22033; (Arthur) Danticat: Close shaves from Haiti to Brooklyn (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Tttnhm@aol.com

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat
Close shaves from Haiti to Brooklyn
By Ian Thomson
21 May 2004 -The Independent

Edwidge Danticat is a young Haitian writer who lives in Florida. Her debut
novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, memorably fused West Indian folklore with scenes
from the Haitian diaspora in America. When Danticat left Haiti for the US with
her parents in 1981, aged 12, her birthplace was under the dictatorship of
President "Baby Doc" Duvalier and his feared Tontons Macoute. In much of her work
she interrogates Haiti's troubled past as well as her own ambivalent status as
a Haitian exile. The Dew Breaker, her latest novel, chronicles both the
victims and perpetrators of Macoute violence as they later struggle to survive in
West Indian enclaves of New York.

At first the novel appears to be in disarray, the plot leaping backwards and
forwards in time. A narrative soon emerges, however, and the disparate stories
converge into a coherent finale. Danticat's literary influences have always
been diverse, and here she borrows from Graham Greene's anti-Duvalierist novel
The Comedians as well as Alex Garland's disjointed thriller The Tesseract to
create a sequence of stories-within-stories. These stories interlock round the
disturbed personality of a former "dew breaker", the name given to a
government torturer from the Duvalier years ("they'd often come before dawn," recalls a
victim, "as the dew was setting on the leaves, and they'd take you away").

Danticat's Dew Breaker, once a political big shot, is now a scared and broken
man who scrapes a living as a barber in Brooklyn. Each day he lives in fear
that his identity will be revealed by a new customer. With immense skill,
Danticat builds up the suspense and foreboding as the retired torturer evades
exposure. His daughter is a sculptor, and through her Danticat introduces us to
other Haitian characters in and around Brooklyn, among them nurses, minicab
drivers and day-care workers.

In the finest story, "Night Talkers", a Haitian-American youth named Dany
returns to Haiti to inform his aunt that he has found the man who murdered their
family. Too frightened to confront the Dew Breaker, Dany crept into his house
at night and stared down at the murderer's sleeping face. Should he strangle
the man in vengeance? (Dany was unaware that his parents' killer lived across
the block, but in this dramatic way unrelated lives can collide, Danticat seems
to be saying.) The closing story is a knuckle-biting account of the Dew
Breaker's last killing in Haiti before he fled to America and assumed a new
identity. The book's random intersections and plots are here satisfyingly resolved.
Danticat's glazed, elegant prose propels The Dew Breaker along effortlessly.
This excellent, unsettling novel is her finest, and a literary gem.

Ian Thomson's 'Bonjour Blanc: a journey through Haiti' (Vintage) is reissued
this month


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