20640: (hermantin)Sun-Sentinel-Inescapable ghosts of Haitian history (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Inescapable ghosts of Haitian history

By Glenn McNatt
The Baltimore Sun
Posted March 21 2004

The Dew Breaker. Edwidge Danticat. Knopf. $22.95. 256 pp.

Marx said that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. On
the beautiful, tormented island of Haiti, tragedy repeats itself simply as
more of the same.

Haiti was founded in 1804 in the wake of a slave rebellion that threw off
French colonial rule and established the country as the world's first black
republic.

The liberation was brief; decades of warfare followed, and were followed by
oppression and abject poverty under brutal military governments and
tyrannical dictators whose misrule has persisted more or less uninterrupted
down to the present day.

So much tragedy invariably leaves its imprint on a people, a terrible tangle
of history, biography, circumstance and chance that forms the emotional
backdrop of Edwidge Danticat's luminous novel, The Dew Breaker.

As Haiti's history was written mostly in blood, so Danticat's story revolves
around a man who was intimately tied to the bloodletting -- as a torturer
and executioner for the Duvalier regime. He was called the Dew Breaker
because he preferred to collect his victims before dawn.

We meet him decades later, after he has moved to the United States, where he
lives quietly with his terrible secret while working as a barber in Brooklyn
and trying to avoid questions about his past.

This is necessary because the tightly knit Haitian community in New York is
full of people who have lost parents, siblings and other relatives and
friends to the apparatus of terror he once served.

Danticat's narrative is organized as a series of linked short stories,
several of which have been published previously. Her characters are ordinary
people -- nurses, hairdressers, janitors and professional funeral singers --
who find themselves inextricably enmeshed in their country's terrifying past
and the lies that cover it up.

The Dew Breaker's American-born daughter is an artist who obsessively carves
her father's portrait. When he unexpectedly confesses his crimes during a
trip to Florida, she realizes that the face she has been scrutinizing for
years belongs to someone she has never really known.

Her mother, Anne, the Dew Breaker's wife, was the sister-in-law of the last
man her husband murdered before leaving Haiti. Even the janitor who rents a
basement room in the family's house in Brooklyn is the son of two more of
his victims.

In Danticat's moral universe, the ghosts of history are everywhere and
inescapable. An elderly seamstress tells a reporter the man who tortured her
in Haiti now lives just down the street. The Dew Breaker's daughter panics
when she thinks she spots a death-squad leader sitting across the aisle in
church.

This is a tale of crime and punishment in the great tradition of Dostoevski:
What good there is comes, if ever, at a steep price, and even then there's
no telling whether it will last.

In Haiti's case, the lessons of history are not encouraging, and neither is
Danticat, whose characters suffer mightily for their country's bloody past
even as they struggle to overcome it.

The Baltimore Sun is a Tribune Co. newspaper.

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