Krik? Krak!
Krik? Krak!
THE LITERARY WORK
A collection of short stories set in both Haiti and New York from the 1930s to the 1980s; published in 1995.
SYNOPSIS
Haitians struggle with poverty and political persecution in their homeland and with cultural alienation and misunderstandings in their adopted country of America.
Events in History at the Time the Short Stories Take Place
Events in History at the Time the Stories Were Written
Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti on January 19, 1969, and immigrated to the United States in 1981. Dandicat received her bachelor’s degree in French literature from Barnard College and a master’s degree in fine arts from Brown University. She began publishing short stories at the young age of 14, then produced her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory the following decade in 1995. Also that year she published Krik? Krak!—a finalist for the National Book Award in 1995. Its stories figure into Danticat’s continuing effort to interject a degree of humanity into perceptions of a nation that is often publicly maligned because of its corrupt politicians and warring governmental factions. Amidst this turbulence, Danticat depicts the Haitians’ struggles to survive in their own country and in their adopted country of the United States.
Events in History at the Time the Short Stories Take Place
The struggle for Haitian independence
While most of the stories in Krik? Krak! take place between the 1950s and 1980, some hearken back in spirit to seminal events in Haiti’s history. Few moments were more pivotal than the revolution of 1804, which ultimately resulted in the country’s obtaining its freedom from France. Since 1697 France had governed a third of the island as the colony of Sainte-Domingue; Spain governed the other two-thirds as the colony of Santo Domingo. The entire island was known as Hispaniola, the name given it by Christopher Columbus, who landed there in 1492. Within 50 years of his discovery, disease and mistreatment had virtually wiped out the island’s indigenous population—approximately 10, 000 Arawaks.
France governed its colony for close to a century before Haiti revolted. The seeds for a fullblown rebellion were sown as early as 1791, two years after the outbreak of the French Revolution in France. Inspired, even inflamed, by the slogan of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” coined in France by the revolutionaries there, black slaves in Sainte-Domingue set about mounting their own revolution to wrest freedom from white slaveowners. On August 14, 1791, a rebel slave named Boukman organized a vaudou (often spelled voodoo) ceremony at the Turpin plantation, near Bois Cayman; among the attendees were Toussaint L’Ouverture, George Biassou, and Jean-François, all of whom would become leaders in the Haitian revolution that followed.
Shortly after the vaudou ceremony, the rebellion began in earnest. Slaves slaughtered whites and set fire to property, fields, and factories; in Cap-Frangais, whites responded by killing non-whites at random, provoking further retaliation by blacks. Before the Cap-Français rebellion had
HAITI’S TRUE RELIGION?
Vaudou, more commonly known as voodoo, is perhaps most accurately defined as a form of religion developed by Afro-Haitians, whose system of beliefs encompasses the natural and supernatural worlds. The concept of family spirits—often called loua or misté—who are inherited through maternal or paternal lines is central to vaudou. These family spirits protect their descendants from misfortune and harm; in exchange, the families conduct rituals in which food, drink, and other gifts are offered to the spirits. Among foreigners, vaudou has acquired a sinister reputation over the centuries, becoming associated not only with service to the spirits but with witchcraft, sorcery, human sacrifice, and cannibalism. During the 1920s, however, radical Haitian intellectuals exalted vaudou as an example of their country’s true culture and faith. Also the later national leader Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier was a proponent of the practice of vaudou.
been suppressed, 10, 000 slaves and 1, 000 whites were killed and 1, 200 coffee estates and 200 sugar plantations destroyed (Metz, p. 268). Elsewhere in the French colony the fighting continued, and the whites found themselves unable to regain control of their former slaves. France’s preoccupation with its own failing government and its ongoing war with Britain further helped the blacks’ cause. There were, in short, two conflicts going on at once—the domestic strife of slave against slaveowner and the international strife of France against Spain for control of territory here. Slave leader Toussaint L’Ouverture emerged as a preeminent military strategist. Deeming it in the best interest of the slaves, he joined with the Spanish forces—led by two black generals, George Biassou and Jean-Frangois—seeking to capture the northern part of Saint-Domingue. Then in 1794 the French National Assembly’s promise to abolish slavery led Toussaint to throw in his lot with the French; a large portion of Biassou and Jean-Frangois’s now-disbanded forces joined him. Eventually achieving the rank of commander in chief over all the French forces on the island, Toussaint captured the port of Santo Domingo in 1801 and gained control over the entire island, nominally for the French but ultimately for himself and Haiti’s black majority. Once in power, Toussaint abolished slavery in the region and appointed himself governor-general for life.
