5/19/2019 Krik? Krak! Summary - eNotes.

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Summary
(MASTERPIECES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE)

Krik? Krak! opens with the story “Children of the Sea,” which consists of an “exchange” of letters between
two young lovers. Hauntingly, the letters are written, but never actually exchanged, because the young man
is on a small boat with a group of people who are trying to escape Haiti, where they are wanted by the police
for speaking out against the government. The reader learns at the end of the story that the young man is
being forced to throw his letters overboard to make the boat lighter, because it has sprung a leak. The reader
also suspects that the boat and its inhabitants will not survive this journey. For all its tragedy, this story has a
tender side. In their writing, the young lovers reveal the depth of their feelings for each other, the
unconditional love that the young woman’s parents have for her, and the young man’s commitment to justice
despite its cost.

Many of the other stories in Krik? Krak! are similarly bittersweet. The prostitute in “Night Women” dreads
the night, when her “suitors” come to visit. Yet, to protect her young son from the truth about her work, she
invents magical stories about visiting angels to explain why she dresses up and puts on make-up at night
when she is not planning to go out. “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” also transforms tragedy into tenderness.
Josephine’s mother’s “crime” is purportedly being a witch and having the ability to fly. Josephine is
devastated by her mother’s imprisonment, and she finds that she cannot talk when she visits her mother.
When her mother dies, Josephine, nurtured by a friend, realizes that the mother-daughter bond is not broken
even by death, and that she might one day be reunited with her mother.

The most complicated story in Krik? Krak! is “A Wall of Fire Rising,” in which Lili and Guy’s young son, a
good student, is chosen for the lead role in a school play. In their pride over their son’s accomplishments, the
parents dream of a better life for him than the poverty, hunger, and unemployment that mark their lives.

Ironically, the son’s school play is about Boukman, a leader of the slave rebellion that won Haiti its
independence from France in 1804. In the play, Boukman’s passionate speeches about freedom are written
not in the Creole dialect of native Haitians but by a European who has the slave speak in “European
phrasing.” As the symbol of the boy’s aptitude for learning, the play hints that Lili’s dreams of an education
for her son will make him less Haitian and more European. Most tragically, the reader learns in a later story
that Lili “killed herself in old age because her husband had jumped out of a flying balloon and her grown
son left her to go to Miami.”

Bibliography

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Braziel, Jana Evans. “Défilée’s Diasporic Daughters: Revolutionary Narratives of Ayiti, Nanchon,
and Dyaspora in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” Studies in the Literary Imagination 37, no. 2 (Fall,
2004): 103-122. Analyzes Danticat’s preoccupation with maternity as an emblem of Haiti and diaspora.
Also discusses Danticat’s feminist re-visioning of Haiti’s history through two heroic maternal figures from
the colonial and the revolutionary periods of Haiti’s history.

Danticat, Edwidge. “The Dangerous Job of Edwidge Danticat: An Interview.” Interview by Renee H.
Shea. Callaloo 19, no. 2 (Spring, 1996): 382-389. In this extensive interview, Danticat talks about the
importance of mother/daughter relationships, the strength of women, and the theme of death in her stories.

Davis, Rocio G. “Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik?
Krak!” MELUS 26, no. 2 (Summer, 2001): 67-82. Argues that ethnic writers such as Danticat are drawn to
the short-story cycle because of its link to oral narrative and thus its ability to develop identity and create
community. Traces recurring images that create a body of mystical unity between the characters of the
stories.

Houston, Robert. “Expecting Angels.” The New York Times, April 23, 1995, Section 7, p. 22. Says that the
best of Danticat’s stories humanize and particularize the lives of people whom many have seen as faceless
representations of misery and brutality. Notes that because some of the stories were written when Danticat
was an undergraduate, their level of sophistication varies greatly.

