Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Haiti, and Symbolic Migration

Abstract

In her article "Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Haiti, and Symbolic Migration" Jennifer E. Henton analyzes Edwidge Danticat's novel with Lacanian thought. It is assumed frequently that literatures of the non-West "arrive" when they move from political and didactic traditions to the "aesthetic" and experimental models that delve into the terrain of the psyche. In The Dew Breaker, the Haitian family's move to the U.S., executed self consciously, indicates loss in a different sense than lack. In the case of Denticat's novel, loss or lack represent not a source of anxiety that evokes matters read in a psychoanalytical framework; instead, Henton argues, in The Dew Breaker loss requires a reading in order to mediate the landscape of the loss. Danticat's text maps out the arrival of the Haitian family in the U.S. where Haiti figures as a symbolic, as well as real landscape and Henton explicates with tenets of psychoanalysis Danticat's narrative.