Grief, Memory, and Erasure Theme Analysis

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.