Wucker, Michele. “Edwidge Danticat: A Voice for the Voiceless.” Americas 52, no. 3 (May/June, 2000): 40-
46. Recounts Danticat’s extensive activities in support of Haitian rights, both in her homeland and in the
United States. Asserts that Danticat examines the human spirit under duress and gives a voice to the
voiceless people who appear in news photos of Haiti.

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5/19/2019 Krik? Krak! Themes - eNotes.com

Themes and Meanings

(LITERARY ESSENTIALS: AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE)

Danticat was separated from her mother for several years while her parents tried to earn money to bring her
to America. In an interview in which she reflected on the relationship of her stories to her own experience,
the author has said that separation and reunion between mothers and daughters is a powerful theme for
Haitian women her age. Her stories often explore the difficulties of becoming a woman experienced by
daughters whose mothers have been present in only a fragmentary way. Krik? Krak! also focuses on
storytelling as a way to heal past psychic injuries and to create a sense of community. The refugees on the
boat in “Children of the Sea” tell stories to help them cope with the possibility of imminent death, and the
townspeople in “Wall of Fire Rising” sit around a blank television screen after the authorities have turned
off the state-sponsored newscasts and tell stories. The mother tells her son stories in “Night Women” to help
him deal with his fear and her prostitution.

Danticat has expressed the hope that the female storytellers she grew up with will tell their stories through
her. “Epilogue: Women Like Us” is a meditation about women and writing. In the world she came from, the
narrator says, women who write were called lying whores and then raped and killed. Writers were
politicians who were sent to prison, covered in hot tar, and forced to eat their own waste. She concludes that
her book is a testament to the way that these women lived and died and lived again. Other prominent themes
in the stories include the endurance of, and rebellion against, repressive governments and governmental use
of superstition and fear of the supernatural to control the populace.

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The Characters
(LITERARY ESSENTIALS: AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE)

Although strength of character is a central focus in Danticat’s stories, because the stories are often told in the
oral style of folktale, the stories rather than individualized characters are central. The women in the stories
are not realistically differentiated but rather represent basic types. These include the young Haitian woman
struggling between the narrow choices of being a “night woman,” that is, a prostitute, or a “day woman,”
that is, a servant. Another prominent type is the Haitian mother who has already suffered persecution and
tries to protect her daughters. Only in the novelistic final story are characters developed realistically.

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5/19/2019 Krik? Krak! Critical Essays - eNotes.com

Critical Context
(LITERARY ESSENTIALS: AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE)

After earning enough money by driving a taxi and working as a laborer, Edwidge Danticat’s parents brought
her to the United States when she was twelve. Her first book, Breath, Eyes, Memory, a novel about four
generations of Haitian women, was published in 1994. She was twenty-five years old and had earned an
undergraduate degree at Barnard College and a Master of Fine Arts degree at Brown University. Her debut
novel was widely praised, and it was picked by Oprah Winfrey’s book club and stayed on the best-seller lists
for a short time. Krik? Krak! was nominated for the National Book Award in 1995.

Danticat became a leading literary spokesperson for the million Haitians who, either voluntarily or
involuntarily, have left their native country. In 1996, Granta magazine named her one of its “20 Best Young
American Novelists,” and Time Magazine named her one of “30 under 30” creative people to watch in 1995.
Her novel The Farming of Bones (1999), about the 1937 slaughter of thousands of Haitian sugarcane
workers in the Dominican Republic by dictator Rafael Trujillo, won an American Book Award. Danticat is
often praised for her political activism in support of Haitian immigrants.

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Analysis
(LITERARY MASTERPIECES, CRITICAL COMPILATION)

Among Haitians, as in many story-telling cultures, special words indicate a storyteller’s readiness to relate a
story and the audience’s readiness to listen. Edwidge Danticat recalls that Haitian children ask “Krik?” and
their grandmothers answer “Krak!” when tales are about to begin. Perhaps like most tales, the stories of this
collection are meant to do more than simply entertain. Danticat’s epilogue underscores what the reader has
already discerned—these stories commemorate the efforts of those Haitians, especially Haitian women, who
have struggled to keep life going in the midst of poverty, bloodshed, terrorism, and death.

We see that valor first in “Children of the Sea,” a story with themes and events that foreshadow those in
other stories of the collection. “Children of the Sea” is a series of letters between a young man who is
escaping Haiti on a boat and the girl he loves, who must stay behind with her family. Although each of the
nameless pair writes faithfully to the other, both know that their letters can never be mailed.

In her letters, the girl reveals that the young man had been a student, one of a group protesting government
repression. She tells him the grisly fates of some fellow students who have been murdered by the macoutes,
the government’s death squads; she tells him of the macoutes’ atrocities, such as their forcing parents at
gunpoint to have sexual relations with their own sons and daughters. When the macoutes come to a
neighbor’s house, the girl and her family hide in a latrine and listen to the neighbor’s screams. The mother
longs to aid her friends, but the father reminds her that as soon as they can get enough gasoline they will
leave Port-au-Prince for Ville Rose; if she goes outside, she will only put their escape in jeopardy. Later,
when the girl complains to her mother that her father despises her student lover, her mother tells her that
they have exiled themselves to Ville Rose because her father had learned that the daughter, herself a student,
was also about to be arrested. Bribing the soldiers cost him all of his land and money. Now in rural Ville
Rose, the daughter recognizes her father’s sacrifice and is reconciled with him. She spends her days writing
letters and waiting for butterflies to light on her hand, a sign of news about her lover.

The young man’s letters relate the terrors of going to sea in a leaky boat, overcrowded with people who are
risking their lives to leave bloody Haiti. To pass the time and subdue their hunger pangs (food—except for
fish—gives out very early), the travelers sing and tell stories. One of the passengers is Célianne, a girl of
fifteen, who is pregnant. She was raped by some macoutes. The baby is stillborn at sea. Célianne can hardly
bear to give up the dead child to the sea, and when at last she does so, she jumps in after it and drowns.

By the end of the story, the fragile boat is taking on water so dangerously that even the young man’s
notebook must be jettisoned, and so his letters end. In his sweetheart’s last letter, she says that she has had
news of a boat sinking near the Bahamas. She fears that the butterflies will announce his death.
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Terrorism, death, the suffering of children, the ties binding mothers and daughters, the importance of stories
to act as witness to these events—these are the themes of this collection. Haiti’s long legacy of terrorism is
the most consistent theme among them. In “Nineteen Thirty-seven” a woman dies in prison. Her daughter
relates the story, remembering her mother’s tale of escaping the 1937 slaughter of Haitian workers by
soldiers of the Dominican Republic, under orders of General Rafael Trujillo. Her mother had fled, almost
flown, over the Massacre River into Haiti and safety so that the daughter could be born. In “The Missing
Peace,” a young woman named Lamort (“Death,” because her mother had died giving her birth) takes an
American writer to the mass grave where the writer’s mother, a journalist, may have been buried. Near the
churchyard, they watch soldiers dragging away a rebel who has evidently been beaten to death.

Violence forms a backdrop even for the last stories of the collection, where the setting is America. In
“Caroline’s Wedding,” for example, each week in church a mother, a Haitian immigrant from Ville Rose,
hears the priest read the names of refugees who have drowned at sea. One of those people is Célianne, the
young mother of the first story. Grace, the daughter who narrates the story, often remembers the agonizing
poverty in which her parents lived before they came to America. Similarly, the Haitians who died in the
killings at Massacre River in 1937 are important elements in several stories, even when they are not central
characters, for their fates are always in the consciousness of their children.

