Survival in
the Reign of Terror
Edwidge Danticat
“The Children of the Sea”
Outline
General Themes
The author Edwidge Danticat and Krik?Krak, the
tradition and the collection of short stories.
Haiti
“Children of the Sea” –”survival” of humanity
Questions
the woman’s experience
The man’s
Humanity at times of trial
Ironies (1): Nature
Ironies (2): Letter Writing
For your reference & Reference
General Theme: Edwidge Danticat
and Fugees
(fyi-- Fugees – “Fugeela”music video, lyrics, “No Woman, No Cry,”
“Killing me softly”;
Wyclef Jean, The Carnival; 2008 freestyle rap: Obama as US
President )
1. One kind of diaspora: refugees –do they reject their past or
can they?
2. The lives of Haitians and Haitian immigrants.
"new folk ethos“:
the definitive cultural forms produced by Africans, or those of African
descent, since the Atlantic Passage.
five elements: 1. Music and dance, 2. Drums and rhythms, 3. Rhetorical and
polemical speech (e.g. rap and dub poetry), 4. Art as education and
entertainment, and 5. Humor and absurdity.(Ref. Martha Cobb Harlem, Haiti,
and Havana http://reach.ucf.edu/~aml3930/danticat/ )
General Theme: the Sea and
Diaspora
The sea – a connecting image for the people of different
diasporas, esp. the African diaspora
Danticat: --The Middle Passage
"No one knows how many people were lost on The Middle
Passage. There are no records or graves--and the
ocean floor is where our fossils are. The journey from
Haiti in the 1980s is like a new middle passage. Not to
romanticize it, but the comforting thing about death is
that somehow all these people will meet. I often think
that if my ancestors are at the bottom of the sea, then I
too am a part of that. So we are all children of the sea"
(qtd in David 78)
Edwidge Danticat: Haitian
Experience + American Education
Born in Port-au-Prince,
Haiti January 19, 1969
grew up in Haiti under
the dictatorship of
"Baby Doc" Duvalier
Father left for NY when D
was at 2, Mother, at 4;
D. emigrated to Brooklyn,
New York 1981 (age 12).
Studied in Barnard College
for French Literature 1990,
Brown College for Fine Art
1993
Parents’ views of her writing
"I think my parents had two fears about my writing. …
1) not safe: “One is that there's such repression in
Haiti that it's dangerous to be a writer. When my
father left to come here, most of the writers he knew
were in prison.
2) a luxury: “And then, I'm from a poor family in Haiti.
There are certain luxuries we weren't used to people
having, like painting all day or writing all day. But
suddenly, there it was for me: the possibility of writing.
(Danticat)
Writings
Beginning, 1978
Breath, Eyes, Memory,
1994 (four generations of
Haitian women who must
overcome their poverty and
powerlessness; mentions the
rural practice of testing a girl’s
virginity and gets criticized by
Haitian Americans)
Kric? Krac! (1995)
Farming of the Bones,
1998 (Haitian/Dominican
Massacre in 1937 – to whiten
the country)
Kric? Krac! (1): storytelling
“Kric” and “Krac”
A weaver of tales
a Haitian storytelling
tradition in which the
"young ones will know
what came before
them. They ask Krik?
We say Krak! Our
stories are kept in our
hearts".
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art5070.asp
Dandicat’s use of Krik? Krak!
tradition
A way of involving the listeners in the story-telling.
“While that[“krik krak”] is the standard ending
(sometimes opening) for a Caribbean story, the
stories are usually anancy stories (trickster stories)
and folktales with moral lessons.
Danticat’s nightmarish tales are a far cry from
those, but her tales do carry a moral lesson – about
the powerful and the powerless, about the failure of
food to triumph over evil.” (Carribean Women Writers
ERIKA J. WATERS)
Kric? Krac! (2):
Stories of Common People
examines the lives of ordinary Haitians in Port-auPrince or Ville Rose, Haiti, or New York:
1) those struggling to survive under the cruel Duvalier
regime and
2) others who have left the country, highlighting the
distance between people's dreams and the
distressing reality of their lives. (Davis 67)
9 stories + an epilogue “Women Like Us,” which link
them together
4 -- Haitian social situations (the boat people, the misery
and violence, the Macoutes), and
5 -- immigrants’ daily lives and more autobiographical. (e.g.
“Caroline’s Wedding”)
Kric? Krac! (2):
Stories of Common People
women = "kitchen poets," women who
"slip phrases into their stew and wrap
meaning around their pork before frying
it." (note)
“. . .poor people who had extraordinary
dreams but also very amazing
obstacles." (source:
http://www.english.uwosh.edu/helmers/storyweaver.html )
Krik?Krak! (3): on Women
Collective Biography of Haitian women.
