(Courtesy of Random House)

Man [sic] at his [sic] best, when he’s [sic] set in all the muck and confusion of life and continues to struggle for his [sic] ideals, is near sublime …

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

In response to the September 11 attacks, the figure of the hero has returned to all reaches of the political and intellectual spectrum. First canonized in the images of firefighters and New York cops, the post-9/11 hero has found its way into every varied aspect of the war on terror and even its opposition.

The conservative celebration of war heroes detailed in books like Senator John McCain’s Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life are mirrored in the volumes produced by leftist intellectuals and cultural critics. While heroism is a theme expected from former prisoner of war McCain, the left reclamation of heroic violence is more notable. Neo-Lacanians, such as Alenka Zupancic, and most commonly in non-academic circles, Slavoj Zizek, have entered the recent debate over ethics with a zeal for violent sacrifice that has been dismissed by many American leftists for being outdated and counterproductive because of its Leninist references.

Outdated or not, this rebellious work has found its way into everything from the Abercrombie & Fitch Fall Catalog to the publication Foreign Policy. Despite antagonism toward this scholarship as Leninist, Zupancic and Zizek are much more Kantian.

The fusion of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and German Idealist Immanuel Kant has developed into an ethical system that could only be called pathological deontology. In Zizek’s 9/11 treatise Welcome to the Desert of The Real, what he finds most admirable in the individuals that flew their planes into the Twin Towers was the undeniable courage to die for a cause (even if, as Zizek explicitly emphasizes, the cause was detestable).

In subsequent work on the subject, Zizek has described what he calls the ethical ‘Act’ as those choices that put the individual at significant risk, what he borrows from Sigmund Freud as being ‘beyond the reality principle,’ or quite literally suicidal. Drawing almost exclusively from pop culture, a stylistic choice that has made him infamous and highly sought after, Zizek isolates films like David Fincher’s Fight Club and other films that contain characters willing to mutilate themselves or even murder those that they love in the name of some ‘Thing’ that is ethical.

What Zizek and others drawing from psychoanalysis are not able to do is define or even hint at what this ethical ‘Thing’ is. A sort of tautology develops where by what is ethical is what you are willing to die for and what you are willing to die for is ethical.

This theoretical circularity not withstanding, it is easy to imagine the thrill of this kind of ethical action being romanticized and redeployed for nefarious purposes. Is not the Halliburton contractor who is so ‘committed’ to the American way of commerce and economic development that he is willing to risk his life rebuilding Iraq; no cost to themselves or others is too high — the very same ethical commitment ‘beyond the reality principle’ that Zizek and others champion?  

These rhetorical tactics have continuously circulated between the White House and those ‘private’ individuals involved in Iraqi reconstruction, calling into question how radical this system of ethics could possibly be. Even former counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke is enamored with bravery, mentioning in his tell-all book Against All Enemies that he disagreed with Bush’s choice to use the term ‘coward’ to describe the 9/11 bombers during his first September 11 address from Barksdale Air Force base.

Traditionally leftist public intellectual Christopher Hitchens has also championed the war in Iraq as an opportunity for those committed to democracy and universal human rights to test the mettle of their convictions. According to Hitchens’ book, The Long Short War, any criticism of the war that does not support regime change and intervention is ethically indefensible.

What animates both sides of the aisle — intellectually, politically, or otherwise — is nostalgia for sacrifice that, well, ‘kicks ass.’ Predictably and not without reason, Noam Chomsky and other leftists committed to non-violence have pointed out how counterproductive any U.S.-led intervention is likely to be, and in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, has been so far. The imperialistic interests served by Bush’s use of metonymy when invoking ‘us as hero’ and ‘them as coward’ has not gone unnoticed.

As Arundhati Roy writes concerning the war in Iraq in her essay “Confronting Empire,” “Our strategy should be not only to confront empire but to lay siege to it.” For Roy and others, 9/11 and the Iraqi war represent a turning point for the left that must now reorient itself towards a complete overthrow of U.S.-led globalization.