Children also play an important role in these stories. Célianne’s dead baby is only the first of many children
who suffer under Haiti’s blood and poverty. In “Night Women,” a Ville Rose prostitute worries about the
effects of her life on her young son. In “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” the young narrator, Marie,
works as a maid for a well-to-do family. When she finds a dead baby in the garden, she names the infant
Rose and tries to keep her—the one creature she can love in all the world. In “A Wall of Fire Rising,” Guy
and Lili try to provide a living for Little Guy, their young son. At the time of the story, Guy has been
promised a few hours of work at the sugar mill, although he is still seventy-ninth on the full-time hiring list.
At the same time, the young son has been given a part in the school play; he will be Boukman, the slave
revolutionary who became a forefather of Haitian independence. Guy and Lili thrill with pride at the long
speech in which Boukman claims to see a wall of fire rising and in its ashes the bones of all those who have
gone before him. It is the vision that presumably committed Boukman to live free or die. Guy is infected
with that vision, and it leads him to actions that cause his death. At the story’s end, Little Guy recites his
inspiring speech over his father’s body.

The theme is concluded in “New York Day Women,” a story made up of a collage of incidents and sayings
from a nameless daughter and mother. The mother is one the “day women” of the title; she walks through
parts of the city while her daughter spies on her. The mother, a refugee from Ville Rose, is walking to a park
to care for a child while the child’s affluent mother goes jogging; it is a job for a “day woman.” From a
distance, the daughter watches her mother read a Big Bird book to the little boy; she recalls that her mother
taught herself to read from her older brothers’ schoolbooks, years ago in Haiti.
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Many of these stories dramatize the ties between Krik? Krak! Analysis - eNotes.com
mothers and daughters, bearing witness to the suffering
and courage of women who appear powerless but who, in extreme times, can risk everything to protect their
families. In return, daughters are obligated to tell their mothers’ stories, to validate their sacrifices. Thus
Josephine, the daughter of “Nineteen Thirty-seven,” carries on her mother’s tradition of pilgrimage to the
Massacre River after her mother’s death in prison. There in 1937, pregnant with Josephine, the mother had
fled Trujillo’s soldiers. She once told Josephine how she had watched her friends and relatives die at that
river and how she herself had sprouted wings and flown across to save the life of her unborn child. Now
Josephine memorializes that escape.

Even Marie, the pitiful child-narrator of “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” tells of her mother’s
comforting visits to her in her dreams. In “The Missing Peace,” the journalist is seeking her mother’s grave,
and at the story’s end, Lamort, the child who guides her, tells her grandmother that she now wishes to be
called by her own mother’s name—another testament.

The last story in the collection, “Caroline’s Wedding,” broadens this theme to comment on the whole
relationship between parents and children. The setting is New York, where Ma lives with her daughters,
Grace (who has just become a naturalized citizen) and Caroline, whose decision to marry a Bahamian man
instead of a Haitian is breaking her mother’s heart. Daily Ma cooks bone soups intended to bring Caroline to
her senses, but she persists in her plans. Ma relates the story of her own courtship, which was finalized when
the father of her husband-to-be wrote an eloquent letter to her father, arranging the marriage. Grace also
recalls her father, the things he taught her; his memories of his early life of wretched poverty in Haiti, where
he once ate food intended for pigs; the very pragmatic letters he wrote their mother before she left Haiti to
join him in America. Ma must accept the ways of their new land, while Caroline and Grace are committed to
the demands of their memories.

The stories of this collection are interrelated not only by these themes and settings but also by imagery and
characters. Throughout the stories, Danticat weaves image patterns of butterflies and flying, the texture of
skin and flowers, colors and smells. Her language echoes from one story to the next.

Even more significantly, however, she links the characters themselves from story to story. Ma in “Caroline’s
Wedding,” the last story in the collection, learns of the drowned boat that evidently carried the letter-writing
student of the first story. Marie, the child who finds the baby in “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” is
the granddaughter of the woman who flew across the Massacre River and the goddaughter of Lili, the
mother in “A Wall of Fire Rising.”

