Exploration essay about the story " A wall of fire rising" with GIVEN sources.

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Here is the details about the paper:" For this paper, you will use the sources I provide to gain a deeper understanding of the short story, “A Wall of Fire Rising.” You will explain how the source information helps you put Guy, Lili, and Little Guy in a variety of contexts: Slavery, Haiti, Africa, poverty and others contexts that you discover as you read and write.The sources for this paper are limited to the story itself and the sources that I give you.

Please do not use any other sources. If you do, I’ll return your paper to you without a grade and you’ll meet with me privately. Your paper will be an exploration of ideas, theories, and interpretations. It will contain a thesis statement that lays out the paper’s purpose.Before you decide on a topic, read the sources very carefully and more than once. Take notes. Decide what interests you the most. Do not make up your mind about the content of your paper until you read the sources thoroughly. Keep an open mind. You can write in the first person (use “I”) or in the third person (no “I”). Although you can use “I,” please remember that this paper is not personal so the focus must remain on the story and the sources.

"Requirements Length: MLA format, 4 pages, double-spaced, not including works cited. The paper need quotation, citation, word cited....

I will attach the sources. Please use only given sources. Source4 and source5 are optional, you can include if you want. 125-Sources and The flying africans are REQUIRED.

Here is the story: https://ischoolworldlit.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/a_wall_of_fire_rising.pdf

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SOURCE 1: Title of Article: Figures of Flight and Entrapment in Edwidge Danticat's "Krik? Krak!" Author(s): Wilson C. Chen Source: Rocky Mountain Review, Vol. 65, No. 1 (2011), pp. 36-55 Published by: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41289362 Accessed: 03-10-2018 23:39 UTC [JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.] Brief summary of the story: Set in a village in Haiti, "A Wall of Fire Rising" provides a glimpse of three critical days in the life of an apparently ordinary Haitian family struggling to survive without gainful employment. While several signs in the text, along with a maternal family tree sketched in a subsequent story, place this family in the mid- twentieth century, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact time in which this story takes place. The main source of work in the village is the local sugar mill, owned and managed by an Arab family - "Haitians of Lebanese or Palestinian descent whose family had been in the country for generations" (60). The father, Guy, is deep on the wait list for permanent employment at the mill, and the mother, Lili, during their most impoverished times, purchases spices on credit and attempts to sell them at the marketplace. Through all of this financial hardship, they are trying to raise a son, Little Guy, and aspire to give him life opportunities beyond a career of backbreaking work at the sugar mill (37). Importance of sugar in Haiti Throughout the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first, the grueling labor and exploitative practices of the sugar industry on the island of Hispaniola continue to be reminiscent of slavery and its legacy on the island. Haitian sugar cane fields are reminders of when French-owned sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans made Haiti (St. Domingue) Frances most profitable colony in the Americas, supplying a great share of the world's consumption of sugar. In Carolyn Ficks words, Haiti was "one of the greatest wealth-producing slave colonies the world had ever known" (91). Indeed sugar cane fields are a repeated setting in Danticat's fiction and allow her to explore issues of violence and trauma across different historical moments in Haitian history (37). Parallel Plots: Little Guy and Guy "A Wall of Fire Rising" is governed by two parallel plot lines involving the respective plights of the father and son. Little Guy has been given the honor of performing the role of the Haitian revolutionary leader Boukman Dutty in his school play. Little Guy enthusiastically announces this news just as Guy Sr. holds back on his news that he has been given a few hours of work cleaning latrines at the sugar mill - his first job at the mill in nearly six months. Thus, one storyline consists of Little Guy rehearsing the glorious revolutionary rhetoric attributed to the legendary Boukman, a slave from Jamaica who was sold into slavery in Haiti and became an inspirational political leader. The reputed vodou priest Boukman, according to legend, spoke powerful words of freedom in defiance of the French colonizers and helped to spark the revolution that led ultimately to the abolition of slavery and the founding of the Haitian republic in 1804. However, while the son gains mastery over Boukman’s words, the father, in the other storyline, turns inward in response to their impoverished conditions and also becomes increasingly obsessed with his desire to fly a hot air balloon, thus inaugurating the theme of flight. As Little Guy proudly announces, "I am Boukman" (54) and subsequently recites Boukman's famous call for freedom, the setting of the story reminds us that this is a family that is still very much in bondage. And the transcendent feelings produced by Little Guy s eloquent revolutionary rhetoric - not to mention the intellectual promise demonstrated by his facility in memorizing these rhetorically complex lines - are in marked contrast with the family's abject poverty as well as the fathers increasing misery. Little Guys defiant words draw attention to a twentiethcentury Haitian community in desperate need of liberation. Quite tellingly, as Little Guy triumphs in mastering the first passage from Boukman's speech, Guy Sr. completes his first day cleaning toilets (38). Myth of “Flying Africans” Guy's flight, even if it leads to a violent, tragic conclusion, does evoke various New World tales of flying Africans and a whole set of twentieth-century reworkings of these narratives. Most fundamentally, this is a legend that