The Dew Breaker

by

Edwidge Danticat

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Grief, Memory, and Erasure Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
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
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Dew Breaker, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Grief, Memory, and Erasure Theme Icon

Through a set of linked stories about Haitians during and after the oppressive Duvalier regime, The Dew Breaker considers how people respond to traumatic memories from the past, particularly violence and death. Some of the characters, such as Papa and Claude, feel grief over acts of violence they have committed, whereas many others, including Anne, Dany, Beatrice, Rézia, Mariselle, and Freda, grieve over losing loved ones to violence or being subject to violence themselves. Meanwhile, almost all the characters are united by a collective grief over the immensely destructive impact that the dictatorship had on Haiti. The book suggests that grieving is vitally necessary in the aftermath of trauma, but that not everyone knows how to grieve. Indeed, the different stories in the book indicate that one must learn how to grieve, particularly in response to the temptation to erase or repress memories.

Attempting to erase the past is most prominently explored through Papa’s attempt to erase his own past of being a “dew breaker,” a torturer and killer working for the Duvalier regime. The many ways in which Papa attempts to erase the true story of his life include escaping Haiti to being a new life in the U.S., lying about where in Haiti he’s from, lying about how he got the scar on his face, and not making any friends outside his barbershop business. Indeed, his daughter Ka notes that both Papa and her mother, Anne, do not have any friends and do everything possible to avoid drawing attention to themselves, including refusing to join the neighborhood tradition of putting up elaborate decorative lights for Christmas.

The development of Papa’s character ultimately shows that attempting to erase the past never really works. Ka notes that her parents’ decision not to befriend anyone leaves them feeling lonely and restless. Anne is isolated by the fact that she is “nurturing a great pain that she could never speak about.” Erasing a person’s identity—whether one’s own or someone else’s—is an act of violence, as shown by the reference to “face scalping,” which the militia leader Emmanuel Constant did to stop victims from being identified. Erasure is confirmed to be unsustainable when Papa is eventually forced to tell Ka the truth about his crimes, and even ends up as the landlord of Dany, the son of two people he killed. Although the book does not reveal if there is ever a confrontation between Dany and Papa, the fact that they end up in such close proximity (and Dany figures out Papa’s identity) shows that it is impossible to actually erase the past.

Yet even as Papa attempts to erase the truth, it is clear that he dreams of being able to properly grieve and atone. Indeed, the book shows that the desire and need to grieve is an important part of being human. This partially explains Papa’s obsession with the Ancient Egyptians, who he claims were similar to Haitians because “they knew how to grieve.” This statement arguably emerges from a place of envy, as many of the Haitians depicted in the book actually struggle to know how to grieve. This struggle is reflected in Dany’s observation about Claude, a young Haitian-American man who killed his father: “Perhaps Claude too had never learned how to grieve or help others grieve.”

The book provides different examples of acts of commemoration and grief to show that grieving is both highly important and difficult to get right. The sculpture Ka makes of her father comes from grief, and is designed to memorialize the period she believes he spent in prison. Papa’s first reaction is to erase the sculpture, just as he erased the truth of his past, by throwing it into the sea. However, the sculpture eventually ends up bringing the truth to the surface, as it forces Papa to finally admit that he was a perpetrator and not a victim of state violence.

The other displays of grief depicted in the novel highlight the great variety among different forms of grieving, suggesting that grief is an experiment, and that there is no single right way of doing it. One such expression is singing: Freda becomes a funeral singer after singing at her own father’s funeral. While out drinking with her girlfriends, she decides to sing her own funeral song. This suggests that certain forms of grieving can be a way of accepting our own deaths, and that grieving can take place in anticipation of an event like death, not just after it.

Another example of a different kind of grief is the mock funeral that takes place in Haiti when Baby Doc and his wife go into exile. As Michel and Romaine describe witnessing the funeral, it becomes clear that the event is not a straightforward process of mourning the ousted dictator, but rather an attempt to deal with the enormous amount of trauma that built up over the Duvalier era and the radical uncertainty of life in Haiti once the regime suddenly comes to an end.

The novel does show that erasure is the ultimate fate of all human life. This is explicitly illuminated when Freda mentions that her mother says people have three deaths: physical deaths, burial, and the “the [death] that will erase us completely and no one will remember us at all.” However, while permanent erasure awaits everyone, in the meantime it is important to honor the past through grief rather than repressing or effacing it. While grief might not be a simple or easy process, the need to cope with loss is universal to all humanity. Finding ways to grieve is thus an essential part of human existence.

Related Themes from Other Texts
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Grief, Memory, and Erasure ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Grief, Memory, and Erasure appears in each part of The Dew Breaker. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Grief, Memory, and Erasure Quotes in The Dew Breaker

Below you will find the important quotes in The Dew Breaker related to the theme of Grief, Memory, and Erasure.
The Book of the Dead Quotes

I was born and raised in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and have never even 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.

Related Characters: Ka Bienaimé (speaker), Papa , Anne Bienaimé/Landlady
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:

My father has never liked having his picture taken. We have only a few of him at home, some awkward shots at my different school graduations, with him standing between my mother and me, his hand covering his scar. I had hoped to take some pictures of him on this trip, but he hadn't let me. At one of the rest stops I bought a disposable camera and pointed it at him anyway. As usual, he protested, covering his face with both hands like a little boy protecting his cheeks from a slap. He didn't want any more pictures taken of him for the rest of his life, he said, he was feeling too ugly.