These stories have been called “spare,” yet Danticat uses rich detail to evoke the beauty and agony of
Haitian life, even though she does not offer a naturalistic re- creation of it. She includes references to
voodoo and its intermingling with Christianity, such as the magic bone soup that Ma prepares, even though
she attends Mass faithfully. The sights and smells of Haiti are vividly suggested when Lamort remarks that
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the night breeze carries the smell of rotting flesh Krik?
fromKrak!
theAnalysis - eNotes.com
mass grave in the cemetery. She covers her nose
with a red hibiscus blossom and runs home, where her grandmother tells her that those hibiscus grow with
blood on them. When Lamort bathes in water from the rain barrel, her grandmother scrubs her back with a
handful of mint leaves. Such details may be economical; they are not spare.

The book concludes with an epilogue, “Women Like Us.” In it Danticat describes, obliquely, the particular
problems of being a writer who, being Haitian and female, knows that she is from a world where writers
have little regard for women and where powerful men have often tortured and killed them. Nevertheless,
like the women she writes about, she is called to honor the memory of those mothers and grandmothers with
her stories—her testament, she says, to “the way that these women lived and died and lived again.”

Sources for Further Study

Belles Lettres. X, Summer, 1995, p. 12.

Essence. XXV, April, 1995, p. 56.

Library Journal. CXX, March 15, 1995, p. 100.

Los Angeles Times. March 30, 1995, p. E8.

Ms. V, March, 1995, p. 75.

The New York Times Book Review. C, April 23, 1995, p. 22.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLII, February 20, 1995, p. 195.

San Francisco Chronicle. May 28, 1995, p. REV4.

USA Today. November 9, 1995, p. D6.

The Washington Post Book World. XXV, May 14, 1995, p. 4.

The Stories
(LITERARY ESSENTIALS: AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE)

The title of Edwidge Danticat’s collection of nine stories, mostly about young women growing up under an
oppressive regime in Haiti and trying to create a new home in America, comes from an African storytelling
call-and-response tradition recounted in the first story, “Children of the Sea.” In this tradition, someone asks,
“Krik?” inquiring whether the audience wishes to hear a story, and the listeners emphatically answer,
“Krak!” which means “yes.”
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Several stories in the collection focus on the relationship between mothers and their children. In “Nineteen
Thirty-Seven,” a young woman visits her mother, who has been imprisoned for being a witch. “Night
Women” is a brief, lyrical piece from the point of view of a young prostitute. The protagonist tells her son
stories of the ghost women in Ville Rose and her own magical ability to make herself a goddess. To keep her
son from being frightened when she has customers at night, she tells him the men are angels. In “Between
the Pool and the Gardenias,” a servant finds the body of a dead baby on a street curb. Because she has lost
several children in childbirth, she picks it up and calls it “Little Rose,” caring for the child as if it were alive
until its odor become so strong that she must bury it in the garden. The Dominican gardener catches her and
accuses her of killing the child and keeping it to perform black magic.

In “A Wall of Fire Rising,” the only story in the collection featuring a male protagonist, a young boy acting
in a school play is asked to play the role of one of the fathers of Haitian independence from French rule in
the early nineteenth century. His father, proud of his son but ashamed of his own failures to support his
family, becomes fascinated with a hot air balloon that belongs to the owners of the sugar mill. Boasting that
he can make the balloon fly, he dreams of taking it to a place with a plot of land where he can build his own
house and keep his own garden. When he does take the balloon up, he jumps out and crashes near where his
wife and son are standing.

Two stories in the collection focus on Haitian women who have immigrated to America. “New York Day
Women” is a counterpoint story in which a young woman who works in a New York advertising office
intersperses her comments about her mother with comments by the mother herself, who cares for the
children of wealthy women who go jogging in the park. “Caroline’s Wedding,” the longest story in the
collection and the most novelistic, focuses on Gracina Azile, a young Haitian woman who gets her
naturalization certificate and applies for a U.S. passport. Her younger sister Caroline, who was born without
her left forearm, is engaged to a man from the Bahamas. Their mother believes that Caroline’s deformity is
the result of her being given a drug after being arrested in a sweatshop raid while she was pregnant. The
narrator gets her passport, but she feels that her whole family has paid dearly for it.

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