I mean, you
didn't expect...

Ms. BANCROFT: (As Mrs. Robinson) What?

Mr. HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) I mean, you didn't really think I'd do
something like that?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. BANCROFT: (As Mrs. Robinson) Like what?

Mr. HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) What do you think?

Ms. BANCROFT: (As Mrs. Robinson) Well, I don't know.

Mr. HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) For God's sake, Mrs. Robinson. Here we
are. You got me into your house, you give me a drink. You put on music. Now
you start opening up your personal life to me and tell me your husband won't
be home for hours...

Ms. BANCROFT: (As Mrs. Robinson) So?

Mr. HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce
me.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) Aren't you?

(End of soundbite)

Mr. POWERS: Watching "The Graduate" again flooded me with old passions. All
that anxious isolation and thwarted romanticism. But I couldn't help noticing
things that had escaped my teenage eyes. Despite hitting the zeitgeist, the
movie was actually a bit behind the times. Based on a novel from 1963--a
different cultural era, really--it celebrates a brand of timid, youthful
innocence that many of Ben and Elaine's contemporaries were happily shedding.
In fact, "The Graduate" represents a fundamental step in the media's
domestication in what we think of as the '60s. The movie came out in the days
of civil rights marches, Vietnam protests and the summer of love. But none of
these appear here. Even when Ben chases Elaine to Berkeley, ground zero of
student radicalism, you get nothing more than shots of picturesque quads and a
gruff landlord asking him if he's an agitator. Ben says no, and he's right.

You see, he and Elaine are ciphers, who don't stand for anything more than a
generational rejection of their parents' inauthenticity. It was easy for many
of us to project our own vague feelings of alienation onto Ben and Elaine
because their rebellion didn't make any demands, didn't confer any
responsibilities, didn't prove irrevocable. Their rebel attitudes often look
dangerous or apocalyptic, but in their way, they proved as safely suburban as
what we were all rebelling against. Small wonder that so many iconoclastic
young boomers like Ben and Elaine would turn into middle-aged bourgeois
bohemians.

I now grasp that the real outlaw is, of course, Mrs. Robinson, who, caught in
the era before women's lib, tries to escape the velvet prison of housewifery
in ways that boys like me found very scary. Although she's by far the film's
most interesting character--I'd pick her over the bland Elaine anytime--it
betrays her by turning her into a petty villain who curses like a fishwife
when Ben crashes Elaine's wedding. And we're not supposed to care because
"The Graduate" sides with Ben and Elaine. They're the young ones, and that's
what matters.

Maybe so. But today she's the character who now feels the most daring, the
most unconventional and the most human. She's the real rebel without a cause.
I know I'm saying this 40 years too late, but here's to you, Mrs. Robinson.

GROSS: John Powers is film critic for Vogue.

(Soundbite of "Mrs. Robinson")

GROSS: You can download podcasts of our show by going to our Web site,
freshair.npr.org.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.