(Courtesy of Knopf website)

Bay kou bliye, pote mak sonje.
He who strikes the blow, forgets; he who bears the bruises, remembers.

In her highly anticipated new collection of short stories, The Dew Breaker, author and Haitian immigrant Edwidge Danticat responds to this proverb. The protagonist of the title story (and a principal figure in several of the collection’s related tales) has emerged from the prisons of Haiti to forge a new life in Brooklyn. Still, he cannot escape the dark prologue to his New World story, nor can his American-born daughter Ka, who, in “The Book of the Dead,” struggles to capture his suffering in rough wooden sculptures.

The protagonist refuses her requests to photograph him, holding a hand up to his face to cover the thick scar that slides down his right cheek to his lips. He haunts the Ancient Egyptian room at the Brooklyn museum, awed by the Egyptian capacity to mourn, their intense probing of the nature of death. One of Ka’s statues, a kneeling, contorted nude of her father in prison, forces him to confront the truth of his past. Drawing upon another Haitian proverb, he confesses the long-kept secret to his daughter: “Your father was the hunter, he was not the prey.”

This man, whose nightmares once drove him from his bed onto the floor, shattering his teeth and forcing him to wear dentures, dreams not of his own pain, but of that he caused his victims, men and women he tortured and killed. The blows he has rained down on others continue to fall on his own head, and he can neither forget nor escape them.

Author Edwidge Danticat (Photo by Jill Krementz, courtesy of Knopf website)

The ‘dew breaker’

In her other books, this man, this father and husband, is only a dark shadow, an angel of death, a “dew breaker.” He gyrates in the black root of candle flames and sways beneath the shifting waves of the river of blood that separates Haiti from the Dominican Republic. He is one of the dictator Francois (“Papa Doc”) Duvalier’s notorious tonton macoutes, a rural militia-cum-secret-police established in 1959 to terrorize the Haitian population into submission.

He is the man who has raped, imprisoned, and murdered the women of Danticat’s five books, has stolen her lovers from each other and children from their parents, has forced her varied protagonists into what may be a permanent exile. In a story from Danticat’s debut collection, Krik? Krak!, a young Haitian man writes to his lover from a boat en route to the United States, imploring, “Whatever you do, please don’t marry a soldier. They’re almost not human.” But in this book, in these stories, the soldier is as human as his victims. His humanity is the heaviest of burdens — one no confession will ever lighten.

The never-ending wait

The majority of Haitians today — most of them poor subsistence farmers living in the mountains — remain unable to read or write. Another proverb appropriately captures the difficulties of Haitian life and the stubborn endurance of the Haitian people: “Beyond the mountain is another mountain.”

Despite, or perhaps because of their ongoing struggles, Haitians have maintained the rich oral tradition of their ancestors, gathering in the ghost light of the setting sun to cheer each other with stories, jokes, and riddles. One person says “Krik?” The others respond “Krak!” And a story begins.

Danticat’s affection for the Haiti of her childhood is palpable, but her stories often plunge into the very darkness from which Haitians struggle to escape. The visceral prose that arrested readers in her debut collection has fallen away and the style of her new collection is sparer, direct, almost dry, yet no less evocative. Moments of humor illuminate the dense terrain that her narrators have tread in Haiti and that they must continue to navigate as strangers in a foreign land.

In the story “Seven,” a wife travels from Haiti to New York to rejoin her husband after seven years apart. After they make love, she leaves the room to find the bathroom, only to quickly return, having been confronted by the sight of two men playing dominoes, who, in deference to her presence, have clothed themselves in identical pink satin robes.

The reunited lovers rely upon their memories of Carnival (the riotous Haitian festival that falls just before Ash Wednesday each year and reaches a zenith on Mardi Gras night) to cope with feelings of disintegration that threaten to overwhelm them. The traditions into which Eric has settled over the last seven years will be irrevocably altered by the arrival of his wife: “Gone were the early-evening domino games. Gone was the phone number he’d had for the last five years, ever since he’d had a telephone. (He didn’t need other women calling him now.)”