circulated among enslaved African communities in the Americas. "First named in [the collection] Drums and Shadows [1940]," observes Olivia Smith Storey, "the Flying Africans specifically refers to African born slaves flying from slavery in the Americas" (1-2). In prominent literary works...the legend is connected with the West African slaves that landed off the coast of Georgia in 1803. According to the basic folk tale, after landing on St. Simons Island, a group of enslaved Africans transcended the conditions of slavery by flying back to Africa. The strictly rationalist outsiders' perspective is that these slaves committed suicide and that was the only form of transcendence. Yet the flying African stories passed down in folklore are celebratory tales of magic and freedom (41). Culture and Language as a Requirement for Flight Interestingly, in many versions of the legend of flying Africans, maintaining one’s African tongue, or at least being reminded of one’s native language by an elder when it has been forgotten, was a precondition of flight. According to the cultural logic of these tales of transcendence, keeping intact or recovering one’s culture prior to the distortion wrought by enslavement gave one the resources, the "magic," to transcend the conditions of enslavement in many stories literally and in several twentieth century literary reworkings, metaphorically. The diasporic predicament sketched by Danticat in this tale presents a family struggling in a system of continual exploitation, yearning for freedom, and lacking access to the kinds of cultural resources that might allow them not only to withstand but also transcend their material circumstances (44). SOURCE 2: Title of Article: "I NEED MANY REPETITIONS" Rehearsing the Haitian Revolution in the Shadows of the Sugar Mill Author(s): Angela Naimou Source: Callaloo, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Winter, 2012), pp. 173-192 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41412503 Accessed: 03-10-2018 23:22 UTC [JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.] Haitian History and Boukman At the threshold of colonial Saint-Domingue and the republic of Haiti lies the story of Bois Caiman. Multiple variants of the story all tell of a summer night in 1791, when enslaved and maroon Black men and women gathered in the Cai ̈man woods to plan a revolt against the colonial slave system. The meeting involved a religious ceremony led by Boukman Dutty and an unnamed mambo to serve the spirits and fortify the commitment to revolt.1 Within a few days, the sugarcane fields of Saint-Domingue' s northern provinces were ablaze, the processing machinery wrecked, and the owners dead or fleeing. The uprising left the economic heart of the world's most brutally profitable colony in what C. L. R. James describes as "a flaming ruin," one that would burn for nearly thirteen years before culminating in the declaration of the free Black Republic of Haiti (173). Importance of Rehearsal Rehearsal has two basic functions in the story: a son repeats his lines from a school play as a kind of practice performance in order to memorize them for the "real" performance, and his father mentally prepares for a future and unrepeatable act. At one level, rehearsal dramatizes people's efforts to gain some narrative control over the telling and meaning of specific historical narratives. At another, rehearsal becomes a literary model of how narrative fiction may theorize an involvement in history as material, social process and as a narrative of that process. Rehearsal can offer us especially suggestive ways to explore the writing of history as a narrative problem (of how to connect the past, present, and future into a story) without ignoring the material conditions that shape both the narrative construction and the events that make up any historical narrative (176). Little Guy’s rehearsals, in contrast to Guy’s own, allow this complex relationship to come into view. Little Guy is the son who plays the father of the revolution. Guy plays the father who is the son of the dispossessed for whom the revolution had been fought - still ‘born in the shadow of the sugar mill; but, no, barely allowed to work there (182). Boukman speech at Bois Caiman ceremony, insurrection of 1791; fire, flames, ashes; Macandal, the west African slave and precursor to Boukman; “A Flying Fool” Haitian sugar cane fields are reminders of when French-owned sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans made Haiti (St. Domingue) Frances most profitable colony in the Americas, supplying a great share of the world's consumption of sugar. Sugar cane fields in Haiti remind Haitians of when sugar fields farmed by Africans kept as slaves transformed Haiti (St. Domingue) into France’s wealthiest colony in the Americas, providing a large piece of the world's use of sugar. Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat's "Krik? Krak!" Author(s): Rocio G. Davis Source: MELUS, Vol. 26, No. 2, Identities (Summer, 2001), pp. 65-81 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the MultiEthnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3185518 Accessed: 09-10-2018 23:37 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press, Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to MELUS This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak! Rocio G. Davis University of Navarre Only when ethnic literature liberates its sources of mea from hegemonic impositions and begins to inform theory and vert traditional signifying strategies can it begin to reconfigur tural interpretation. As though responding to this challenge, e fiction demonstrates a proliferation of the short story cycle, a until now most clearly defined within the Euro-American lite tradition, that many ethnic writers have adapted for the formulat of their processes of subjectivity. Amy Tan's The Joy Luck C Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Julia Alva How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, and Louise Erdich Love Medicine emblematize how ethnic writers appropriate specifics of this narrative genre to engage with the dynamics meaning. This article will explore the short story cycle as a v for the development of ethnic literature by analyzing Hai American Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak! to