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Abstract
The increasing prominence of trauma theory in literary analysis since the 1990s has led some critics to revise notions of the relationship between reader and text. This is not simply because trauma theory invites the reader’s ethical engagement with the text; these theories also re‐evaluate the relationship of reader to text by conceptualizing the text as a “witness” to trauma. This essay explores the political ramifications of such a model with reference to The Dew Breaker (2004) by Haitian‐born US immigrant writer Edwidge Danticat. This text depicts the figure of “the Dew Breaker” (a Tonton Macoute and torturer, of François Duvalier’s regime) and the people directly and indirectly affected by his legacy of terror in Haiti and the United States. The construction of Danticat’s text challenges any notion that the reader can unambiguously witness trauma or empathize with the characters. It enables a critique of literary analyses which see traumatic experiences as available for assimilation into a model of “testifying” text. Furthermore, reading The Dew Breaker as trauma fiction reveals how celebratory notions of audience empathy can overlook the fact that reading fiction is not necessarily an engaged political intervention.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank her colleague John Jervis and the anonymous Journal of Postcolonial Writing reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments on an earlier version of this essay.
Notes
1. See Danquah 39–44. While Danticat finds “AHA” a useful shorthand, she often affirms that she is “Haitian” (see interviews with Mirabal and Lyons).
2. The key discussions here are Munro, Kaussen, Harbawi, Vickroy, Donette, Mehta, and Hewett. Shernak and Novak have also both examined Danticat’s use of the testimonial form. However, this is not to give the impression that trauma as an interpretative framework is employed unanimously – Cowart’s Trailing the Clouds does not mention trauma; instead, he finds he cannot empathize with the characters, as he “grows impatient” with the “sensational elements” of Danticat’s writing (131).
3. In negotiating between useful and key aspects of Caruth’s and LaCapra’s theories, both Vickroy and Whitehead slide between the two. Vickroy, for example, moves from discussing Caruth (20) to LaCapra’s notion of empathy (21) without underscoring how these theories should be distinguished. Whitehead contextualizes the theories in later discussions. However, her introduction slides between Caruth’s formulation of trauma fiction as a “crisis of truth” to ideas of testimony and ethical response, arguably grounded in LaCapra’s theories (7–8).
4. Although psychoanalysis privileges the individual testimony in a therapeutic context, there has also been a psychoanalytic interest in collective memory, represented in Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939), Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) and Totem and Taboo (1914).
5. This problem may not be exclusive to postcolonial literature, but what is significant is that a reading process that shifts emphasis to the reader is a kind of re‐colonization of the text through the application of paradigms that privilege audience response rather than histories inscribed.
6. Spivak discusses epistemic violence in theoretical writing, which she distinguishes from, but also relates to, “violence in the world” (Harasym 36).
7. For Danticat, English is a provisional tool, and the language of migration: “If we are in English” she argues, “it’s because we are migrants” (Laforest 227). Danticat has said that she hopes that by writing in English she can appeal to those second‐ or third‐generation Haitian Americans who are monolingual and have lost touch with French and Kreyòl (Anglesey 39). Her writing in English also reflects the low literacy rate in Haiti (Munro 28).
8. Danticat suggested to Lyons: “[w]e [Haiti] haven’t been a colony for a very long time. If anything, the closest thing we now have to a colonial power is the United States” (197).
9. According to Bell, the United States consistently supported Duvalier following Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1959, with “only brief interruption during the Kennedy administration” (11).
10. This policy was continued by the Bush and Clinton administrations (Farmer 173), until political pressure forced its reconsideration.
11. According to Stepick et al. immigration policies disadvantage Haitians, whilst comparatively favouring other ethnicities such as white Cubans (24).
12. This is an elastic temporality referring to a period near the book’s publication date, a flexible designation which acknowledges the difficulty of fixing a definitive timeframe for many of the stories. This temporality relates to “The Book of the Dead”, “Seven” (which refers to the shooting of Patrick Dorismond in 2000), “Water Child” (linked in temporality to “Seven”), “Night Talkers” (Dany, the husband in “Seven” and Michel from “Monkey Tails” are located in the same timeframe as tenants of the Dew Breaker), “The Bridal Seamstress” (likely to be set in the recent present).
13. “The Book of Miracles” set after Emmanuel Constant fled to the United States in 1994, and “Monkey Tails” (1986).
14. “The Funeral Singer”, set ten years after the assassination of J.F.K. (176).
15. “The Dew Breaker”, set c. 1967.
16. Here, while Danticat’s approach can be usefully aligned with Caruth’s argument that trauma and literature intersect at “the complex relation between knowing and not knowing”, her textual politics can be set against Vickroy and Whitehead’s readings of trauma fiction.
17. Claude’s story is a comment on the 1996 Anti‐Terrorist Act. Any non‐US citizen convicted of what the Act terms “aggravated felony” is automatically deported after serving his or her American jail sentence. One result of this has been increased deportations of Haitian youths, some of whom have never visited Haiti, have no relatives there, and cannot speak Kreyòl.
18. LaCapra has usefully distinguished between empathy (a rapport with the other), identification (fusion with the other), and sympathy (the other as an object of pity or condescension) (Writing 212).
19. After the shooting, New York Mayor Rudi Guiliani immediately released Dorismond’s arrest record, and disclosed his juvenile offences (a record which was sealed because of Dorismond’s age at the time of the crimes, a right of closure which Guiliani’s legal advisers decided had expired with Dorismond’s death). Guiliani also spoke at press conferences and interviews about Dorismond’s offences, in such a way that appeared to justify or lessen the killing because the Haitian was apparently already a criminal (see Carlson).
20. In her interview with Robin Dougherty, Danticat makes the point that US intervention in Haiti might be less concerned with Haiti than with trying to stem mass immigration to America.
21. For recent more politically engaged readings see both Kaussen and Mehta.