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Crystal
Newbie Poster
Username: Crystal
Post Number: 15
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, March 31, 2004 - 11:54 am: | 
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By Edwidge Danticat - another author I’ve been sleep on. I really enjoyed this. It’s a collection of stories that are tied together by some of the characters. Most are set in the Haitian-American communities of the east coast and some are set in Haiti and covers the 1960’s forward and the atrocities of the notorious Doc family. She does a good job of describing the settings. I’ve got a couple of others of hers on my library list.
Actually, I haven’t read much by Caribbean authors. I think I’ll make this summer a literary Caribbean vacation. Any suggestions?
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Yukio
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 123
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, March 31, 2004 - 12:08 pm: |
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crystal...i've been readin caribbean lit. for the past year or so...lets read together! If you're read Caryl phillips then you're read caribbean lit...as well as jamaica kincaid...
check 2 nytimes reviews of Danticat...also consider Darkest Child Review:
Off the Island
By Richard Eder
THE DEW BREAKER
By Edwidge Danticat.
244 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $22.
Archimedes held that he could lift the earth if he had a lever long enough, and an extraplanetary fulcrum to rest it on. There are horrors so heavy that they seem untellable. To bear to tell them so that we can bear to read them, a writer must find somewhere outside -- peaceful, unmarked -- to project them from. Atrocity enters the imagination not as the violating point of the knife but as the fair flesh violated.
That is how the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat has managed over the past 10 years to portray with such terrifying wit and flowered pungency the torment of the Haitian people. In one of the stories in ''Krik? Krak!,'' a National Book Award finalist, a maid to a rich Haitian family finds a dead baby, names it Rose, keeps it for days, washing it to dissipate the smell, and finally buries it. It is discovered by the gardener, her lover, who calls the police.
So much for horror; but what locks it in is the maid's irony: ''We made a pretty picture standing there, Rose, me and him. Between the pool and the gardenias, waiting on the law.''
Or in ''The Farming of Bones,'' a novel about Trujillo's 1930's massacre of Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic, no awful detail precipitates the bloody swirl so clearly as the lilting innocence of the word ''parsley.'' ''Pesa'' in Creole, ''perejil'' in Spanish; but Haitians can't manage the Spanish ''r'' and its guttural ''j,'' so those unable to say ''perejil'' were killed and parsley stuffed in their mouths.
The final and title story of ''The Dew Breaker,'' Danticat's new collection, makes a more direct approach to horror. Set in the 1960's during the reign of François Duvalier, it recounts, dry-mouthed, the hours spent by a Tonton Macoute (one of Duvalier's murderous agents) as he waits in his car for a dissident preacher to arrive at church.
The agent bursts in after the sermon, throws the priest into a truck, tortures him and takes him to headquarters to kill him. Word mysteriously comes -- the regime's terrors were always mysterious -- that he is to be released instead. Before the agent can obey, the priest gouges his face with a shard of wood; the agent shoots him dead.
Yet even this story, with its headlong darkness, has strangely flickering lights that permit us to see it by. Waiting, the agent sends a loitering schoolboy to buy cigarettes; when the boy returns, the man questions him paternally about his schoolwork. There is the street scene itself. Among the kiosks purveying tobacco, trinkets and food, the waiting car is one kiosk more, purveying death; and as much part of daily neighborhood life as the others.
When the priest is dragged into prison, bleeding and burned with cigarettes, his cellmates urinate on him. It is a work not of contempt but of corporal mercy, since they believe urine to heal and soothe. Haiti lives at depths where contempt cannot grow; down there, mercy straggles but persists.
In her other stories and in this collection Danticat often uses the Haitian community in the United States as the horror-spared site for her fulcrum. Despite difficulties, strangeness and uncertainties, these characters are swimmers pulled from the depths. Nitrogen bubbles course agonizingly in their bloodstream, memories rack them; yet there is an uncertain daylight, and it is by this that darkness is called up and told.
