Dew Breaker Research Articles

Crossing racial predicaments and reconstructing identity: The biopolitics of race in Edwidge Danticat's works

AbstractFocusing on The Farming of Bones, Brother, I'm Dying, and the short story “Night Talkers” collected in The Dew Breaker, this article explores how Edwidge Danticat engages with the biopolitics of race in her writing. The biopolitics of race traumatizes people through racial discrimination, exclusion, and purification; in Danticat's works, this is manifested in atrocities inflicted on Haitian workers, the exclusion of asylum seekers, and the deportation of Haitian descendants. Those racially excluded people resist the destructive effects of state racism by creating testimonial narratives to record crimes and atrocities, or by establishing communities for mutual support. Through the dynamics of biopolitical oppression and resistance, Danticat empowers those precarious people and achieves her purpose of political writing: while dissolving the negative influence of biopolitics, she reconstructs individual subjectivities through testimony, and rebuilds fragmented identities through the solidarity of Haitian communities, in order to reaffirm the national identity of the Haitian people.

Fragmentation and Discontinity in Postcolonial Edwidge Danticat's "The Dew Breaker"

Postcolonial novel is a genre that deals with studies which have the greatest influence, particularly silence that is voiced into speech sounds and words, a silence elucidated through gender bodies that acquire resolutions, discoveries and thus, to women’s liberations through means of not only voices of “self” but also communal that connect “persona” with past and future generations. The supporters of radical-libertarian feminism suggest that restricting women to behavior which is increased under feminine traits in itselfoppressive and that all women have shared oppression, therefore, becoming “sisters” believing that this oppression offers hope that the situation is temporary. Thus, it is better to bear in mind that those writings have no boundaries in both time and place while it isabout to gathering victims of the same influence in patriarchal societies. In literary contexts, transgression appears in different kinds of subaltern characters, the marginalized who are ready to negotiate the norms of society or a family by occupying a kind of divergent position from which new energies could be created. The power of language, too, plays an important role when it comes to characterize and define human experience. Résumé : Le roman postcolonial est un genre qui traite des études qui ont le plus d’influence, en particulier le silence exprimé en sons et mots de la parole, un silence élucidées à travers des organes de genre qui acquièrent des résolutions, des découvertes et ainsi, aux femmes libérations par le biais non seulement des voix du « soi » mais aussi des voix communautaires qui se connectent « persona » avec les générations passées et futures. Les partisans du féminisme radical-libertaire suggèrent que restreindre les femmes à un comportement qui est accru sous des traits féminins en soi oppressive et que toutes les femmes ont partagé l'oppression, devenant ainsi des "sœurs" croyant que cette oppression offre l'espoir que la situation est temporaire. Ainsi, il vaut mieux garder à l'esprit que ces écrits n'ont pas de frontières dans le temps et dans l'espace pendant qu'ils sont sur le point de rassembler les victimes de la même influence dans les sociétés patriarcales. En littérature contextes, la transgression apparaît dans différents types de personnages subalternes, les marginalisés qui sont prêts à négocier les normes d'une société ou d'une famille en occupant une sorte de position divergente à partir de laquelle de nouvelles énergies pourraient être créées. Le pouvoir du langage aussi joue un rôle important lorsqu'il s'agit de caractériser et de définir l'expérience humaine.

Rethreading the Fabric of Mystery: Thinking Myth, Counter-Myth, and Christian Theology With Hortense Spillers

Abstract Hortense Spillers asserts the imperative for black writers to reconfigure the languages they inherit. One way of doing so is to craft counter-myths against dominative mythologies. Spillers casts myth as an integration of form and concept which overdetermines the significance of what it is used to talk about. One crucial effect of America’s racialising mythos has been to deny black women the ability to determine that significance. She then describes how this mythos is crafted through a double wounding that creates at least two ‘interstices’—first between home and market, then between blackness and humanity—which are covered up by mythological terms. Finally, Spillers shows how counter-mythologies can be crafted by speaking from within these interstices to reconfigure the conditions of possibility governing meaningful speech, taking the 19th- century African-American preaching tradition as her example. The article concludes by reflecting on what it might mean to practice Christian theology as counter-mythology in light of Spillers’ work through a reading of Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.

