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Books
by Edwidge Danticat
The Dew Breaker
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Breath, Eyes, Memory
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Krik? Krak!
/The Farming of
Bones /
Brother, I'm Dying
The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian
Dyaspora in the United States /
Eight Days /
Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490
After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti /
Behind the Mountains
Beacon Best of 2000: Creative Writing by Women and Men of All Colors
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A
Conversation with
Edwidge Danticat
Author
of
The Dew Breaker
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From
the universally acclaimed author of Breath, Eyes, Memory
and Krik? Krak! (both Oprah's Club selections), a
powerful new work of fiction that explores the trials and
reconciliation in the life of a man known as a "dew
breaker," a torturer, whose past crimes in the country of
his birth lie beneath his new American reality. In Haiti in the
dictatorial 1960s, Manhattan in the 1970s, Brooklyn and Queens
today, we meet the dew breaker's family, neighbor's and victims. An
unforgettable, deeply resonant book--of love, remorse, history,
and hope, of rebellions both personal and political—The Dew Breaker proves once more that in Edwidge Danticat we have a
major American writer. |
Q:
Can you tell us about the title of your new book
The Dew Breaker?
Danticat:
The title is my English translation of a Creole expression
“shoukèt laroze,” which during the twenty-nine year period
(1957-1986) that Haiti was ruled by the father and son
dictators, François “Papa Doc” and Jean Claude “Baby
Doc” Duvalier, referred to a rural chief, a brutal regional
leader and sometime torturer. I have always been fascinated by
the poetic naming of such a despicable authority figure and when
I started writing about a former torturer, I decided to
translate the expression in the most serene sounding way I
could. And so we have “the dew breaker.” I could have chosen
several other ways to translate this, “the dew shaker,”
“the dew stomper,” for example, but I like the way the words
“dew breaker” echo the American expression “ball
breaker,” which is a more fitting label for these kinds of
people.
Q:
Why did you decide to structure the telling of the book in the
way that you do? Do you feel that this book represents a
departure from your previous works? If so how?
Danticat:
I wanted the book to open up, as you read it, that is, with each
new character, each new situation, I wanted to add layers upon
layers to the central figure, the dew breaker. I wanted the
reader to be introduced to the dew breaker from different
angles, and for those who love him, an even for him, to see
himself from various perspectives. This book is a departure for
me in that I am writing mostly about men. And I’m writing
about different time periods in a non-linear way.
Q.
What kind of research, if any, went into the writing of the
book?
Danticat:
I read a lot about the twenty-nine year period of the
dictatorship, even though I have merged certain years and have
moved certain events to fit the period the book covers. I read a
lot of personal narratives, academic texts, old news accounts,
spoke to a lot of people and asked them to share their memories
of growing up during the Duvaliers’ dictatorship. I was born
in 1969, and spent the first twelve years of my life under the
dictatorships so I also used my own memories.
For
example, there is an incident in the book where a minister is
arrested by Papa Doc’s henchmen. This really happened when I
was growing up. The minister was severely beaten as he was
leaving his church one night and was nearly killed, so I used my
memories of that time. The real life minister also had a radio
program on Radio Lumière, the religious station mentioned in
the book, even though he never used the words my fictional
minister uses in his radio and live sermons.
Q.
Would you say that most of your characters attempt in some way
to reinvent themselves or escape their past? How successful are
they?
Danticat:
Like all new immigrants, many of the characters have no choice
but to reinvent themselves in some way or other. Otherwise they
would not survive their new lives in America. They try to forget
what haunts them and use what is useful to them from their past,
but ultimately, most of them find balancing these two realities
quite difficult. And like all immigrants, some of them succeed
and some of them fail.
Q:
To what extent are you trying to inform people about Haitian
politics and people in your writing? What response do you expect
to The Dew Breaker in the Haitian-American community?
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Danticat:
It’s hard to say how anyone will react to a book. You
never know until they read it, and if they choose to
share their impressions with you, react to it. There is
not one Haitian-American community, but several
communities. I am really not sure how these communities
will react. I hope, as I do for all my books, that it
will cause some reflection and healthy debate,
especially as Haiti celebrates two hundred years of
independence in 2004, but still finds itself mired in
poverty and political quagmires.
