Scars of Trauma: Duality of Signification in Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker (2004)

As sliding into the abyss of trauma is harrowing, the cathartic role of telling one's story becomes crucial. This paper studies The Dew Breaker (2004) by Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat exploring how a work of fiction can be testimony of trauma and how the notion of trauma can penetrate a narrative; form and content. It shows how scars of political torture narrate the trauma of Haitian people during and after the Duvalier regime. The paper reads The Dew Breaker as striking in countering the perspective towards trauma narratives as unilateral manifestations of pain, victimisation, silence and/or irredeemable guilt. The novel is rich in workings of trauma that mainly take the form of dualities and, it is argued, these are dualities that interrelate to reconcile. Layers of trauma are presented in the form of binary patterns rather than binary oppositions. Suffering is not versus healing, alienation does not impede narration, and neither is the victim placed against the perpetrator. The aim of the paper is to expand trauma's conceptual framework by blurring the line between apparent dichotomies and formulates a new possibility of approaching a trauma narrative that can bear a sign of hope and transformation.