ABSTRACT
In Edwidge Danticat’s book The Dew Breaker (2004), a Haitian man working as a Tonton Macoute and torturer for the Duvalier regimes which controlled Haiti from 1957 to 1986 talks to a woman he has taken to bed. He describes to her how he fi rst heard the president give a long speech, which the man had been forced to attend. After the fi fth hour of the speech, the man had fancied seeing “a fl ock of winged women” of all skin colors circling the palace, hissing at the president angrily. He imagined, he tells his lover, that they were caryatids, originally the name for Greek classical architectural statues of women (sometimes thought to have been of slave origin and associated with spiritual power) holding up a superstructure as pillars, or perhaps angels functioning as additional souls for the listeners standing beneath the palace. The woman’s reply to him is simple: “You can’t afford to be a spiritual man.”1