What has developed from all of these disparate attempts to conjure an heroic ethical response is both a deadlock and a remarkable amount of agreement. Everyone seems to agree that there is a fight to be had, and violent or non-violent, it is definitely oppositional; the only question is whether to reinvigorate individuals to put it all on the line for democracy, anti-globalization, or American security in all of its forms — national security, economic security, food security, and even sexual security. In a more reflective response to the current fervor, philosopher Judith Butler asks in the preface to her new book The Precarious Life “… whether the experience of vulnerability and loss have to lead straight away to military violence and retribution … [and] what, politically, might be made of grief besides the call for war[?]”

Ralph Ellison (Courtesy of Random House)

Juneteenth as a moment for pause

The preacher’s job, his main job, Bliss, is to help folks find themselves and to keep reminding them to remember who they are. So you see, those pictures can go against our purposes. If they look at those shows too often they’ll get all mixed up with so many of those shadows that they’ll lose their way. They won’t know who they are is what I mean.

In a response to this sobering question, Ellison offers a radical democratic ethics that requires a different sense of heroism in Juneteenth. His is an ethics that emerges from a Christian tradition of forgiveness that does not start from the same necessity for retributive justice prefigured in forms of heroism emerging after 9/11. To my knowledge, forgiveness is not an option that any of the talking heads, left or right, have openly considered. There is a reason for this.

In The Precarious Life, Butler describes in detail the rigor with which public debate over 9/11 has been regulated through the personalized attack of anyone willing to “consider the grounds and causes of the current conflict.” But, even Butler’s much needed, as she says, return to Aeschylus as a model to refuse revenge and instead “take stock of how the world has become formed” is not willing to go the next step and consider forgiveness in the place of justice. Despite the serious questions she asks, there is still a disclaimer at the beginning of The Precarious Life, clarifying that “one can — and ought to — abhor the attacks on ethical grounds (and enumerate those grounds).”

Without dismissing the ‘right’ to condemn the events of September 11, 2001, or the importance of debating military intervention, to take seriously Juneteenth is to ask what is truly taboo: Should we forgive those whom have so gravely injured us, and should that forgiveness come at the expense of safety and our desire for justice? It is this question which Ellison explores through the character of A.Z. Hickman and his relationship to his lost son, Bliss.

Juneteenth is a novel about things that can only be forgotten for so long. The return of a repressed history is both the site for the novel’s most important conflict, an internal battle for identity and security, and its most important relationship, an adopted child and a ‘least likely’ father’s attempt to bridge the racial gap. The characters of Juneteenth are caught between the apparent freedom of American individualism as described in the reoccurring quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the ‘servitude’ of history described by T.S. Elliot at the beginning of the novel.

Taking its name from the commemoration of emancipation that is celebrated throughout black communities, Ellison’s work-in-progress novel charts an untimely critique of the current democratic order and the paucity of political options that Ellison did not live to experience but in may ways foresaw.  

The story of Juneteenth begins in the office of Sunraider, a race-baiting senator from an unnamed Northeastern state. A congregation of black Southern Baptists led by preacher A.Z. Hickman has made a trip to Washington, D.C., to speak to one of the most controversial men there. Mistaken as a group of protesters, the delegation is escorted out of the building. We come to find that the congregation is actually the surrogate family of Sunraider, who was once known by those who loved him as Bliss. Rebuked by Sunraider’s receptionist, the group goes to watch the senator deliver one of his infamous speeches. Before Hickman is able to make contact with his estranged son to warn him of a plot on his life, another man opens fire on the Senate floor.

The majority of the novel takes place in a series of flashbacks and bedside conversations between Hickman and Sunraider/Bliss at a hospital in the immediate aftermath of the gunshots. Mortally wounded, the senator is led by Hickman to confront his past, who he is, and who he has become.

As Ellison’s stream of consciousness style unfolds, we find three distinct chronological periods in the senator’s life: A distinctly black childhood spent as a preacher, an interim period of questions and running spent mostly as a conman filmmaker, and the internal investigations of his identity on his deathbed. In all three of the periods, Ellison returns to Hickman’s struggle to understand Bliss’s decision to leave the black community and Bliss’s own struggle to find peace in the fleeting moments of his life.

