22498: radtimes: Grappling With Haiti's Beasts (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Grappling With Haiti's Beasts

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2004-06-22.htm

Atlantic Unbound | June 22, 2004

Edwidge Danticat talks about reconnecting with her homeland—and coming to
terms with its legacy of violence—through fiction

The acclaimed fiction writer Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and raised
there by an aunt and uncle after her parents immigrated to the United
States in search of a better life. It was not until age twelve that
Danticat moved to the United States to reunite with her parents in
Brooklyn, New York. There, she found herself turning to books for
companionship and to escape the isolation of the early years of the
immigrant experience.

She went on to attend college at Barnard and graduate school at Brown, and
has since written extensively about her native Haiti in all its tremendous
beauty and tragic bloodshed. She found early success as a writer—perhaps in
part because she experienced so much at a young age. Breath, Eyes, Memory,
her debut novel about a young Haitian girl's immigration to the United
States, was an Oprah Book Club selection. Krik? Krak!, a series of stories
about life under Haiti's dictatorships, was a National Book Award finalist.
And her third book, The Farming of Bones, about an orphaned Haitian girl
living in the Dominican Republic during the dictator Trujillo's genocide,
won an American Book Award.

In her new book, The Dew Breaker, Danticat explores Haiti's legacy of
violence and its lingering effects not only on those who have suffered from
it, but also on those who perpetrated it. The narrative centers on a "dew
breaker," a member of the Duvalier regime's government henchmen and
volunteer torturers, also known as the Tontons Macoutes. We meet this
particular dew breaker—who remains nameless throughout the book—in his
later years, when he's living a quiet life in America with his wife and
daughter. Through a series of interconnected stories, we also meet some of
his victims, and witness their daily struggles to make sense of the
physical pain they endured at his hands and the emotional pain they
continue to endure as a result.

Danticat was named one of "30 Under 30" creative people to watch by New
York Times Magazine in 1995, one of the Best Young American Novelists by
Granta in 1996, and one of the "15 Gutsiest Women of the Year" by Jane
Magazine in 1998. She teaches Creative Writing at New York University.

We spoke by telephone on May 1.

—Dana Rousmaniere

Why did you decide to write The Dew Breaker as a series of interconnected
stories, as opposed to one narrative?

I started writing "The Book of the Dead," the first story in The Dew
Breaker, as a short story, and everything in the rest of the book sprang
from that. I meant to write a story about a girl and her father who go on a
trip where he reveals that he's not a victim of torture as she thought he
was, but actually a torturer. From there, I wanted to find out more about
him, so I started writing the last story, "The Dew Breaker," about his
past, and then the middle story, "The Book of Miracles." Then I found
myself writing other stories that were connected to him in the perimeters.
So one story led to another. When it came together it just seemed like the
structure it was meant to have. If I were writing a novel, I would have had
a different approach.

Can you explain the significance of the term "dew breaker," and why you
chose to center the stories on this character?

The term "dew breaker" is a Creole expression for a representative of the
dictatorship in a rural area—a person with free reign in the area, acting
as judge, jury, and executioner. A dew breaker comes in the early morning
to claim his victims, breaking the dew on the grass. I decided to center
the book around this character and around the dictatorship because my
entire childhood was spent in a dictatorship. Growing up, I was always
seeing people like that, and the things they did in the name of
dictatorship. I didn't really understand it then, so I wanted to revisit it
through the eyes of someone who was a victim of the dictatorship, and also
through the eyes of a perpetrator.

It must have been scary to witness that sort of violence as a young child.

I didn't see it head-on. But it wasn't unusual to see people being arrested
without knowing what they had done, or to see people disappear and never
know why. Writing this was a way for me to try to understand it better now.

Do these same things still happen in Haiti today?

Not to that extent, but there are certainly people who are vulnerable to
political violence because they support a certain side.

Are the stories you tell in The Dewbreaker fictionalized accounts of real
events?