In 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte, first Consul of France, sent an army under the command of General Charles LeClerc to retake the island. After Toussaint’s chief lieutenants Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe went over to the side of the French, Toussaint himself was forced to surrender to LeClerc, who had the former leader imprisoned in France, where he died in 1803. On learning that Napoleon planned to restore slavery, Dessalines and Christophe, along with other soldiers of color, defected from the French army and became insurrectionists once more. Fierce fighting and yellow fever took their toll on French forces, who finally surrendered to the blacks in November 1803. On January 2, 1804, Dessalines announced the birth of a new nation, now called “Haiti” (the Arawak word for mountainous).
In Krik? Krak! the spirit of the revolution for independence is often evoked, especially in the story “A Wall of Fire Rising”. As a young black couple tries to eke out a living in twentieth-century Haiti, their seven-year-old son wins the part of Boukman in a school play. The speeches the boy must learn—passionate calls for freedom and independence for blacks—form an ironic counterpoint to the day-to-day struggle for existence that his parents must face and that eventually claims his father’s life.
The Duvaliers’ regime
During the 1950s Frangois Duvalier, a physician, writer, and patron of vaudou, rose to prominence in Haiti, capturing the allegiance of the army and winning a significant degree of popular support. Representing himself as a champion of Haitian blacks, “Papa Doc” Duvalier—so called because of his mild, fatherly demeanor—won a decisive majority in the presidential election of 1957; he was re-elected in 1961.
Within months of his victory, Duvalier set about establishing a totalitarian state. Dismissing the chief of staff, he seized direct control of the army, closed the nation’s military academy, and founded several competing military bodies, headed by his own men. The most infamous of these was the Volunteers for National Security, more popularly known as the “tontons macoutes”—a reference from Haitian folklore to the bearded bogeymen who carried away badly behaved children during the night. Formed to keep the army in check, the macoutes spied upon, imprisoned, tortured, or killed any Haitians who might offer resistance to the Duvalier regime.
Meanwhile, Duvalier declared himself president for life in 1964, after bringing all national institutions—schools, churches, trade unions, the press, and the media—under his control. Censorship was widespread; even the Roman Catholic Church came under attack when Duvalier, in pursuit of unchallenged control, expelled its priests and closed its seminary. Hoping to escape Duvalier’s oppressive regime, many Haitian journalists, writers, and intellectuals fled into exile; the predominantly black working classes and peasantry, however, remained behind, struggling against increasing poverty and political persecution. Several attempts were made to remove Duvalier from power, but these coups—usually undermanned and poorly executed—all resulted in failure and the execution of those responsible. Nonetheless, the threat of assassination or deposition was everpresent; Duvalier lived in constant fear for his life.