One of the earliest sources of conflict for Hickman and Bliss is the arrival of the moving picture to a small town they are preaching in. The initial teaser for this new magical process comes from Bliss’s friend and provocateur, aptly named Body. Body, who overhears a conversation between three white men about a box that can show moving pictures in the dark, comes to represent Bliss’s flesh, his earthly desires. In fact, even when Body attempts to turn their discussions toward other topics, Bliss brings the conversation back to the subject of this strange new technology. Driven to learn more and more about this device, Bliss begins to pester Hickman to take him to see the pictures.

Giving into Bliss’s persistence, Hickman ultimately takes him to the picture show. But as the reverend emphasizes, the purpose of their trip is not pure enjoyment; it is also an important educational experience. In a rendition of Jesus’s proclamation in Acts 17 about living in — but not of — the world, Hickman describes the importance of knowing temptation in order to empathize with the sinner. Ellison uses the film’s distant world of shadows and spectacle as a metaphor for the socio-political. Both in the spectacular political shows that Bliss’s alter-ego Senator Sunraider puts on to rally white racism and in Bliss’s personal loss of identity, the movies are a vehicle for Ellison to explore the alienation that so many feel towards their own self-image. What is at stake in Ellison’s critique of politics is the centrality of manipulation.

For Bliss, the first picture show becomes a traumatic reminder of his lost mother. Attempting to reground the young Bliss, Hickman reminds him, “They’re only shadows … They’re fun if you keep that in mind. They’re only dangerous if you believe in them …” Despite Hickman’s early warnings regarding the movie house and this second attempt to deny the power of the ‘shadows,’ Bliss becomes transfixed by the moving image. Hickman’s description of the film as only shadows speaks to Ellison’s difficult relationship to politics. In Hickman’s attempt to reflect upon the place Washington, D.C., the reader finds a tremendous disdain for the compromise inherent in political power. For Ellison, the safety of social power — whiteness — always comes at the sacrifice of the courageous fight for ‘Truth.’

This conflict plays out in Hickman’s reluctant, yet deep and abiding, faith in the memory of President Abraham Lincoln. Despite all of his failures and inconsistencies, Lincoln represents the true vision of democracy. Lincoln made the difficult decision to emancipate the slaves not because he had the moral purity or interest do so, but because it was right.

This romantic democratic vision occurs throughout Ellison’s work. In his essay entitled “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” Ellison describes that it is the ability to demand what is right in the face of civil war and insecurity that gives democracy its meaning. Ellison writes that what is lost in equating democracy with stability and security is “the need for that tragic knowledge which we try ceaselessly to evade: that the true subject of democracy is not material well being … Without the [pressure] of the Black American, something irrepressibly hopeful and creative would go out of the American spirit, and the nation might well succumb to the moral slobbism that has ever threatened its existence from within.”

It is in this view of democracy that the current political order in all of its exclusion — whether it be the detainees at Guantanamo or the contract on Baghdad — becomes the true threat to freedom. The choice to become part of this system of compromise is the ethical significance of Bliss’s turn to whiteness and politics.

As the narrative unfolds, we learn that Bliss ran away repeatedly to hide in movie theaters until his final disappearance and reappearance in the grand theatre — Washington, D.C. In the theatrical performance of race-baiting, Bliss believes he has found the sense of belonging that drew him to the movies. Bliss explains in a fevered conflation of his theater experience and his turn to whiteness that both were a search for security in the safety of being powerful. What is at stake for Bliss is a feeling of belonging. The love of the African American community is not enough because to accept his blackness would require a life that he could not control. Here we find Bliss’s moral decline as a warning for what America can expect at the end of security and justice at all costs.

