Approaches to Teaching the Works of Edwidge Danticat

Celucien Joseph, Suchismita Banerjee, Marvin Hobson, Danny Hoey, Jr., Celucien L. Joseph, Suchismita Banerjee, Marvin E. Hobson, Danny M. Hoey, Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000012521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Providing an intellectual interpretation to the work of Edwidge Danticat, this new edited collection provides a pedagogical approach to teach and interpret her body of work in undergraduate and graduate classrooms. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Edwidge Danticat starts out by exploring diasporic categories and postcolonial themes such as gender constructs, cultural nationalism, cultural and communal identity, and moves to investigate Danticat's human rights activism, the immigrant experience, the relationship between the particular and the universal, and the violence of hegemony and imperialism in relationship with society, family, and community. The Editors of the collection have carefully compiled works that show how Danticat's writings may help in building more compassionate and relational human communities that are grounded on the imperative of human dignity, respect, inclusion, and peace.

Part I
Critical Literary, Historical Narrative, and Transformative Pedagogy

1 From Duvalierism to Dechoukaj in The Dew Breaker

Jonathan Glover

This chapter examines Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker (2005), a text that confronts neo/colonial narratives of Haiti by elucidating the geopolitical inequities that foment Haitian political strife, primarily through Danticat’s depiction of the tonton macoute not as a demonic embodiment but as a human figure corrupted by harrowing social conditions. Nine short-stories comprise The Dew Breaker, each story interweaving with the others to create a novel from originally autonomous, alinear fragments. The characters of each story, from the diasporic characters living in Brooklyn to those living in rural Haiti, are connected to one another through Mr. Bienaime, the dew breaker of the book’s title.

The consequences of the dew breaker’s actions reverberate throughout the United States and Haiti and span the administrations of Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier (1957–1986) as well as Jean-Bertrand Aristide, their democratically elected successor (1991, 1994–1996, 2001–2004), and the first administration of René Préval (1996–2001), revealing the transnational and cyclical dynamics that perpetuate Haitian political violence. This transnational and broadly periodized narrative thereby resists the commemorative process of fixating on a particular moment of crisis or a particular political figurehead, often for partisan, politically instrumentalist ends. Through these narrative strategies The Dew Breaker rehumanizes the Tonton Macoute and demonstrates that Haiti is neither isolated from Western hemispheric politics nor anterior to North American modernity.

The Frame of Evil

In 1957, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, a doctor and anthropologist from the Haitian countryside, ascended to power through a rigged presidential election. Running on a platform of noiriste, a négritude-influenced counter-ideology to mulatto elitism, Papa Doc held significant sway with the rural black peasantry, the urban black middle class, and the largely black Haitian military. Despite this widespread popularity, however, Papa Doc saw fit to ensure his election through intimidation and electoral manipulation (Lundahl 266), strongman tactics that foreshadowed the coming totalitarianism of his self-decreed presidency for life. A key feature of Duvalier’s reign was his creation in 1962 of a personal secret police force, the Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale, commonly known as the tonton macoutes, “a 10,000 man terror corps that was used to intimidate real or imagined adversaries . . .” (257). Across Europe and North America, British author Graham Greene popularized the image of the tonton macoutes, with their denim uniforms and ever-present dark sunglasses, in his novel and subsequent Hollywood screenplay The Comedians (1966/1967).

In the dedication note to the novel, Greene asserts the unmitigated realism of his work, describing Duvalier and the tonton macoutes through the symbolics of darkness and evil: “Poor Haiti itself and the character of Doctor Duvalier’s rule are not invented, the latter not even blackened for dramatic effect. Impossible to deepen that night. The Tontons Macoute are full of men more evil than Concasseur,” Greene’s fictionalized macoute captain (2). The Comedians depicts Haiti’s descent from an impoverished but relatively stable tourist destination to a totalitarian state through the eyes of Mr. Brown, a British expatriate who owns and operates a hotel in Port-au-Prince. Based largely but by no means completely on Greene’s two visits to Haiti—once before Papa Doc’s election, once after—The Comedians illustrates an oppressive and brutal period of Haitian history requiring, as Greene argues, no sensationalism—“Impossible to deepen that night.” In J. Michael Dash’s estimation, however, The Comedians renders Haitian politics a spectacle of “black lunacy” by favoring “betrayal, injustice and human failure” over “nobility and goodness” (Haiti 111, 106). While much of the violence and oppression depicted in The Comedians was a common feature of the Duvalierist state; what is at stake in such a depiction of Haitian politics, a depiction that emphasizes darkness and attributes the brutality of Duvalier’s tonton macoutes to the transcendental signifier of evil, a concept associated with an intrinsic spiritual essence, the soul?