Scars of Trauma: Duality of Signification in Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker (2004)

Scars of Trauma: Duality of Signification in Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker (2004)

Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre

Reviewed by: Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre Patti M. Marxsen Clitandre, Nadège T. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. UP of Virginia, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8139-4187-5. Pp. xx + 249. It is rare for an entire book of literary criticism to be devoted to a Haitian writer. In her deeply nuanced study, Clitandre adopts an approach that resembles literary biography, although her theoretical concerns release the apparent subject, Danticat, from the role of central character and authorial anchor. Rather, the true subject emerges as countless other subjectivities, voices masked by simplistic categories or lost in collective cultural identities. In defiance of such erasure, Clitandre's project zeroes in on the lives of approximately 1 million hyphenated Haitians living outside the "homeland." Her method is clear from the outset—the deconstruction of a unique diasporic consciousness forged by Danticat across two decades of writing that embraces history, displacement, loss, assemblage, and "the everyday lives and narratives of diasporic subjects" (15). Clitandre's close reading of recent memoirs and major novels—Breath, Eyes, Memory, The Dew Breaker, and Farming of Bones—is filtered through the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus in which the woodland nymph, known for her melodious voice, is silenced by the jealous goddess Juno. This artful deployment of Ovid's voiceless Echo of antiquity is closely linked to Clitandre's argument for Danticat's "feminist revisioning of Haitian history from a diasporic lens" (16). Through a sustained argument, she asserts that "Danticat's fictional texts uncover the silenced, displaced, and disavowed histories of Haitian people in general and Haitian women in particular" (18). This approach necessarily engages the author and reader with significant events of Haitian history as the concept of "Echo chamber" is redefined as a dynamic space that captures unpredictable resonance. From Danticat's first reading of Haitian literature at the Brooklyn Public Library as a young girl in the 1980s, herself part of the Duvalier-driven diaspora, we come to understand her literary sources. We also encounter the meaning of personal "creation myths" in diasporic lives, those interiorized experiences that draw on historical, fragmented, and inherited memory. To this end, and with deliberate emphasis on the Duvalier era and its aftermath (1957–87), Clitandre convenes a conversation among historians, literary critics, writers, psychoanalytic theorists, and contemporary scholars to address the problem of memory in societies marked by violence, censorship, and silence. Indeed, [End Page 190] in Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010), Danticat acknowledges that"Grappling with memory is, I believe, one of many complicated Haitian obsessions" (34). Memory also emerges full-force in her "family memoir" Brother, I'm Dying (2007) focused on the"separate but intertwined lives"of her father and uncle, a Baptist pastor who died in a Miami detention center in 2007 (169). Given its vast terrain and articulate interpretation of a major literary voice, Clitandre's book is highly original and establishes a fresh model of scholarship in the still unexcavated silences of Haitian literature. Patti M. Marxsen Independent Scholar Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

Ways of Listening: Hearing Danticat's Calls to Multiple Audiences in The Dew Breaker

This essay argues that Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker constitutes its audience as multiple in order to initiate relational practices across differently positioned groups of readers, on the model of stories in a short story cycle, so that they might decolonize their relations. The argument extends recent postcolonial theory of trauma literature that emphasizes the problems of idiopathic empathy and the importance of equal and reciprocal relations among communities to Danticat’s disparate readerships. The article contends that Danticat treats different cultural tasks as most important for different audiences and that her self-conscious address to multiple readerships undercuts the centrality of western readers. For Haitians in and out of dyaspora, The Dew Breaker often treats the aporia inflicted by historical trauma as calls to community and agency. For non-Haitian African-Americans, it highlights overlapping experiences with Haitian immigrants, providing a tentative basis for common struggle, while it differentiates black cultures. For Western readers, The Dew Breaker offers practice in stepping aside from central positions, recognizing the interpretive agency of other communities, and tracing US governmentality, which produces a cascade of aporia in the lives of immigrants.

Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2013 ed. by Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr.

Reviewed by: Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2013 ed. by Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr. Lorie Watkins Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr., eds. Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2013. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. Each year the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference collects selected papers presented at the conference into a single volume published by the University Press of Mississippi. The recently published 2013 collection features [End Page 74] papers from the fortieth annual conference examining the role of William Faulkner’s work in connection with the literature of the black Americas. In a somewhat unusual move for the series, this volume includes both critical and creative interpretations of the conference theme. Seventeen essays and poetic selections examine issues of Faulkner’s influence on writing in black literatures of the Americas, influences on and reinterpretations of his own work, and the connections between Faulkner’s work and the literature and writers of the region. In his introduction to the volume, Jay Watson quotes a key line from Édouard Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi: “Faulkner’s oeuvre will be made complete when it is revisited and made vital by African Americans.” This goal, Glissant suggests, “will be achieved by a radically ‘other’ reading” (xxi). The artists and critics from the Caribbean and America contributing to the 2013 volume, as Watson notes, “reveal that the revisionary work Glissant describes has been long underway in the Americas. They return us to Faulkner with new insight not only into the magnitude and impact of his achievement but also—just as meaningfully—into its limits” (xxi–xxii). Following the Introduction and “Note on the Conference,” the volume opens with “African American Poetic Responses to Faulkner” by Chiyuma Elliott, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Derrick Harriell, Randall Horton, and Jamaal May. At turns playful and poignant, these poetic interpretations of Faulkner’s life, texts, and characters invite readers to reimagine Faulkner’s life and his apocryphal world in exciting and enlightening ways. The critical essays that follow put Faulkner’s work in conversation with a variety of literary and cultural topics. James Smethurst examines the early African American migration narrative in Faulkner’s fiction, Thadious M. Davis evaluates Faulkner’s use of the black voice, George Hutchinson connects Faulkner’s career with the evolution of black modernism, and Tim A. Ryan outlines connections between Faulkner’s writings and the work of Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton. In the first of several thematic pairings, Joe Fruscione examines Faulkner’s and Ralph Ellison’s reactions to intellectual celebrity and their shared experiences in President Eisenhower’s People-to-People program, while Ben Robbins examines transgressive sexualities in Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms” and James Baldwin’s Another Country. Lisa Hinrichsen examines how African American writers like Randall Kenan have dealt with the gothic nature pervading of much of Faulkner’s work, and Matthew Dischinger explores the importance of the narratives told by the plantation ledgers in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. Doreen Fowler uses Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! to illustrate the power of language with respect to race and the social construction of identity, and Ted Atkinson shows how Natasha Trethewey creatively reimagines Light in August in her powerful poem, “Miscegenation.” The remaining essays largely connect Faulkner’s work to that of other writers. Andrew B. Leiter speaks to Jean Toomer’s influence on Faulkner, John Wharton Lowe examines Faulkner’s influence on Ernest J. Gaines, Dotty Dye reads Faulkner’s A Fable alongside Claude McKay’s Banjo, and T. Austin Graham juxtaposes Faulkner’s The Unvanquished with W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction with an eye toward their depictions of the Civil War. Jenna Sciuto and and Sharron Eve Sarthou read Faulkner comparatively against two writers of the black Caribbean; Sciuto reads Faulkner alongside Haitian writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Love, and Sarthou shows how Haitian American Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker critiques Faulkner’s depictions of Haiti in Absalom, Absalom! I had the pleasure of attending the 2013 conference, so I heard many of these works read in...

Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction by Maria Rice Bellamy

Reviewed by: Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction by Maria Rice Bellamy Alexandra Kingston-Reese Maria Rice Bellamy. Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2015. xii + 190 pp. Throughout Maria Rice Bellamy's Bridges to Memory, the figure of trauma's ghost resonates. Its presence echoes; its residue clarifies as often as it clouds. It even manifests literally in the fictional narratives at the center of the book's focus. But this is not a book that lets trauma's ghost remain in the shadows. Through the theory of postmemory, what Bellamy offers is a concerted realignment of the way contemporary ethnic women writers engage generationally with traumatic pasts that is both conceptually distinctive and socially forceful. With deft treatment, the ghostly presence of trauma is engaged to recover the violent experiences of ethnic American women often "repressed from mainstream social consciousness" and reimagine the effect of its legacy on future generations as they work toward repair (3). Reading works such as Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, and Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Bellamy casts each as revelatory: braiding narratives of past, present, and future generations to draw attention to and expose "inherited forms of traumatic memory" (2). It is with this emphasis that Bridges to Memory gains ethical force. By drawing together narratives whose focus is to illuminate the "suffering of others" through practices of "mediation" (5), the book identifies the experience of violent trauma not solely as the domain of the individual but as "intersubjective communion" (4). Theorizing this experience in terms of postmemory, Bellamy negotiates trauma as a space "inhabited by narrators and auditors, survivors and descendants, in which temporal and subjective boundaries are blurred, allowing the memories of one to haunt and infect the other." She navigates facets of postmemory not simply to identify a new contemporary genre of the postmemorial journey—"comprised of a three-step process of identification, translation, and differentiation" (6)—but to shed light on how narratives of postmemory are as literarily innovative as they are socially representative, employing an array of techniques "to overcome the traumatic ruptures and temporal distance that separate the child of postmemory from her ancestral inheritance" (7). With such a dextrous model, Bellamy is able to illuminate the effect of postmemorial journeys on the formation of contemporary identities while simultaneously provoking a generative literary conversation elicited by traumas of the female body and the expressive techniques used to convey them. [End Page 769] Each chapter seeks to explore elements of the contemporary genre of postmemory. Bellamy considers a range of texts by ethnic women that include not just African Americans but what she calls "hyphenated Americans" (14). While the first two chapters of the book analyze narratives of African American postmemory (particularly those of slavery) in novels by Jones, Butler, and Perry, the remaining three chapters provide examples by other ethnic American women that offer their own "particular challenges of geographical, cultural, and linguistic displacement": García's portrait of the Cuban Revolution, Keller's account of the Korean tradition of comfort women, and Danticat's story-cycle of Haitian traumatic history. Beginning with Jones, the book establishes a classic example of postmemory fiction in which "late-twentieth-century descendants of American slaves" must engage with "their traumatic inheritance" as a "process of excavating memories and experiences that have been consciously forgotten, distorted, or destroyed" (19). This is a process, Bellamy claims, that Jones recuperates through the use of "oral transmission to access the experiential history of slavery and explores how the physical body testifies to the enduring trauma of enslavement." But, she asks, "[w]hat if postmemory were experienced physically, affecting the inheritors of traumatic memory in their bodies as well as their minds and emotions?" (45). This is the question Bellamy asks with regard to Butler and Perry, and which she complicates in the third chapter in a discussion of embodiment in García's Dreaming in Cuban. In this novel, García "uses alternative forms of connection...

Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times by Martin Munro

Reviewed by: Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times by Martin Munro Mollie McFee Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times. By Martin Munro. University of Virginia Press, 2015. ISBN 9780813938202. 240 pp. $29.50 US. Paperback. Martin Munro's Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times draws together a number of novels and films that, Munro argues, cast certain cataclysmic events of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Haitian history in apocalyptic terms. Across the book's four chapters, Munro defines apocalypse in three distinct ways: 1) a unique relationship to time in a society marked by ongoing tragedy, 2) the uncovering of traumatic memory, and 3) the almost utopian promise of new beginnings following the end of an era. "Apocalypse" and its adjectival form "apocalyptic" are also frequently used to describe the conditions of poverty and destitution portrayed in many of the cultural productions Munro studies in the book. Though Munro repeatedly nods to the 2010 earthquake that wrought destruction across Haiti, he does not study it at length. Rather, Munro states that this apocalypse "had been prepared for, indeed prophesied to some degree in religious and political discourse, the arts, and culture more generally for decades, perhaps centuries" (1). The major crises Munro discusses are the Duvalier regimes and their effects and the violence perpetrated by the Chimères, militarized supporters of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Munro also discusses phenomena such as evangelical Protestantism and the potentially destructive environment as significant contributors to the apocalyptic strain in Haitian culture. Munro's discussion of post-Duvalier accounts of traumas induced by that regime introduces a particularly innovative understanding of apocalypse. The book's first chapter makes use of the Greek definition of the term, meaning "to unveil or uncover," to explore works that narrate the repressed traumatic past of the Duvalier years. Munro states, "Narrative is thus a means of invoking the past in order to break with the sense of living endlessly in that time, and memory becomes a means of resistance, a deferred way of challenging the dictatorships and the amnesia that allows the terror of the past to haunt still the present" (40). The apocalyptic action of uncovering memory thus inaugurates a new era in which the past is no longer an endlessly present terror. The chapter turns to four texts that narrate the traumatic conditions of the Duvalier regimes: Raoul Peck's film L'Homme sur les quais (1993), Kettly Mars's novel Saisons sauvages (2010), Edwidge Danticat's novel The Dew Breaker (2004), and Évelyne Trouillot's novel La Mémoire aux abois (2010). With the exception of Mars's novel, each [End Page 180] of the case studies narrates confrontations with memory following trauma, depicting the phenomenon as freeing. In the case of Saisons sauvages, Munro argues that Mars's portrayal of the regime's horrors serves as a warning and a defense against the return of dictatorial rule. In the second and third chapters, which discuss the presidencies of former priest, liberation theologian, and populist politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Munro's close readings use "apocalyptic" to describe catastrophic, dystopian, or surreal descriptions in the films and novels he analyzes. Titled "Utopian Ends: Aristide and the Apocalypse" and "The Chimères and the Haitian Antihero," these chapters describe the troubling figure Aristide presents in Haitian history and culture. Aristide's radically egalitarian rhetoric was initially seen as the beacon of a new, post-Duvalier era in Haiti. However, these dreams were dashed when Aristide's supporters inflicted widespread violence upon Haitian society and were themselves unable to escape conditions of poverty. The novels and films Munro examines (including Lyonel Trouillot's Rue des pas perdus [1996], Raoul Peck's film Moloch Tropical [2009], Yanick Lahens's novel La Couleur de l'aube [2008], and Charles Najman's documentary Haïti, la fin des chimères? [2004], to name only a few) certainly represent a dystopian urban Haiti that appears perpetually on the brink of both tragic destruction and utopian rebirth. The fourth chapter of Tropical Apocalypse does not focus on a particular apocalyptic event but rather addresses two distinct ways in which nature emerges as a force both...

Wounds Seen and Unseen: The Workings of Trauma in Raoul Peck’s Haitian Corner and Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker

Drawing on literary scholar Lisa Woolfork’s theory of bodily epistemology, this article comparatively discusses Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s 1988 film Haitian Corner and Haitian American writer EdwidgeDanticat’s 2004 novel, The Dew Breaker as trauma fiction that deploys both the psyche and the body in explorations of trauma. The two works do so both through their characters and in the form that their narratives take, characterized as they are by an aesthetics of fragmentation that seems to “reproduce the ‘symptoms’ of disjunctive’ temporality and causality’ that characterize narratives of trauma.”

Reprises textuelles dans The Dew Breaker d’Edwidge Danticat

In her recent novel, The Dew Breaker (2004), Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat weaves together the lives of her bruised Haitian characters and their torturer, a former Tonton Macoute, all gone into exile in the US. Seven of the nine chapters were previously published as separate short stories and have been rearranged to form a novel. The reader is then led to unravel a narrative tangle made of many threads. The disparate nature of the book, its non-linear narrative, the plurality of stories and voices, the gaps in a fragmented, elliptic text all partake of an alternative approach to creative writing. Like a seamstress, the novelist pieces together individual stories, connecting them as the multifarious facets of a great whole. In the wake of francophone Haitian writers (namely Jacques Roumain, the author of Masters of the Dew, or Jacques Stephen Alexis who wrote General Sun, My Brother), Edwidge Danticat fictionalizes the traumatic history of a people confronted with violence and terror and engages in a complex intertextual play. Combining ethics and aesthetics, temporal and textual memory, the novelist explores facts and, rather than give answers, raises difficult questions. Her characters, whether victims or perpetrators, all strive to free themselves from a haunting past : is it ever possible to forgive so as to heal the pain ? Can one make amends for the harm that has been done to victims who seek redress ?