show how the dra of identity and community is mediated through a genre th linked to the oral narrative, itself a way of fostering imagina communities and developing identities. The dynamics of the short story cycle make it appropriate the quest for a definition of the cultural pluralism that incorpo immigrant legacies while adapting to the practices of the cultu which these works are created. A cycle may be defined as "a s stories linked to each other in such a way as to maintain a bal between the individuality of each of the stories and the neces of the larger unit" (Ingram 15). The term "short story cycle" plies a structural scheme for the working out of an idea, charac or themes, even a circular disposition in which the constituent MELUS, Volume 26, Number 2 (Summer 2001) This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 66 ROCIO G. DAVIS ratives are simultaneously independent and interdependen challenge of each cycle is twofold: the collection must asser individuality and independence of each of the component while creating a necessary interdependence that emphasi wholeness and unity of the work. Consistency of theme evolution from one story to the next are among the clas quirements of the form, with recurrence and development integrated movements that effect final cohesion (Ingram 20). The essential characteristics of the short story cycle abou the literatures of the world: Homer's Odyssey, Ovid's Me phoses, Boccaccio's Decameron, Chaucer's The Canterbury the Indian Panchatantra, the Arabian A Thousand and One N and Mallory's Morte d'Arthur reflect the fundamental separ and cohesion of the form as defined by twentieth-century Cycles figure prominently in twentieth-century American ture: Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Ernest Heming in our time and Raymond Carver's Cathedral, among others constituted and popularized the form within the "mains canon. By appropriating and transforming this narrative ge established and defined by "mainstream" writers and critics ticat, like other ethnic writers, intervenes in the dominant American literary tradition. A text such as Krik? Krak! cha hegemonic discourse on several levels, as the author explo advantages of the established structure and theme to presen version of the immigrant story, blending cultural tradition codes for innovative literary representation. The short story cycle looks back to oral traditions of nar while embodying signs of modernity. One of its most salien tures is its attempt to emulate the act of storytelling, the effor speaker to establish solidarity with an implied audience counting a series of tales linked by their content or by the tions in which they are related. The experience of the oral tive, of telling and listening to stories, has been a vital part development of the body of thought and tradition that has f culture and united diverse peoples. As Walter Ong argues physical constitution as sound, the spoken word manifests h beings to each other as persons and forms them into clos groups: when a speaker is addressing an audience, the memb the audience normally become a unity, with themselves and This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EDWIDGE DANTICAT'S KRIK? KRAK! 67 the speaker (74). Much of the vividness of the oral narrative precisely from the fact that it resists writing, preserving the sp word as always "an event, a movement in time, completely l in the thing-like repose of the written or printed word" (Ong Sarah Hardy's comparison of the short story and the oral n tive is, I believe, equally applicable to the story cycle: "A theme or episode. .. pulls in the direction of its own self-co narrative line, towards other similar and parallel stories, an wards certain patterns of language or a particular set of sym .... In other words, the presence of an audience is vital t completion and validity of the short-story [cycle] form just in an oral setting" (355). The title of Danticat's cycle sets it within the oral narrative. She invites the reader not merely the book but to participate in a traditional Haitian storytellin ual. "Krik? Krak! is call-response but it's also this feelin you're not merely an observer-you're part of the story. Som says, 'Krik?' and as loudly as you can you say 'Krak!' Yo the person to tell the story by your enthusiasm to hear it" 12). In the stories, Danticat examines the lives of ordinary Haitians: those struggling to survive under the cruel Duvalier regime and others who have left the country, highlighting the distance between people's dreams and the distressing reality of their lives. As Ethan Casey points out: "Writers will spend precious time accounting for what has happened, it is true; the literary challenge is to write about Haiti in the vocabulary of human tragedy and human survival" (525). As such, the book becomes a literary response to the Haitian situation and a feeling description of the immigration of the 1980s. Importantly, Danticat's presentation of the theme of storytelling through the technique of storytelling locates her writing within what Jay Clayton has called the "narrative turn" in recent ethnic fiction, which stresses the political dimensions of form, making the pragmatics of traditional narrative a theme in the fiction (378, 387). Through technical experimentation with the story cycle, Danticat heightens the power of narrative, elucidating the significance of the oral mode to her characters by positioning the theme within a genre that engages it on different levels. Importantly, the blending of the performative dimension of storytelling This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 68 ROCIO G. DAVIS in form and content allows Danticat to expand the reach of h by making the text dramatize as well as signify. In a note distributed by her publisher, Danticat defines th lenge she set herself: "I look to the past to Haiti-hoping tha extraordinary female story tellers I grew up with-the on have passed on-will choose to tell their stories through my For those of us who have a voice must speak to the present a past" (qtd. in Casey 525-26). Danticat's narrative present voices and visions of women, usually mothers and daug whose personal tragedies impel them to form community in midst of oppression and exile. Because the