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Edwidge Danticat’s harrowing tales of Haiti
BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ
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The Dew Breaker
By Edwidge Danticat. Knopf, 256 pages, $22.
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A legacy of violence
Always engrossed in the stories she read and heard as a child, Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat first published her own writing in a teen magazine in New York City. She and her brother joined their parents in Brooklyn when she was 12 (they’d lived with other family in Haiti, after her mother emigrated when she was four and her father when she was two). Dancticat drew on childhood memories in her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), and in her National Book Award-nominated collection of stories, Krik? Krak! (1996). The 1937 Trujillo-ordered massacre of Haitians on Dominican soil inspired her American Book Award-winning novel, The Farming of Bones (1998). And now, in the midst of yet another violent upheaval in her home country, the 35-year-old author explores the inner lives of several Haitian exiles and immigrants in The Dew Breaker. The following is drawn from a recent phone conversation with Danticat, who was at a Buffalo hotel, beginning a 15-city book tour which will bring the Brown alum to Providence for a reading on March 22. Q: What do you believe distinguishes your new book from your previous writing? A: What is different, primarily, is that I’m writing about men. Before I was exploring a lot of mother/child and mother/daughter relationships. This time I’m trying to explore the idea of fatherhood and what that means. The whole notion of the "land of our fathers" reads differently than "motherland." For example, a lot of the stories deal with the aftermath of the Duvalier dictatorship, from 1957 to 1986. The Duvalier father used to call himself "Renovator of the Fatherland." Most of these stories are about men or boys and their relationship to their fathers and also about the notion of fatherland. Q: How did it feel to write in the head of male characters? A: Strangely enough, it didn’t feel that different. Ultimately, it’s still about creating characters and building long-term personality traits. I didn’t find myself thinking, "Oh, this is how men move or how they think," because they were just reacting to singular situations so that you have to really think about what that particular person’s reaction would be. It was more about trying to delve into the heart of each particular person. Q: How would you describe the structure of the book? A: I consider the book a collection of linked stories. After I wrote the first one, "The Book of the Dead," I was very curious about the father character and I wrote the last story, "The Dew Breaker," to find out more about him. Not all of the characters link to that central one. It wasn’t meant for everybody to connect. The stories are meant to be read differently but at the end to have a collective impact. I think of it as a series of testimonies —everybody’s testifying about their exile — but not always about the Dew Breaker. Twenty-nine years of a dictatorship produce a lot of these people. Q: Your book couldn’t be more topical — do you have any hope that things will ever resolve themselves into a peaceful solution in Haiti? A: I’m very hopeful since these recent events that people will now in some way be able to move forward, but justly. The majority of the people of Haiti are poor and have been unrepresented in government and their desires are pretty quickly trampled over. So my hope is that they will be considered in this new formula which seems that it will prioritize the former military people and the rich people and the US interests. There was an intervention in ’94 [by U.S.-led forces] and there was no thorough program nor attempt at disarmament. Everybody’s super-armed; there are killings on both sides. I hope that this time we won’t be left stranded with the same situation, because the country’s so polarized right now. I hope at least there will be some reconciliation with both sides. What I observe happening right now is that it will be sort of like Iraq, where we get whatever the US government wants. And whatever the wealthy and elite of Haiti ask for, they’ll get, and the people will be ignored. Q: And you’re saying that that has to change? A: Yes. I hope they will also consider the very poor of Haiti, who suffer incredibly in ordinary times and in times like this are suffering most. They’re the ones who can’t get food — their suffering increases. The majority of people in Haiti live from day to day. A lot of people don’t know if they’re going to eat when they get up in the morning unless they’re able to go out in the street and sell something. Under this kind of insecurity that we have now with people shooting each other, they can’t even do that. I hope they won’t be completely neglected in these decisions. I hope their needs will be taken into consideration in this new process. That’s the only way we can move forward. You can’t run a country neglecting the majority of the people, which has happened a lot in the past. Q: Do you have feelings about being in the States and watching the policies of the US affect your home country? A: Someone has said, "Countries, nations, have interests, they don’t have friends." I think US policy in Haiti has never been really interested in Haitians. It’s been interested in US interests. For 29 years, they supported the Duvalier regime because during the Cold War they were trying to prevent the advance of communism in the region. The policy was, "So-and-so’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch." I don’t think US policymakers really care about Haiti. We had a 19-year US occupation in 1915 that left us with an army that terrorized people for decades and now they’re talking about bringing this army back. I don’t think these interventions are ever really about the people of Haiti. This is the third intervention in the last 100 years. If there was an interest in getting something permanently done, it would have been. Q: Haiti’s history