20171: (Craig) Books of The Times | 'The Dew Breaker' (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig <hoosier@att.net>

Books of The Times | 'The Dew Breaker': Hiding From a Brutal Past Spent Shattering Lives in Haiti
March 10, 2004
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Haiti's bloody and bitter history of violence, corruption
and vengeance stalks all the characters in Edwidge
Danticat's remarkable new novel, infecting their dreams and
circumscribing their expectations. It is a nightmare they
are all trying in vain to rewind and erase.

The title character, the so-called Dew Breaker, is a
seemingly ordinary Haitian immigrant living a willfully
quiet life in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter. But he
is hiding a terrible secret: back in the 1960's in Haiti he
was a member of the dreaded Tontons Macoute, the
blood-soaked enforcers of Fran?ois Duvalier's murderous
regime.

The Dew Breaker's name came from the fact that he and his
henchmen would usually arrive "before dawn, as the dew was
settling on the leaves" to abduct victims from their homes;
he tortured and killed untold numbers of innocents,
including a much-loved preacher who dared to speak out
against the government. The scar on his face is both a mark
of Cain and a reminder of his violent past.

The other people in this book - who, we gradually learn,
are members of the Dew Breaker's family and former victims
and their family members - are equally in thrall to the
past. Whether they have stayed in Port-au-Prince or left
for the United States to try to write a second act to their
lives, they all find themselves haunted by the long events
that left them with broken bodies, fractured families or
smashed hopes. For these characters the dead are not merely
ghosts; they are palpable, intimately felt presences in
their daily lives.

In her earlier books "Breath, Eyes, Memory," "Krik? Krak!"
and "The Farming of Bones," Ms. Danticat, who was born in
Haiti and moved to the United States when she was 12,
demonstrated an ability to use her lyric gift of language
and her emotional clarity to show how the public and the
private, the personal and the political are intertwined in
the lives of Haitians and Haitian-Americans, and to show
how the past anchors and hobbles the present.

"The Dew Breaker" not only showcases these same qualities,
but it is also Ms. Danticat's most persuasive, organic
performance yet. As seamless as it is compelling, the novel
recounts its harrowing tale in limpid, understated prose,
using a looping structure of overlapping stories to tell
the Dew Breaker's story by indirection.

It is a tale that uses its characters' experiences as a
prism to examine Haiti's own difficulties in breaking free
from a centuries-old cycle of violence and vengeance that
continues through today, a tale that simultaneously unfolds
to become a philosophical meditation on the possibility of
redemption and the longing of victims and victimizers alike
to believe in the promise of new beginnings held forth by
the American Dream.

Ms. Danticat gives us few direct glimpses of the Dew
Breaker. Instead we see him through the eyes of others:
former victims, who believe they have seen him, their
tormentor, walking the streets of Brooklyn, an evil spirit
come back to torment them; his wife, Anne, a devout woman
who believes in miracles and the miracle of his
transformation; and their Americanized daughter, who has
grown up thinking of him as an ordinary father, a man she
can love and rebel against like any other child.

The Dew Breaker calls his daughter ka - the ancient
Egyptian word for the soul; he sees her and her mother as
good angels, his rescuers from his past. When he confesses
his past to his daughter, she immediately wonders if he is
"going to explain why he and my mother have no close
friends, why they've never had anyone over to the house,
why they never speak of any relatives in Haiti or anywhere
else, or have never returned there or, even after I learned
Creole from them, have never taught me anything else about
the country beyond what I could find out on my own, on the
television, in newspapers, in books?"

Each tale in "The Dew Breaker" could stand on its own as a
beautifully made story, but they come together like
jigsaw-puzzle pieces to create a picture of this man's
terrible history and his and his victims' afterlife. Some
of the puzzle pieces are missing of course, but this is a
matter of design. It is a measure of Ms. Danticat's fierce,
elliptical artistry that she makes the elisions count as
much as her piercing, indelible words.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/10/books/10KAKU.html?ex=1079918717&ei=1&en=0af181499de35b8c
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company