practice of break lence has become one of the shaping myths in the writings o nic women, storytelling in the cycle becomes both a med self-inscription and subjectivity and an instrument for dial The telling of stories heals past experiences of loss and sepa it also forges bonds between women by preserving tradition female identity as it converts stories of oppression into para self-affirmation and individual empowerment. The mann which Danticat links the stories with the processes o inscription by the different women becomes a metaphor for gotiation of the characters' strategies of survival. The profoundly oral character of Haitian culture is illustra both textual and contextual levels in Krik? Krak!. The epigr the cycle, a quote from Sal Scalora from "White Darkness Dreamings," discloses the purpose of the old tradition: "We t stories so that the young ones will know what came before They ask Krik? We say Krak! Our stories are kept in our he Seven of the nine stories are told in the first person, with them written as monologues, and the rest alternating two vo the narration. The epilogue, "Women Like Us," is written second person, a technique with rich connotations in a cont rary text inspired by the oral tradition. The art of storytelli ures importantly in several of the tales. The game of "Krik? is played in the first story as a way for the refugees on the wile away the fearful hours. In "Wall of Fire Rising," the in tants of the town who watched a state-sponsored newscast e evening "stayed at the site long after this gendarme had go told stories to one another beneath the big blank screen" (6 night woman whispers her mountain stories in her son's ear This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EDWIDGE DANTICAT'S KRIK? KRAK! 69 ries of the ghost women and the stars in their hair. I tell him o deadly snakes lying at one end of the rainbow and the hat fu gold lying at the other. I tell him that if I cross a stream of clear hibiscus, I can make myself a goddess" (86). "We know ple by their stories" (185), one of the characters declares, sign ling how storytelling, which educates people in imaginative his and community values, provides an organic link between the and the lives of the people in the present. Other stories present verbal games that serve both as entert ment and strategy for identification and survival. Among the r that unite the women in the stories is the verbal code established in times of trial which was used to signal belonging. When Josephine meets a woman who claims to be part of the group who went on pilgrimages to the Massacre River, she questions her in the secret way because "if she were really from the river, she would know . all the things that my mother had said to the sun as we sat with our hands dipped in the water, questioning each other, making up codes and disciplines by which we would always know who the other daughters of the river were" (44). This question-and-answer ritual is kept alive by Gracina and Caroline in Brooklyn: "We sat facing each other in the dark, playing a free-association game that Ma had taught us when we were girls.... 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" (165). This game, played in the United States, carries within it memories of the lost country and links to those who have died. Gracina will be charged, in a dream, with remembering the lost past through the paradigm of the game: "If we were painters, which landscapes would we paint?. . . When you become mothers, how will you name your sons?. .. What kind of lullabies do we sing to our children at night? Where do you bury your dead?. . . What kind of legends will your daughters be told?" (210-11). The commission, which emphasizes the power of the word, implies that the daughters must be similarly creative and constructive. The words and the hidden meanings in their mothers' verbal games form a significant starting point from which they can develop their own voice and autonomy because a space is created within the inherited contest in which their own representation is possible. Drawing from a rich source of This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ROCIO G. DAVIS 70 oral traditions, as well as from their own experience and im tion, the daughters can then construct and claim their own s tivity. Moreover, the narrative structure of short story cycles mirrors the episodic and unchronological method of oral narration. Most cycles do not have a linear plot, emerging rather as portraits of persons or communities pieced together from the diverse elements offered in the individual stories. The fundamental structure of a cycle lies in the interaction of the elements in the independent stories, as connective patterns on all levels draw these together into a totality strengthened by varying types of internal cohesion: a title, the development of a central character, the delineation of a community, or an explicit theme. Nonetheless, the most pervasive unifying pattern of short story cycles appears to be the dynamic of recurrent development (Ingram 17). The repetition of a theme from different angles and its ensuing growth in depth in the mind of the reader may unify a cycle at the same time that it individualizes each story. Moreover, the genre, as with the oral narrative, intensifies the normally participatory act of reading by insisting that we "fill in the blanks" as we go along; the discovery of connections is transformed into the reader's task. In a text that centers on the forging of community through the relationships of mother and daughters, "the structure nicely evinces not only the varied perspectives the women have regarding similar events but also the tenuous balance between separation and connection that many psychoanalytic theorists argue is a key to understanding mother-daughter relation- ships" (Kelley 306). Recurring images that appear in Krik? Krak! create a bond of mystical unity between the characters, their lives, and their destinies. The butterfly, one of the principal images in almost all the stories, becomes a symbol of both continuing life and transformation (Shea 15). The butterfly's life cycle, which involves a manner of death and rebirth, becomes a paradigm of the need to emphasize the existence of life and the search for beauty in situations of precarious