“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” wrote James Baldwin. This quote in Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat’s new essay collection We’re Alone captures the dual meaning of the title: the isolation and despair of the oppressed who believe no one is coming to help them, and the intimacy between author and reader, alone together on the page.

Danticat’s offer of intimacy leads the reader into many circumstances nobody would want to go: the terror of mass shootings; the pain and humiliation of prisons and detention centers; the chaos of coups d’état and the gang violence that follows; the lurid prejudices against immigrants and refugees.

It also invites us into communion with many of the writers who found her at times she felt lost and alone: the life-capturing drama of Lorraine Hansberry, the everyday magic of Gabriel García Márquez, the piercing reportage of Audre Lorde, the world-enveloping spirit of Zora Neale Hurston, the profound graciousness of Toni Morrison, and of course the call to action of James Baldwin. Another figure also turns up frequently to share in, if not immediately resolve, the common thread of suffering: “This is my body,” he says, “given for you.”

Baldwin’s apostate but unshakable connection to this figure gives Danticat her mission as a writer: bearing witness. “Every word I put down on paper is an act of both witness and love,” she writes. Where there is nothing else to be done, bearing witness is the act of love.

When Danticat’s neighbor dies during the early days of Covid and a normal funeral cannot be held, she stands instead outside the house to pay her respects in the rain. “It felt like the God our neighbor loved so much was weeping for her.” I have always thought the same thing about the rain.

But rain can be the source of the disaster too. Devastating hurricanes and other weather events are a regular part of life for increasing numbers of people, and they are only intensifying thanks to climate change. In the wake of one of these flattening her mother-in-law’s house, Danticat describes the rare sight of a fully circular rainbow floating above it, and thinks of a gospel favorite by Mahalia Jackson, “God Put a Rainbow in the Sky.”

Who sent the rain? And who sent the rainbow? With endurance of the former and hope in the latter, Danticat invites us to witness them together.

Disclaimer: For selected passages previously published in Plough, the magazine and I are thanked in the book’s acknowledgments.