Shortly before his death in 1971, Duvalier changed the age requirement for the office of president from forty to eighteen years of age, enabling him to name his young son, Jean Claude Duvalier as his successor. Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, whom many Haitians considered a playboy under the influence of his mother and sister, assumed the office of president at the age of nineteen. Initially, the younger Duvalier implemented some minor reforms: he released many political prisoners; declared an amnesty for all exiles who were not communists; and restored some degree of freedom to the press. “Baby Doc” did not, however, reform the voting process—election outcomes were rigged, as they had been in his father’s time. Nor did he disband the tontons macoutes, who continued to thrive under the new regime. Meanwhile, Haiti itself continued to grow poorer; official corruption, population growth, natural disasters, and the decline of tourism all contributed to a severely depressed national economy. Matters between Duvalier and his subjects
DEATH AT THE DOMINICAN’S DOORSTEP
Danticat’s fiction recalls another tragic event in Haitian history: the 1937 massacre of some 50, 000 Haitian laborers by the army of the Dominican Republic. Relations between these two neighboring countries had long been strained and hostile. Formerly called Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, which occupies the eastern two-thirds of Hispaniola, only emerged as a separate, undominated part of the world after weathering a series of wars with Haiti and enduring a lengthy occupation by U.S. troops (1916-22), In 1922 the United States and Dominican leaders reached an agreement that led to the formation of a provisional government. The relatively peaceful, uneventful administration of Horacio Vásquez ended in 1930, when General Rafael Trujillo, a disciple of the American occupational forces, seized control of the government (see In the Time of the Butterflies , also in Literature and Its Times). Backed by the army, Trujillo ruled as a dictator until his assassination in 1961. During his regime, Trujillo encouraged anti-Haitian feeling, especially after Haitian sugarcane cutters migrated to the eastern side of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the 1930s. It was on Trujillo’s orders that the cane cutters were slaughtered. In ‘’Nineteen Thirty-Seven, the second story in Krik? Krak!.. Danticat explores the ramifications of that massacre on the survivors and their descendants, who keep the memory of their dead alive.
further deteriorated after his marriage to a woman who became notorious for her greed and extravagance. During the 1980s protests were mounted against political corruption and social injustice. The protests led by the Catholic clergy and other religious groups grew increasingly more frequent
A HISTORY OF POLITICAL INSTABILITY
Haiti has the distinction of being the first (and perhaps only) country to lead a successful stave revolt that resulted in the independence of black slaves, and it was the second nation to declare its independence in the western hemisphere. Consequently, Haiti has served as a symbol of liberation to many who have struggled against subjugation. However, despite its promising beginnings, the country has suffered much at the hands of violent dictators and powerful foreign influences. Jean Jacques Dessalines, who proclaimed himself emperor in 1804, was assassinated in 1806, setting an unfortunate precedent for the next century. A succession of strong-willed ambitious leaders seized power and resorted to repressive measures to maintain their position, only to be assassinated or overthrown, often by the person who replaced them in office. In 1915 the United States dispatched Marines to Haiti to protect American interests; for nearly 20 years, U.S. troops quashed native attempts at resistance against them, while the U.S. Government placed a series of puppet presidents in office. After U.S. troops left the country in 1934, Haiti continued to suffer political insurrections and was governed by military juntas during periods of instability until the presidency could be restored through election. This period of volatile rule in Haiti continued until the election of Francois Duvalier, who assured the stability of his presidency through an absolutist dictatorship and, upon his death, passed the reins of government to his son, Jean Claude. After three decades, however, Haitians rebelled against the Duvaliers, eventually driving Jean Claude and his family into exile. The fall of the dictatorship did not usher in a new age of order, stability, and democracy for the country. To this day, Haiti continues to be plagued by political unrest. Four of the six presidents who succeeded the Duvaliers were overthrown while still in office. Despite new political developments and new policies to improve the quality of life in Haiti, the country’s image as a violent, unstable, poverty-stricken nation persists in mainstream societies. Edwidge Danticat’s work attempts to combat the negative and often violent stereotypes associated with Haiti by emphasizing the humanity of its people and separating them from the politics of the land.
and clamorous. In 1986 the government collapsed, and Duvalier and his immediate family fled to France. Haiti’s woes, however, did not end with the Duvaliers’ fall; without a strong central government, the country experienced anarchy and confusion. Meanwhile, political and military institutions had been seriously discredited under the last two regimes. Strikes, protest marches, robberies, murders, and other abuses of power continued unabated, causing Haitians to describe their situation as “Duvalierism without Duvalier” (Metz, p. 295).
In “Children of the Sea”, the opening story of Krik? Krak!, Danticat explores the effects of the Duvaliers’ regime on two separated lovers—a politically active young man forced to flee into exile and his girlfriend, still in Haiti, who witnesses all the atrocities committed by the tontons macoutes. But the misdeeds of the Duvaliers’ hated secret police reach past the country’s borders, making themselves felt even in the boat on which the young man is traveling. One of his fellow passengers, a young girl named Célianne, has been gang-raped by the macoutes and is now pregnant as a result of their vicious attack.
