There are rare moments in the publishing world when a young author pens a novel so astonishingly wise and insightful, it quite takes our breath away. Edwidge Danticat, a National Book Award-nominee and acclaimed author of Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!, is one of those authors.
The title of her new novel, The Dew Breaker, refers to a man who was a torturer in the Tonton Macoutes, the personal police force of the father-son dictators in Haiti, François “Papa Doc” and Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, during the period from 1957 to 1986. The term “dew breaker” is a loose translation of a Creole expression, shoukèt laroze, an oddly lyrical epithet. The torturers would oftentimes steal into peoples’ homes before dawn, breaking the morning dew on the leaves as they came to seize their victims—men from whom they wanted land, women who had refused their flirtations, or anyone who was seen as dangerously subversive.
We first meet the dew breaker as an older man, a barber, traveling with his only daughter from New York to Tampa to help her deliver a sculpture to a popular Haitian-American actress. The sculpture is of himself, in three-foot mahogany—naked, kneeling, and hunchbacked, as his daughter has imagined him in prison. But on this trip, for the first time, he tells her he never was in prison. Instead, the pitted scar on his face was given him by his last prisoner. “You see, Ka, your father was the hunter, he was not the prey.”
Later, back in the hotel room, she phones her mother and whispers into the receiver, “Manman, how do you love him?” She doesn’t know the entire truth, and neither do we, until the book’s surprising and powerful denouement.
although the dew breaker (who is never named) is at the center of the novel, it is more about his family members, neighbors, and victims. The novel unfolds much like a book about a famous painting, where we are given small sections to view, in sequence, until we near the end when the final piece is revealed in all its grandeur. We make connections, and the full work seems complete and satisfying. It’s the negative space of the book, the personal stories of the people who surround the dew breaker that illuminate the dew breaker’s character, as if we see his person more brightly with each victim’s telling.
In clear and precise prose, Danticat moves easily from present-day Brooklyn and Queens to dictatorial Haiti in the 1960s to Manhattan in the ’70s and back again. She plunges into the lives of her characters—neighbors of the dew breaker, an RN, a restaurant owner, a bridal seamstress, a man who talks in his sleep, a funeral singer—in a painful reckoning with the past. In the words of Anne, the dew breaker’s wife, “There was no way to escape this dread anymore, this pendulum between regret and forgiveness.” It is as though we, too, are victims, compelled to recognize that we cannot easily escape our own sins and the tangential consequences of actions long ago.
Danticat shines when telling immigrant stories. She pinpoints the insular caution of life in a new place, the fear of venturing out into the busy unknown, and the final emerging into a society that is jumbled and variant. She writes from experience—from a knowing, distant place where she can observe the nuances of both the old and the new. When Danticat was two, her father left Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to attempt a better life in the United States. Her mother joined him two years later, leaving Danticat with an aunt and uncle in Haiti. When Danticat turned 12, she rejoined her parents in New York, speaking only French and Creole. She went on to graduate from Barnard College with a degree in French literature and a master’s degree in fine arts from Brown University. Her first literary influences, she says, were the stories and folktales of her grandmothers and aunts, then other Haitian writers, and finally the works of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Amy Tan, and Jamaica Kincaid.
When Danticat is asked in interviews if she sees herself as the voice of Haiti, she protests by saying that she is one of many, and that her greatest hope is that she has made the reader curious about Haiti. She succeeds. In the end, we’re hungry to know more about this country fresh on our television screens, still mired in poverty and political quagmire. We want to know more than the news can ever provide. We want more of the truth that can only be told in fiction.
Elissa Elliott is a writer living in Rochester, Minnesota.
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Related Elsewhere:
The Dew Breaker is available from Amazon.com and other book retailers.
An excerpt and more information about the author are available from the publisher.
Books & Culture Corner appears every Monday. Earlier editions of Books & Culture Corner and Book of the Week include:
God Is in the Details | A scientist affirms his faith. (Feb. 23, 2004)
History Repeats Itself, Sort of | How the fate of Eugene McCarthy’s insurgency against LBJ sheds light on the 2004 presidential campaign. (Feb. 16, 2004)
The Worst President Ever? | Former Nixon aide John Dean attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of Warren G. Harding. (Feb. 09, 2004)
Wholly, Wholly, Wholly | Calvinists and conga drums in Grand Rapids: a report from the seventeenth annual Calvin Symposium on Worship and the Arts. (Feb. 02, 2004)
The Doom of Choice | Fate, free will, and moral responsibility in Tolkien. (Feb. 02, 2004)
A Rose Among Thorns | A new novel by the author of Father Elijah illumines the spiritual consequences of our simplest decisions. (Jan. 26, 2004)
Baptized in Fire | A new book on Martin Luther King, Jr., emphasizes his spiritual transformation. (Jan. 19, 2004)
O’Connor v. the Antichrist (Jan. 12, 2004)
Moody, the Media, and the Birth of Modern Evangelism | A cautionary tale. (Jan. 05, 2004)
A Few Coming Attractions from 2004 | Plus: What to buy with those gift cards, and some of the books in my to-read stacks. (Dec. 29, 2003)
The Top Ten Books of 2003 | Plus: The Worst Book of the Year, more good reading, digital books, and a little Christmas music. (Dec. 22, 2003)
Books at Warp Speed | We continue our annual roundup of noteworthy books. (Dec. 15, 2003)
Is “Sensual Orthodoxy” a Contradiction in Terms? | Read this unconventional collection of sermons and judge for yourself. (Dec. 8, 2003)
Books, Books, Books! | We begin our annual roundup. (Dec. 8, 2003)
Urban Eden | In City: Urbanism and Its End, a new history of New Haven, Connecticut, the city (in its late 19th-century form) is an ambiguous heaven-and the suburbs that relentlessly followed are hell. Which leaves us where, exactly? (Dec. 01, 2003)
Cool Drink of Water | A poet’s voice in the evangelical wilderness.
Faith, Hope, and Charity in North Carolina | New novels by Michael Morris—whose first novel, A Place Called Wiregrass, was a word-of-mouth hit— and Jan Karon, who continues her beloved Mitford saga. (Nov. 17, 2003)
Remember Afghanistan? | Two inside reports. (Nov. 10, 2003)
The Troubled Conscience of a Founding Father | An Imperfect God examines George Washington and slavery. (Oct. 27, 2003)
The Year of the Fish | The 2003 baseball season concludes with a bang—and 2004 is just around the corner. (Oct. 27, 2003)
I Shop, Therefore I Am | Critics of “consumer culture” are all wet, Virginia Postrel says. The riot of choices available to us resonates with our deepest aesthetic instincts (Oct. 20, 2003)
Back to the Future | A sprawling new novel by the author of Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon goes to the 17th century to investigate the birth of the modern world. (You won’t be surprised to learn that the Puritans are among the Bad Guys.) (Oct. 13, 2003)
Poetry, Prayer, and Parable | The playful provocations of Scott Cairns (Oct. 06, 2003)