Through Hickman’s prodding and guided remembering, Bliss comes to realize that what he found in the safety of white authority was as illusory as the moving image:

So I said: What is the meaning of this arrangement of time, place and circumstance that flames and dampens murder in my heart? And what is this desire to identify with others, this need to extend myself and test my farfetched possibilities with only the agency of shadows? Merely shadows. All shadowy they promised me my mother and denied me solid life.

The knowledge that he made the wrong choice grips Bliss towards the end of the guided journey through his past, but it is not enough to redeem him. Instead, it drives Bliss further into delirium. Confronted by so much failure and deceit, he calls out in a crazed declaration (potentially internal monologue): “If I had only known that what I came to know about the shape of horror and the smell of pride — I say, HOW THE HELL DO YOU GET LOVE INTO POLITICS OR COMPASSION INTO HISTORY?”

The fall of Bliss appears to be a double failure. A failure of Hickman to produce the white insider who can lead on behalf of black interests and Bliss’s failure of character to accept the love and humanity Hickman bequeathed to him. However, Ellison discourages this reading of Bliss through Hickman’s perseverance regarding Bliss’s spiritual fate. In these bleak moments, Hickman reiterates the role of the preacher to try to help in any way and bring understanding because, as Hickman says, “what else is there?” What seems like resignation on the part of Hickman becomes the context for Ellison to describe what is truly sublime about Emerson’s doomed struggle through the muck.

Sacrifice and the unlikely heroics of forgiveness

A man [sic] has to live in order to have a reason for dying as well as have a reason to be reborn — because if you don’t you’re already dead anyway.

It is in the fading and seemingly last moments of Bliss’s life that Ellison is able to develop the complexity of his ethical position as it relates to how to live in American democracy. Although Ellison describes in his notes that “the mind becomes the real scene for action,” the more overtly political import cannot be discounted. As signified by Bliss’s quickly declining health, the question of the ‘Truth’ is urgent for Ellison. From the moment Bliss is shot in the beginning of the novel, the search for the ‘truth of what happened’ is described as having an immediacy that exceeds the eminent biological threats to Bliss’s fate. As Ellison’s notes in the appendix to the novel indicate, Bliss’s black experience comes to represent the “embodiment of American democratic promises” as a last chance to confront the traumatic history that runs just below the “shaky foundation” of the nation.

In Bliss, Ellison explores the universal potential of the black experience, and more importantly, the already shared experience of black suffering. The discussion of Bliss’s ‘racial origin’ unfolds in an unexpected way regarding his connection to blackness. In the first confrontation over Bliss’s origin, the assumption is that Bliss must be half black since, as one of the Church sisters puts it, “Half the devilment in this country caint be located on account of it’s somewhere in between black and white and covered up with bedclothes in the dark.” Initially, it seems it is Bliss’s blood that connects him to both worlds, but Ellison’s democratic vision is much more radical than that. Bliss’s miscegenated past is not at the level of biology (we discover later his identity has no truth in that it is completely unknown), but at the level of experience.  

Hickman rediscovers the senator’s blackness in his ‘look,’ something from Bliss’s younger days that still shows through. This epiphany of recognition comes to Hickman when he sees Bliss’s anguish as he tries to remember his past:

Now I understand: That look, that’s us! It’s not in the features but in what that look, those eyes, have to say about what it means to be a man who tries to live and struggle against all troubles of the world with but the naked heart and mind, and who finds them more necessary than all the power of wealth and great armies. Yes, that look and what put it there made him one of us.

Distinct from most other accounts of race is the potential for sacrifice to transform one’s social, even racial, designation. For Ellison, as represented in Hickman’s personal exploration, the political potential of the black experience is not the possibility of justice but the potential of forgiveness. Ellison uses the endgame between Hickman and Bliss to elucidate the heroic potential of living in this state of sacrifice and marginality.