“In many ways, each of these 10 stories (in Krik? Krak!) is
part of the same tale. Women lose who and what they
love to poverty, to violence, to politics, to ideals. The
author’s deceptively artless stories are not of heroes but
of survivors, of the impulse toward life and death and the
urge to write and to tell in order not to forgot.” (ELLEN
KANNER CARRIBBEAN WOMEN WRITERS)
e.g. Celianne –a woman with a still-born; "Caroline's
Wedding" – Caroline, one with a missing arm, which is a
birth defect causing her some imaginary pain of
amputation.
Krik?Krak! (4): butterfly as a
central image
Butterfly – rebirth and transformation, as
a means of endurance and survival
In “Children of the Sea,” butterflies send
messages.
Haiti: in the Greater Antilles
Sargasso Sea
1. the Bahamas to
the North East of Cuba
Antigua
the Greater Antilles
Martinique
the
Lesser
Antilles
Haiti
Haiti (1) a Country with many
languages
The name of Haiti means mountainous
country, which was given by the former
Taino-Arawak people.
1492
~1600
1697
1697~1791
1791
Columbus discovered Haiti.
Spanish conquered Hispaniola (island).
Spanish ceded the domination of Haiti to
the French.
The richest colony in the world
the first major black rebellion took
place.
Haiti (2) The
st
1
Black Nation 
US Domination
1796
the former slaves prevailed under the
leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture
1804
the Republic of Haiti -The first independent black nation
The failed dictatorship  coup and
political unrest
~1820
1915~1934
The US invaded Haiti for 19 years,
which instituted virtual slavery
Recent Haiti: Political Upheaval
1957
1971~
1986
1990 ~
Francois Duvalier “Papa Doc” became the
president, ensuring his power through his private
militia, the tontons macoutes (which means in
kreyol, “uncle boogeyman“ 惡魔).
Duvalier died and his son Jean- Claud “Baby Doc”
succeed. By this time Haiti is the poorest country in
the western hemisphere (and remains so to this
day).
 Haitian refugees
(Danticat, born 1969, her parents left in 1971 and
1973)
US funding and investments continued in this
period (e.g. assembly plants for U.S. manufacturers)
Election and exiling Aristide twice (the old president
referred to in the story?)
Recent Haiti: Refugees
1972 Arrival of “boat people”
in Florida.
• 2004 In Haiti's chaos, unpunished rape
was norm
<http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/haiti/rape.htm >
Haitian Race and Culture
-Divisions of race and class between
blacks(about 95% of population)
and mulattos(about 5%)
-Nearly all the blacks speak Creole
-French is spoken mainly by the
mulatto elite, and is the official
language.
Haitian Race and culture(2)
80% --believe in Catholicism
5% -- Protestantism
Voudon (voodoo)--popular among the farming
society
Voudon -an animistic African religion that has
been melded with Catholicism
Source:
http://www.caribnationtv.com/haiti.html
Voodoo Festival
How to survive during the time of dictatorship,
political upheavals and military violence?
“Chidren of the Sea”
Two narrators –
1. The girl – escapes with her parents from Portau-Prince to Ville Rose
2. The boy – a member of the Youth Federation
and a radio show host, makes a narrow
escape by sea.
Survival in “Chidren of the Sea”
Starting Questions
Love & Gender:
How are the two lovers related to each other?
Why do they not have names? (“Kompe” should be a
term of address.)
Survival and Deaths:
How are the parents different in face of dictatorship and
violence?
What different stories of survival & death do the boy and
girl each tell? (e.g. Madan Roger; Celianne; Lionel; Swiss;
Justin Moise Andre Nozius Joseph Frank Osnac
Maxilmilen)
What are the minor characters’(e.g. Madame Roger,
Celianne, an old man) ways of surviving or resisting the
dictatorship? Why did the baby of Celianne, Swiss, not cry
at all on the boat?
Survival in “Chidren of the Sea”
Starting Questions
Style & Theme:
In this ‘human’ tragedy, what roles does
nature play? e.g. butterflies (5, 25, 28-29);
banyan tree, children of the sea, etc.
Why do we have two narrators?
What is the overall tone of the story? Sad,
ironic, or keeping some sense of hope?
The Girl
Though remembered as one protected by her
‘genteel’ mother and watched by her father (p.
9), she gets violent (4, 7) and rebellious (11).
Witnesses cruelties of the macoutes
Madame Roger’s son;
forcing incest;
Dogs licking dead faces, soldiers molesting
women.
Communication with her mother p. 13
Fights with her father (in the city) and starts
communicating with him in Ville Rose p. 22,
28.
The Boy
※ dignity：avoid crying(p9), bathroom(p15)
※ his sense of identity:
Haitian – the song p. 9;
(the others) not mistaken for Cuban 8,
The boy – growing awareness of the Middle Passage:
finally an “African” 11; sailing for Africa 14; “bathroom”
like the slaves 15.
loses his sense of location on the boundless sea (11)
awareness of approaching death – accept the idea of
dying 6, Dream of ‘heaven’ 12,
a sense of community: singing 9, sharing food and storytelling 14
His Dreams: of destruction and
sublimation, or joining the black ancestors
i.