has been complicated from the beginning, hasn’t it? A: Yes, the genesis of the country in 1804, having defeated the French, we had to pay the French money for our independence and our resources were eventually depleted to serve other people. The country has had some huge obstacles to contend with in its relatively young history. Q: You’ve written so eloquently about the legacy of violence in Haiti. What did you want to say about redemption or healing for any of the characters in The Dew Breaker? A: It’s up to each particular character to decide whether they forgive or not, and it’s up to the person who has caused the harm whether to seek redemption. We must look at these people in a complicated way. It’s so easy to decide other people’s culpability without considering our own. There is the possibility of ordinary people to become torturers. We have a proverb: "The one who gives the blow may forget, but the one who wears the scar remembers." Ultimately, this Dew Breaker shows that we can both give the blows and carry the scars. —Johnette Rodriguez
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The first thing to say about Edwidge Danticat’s stunning new book, The Dew Breaker, is that it’s engrossing for its fine-tuned characterizations and evocative interactions, not for any detailed violence provoked by the torturer in the title. The term refers to the practice by Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes gangs of grabbing their victims from their homes just as the sun was rising and the dew was breaking. The second thing to note is that the characters and events in this series of nine Interconnected stories form a kind of suspense novel, in which the reader tries to fit the snippets of information together to form a cohesive whole. But, like Haiti itself, far too many loose ends remain for the package to be neatly tied up. Indeed, such is Danticat’s craft and vision that we are often left to ponder the past and question the future of the characters. Is the absent boyfriend in the third story, "Water Child," the same man as the eager husband in the second, "Seven"? Two specific clues are dropped, about his second job as a janitor and about his phone number changing. But there could be many Haitian immigrants who match those specifics. Similarly, when the title character of "The Bridal Seamstress" fantasizes that wherever she has moved in New York City, the man who tortured her in Haiti shows up in her neighborhood, we realize that he might not be the same "dew breaker" as the father/ husband/barber/landlord/former torturer who occurs in several of the other stories, including the title one. But it is precisely those stories that vie for our attention. First comes the barber whose broken spirit has him toss his daughter’s statue of him into a lake ("The Book of the Dead") and later his wife, who is fascinated with telling her family about miracles, wishing all the while that she could explain to her daughter about the miraculous transformation of her father ("The Book of Miracles"), and next the barber’s basement tenant, Dany, who journeys back to Haiti to tell his aunt he’s located the man who orphaned him by killing his parents ("Night Talkers"). The latter story is especially vivid and memorable: for the magic realism overlay of dreams, its warm portraits of the mountain villagers where Dany’s Aunt Estina lives, and Estina’s wise words to Dany about the violence that claimed his parents and her eyesight: "There’s a belief that if you kill people, you can take their knowledge, become everything they were. Maybe they wanted to take all that knowledge for themselves." During Dany’s quest to decide what to do with his feelings of rage and revenge, his aunt introduces him to Claude, a young man who’d been deported from the US and jailed for a time in Haiti for killing his father. Claude realizes he’s been given a second chance at life, and when he expresses his appreciation for that, Dany realizes what his own choices will be. Dany’s search for knowledge about his parents mirrors his roommate Michel’s remembrance of who his father had been, in the light of his own impending fatherhood, and how his good friend Romain had coped with being the son of a notorious macoute (a militiaman under "Baby Doc" Duvalier). Female characters in Danticat’s book also wrestle with memories of their fathers: the Dew Breaker’s daughter used to sit with him in the Ancient Egyptian rooms at the Brooklyn Museum and listen to him read to her from the Book of the Dead; the title character of "The Funeral Singer," Freda, earned her reputation from the first time she sang at her father’s funeral mass, a fisherman’s song he’d taught her long before he was tortured and took out his boat for one last time. In the dreadful heritage these adult children examine are all the elements of life under 29 years of two vicious and vengeful dictators in Haiti: fear and suspicion, brutality and murder, yet also a spirit of survival, an enduring hope, and the balm of parental love. In seeking to understand their fathers and to enfold their legacies into their present lives, these characters stand for all Haitians who try to understand what has gone on in their country, their "fatherland." Danticat orders these stories quite cannily, since the first introduces the Dew Breaker through his daughter’s eyes and his confession to her, and the last (and longest) story finally brings us to his perspective, his memory of the last horrible crime he committed, why he had to flee afterward, how he met the woman who became his wife, and how they conspired to keep his secret once they settled in Brooklyn. The Dew Breaker, though a set of discrete stories, is like a shimmering curtain of glass beads: individual fragments of polished prose that can in one moment create a composite image and in another offer a glimpse between their swaying strands. Always shifting and always beautiful, the stories maintain a sense of mystery about what lies behind them. Edwidge Danticat reads at Brown University’s Salomon Center, on the College Green in Providence, this Monday, March 22 at 7 p.m.; call (401) 863-3168.
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