The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat

Author: Hannah Martin

  

Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Dew Breaker is a collection of stories connected through seemingly unrelated yet recurring characters. The novel explores such literary themes as voicelessness, the violence inherent in the language, and the recurring image of blood. The novel also explores much broader themes such as the (in)communicability of experience, creative practices and patterns of diaspora across the globe. 

The first story invites the reader into the lives of a daughter who has erected a sculpture of her father out of wood. The crack down the back of the mahogany she has used may make the work look amateurish, but it actually reflects the imperfections of her father. Perhaps Ka has aestheticized and generalised her father’s faults in attempting to represent him, yet as the TV star also identifies with the statue, Ka’s father has escaped her representation. In being sceptical regarding whether artistic representations achieve true representation, Ka aims for mimesis through a creative practice. In this way, the novel refuses binaries; Ka’s father has been represented and his own story juxtaposed against the stories of those he tortured. This focus on the individual privileges the singularity of experience. It also emphasises that the series of protagonists are no more or less important than the one before, which, in turn, suggests tenuous continuity but not homogeneity. What the text involves occupies an inbetween space, and the text itself occupies an ambivalent space: in this sense, it is not a novel, but a collection of short stories.

The married couple who remain nameless and speak different languages from each other personify the loss of connection apparent between the subsequent protagonists in each story. The alienation one can feel, even towards a cherished companion, is just one of the themes recurrent throughout the novel.
 

The reader also gets a glimpse into the life of a nurse who treats people whose voice box has been removed, and helps them recover from the initial shock. In her home life, we see that her parents live in Haiti, and instead of sending letters, she sends money. The theme of voicelessness is particularly apparent in this story, as is the issue of identity. Nadine’s “distorted reflection of herself” (p 57) in the elevator doors could be how she perceives herself, or positing the question to herself that if someone has no identity, are  they soon forgotten?

The theme of voicelessness is resurrected in a story where the only connection a nephew has with his aunt is that they both talk in their sleep. The refusal of closure is represented in this story through the aunt’s death before she has answered her nephew’s questions. Her experiences cannot be compensated and there is a significant lack of redemption for the nephew.

An aspect that connects all the stories together is the fact that things are destroyed. The sculpture, the letters, the aborted baby, memories – intangible things are often associated with unreliability yet even physical, material things that document significant events can be destroyed, leaving them to history which itself will eventually be forgotten. The very fragility of human connections and the memories of lives lost assimilate torture yet the enduring effects of such are particularly prominent on the characters, and the varying degrees of which on different characters are interesting to note. 

The emotional cost of transnational migration is alienation and loneliness. The novel could be argued to act as a counter-narrative to Haitian diaspora; the emphasis placed on complex human losses and the almost mimetic reproduction of what is lost in movement is represented through the lives of the protagonists, each in their own stories. What is left is not a neat, clear, resolved history, but a heavy sense of marginalisation and overshadowing, caused, in most part, by natural disasters. The narrative reproduces that refusal of recuperation, and, in a sense, makes the reader feel better, yet dissatisfied simultaneously. The fact that it has been written in English for a non-Haitian audience suggests another attempt at trying to bridge the gulf between Haitians and non-Haitians. 
The Dew Breaker is not a collection of stories that one can pick up, read and think ‘That was a nice book’. The history and the politics behind Haiti are embedded within the text, which gives it a profound sense of gravitas. Danticat has produced a truly remarkable book that scrupulously depicts Haitian uprootedness.