The Dew Breaker

The book is episodic and can be looked at a series of short stories. But they're all interrelated, and tell the story of Haiti over the past twenty years. A "dew breaker" is a prison guard who tortures the captives in his charge. And he is the central character in the book. He now lives in Brooklyn and has a loving wife and a grown up daughter. He now works as a barber and his past seems a long time ago. We see him through his daughter's eyes as he reveals his true past to her. The daughter loves her father but this new fact about his life is hard to accept.

We also meet other Haitian people, living in America. There's the nurse who sends most of her paycheck home to her mother. There's the young man who brings his wife to this country. There's another man who travels back to Haiti to visit his dying aunt. There are three Haitian women learning English and sharing their stories with each other.

Eventually, we flash back to the story of the "dew breaker" in Haiti. It's not a pleasant story but yet a very human one. Even though we don't forgive, we do understand.

I was a little reluctant to read this book. I thought it would have detailed horrors and be excessively brutal. I was glad that Ms. Danticant, in her wisdom, spent most of her time on character development and story. She only put in a few of the horrible details, mostly focusing on the people, rather than on the gore.

The book is only 242 pages long, a fast read. It left me with a deep understanding of Haiti, its people, and what is going on in the news today.


"Atonement...was possible and available for everyone."   August 18, 2004
Mary Whipple (New England)
32 out of 35 found this review helpful

Author Danticat introduces her story of Haitian immigrants and the lives they have escaped in Haiti with the story of Ka, a young sculptress whose parents think of her as a "good angel," her name also associated symbolically with the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Ka is in Florida with her father to deliver a powerfully rendered sculpture to a Haitian TV actress. Ka's father, who served as the model for the sculpture, however, destroys it, confessing tearfully that he is not the man his daughter has always believed him to be, and admitting that the disfiguring scar on his face was not the result of torture in a Haitian prison. He was "the hunter," he says, and "not the prey," one of the "dew breakers," or torturers, who as part of the Tonton Macoutes, committed political assassinations and inflicted unimaginable tortures on orders of dictators Francois Duvalier and his son "Baby Doc" between 1957-86.

In a series of episodes which resemble short stories more than a novel in form, Danticat illuminates the lives of approximately a dozen Haitian immigrants as they remember this traumatic period "back home." As the "novel" alternates between past and present, it is told from disparate points of view--those of Ka's mother and father, a young man visiting Haiti after ten years to see his blinded aunt, a wedding seamstress in New York, a Haitian-American reporter investigating a possible "dew-breaker," a man remembering a Haitian friend's long-ago disappearance as he awaits his son's birth in New York, and a popular Haitian preacher whose arrest affects lives for many years.

The novel gains much of its power from the horrors of vividly described torture and the overwhelming fear engendered by the Tonton Macoute militia. By calling up such emotionally charged memories and presenting them in a series of episodes, the author can let the personal stories unfold without having to order events so that they lead to a grand climax. What distinguishes this "novel" from a short story collection, however, is the repeating motifs that appear throughout these seemingly separate episodes (a man's widow's peak, a woman's fear of cemeteries, for example), and by the end of the novel the connections among all the characters become obvious. A vivid documentation of many of the worst human rights abuses of the century, Danticat's novel is a moving testament to the Haitians' resilient spirit and a celebration of their survival. Mary Whipple


Framing The Unmasterable, Memoried Past   April 17, 2004
Alan Cambeira (Dominican Republic, author of Tattered Paradise...Azucar's Trilogy Ends)
25 out of 28 found this review helpful

Danticat is enormously good for us, especially now. She reminds us of the beautiful literary spirit of Haiti... much like that glorious cadre of revolutionary Haitian women literary figures Ghislaine Charlier, Jan J. Dominique, Nadine Magloire, and of course Marie Chauvet and more recently Myriam Chancy. Exquisite writers all. Danticat, like her sisters, reminds us of the rich literary legacy that truly celebrates all that is beautiful about this much maligned and misunderstood country. Danticat herself, in my view, is an accident of literary privilege, a formidably keen observer or witness to events that have happened or to what is currently happening. This story, The Dew Breaker, while a horribly true tale of interwoven lives connected gruesomely by the "beast", actually chose her; she is the extremely gifted and talented vessel that serves to receive this story.

