Papa’s Scar Symbol Analysis

One of the very first things readers learn about Papa is that he has a scar across his face, which Ka says is from the year he spent in prison in Haiti. By the end of the book, it is revealed that the scar was actually caused by the preacher slashing Papa’s face with a broken chair leg after Papa arrested him and brought him to prison. So while the story Papa tells Ka about getting the scar in prison is technically true, it is misleading. It implies that Papa was the victim of persecution when in fact, he was the perpetrator. In this sense, the scar symbolizes how violence cannot be easily understood outside of the context in which it occurs. While the scar makes Papa look like a victim—and while it is technically true that in the moment of being struck with chair leg, he was a victim of violence—the overall context of the preacher’s arrest shows that Papa was the perpetrator.

The scar also highlights important points about the themes of memory, erasure, and haunting. When Papa kills the preacher, the preacher feels vindicated by the fact that he managed to scar Papa’s face. He knows that this means that for the rest of Papa’s life, Papa will be unable to avoid the memory of the brutality he inflicted on others. Ka’s descriptions of how her father hates having pictures taken of himself and always hides his scar proves this to be right. Although Papa lies about the scar’s origin, he cannot escape the its power as a reminder of the past. Indeed, just as the preacher predicted, the fact that Papa has to lie about the scar makes him even more inescapably aware of the truth. By inflicting the scar on Papa’s face (rather than another part of his body), the preacher ensures that Papa cannot cover it up. The scar becomes part of who Papa is—a core element of his identity. In a sense, this is the opposite of the “face scalping” practiced by Emmanuel Constant’s militia. While face scalping involved removing the skin from the face of a corpse in order to make it unidentifiable, the scar makes visible the reality of who Papa is—a dew breaker, someone who tortured and killed people for a living.