The Dew Breaker

by

Edwidge Danticat

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The Dew Breaker: Night Talkers Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Dany has been walking up a mountain in rural Haiti for two hours and he is in pain. His roommate back in New York, Michel, recently had an operation to remove his appendix; Dany now panics that he might get appendicitis here and die. He is traveling to see his Aunt Estina. It has been a decade since he moved to New York, and 25 years since his parents were killed by government forces. In the period between these events, Estina raised Dany in Port-au-Prince, but she has now moved back to her familial village in the mountains. He wants to surprise her by visiting her there.  
As someone who was orphaned by the dictatorship, Dany is a victim in a very straightforward sense. His parents were taken from him when he was at a very young, totally innocent age. He thus has a profoundly different relationship to the past and to Haiti than the Bienaimés, for example.
Themes
Grief, Memory, and Erasure Theme Icon
Victims vs. Perpetrators Theme Icon
Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
Dany eventually finds a village, where a little girl is sitting with a pestle and mortar. He greets her in Haitian Creole, asking for water. An older girl brings him some, and he drinks eagerly. At this point a large group of children have gathered to watch him. A man (Old Zo) walks by, and Dany accidentally insults him by implying that he is the little girl’s grandfather, when he is actually her father. He says he is on the way to visit his aunt, Estina Estème. Old Zo asks who Dany’s father was, then reveals that he knows about how Dany’s father died in a fire with his wife. Only their son survived. Now, Dany confirms that he is that son.
Like the husband and wife who were separated for seven years, there is also a mythic quality to Dany’s return to the village where his Aunt Estina lives. The respect and interest with which the villagers greet him makes him appear important, almost like a hero returning from an expedition or war. Yet he is also a tragic figure; the story of how he was orphaned is obviously well known in the area, and this partly explains people’s interest in him.
Themes
Grief, Memory, and Erasure Theme Icon
Victims vs. Perpetrators Theme Icon
Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
Old Zo takes Dany to Estina. Dany recognizes her house as they approach. Although Estina is not in, there is a group of men, women, and children there who know Dany and ask if he remembers them. He greets them, and they tell him Estina is on her way. Some of the people complain that he didn’t write to them or send them money from New York. Then Estina appears, being led by two men. Dany had almost forgotten that she was blind. 
Even without really knowing him, the villagers have a complicated relationship to Dany. They are fascinated by him and treat him with deference, but also chastise him for forgetting about them while he was in New York.
Themes
Grief, Memory, and Erasure Theme Icon
Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
Estina takes Dany inside her house so they speak privately. For a number of years, Dany has been paying his childhood friend to come and check on Estina, sending him money to buy anything that Estina needed and asking that he report back to Dany. Now, she asks him if he has been sent back from the U.S. She explains that there are a few boys in the village who have been sent back, some of whom no longer speak Creole. She also explains that when Dany arrived earlier, she was assisting a midwife during a birth.
Estina’s words serve as an important reminder that immigration is not unidirectional. Yes, there is a far greater flow of people from Haiti to the US than the other way around, but these immigrants still retain important connections to their homeland, and some of them even end up coming back. At the same time, Estina hints that they don’t choose to return.
Themes
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Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
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Dany tells Estina that he came back because he wanted to tell her that he has found the man who killed his parents. At this inopportune moment, Old Zo walks in, and announces that people are going to bring food for them to eat. Many people follow him, bearing dishes. The visitors stay until it is dark, and Estina is tired. She falls asleep straight away, and talks elaborately in her sleep. Dany is a sleep talker as well, and sometimes narrates his dreams aloud.
Dany and Estina clearly need some time alone to catch up, but they can’t interrupt the hospitality ritual of the villagers. Even though Dany has come to see Estina, it is the whole village who welcomes him back, highlighting the collective mentality that comes from village life.
Themes
Grief, Memory, and Erasure Theme Icon
Victims vs. Perpetrators Theme Icon
Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
When Dany wakes up, Estina and Old Zo’s daughter, nicknamed Ti Famn (little woman) have breakfast waiting for him. He has a cold shower in a stream, and wonders if his father washed there when he was alive. Back inside Estina’s house, Dany finds a tattooed teenager there. Estina introduces him as Claude, “one of the boys who was sent back.” Estina says that Claude is learning Creole but doesn’t have anyone with whom he can speak English. Claude explains that he is grateful for Estina taking care of him. Without her, he might be homeless in Port-au-Prince. He said that he spent the first three months in prison in the city “because [he] had no place to go.” Then his mother introduced him to some family members.
