20374: Lemieux: NY Post: Haitian author's new book very timely (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

NY Post
March 14, 2004

ON HAITI'S HEARTACHE

By DYLAN FOLEY
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Danticat says her native country, Haiti, has "never had a
chance to mourn."
- N.Y. Post: Jennifer Weisbord

March 14, 2004 -- With sad but very appropriate timing,
Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat has released a new
fiction collection, "The Dew Breaker" (Knopf, $22). The
linked short stories follow a former Haitian government
torturer who is now living as an anonymous barber in
Brooklyn.
The stories look at the torturer through his own eyes, and
through those of his daughter, his wife and his victims.

"I was interested in seeing how different people saw the
same man," says Danticat, in an interview in a Greenwich
Village cafe. "It is dangerous to oversimplify him, because
there are so many layers."

Danticat's joy at publishing a new book is overshadowed by
the violence in her native land in the wake of President
Aristide's ouster. "I feel very sad because Haiti is in a
quagmire," says the 35-year-old writer. "I have been so
numb these past few days."

Her book, coincidentally, partially takes place during the
29-year father-son Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, which
also ended in a coup in 1986.

The title is a translation of the Creole slang for the
habit of Haitian death squads of picking up their victims
at dawn.

The stories move back in forth in time from Haiti of the
1960s, where the torturer plied his trade of rape and
murder, to present-day New York, where his survivors cope
with their physical and emotional scars.

Danticat's gorgeous prose is in stark contrast to its
subject matter: the everyday horrors of life under a brutal
regime. A fisherman is murdered for his fish market stall.
A woman is severely beaten because she won't date a
militiaman.

At the beginning of the stories, Ka Bienaime, a
thirtysomething artist in New York, is told in the present
by her father that he was a torturer, not a political
victim.

She is shocked to learn that her kind father had once
excelled at beating and killing Haitian dissidents.

Danticat herself was raised in Port-au-Prince for the first
12 years of her life. She remembers the everyday oppression
and fear of the Duvalier regime.

"Everybody who grew up in that period, there were things
you could not say," she says. "In my mother's generation,
there were public executions. [Papa Doc] Duvalier was a
master of terror and knew how to use the psychology of the
people.

"Someone could be there one day, then you'd never hear from
them again," she continues. "You weren't even allowed to
ask. Some would have been arrested, some would have fled."

Her parents left Haiti for economic opportunity. Her father
was a cab driver and her mother worked in a textile
factory.

Danticat followed them to New York City a few years later
in 1981, and went on to attend Barnard College, where she
started her first novel "Breath, Eyes, Memory," which
become an Oprah Book Club selection.

Her second novel, "The Farming of Bones," won an American
Book Award.

And her short story collection "Krik? Krak!" was a finalist
for the prestigious National Book Award.

All of Danticat's fiction deals with the political violence
inflicted on the Haitian people by a series of regimes and
the neighboring Dominican Republic.

In the new book, Danticat explores the mindset of Anne, the
dew breaker's wife. Anne is the stepsister of a murdered
dissident, but lives with her husband out of a mixture of
denial and commitment.

"When her daughter asks Anne, 'How do you love him?', I
don't think she understands herself," says Danticat.
"Everyday, she wakes up and she has to forgive him over and
over again. Silence is one of the ways she has chosen to
deal with it."

The survivors in her stories often have trouble leaving
behind their torturers. "In the Haitian or the Rwandan
experience, or even in the Holocaust experience, we can't
escape these torturers," says Danticat. "Even if we never
see them again, they are still with us.

"What happens in Haiti is so dramatic," she continues. "It
begs for a fictional parallel. You'll see a convicted
murderer entering a town with the rebels and he's cheered
by the crowds. If you wrote this, no one would believe
you."

Though horrified by this month's coup in Haiti, Danticat
was no fan of Aristide.

"Aristide made some terrible mistakes, and some of them
came back to bite him on the butt," she says. "He harbored
some terrible people himself" - including a police chief
who murdered a journalist friend of Danticat's.

With Haiti suffering 33 coups over 200 years, Danticat
notes there is never time to process the chaos. "Haiti's
struggle has been to go from survival to some long-term
plan," she says.

"A friend of mine once said, our biggest problem is that
we've never had a chance to mourn, we've never had a good
cry. Each time something happens, we immediately move into
the next crisis."


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