survival. The most vivid evocation of butterflies is in "Children of the Sea," where the young woman left behind in Ha speaks to her boyfriend on the refugee boat: "i don't sketch m butterflies anymore because i don't even like seeing the sun. sides, manman says that butterflies can bring news. the bright on This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EDWIDGE DANTICAT'S KRIK? KRAK! 71 bring happy news and the black ones warn us of death" ( character looks to the butterflies to bring her tidings of h friend's fate and, when the awaited sign comes, refuses to what it implies: "there it was, the black butterfly floating us. i began to run and run so it wouldn't land on me, but it ready carried its news. .. now there are always butterflies a me, black ones that i refuse to let find my hand" (28). In oth ries, images of butterflies acquire expanded meaning. The s son, fragile in his innocence, in "Night Women," is describ butterfly fluttering on a rock that stands out naked in the m a stream" (85). Lamort and Raymond in "The Missing Peac with "leaves shaped like butterflies" (103), this game height the pathos in the characterization of the adolescent who works for the military. Complementary to the image of the butterfly is the ima flight, another constant in the cycle. Defile, in the story " was accused of being a witch because she was seen flying her mother's death, Josephine understands the truth of this that on the night of the massacre "my mother did fly. We down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican s the water and out again on the Haitian side of the river" (49 in "Wall of Fire Rising," dreams of flight. His wife tries to of this absurd obsession by pointing out that "if God want ple to fly, he would have given us wings on our backs." To her husband replies, "You're right, Lili, you're right. B what he gave us instead. He gave us reasons to want to gave us the air, the birds, our son" (68). Guy will die in a f attempt to fulfill his dream and, looking at his dead body, only say to the men who want to close his eyes, "my husba likes to look at the sky" (80). These desperate images of flig test to the need to escape from the violence and oppression old country, another central concern of the characters. Images of death also recur, in particular the death of infan sephine contemplates the women in jail with her mother an izes that they were all there for the same reason: "They we to have been seen at night rising from the ground like birds A loved one, a friend, or a neighbor had accused them of ca the death of a child" (38). Celianne gives birth to a stillborn on the refugee boat and later throws herself into the sea af This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ROCIO G. DAVIS 72 The description of the baby foreshadows that of another de fant in a later story: "I never knew before that dead children purple. The lips are the most purple because the baby is so Purple like the sea after the sun has set" (25). In "Between th and the Gardenias," Marie, haunted by her repeated miscarr the babies "my body could never hold" (92), retrieves an doned baby that the reader understands is dead: "She was pretty. Bright shiny hair and dark brown skin like mahogan coa. Her lips were wide and purple, like those African dol see in tourist windows but could never afford to buy" (91). three recurring images-the butterfly, the wish for flight, and of infants highlight the themes of innocence and the pri for its loss, of the need to escape and of freedom. The viole tories and continuing dreams of many of the characters find bolic expression in these images. Because these symbols ar sent in stories about leaving Haiti and seeking a future elsew they emphasize the presentation of many of the painful reali the immigrant situation. The specificities of the form make the short story cycle a nent vehicle for the distinctive characteristics of ethnic fiction in general. The short story cycle is itself a hybrid, occupying an indeterminate place within the field of narrative, resembling the novel in its totality, yet composed of distinct stories. Interestingly, as Jerome Bruner and Susan Weisser show, "genre is a way of characterizing a text in terms of certain formal and content properties, but it is also a way of characterizing how a reader or listener takes a text, whatever its actual content and its formal characteristics may be" (131). Ethnic fiction lends itself to new strategies of read- ing, enhancing awareness of immigrant issues through renewed ethnic creativity. The ethnic short story cycle may therefore be considered the formal materialization of the trope of doubleness as the between-world condition is presented via a form that itself vacillates between two genres. Elizabeth Ordofiez has pointed out that the "disruption of genre" is a common thread that links various ethnic texts by women: "the text itself becomes both the means and embodiment of modifying and reshaping female history, myths, and ultimately personal and collective identity" (19). Subverting narrative styles chracterizes much of this writing; the fiction of Amy Tan, Julia Alvarez, Louise This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EDWIDGE DANTICAT'S KRIK? KRAK! 73 Erdich, Toni Morrison, Theresa Cha, Fae Myenne Ng, among ers, attests to their emancipation from the confines of trad theories and practices. Specifically, Danticat's cycle, the wr a subversively oral matrilineal tradition, permits the reader beyond cultural nationalism toward a "re-vision and revital of female ethnicity in a more broadly conceived context" (O 20). On different levels, ethnic short story cycles may project a desire to come to terms with a past that is both personal and collective: this type of fiction often explores the ethnic character and history of a community as a reflection of a personal odyssey of displacement, and search for self and community. More specifically, the two principal thematic constituents of the ethnic story cycle are the presentation of identity and community as separate entities and the notion of an identity within a community, again, a common theme of ethnic fiction. In Danticat's case, the textual tension arises from the presentation of women who struggle to establish and preserve the bonds of the Haitian community in the