Laura Riley

TITLE: The Dew Breaker

AUTHOR: Edwidge Danticat

Reviewed by: Laura Riley

How can a novel filled with such terror have such a beautiful title?

The Dew Breaker sounds romantic, doesn't it? It summons up images of a pink and orange sunrise, and since it is set in Haiti, allows us to easily imagine our neighbouring nation's landscape. The scene throughout though is bleak instead of bright, and Haiti's history clouds the meaning of the phrase Dew Breaker, bringing a dark tone to the novel. Edwidge Danticat, who left Haiti in 1971 at the age of two, shares part of Haiti's heartbreaking, and horrifyingly recent history through three main characters, whose lives and secrets are brilliantly described, directly and through the tangential stories of others.

I've heard before that stories always have three sides: my side, your side, and the truth. Danticat proves that there are as many sides to a story as there are people telling it, and hearing it. Sometimes, one person even has multiple versions of his own story, one that he remembers as true, and the variations that he tells others, which inevitably become embroidered over time.

BUDDING JOURNALIST

The Dew Breaker, or in Creole, the 'choukt lawoze', are torturers, people who have reasons to change their stories. 'The Bridal Seams-tress' is a chapter in which a budding journalist interviews Beatrice, a seamstress for many Haitian brides in New York, on her expected retirement. The chapter stands alone except for the fact that, halfway through the novel, Beatrice describes why Danticat's title is, as you probably suspect at this point, haunted. The choukt lawoze would 'break into your house. Mostly it was at night. But often they'd also come before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves, and they'd take you away.'

The first character, who we don't hear directly from but whose story dominates the novel, is Mr. Bienaim. He is a barber, who owns his own shop and lives with his wife and only daughter in Brooklyn, New York.

Mr. Bienaimis also a torturer, who, 20 years ago, used to be part of the Tonton Macoutes, or private police force of then dictator of Haiti, François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier.

The Dew Breaker opens with the line, 'My father is gone.' Mr. Bienaimdisappears, we later learn, to destroy a sculpture that his daughter made of him while they are on their way from New York to Florida, delivering it to the famous Haitian television star who commissioned the piece. The sculpture included Mr. Bienaim's scar that travels from his right cheek down his jaw line, but it isn't shame of his image that drives him to drown the sculpture. Instead, it is shame of the situation that gave him the scar in the first place and so the first chapter begins, with Mr. Bienaim's confession to his daughter Nadine that he is one of them, the hunter' not the prey."

He isn't the former prisoner who was lucky to get out alive that Nadine believed him to be. Nadine, prior to hearing his confession, and perhaps even after, reveres her father and aggrandises his past. Mr. Bienaimcan't see the same noble reflection in his sculpture that she intends the piece to have because he knows the truth of his past actions. And, as he thinks towards the end of the novel, "Whenever people asked what happened to his face, he would have to tell a lie, a lie that would further remind him of the truth."

Every time he sees his own image or feels his scar, which he does to cover it up whenever a picture is being taken, he remembers the lie, the versions of the lie that he tells to cover up the atrocities he's been part of and witness to. Those versions only serve to reinforce the reality of his crimes; his constant public denial of past events makes his private suffering deeper and harder to bear over time. Until the point when he is literally confronted with an image of himself, made by his daughter. When he can't look himself in the face, he confesses to her.

HAUNTING PERSONAL HISTORIES

Danticat, in just the first chapter, shares a bit of Haiti's fractured history, shows how haunting personal histories can be, and describes how intimacy and distance can exist simultaneously in tightly-knit families. In each chapter Danticat tells us stories, and through The Dew Breaker her characters learn of secrets, like Nadine does, that will fulfil, suspicions and create doubt for the rest of their changed lives.

Nadine is the second character that Danticat keeps referring to throughout the book. Her nickname is Ka, which means little part of the soul' in ancient Egyptian mythology, and translates into 'little angel' in Creole. In a Christmas Eve sermon in New York, Ka thinks she sees Emmanuel Constant, a man who is wanted in Haiti for torture, rape and murder, and, as a child with a clean conscience, fumes with anger.

Ka is Mr. Bienaims 'little angel' and acts as his foil, whose conscience forces him to confront his truth, and tell it, at least to her. Anne, Ka's mother, is the only other person who Mr. Bienaim's reveals himself to.

COMPLEX FEMALE CHARACTERS

Danticat is well-known for her complex female characters and Anne is certainly more the rule than the exception. Anne recognises that while her husband was 'the hunter, not the prey,' he in the end becomes a victim of a point in time, of a regime, of his haunted memories. As a reader it's hard to sympathise for Mr. Bienaim, but Danticat, through Anne and her nuanced understanding of her husband, makes it entirely possible.

Anne says that 'It was always like this, her life a pendulum between forgiveness and regret'. By knowing Mr. Bienaims past and still choosing to marry him before following him to New York from Haiti, Anne forgives him and tries to help him redeem himself. She is not a Redeemer though, and since she is aware of his sins she cannot help but sometimes regret her choice to help save him from himself.

By taking on the contradiction of his past life and his desire for a new start, Anne suffers with the sway of her conscience is she helping Mr. Bienaimor hurting him by supporting his new life? When the sun comes up each morning, when the dew breaks, will she be perpetuating a crime, or will she be facilitating a second chance? Danticat raises a lot of important questions about morality, forgiveness, and redemption. Throughout the novel she explores answers but never preaches any, leaving us readers the sweet freedom of finding our own.

Constant, as an update, is currently living in Queens, New York. In 1995, he faced deportation to Haiti to stand trial. While he still has to check in daily with the United States Immigration and Naturalisation Service, he is free to move about the U.S. since his deportation was postponed indefinitely when he threatened, on 60 Minutes, to divulge details of his relationship with the CIA during the 1990s.