Writing the Haitian Diaspora: The Transnational Contexts of Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker

Abstract

In a May 2008 investigative series published in four installments in the Washington Post, reporters Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein uncovered what they called the “unseen network of special prisons for foreign detainees” scattered across the United States, and into which “[s]ome 33,000 people are crammed … on [any] given day, waiting to be deported or for a judge to let them stay” in the country. The series of reports, which devotes considerable attention to a roster of detailed case studies charting abuses of both physically and mentally ill detainees, many of whom die while in detention, purports thereby to put a human face on what it more generally calls “the human cost of increasingly strict policies in the post—September 11 United States and [the] lack of preparation for the implementation of those policies.” In the case of this network of shadowy detention centers, Priest and Goldstein suggest, the problem started with the conversion of the former federal Immigration and Naturalization Service into what we now call the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau, which in turn is now subsumed into the Department of Homeland Security. According to the reporters, detention in the system, which can often result from simple misunderstandings about a given detainee’s immigration status, can turn out to be a death sentence for anyone unlucky enough to find themselves held while also suffering from serious medical conditions that the staffs in many of the system’s facilities are neither trained nor equipped to handle.

We are a people living through the tragedy of its survival. We’ve had to hide, we’ve had to lock ourselves up inside ourselves, we’ve had to keep ourselves to ourselves to resist the state. It is this situation, above all, that has kept us strong and kept us coherent. But, after a while, such a people understood that, if it went on locking itself up, it would die. So, it chose to leave. It was the leave-taking of a few in order to prevent the asphyxiation of all.

(Yanick Lahens, quoted by Zimra, 1993, 91)

I tell lies for a living.

(Edwidge Danticat, Voices video series, 2004)