March 25-31, 2004

books

Breaking Point

Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat takes two cultures on the edge and tries to make them whole again.

by John Freeman

Since she came to Brooklyn from Haiti in 1981, Edwidge Danticat has had feet in two cultures. Writing has always been her way to connect the two. "When I got here I felt so lost in a way," says Danticat over the phone from Mount Holyoke College, where she is giving a talk, a Brooklyn accent giving her voice a rich, throaty bottom. "Writing was a way to interpret my world. To incorporate the new things I was learning."

Danticat was a quick study, indeed. From Breath, Eyes, Memory, begun when she was still in high school and later made a selection for Oprah's Book Club, to Krik? Krak!, named a National Book Award finalist when she was just 25, Danticat made her name as a writer who could depict characters caught between the past and the future -- a Haiti mired in the past, and an America where remnants of that past are surreally out of place.

This month Danticat publishes her third novel, The Dew Breaker, with cruel timeliness, as Haiti nearly tipped over into anarchy. The book revolves around a former dew breaker, a transliteration from Creole of the name given to enforcers from Duvalier's regime. The book opens in 2000 and Danticat's dew breaker has moved to Brooklyn to put his past behind him. In the opening sequence, however, he must reckon with his crimes when his daughter crafts a sculpture of him. "Ka," he says, addressing his daughter with a nickname that means body double, "when I first saw your statue, I wanted to be buried with it."

A note in Danticat's acknowledgements makes clear that unlike Breath, Eyes, Memory, this is not a very autobiographical novel. "After the first piece was published in The New Yorker," she says laughing, "a friend of mine came up to me, and said, "Aren't you worried people are going to think your pop is a torturer?'" Danticat's father actually drove a cab, but she does know what it feels like to live in close proximity to people who may have done very bad things.

"At the time I came to Brooklyn, when I was about 12, you had a huge wave of migration -- in the early stages of a dictatorship, in the '50s and '60s, you had the brain drain. In the '80s, you had a lot of other people coming out -- people from the countryside. Mixed in with the victims, you also had the perpetrators. There were always these whisperers that so and so was here now and is now something else."

The Dew Breaker dramatizes this frisson of fear and dread by taking a round-robin approach to narration. The first story in the novel is narrated from the perspective of the dew breaker's daughter; it then expands to include people in his East Flatbush neighborhood: barbershop customers, his wife and Haitian-Americans who narrowly escaped his sword. Some chapters don't even touch on him, but merely evoke the brutal memory of living under the threat of violence. "They'd break into your house before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves, and they'd take you away," remembers a retired dressmaker.

This interlocking story structure aptly mirrors the fabric of this community and how it must weave itself together. "This is a book as much about creating art out of mystery, or out of pain, as much as it is about the man," says Danticat. "It's about piecing together fragments, pieces that are thrown to us and [we're] forced to make wholes out of disparate parts."

Part of Danticat will always be in Haiti; not only does she have a past there, but relatives, too -- a worrisome thing now. "Like everybody else, I check in with them regularly," she says. "Thankfully they're not yet in the region that's having the most trouble. Like everybody else, they are praying for an outcome. My uncle, who raised me, who I was with before I came here, he's 81 years old, he's in the capital. They're not amongst the powerful people. They are just waiting for people to settle things."

Danticat recently moved to Florida to be with her husband, so she is closer to Haiti, but not close enough. In the meantime, she does not bemoan having to write her way to wholeness. "Dealing with two places is a gift, a rich life is what every artist seeks. Having two cultures to draw from is great in terms of creativity, in finding nuance. That's not tragic -- it's wonderful with possibilities, it adds layers to one as a person." In The Dew Breaker, she proves what wonderful layers it can add to fiction as well.

Edwidge Danticat reads and signs, Thu., March 25, 7 p.m., free, Free Library Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341.

THE DEW BREAKER

By Edwidge Danticat Knopf, 244 pp., $22