Narrating Diaspora in Edwidge Danticat's Short-Story Cycle The Dew Breaker

A short-story cycle consisting of nine interconnected stories, Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker (2004) uncovers and creatively maps a Haitian American world whose traumatic experiences remain lar...

Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat

Reviewed by: Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat Christine Germain (bio) Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 256 pp. Filling our imagination with the realities of life in Haiti, Edwidge Danticat has become the contemporary raconteur of its people. In her newest novel, Claire of the Sea Light, she brings us to the “small and unlucky” town of Ville Rose. Having visited this locale in The Dew Breaker (2004) and Krik? Krak! (1995), she gives us an even fuller glimpse into the town and its inhabitants. Danticat creates a tale with violence, revenge, and classism at its core, weaving the overarching theme of a complex and troubled Haitian society. The novel is centered on the disappearance of Claire, the daughter of a poor fisherman. Claire leaves her home upon discovering that her father has given her away to a wealthy store owner. She leaves because poor Haitian children “given away”—the restavec—experience physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. But Danticat complicates this social phenomenon. Throughout the novel the reader feels the internal struggle that Claire’s father endures. As Danticat expressed in an interview on the book, she wants to counter the assumption that poor Haitians give up their children without emotional pain and moral anguish. In her depiction of a twenty-first-century poverty-stricken Haiti, Danticat shows the expected dire circumstances for many of her characters. Simultaneously, she represents the characters, particularly women, as defying their victim status. These women approach the adversity in their lives with quiet resolve and determination. Most notably, Flore, the maid of a wealthy family who was raped by her employer’s son, becomes a symbol of proletarian pride and resistance. Defying societal expectations, she rejects their offer to adopt her child. Courageously, she leaves with her child for an unknown destination. [End Page 214] Like much of Haiti, the innocent residents of Ville Rose have fallen victim to violence from the nefarious gangs, the chimeras. But Danticat shows that members of the chimeras are not innately violent; rather, it is the condition of poverty that encourages them to commit acts of violence. In one instance, the wealthy fabric store owner Laurent Lavaud is shot by the chimeras and Bernard Dorien, an innocent young man, is mistakenly taken into custody for the murder. He is later released as a result of a deal made between the authority and Tiye, the gang leader. In a surprisingly retaliatory move, Lavaud’s wife, who belongs to the upper crust of this small town, seeks revenge for her husband’s death. This results in the murder of the Bernard Dorien and two other innocent individuals. Danticat paints the portrait of a town in peril, which can be read as a microcosm for life in Haiti. She describes her mission in writing this book as “paint[ing] an image of a small place with big problems but also with big possibilities.” And what are possibilities for the enormous problems Haiti faces? Fòk nou voye je youn sou lòt “We must look after each other,” the words uttered by the namesake of the novel, offer a ray of hope for the survival of Ville Rose, and ultimately Haiti. Danticat infers that only when Haitians band together can they survive the dangers threatening the very fabric of their society. Thus, by placing her trust in the community, Danticat is putting the power to effect change in the hands of Haitian people. [End Page 215] Christine Germain Christine Germain teaches writing at University North Carolina at Charlotte in the University Writing Programs. She attended Columbia University and Cornell University and is currently at work on a book of short stories. Copyright © 2014 State University of New York Press

Art as Engagement: Violence, Trauma, and the Role of the Reader in Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker

Art as Engagement: Violence, Trauma, and the Role of the Reader in Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker

Beyond Truth and Reconciliation in La Mémoire aux abois and Un alligator nommé Rosa

Un peuple sans memoire ou dememoire est condamne a repeter les memes erreurs, a subir les memes dictatures du passe. --Franck Laraque The familiar adage that truth is stranger than fiction came to life in January of 2011 when former dictator Jean-Claude Doc Duvalier landed in Port-au-Prince after nearly twenty-five years in exile. The teledjol kicked into intense overdrive as people speculated about the nature of this controversial return to the native land. Why did Duvalier return? Would he face justice for human rights abuses committed during the regime, which spanned two generations? A press statement announced that the purpose of this audacious homecoming was an innocuous act of solidarity: his desire to celebrate the anniversary of the earthquake in the company of his countrymen and women. That this was the same homeland in which the Duvaliers were responsible for 50,000 killings of those same countrymen and women during the period known as la terreur (1957-1986) was not a point lost on survivors of the regime, family members of victims, writers, journalists, and scholars. More than two decades after the end of la terreur Baby Doc's reversal and refusal of his exile sought to revise the heritage of this painful past. (1) It also exacerbated an environment fraught with tensions that ranged from political to epidemiological--an unfolding contested election, the imminent one-year anniversary of the quake, and the raging cholera epidemic. In an op-ed for the Haitian newspaper, Le nouvelliste, Lilliane Pierre-Paul implored people not to forget, Ils ont dechire ma vie. Les consequences de cette situation ont coute la vie a l'un de mes freres. Je ne cherche pas la revanche, mais il faut que justice soit faite [...]. C'est la verite qui nous soulagera. (2) Because there had been no truth and reconciliation initiatives, no prosecution for Duvalier's crimes against humanity, la terreur was cloaked in silence by the official historic record though painfully omnipresent in the memory of traumatized individuals. As Duvalier continues to enjoy life in Haiti though former victims and international human rights groups call for him to be held accountable, the vexed relationships between history and memory, remembering and forgetting, are colliding. (3) His shocking return to the native land exposed a possible crisis of collective memory. As Edwidge Danticat observed: There are plenty of people who remember, however, there have been so many other disasters since--political, natural environmental--that the Duvalier disaster has somehow faded into the past. This might also [relate to] the fact that half [the] population is under twenty-five, and Haitian history books have not been updated since Duvalier's father took power in the 1950s. There have also been no acts of preservation, no preserved testimonies, no museums, no memorials to those killed by the Duvaliers, both father and son.... (4) The disturbing jubilant reception by some--from chanting in the streets to graffiti in public places--turned Haiti into un lieu dememoire, a charged and divided atmosphere of forgetting. It is a crisis of history and memory: the youth celebrating have no memories of the regime because of their age, and because there have been no official acts of memorialization or lieux de memoire to provide historic awareness. The former dictator's presence crystallized a generational gap of memory between Haitians born after the regime's end who had no recollection of that period, and those for whom the wounds of memory hauntingly remain. Prior to Duvalier's return, several literary texts explored these wounds of memory through imagined encounters between perpetrators and victims: Danticat's The Dew Breaker (2004), Marie-Celie Agnant's Un alligator nomme Rosa (2007), and Evelyne Trouillot's La Memoire aux abois (2011). By juxtaposing contemporary dictator novels with Baby Doc's return and the responses to it, I want to suggest that cultural production can step into the breach of memory described above. …

Silence and Speech: Figures of Dislocation and Acculturation in Edwidge Danticat's THE DEW BREAKER

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: acculturationEdwidge DanticatHaitiimmigrationtraumatic memory

Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide ed. by Martin Munro (review)