I guess in some ways they're a collage of real events. The dew breaker
certainly could have been a real person. The reason he doesn't have a name
in the story is because there were so many people like him. Even though
most of the people are fictional characters, they intermingle with a lot of
real people as well.

A theme that runs throughout each of the stories is separation from loved
ones, whether it's a husband in America separated from his wife in Haiti, a
daughter in America separated from her parents in Haiti, or a child living
in Haiti without one or both parental figures. To what extent are these
stories based on your own experience of having been raised by your aunt and
uncle while your parents were in America?

The idea of family separation due to economic or political situations
interests me very deeply because it's something that happened to me. My
parents left Haiti when I was very young, and I was separated from them for
about eight years. I'm interested in exploring not just how it happens and
why it happens, but also the aftermath—how do parents and children,
husbands and wives, live with these separations? People who have read the
book tell me they can't believe people were separated for that long. But
it's quite common. I'm very much interested in the effects of those kinds
of separations and their human costs.

What was the human cost in your own situation?

There was a lot of heartbreak. But I was lucky that my family was able to
come together again. There are some families that never regroup and never
heal from that separation. I think that in those situations, absences are
as important as presences. When people aren't there for certain holidays,
certain meals, certain moments in life, it becomes very poignant.

In your stories each of the Haitian émigrés now living in America seems to
be living a life of isolation, whereas you portray the sense of community
in Haiti as very strong. Have you been able to find a sense of community
among Haitians living in America?

Absolutely. There's isolation in the immigrant situation, but a lot of
people have managed to recreate community. For much of my life, I've lived
in Haitian communities, and I think people try to create a little bit of
home in them. The new community becomes as much a part of one's identity as
home was. I've definitely found community here, but it's been a community
based on absences. Even in your own family, there are so many people who
are not with you. My father, for example, has three sisters whom we never
got to know. So you reach for another kind of community—you have a
different type of extended family. But there's also a kind of longing for
the life you had, or could have had—a different kind of life altogether.
There is always that other part of you that's missing.

Another theme that runs throughout the book is the sabotage of your
characters' ability to interact with the rest of the world; there's the man
who hides his scarred face, a woman whose larynx has been removed, a woman
who's been blinded in a fire, even an artist whose sculpture has been
destroyed. Can you explain the significance of this?

It's just that there was so much physical violence associated with the
dictatorship. People ended up not just psychologically scarred, but
physically scarred as well.

Toward the end of the story, the dew breaker has a dream about being in a
garden with his mother, trying to touch a mimosa pudica, or "shame plant, "
which has leaves that fold up when touched. Is this scene meant to show the
dew breaker finally coming to terms with his shameful past?

That scene is meant to be the dew breaker's mother's way of telling him
that it's time to change. I had discovered the mimosa pudica on a trip, and
was awestruck by it—the way it opened and closed. I just loved that plant
immediately. And when I found out that it was called a "shame plant," I
decided that I had to have it in the story—it was the perfect opportunity.
The dew breaker's mother was a gardener and had such knowledge of plants,
so it seemed like a good way for her to communicate with him. But it also
represents his state of mind at that moment—that he's always wanted to
change, but needs to get out of the life he's been leading in order to move on.

I thought the character of Anne, the dew breaker's wife, was an interesting
contrast to the dew breaker himself, in the sense that she's almost
saintly. In fact, when she meets him, she appears like an angel in a plain
white nightgown—albeit a mad angel. Anne believes "that atonement,
reparation, [is] possible and available for everyone." Is that the moral
you want people to walk away from this book with?

No, I don't want people to think that. Personally I'm somewhere between
believing in the possibility of atonement and reparation, and wanting to
say "execute all the brutes," like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. I think I
want people to come to their own conclusions. This is Anne's way of
explaining her choice (to forgive this man and be married to him), which I
thought was a very big challenge for the book. It's the one thing people
seem to have the most trouble with. People say, "How can she?" Well, this
is how she can. But this is only one path. It doesn't have to be true for
everyone. If there is a moral for me it's that I want people to examine the
circumstances that create people like the dew breaker—the conditions out of
which they arise. What Anne's saying is that she was able to lift him from
that, to take him out of that environment and allow him to become a
different person. That was her role. It's important not to simplify these
people—to just write them off as bad and remove ourselves completely from
the equation. Anyone subjected to certain conditions of deprivation and
under the rule of all-powerful people could be vulnerable to falling into
that same kind of morally twisted life.

