Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker

"I'm sharing with you Voltaire's words," he said. I tell you that in Europe they eat sugar with our blood in it and you mock me with a colonial title."

Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker is a fascinating look on post-Duvalier Haiti's unforgettable ties to the Duvaliers across land and sea. Haitians and Haitian-American characters from East Flatbush, Brooklyn to Port-au-Prince find themselves irrevocably united by the shared repression caused by Papa Doc and Baby Doc. The 'dew breaker' in the novel, now an old man, was a fat macoute who now lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Anne, and his daughter, Ka. Ka, from Egyptian mythology, is the life spirit for her parents, whose marriage resulted from great tragedy. Ka's father lives a life of deep remorse and shame, hiding his identity and past from Haitians he crosses path with to avoid recognition by former victims of his torture in 1960s Port-au-Prince. Danticat's novel lacks a singular framework and endeavors to demonstrate how one individual's life impacts everyone around him or her by switching between different Haitian characters in Miami, Leogane, Port-au-Prince, a small Haitian village in the mountains, and New York City.

One thing that struck me right away is the intertextuality between this novel and Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew. Masters is a classic in Haitian literature and Edwidge  Danticat is very familiar with Haitian literature, especially Jacques Stephen Alexis and Marie Vieux-Chauvet. Indeed, Danticat helped translate one of Alexis's novels and wrote the foreward to Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness. Roumain's novel obviously has dew in the title, with the dew symbolizing life, something Danticat uses in her own novel. Although Danticat's novel is not part of the peasant novel tradition in Haitian literature, she uses characters of peasant origin who suffer, triumph, and grow during and after the fall of the Duvalier. There's also a theme of universality and entwined fate in Danticat's novel that links it to Masters, which is essentially about the need for the peasants of a small Haitian village to overcome a feud between two families to establish a coumbite that will overcome petty differences between individuals to provide collective salvation by irrigating land and producing enough food to feed all stomachs. In addition, some names from Roumain's novel reappear in Danticat, such as Dormeus and Bienaime.

Danticat's The Dew Breaker also fuses elements of oral tradition, peasant culture, Vodou, and Egyptian mythology to create her Haitian world. It's a world full of references to funeral singers, Haitian folk music like "Brother Timonie," Haitian barbers and beauticians in Flatbush, Brooklyn who share their world with a myriad of other Caribbean and American people of African descent. Jamaicans, African-Americans, Colombians, and whites live in the heterogeneity of New York City while Haitians still retain their own ethnic community in churches, businesses, and newspapers. Ka, daughter of a former murderer and torturer, is an artist whose sculpture of her father instigates her father's confession. Her name's allusions to the Egyptian Book of the Dead and Haitian Vodou also reinforce the notion of a mutual origin of ancient Egypt and Haitians, which also connects Haitians to other peoples of African descent. Danticat's recreation of Haiti in 1967 and 1986 also provides a portrait of a society in two vastly different states: compliant and submissive to the totalitarian Papa Doc and the jubilation and murder of macoutes by the Haitian people who recognized their collective power by forcing Baby Doc to flee the country. During the chaos that ensued, Haitians marched through the streets of Port-au-Prince, killed and burned their former torturers, and took over privately-owned water pipes.

By taking the reader back to Haiti in these previous decades and the present in their American lives, Danticat reminds the reader that Haitian immigrants will never sever their bonds to the island, even if their worst humanitarian crises forced them to flee to the United States. Everyone is connected perpetually to their own homeland, ancestors, and their neighbors. Thus, the novel's characters are forever tied to Haiti, even Ka, who does not know how her parents met and how they could love each other. Her father, who tortured and killed her mother's stepbrother, found her mother, Anne, in the streets of Port-au-Prince just before meeting him. Anne's stepbrother, a Baptist preacher urging the sleeping masses of Haiti to rise and remove Papa Doc's iron grip on their lives, is a thinly-veiled reference to the Aristide, a Catholic priest who led the resistance to Baby Doc and later become the first democratically elected president of Haiti to only be deposed twice, IN 1991 and 2004. Anne's stepbrother is also an allusion to Manuel, the peasant protagonist of Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew who succeeds in liberating his village through self-sacrifice to end the feud and convince them to use the coumbite to become masters of the dew, masters of their own lives in the present rather than wait for a paradisaical afterlife.