Edwidge Danticat: A Reader's Guide. Edited by Martin Munro, foreword by Dany Laferriere. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. 232 pp. $22.50 paperback.Review by Tomaz CunninghamEdwidge Danticat: A Reader's Guide, edited by Martin Munro, is a collection of fourteen essays followed by a personal interview with Edwidge and a thorough bibliography on her work. Divided into four sections, reader's guide addresses all of from her first highly-acclaimed and controversial novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) up to and including moving personal memoir Brother, I'm Dying (2007). Lesser known portions of work, such as her young adult fiction and travel writing, are addressed in this reader by academics, literary critics, and fellow writers of Caribbean fiction. Together, these fourteen essays provide a thorough and current perspective on work of an incredibly prolific writer whose personal story is one Munro describes as of modern (25).The first section of book, entitled Contexts, contains four essays, which attempts to examine both Edwidge personal life and her as they relate to Haitian, Caribbean, and African-American literature (11). Inside Out: A Brief Biography of Edwidge Danticat, a biographical essay by Munro, traces certain aspects of life from her youth in Duvalierist Haiti to her immigration to Brooklyn, New York and later relocation to Miami. Munro notes that connection to Haiti has largely been a result of migrant Haitian communities that she has been able to find in United States. Munro also names some of literary influences, both Haitian and African-American, and traces her growth as a writer from Eyes, Breath Memory to The Dew Breaker (2004), latter of which he describes as Danticat's most accomplished work to date (23). Similarly, essays by J. Michael Dash (Danticat and her Haitian Precursors) and Carine Mardorossian (Danticat and Caribbean Women Writers) examine work in context of Haitian and Caribbean literature and explore how both fits into and expands certain constructions of identity (national identity, gender, class and race for example) normally accepted in Caribbean literary expression. The most ambitious essay in this section is Danticat and The African American Women's Literary Tradition, in which RegineMichelle Jean-Charles compares with African-American women's writing. This essay seeks in some way to explain selfidentification as an African-Haitian American (AHA) woman and writer and explore how this identity impacts her writing. According to JeanCharles, shares certain themes common to AfricanAmerican women's writing, such as healing from sexual violence, closeknit female relationships, silence and voice and the transformative power of reading and writing (59). However, Jean-Charles also notes that race does not play such a crucial role in work as it does in literary tradition of most African-American women writers. Other factors, such as nationality, language and common experience of immigration inform identity of subjects as much as issues of race (58).Texts and Analyses, second section, is most useful portion of work from a standpoint of literary criticism. This section examines entire corpus of novels, young adult fiction, and travel writing. In Writing Young: Young Adult Fiction, Kiera Voclavik examines Behind Mountains (2002) and Anacaona (2005), noting that recurrent themes of exile, violence and sadness that characterize are as present in young adult fiction as they are in her fiction for mature audiences. The understandable absence of adult theme of sexual relations make young adult fiction an effective way to introduce young non-Haitian readers to culture and history. …

More than Hunter or Prey: Duality and Traumatic Memory in Edwidge Danticat’s <i>The Dew Breaker</i>

Journal Article More than Hunter or Prey: Duality and Traumatic Memory in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker Get access Maria Rice Bellamy Maria Rice Bellamy College of Staten Island, CUNY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 37, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 177–197, https://doi.org/10.1353/mel.2012.0005 Published: 01 March 2012

The ethics and aesthetics of representing trauma: The textual politics of Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker

The increasing prominence of trauma theory in literary analysis since the 1990s has led some critics to revise notions of the relationship between reader and text. This is not simply because trauma theory invites the reader’s ethical engagement with the text; these theories also re‐evaluate the relationship of reader to text by conceptualizing the text as a “witness” to trauma. This essay explores the political ramifications of such a model with reference to The Dew Breaker (2004) by Haitian‐born US immigrant writer Edwidge Danticat. This text depicts the figure of “the Dew Breaker” (a Tonton Macoute and torturer, of François Duvalier’s regime) and the people directly and indirectly affected by his legacy of terror in Haiti and the United States. The construction of Danticat’s text challenges any notion that the reader can unambiguously witness trauma or empathize with the characters. It enables a critique of literary analyses which see traumatic experiences as available for assimilation into a model of “testifying” text. Furthermore, reading The Dew Breaker as trauma fiction reveals how celebratory notions of audience empathy can overlook the fact that reading fiction is not necessarily an engaged political intervention.

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

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.