My greatest
wish is that after reading my book, my readers will go
out and find many more books to read about Haiti.
Q:
You have spent your life in America. What is it like for you to
write of a place which, though an integral part of your life, is
no longer your home? And do your memories of Haiti inform your
writing?
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Danticat:
My memories inform my writing a great deal, but since Haiti is a
lively place, a place that is changing all the time, I can’t
afford to just use my memories. I do a lot of research. I go to
Haiti a lot, since I still have family there. I observe. I
listen. I blend the Haiti I see today with the Haiti I once
lived in and try to create interesting and complex situations
for my characters who are facing the current reality as well as
the past. Though I don’t live in Haiti, I feel very connected
to it. It’s as much a part of me as the United States, as much
home for me—if in a more spiritual way—as where I live now
in Miami.
Q.
At one point in the book, an aspiring journalist, Aline, thinks
that she “had never imagined that people like Beatrice (a
bridal seamstress she is interviewing in Queens) existed, men
and women whose tremendous agonies filled every blank space in
their lives.” Aline realizes that these are the people she
wanted to write about. Is the way Aline thinks of these men and
women in this passage similar to how you conjure the characters
you write about?
Danticat:
Yes and no. I am indeed very much drawn to people who live in
between determined categories, people who are something between
model immigrants and so called deviant ones like Claude, a young
man who is deported from the United States for committing a
horrible crime. I think all of us live nuanced and complicated
lives. I am not interested in writing about people who can be
defined too easily, who are either too good or too bad. I like
to write about those gray places, those “blank” spaces, if
you will, the stuff in-between.
Q: “People here (in America) are
more practical maybe,” a first-generation American character
states, “but there, in Haiti or the Philippines, that’s
where people see everything, even things they’re not supposed
to see. So I see a woman’s face in a rose, I’d think
somebody drew it there, but if you see it, Manmam, you think
it’s a miracle.” Do you think of this American
“practicality” as a positive force? What would you say are
some of its repercussions, if any? And on the other hand, do you
think that poorer countries of the world may pay a price for
holding on to tradition, or to their spiritual beliefs?
Danticat: In this scene, the dew
breaker and his wife and daughter are on their way to church.
The Filipino man who had seen the Madonna’s face on a rose
petal. Her daughter replies by trying to find a proper, an
“American” explanation for this miracle—for instance maybe
someone drew the Madonna’s face on the rose petal. In any
early draft, I had the mother reply that on American money it
says “In God We Trust” to show that Americans have their
traditions and firm beliefs too. The American dream in itself is
a kind of miracle story, isn’t it?
I think when you talk about people from
poorer countries, you have to realize that not all people from
poorer countries have the same beliefs. There are people from
Haiti or the Philippines, for example, who would reply the same
way as this first generation American woman. So the dichotomies
are not always so clear cut. We all have our traditions, which
have both positive and negative repercussions. It all depends on
how we integrate them in our lives and whether they serve us or
hold us back.
But I don’t believe there’s anything
wrong with having faith, as long as it does not become a crutch.
On some level the preacher in the book is being punished for
preaching liberation theology, because he’s basically saying
that tradition and faith can be used to oppress a nation. In the
most evil hands, traditions can be used like a weapon against a
people. In some other instance it’s the very thing that
liberates them.
Q: Some of the Haitian characters in
your book are portrayed as trying to create a tiny version of
their home country in America, never quite stepping wholly
outside that world. How do you think this affects their
experiences as immigrants?
Danticat: I think we’re all a little
cautious when we move to a new place. We all retreat to familiar
versions of our old lives and try to recreate that in a new
place. Many of the characters eventually move into their new
society, but for some of them it takes much longer than others.
Having just left a dictatorship, most of the characters are
fearful as they try to navigate a new situation they barely
understand.
They seek comfort in each other. Sometimes
one had to do that to survive. If you don’t speak the
language, naturally you’re going to try to find other people
like you, people who might be able to help you go to the doctor,
get a job. So sometimes the first period of insularity is not a
choice but a necessity.
Q: Anne, the wife of the “Dew
Breaker” is able to remain married to a man she knows to have
to have committed unspeakable acts, while a village embraces a
man who has killed one of their own. What does this say about
the nature of love and forgiveness?
