21420: Lemieux: Toronto Globe and Mail:Haunted by Haiti's ghosts (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

Haunted by Haiti's ghosts

Edwige Danticat's latest novel deals with the
legacy of evil wrought by her country's terrible
history, RAY CONLOGUE writes



By RAY CONLOGUE


UPDATED AT 10:29 PM EDT  Monday, Apr. 19, 2004

MONTREAL -- Nothing could be further from the
image of Haiti as a place of violent nihilism and
a crumbled civil society than Edwige Danticat.

This young novelist, who has already gained
acclaim as a leading voice among Haitian-American
writers, has kindly eyes, a soft mouth and
dimpled cheeks. She speaks shyly and almost sotto
voce, and her earlier book, Breath, Eyes, Memory
was alluring enough to get her invited onto The
Oprah Winfrey Show.

But getting on Oprah was never one of Danticat's
career objectives. Her graceful prose style and
growing moral authority are still at the service
of the United States' million-strong Haitian
community ("which is where I believe many of my
readers are located," she says). And she does not
hesitate to attack the most difficult subjects,
from the devaluation of women in Haitian society,
to the poisoned legacy of three decades of
dictatorship.

Her latest novel is The Dew Breaker, from the
Creole expression shouket laroze. It describes
the killers of the Duvalier dictatorship who
padded through the early-morning dew and dragged
people from their homes. In particular, the book
revolves around a former "dew breaker" who
renounced his ways, fled to Brooklyn to become a
barber and devoted father -- and then made the
great error of lying to his daughter about his
past.

"We have 29 years of this history in Haiti," says
34-year-old Danticat, who is in Montreal for the
Blue Metropolis festival and also to catch up
with the large community of French-speaking
Haitian writers there. "There are a lot of people
like 'the barber.' A dew breaker named Lou Désir
left Haiti disguised as a nun. So a lot of people
were able to do these things. And . . . the same
conditions are creating a whole new generation to
replace them."

This is a veiled allusion to the current chaos in
Haiti, which risks a return to the violence of
the Duvalier era. Danticat tries to be hopeful,
but her great subject is the persistence and
mutability of evil. She smiles wanly. "There is
going to be a future for Haiti, so we might as
well hope it will be a little better."

The Dew Breaker took shape first as a short story
about a young woman artist named Ka, whose father
has abruptly destroyed a carving she made of him.
He was, he declares, never a prisoner, as the
carving depicts. He was a torturer. He lied to
her, and now he wants to make a clean breast of
it.

The rest of the book is a series of apparently
unrelated stories about Haitians in New York,
linked only by the fact that each has, or
imagines they have, some contact with "the
barber." There is a deluded woman, an embroiderer
of wedding dresses, who is sure that the murderer
of her family follows her everywhere in New York,
moving to any street she lives on. She has heard
he is a barber, and yet she has probably never
seen the man. But in another story, a young man
who witnessed "the barber" shooting his parents
to death as a child, discovers that the man is
living upstairs from his basement room in
Brooklyn. In fact, the barber is his landlord.

The book concludes with a flashback to 1968, when
the barber committed his final murder and fled
Haiti. It ends with a brief reflection on his
daughter Ka, who must now go forward in the
knowledge that she exists because her father's
atrocities led him to the woman who would become
her mother.

Danticat, too, was born in the midst of this
horror, but her family survived it relatively
unharmed. Her father, a shoemaker and sometime
shirt-maker in Port-au-Prince, had "political
trouble" (as she puts it) and moved with her
mother to the United States. But he left behind
his pretty four-year-old daughter, and it was
eight years before he could bring her to the
United States.

During that time, little Edwidge, left in her
aunt's care, knew nothing of her parents apart
from an occasional Sunday phone call at a local
post office. "My story was of being separated
from my parents, "lob ba dlo" (là-bas de l'eau,
or "across the water"). They could have died and
I wouldn't have known right away."