The dew breaker's final victim, the preacher, encourages his followers to
ask, "What will we do with our beast?"—seemingly referring all at once to
the government, the devil, and evil itself. Who or what do you think is
Haiti's beast right now?

That's a big one. I think we have many beasts. Certainly, one of them is
division—the fact that different elements of Haiti's society see their
goals as contrary. I think people often believe our biggest problems are
political, but we also have very strong social problems—like extraordinary
inequality in the distribution of resources, unsympathetic political
leadership, and poverty. There's a lack of unity across social and economic
classes—an inability to move on together as a nation. That's the case in
many countries, but in Haiti it's almost as if one group's progress is seen
as another group's loss, and there's a history that only encourages that
feeling.

Do you see any hope for eliminating Haiti's beasts?

I have hope. We have to have hope, because whether it's worse than the past
or a little better, the future is going to come no matter what. My hope is
in the people of Haiti. If given an opportunity, I think Haiti's people can
really thrive. It's just a matter of getting that chance. This year is the
bicentennial of Haitian independence. It's a symbolic moment for renewal
and hope. When you think about it, our ancestors, who were slaves, had an
even greater battle to fight than we do now. So from that we can take some
hope.

What do you think of Haiti's new acting Prime Minister, Gerard Latortue? Do
you think his background with the United Nations and as an economist will
help him make significant changes?

I hope he can make a difference. But I think in some ways, he's in a
position where he has to do whatever the United States or other large
powers ask him to do. He has inherited a great burden and responsibility,
and I don't know how independently he can act.

Would you ever go back to Haiti to live full-time?

Oh, yeah, I could imagine that. I've gone back a lot in recent years,
mostly to the countryside. I could see myself living there—not in the city
so much.

What are you working on next?

I'm working on a book for young adults. It's part of the Scholastic World
Diaries series and will be published next spring. World Diaries is a series
of books about young women who are leaders. The books are fictional
diaries, capturing women's experiences right before they take on a
leadership role. I'm doing mine about a woman called Anacaone, an
indigenous woman who was one of the few female leaders on the island of
Haiti and the Dominican Republic before Columbus came. It's my second young
adult book. I did another one called Behind the Mountains, which is also in
the Scholastic World Diaries Series. I've enjoyed writing young adult
books. It's a nice change.

You've accomplished so much at a young age, publishing your first book at
age twenty-five and being nominated for a National Book Award at age
twenty-six. To what do you attribute your early success, and how do you
think your work has evolved since then?

I hope my work has gotten better. You never know why anything happens, but
I've always been really passionate about writing, and it really helped me
to adapt and survive my early years here. I never thought about it. I was
just consumed by the desire to write, so I did. I'm really lucky and
blessed that people have read my work and have taken to it, but I feel like
it's something I would have done no matter what. There are so many writers
who don't get a readership, so it's hard to know what makes people pick up
your book over someone else's. I just feel really lucky that they do.

What advice do you have for other young writers?

Write what you're most passionate about. Also, stop and consider what your
story is—what you have to say. And I would recommend plenty of reading.
When I teach, I tell students that you have to read other students' writing
in order to learn. Just read for the joy of it, to learn process, and to
see how people do things in their writing. Then, just write for your life.
Write whenever you can. When I teach writing, I find that I often meet
people who have a great story and are passionate about it, but may be
struggling with a way to tell it, and I meet others who have a really great
way with words, but don't have a story. I would recommend that they find
their stories and then find the best way to tell them.
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Dana Rousmaniere is a freelance writer living in the Boston area.

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