Related Characters: Ka Bienaimé (speaker), Papa , Anne Bienaimé/Landlady
Related Symbols: Papa’s Scar
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:

I’d used a piece of mahogany that was naturally flawed, with a few superficial cracks along what was now the back. I’d thought these cracks beautiful and had made no effort to sand or polish them away, as they seemed like the wood's own scars, like the one my father had on his face. But I was also a little worried about the cracks. Would they seem amateurish and unintentional, like a mistake? Could the wood come apart with simple movements or with age? Would the client be satisfied?

Related Characters: Ka Bienaimé (speaker), Papa
Related Symbols: Papa’s Scar, The Sculpture
Page Number: 7
Explanation and Analysis:
Water Child Quotes

This was what they’d sacrificed everything for. But she always knew that she would repay them. And she had, with half her salary every month, and sometimes more. In return, what she got was the chance to parent them rather than have them parent her. Calling them, however, on the rare occasions that she actually called rather than received their calls, always made her wish to be the one guarded, rather than the guardian, to be reassured now and then that some wounds could heal, that some decisions would not haunt her forever.

Related Characters: Nadine Osnac, Nadine’s Father, Nadine’s Mother
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:
The Book of Miracles Quotes

Anne had closed her eyes without realizing it. Her daughter knew she reacted strongly to cemeteries, but Anne bad never told her why, since her daughter had already concluded early in life that this, like many unexplained aspects of her parents’ life, was connected to “some event that happened in Haiti.”

Related Characters: Ka Bienaimé, Papa , Anne Bienaimé/Landlady
Page Number: 72
Explanation and Analysis:

Besides, soon after her husband had opened his barbershop, he’d discovered that since he'd lost eighty pounds, changed his name, and given as his place of birth a village deep in the mountains of Leogane, no one asked about him anymore, thinking he was just a peasant who'd made good in New York. He hadn't been a famous “dew breaker,” or torturer, anyway, just one of hundreds who had done their jobs so well that their victims were never able to speak of them again.

Related Characters: Papa , Anne Bienaimé/Landlady
Page Number: 76-77
Explanation and Analysis:

What if it were Constant? What would she do? Would she spit in his face or embrace him, acknowledging a kinship of shame and guilt that she'd inherited by marrying her husband? How would she even know whether Constant felt any guilt or shame? What if he'd come to this Mass to flaunt his freedom? To taunt those who'd been affected by his crimes? What if he didn't even see it that way? What if he considered himself innocent? Innocent enough to go anywhere he pleased? What right did she have to judge him? As a devout Catholic and the wife of a man like her husband, she didn't have the same freedom to condemn as her daughter did.

Related Characters: Ka Bienaimé, Papa , Anne Bienaimé/Landlady, Emmanuel Constant
Page Number: 81
Explanation and Analysis:
Monkey Tails: February 7, 1986 / February 7, 2004 Quotes

I was twelve years old and, according to my mother, three months before my birth I had lost my father to something my mother would only vaguely describe as “political,” making me part of a generation of mostly fatherless boys, though some of our fathers were still living, even if somewhere else—in the provinces in another country, or across the ally not acknowledging us. A great many of our fathers had also died in the dictatorship’s prisons, and others had abandoned us altogether to serve the regime.

Related Characters: Michel (speaker), Michel’s Mother, Monsieur Christophe
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
The Funeral Singer Quotes

My mother used to say that we'll all have three deaths: the one when our breath leaves our bodies to rejoin the air, the one when we are put back in the earth, and the one that will erase us completely and no one will remember us at all.

Related Characters: Freda (speaker)
Page Number: 177
Explanation and Analysis:
The Dew Breaker (Circa 1967) Quotes

But he could never shake from his thoughts the notion that his wife’s death had been his fault, that she’d been killed to punish him for the things he said on his radio program or from the pulpit of his church.

Related Characters: The Preacher
Page Number: 207
Explanation and Analysis:

Maybe be shouldn’t have preached those “sermons to the beast,” as he liked to think of them. But someone needed to stir the flock out of their stupor, the comfort that religion allowed them, that it was okay to have wretched lives here on earth so long as Heaven was glowing ahead. Maybe his death would do just that, move his people to revolt, to demand justice for themselves while requesting it for him. Or maybe his death would have no relevance at all. He would simply join a long list of martyrs and his name would vanish from his countrymen's lips as soon as his body was placed in the ground.

Related Characters: The Preacher
Page Number: 227
Explanation and Analysis:

And yet he had not been completely defeated. The wound on the fat man’s face wasn’t what he had hoped, he hadn’t blinded him or removed some of his teeth, but at least he’d left a mark on him, a brand that he would carry the rest of his life. Every time he looked in the mirror, he would have to confront this mark and remember him. Whenever people asked what happened to his face, he would have to tell a lie, a lie that would further remind him of the truth.

Related Characters: Papa , The Preacher
Related Symbols: Papa’s Scar
Page Number: 227-228
Explanation and Analysis: