Violence vs. Care Theme Analysis

The Dew Breaker contains harrowing depictions of violence, but also many descriptions of care. In a sense, violence and care represent the process of destruction versus reconstruction, on both personal and societal levels. Through violence, the Duvalier regime was a powerfully destructive force, and in its aftermath the book’s characters are left trying to rebuild themselves, their lives, and their country. Yet Danticat also shows how violence and care, despite being opposites, have a very close relationship with one another. This is particularly emphasized via the fact that so much of the violence in the novel is intimate—not just in the sense that much of it is committed within intimate relationships (such as Claude killing his father), but in the sense that all violence involves a sort of perverse physical intimacy. 

The connection between violence and care emerges early in the book through the juxtaposition of Papa and Nadine’s stories. The description of Papa’s career as a torturer includes the claim that he was “just one of hundreds who had done their jobs so well that their victims were never able to speak of them again.” Nadine, meanwhile, is a nurse who works in an Ear, Nose, and Throat ward, and is often caring for patients who wake up from surgery to realize that they can no longer speak. Although in some sense the description of Papa’s victims uses speaking as a euphemism (as most of his victims end up dead), this parallel nonetheless illustrates a significant connection between these two very different types of work. Papa takes away people’s ability to speak as a method of political oppression, whereas Nadine cares for people whose loss of speech is a necessary side effect of medical treatment. In caring for people, Nadine allows them to keep living, helping them to thrive. In this sense, although Papa and Nadine both “silence” people, the work they do has two completely oppositional effects. 

At the same time, the descriptions of Nadine’s work highlight that many of her patients experience the care they receive at the hospital as a kind of violence. Most are frightened and horrified to realize that they can no longer speak (as is true of Ms. Hinds, the patient featured in the story). They feel violated by the procedures they undergo, and are left in both physical and psychic pain afterward. While there is of course no real equivalent between torture and medical procedures, it is significant that medical patients can feel violated and harmed as if they had been inflicted with violence.

The connection between violence and care is further illuminated by one of the torture victim’s descriptions of why Papa was so cruel: “He’d wound you, then try to soothe you with words, then he’d wound you again. He thought he was God.” This quotation shows that Papa weaved care into his torture procedure in order to enact even more cruelty. This highlights how, in certain contexts, care can actually be a means to enact violence. The implication of this is disturbing, because it suggests that the kindness and care Papa shows after his life as a torturer ends (to Anne, Ka, and his barbershop clients) may not be as far removed from his practice as a torturer as the reader might at first assume.  

The connection between violence and care is also revealed to work in the other direction, wherein what might initially seem like violence is actually a form of care. The best example of this comes in the description of the preacher’s brief time in prison. After being taken from the church and brutally beaten, the preacher passes out in his prison cell. He wakes up to the feeling of warm water on his face and goes to drink, only to realize it is urine. At first it seems that this is an act of the prison guards, further torturing and degrading the preacher by urinating on him. However, afterward he realizes that it is actually his fellow prisoners, who believe that urinating on wounds can serve as a healing, “ritual cure.” Once again, the close proximity between violence and care emerges through the fact that they both involve physical intimacy. Certain acts can only be understood as either violence or care once the context in which they are taking place is made clear.

Violence and care are also linked due to the fact that so much of the violence depicted in the book takes place in an intimate context. Many of the perpetrators of violence have some kind of intimate connection to their victim. For example, Claude kills his father, and the preacher Papa kills ends up becoming his brother-in-law. As the book notes, the power of the regime operates through the fact that those who serve it must be ready to kill their own family members in order to demonstrate their loyalty. In other words, the violence of the regime is intensified by the fact that it colonizes every aspect of a person’s life—even their intimate relationships.

Meanwhile, because of the pervasive nature of the violence of the Duvalier regime, many nonviolent characters have to negotiate their intimate proximity to violent people. This is obviously true of Anne and is also true of Léon, the shoeshine man whose son works for the Duvalier regime. Léon reasons that although he deplores what his son does, “he still had to let the boy come home now and then for the boy’s mother’s sake and still had to acknowledge that maybe it was because of his boy that he’d not yet been arrested.” The moral challenge of having a violent son becomes even more complicated by the fact that Léon’s proximity to his son may be saving his life. In this sense, the violence that Léon’s son enacts on others becomes a perverse sort of care for his father, protecting Léon from violence. Once again, the pervasive nature of violence under Duvalier and the strange overlap between violence and care mean that neither violence nor care can be totally extricated from one another.