More than Hunter or Prey: Duality and Traumatic Memory in Edwidge Danticat's "The Dew Breaker"

Ka's relationship to her parents' traumas is best understood as post- memory, a concept Marianne Hirsch conceived to explain the experience of people like herself: those raised by Holocaust survivors whose lives have not been touched literally by that trauma but have nevertheless been dominated by it due to their intimate connection to parents who pass residual traumas on to their children through verbal and nonverbal means. While Hirsch mentions the importance of stories and documents in addition to images in the trans- mission of traumatic memory, her work assumes "the privileged status of photographs as a medium of postmemory" ("Surviving" 13).\n14 He fi nally provides Ka an additional point of entry into her parents' past-beyond her father's predatory role and her mother's more passive one-and offers a stance worthy of emulation.