The “boat people”
Between the 1950s and 1980s, many Haitians fled the island to escape the Duvaliers’ oppressive regime. In the 1950s and 1960s the majority of these refugees belonged to the urban middle and upper classes; by the 1970s poor Haitians, from both rural and urban areas, accounted for most of the refugees. Some of these Haitians migrated to the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Canada, France and sometimes Africa. The United States, however, was usually the primary destination, receiving an estimated 68 percent of all Haitian emigrants between 1950 and 1985 (Metz, p. 320). The cities of New York, Miami, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia reported sizable numbers of Haitian residents by the mid-1980s.
Escaping from Haiti was hardly a clandestine affair; the tonton macoutes sometimes helped would-be emigrants to boats that were waiting conspicuously in the harbor for them. In fact, Jean Claude Duvalier thought that the Haitian people’s flight would help the country’s economy, as those who fled would send money back to their relatives in Haiti. During the 1970s and 1980s these emigrants became known as the “boat people” because they often set off for foreign shores in small boats or rafts, without documentation. According to reports made by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, an estimated 55, 000 “boat people” arrived in Florida between 1972 and 1981 (Metz, p. 327).
This Haitian diaspora, or dispersal of emigrants, created a host of new problems: adding to overpopulation in the countries who received this influx of refugees, leading to economic exploitation of emigrants because of their illegal status, and causing the deaths of many Haitians as they attempted to reach their destinations. The United States and various other Caribbean countries eventually called for Jean Claude Duvalier to forbid Haitians from leaving their country, a demand to which he finally acquiesced. In 1981 the United States formed an agreement with Haiti to intercept Haitian boats and return the passengers to their homeland; approximately 54, 000 Haitians experienced such a return between 1981 and 1992 (Metz, p. 327).
In “Children of the Sea”, Danticat depicts the plight of these “boat people”, conveying everything from the physical discomfort they experience while crowded on a small craft, to the boredom they try to assuage by telling each other stories, to the growing sense of dread they experience as their boat begins to leak before land is sighted. The story ends on an ominous note as the young girl in Haiti reports that “last night on the radio, i heard that another boat sank off the coast of the Bahamas, i can’t think about you being in there in the waves, my hair shivers” (Krik? Krak!, pp. 18-19).
Women in Haitian society
Theoretically, gender roles in Haiti follow traditional patterns. Among married couples, the husband is the breadwinner, the wife the housekeeper and caretaker of the children. Men have enjoyed higher legal standing in the courts; wives have been subject to greater sanctions against adultery than husbands, and only since 1983 have married women in Haiti been accorded adult rights.
Sexual stratification, however, blurs when one considers the realities of a disproportionately female society. Emigration and disease, among other causes, have resulted in there being far more women than men in Haiti; demographics show a shortage of men above the age of ten, especially in urban areas. Consequently women enter the labor force quite early: an estimated 10 percent of Haitian females begin working between the ages of five and nine, an estimated 33 percent between the ages of ten and fourteen (Metz, p. 336). Moreover, female heads of households have become increasingly common; an official survey in 1996 revealed that women headed 26 percent of rural households and 46 percent of urban households (Metz, p. 336).
In rural society, women play a pivotal role in Haiti’s internal market system. They function as intermediaries between the peasant villages and the markets and towns, selling a villages’ surplus produce and purchasing medicines and necessary household articles with the proceeds. Some women even amass sufficient capital to become full-time market traders and acquire economic independence from men. In urban society, women hold a variety of jobs, ranging from household servant to factory worker. In both rural and urban regions, Haitian women tend to be the mainstays of their families.
Krik? Krak! reflects the realities of life in Haiti’s predominantly female society. Nearly all the stories are told from a women’s point of view; moreover, most of the female protagonists are widows or single women who must support themselves or their families by their own efforts. Husbands and male lovers are usually absent (as in “Children of the Sea”), unreliable (as in “Between the Pool and the Gardenias”), or dead (as in “Caroline’s Wedding”). Some men, unable to cope with the demoralizing realities of life below the poverty line, die in the course of the story (as in “A Wall of Fire Rising”). In the Krik? Krak! stories, the primary bond is not so much between husband and wife as between mother and child—specifically, mother and daughter. Time and again, an older generation of women attempts to impart its wisdom and experience to a younger generation, some of whom are more receptive to these teachings than others.