United States through powerful links with the mother country. Her stories, centering on the politics and the people of Haiti and Haitian immigrants to the United States, illustrate the numerous and varied connective strands that serve to draw the individuals of the short story cycle into a single community. The passage from appreciation of individual stories to the whole presented in the cycle marks the shift from the individual to community, setting the individual against the social group to which he or she belongs. The connections that are established will therefore yield what J. Gerald Kennedy has called the "defining experience" of the short story cycle: a vision of community accumulated by the reader's discernment of meanings and parallels inherent in the composite scheme (196). This movement, witnessed in other cycles by women such as Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, constitutes the collective protagonist, the community, as the central character of the cycle. The individual stories in Krik? Krak! present versions of life in and away from Haiti that create a composite portrait of the Haitian and her world. Although the stories are independent and written in different styles, they inform and enrich one another. In "Caroline's Wedding," the protagonist and her mother attend a funeral service This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 74 ROCIO G. DAVIS for those who died at sea in the first story. The seaside t Ville Rose figures in the lives of many of the female charac the young woman and her parents in "Children of the Se refuge there when she is being sought by the police; this to also the setting of the stories "The Missing Peace," " Women," and "Seeing Things Simply." More importantly, a mon ancestry links the women in the diverse stories. Th character of "Between the Pool and the Gardenias" is th daughter of Lili from "A Wall of Fire Rising" and the grandd ter of Defile, imprisoned for witchcraft in "1937." As Rene signals, these details serve to show that the many narrators c understand their connections and their place primarily "throu bonds of women" (14). The presentation of women and their relationships, specif that of mothers and daughters, is pivotal to Danticat's narrat this sense, she reflects the same concerns as another emblem mother-daughter short story cycle, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Both complex ensembles of stories told by mothers and dau are innovative variations of the traditional mother-daughte which focuses on the daughter's perspective and the foregrou of the voices of mothers as well as daughters (Heung 599 women in both cycles are primarily responsible for the per tion of culture and bonds with the lost homeland. The mothe major roles in the daughters' lives and growth, a role that pr the daughters with models for self-affirmation. Although the ers all have different names and individual stories, they seem changeable in that their role as mother supersedes all other discrete identities of the women are woven into a collectivized in- terchangeability through the cycle's juxtapositions of characters and motifs. Through the narrative interweaving of time frames and voices, both Danticat and Tan unite generations of women within a relational network that links grandmothers, mothers, daughters, aunts, and sisters. For these women, however, "mutual nurturance does not rise from biological connections alone; rather, it is an act affirming consciously chosen allegiances" (Heung 612-13). In stories where the mother/daughter bond is broken by the mother's death, this loss is viewed as devastating and must be compensated for by the daughter's taking the place of the mother or finding mother substitutes. Josephine, in "1937," is taught early This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EDWIDGE DANTICAT'S KRIK? KRAK! 75 in life the importance of a mother and need to belong to a of women: "Manman had taken my hand and pushed it in river, no further than my wrist.... With our hands in the Manman spoke to the sun. 'Here is my child, Josephine. We saved from the tomb of this river when she was still in my You spared us both, her and me, from this river where I lo mother"' (40). She joins the yearly All Saint's Day pilgrim Massacre River with the women who had lost their mothers there: My mother would hold my hand tightly as we walked toward the water. We were all daughters of that river, which had taken our mothers from us. Our mothers were the ashes and we were the light. Our mothers were the embers and we were the sparks. Our mothers were the flames and we were the blaze.... The river was the place where it had all begun. "At least I gave birth to my daughter on the night that my mother was taken from me," she would say. "At least you came out at the right moment to take my mother's place." (41) The narrator of "Between the Pool and the Gardenias" reiterates the idea of the loss of a mother and importance of the link with past generations: "For no matter how much distance death tried to put between us, my mother would often come to visit me. ... There were many nights when I saw some old women leaning over my bed. 'That there is Marie,' my mother would say. 'She is now the last one of us left"' (94). As exemplified in this story, Danticat locates subjectivity in the maternal and employs it as a axis between the past and the present. Other daughters feel the need to complete the work their moth- ers had left undone. Emilie, in "The Missing Peace," comes to Ville Rose to search for her mother, a journalist who disappeared while on assignment in the area. Part of her pursuit involves an attempt to bond with her lost mother by fulfilling one of her dreams "I am going to sew [the small pieces of cloth] onto that purple blanket. . . . All her life, my mother's wanted to sew some old things together into that piece of purple cloth" (114). Her search parallels that of Lamort, named because her mother died when she was born: "'They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother,' [Emilie] said. 