This question lies at the center of my reading of Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, a novel that also depicts the violence and depravity of Duvalierism but in a markedly different way—through a humanizing rather than a demonizing portrayal of a tonton macoute. The Dew Breaker dramatizes the social and political links that connect Haiti and the United States through the relation of numerous Haitian and Haitian American characters to the central figure of The Dew Breaker, a Tonton Macoute who once tortured political prisoners for Papa Doc but now, thirty-seven years later, tries to live a peaceful and anonymous life of exile in Brooklyn, New York. Through the force of allusion, Danticat makes the connection between The Dew Breaker and The Comedians all the stronger. In her concluding chapter, “The Dew Breaker: Circa 1967,” Danticat imagines “Human Rights people . . . gathered in hotel bars at the end of long days of secretly counting corpses and typing single-spaced reports . . .” These human rights workers quote from the dedication note to The Comedians as they write, illustrating the discursive power of Greene’s novel: “‘Impossible to deepen that night.’ These people don’t have far to go to find their devils. Their devils aren’t imagined; they’re real” (186). This allusion demonstrates Danticat’s desire to confront the frame of evil that serves as an explanatory device for Haitian political violence in a wide array of media, including novels and films like The Comedians and even humanitarian reporting. Invoking Greene, these human rights workers depict men like The Dew Breaker as devils, intrinsically evil beings who, in accordance with their essential malevolence, inevitably perpetrate evil deeds. This Manichean moral schema (good versus evil) evacuates structural concerns from consideration of Haitian politics and dehumanizes the victims and victimizers enmeshed in such systemic political violence.

Departing from the explicatory frame of evil, the multi-voiced and chronologically fragmented narrative of The Dew Breaker elucidates the geopolitical inequities that foment Haitian political strife and depicts the tonton macoute not as a demonic embodiment but as a human figure corrupted by harrowing social conditions. Nine short stories comprise The Dew Breaker, each story interweaving with the others to create a novel from originally autonomous parts.¹ The characters of each story, from the diasporic characters living in Brooklyn to those living in rural Haiti, are connected to one another through Mr. Bienaime, The Dew Breaker of the book’s title. The consequences of The Dew Breaker’s actions reverberate throughout the United States and Haiti and span the administrations of Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier (1957–1986) as well as Jean-Bertrand Aristide, their democratically elected successor (1991, 1994–1996, 2001–2004), and the first administration of René Préval (1996–2001), revealing the transnational and cyclical dynamics that perpetuate Haitian political violence. This transnational and broadly periodized narrative thereby resists the commemorative process of fixating on a particular moment of crisis or a particular political figurehead, often for partisan, politically instrumentalist ends. Through these narrative strategies The Dew Breaker rehumanizes the tonton macoute and demonstrates that Haiti is neither isolated from Western hemispheric politics nor anterior to North American modernity.

“What did they do to you?”: The Making/Unmaking of a Macoute

The establishing story of The Dew Breaker, The Book of the Dead, presents Bienaime thirty-seven years removed from his life as a macoute, a temporal and spatial distancing from the scene of his crimes that fosters empathy for the now elderly family man and Brooklyn barber whose name itself—Bienaime means “well loved”—calls attention to his progression. Narrated by Ka, Bienaime’s daughter and an aspiring sculptor, “The Book of the Dead” begins in a Lakeland, Florida hotel office, where Ka has gone to report her father missing from their hotel room. As Ka explains to the hotel manager and a police officer, she and her father have been travelling from Brooklyn to deliver one of Ka’s sculptures to a buyer in Tampa. The sculpture, a wood-carving of Bienaime depicted as a prisoner in a Haitian jail, has also gone missing from the hotel. As the hotelier and police officer question Ka about her father, she leads them to believe that she was born in Haiti, despite being an American citizen by birth. In a retrospective narration, Ka explains why she has lied about her birthplace: “I was born and raised in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and have never been to my parents’ birthplace. Still, I answer ‘Haiti’ because it is one more thing I’ve always longed to have in common with my parents” (3–4).