Is there redemption for the protagonist, the shouket laroze himself? I don't know. Perhaps even Danticate isn't quite certain. The protagonist, an ultimately pathetic soul, is caught up in a nightmarish episode of reality --as is all of Haiti. As his daughter peels away the layers of his humanity, penetrating ever so deeper into his tortured soul to see just who he is, she too (like us) arrives at the point of moral ambiguity about her father. The skillful artistry in Danticat actually tortures us with this sense of indefiniteness ... which is what all excellent writers often do, of course. With measured steps,the author takes a daring literary plunge into the often risky arena between the short story and the novella. She triumphs wonderfully. In telling a painfully good story, Danticat presents us with real people agonizing in their search for answers, explanations and understandings. M' pa di passe ca.
Definitely recommended reading.

Alan Cambeira
Author of AZUCAR! The Story of Sugar (a novel)


Love and Redemption   March 28, 2004
Geoffrey Philp (Miami, Florida)
23 out of 26 found this review helpful

Given the subject matter of The Dew Breaker, the story of a killer in Haiti who has "given in to the greatest hazard of the job... It was becoming like any another job," Edwidge Danticat has taken an enormous emotional and aesthetic risk by choosing to tell his story from his daughter's sympathetic point of view. Ms. Danticat also displays her story telling gifts by two astonishing twists in the plot and her capable handling of a central trope that reveals even as it hides the past of one of its central characters.

In The Dew Breaker, Danticat has succeeded in showing us that love, even for a monster, can have redemptive effect. And while Ka Bienaim's father can never fully accept the grace offered to him by Anne, his wife, and Ka, his daughter-he destroys a statue of himself that was a gift from his daughter-he does live a reformed life after he leaves Haiti.

The Dew Breaker is a sublime work and the tone that Ms. Danticat maintains throughout the work captures the moral dilemma of the "hunter and the hunted." It is easy to want revenge for horrific acts that have been done to our loved ones. But killers have families and children who love them, and they are in desperate need of the kind of salvific love that Anne offers. This humane novel is an act of bravery that may bring life back to the "dead spots" of Haiti's troubled past.


A legacy of horror   April 1, 2004
Luan Gaines (Dana Point, CA USA)
22 out of 23 found this review helpful

Throughout The Dew Breaker, evil prevails in all its manifestations, particularly in the guise of authority, demanding homage from the persecuted. This novel is beautifully constructed; characters fall into place within the chapters, the infinite connections that bind one life to another clearly drawn. In each facet of her story, the author builds the momentum in this cautionary tale of horror, love, rebelliousness and hope, touched with myth and memory.

As the novel begins, a young woman gazes upon her father with eyes of love, unaware of his past. Finally confessing his carefully hidden secret, he is revealed as deeply flawed, his actions virtually unforgivable. The scar he wears on his face carries a terrible history, his life in America built on deception. In his mouth the truth is a lie. Although the father pardons himself, there are many who damn him for the monster of their nightmares.

Weaving through the chapters, we learn of those who have been touched by brutal dictatorship and oppression, where unmarried women bear fatherless children, eking out the most basic existence. Haiti, an island paradise, turns into hell under a despot's reign of terror, freedom a vague dream, while the hungry scratch for garbage, all under a starlit sky of infinite beauty. Even when these characters find a different life in America, they carry the indelible scars of Haiti in their hearts.

This passionate novel is an assemblage of powerful interrelated stories; here a chorus of voices hums, the heard and the unheard, the "disappeared", the unborn, the women whose voice boxes have been surgically removed, the desperate murmur of prayers, the eternal silence of the dead and the staccato of random gunfire. There is a staggering contrast between good and evil in The Dew Breaker, as well as the grinding reality of a world made suddenly transcendent in the bright rays of the morning sun. Horrifying, how evil walks so freely through the world, casually touching its victims, then casually strolling into the quiet evening and a peaceful existence, unexposed and unrelenting. Luan Gaines/2004.