'You, child, were born a woman"' (116). An epiphany comes for both women as they are forced to face and accept the loss of their mothers: "I became a woman last night ... This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 76 ROCIO G. DAVIS I lost my mother and all my other dreams" (121), Em Lamort will take her mother's name, Marie Magdalen rightful heritage. Though these stories reflect loss and a lack of affiliation, the overwhelming movement is towar ciliation and pertinence, confirming the necessity and the ity of seeking connection even after death. Occasions in which communication between mother and child is obstructed result in confusion and unnecessary hurt. Two stories that mirror each other present the mother leading a secret life that her offspring does not know about. "Night Women," set in Haiti, is a mother's monologue as she gazes at her sleeping son. "There are two kinds of women: day women and night women. I am stuck between the day and night in a golden amber bronze" (84), she says. Corollary to this, the story entitled "New York Day Women" has a daughter watching, unobserved, as her mother makes her way from her home in Brooklyn to Madison Avenue where in Central Park she cares for a young child while his Yuppie mother goes jogging: "This mother of mine, she stops at another hot-dog vendor and buys a frankfurter that she eats on the street. I never knew that she ate frankfurters. . . . Day women come out when nobody expects them" (150, 153). Both stories emphasize the different worlds that mothers and children inhabit while linking the mothers. Furthermore, issues of race and class oppression suggested in both stories serve as factors that complicate maternal relationships because they lead the mothers to find ways of surviving or of asserting independence that they cannot, or will not, share with their children. The second story also suggests that the rift between mother and daughter may be brought about by attitudes towards immigration. Exile, which implies the loss of an original place, banishes belong- ing to memory and often causes dissociation from both the old ways and the new home. The process of diasporic self-formation is presented here through the growing distance between mother and daughter who struggle to define new identities and decide what to keep and what to relinquish. This theme recurs in "Caroline's Wedding," where conflict centers on the American-born daughter's impending marriage with a Bahamanian and her mother's reactions to it. Gracina, the daughter born in Haiti, tries to serve as buffer between the two points of view. She understands her mother's dreams: "Ma wanted Eric to This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EDWIDGE DANTICAT'S KRIK? KRAK! 77 officially come and ask her permission to marry her daught wanted him to bring his family to our house and have his fa her blessing. She wanted Eric to kiss up to her, escort her buy her gifts, and shower her with compliments. Ma wante blown church wedding. She wanted Eric to be Haitian" (1 Caroline, the old country's rules do not determine her obli nor her mother's authority. The traditional role of a Haitian has been greatly curtailed in America, and the mother has learn to deal with daughters whose way of life is American: we were children, whenever we rejected symbols of Hait ture, Ma used to excuse us with great embarrassment an 'You know, they are American.' Why didn't we like the thic pig skin that she would deep-fry so long that it tasted like We were Americans and we had no taste buds. A double tra (214-15). "In Haiti, you own your children and they find it n (215), their mother would say, which explains her sense of what she considers abandonment by her younger daughter. lationships between the mother and daughters in this American family underline some of the cross-generatio cross-cultural conflicts typical of ethnic texts. At the end story, the relationship will rest on the daughters' recognitio value of the mother's establishment of community that pr them with the resources they need to survive on their own. There is an obsessive need to find and establish familial and his- torical connections with other Haitians. Because "Ma says all Haitians know each other" (169), the community in America survives. The immigrants experience continued and profound nostalgia for the lost home though their children chaff at the extent of this loyalty: "Twenty years we have been saving all kinds of things for the relatives in Haiti. I need a place in the garage for an exercise bike" (150). The song "Beloved Haiti, there is no place like you, I had to leave you before I could understand you" is sung by the refugees in the first story and listened to on the radio in the last. In consequence, history also becomes a protagonist in Krik? Krak! as stories set in Haiti directly or indirectly involve historical events. "1937," for instance, centers on the Dominican Republic's dictator Rafael Trujillo's massacre of Haitians at the river separating Haiti from the Dominican Republic. Furthermore, Danticat has commented that the original title of the first story was "From the This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 78 ROCIO G. DAVIS Ocean Floor" but that she decided to change it to "Children Sea" to emphasize the link to the Middle Passage. "It's a powerful image-from the ocean floor," she explains. "N knows how many people were lost on The Middle Passage are no records or graves-and the ocean floor is where our f are. The journey from Haiti in the 1980s is like a new midd sage. Not to romanticize it, but the comforting thing about d that somehow all these people will meet. I often think that ancestors are at the bottom of the sea, then I too am a part o So we are all children of the sea" (Shea 12). Gracina, in line's Wedding," reflects on this ancient belief that links H "There are people in Ville Rose, the village where my mo from in Haiti, who believe that there are special spots in th where lost Africans who jumped off the slave ships still res those who died at sea have been chosen to make that journey der to be reunited with their long-lost relations" (167-68 death of the people in the refugee boat in the first story wil lish historical links, forging a community of Haitians that in not only those alive in the present time but also those lost past. Though the stories in Krik? Krak! have a continuity derived from recurrent themes and motifs, they are more profoundly linked by a spiritual vision where the bonds between women are imperative for