The young girl kneaded the tufted carpet beneath her, twisting the strands with her fidgety hands. She cradled her knees against her chest, watching as her grandmother began to pull yarn from a nearby basket. She pulled the bundles of yarn out by single threads, gathering the colorful rolls at the foot of her rocking chair. The young girl scooted closer to her grandmother, watching as her callused fingers began to draw out a crocheted chain.
“Grandma,” the young girl said, “tell me about your grandmother.”
Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker is a split narrative spanning across a multitude of Haitian-American immigrants. “Night Talkers” is a short chapter within this novel following the perspective of Dany, a young man who went back home to visit his aunt in Haiti. Danticat uses Dany as a foil to many Haitian characters, as well as a foil for Claude, a Haitian-American.
Dany is much more collected than Claude, a man who returned to Haiti after serving time in jail for killing his father at a young age. Despite everything Claude did, he viewed his actions as the greatest opportunity he had ever been given, as he since gained the chance to make everything better in his own life going forward.
Dany describes Claude by saying he “was probably in his late teens, too young, it seemed, to have been expatriated twice, from both his native country and his adopted land” (Danticat 100). Pointing out Claude’s past through a potentially judgmental lens creates a strange tension between Dany and Claude. It seems as though the two of them were expected to be similar because of their time in America, but this was certainly not the case. The only reason Dany purposefully interacted with Claude was because of his aunt’s request; she asked Dany to provide Claude someone to speak English to, since Claude had completely forgotten the language he had been raised with since birth.
“Well, my mémère was a very interesting woman,” her grandmother began to explain. “I don’t remember much about her, as she died when I was very young. But she loved to say ‘tête de pierre’. No one ever insulted her grandchildren as lovingly as she did.”
“What does that mean?” The young girl asked.
Her grandmother looked down upon the girl.
“What?”
“The French,” she said, not entirely remembering the words that her grandmother had just said or even beginning to understand what they could have meant.
Her grandmother began to laugh. She continued crocheting, turning the bend and starting another row. Perhaps she was making a scarf or a quilt.
“Tête de pierre,” her grandmother repeated. “It means ‘head of stone’.”
“Identity is expressed through language all the time, but will always elude the enunciating subject. Identity is performed in a permanent temporality and the immediacy and spontaneity require repetition that is always in the present” (Ogunfolabi 42).
Ogunfolabi explores the importance of language within the context of identity; while one can have an identity without having the language, the personal experience of one’s own self can certainly be impacted by the lack or capability of understanding language. When knowing a language, an individual has easier access to a community that might otherwise be alienating to them.
That was all the French the young girl learned that day. And that was all the French her grandmother ever taught her; not because she died or anything terrible happened, but because that was all that she held onto. The brief glimpses of her mémère cooking, calling to her grandchildren and muttering under her breath, “tête de pierre!”
This was what it meant to make a new home across the ocean: to provide those who followed after you only an inkling of another self on the other side of the world.
The young girl left her grandmother’s house in the early evening. And as she tried to sleep, all she could think about was tête de pierre. How does someone turn their head into a rock, anyway? Could a mind ever truly forget that it was a human being and instead believe that it was made out of many little pebbles?
Dany went back to Haiti briefly to visit his aunt, who died during his stay. He was overwhelmed by grief, and his sadness was read as another language entirely. It were as though Dany became silenced by what he felt. Danticat writes, “They were speaking about him as though he couldn’t understand, as if he were solely an English speaker, like Claude. […] all he wanted to do was lie down next to his aunt, rest his head on her chest, and wrap his arms around her waist, the way he had done when he was a boy. He wanted to close his eyes until he could wake up from the unusual dream where everyone was able to speak except the two of them” (Danticat 112). By treating Dany as though he lacked the ability to speak, he was removed from his own people and left alone to wallow within his grief. His sense of isolation was heightened by the lack of communication provided to him. And so he was left feeling alone: lacking both a genetic connection to his community and someone to bridge the gap between his Haitian and his American identities from the passing of his aunt.
The young girl looked up at the ceiling as she tried to fall asleep. Instead of counting sheep, she counted numbers. She could count to three in German, five in Italian, and ten in French.