In ''The Funeral Singer,'' the telling is light but painful. Three Haitian women meet regularly at a restaurant one owns on the Upper West Side. She'd fled after being forced to have sex with the Tonton Macoutes; another, after her painter husband was shot for a caricature of Duvalier. The third, the narrator, was the daughter of a fisherman who drowned, perhaps deliberately, after his fish stall was taken over. At his funeral she sang ''Brother Timonie'' -- the name means ''steersman'' -- so affectingly that soon she was in demand at other funerals. Now, with the slow rock of a fishing boat on a sea swell, the women talk, remember, try to look ahead. Lubricated with rum, the narrator sings ''Brother Timonie,'' the steersman's song learned from her father. The others join in; tableware is smashed. ''And for the rest of the night,'' the story concludes, ''we raise our glasses, broken and unbroken alike, to the terrible days behind us and the uncertain ones ahead.''
In ''Monkey Tails,'' an immigrant groping at the edge of security and perhaps happiness lies in bed with his pregnant wife and tapes, for their unborn child, his own childhood memories of chaos and betrayal. In ''Seven,'' a man preparing for his wife's arrival from Haiti, after seven years apart, gets his bachelor housemates to agree not to sit around in their underwear.
Venturing from their room on her first night, the wife reports ''two men playing dominoes in the kitchen . . . dressed in identical pink satin robes.'' It is the lightest of the stories yet shadowed with the marital uncertainty that follows long separation.
IN a breathtaking displacement, Danticat starts the collection with the aftermath, 25 years later, of the prison murder story recounted at the end. A young Haitian-American artist drives to Florida to deliver a carving. Her father comes for the ride, a quiet man who has worked as a barber in Brooklyn since he fled Haiti. She adores him; in fact, he is her sole subject so far, rendered kneeling, naked and disfigured by a facial scar inflicted in a Haitian jail. Her intention was to symbolize the torment of their country; soon we see the terrible complexity of the torment.
One morning the father sneaks out of their motel and throws the sculpture into a lake. He doesn't deserve a statue, he tells her. ''Your father was the hunter, he was not the prey.'' His years in prison were spent as torturer and killer. As for the nightmares he often complained of, they were ''of what I, your father, did to others.''
To the reader -- who has not yet been plunged into the terror of the final story -- it is a whiplash, searing yet oddly cauterized. This is America, not Haiti, and the daughter can own the confidence to feel horror and express it. ''How do you love him?'' she demands of her mother, who always knew the truth and who also knew a different one. Her husband had indeed fled a nightmare. ''You and me, we save him,'' the mother says. ''When I meet him, it made him stop hurt the people. This how I see it. He a seed thrown in rock. You, me, we make him take root.''
A different truth and one impossible, perhaps, for an American daughter to accept. Hard for the reader, as well. And almost certainly for Danticat. She has written a Haitian truth: prisoners all, even the jailers. With neither forgiveness nor contempt, she sets it upon a fulcrum from where she's had the courage and art to displace the world even as she is displaced by it.
Richard Eder writes book reviews and articles for The Times.
Here's another by the Times infamous reviewer Kakutani(Toni MOrrison's nememsis):
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Hiding From a Brutal Past Spent Shattering Lives in Haiti
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
THE DEW BREAKER
By Edwidge Danticat
244 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $22.
Haiti's bloody and bitter history of violence, corruption and vengeance stalks all the characters in Edwidge Danticat's remarkable new novel, infecting their dreams and circumscribing their expectations. It is a nightmare they are all trying in vain to rewind and erase.
The title character, the so-called Dew Breaker, is a seemingly ordinary Haitian immigrant living a willfully quiet life in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter. But he is hiding a terrible secret: back in the 1960's in Haiti he was a member of the dreaded Tontons Macoute, the blood-soaked enforcers of François Duvalier's murderous regime.
The Dew Breaker's name came from the fact that he and his henchmen would usually arrive ''before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves'' to abduct victims from their homes; he tortured and killed untold numbers of innocents, including a much-loved preacher who dared to speak out against the government. The scar on his face is both a mark of Cain and a reminder of his violent past.