Through being deported back to Haiti, Claude ends up as a kind of orphan figure (even if he is not literally an orphan). He is separated from his family and left to fend for himself in a country where he knows no one and cannot speak the language. Estina’s informal adoption of Claude suggests that she makes a habit of gathering such “orphans” and caring for them.
Themes
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Victims vs. Perpetrators Theme Icon
Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
Claude comments that it’s “real big” that Dany has come back to see Estina, and that he hasn’t forgotten his family back in Haiti. He laments that he had become totally disconnected from his family members there. Nonetheless, they welcomed him “after what [he] did,” because they knew he was family. He says that he now feels like a “puzzle” which his family members are slowly putting back together. He admits that he would have looked down on the people he lives among now as “backward-ass peasants.” However, now he feels that he has turned his life around after being in prison and deported, and enjoys living in Haiti. 
Although Danticat has not yet revealed what Claude has done, it is clear that he—like Papa—has committed some kind of crime, act of violence, or other violation. Yet unlike Papa, he has not tried to (or not been able to) cover up the evidence of his crime, and thus he is in a position of comparable vulnerability, seeking forgiveness from those around him. 
Themes
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Victims vs. Perpetrators Theme Icon
Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
Dany feels irritated by Claude. When Claude offers to show him around, Dany turns him down. After Claude leaves, Ti Famn takes Dany’s coffee cup and he wonders if she is actually an adult in her 20s, even though she looks about 12 years old. Estina explains that “his people say” that Claude killed his own father. That night, Dany dreams about the conversation he plans to have with Estina about his parents’ death. Dany was 6 years old when his parents were killed. He remembers hearing an explosion at night, then going out to the wooden porch of his house to see his parents’ dead bodies lying on the ground. A man demanded that he stay silent, or else he would shoot Dany too.
This passage establishes a parallel between Dany and Claude, although it would perhaps be more accurate to say that they are inversions of each other. Both are young Haitian American men who immigrated to New York, lost one or both parents, and have been informally adopted or raised by Estina. Yet whereas Ddany was purely a victim of the violence that killed his parents, Claude was a perpetrator. Again, Danticat shows victims and perpetrators existing in close proximity.
Themes
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Victims vs. Perpetrators Theme Icon
Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
In the dream, Dany tells Estina that the man who murdered his parents (Papa) now has a barbershop in New York. He met Papa when he heard that he was renting out a room in his house. When Dany moved into the room, he spent months unable to sleep. He would go to get his haircut in Papa’s barbershop, and Papa would hardly speak to him, only asking in a quiet, gentle voice how much he would like him to cut and offering a shave. One day, when Anne was out of town, Dany climbed up the stairs of the house and into Papa’s bedroom. He watched Papa sleep and imagined strangling or suffocating him to death, or perhaps just asking him: “Why?”
This passage establishes a clear and intimate connection between all of the stories thus far. Dany, Michel, and the unnamed husband and wife are all tenants of Papa and Anne in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, Danticat has strongly hinted that the unnamed husband is Eric, Nadine’s ex-boyfriend. This highlights the intense interconnection that exists within the Haitian diasporic community—which, as Dany’s story shows, can have explosive consequences.
Themes
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Victims vs. Perpetrators Theme Icon
Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
As Dany watched Papa sleep he realized that he didn’t want to kill him, because then he would never get the answer of why Papa killed his parents. Dany suddenly wakes up, and Estina asks him if he was dreaming about his parents, saying that he was “calling their names.” Dany asks if his parents were involved in politics, and Estina replies, “No more than any of us.” She explains that they did nothing wrong and may have been confused with someone else. Dany tries to question her further, but she says that she is too tired to keep talking, and that they can speak again in the morning. However, when Dany wakes up the next day, he realizes that she is dead.  
This passage contains meditations on the nature of justice. Does justice take the form of vengeful violence, as Dany momentarily thinks? His answer is no, because in killing Papa he would deny himself the justice of knowing why his parents were killed. At the same time, as Estina points out, there is no real answer to this question, and thus answers cannot deliver justice. Under the Duvalier dictatorship, countless innocent people were killed for no reason at all.
Themes
Grief, Memory, and Erasure Theme Icon
Victims vs. Perpetrators Theme Icon
Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
Ti Famn wails loud enough that everyone in the surrounding area learns of Estina’s death. Dany is crippled by sharp stomach pain. Local women mill around him, commenting on his condition and trying to find ways to help. Old Zo suggests that Estina knew she was about to die and “call[ed]” Dany to come back before she did. They are all talking about him as if he doesn’t speak Creole himself. He wants to wrap his arms around Estina’s body, feeling like he is in a strange dream where everyone can speak except the two of them.
Dany’s dream about talking to Estina was highly mundane and realistic, whereas his waking reality takes the form of a strange dream or nightmare. He actually has more agency in his dreams than he does in reality, and is able to communicate better within them, as well. Note the return of the motif of voicelessness in this passage.
Themes
Grief, Memory, and Erasure Theme Icon
Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
A few days later, Dany helps Old Zo make the funeral arrangements, while Ti Famn and the other women prepare Estina’s body for burial. They dress her in a blue dress Dany sent her from New York, which had remained in its giftwrap, never worn. They cut away pieces of the dress, and tell Estina not to let anyone in the afterlife take the dress from her. As is traditional, Dany is given a few pieces of the dress to carry around with him for the rest of his life.
Here is an example of yet another grieving ritual. Through cutting away pieces of Estina’s dress, Dany will be able to feel connected to her across different worlds (the mortal world and the afterlife). This shows that death does not always have to be thought of wholly as absence, but can be seen as a kind of connection to somewhere else, too.
Themes
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Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
Dany always found it strange that Haitian funerals were half festive and half mournful, but he loves the part of the ceremony where attendees share memories of the deceased. Many of those in attendance say that Estina helped birth them. Dany thinks of all the things he would say if he spoke, including the fact that he never wanted to leave Estina but that she insisted that he get as far away from his parents’ murderer as possible. Toward the end of the wake, Claude arrives and expresses his condolences. He tries to hug Dany, but Dany shrinks away.
The interconnection caused by diaspora means that while Estina hoped that Dany would be far removed from the person who murdered his parents (Papa), she inadvertently sent him to Papa’s city, neighborhood, and even house.
Themes
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Victims vs. Perpetrators Theme Icon
Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
Dany wonders if it’s true that Estina somehow called him back, and if Papa isn’t actually his parents’ killer, but rather just a “phantom” that helped bring him back to Haiti. He asks Ti Famn her real name, feeling that her nickname implies that she is generic. She tells him that her name is Denise Auguste, and that she is 20 years old. Estina’s death has broken the ice between them, making them seem more like “equals.” Dany goes outside and wipes down the mausoleum where Estina will be buried. Other men cleaned it earlier, but Dany wants to make sure it is “spotless.” He sees Claude and apologizes for his behavior earlier, and Claude says he completely understands. 
It is obvious from this passage that Dany is struggling to make sense of the world in the wake of Estina’s death. His reason for coming back to Haiti has disappeared, and he has lost hope of gaining Estina’s insight into what he should do regarding Papa. At the same time, the character of Claude shows that death can cause positive transformations in people. In the wake of possibly killing his father, Claude has become a gentle, caring person.
Themes
Grief, Memory, and Erasure Theme Icon
Victims vs. Perpetrators Theme Icon
Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
Although Claude’s outward tattooed appearance is menacing, Dany can’t help but feel that he looks innocent and vulnerable, like a child. He says he has heard that Claude killed his father, then quickly apologizes, saying it isn’t his business. Yet Claude immediately confirms that it’s true. He says he wishes he could tell Dany that it was an accident or done in self-defense. In reality, he was 14 years old and addicted to drugs, while also selling them. His father found his supply and took it; Claude threatened him with a gun, and when his father didn’t give the drugs back, he shot him.
The stark reality of Claude’s crime is horrifying, particularly considering that Claude does not attempt to excuse himself or soften the truth of what happened. (Of course, this serves as an important contrast with other characters in the book, notably Papa.) At only 14, Claude should have been innocent, but he ended up perpetrating one of the absolute worst forms of violence imaginable.
Themes
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Victims vs. Perpetrators Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon
Quotes
Claude’s voice is neutral, but a tear falls from his eyes. He says that he is “the luckiest fucker alive,” because committing such an awful act so young gave him the chance to turn his life around. He has also received other kinds of luck, such as the fact that he was released from prison in Port-au-Prince after three months because of overcrowding. As Claude keeps talking, Dany observes that he is also a “night talker” someone who speaks their nightmares aloud at night.
This reference to the title of the story again illuminates the motif of speaking—and being unable to speak. As sleep talkers, Estina and Dany were able to express things in their sleep that they might not be able to in the day, and this is true for Claude as well, even though he doesn’t need to be asleep to do so.
Themes
Grief, Memory, and Erasure Theme Icon
Victims vs. Perpetrators Theme Icon
Love, Hope, and Redemption Theme Icon
Violence vs. Care Theme Icon
Diaspora, Interconnection, and Haunting Theme Icon