The Short Stories in Focus
The plot
Danticat’s collection weaves together stories about various Haitians. Of the nine stories, seven take place in Haiti while the last two are set in New York. Many of the protagonists in the stories are linked through familial or communal ties.
The first story, “Children of the Sea”, consists of letters written by two young lovers torn apart by politics. Branded as traitors because of their participation in a radical youth group, they are forced to flee, separately, from the wrath of the tonton macoutes, out to punish “enemies of the state”. As the story begins, the male protagonist, with other refugees, has boarded a small boat bound for Miami; he decides to keep a journal, which he addresses to his sweetheart, even as he acknowledges that she may never see it. Meanwhile, his girlfriend is similarly occupied: writing an account of the days until she and her parents can escape the chaos of Port-au-Prince and find refuge in the small province, Ville Rose. The couple’s parallel narratives reveal not only their undying love for each other—in letters that they will never be able to deliver—but the terrible atrocities they witness on their separate journeys.
The young man begins by expressing his anxiety over the thought of never seeing his lover again and the possibility that she will marry another, according to her father’s wishes. The young woman’s writings mirror his anxiety and sense of hopelessness, even as her concerns broaden to include her parents and the larger Haitian community, all of whom wonder when and if the country will ever be at peace. Disillusioned by the state of affairs in their country, the young woman’s parents hide and destroy campaign paraphernalia that would link them to a departed president (to whom—it may be inferred—they had formerly pledged their allegiance).
The girlfriend’s narrative further exposes the cruelty of the new regime as she relates the story of her next-door neighbor, Madam Roger, who was able to retrieve only her son’s severed head after he was killed by the tontón macoutes. Meanwhile, the macoutes continue to harass Madam Roger about her son’s political resistance, beating her to death after she excoriates the current regime and praises those, like her son, who had the courage to resist. While hiding in the outhouse, the girlfriend and her parents witness Madam Roger’s murder but are too terrified to intervene. After the entire family flees to the countryside, the mother reveals that authorities had identified the young girl herself as a rebel and that the father had given all he possessed, including their house, to keep her from being arrested. While eternally grateful for her father’s loyalty, the girlfriend still worries about the fate of her exiled lover.
Meanwhile, the male protagonist and his fellow refugees remain at sea, hoping to be picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard or to somehow reach the coast of Florida on their own. Needing something to sustain them through the risks and the boredom of their long voyage, the travelers comfort themselves by singing “Beloved Haiti” and telling each other “Krik? Krak!” stories: “Someone says, Krik? You answer, Krak! And they say, I have many stories I could tell you, and then they go on and tell these stories to you, but mostly to themselves” (Krik? Krak!, p. 14).
Over time, the young man hears some of his fellow passengers’ stories, including that of Célianne, a 15-year-old girl who became pregnant after ten macoute officers invaded her home, forced her brother to sleep with his mother, and then raped Célianne while her family watched. Later, Célianne gives birth to a dead baby while aboard the vessel. Ominously, water begins to seep into the boat and the passengers are forced to throw their personal belongings overboard in order to stay afloat. Despite the urgings of her fellow travelers, Célianne refuses to throw her baby overboard. Eventually, she complies, but immediately takes a suicidal jump overboard after her child. Meanwhile, the boat continues to leak, and the male narrator is forced to throw his journal into the sea as well. The young man’s narrative thus concludes as he tries to find some comfort in the thought of his possible death by drowning: “I go to them now as though it was always meant to be, as though the very day that my mother birthed me, she had chosen me to live life eternal, among the children of the deep blue sea, those who have escaped the chains of slavery to form a world beneath the heavens and the blood-drenched earth where you live” (Krik? Krak!, p. 27).
Back in Haiti, the young woman, ignorant of her lover’s likely fate, beholds a black butterfly—a symbol of death—and reports hearing of another refugee-laden boat’s sinking off the coast of the Bahamas. The possibility that her lover might have been on that boat fills her with fear, and she ends her own story with a poignant affirmation of her devotion to him: “Behind these mountains are more mountains and more black butterflies still and a sea that is endless like my love for you” (Krik? Krak!, p. 29).