Ellison’s equation of truth and heroism sound remarkably similar, at least in form, to the Bush administration’s justifications for war. After all, what is the war on terrorism if not the rally of the U.S. populace behind the rhetoric to sacrifice our lives in the name of worldwide democracy? But what is markedly different here is the ethos of that commitment, what Ellison calls an ‘understated heroism.’ Rather than the triumphalist tenor of current U.S. military actions, Ellison’s hero, Hickman, carries the burden of a tragic fate. Through Hickman’s attempt to make ‘Truth’ out of Bliss’s demise, Ellison defines ethical individuals as those “who have had the power to stay awake and struggle.” However, unlike the U.S. drive to victory, Hickman’s struggle defines the value of living in terms of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘muck and confusion.’ Hickman gives up on certainty and redemption in favor of sacrifice and forgiveness.  

The most trying decision for Hickman is the moment he is first confronted by Bliss as a baby. The reader discovers at the end of the novel that Bliss was an offering on behalf of a white woman who wrongly accused Hickman’s brother of rape to explain her extramarital pregnancy. Hickman is filled with hate and revenge on behalf of his brother’s wrongful death and wants to kill both the mother and the unborn child, but something exceeds his desire for revenge. It is the moment when Hickman experiences something ‘more than himself’ that he vows both to raise Bliss in love and devote his life uncompromisingly to forgiveness. Given the cycle of revenge that drives the current conflicts throughout the globe, Ellison’s concept of the hero offers a very inviting — and at the same time humbling — critique of both left and right politics.

Butler makes a similar move in her development of an ethics that is in response to the call of the ‘Other.’ Relying heavily on the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Butler attempts to find her ethical horizon in a commitment to those who have been written out of the Iraqi conflict and other violent actions at home and abroad — in her words, those at the “limits of what we can know.” But to what end? It is in her goals that Butler can be distinguished from Ellison. Butler dedicates her book to “an attempt to break the cycle of violence and revenge” while Ellison simply finds freedom in the sacrifice of justice and security that comes with forgiveness.

What should be clear is that Ellison qua Hickman makes no promises about the success that such a struggle for the truth of compassion will produce. Instead, he redefines the value structure for success, returning to the notion of love that motivates the acceptance of Bliss. Ellison elevates the pursuit of truth beyond the continuation of life:

That kind of man [sic] loves the truth even more than he loves his life, or his wife, or his children, because he’s been designated and set aside to the hard tasks that have to be done. That kind of man will do what he sees as justice even if the earth yawns and swallows him down, and even then his deeds will survive and persist in the land forever.

Thus the ethical force of Hickman’s character is his ability to turn against revenge to the point that it destroys everything he holds dear, even allowing his son to turn against the people he loved and still returning to save him with his forgiveness. It is in this impossible pursuit that Ellison defines freedom. In the selected notes to the Vintage edition of Juneteenth Ellison writes, “This society is not likely to become free of racism, thus it is necessary for Negroes to free themselves by becoming their idea of what a free people should be.”

In this commitment beyond life itself, Ellison would seem to swing toward the ‘pathological deontology’ of Zizek and others who call for sacrifice in the name of ethics. I would not argue that Zizek’s film examples or his historical examples of Jewish uprisings are devoid of ethical content, but they are quite different, at least in Zizek’s representation of these events, from the sacrificial act of forgiveness. The ‘understated’ view of Ellison’s hero militates against the leftists that are spoiling for a fight. Sacrifice in the character of Hickman is not grand or dramatic; it is grounded in humility.

In this way, Ellison’s ethics dissolve the opposition assumed by the spectrum of leftist strategies discussed earlier. Unlike the oppositional strategies of Zizek and others on both the left and the right, Ellison uses Hickman’s intimacy with Bliss to demonstrate the degree to which, in a sense, we are all invited to be ‘Negroes.’ Hickman reminds Bliss and the reader that what was offered was the option to turn against the manipulative institutions of white authority. Bliss literally had the opportunity to be black despite his obviously white appearance. This transformation was made possible because of Hickman’s decision to forgive Bliss and Bliss’s mother.  

It is hard not to see this as a broader invitation to all that read Juneteenth. What Ellison gives up in this formulation is any exclusive right to be black. It is, in a sense, the ultimate act of forgiveness and sacrifice: Those that have injured, white society, are invited to ‘live as if they were free.’ The possibility of justice or retribution is short-circuited by Ellison’s act of forgiveness because it is a form of forgiveness without expectation. Like the Christian tradition that informs Ellison’s ethics, it is an undeserved forgiveness.  

