20632: (Craig) NYT Books: 'The Dew Breaker': Off the Island (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig <hoosier@att.net>


'The Dew Breaker': Off the Island
March 21, 2004
By RICHARD EDER

Archimedes held that he could lift the earth if he had a
lever long enough, and an extraplanetary fulcrum to rest it
on. There are horrors so heavy that they seem untellable.
To bear to tell them so that we can bear to read them, a
writer must find somewhere outside -- peaceful, unmarked --
to project them from. Atrocity enters the imagination not
as the violating point of the knife but as the fair flesh
violated.

That is how the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat
has managed over the past 10 years to portray with such
terrifying wit and flowered pungency the torment of the
Haitian people. In one of the stories in "Krik? Krak!," a
National Book Award finalist, a maid to a rich Haitian
family finds a dead baby, names it Rose, keeps it for days,
washing it to dissipate the smell, and finally buries it.
It is discovered by the gardener, her lover, who calls the
police.

So much for horror; but what locks it in is the maid's
irony: "We made a pretty picture standing there, Rose, me
and him. Between the pool and the gardenias, waiting on the
law."

Or in "The Farming of Bones," a novel about Trujillo's
1930's massacre of Haitian workers in the Dominican
Republic, no awful detail precipitates the bloody swirl so
clearly as the lilting innocence of the word "parsley."
"Pesa" in Creole, "perejil" in Spanish; but Haitians
can't manage the Spanish "r" and its guttural "j," so
those unable to say "perejil" were killed and parsley
stuffed in their mouths.

The final and title story of "The Dew Breaker,"
Danticat's new collection, makes a more direct approach to
horror. Set in the 1960's during the reign of Francois
Duvalier, it recounts, dry-mouthed, the hours spent by a
Tonton Macoute (one of Duvalier's murderous agents) as he
waits in his car for a dissident preacher to arrive at
church.

The agent bursts in after the sermon, throws the priest
into a truck, tortures him and takes him to headquarters to
kill him. Word mysteriously comes -- the regime's terrors
were always mysterious -- that he is to be released
instead. Before the agent can obey, the priest gouges his
face with a shard of wood; the agent shoots him dead.

Yet even this story, with its headlong darkness, has
strangely flickering lights that permit us to see it by.
Waiting, the agent sends a loitering schoolboy to buy
cigarettes; when the boy returns, the man questions him
paternally about his schoolwork. There is the street scene
itself. Among the kiosks purveying tobacco, trinkets and
food, the waiting car is one kiosk more, purveying death;
and as much part of daily neighborhood life as the others.

When the priest is dragged into prison, bleeding and
burned with cigarettes, his cellmates urinate on him. It is
a work not of contempt but of corporal mercy, since they
believe urine to heal and soothe. Haiti lives at depths
where contempt cannot grow; down there, mercy straggles but
persists.

In her other stories and in this collection Danticat often
uses the Haitian community in the United States as the
horror-spared site for her fulcrum. Despite difficulties,
strangeness and uncertainties, these characters are
swimmers pulled from the depths. Nitrogen bubbles course
agonizingly in their bloodstream, memories rack them; yet
there is an uncertain daylight, and it is by this that
darkness is called up and told.

In "The Funeral Singer," the telling is light but
painful. Three Haitian women meet regularly at a restaurant
one owns on the Upper West Side. She'd fled after being
forced to have sex with the Tonton Macoutes; another, after
her painter husband was shot for a caricature of Duvalier.
The third, the narrator, was the daughter of a fisherman
who drowned, perhaps deliberately, after his fish stall was
taken over. At his funeral she sang "Brother Timonie" --
the name means "steersman" -- so affectingly that soon
she was in demand at other funerals. Now, with the slow
rock of a fishing boat on a sea swell, the women talk,
remember, try to look ahead. Lubricated with rum, the
narrator sings "Brother Timonie," the steersman's song
learned from her father. The others join in; tableware is
smashed. "And for the rest of the night," the story
concludes, "we raise our glasses, broken and unbroken
alike, to the terrible days behind us and the uncertain
ones ahead."

In "Monkey Tails," an immigrant groping at the edge of
security and perhaps happiness lies in bed with his
pregnant wife and tapes, for their unborn child, his own
childhood memories of chaos and betrayal. In "Seven," a
man preparing for his wife's arrival from Haiti, after
seven years apart, gets his bachelor housemates to agree
not to sit around in their underwear.

Venturing from their room on her first night, the wife
reports "two men playing dominoes in the kitchen . . .
dressed in identical pink satin robes." It is the lightest
of the stories yet shadowed with the marital uncertainty
that follows long separation.

In a breathtaking displacement, Danticat starts the
collection with the aftermath, 25 years later, of the
prison murder story recounted at the end. A young
Haitian-American artist drives to Florida to deliver a
carving. Her father comes for the ride, a quiet man who has
worked as a barber in Brooklyn since he fled Haiti. She
adores him; in fact, he is her sole subject so far,
rendered kneeling, naked and disfigured by a facial scar
inflicted in a Haitian jail. Her intention was to symbolize
the torment of their country; soon we see the terrible
complexity of the torment.

One morning the father sneaks out of their motel and throws
the sculpture into a lake. He doesn't deserve a statue, he
tells her. "Your father was the hunter, he was not the
prey." His years in prison were spent as torturer and
killer. As for the nightmares he often complained of, they
were "of what I, your father, did to others."

To the reader -- who has not yet been plunged into the
terror of the final story -- it is a whiplash, searing yet
oddly cauterized. This is America, not Haiti, and the
daughter can own the confidence to feel horror and express
it. "How do you love him?" she demands of her mother, who
always knew the truth and who also knew a different one.
Her husband had indeed fled a nightmare. "You and me, we
save him," the mother says. "When I meet him, it made him
stop hurt the people. This how I see it. He a seed thrown
in rock. You, me, we make him take root."

A different truth and one impossible, perhaps, for an
American daughter to accept. Hard for the reader, as well.
And almost certainly for Danticat. She has written a
Haitian truth: prisoners all, even the jailers. With
neither forgiveness nor contempt, she sets it upon a
fulcrum from where she's had the courage and art to
displace the world even as she is displaced by it.



Richard Eder writes book reviews and articles for The
Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/books/review/21EDERLT.html?ex=1080862291&ei=1&en=863a828db15e29f3
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company