I dream that we are caught in one hurricane
after another. I dream that winds come of
the sky and claim us for the sea. We go
under and no one hears from us again. (p.6)
ii. The other night I dream that I died and went
to heaven. This heaven was nothing like I
expected. It was at the bottom of the sea. (p.
11-12)  starfish and the mermaid having
Catholic Mass under the sea  Children of
the Sea
Humanity at times of trial
the boat people
Vulture 18; gossiping, and
fighting 20-21; have to “do
something to” those sick
people 20
an old man like a painting,
the boat like a museum 21
The boy --cannot throw out
the baby Swiss,
Communication between
the old man and the man:
keeping one’s name and
the other’s message. 27
Under dictatorship
whether to rescue
Madame Roger.
hope (of return of
the old president)
used as a weapon.
18
Madan Roger—speaks
out against the soldiers
Celianne – raped, later
chooses to die with
Swiss (a baby who
does not cry)
Humanity at times of trial (3)
Family -- Papa and Mamma: differences
Their different views of the two protagonists'
love p. 13; --mama: ambition; papa – not do her
‘good’
Their different social status: “he was a
gardener from Ville rose and her family was
from the city and some of them had even gone
to university” (p. 22);
Their responses to Madame Roger’s disaster
and death—rescue or not; self-denial and
mourning 17; 19
Manman speaks for Papa. Regrets being mean
to you(p. 5); how he saves her 24
Humanity at times of trial (3) –Love
The boy –
The girl –
Sex as a way of intimacy. --loves some one in her
life. 22
Tried to win the father
over.
Listen to the exam
result.
Don’t marry a soldier
Writing under the
Remember their “silly
banyan tree
dreams”: “Passing the
university exams and
then studying hard to go
until the end, the farthest
of all we can go in school.
(p.21)
Notebook as his will
Ironies in
Symbols associated with nature
Love and red ants p. 3;
Mountains and endless sea as obstacles
endless mountains – p.3; p. 26
–boundless and unpredictable p. 6;
sea – endless as love, too. The sea that is “endless like
my love for you” pp. 15; 29
sun
the sun  associated with Africa pp. 11; 14; 27-28
(going to Africa—losing their direction)
Butterfly – superstition or intuition? her father’s hand;
Banyan tree p. 26 --a spiritual support, most trusted friend, holiness; can gods
hear them?
Irony(2): the Letters will never
reach each other
Motivation: keeping their connection with a
faith in their reunion. “I will keep writing like we
promise to do. When we see each other again, it will
seem like we lost no time” (p. 8)
Awareness of not meeting again. “It was nice
imagining that I had you here to talk to.”  A
poignant revision of the Krik, Krak tradition. (p. 27)
His love will live when he becomes a child of the sea.
Conclusion: Despite all the weaknesses, evils,
deaths and ironies they witness and/or experience,
love and human connections are confirmed in their
lives.
Irony(3): a country with its social
fabric completely destroyed
Forced incestuous relations
The boy
as a child -- writing about the empty faces of
“young children” and the country’s hopeless
future. 5
Gender identity: the boy jealous about her being
protected as a girl.
The girl – survives at least with endless
love
For your reference
"Epilogue: Women Like Us."
Writers don't leave any mark in the world. Not the
world were we are from. [In Haiti, only politicians
write.]
You remember thinking while braiding your hair
that you look a lot like your mother and her mother
before her. It was their whispers that pushed you,
their murmurs over pots sizzling in your head. a
thousand women urging you to speak through the
blunt tip of your pencil. Kitchen poets, you call
them. Ghosts like burnished branches of a flame
tree. These women, they asked for your voice so
that they could tell your mother in your place that
yes, women like you do speak, even if they speak
in tongues that are hard to understand.
Reference
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/EdwidgeDanticat.html
http://www.english.uwosh.edu/helmers/storyweaver.html
Caribbean Women Writers
http://www.english.ucf.edu/publications/lit3930/biography.html
Danticat, Edwidge and Margaria Fichtner. "Author Edwidge
Danticat Writes about Being Young, Black, Haitian, and
Female." Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service. Rpt. in
Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 139.
Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Fu
Jen Catholic University. 6 Jan. 2010
<http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=fujen>.
Davis, Rocio G. “Oral narrative as short story cycle: forging
community in Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak!.” MELUS.
26.2 (Summer 2001) p65. From Literature Resource Center.
Wylie, Hal. "Krik? Krak!." World Literature Today. 70.1 (Winter
1996): p224. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Fu Jen Catholic
University. 6 Jan. 2010
<http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=fujen>.