His wife must endure a similar disruption — on arriving at the airport, she stands and watches as a customs man pushes through her luggage, confiscating almost everything she’s brought from Haiti. The seeming lightness of lives reduced only to essentials belies the immense weight of expectations born of the near decade spent waiting to see one another. Even the ritual of making love seven times, once for every year apart, fails to restore the couple’s sense of gravity. They venture out onto the streets of New York, walking hand-in-hand, but the unfamiliar surroundings can only conjure more memories of Carnival theater. Utterly lost, they have become actors, “performing their own carnival,” their only connection with one another a conspiratorial agreement to pretend that everything will normalize eventually.

Reaching the promised land

Immigrants must wait. They wait to receive a visa (or to board the boat that promises to transport them to a better world, on earth or in heaven). They wait to pass through customs. They wait for the day when lover, parent, child will cross the waters to join them. They wait for the day of return. They wait for the day when they will wake, each morning, without tasting fresh coconut milk on the tips of their tongues or feeling the smoothness of a conch shell against the soft skin of their cheeks. They wait to become U.S. citizens. They wait for a time when they won’t feel the need to wait for anything anymore.

Danticat’s personal history (of waiting, hoping, fearing, dreaming) informs her ongoing chronicle of the immigrant experience. Her father immigrated to the United States in 1971, only two years after her birth, and her mother followed him two years after that, leaving Danticat to be raised by an aunt and uncle. At 12 years old, she, too, left Haiti to join her parents in New York.

The Danticats were one family among many who chose to immigrate to the United States during the peak years of the Haitian exodus. Shallow waves of immigration slapping American shores in the 1950s gave way to a virtual flood over the next twenty years as the cresting of the Duvalier dictatorship drove first middle class and then poor Haitians to seek refuge elsewhere. Some Haitians chose Europe or Africa as their destination, but the largest group of the diaspora settled in the United States, many (like the Danticats) in largely Haitian ethnic enclaves.

In his book, Haiti: In Focus, Charles Arthur, the coordinator of the London-based Haiti Support Group, writes: “In the last few years, many Haitian-Americans have abandoned their dreams of going home. Many have begun the process of seeking U.S. citizenship.” Still, Danticat finds hope for Haiti in the irrepressible spirits and unfulfilled longing of Haitian immigrants, particularly those now living in the United States.

The possibility of return to Haiti varies for Danticat’s characters. Wealthier Haitian Americans, such as the actress Gabrielle Founteneau and her family (in “The Book of the Dead”), visit every year. “There’s nothing like sinking your hand in sand from the beach of your own country,” says Mrs. Founteneau, Gabrielle’s mother. “It’s a wonderful feeling, wonderful.”

For the man she addresses, the “dew breaker” in hiding, returning to Haiti would mean only facing judgment that denies the possibility of transformation. The answers that Danticat suggests never fully eclipse the questions she poses. Has the “dew breaker,” now husband and father, become a new person — albeit one with an old face? Can the prey or the hunter ever move beyond memories of a violent past?

Another character in the collection, a victim of the “dew breaker,” seems to accept yesterday’s tormenter as transformed. In “Night Talkers,” Dany (one of the men wearing pink satin robes) goes back to Haiti after ten years to tell his aunt that he has found the man who murdered his parents. Seizing the opportunity to take revenge, he has failed to follow through — what if this man is not the man, but some other man, an innocent? Evil, as Danticat depicts it, is not only banal, it is infinitely mutable.

In his aunt’s village, Dany meets Claude, a Haitian teenager expelled from the United States for murdering his own father. Danticat presents Claude’s actions as distinct from those of the tonton macoutes and Haiti’s history of politicized violence. Still, the violence in his past clings to Claude like an invisible tattoo, one that has changed him irrevocably.

“I’m the luckiest fucker alive,” Claude tells Dany. “I’ve done something really bad that makes me want to live my life like a fucking angel now.” Ironically, Claude’s crime has reunited him with his community and he belongs in a way that Dany never will. Irony plays a significant role in Danticat’s stories, an irony that circles back on itself like the primal image of the snake eating its tail.

In “Monkey Tails,” the most overtly political story in the collection, Michel (the other man wearing a pink satin robe) declares his intention to name his soon-to-be-born son Romain after his first real friend, the son of a tonton macoute. He reflects on Romain’s father, “Maybe Regulus would survive and emerge from all this a new man, repent for all his sins, reclaim all his children, offer them his name — if they still wanted it — beg their forgiveness, both for what he’d done to them and for what he had done to his country.”