Most of the subsequent stories in the collection explore Haitians’ day-to-day struggles to survive in their troubled country, amid such obstacles as political persecution (“The Missing Peace”), ignorance and superstition (“Nineteen Thirty-Seven”), and the grinding realities of poverty (“A Wall of Fire Rising,” “Night Women”). In the last two stories, however, the focus shifts to transplanted Haitians, now making their homes in New York. The final story, “Caroline’s Wedding”, depicts a Haitian-American family struggling to maintain connections with its homeland while forging a new sense of identity in the United States. “Caroline’s Wedding” also brings the collection full-circle, in that the main plot of “Children of the Sea” resurfaces here as a subplot.
Featured in “Caroline’s Wedding” are Mrs. Azile, a Haitian immigrant mother and her two daughters: Grace, who narrates the story, and Caroline, who is engaged to marry Eric, a Bahamian janitor. Mr. Azile, the father in the family, is dead but his memory lives on in the minds of his children who constantly think of him. His widow attempts to preserve Haitian traditions in the United States and adamantly opposes her younger daughter’s wedding because Caroline’s fiance is not Haitian. The American-born Caroline, however, seems to have stronger ties to the United States than to Haiti; Caroline’s missing left forearm, the result of being exposed before birth to a dangerous tranquilizer, comes to symbolize her limited involvement with her Haitian roots and her immediate family. Mother and daughter repeatedly clash over the importance of Haiti and Haitian culture in their present-day lives. By contrast, Caroline’s older sister, Grace—who has just attained her American citizenship—embraces the traditions of both Haiti and the United States, while maintaining a neutral stance in the conflict between her mother and sister.
At one point, the mother asks both Grace and Caroline to attend a memorial mass for Haitian refugees who died while trying to flee their homeland. Caroline, who does not like to focus on the past, refuses, but Grace agrees to accompany her mother. During the service, the priest asks the congregation for special prayers on behalf of a young girl who gave birth on one of the boats bound for America, then jumped overboard with her dead baby. This reference to Célianne, whose history is recounted in “Children of the Sea”, brings the story-cycle full-circle, emphasizing the Haitians’ ongoing struggle to find refuge in a hostile world.
Meanwhile, on a more human, even comedic scale, the domestic disagreements between Mrs. Azile and Caroline continue. Caroline remains adamant about wedding Eric, while her mother continues to lament that her daughter is marrying a non-Haitian and worries as well about Eric’s motivations. When Grace tries to reassure her mother about the couple’s love for each other, Mrs. Azile retorts that love does not always last. Grace recalls that, in order to escape Haiti, her parents divorced and her father married another woman to gain American citizenship. Later, he divorced his second wife and sent for his first wife and daughters, but the Azile marriage never regained its earlier passion. Grace reflects soberly upon the price her family paid for the freedom they now enjoy as Haitian Americans.
Despite her anxieties, Mrs. Azile ultimately accepts Caroline’s relationship with Eric and helps her daughter prepare for her wedding, a civil ceremony held in a judge’s office. Grace and her mother serve as witnesses. Caroline leaves on her honeymoon, with thoughts of her mother. The newlywed sends her mother roses, which Mrs. Azile cherishes, despite feeling that the flowers are too expensive. Meanwhile, Grace continues to contemplate her own identity as a naturalized citizen, still bound to Haiti by memories and traditions. The story ends as mother and elder daughter bond over a Haitian game of questions and answers that Mr. Azile used to play with his children.
A tradition of orality
The importance of oral communication is a recurring theme in the stories comprising Krik? Krak! However different their experiences or situations, Danticat’s characters are linked through various forms of shared speech. In “Nineteen Thirty-Seven”, for example, the survivors of the 1937 Haitian massacre have developed a series of questions and answers by which one survivor recognizes another:
“Who are you?” I asked her.
“I am a child of that place”, she answered. “I
come from that long trail of blood”.
“Where are you going?”
“I am walking into the dawn”.