When they finally brought her to Miami, she was a
Creole-speaking little girl who had to learn
English and become American. This was traumatic
enough to inspire her first novel, Breath, Eyes,
Memory. "It was pretty clearly autobiographical,"
she says with a laugh, "about a girl who moves to
the U.S. at age 12. You have to write that book
before you can go on."

The Dew Breaker contains a surprising amount of
humour and sly observation of celebrity-obsessed
American life. There is Ka, listening to the
banal remarks of the famous TV star Gabrielle
Fonteneau and realizing that, "I'm not beyond the
spontaneous fanaticism inspired by famous people,
whose breezy declarations seem to carry so much
more weight than those of ordinary mortals."
There is a young woman trying to memorize the
Gettysburg Address for a citizenship test in
spite of the fact that her English is weak,
except for food words learned at her restaurant:
"four scones and seven tears ago, our fathers
blew up this condiment." The U.S. emerges in all
of its "fluffyhead" glory (to use an expression
of Tama Janowitz).

But Danticat ably juxtaposes these scenes with
dizzying, Kafka-esque descents into the minds of
killers and victims from a traumatized culture.
She visits the minds both of the barber and of
his final victim, a radical preacher who
advocates revolution even as his executioners
await him outside the church.

"Maybe there is a dark corner of oneself that
feeds characters like the minister and the
barber," she says. "The minister is seeking
martyrdom, and so I tried to imagine my own
death. People had to do that under the
dictatorship because there was no way to escape
it."

Danticat has recently become a regular visitor on
TV talk shows, where she quietly does battle with
the presumption that her country of birth is an
utter failure and isn't it wonderful to live in
the USA? "I like to remind them that Haiti was
occupied from 1915 to 1924 by the American army,
just like Iraq today. And when the Haitians would
catch an American, they would hang and burn him.
And that Haiti today still has structures from
that time. Its army, for example," she concludes
with a small smile, "was created by the
Americans."

Many of her readers are young Haitian-Americans
who were born in the United States. "The first
issue for them is to understand the experience
their parents had in Haiti. Many of them were
born here. They hear their parents talking about
beautiful physical memories -- the beaches, the
mountains -- like the Fonteneaus [the wealthy
family in The Dew Breaker]. But what they see are
these hellish images on CNN."

A problem for these young people is that their
parents' generation, the one that knew the
horrors of the Duvalier regime firsthand, wrote
very little. These people's energy went into
learning the English language, and in the end
they had forgotten too much French and learned
not enough English to become writers. "Language
is a vessel of intimacy, and that generation did
not possess such a vessel."

The contrast with the Haitians of Quebec is
obvious. "There was an earlier generation of
Haitian writers in Quebec who were able to be
productive because, unlike us in the United
States, they didn't have a language barrier. So
in the U.S., we're doing it a generation later,
and our first Haitian writers are only emerging
now." She is particularly proud of editing a
volume of stories by 33 young Haitian-Americans,
called The Butterfly's Wing.

Thinking back to her own childhood memories,
Danticat describes a hierarchical society where a
man like her father could not possibly have met a
rich person. The wealthy elite is so disdainful
of the throngs of the poor, she says, "that there
could never be a Romeo and Juliet story there.
Nobody would ever forsake their class for love."

And yet her own parents are deeply connected to
their homeland and greatly fear that their
grandchildren will know nothing of it. "I am the
only one of my four siblings who married a
Haitian. When she talks of my siblings, my mom
says, 'Oh, no, I won't be able to speak Creole
with my grandchildren!' " Danticat sprinkles her
books with Haitian Creole, which is a mixture of
the simplified French spoken by slaves together
with bits of African languages. She used to
italicize the Creole expressions, "until the
Dominican writer Junot Diaz taught me not to do
that. He said, 'I don't speak in italics.' " So
she threads the Creole casually into the English
dialogue, always taking care to paraphrase or
translate it within the following couple of
sentences.

"I've been accused of exoticizing my writing, but
I don't do it a lot; and when I do, it's to
deepen and richen the experience of the stories
for my Haitian readers."

And although she does not yet have children,
she's very sure they will speak Creole, and that
her mother will be pleased.









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