Here, Danticat outlines a path to redemption, but her characters seem unprepared to seek it out. Danticat expresses her true hopes for Haiti in another story. In “The Funeral Singer,” three women gather to tell each other the stories of their past, and find a way to let go as they join the title character in her last funeral song. Haiti’s “not a lost cause yet,” says Mariselle, one of the women, “because it made us.”  The three women resemble keepers of the hearth, at once young and ancient, staying awake to tend the sacred fire.

The personal, the political

Danticat’s stories and style draw heavily upon diverse Haitian influences. She acknowledges a debt to the oral tales told to her by her grandmother and aunt and the work of various Haitian authors, including Marie Chauvet, Jacques Roumain, J.J. Dominique, and Jacques Stephen Alexis. Water imagery, a part of what makes Danticat’s prose so vivid, also permeates the canon of Haitian literature — and politics. President-in-exile Jean Bertrand Aristide’s initial campaign and enduring political party claimed its name “Lavalas” from the Creole word for an avalanche or a flood.

Danticat declines to characterize her work as political, but seeming allusions in The Dew Breaker to concrete incidents in Haitian political history are noteworthy. The final story in Danticat’s collection relates the assassination (by the “dew breaker”) of a preacher who delivers popular, incendiary sermons over Radio Lumière (Protestant). “What will we do with our beast?” the preacher asks devoted listeners.

The young Jean Bertrand Aristide began his political career as a pastor who delivered popular, incendiary sermons over Radio Soleil (Catholic) in the late 1980s. He became Haiti’s first democratically elected president in 1990. In contrast to the story’s preacher, Aristide survived numerous assassination attempts but a military coup forced him to flee Haiti for the United States only a few months after he assumed the presidency.

According to Charles Arthur, writing in Haiti in Focus, the three years Aristide spent courting the Clinton administration so changed him (and his political program) that his former supporters could barely recognize him upon his return. Allegations of corruption further eroded his support and contributed to his returning to exile this year.

The extent of Aristide’s transformation from populist preacher to “political animal,” from activist to prey to hunter, can find no better measurement than Aristide’s inclusion (by media rights organization Reporters Without Borders) on a 2003 list of “predators of press freedom.”

In becoming expatriates, the men and women of Danticat’s stories have refused to become either prey or hunters. Only slightly less helpless than they were in Haiti when it comes to revitalizing their country, the characters consider the possibility of joining that struggle with cautious fervor.

“I’m going back,” declares Freda, the title character in “The Funeral Singer.” “I’m going to join a militia and return to fight.” Freda’s friends discourage her ambitions, predicting her death should she become a fighter. The unasked question hangs in the air like the smoke from an extinguished flame: Should Freda choose to fight, can she become anything but the prey or the hunter?

Staring into the sea

The life of a Haitian immigrant, as represented by Danticat, is a river that flows between two worlds — the past and the present, the primal and the modern, Vodou and Christianity, the miraculous and the mundane. If the “dew breaker” were to look down into this water, he would not see his own reflection. It is too crowded with anguished faces, the faces of the 32,000 Haitians cut down by Dominican soldiers along the border, the faces of Haitians rubbed out by their own countrymen, the tonton macoutes, the faces of people across the waters who may never stop mourning what they have lost.

Danticat has given this man safe passage to a new world and provided him with an American dream — a slimmer build, an honest profession, and a wife and daughter who learned to love him before they knew his secrets. But Danticat has denied him a name and, in doing so, has made uncertain the authenticity of his transformation. Even now, he remains the “dew breaker,” “the fat man,” “the hunter.”

The collection of stories, a river in itself, flows backwards, from the present to the past, from the new world to the old. The waters of this river divide the woman and the man, bound by the blood of one country, and this man — this father, this husband, this killer — though he has escaped to one bank of the river, may not even exist on the other.

STORY INDEX

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Other books by Edwige Danticat

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Interview with Edwidge Danticat
URL: http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/danticat.html

Atlantic Interview with Danticat
URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2004-06-22.htm

Sierra Prasada Millman