Danticat: This is the part of the book
I wrestled with the most. How do we love people who have done
such horrible things? When I was younger, I was always confused
that the dictators’ foot soldiers, who were so brutal with
other people had wives and children, whom they loved. This is
something I could never clearly explain to myself. I am not
saying that everyone should be forgiven and loved after having
done such terrible things. I think people like this should be
punished as severely as justice allows.
But we have those cases where the mothers of
murdered children befriend the killers. Where former victims in
South Africa embrace their torturers. I can’t explain that,
but I think somehow people can and do reach inside themselves to
make that happen, so that they can move on with their lives.
But for people whose fathers and mothers
committed these crimes, I will often hear the say, “That is
not the same person I knew. That is not my mother, my father, my
brother, sister.” Perhaps there is a part of that person that
the loved one will always hate, but there is also a part of them
that they’re somehow able to love, the part who tucked them in
at night and walked them to school in the morning. I think
it’s an incredible act of love, to love someone whom you know,
on some level, is not at all worthy of anyone’s love.
Q: What’s next for you?
Danticat: I hope to start another
novel soon. I just finish a young adult book called Anacaona,
Golden Flower. It’s about a Taino woman named Anacaona.
She ruled over a part of Haiti, Léogâne, where my family is
from. She was a warrior, a dancer, a storyteller, and a
fantastic potter and has been my (s)hero since I was a little
girl.
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Praise for Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik?
Krak!
Pure beguiling
transformation.--Los Angeles Time
Prose as clear as a
bell, magical as a butterfly, and resonant as a drum.--Julia Alvarez
Danticat's calm
clarity of vision takes on the resonance of folk art . . .
Extraordinarily successful.--New York times Book
Review
Demonstrates the
healing power of storytelling.--San Francisco Chronicle
Thomas Wolfe, shake
hands with Edwidge Danticat, your spiritual heir.--Newsweek
Virtually flawless.--Washington Post Book
World
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Edwidge Danticat—born 1969 in Jacmel,
Haiti—moved to the United States when she was twelve. Her first
languages were Creole and then French. She attended high school
in Brooklyn and graduated from Barnard College and earned her
MFA at Brown University. Her much-praised first novel,
Breath, Eyes, Memory—a lyrical and austere portrait of the
Haitian diaspora in their Brooklyn exile—was published
in 1994, at aged 25. A year later
Krik? Krak! her first
collection of short stories, was nominated for the US National
Book Award. Her second novel
The Farming of
Bones
recreates the events surrounding the Haitian Massacre of 1937
(15,000 slaughtered by Trujillio's regime in the Dominican
Republic), examining the struggle "of two different people
trying to share one tiny piece of land." The Farming of
Bones was an American Book Award winner. She is also the
editor of
The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian
Dyaspora in the United States
and
Beacon Best of 2000: Creative Writing by Women and Men of All Colors. |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist
at Work
By Edwidge Danticat
Create Dangerously
is an eloquent and moving expression of
Danticat's belief that immigrant artists
are obliged to bear witness when their
countries of origin are suffering from
violence, oppression, poverty, and
tragedy.
In this deeply personal book, the
celebrated Haitian-American writer
Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and
exile, examining what it means to be an
immigrant artist from a country in
crisis. Inspired by Albert Camus'
lecture, "Create Dangerously," and
combining memoir and essay, Danticat
tells the stories of artists, including
herself, who create despite, or because
of, the horrors that drove them from
their homelands and that continue to
haunt them. Danticat eulogizes an aunt
who guarded her family's homestead in
the Haitian countryside, a cousin who
died of AIDS while living in Miami as an
undocumented alien, and a renowned
Haitian radio journalist whose political
assassination shocked the world.
Danticat writes about the Haitian novelists she
first read as a girl at the Brooklyn Public Library,
a woman mutilated in a machete attack who became a
public witness against torture, and the work of
Jean-Michel Basquiat and other artists of Haitian
descent. Danticat also suggests that the aftermaths
of natural disasters in Haiti and the United States
reveal that the countries are not as different as
many Americans might like to believe..—CaribbeanLiterarySalon
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Review and Interview by Kam Williams |
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update
1 February 2012
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