Violence all around them, but the characters are serene : Danticat

It's amazing that a book (novel? story collection? not sure what to call it) that is centered on trauma and the survivors of trauma can be so serene and placid in tone. Perhaps that's part of the strategy for survival of trauma. In this case, Edwige Danticat's "The Dew Breaker," the trauma concerns the lives of Haitians at home and in exile (in NYC). She takes a very interesting and unusual tack; we suspect, from reading many other stories of political exile, that the main character(s) will be those who flee prosecution from a tyrannical government (Vietnam, Cambodia, South Africa, Afghanistan, USSR, to name a few) or flee from war (all of the above plus Bosnia), but, as Danticat surprises us in the first story, we see that (at least some) of her refugees are the oppressors - the horrible military police who tortured others at the command of the dictatorship (Duvalier father and son). The middle section of stories brings us back to Haiti, the exile's return, and in one particularly intriguing story a young man returns to find his aunt and tell her that back in NYC he has discovered the man who killed his parents (it's the same man we met in the first story, so wracked by guilt that he has kept his secret from his daughter all her life). We move even farther back in time, too, to a story set in 1986 (?) on the day Baby Doc fled the island and we see, through the eyes of a boy, the rampage and the vengeance against the Macoute (military police). So it's a collection with violence and vengeance simmering all around, but the characters are all buttoned down tight and express very little. It's how they survive.