A first-generation Haitian American, Ka registers a feeling of dislocation, of severed origins. She wishes to have Haiti in common with her parents, but her birth and upbringing in America make Haiti a lost, irretrievable homeland. This generational gap between Haitian-born parents and their U.S.-born daughter also manifests in Ka’s greater facility with English, leading to conversations where Bienaime chooses to speak certain phrases in Creole while Ka answers “defiantly in English” (17). This feeling of dislocation leads Ka to create a mythic mental image of her parents’ Haitian past from the stories she has heard of their lives: this idealized family history grants Ka access to the national-cultural origins from which she feels estranged.

Ka creates a concrete embodiment of this idealized past in the form of her wood-carved sculpture of her father. Throughout Ka’s life, Bienaime had explained the “ropelike scar that runs from . . . [his] right cheek down to the corner of his mouth,” as a wound inflicted upon him by a Haitian prison guard during his year of incarceration (5). In accordance with these stories, Bienaime’s revised past, Ka’s sculpture depicts her father as a beaten yet still noble and pensive prisoner:

my first completed sculpture of him was the reason for our trip: a three-foot mahogany figure of my father, naked, kneeling on a half-foot-square base, his back arched like the curve of a crescent moon, his downcast eyes fixed on his very long fingers and the large palms of his hands. . . . It was the way I had imagined him in prison. (6)

The sculpture connects Ka to an imagined family past, one based on idealization of her father’s victimization (via state-sanctioned torture) and survival (in diasporic exile). But, as will be revealed to her when Bienaime returns to the hotel, this family narrative is an inversion of her father’s actual relationship with the Duvalierist torture state.

Bienaime has thrown the sculpture away in shame because it embodies the fallacy of his revised life story—Bienaime was not the victim but the victimizer, a state-appointed torturer, during his time in the Haitian prison. As he explains to his bewildered daughter,

One day for the hunter, one day for the prey. Ka, your father was the hunter, he was not the prey. . . . Ka, I was never in prison. . . . I was working in the prison. . . . It was one of the prisoners inside the prison who cut my face in this way. . . . This man who cut my face . . . I shot and killed him, like I killed many people. (21–22)

Ka experiences Bienaime’s confession as “a monologue” told “in one breath” and wishes she “too had had some rehearsal time, a chance to have learned what to say in response” (22). The rehearsed character of Bienaime’s confession, like his recurrent nightmares (23), demonstrates the gravity of his crimes, their manifestation as a burdensome family secret he has long wished to share with his daughter. Recalling her Egyptophile father’s performance of “The Negative Confession” from The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Ka realizes that Bienaime had, in fact, been giving a circumscribed confession to her for many years, if only she had “removed the negatives”: “‘I am not a violent man’ he had read. ‘I have made no one weep. I have never been angry without cause. I have never uttered any lies. I have never slain any men or women. I have done no evil’” (23).

Ka, however, is wary of her father’s wish for understanding: “It was my first inkling that maybe my father was wrong in his own representation of his former life, that maybe his past offered more choices than being either hunter or prey” (24). Susana Vega González reads Ka’s statement as an invocation of the vodou principle of Marasa, represented by the twins of the lwa family: “Once she knows the true situation of her father in the Haitian prison, Ka, the daughter, opts for a dialectic position, as if applying the Marasa principle of doubleness from voudou lore, seeing her father as both victim and victimizer” (González 185). While a provocative reading, I suggest that Ka actually critiques Bienaime’s bifurcation of the world into hunters and their prey as a fallacy, a reiteration of a kill or be killed binary. Bienaime, in other words, speaks as though his conscription into t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Edwidge Danticat in a Global Classroom and Transnational Context: Rethinking Pedagogy, Transcultural Community, and Engaged Learning
• Part I Critical Literary, Historical Narrative, and Transformative Pedagogy
• Part II Gender Alliance, Pedagogy, and Engaged Learning
• Part III The Global Classroom, Transnational Community, and Cross-Cultural Communication
• Part IV Citizen-Artist and Teaching as Activism
• List of Contributors
• Index