"Papa Doc" Duvalier and the Dew-Breaker

Today, we began to discuss the many ways in which The Dew-Breaker references the history of Haiti and particularly the repercussions of dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier's reign on the Haitian people. All the characters in Danticat's book of linked stories suffer from their associations with the violence of Duvalier's Haiti and attempt to understand how to live with the decisions they made in a society where every individual was either "hunter or prey," as Ka's father describes it in the first story of the collection. I gave you an outline of Papa Doc's place in Haitian history in class, but I'm providing you with the following links to get more acquainted with him as you read The Dew-Breaker. Please post any comments on the book or the interplay of history in the lives of the characters in Danticat's book below.

List of Duvalier links:
Papa Doc's Wiki page

Another article on Duvalier reign

Site about Haitian history

Edwidge Danticat and the Dew-Breaker

Edwidge Danticat spent the first twelve years of her life in Haiti before moving to a Haitian-American community in Brooklyn. Danticat was educated at Barnard College and Brown University and came to prominence at a very young age with the publication of her first book, Breath, Eyes, Memory in 1994. Attaining widespread critical praise upon its publication, she became the first Haitian-identified author to achieve renown in the United States and the acceptance of her work is seen to mark the beginning of a belated opening of American literary culture to the stories of women and people of color.

Danticat's writing focuses on a number of themes we've discussed in class--from the power of the past to the importance of telling stories in order to construct an identity. Her work also often represents another theme fundamental to our work in class, her sense of feeling pulled between a number of cultures: Haitian and American; black and white; English- and French Creole- speaking; the political and the literary.

The Dew-Breaker is a particularly interesting book to read alongside The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao because it shares many of the central preoccupations of Diaz's novel (not to mention the fact that Danticat and Diaz are good friends). However, Danticat's book more directly addresses the questions about torture and human rights that Diaz's introduce. Also, unlike Oscar Wao, The Dew-Breaker is not a conventional novel, but a series of linked stories that function much as a novel does. As you read, think about how Danticat's choice to render the narrative in this way affects your experience of The Dew-Breaker. What are your first impressions of the book?

Junot Diaz and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

For the next week or so, we will be exploring The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Oscar Wao, published just this past year, is Diaz's first novel; he published his award-winning book of short stories, Drown, almost ten years ago. Since its publication, Diaz's novel has gone on to win a bevy of prizes, including the vaunted Pulitzer.

Diaz's novel introduces a number of questions we will focus on during this portion of the quarter. Most prominently, the novel asks us to think about the American novel outside of the continental United States. Diaz is Dominican-American and his novel moves smoothly between the Dominican Republic and the U.S., the past and the present, with ease. Diaz's novel represents a move toward a different concept of the nation and citizenship in the nation. It also asks us to think a lot about the form of the novel--as we have been doing thus far in class. Oscar Wao is littered with footnotes that threaten to take over the novel and texts that interweave with Diaz's main narrative. Like Mao II, Diaz's book also asks us to think about the intersection of history and literature; Diaz provides us with a graphic, politicized history of the Dominican Republic at the same time as he gives us a fable about a fat, nerdy Dominican boy in the U.S. who can't get a girl to date him.

This Is Your Life and Photography in MAUS

In class on Wednesday, we watched a clip from the following This Is Your Life episode to open up discussion about the disjuncture between American and European experiences of the Holocaust, as well as 1950s America's awkward attempts to integrate genocide into technicolor television culture.

The full video is below for those interested. Take a look and comment if the spirit takes you.



Also: We didn't get a chance to finish talking about the last pages of MAUS. How dos the introduction of photographs in the last pages of Book II affect our reading of the text? How does the photograph compare to comix as visual media? Is Maus a text appropriately read as a piece of documentary, a remnant of a survivor's experience or something else? Also notice the ways in which the Spiegelman plays with the photograph as another object on the comix page. The many photographs of the Spiegelman family dead are piled atop one another as if they are dead bodies piled inside the gates of (M)Auschwitz and his father's photograph is a play on the many other meta-biographical elements of the book (the souvenir photo of Vladek is a fake, but a fake of something that really happened).

Maus on NPR

Spiegelman has given a number of interviews, but his NPR material is particularly interesting. Click here to listen to Spiegelman on the rise of underground comix (like his own RAW) and some audio of Vladek Spiegelman, as well.

I will send my powerpoint via email, since Blogger is not a fan of my posting a document on this site.

Spiegelman fans, also make sure to check out his newer book, In the Shadow of No Towers, written about and in the wake of 9-11. Although the text begins as a book about the fall of the Twin Towers, it ends up becoming a meditation of the comix form and the possibility for visual and literary expression to be commensurate to the task of representing disaster.

Art Spiegelman and MAUS

When Art Spiegelman published MAUS I in 1986, he transformed the medium of comics and greatly affected the American literary world. His work experimented with the traditional form of the comic strip at the same time that it altered forever the content associated with the medium. Spiegelman's choice to depict the Holocaust and its aftermath in a medium often associated (rightly or wrongly) with children, cartoons, and simple caricature changed both the landscape of the comic and that of Holocaust representation. Comics or "comix," as Spiegelman dubbed them, were suddenly taken much more seriously than ever before. MAUS I and II appealed to a broader audience than did the conventional comic strip. When MAUS won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 (after the publication of the second volume in the series), Spiegelman's work drew even greater attention. Since the publication of this magnum opus, he has become one of the comix medium's greatest advocates, traveling the country with his Comix 101 presentation and arguing for the importance of the form.

Spiegelman was born in 1948 in Stockholm, Sweden. His parents, Anja and Vladek, who appear as central characters in MAUS, were refugees, survivors of the concentration camps and World War II. Using the medium of the comic and the figures of the cat and mouse to represent Nazi and Jew respectively, MAUS tells Spiegelman's parents' stories, as well as his own. After getting his start by editing and writing for the graphic magazine RAW, in which early drawings from MAUS were serialized, Spiegelman went on to draw covers for The New Yorker for a number of years, eventually falling out with the editors due to the political nature of many of his drawings.



How does Spiegelman's medium affect his message in MAUS? Is there something sacrilegious about his representation of the Holocaust? Do we read his work as straight memoir, fiction, or some hybrid in-between genre? Has he chosen the appropriate vehicle for telling this story?