The Dew Breaker
Author: Edwidge Danticat
Reviewer: Mary Hanna
Publisher: Vintage (2004)
AS GRIOT of Haiti's painful experience, Edwidge Danticat spins fine tales of history, both political and personal.
In The Dew Breaker, she gives us the terrifying premise of a former macoute torturer living in Brooklyn. Each chapter is a short story that weaves together the experience of torturer and tortured in the settings of sixties' Haiti and contemporary Brooklyn.
Shame and guilt, forgiveness and redemption, are examined minutely and presented to us as a rewarding and affecting read interlaced with Creole and folklore. In these nine stories, Danticat says much about the human condition and the sometimes intolerable yearning for understanding and wholeness.
In The Book of the Dead, the opening story, the nameless torturer's daughter tells the tale of trying to understand why her father has destroyed the statue she has made of him and sold to a celebrity. The point of view is original and we get an intimate and heart-wrenching picture of family life as a legacy of violence.
CONNECTIONS
In 'Seven', one of the torturer's tenants is reunited with his wife after seven years. The yearning and loneliness of the Haitian immigrants in Brooklyn imbue this story with a kind of majesty while the irony of feeling safe in the household of the torturer underscores the fragility of human relationships in this world.
The torturer lives now as a barber and landlord, carefully covering the terrifying scar on his face and keeping out of the limelight. All who come into contact with this mild-mannered, thin man a good husband and father are struck by his modesty.
The connections between the stories are delicate and deep, so that the torturer is surrounded by voices crying out their experience and pain, and yet he manages to survive incognito.
In 'The Bridal Seamstress', an aspiring journalist finds her true métier when she interviews a Haitian seamstress who was tortured and who lives now with the delusion of being followed always by her torturer.
The journalist Aline says:
Growing up poor but sheltered in Somerville, Massachusetts, Aline had never imagined that people like Beatrice existed, men and women whose tremendous agonies filled every blank space in their lives. Maybe there were hundreds, even thousands, of people like this, men and women chasing fragments of themselves long lost to others. Maybe Aline herself was one of them.
Aline decides to try to write about these people, even if it means quitting her present post.
This credo is what Danticat has followed in all her books. She is the voice of the suffering, specifically Haitian people, and she is given in all her work to the mysterious interweaving of time and fate in the histories of those whom Haitian history has touched and bloodied.
The depth of violence that the torturer perpetrated in his heyday is described in the succinct metaphor of his trade: the dew breaker. In 'The Book of Miracles', where the torturer's wife shares her stories of miraculous happenings with her family, and his daughter, ignorant of his history, nearly (wrongly) denounces a fellow congregant in church as a dew breaker, we are told:
He hadn't been a famous 'dew breaker', or torturer, anyway, just one of hundreds who had done their jobs so well that their victims were never able to speak of them again.
So Danticat speaks for them. In 'Night Talkers', we meet Danny, one of the torturer's tenants, who journeys home to the mountain village in Haiti where he arrives just in time to witness his aunty's death.
This surrogate mother is the peace of his heart, for he has recognised his torturer and yet cannot speak of him, unlike the mysterious Claude who is a palannit, a night talker, 'one of those who spoke their nightmares out loud to themselves'.
Except Claude was even luckier than he realised, for he was able to speak his nightmares to himself as well as to others, in the nighttime as well as in the hours past dawn, when the moon had completely vanished from the sky.
This is Danticat's credo as a writer; for her brilliantly gruesome tales have been her stock in trade right from her first books that titillated the literary world, Krik! Krak! and Breath, Eyes, Memory.
Danticat is the queen of nightmare visions told in luminous, clear prose with a lilt of lifetime suffering and survival woven through the text.
'The Funeral Singer', my favourite story in The Dew Breaker, tells of a group of three young Haitian women who meet in a high school equivalency class in Brooklyn and tell their stories allusively in the growing intimacy of having drinks together after tests, which two of them consistently fail. The narrator tells us:
The first time I ever sang in public was at my father's memorial Mass. I sang 'Brother Timonie,' a song whose cadence rises and falls, like the waves of the ocean. I sang it through my tears, and later people would tell me that my sobs reminded them of the incoming tide. From that moment on I became a funeral singer.
The women laugh and weep, drink and break glasses, none of them able to really leave behind the tortured island of their birth.
SECRETS IN TEXT
The final story, of the same name as the title of the book, pulls together the intimations and secrets that have been spilled or withheld in the body of the text.
The torturer, not yet thirty and enormously fat, is scarred by the pastor, a vibrant preacher of rebellion who has taught his followers to ask 'And what will we do with our beast?' For this crime the preacher is slated for death in the brutal regime of Baby Doc.
The story follows the last day of both the participants and a lively crew of supporting actors, including Anne, the preacher's epileptic half-sister, whom the ultimately reformed torturer takes to New York as his wife.
We learn of the preacher's brave death after scarring his torturer with a broken chair leg, and of how the torturer was recruited in the first place into the ranks of 'the Miliciens, the Volunteers, what later would be called the macoutes'.
This story leaves no doubt that the mild-mannered Brooklyn barber was once a dew breaker for the macoutes. He enjoyed his work.
He liked to paddle them with braided cowhide, stand on their cracking backs and jump up and down like a drunk on a trampoline, pound a rock on the protruding bone behind their earlobes until they couldn't hear the orders he was shouting at them, tie blocks of concrete to the end of sisal ropes and balance them off their testicles if they were men or their breasts if they were women.
Danticat's cool prose tells of gore and horror with aplomb. She allows spaces for the reader to weep and for the sufferers in her tale to be damaged into silence. Her forte is the narrating of those silences, like a palannit.
The story of the torturer is the story of Haiti's people from the points of view of perpetrator of violence and victims alike. The strong narrative surrounds the issues of guilt and redemption and presents a total picture of the historical Haiti in the years close to and including Baby Doc's exile and the strange soul-dislocation of the emigrants into Haiti's new communities in the United States. It is a text to be taken in small doses and savoured, another great achievement for its young author.
Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and moved to Brooklyn when she was 12. She is a National Book Award finalist and an American Book Award winner.
She has also written two stories for children Anaconda, Golden Flower and Behind the Mountains and she has edited two texts of creative writing, including The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Diaspora in the United States.
