Week 8

For this week’s assignment, from Dewbreaker, I read The Book of the Dead, and Seven. These short stories convey the world and lives of fictitious Haitian-American characters.  

In The Book of the Dead, we read and discussed it in class, but I will briefly go over it here. In the story, a female sculptor and her father are traveling from New York City to Florida. The father, and the sculptor’s mother, both came from Haiti before moving to the States. Already here we have three very different “worlds.” The sculptor is American, but by blood she is full Haitian. We see her struggle with this in the story. We see this when the police office asks where she and her father are from. She answers, “Haiti,” though she was born and raised in Brooklyn and has never been to Haiti. It is easier for her to tell the officer this, and but she confesses to herself that it is something she has longed to have in common with her parents. She isn’t apart of the “Haitian world” so much because her parents have let go of their past to “start over” in the States. She knows very little about Haiti and the culture her parents had once belonged to. The father takes great interest in Ancient Egyptian culture and beliefs, and adopts many of those beliefs. We see this a lot in the end, when the sculptor and her father are discussing her name, Ka. Her name is from Egyptian mythology, and is an example of how he has abandoned his past beliefs and adopted new ones. A theme that is conveyed in this story is very much about fitting into a culture.

In addition to The Book of the Dead, I also read Seven. Seven is a charming tale of two lovers who have waited seven years to be together again. The man in the story moved from Port-Au-Prince to New York City, got a green card that took six years and eleven months to get, then sent for his wife to move to the big city. Similar to the Book of the Dead, the characters in this story left Haiti to start a new life in the States. In both, the characters moved to New York City.

The primary features of his world, spatially, is his apartment building. Most of the story takes place in his apartment, and we see that from the perspective of the narrator following the man first. Then we see the apartment from the narrator’s view of the woman, as she spends her days there while he is at work. She fell into a routine of waking up each morning, listened to the Haitian radio stations, cooked, and wrote letters to her friends and family back home. She is in a new world and is still holding on to her culture and her life back home. In the world of the apartment, one day when he gets home from work she had cooked dinner for him and his two other male roommates. The apartment then felt like a family,with this sense of unity, as they all spoke and ate together.

Besides from when she first gets off the plane and leaves the JFK airport, the only time when she experiences the new world is on the weekends when he doesn’t have work. He is afraid that she shouldn’t leave the apartment and wander, for the fear of her getting lost, and struggling with her lack of English. So he takes her out that weekend and she catches a glimpse of the new world she is in. They take the bus and go to the park. At the end of the day on the way home, they are both thinking about Carnival, and how they dressed as a bride and groom and wandered the streets looking for someone to marry them. This belief of the Haitians is a tradition to the carnival celebration. The story ends with her thinking about what if they were to do that in this new world.

To describe and convey the world to us, the creator doesn’t just tell us about the world, but describes it through actions. In the beginning, the man asked his landlord if his wife could stay. The landlord, being a wealthier caucasian woman, said yes, but “I just hope she’s clean.” I realized the landlord said this because the wife is coming from a foreign country. This scene shows the culture and beliefs of the time that characterize the world.