“Where are you going?”
“I am the first daughter of the first star”.
(Krik? Krak!, p. 44)
In “Caroline’s Wedding”, sisters Grace and Caroline play a similar game with each other, learned from their mother. Grace recalls, “Ma too had learned this game when she was a girl. Her mother belonged to a secret women’s society in Ville Rose, where the women had to question each other before entering one another’s houses” (Krik? Krak!, p. 165). The game becomes a bridge between the generations, a ritual handed down from mother to daughter.
Other forms of speech take on a similar significance in Danticat’s stories. In “A Wall of Fire Rising”, the lines Little Guy must recite for his school play encompass Haiti’s past and present woes, from political oppression to crushing poverty. Stories and songs also connect characters. In “Children of the Sea”, the Haitian refugees attempting to reach Florida by boat sing the anthem “Beloved Haiti, there is no place like you” and enact the storytelling ritual of “Krik? Krak!” to make the long hours pass more quickly.
By using the catch-phrase “Krik? Krak!” as the title of her short-story collection, Danticat herself evokes a common form of storytelling in the Caribbean illustrated by the boat people. Although the ritual structure varies in different parts of the Caribbean, all varieties emphasize the call-and-response elements integral to this type of storytelling. In one common version, the storyteller asks “Krik?” at varying points in the narrative to see if her/his audience would like for her to continue. If they are willing, the audience replies “Krak!” and the tale continues. This type of storytelling has become a way of passing down the folklore and the history of the Haitian people to future generations. Oral communication may be even more vital among Haitians because of the country’s high rate of illiteracy. The Haitian-American Danticat melds two traditions of storytelling—oral and written—in Krik? Krak!, quoting the following passage by Sal Scalora as an epigraph to her collection:
Krik? Krak! Somewhere by the seacoast I feel a breath of warm sea air and hear the laughter of children.
An old granny smokes her pipe,
Surrounded by the village children…
“We tell the stories so that the young ones
will know what came before them. They ask Krik? We say Krak!
Our stories are kept in our hearts”.
(Scalora in Danticat, Krik? Krak!, p. v)
Sources and literary context
Although Danticat has denied in interviews that any of her works are autobiographical, she nonetheless draws heavily upon her knowledge and experiences of Haiti. In an interview with National Public Radio, Danticat reveals that she “wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that [she] knew growing up, and this was, for the most part…poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles” (Danticat, Interview). Danticat also acknowledges a particular debt to the stories that she heard from the older women in her family when she was a young girl growing up in Haiti. In fact, she dedicates Krik? Krak! to two aunts who died the year that the work was published.
Danticat has been compared with other female authors from the Caribbean, especially Christina Garcia (Dreaming in Cuban) and Julia Alvarez (in the Time of the Butterflies). All three women choose to write in English as a way of expressing their situation of belonging to two places: the Caribbean and the United States. In another interview, Danticat further explains, “I came to English at a time when I was not adept enough at French to write creatively in French and did not know how to write in Creole because it had not been taught to me in school, so my writing in English was as much an act of personal translation as it was an act of creative collaboration with the new place I was in” (“A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat”).
Events in History at the Time the Stories Were Written
Haitian New York
During the Haitian diaspora that took place between the 1950s and 1980s, many refugees entering the United States chose New York as their city of adoption. Indeed, New York is the home of more Haitians outside of Haiti than any other locale in the western hemisphere. In the 2000 census, estimates revealed that there were about 500, 000 people in the New York Metropolitan Area who claimed Haitian ancestry. Of this number, approximately 200, 000 Haitian Americans reside in Brooklyn, New York, including Edwidge Danticat herself.
Ties between the immigrants and their families still in Haiti remain strong. Nearly one-fourth of the income accumulated by the approximately 2.5 million Haitians living in the United States is sent back to help struggling relatives in Haiti. Meanwhile, many Haitian immigrants strive to hold onto their heritage, even as they try to make places for themselves in the United States, as illustrated in such stories as Danticat’s “Caroline’s Wedding”.
