20148: (Hermantin)Miami-Herald-THE DEW BREAKER (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Sun, Mar. 07, 2004

FICTION | THE DEW BREAKER


SCAR FACE

A HUNTER AND HIS PREY ARE THE FOCUS OF HAITIAN-BORN EDWIDGE DANTICAT'S NOVEL
ABOUT A TORTURER


The Dew Breaker. Edwidge Danticat. Knopf. 256 pages. $22.

BY BETSY WILLEFORD

What is a dew breaker, you ask, as good a place as any to start. A torturer,
in Edwidge Danticat's urbane translation. ``They'd come before dawn as the
dew was settling on the leaves, and they'd take you away.''

The torturer in question is never mentioned by name in the nine related
stories that make up this novel, although Danticat provides a layered
perspective of him. He is referred to as ''father,'' ''the landlord,'' ''the
barber,'' ''the fat man,'' ''sergeant,'' as Danticat moves her story across
time, place and that third dimension, memory.

When we first meet him he is a 65-year-old barber, a ''quiet and distant
man,'' living and working in Brooklyn, forced by circumstance finally to
tell his grown daughter that his nightmares and the ''blunt, ropelike scar''
down the right side of his face are not, as he has always claimed, the
result of his spending a year in a Haitian prison. ''Your father was the
hunter,'' he confesses. ``He was not the prey.''

During the early years of the Duvalier father-son dictatorship he was a
guard whose zeal made him first among equals at the notorious barracks
Casernes Dessalines. As the novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, who did time on
the other side of those cell bars once wrote, ``You become a true gendarme,
a torturer.''

Born in East Flatbush, the daughter has a hazy notion of the hallucinatory
realities of Haiti. She wonders why her parents never went back to visit,
why although they live in a Haitian-American neighborhood, they have no
close friends, never invite people to their home, never talk about relatives
in Haiti. In that sense the dew breaker's daughter resembles Aline, a young
journalist in ''The Bridal Seamstress.'' Raised in Somerset, Mass. Aline is
a dutiful first-generation American who learns more about Haiti from
Beatrice, the seamstress, than she ever did from her parents.

Beatrice lives in Queens, moves from rented house to rented house, convinced
that the man who whipped the soles of her feet until they bled, then sent
her to walk barefoot on the tar roads, occupies vacant houses wherever she
goes, watching her. When Aline asks if she's sure it is the same man,
Beatrice describes the peculiar intimacy between an officially sanctioned
thug and his victims. ``You never look at anyone the way you do someone like
this. No one will ever have that much of your attention.''

The interview leaves Aline aware for the first time of ''men and women whose
tremendous agonies fill every blank space in their lives.'' The novel is a
palimpsest of such people, their memories, their perceptions, secrets,
evasions, loneliness, grief. It also is a vivid document of recent Haitian
and Haitian-American history, populated by references to Patrick Dorismund,
Abner Louima, Emannuel Constant, the macoute called Madame Max who was the
dew breaker's superior at Casernes.

Danticat invokes the names sparingly, knowing she can be more direct by
being oblique. Images, for instance of water babies -- stillborn infants,
aborted fetuses, children who drowned young -- appear throughout the book,
suggesting irrevocable loss. The scenes are memorable, cinematic. An
ashen-faced Francois Duvalier, girded in waistcoat, hat, a .38 ''visibly
attached to his belt, and a rifle at his side'' speaks from the presidential
palace balcony for five or six hours during which no one in the assembled
crowd dares move. (A woman whose truncated childhood began in pre-war
Germany once described being taken, at age 6 and suffering a runny nose, to
hear Hitler speak. She stood motionless for hours.)

Ultimately, Danticat's book is about memory. The street kid in one of
Port-au-Prince's rust-colored slums whom the dew breaker sends to buy a pack
of cigarettes is studying history. Thirty years later, in the comparative
safety of the United States, children of Haitian exiles study art, or French
literature, become nurses, editors, TV stars. Like their contemporaries from
other backgrounds, their focus is turned toward the future.

Ripped from today's headlines is a loathsome phrase that should be retired
even from blurb-speak. Chaos and brutality are ever present in Haiti, as
they are now. In less dramatic times, Haiti is easy to dismiss. When
Washington invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, who recalled that the U.S.
Marines had occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934? Who pondered what the fruits
of that occupation were? Difficult to read Danticat's understated and
remarkably unsentimental novel without thinking of Auden's poem which begins
``About suffering they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters -- how it takes
place/ While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
dully along.''

Betsy Willeford is a writer in Miami.

_________________________________________________________________
One-click access to Hotmail from any Web page – download MSN Toolbar now!
http://clk.atdmt.com/AVE/go/onm00200413ave/direct/01/