Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat

First published: 1995

Type of work: Short stories

Type of plot: Fable; Magical Realism; domestic realism

Time of work: 1930’s-1980’s

Locale: Ville Rose, Haiti; New York, New York

Principal Characters:

• Josephine, a young woman who visits her mother in prison
• Défilé, Josephine’s mother, who is imprisoned for witchcraft
• Guy, a young father who flies a hot air balloon to prove his value
• Marie, Josephine’s daughter, who finds a dead baby and keeps it with her
• Gracina Azile, a young woman who was born in Haiti but who grew up in New York
• Caroline, Gracina’s younger, American-born sister

The Stories

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.”

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.

The Characters

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.

Critical Context

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.

Bibliography

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.