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July 14, 2004
Thinking
Feminism, The Body and The Machine 
Women have complained, justly, about the behavior of “macho” men. But despite their he-man pretensions and their captivation by masculine heroes of sports, war, and the Old West, most men are now entirely accustomed to obeying and currying the favor of their bosses. Because of this, of course, they hate their jobs—they mutter, “Thank God it’s Friday” and “Pretty good for Monday”— but they do as they are told. They are more compliant than most housewives have been. Their characters combine feudal submissiveness with modern helplessness. They have accepted almost without protest, and often with consumptive relief, their dispossession of any usable property and, with that, their loss of economic independence and their consequent subordination to bosses. They have submitted to the destruction of the household economy and thus of the household, to the loss of home employment and self-employment, to the disintegration of their families and communities, to the desecration and pillage of their country, and they have continued abjectly to believe, obey, and vote for the people who have most eagerly abetted this ruin and who have most profited from it. These men, moreover, are helpless to do anything for themselves or anyone else without money, and so for money they do whatever they are told. They know that their ability to be useful is precisely defined by their willingness to be somebody else’s tool. Is it any wonder that they talk tough and worship athletes and cowboys? Is it any wonder that some of them are violent? Cross Currents
Interview
Grappling With Haiti's Beasts The term “dew breaker” is a Creole expression for a representative of the dictatorship in a rural area—a person with free reign in the area, acting as judge, jury, and executioner. A dew breaker comes in the early morning to claim his victims, breaking the dew on the grass. I decided to center the book around this character and around the dictatorship because my entire childhood was spent in a dictatorship. Growing up, I was always seeing people like that, and the things they did in the name of dictatorship. I didn’t really understand it then, so I wanted to revisit it through the eyes of someone who was a victim of the dictatorship, and also through the eyes of a perpetrator. Interview of Edwidge Danticat. The Atlantic
Review
Notes of a Native American A friendship that endures might reasonably be defined as a house in which disagreements are confined to an attic that can be opened for memoirs but never for continuation of a former argument. Baldwin and I came to our friendship with differences. He was black and I was white, he loved men and I loved women, he assumed his ancestors came to America in chains and I assumed my parents, who slipped over the border separately and illegally, came here because they had nowhere else to go. Despite the differences—we lived many miles apart—because of our friendship, our families took a liking to each other. There are surviving photographs of Jimmy bouncing two of my pajama-clad children on his knee. I loved and admired Baldwin’s mother, Berdis, and believed it was reciprocal, even at our last warm meeting after Jimmy’s death. Berdis visited with my family when Jimmy was abroad. I was welcome in Berdis’s apartment on 131st Street in Harlem, but not by the policeman who stopped me outside and wanted to know what my white face was doing in that neighborhood. Poets & Writers, Inc.