It would be easy to dismiss Ellison’s generosity on the grounds that it lets ‘the injurers’ off the hook. It is difficult to imagine that anyone would not accept Ellison’s forgiveness; it seems so easy. But an opportunity like this comes at a cost; living free requires the sacrifice of power and privilege, trading in safety for a meaningful life. Such a call becomes a new Juneteenth celebration.

The political ethos that comes from this appeal to a universal human trauma, or at least the ability to share that experience, harkens back to the closing words of Ellison’s first novel, Invisible Man. Again, it seems Ellison pins his art, his raison de etre, to the ability ‘on some lower frequency to speak for you.’ Again, this is not a simple solution; in spite of Ellison’s recurrent universalism, we are still left with a question regarding Bliss’s fate: Is it too late? Has Ellison’s provocation, like Hickman, arrived to find a deaf audience that cannot or will not be warned?

Even the state of Bliss’s soul, so to speak, is unclear; the closing moments of the book tell of a ghastly machine that continues to run despite its bastard, irreconcilable parts and a fading, paralyzed Bliss unable to reach out for Hickman’s fading voice. I would like to believe that Hickman’s fidelity to being a preacher ‘remind[ed]’ Bliss to ‘remember’ who he was. But leaving this question open embodies freedom as Ellison defines it; the incompleteness of history serves also as the point of ethical departure; in this tension lies a vision of democracy in stark contrast to the legalism and fear that define the will for revenge at the heart of the current political landscape.

It is difficult to imagine people taking the idea of forgiveness seriously in the context of 9/11 and the resulting obsession with national security, but at the same time, it is difficult to imagine the destruction that is continuing to occur if we were willing to commit ourselves to forgiveness above and beyond our own safety and security. A society without violence is as unlikely as a society without racism, but inevitability seems like a poor reason to not live like we are free. At the very least, it is a reason to seriously consider what Ellison’s work can contribute to the current search for new democratic strategies in an increasingly hostile nation.

Jairus

(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

Here at ITF we love to read, and our editors want to share some of their favorite books with you. Think of it as a book club in cyberspace — with a dash of identity and community, of course!

We kicked off ITF — Off the Shelf in May with Jairus Victor Grove’s Heroic ethics, a critique of Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth.  Though May has come and gone, we promise to keep the intriguing books coming. Each month an ITF editor will review a book concerning identity and/or community. The featured works will be a mix of old and new, fiction and nonfiction.

We’ll keep our Bookshelf at Powells.com updated so that you can purchase the books we’ll be reviewing in subsequent months a month or more in advance. And don’t worry, if you prefer to shop at Amazon, just click here or on the titles of the books listed at the bottom of this page. You’ll be taken right to the Amazon site, where you can purchase those books and start reading. (Of course, if you already have a dog-eared copy of the book sitting on your bookshelf somewhere, more power to you.)

While we’ll make our book reviews available to all ITF readers, only readers like you who are registered on our site have access to all the special features of Off the Shelf. In this space, members can access exclusive interviews with the authors of selected books and participate in online discussions with other ITF readers and editors about the books. Members can submit their own reviews of the Book of the Month for publication on our site. And you don’t have to wait for us to publish our reviews to submit yours!

So don’t just sit there — get your copy of Bernard Henri Levy’s War, Evil, and the End of History now! And at the risk of sounding like your high school English teacher, beware: There aren’t CliffsNotes for most of our recommendations. So it’s probably a good idea for you to get your hands on — and read — our featured books ahead of time.

Here’s what we’ll be taking Off the Shelf during the next few months:

May: Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth
June: Benjamin Weissman’s Headless
July: David Bezmozgis’ Natasha and Other Stories
August: David K. Shipler’s The Working Poor
September: Bernard Henri Levy’s War, Evil, and the End of History
October: Rebecca Carroll’s Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois From a Collective Memoir of Souls