While Breath, Eyes, Memory is primarily about the intimate relationships between grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and sisters, it still provides insight into the conditions of life in Haiti. Desai often mentions “Duvalier” and his regime, as does a lot of the criticism on the text. We will look closer at this figure to illuminate the context of the novel.
There are actually two Duvaliers, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Jean-Claude Duvalier, “Baby Doc.” The latter is the ruler mentioned in Clear Light of Day; he ruled from April 22, 1971 until February 7, 1986.
Duvalier was born in Port-au-Prince in 1951. His father became president when Baby Doc was six years old, and was known for his brutality and iron-fisted rule of Haiti. Writing for the Harvard Crimson in 1963, Robert F. Wagner, Jr. detailed the state of the country: “Duvalier has combined… corruption with a ruthless disregard for personal liberties. His secret police force has quashed all significant, internal political opposition, either by forcing heretics into exile or by liquidating them. Exiled opposition leaders estimate that there have been some 2000 executions in the past month alone; independent observers, including diplomats and newspapermen, essentially confirm this estimate.”
Young Duvalier was sent to elite schools but cared mostly for women, fast cars and motorbikes, and loud music. When his father named him the successor to the presidency he was initially quite displeased. Nevertheless, after his father died in 1971, he became the world’s youngest head of state (and “president for life”) at the age of nineteen.
For many years, Duvalier left the administration of Haiti in his mother and her lover’s hands. The army lost power while the Tonton Macoutes amassed more and more, just as it had during his father’s time. Duvalier styled himself as an ardent anti-Communist and an enemy of Castro, thus securing approval from President Reagan and money from his own country due to military and diplomatic backing.
Duvalier married Michele Bennett, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, in a lavish ceremony in 1980. They divorced in 1993. The New York Times provided an overview of the pros and cons of Duvalier’s regime, noting that “investment increased and he pushed urbanization and public works projects, drawing poor farmers from the countryside to such an extent that some argue that agriculture fell into an irreversible decline. The large Haitian diaspora blossomed as people fled and sent money home, buttressing the weak economy. He welcomed nongovernment organizations to fill in what his government could not or would not do” but, perhaps more importantly, he led “what human rights workers called one of the most oppressive governments in the Western Hemisphere” and “he never apologized for atrocities, including brutal crackdowns on opponents at the hands of the feared Tonton Macoutes, a civilian militia that left a thousand people, if not more, dead, disappeared or illegally detained.”
A popular uprising ousted Duvalier in 1986, and he and his wife, mother, and children fled to France on a plane bound for the United States. An Independent journalist provided a chilling tale of his last day: “[Duvalier] ordered Ernest Simon, one of the palace’s houngans, or voodoo sorcerers, to lay a spell on the presidential bed so that the next occupant would die a terrible death there. The houngan called for two newborn, unbaptised children whom he could sacrifice in the ritual. The hospital charged $400 though one, a little girl, was sent back: the gods, the outraged houngan insisted, needed male blood. In the presence of Duvalier and his wife the babies were killed after hours of incantations and the liberal use of rum and herbs.”
He broadcasted an apology to Haiti in 2007. He returned to his country unexpectedly in 2011 and was charged with corruption, abuse of power, and embezzlement, but a Haitian judge ruled that he could not be tried on human rights violations because the statute of limitations had run out. Those charges were reinstated in February 2014. Duvalier died of a heart attack at age 63 in Port-au-Prince in October of 2014.