Then she turned over on her side, thinking again. Tête de pierre. In English, what did those words mean? She wondered if a translation could capture the wedding picture of her grandmother’s mémère and pépère, or the sigh that she likely gave before every ‘tête de pierre‘ to leave her mouth.
Could someone ever make a hardened rock moldable again?
The young girl wanted to see the world through her grandmother’s mind, but her eyes had been riddled with cataracts and by years of haziness. There was so much the young girl had not inherited.
But, if nothing else, she had been given her grandmother’s stone head.
Reflection
I wanted to write this piece because of something I found super fascinating within The Dew Breaker: the identity of a person when they tethered or kept away from their culture. I was also inspired by something I’ve thought about a lot, which is the loss of language within the generations of my own family. Though the experience of European immigrant families is certainly different from Danticat’s depiction of Haitian-American immigration, I thought the through-line of language loss (specifically in the “Night Talkers” chapter of The Dew Breaker) is a unique thematic concept that is not discussed enough. When one cannot speak the language of their family, it is easy to feel disconnected from said family. I think this is inherently just part of human nature (i.e. feeling separated or having a fear of missing out on something you cannot/do not understand), but that doesn’t make it any easier. I’ve always been very interested in the languages that my grandparents used to be fluent in, because it always felt like a skill that I should have, too. However, I’ve never really learned much besides the very basics of French, Italian, and German because of my grandparents’ age and their lack of connection to people who also speak the same language. Because they stopped needing the language in everyday communication, they forgot it, and such languages stopped being passed down.
Claude’s experience in The Dew Breaker is notably different from my own. I think it is also important to note his experience with killing his father has certainly colored the way he views the world, and he exists as his own distinct character. I’m hoping it doesn’t come across as me saying I have experienced similarly to Claude or Dany; rather, I would like to play around with Danticat’s theme of forgetting a part of one’s identity and the homogenizing experience of America. Even though Claude is obviously still Haitian (and one does not have to speak any given language in order to be any given nationality or ethnicity), it is harder for him to bridge the gap between himself and others. He cannot completely advocate for himself in Creole, so he is, in this way, pulled away from the family who lacks English knowledge. The language barrier does not inherently prevent an individual from participating in a given culture, but it does add another hurdle which must be leaped over. This could be potentially alienating, and I believe this is why Danticat writes Dany in “Night Talkers” as a ‘bridging’ character between those who speak Creole and the English-speaking Claude.
Danticat’s depiction of language creating a connection is also very interesting; Claude and Dany are almost expected to communicate with each other because they know the same language. While reading this, I wondered how it might work inversely in a country like America, where English is the most widely-spoken language. I know from my own family that many of grandparents created life-long friends specifically because of their shared language; my grandpa on my mother’s side says that he’s friends with all the Italian people in his town. He barely speaks any Italian anymore, but it is still a part of who he is.
Being able to speak a second language fluently is such a valuable and beautiful skill to have, especially because it can more than just a tool: language is part of an individual and certain manners of speaking can easily frame the way in which someone might see the world. When someone learns another language, they have then gained another set of eyes; their perspective may shift or it may be elevated by everything they have come to understand.
Works Cited
Bekerman, Zvi. “Constructivist Perspectives on Language, Identity, and Culture: Implications for Jewish Identity and the Education of Jews.” Religious Education, vol. 96, no. 4, Fall 2001, pp. 462–73. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.libproxy.plymouth.edu/10.1080/003440801753442375.
Danticat, E. (2004). The Dew Breaker. Alfred A. Knoff.
Ogunfolabi, Kayode O. “On Identity, and ‘Separation of Word from History.’” Atenea, vol. 24, no. 2, Dec. 2004, pp. 39–50. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx direct=true&db=aph&AN=16560418&site=ehost-live.
SOINEY, MADELINE. “The Weaponization of Language against Ethnic Haitians in the Dominican Republic.” World Tensions / Tensões Mundiais, vol. 19, no. 39, Jan. 2023, pp. 129–56. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=163643425&site=ehost-live.
Steele, Brent J. “The Power of Language and Identity: British Neutrality and the American Civil War.” Conference Papers — American Political Science Association, Aug. 2003, pp. 1–37. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.libproxy.plymouth.edu/apsa_proceeding_2553.pdf.
Sprockets and Springes 