Emigration in the 1990s
Tales about the “boat people” begin and end the story-cycle in Krik? Krak! At the time Danticat was writing and publishing these stories, U.S. policy towards Haitian refugees was undergoing a dramatic change. The influx of “boat people” slowed briefly during the early 1990s but resumed after the left-wing President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest, was ousted by a military coup in 1991. His successor, General Raoul Cedras, instituted a harsh military regime (1991-94), during which the army carried out “a savage and systematic repression of the slums and countryside”, which resulted in thousands being killed (Dash, p. 24).
Once again, politically oppressed Haitians took to the seas on rafts and boats, attempting to reach safer shores. Many were picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard, which took them to an encampment at the U.S. naval base at Guantánama, Cuba. Using the terms of the old agreement with Jean Claude Duvalier, President George Bush ordered the Haitians returned to their homeland, a decision that elicited the condemnation of Democratic presidential candidate, William Clinton. Once Clinton himself took office, however, he did not immediately alter the existing policy regarding Haitian refugees. By 1994, strong criticism from the African American community had prompted Clinton to offer asylum to victims of political repression. But as the decade wore on, more Haitian boat people would be turned away than allowed into the United States. Clinton also denounced the Cedras regime for its violence and cruelty, and contemplated an invasion of Haiti to remove Cedras from power. Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter was dispatched to Haiti and managed to negotiate an agreement with the military; Clinton canceled the impending invasion but nonetheless deployed some 20, 000 American troops to Haiti. In October 1994 President Aristide returned from exile in Venezuela and resumed his former office.
Reviews
Like Danticat’s first novel (Breath, Eyes, Memory), Krik? Krak! was well received. Many reviewers hailed Danticat as a new and exciting talent who skillfully brought to life the customs and culture of her homeland. Reviewing the collection for the Washington Post, Joanne Omang wrote, “In Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat, modern Haiti may have found its voice…into these nine short stories she has woven the sad with the funny, the unspeakable with the glorious, the wild horror and deep love that is Haiti today” (Omang in Narins and Stanley, p. 93). Richard Eder, writing for Newsday, was similarly enthusiastic, declaring that “the best of [the stories in Krik? Krak!], using the island tradition of a semi-magical folk-tale, or the witty, between-two-worlds voices of modern urban immigrants, are pure beguiling transformation” (Eder in Narins and Stanley, p. 93). Some critics also noted—and were impressed by—the subtle interconnections that bound several stories together. Kimberly Hébert, writing for Quarterly Black Review, observed that “the awful-ness of the pain and the tragedy of Haitian poverty are not all Danticat has to tell. She weaves a rich web of remembered rituals and dream fragments that connects the first story to the last. As the stories progress from one to the next, we realize that Danticat is tracing a family lineage, a history of people related by circumstance” (Hebert in Narins and Stanley, p. 95). Summing up the strengths of the collection, Hébert concludes, “The stories that Edwidge Danticat has chosen to tell are deeply spiritual and ultimately disturbing. They are a powerful synthesis of the old with the new, the past with the present; a looking backward to go forward; a loud and powerful Krak! to her ancestors’ spirit-giving Krik?” (Hébert in Narins and Stanley, p. 96).
—Pamela S. Loy and Keidra Morris
For More Information
Abbott, Elizabeth. Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988.
Casey, Ethan. “Remembering Haiti”, in Callaloo 18, no. 2 (1995): 524-28.
“A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat”, in Behind the Books. 2000. http://www.randomhouse.com/vmtage/danticat.html (24 July 2002).
Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! New York: Soho Press, 1995.
_____. Interview by Liane Hansen. NPR, 7 May 1995.
Dash, J. Michael. Culture and Customs of Haiti. West-port: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Davis, Rocio G. “Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krakr”, in MELUS 26, no. 2 (summer 2001): 65-82.
Ferguson, James. Papa Doc, Baby Doc: Haiti and the Duvaliers. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Metz, Helen Chapín. Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies. Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, 2001.
Narins, Brigham, and Deborah A. Stanley, eds. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 94. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997.
Rogozinski, Jan. A Brief History of the Caribbean. New York: Meridian, 1994.
Sherlock, Philip Manderson Sir. The Iguana’s Tail: Crick Crack Stories from the Caribbean. New York: Crowell, 1969.