When Life Is a Ghost Story

By Pico Iyer Monday, Mar. 01, 2004
    • When The Dew Breaker (Knopf; 244 pages), Edwidge Danticat's book of linked stories, begins, a young artist born in Brooklyn, N.Y. — Haitian, though she's never been to Haiti — learns from her father how he acquired the scar on his cheek he brought back from prison. He wasn't one of those receiving punishments, he tells his already unsettled daughter; he was one inflicting them. His sense of guilt is one reason he gave her the name "Ka," after the good angel of ancient Egyptian mythology. It's also why he gets her to read The Book of the Dead with him. A dew breaker, we will learn, is a torturer who goes out before dawn to collect his victims.

    An island that has suffered decades of bloodshed and dictatorship — not to mention the possession of souls — seems to offer a formidable prospect for a novelist: What fiction can possibly stand up to such charged reality? Danticat, though, only 35 and already the author of three acclaimed works of fiction on her ill-starred home and one work of nonfiction, is undaunted. In The Dew Breaker she brings together myriad perspectives on the central torturer into a kind of mosaic. "It's a puzzle," as a teenage killer in one story says, "but a weird-ass kind of puzzle." A stained-glass window, he might be saying, catches a saint from the other world; a jigsaw puzzle catches someone far from saintly in our own.


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    The nine quiet, carefully composed stories stitched together here give us the lives of nurses, janitors, hairdressers and professional funeral singers trying to balance their hopes between Haiti and its second act, America. Many have fled their island to escape bad memories — and look up in New York City to see their parents' killers in the next row at church, or in the barbershop. Though they could be haunted immigrants from many a troubled place, they have a dark broodingness that suggests that life is a ghost story, made up of dead brothers, lost fathers. Even when the latest tyrant, "Baby Doc" Duvalier, flees in 1986, that only clears the way for murderers to be murdered in turn.

    What all these scarred characters are looking for, in effect, is a way to mourn their dead properly, as in the rambunctious, storytelling wakes of home. The dew breaker himself is drawn to the ancient Egyptians because "they know how to grieve." The only redeeming thing about committing terrible acts, he seems to know, is that it impels one to try to lead the rest of one's life more cleanly. Danticat's gift is to combine both sympathy and clarity in a moral tangle that becomes as tight as a Haitian community. She doesn't try to bring everything together into a grand resolution, because she's too wise about Haiti and history to expect the future of her country or even of the most penitent onetime torturer to be clear cut. But when the final piece of her moving puzzle falls into place, we, like the dew breaker's daughter, see just how much we didn't know when we were sure we knew it all.