The other people in this book -- who, we gradually learn, are members of the Dew Breaker's family and former victims and their family members -- are equally in thrall to the past. Whether they have stayed in Port-au-Prince or left for the United States to try to write a second act to their lives, they all find themselves haunted by the long events that left them with broken bodies, fractured families or smashed hopes. For these characters the dead are not merely ghosts; they are palpable, intimately felt presences in their daily lives.
In her earlier books ''Breath, Eyes, Memory,'' ''Krik? Krak!'' and ''The Farming of Bones,'' Ms. Danticat, who was born in Haiti and moved to the United States when she was 12, demonstrated an ability to use her lyric gift of language and her emotional clarity to show how the public and the private, the personal and the political are intertwined in the lives of Haitians and Haitian-Americans, and to show how the past anchors and hobbles the present.
''The Dew Breaker'' not only showcases these same qualities, but it is also Ms. Danticat's most persuasive, organic performance yet. As seamless as it is compelling, the novel recounts its harrowing tale in limpid, understated prose, using a looping structure of overlapping stories to tell the Dew Breaker's story by indirection.
It is a tale that uses its characters' experiences as a prism to examine Haiti's own difficulties in breaking free from a centuries-old cycle of violence and vengeance that continues through today, a tale that simultaneously unfolds to become a philosophical meditation on the possibility of redemption and the longing of victims and victimizers alike to believe in the promise of new beginnings held forth by the American Dream.
Ms. Danticat gives us few direct glimpses of the Dew Breaker. Instead we see him through the eyes of others: former victims, who believe they have seen him, their tormentor, walking the streets of Brooklyn, an evil spirit come back to torment them; his wife, Anne, a devout woman who believes in miracles and the miracle of his transformation; and their Americanized daughter, who has grown up thinking of him as an ordinary father, a man she can love and rebel against like any other child.
The Dew Breaker calls his daughter ka -- the ancient Egyptian word for the soul; he sees her and her mother as good angels, his rescuers from his past. When he confesses his past to his daughter, she immediately wonders if he is ''going to explain why he and my mother have no close friends, why they've never had anyone over to the house, why they never speak of any relatives in Haiti or anywhere else, or have never returned there or, even after I learned Creole from them, have never taught me anything else about the country beyond what I could find out on my own, on the television, in newspapers, in books?''
Each tale in ''The Dew Breaker'' could stand on its own as a beautifully made story, but they come together like jigsaw-puzzle pieces to create a picture of this man's terrible history and his and his victims' afterlife. Some of the puzzle pieces are missing of course, but this is a matter of design. It is a measure of Ms. Danticat's fierce, elliptical artistry that she makes the elisions count as much as her piercing, indelible words.
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Crystal
Newbie Poster
Username: Crystal
Post Number: 16
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, March 31, 2004 - 12:45 pm: |
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Thanks Yukio! The stories in The Dew Breaker are beautifully written. I highly recommend it. I sometimes like to have a marathon reading session of one author so I think I'll go and get Krik? Krak! and The Farming of Bones from the library.
I haven't read anything by Caryl Phillips yet - he's now on my list. The only thing I've read by Jamaica Kincaid was Mr. Potter and I just didn't get it. It was requiring a little more from me than I was able to give it at the time. I should try it again. |
Bookgirl
Veteran Poster
Username: Bookgirl
Post Number: 51
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, March 31, 2004 - 02:39 pm: |
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I've read all of Jamaica Kincaid's books and loved each and every one. Her writing is so rich in descriptives. She's a good author for a marathon read, Crystal.
I found Mr. Potter, every interesting. It did take a lot to understand where she was coming from; but I find that is the case with most of her writing. Her early books depict a young girl from the islands. Maybe that is what lead me to follow her literary journey. Try starting at the beginning. She really writes such interesting stories about Carribbean life and culture. |
Crystal
Newbie Poster
Username: Crystal
Post Number: 17
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, March 31, 2004 - 05:04 pm: |
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Thanks Bookgirl! She's added to the list. Now, if I could only find the time to read everything I want. |
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