survival. The most vivid metaphor for interconnections, echoes, and blending appears with Danticat's image of braids in the final section, "Epilogue: Women Like Us," a meditative finale to the nine stories. "When you write," she says, "it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity" (220). Danticat uses this ritualistic image to illustrate the inseparable strands of history and the need for community: Your mother, she introduced you to the first echoes of the tongue that you now speak when at the end of the day she would braid your hair while you sat between her legs, scrubbing the kitchen pots.... When she was done, she would ask you to name each braid after those nine hundred and ninety-nine women who were boiling in your blood, and since you had written them down and memorized them, the names would come rolling off your tongue. And this was your testament to the way that these women lived and died and lived again. (224) This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EDWIDGE DANTICAT'S KRIK? KRAK! 79 The persona in the epilogue pays tribute to what she calls " Poets," those voices "urging you to speak through the blunt your pencil" (222). The storytelling tradition, essential f transmission of lives and cultures, strengthens the connectio tween women: " With every step you take, there is an army of women watching over you. We are never any farther than the sweat on your brows or the dust on your toes... you have never been able to escape the pounding of a thousand other hearts that have outlived yours by thousands of years. And over the years when you have needed us, you have always cried 'Krik?' and we have answered 'Krak!' and it has shown us that you have not forgotten us. (222-24) The use of the second-person narrator implicates the reader/listener, inviting her to participate in the storytelling act, commisioning her, as with many of the characters, with the task of telling, of participating in the process of creating and preserving community though narrative. Considering the urgency and implications of the identity politics within which Danticat works and her awareness of the dynamics of the culturally diverse audience of her story, her innovative use of narrative perspective in the concluding section of her cycle further challenges the construct of a monolithic "you." Ethnic writers who use the second-person address are aware that "assumptions that white middle and upper class audiences bring to the act of reading are thus foregrounded and exposed-particularly the insidious assumption that they are, 'naturally,' the universal you addressed by the text" (Richardson 323-24). Opening up a possibility for the narratee, the second-person point of view also opens up a possibility for the reader. The use of the narrative "you" becomes one of the more interesting facets of literary theory and criticism because, while in standard fiction the protagonist/narratee is quite distinct from the actual or implied reader, this mode of narration often collapses this distinction because the "you" could refer to the reader as well. Danticat's epilogue to her short story cycle forces the reader to face the experience of cultural betweenness and choices in the manner that implicates most directly, pulling her into the drama This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 80 ROCIO G. DAVIS and suggesting that this is, more than just a Haitian-American and dilemma, everyone's as well. Although the oral comm figured in Krik? Krak! is clearly distinct from the mass read in the US and European markets, Danticat, by identifying an testing the assumed "you," generates a widening of disc space, where more and more diverse voices may be hear similarly plural subjectivities may be addressed. This conc strategy is Danticat's tour de force, the final touch to the in tion of theme and technique, as she weaves the formal stran oral narrative and story cycle with the contextual tellin women's lives, expanding the reach of the stories and dr more people into the experience. This short story cycle, as a discourse on ethnic self-defin has recollections or personal experiences of Haiti as an impo aspect of the creation of self. The questions the characte themselves are answered through narratives that, in reflectin form of the oral narrative, articulate almost epic tales of surv Edwidge Danticat has turned to roots-family, community ethnicity-as a source of personal identity and creative expre The manner in which she, like other ethnic writers, has app ated the short story cycle as a metaphor for the fragmentati multiplicity of ethnic lives is itself an articulation of the p towards ethnic self-identification. The subsequent narrat turning to past forms of narration and reflecting a tendenc wards a hybrid form, provides enriching glimpses of societ the process of transformation and growth. The vivid dream a piration that remains at the end of the book is succinctl claimed by Josephine: "I raised my head toward the sun thin one day I may just see my mother there. 'Let her flight be jo said to Jacqueline. 'And mine and yours too"' (49). This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EDWIDGE DANTICAT'S KRIK? KRAK! 81 Works Cited Bruner, Jerome and Susan Weisser. "The Invention of Self: Autobiography and Its Forms." Literacy and Orality. Ed. David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. 129-48. Casey, Ethan. "Remembering Haiti." Callaloo 18.2 (1995): 524-28. Clayton, Jay. "The Narrative Turn in Recent Minority Fiction." American Literary History 2.3 (1990): 375-93. Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! London: Abacus, 1996. Goellnicht, Donald C. "Blurring Boundaries: Asian American Literature as Theory." An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Ed. King-Kok Cheung. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. 338-65. Hardy, Sarah. "A Poetics of Immediacy: Oral Narrative and the Short Story." Style 27.3 (1993): 352-68. Heung, Marina. "Daughter-Text/Mother-Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club." Feminist Studies 19.3 (1993): 597-615. Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre. The Hague: Mouton: 1971. Kelley, Margot. "Gender and Genre: The Case of the Novel-in-Stories." American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Julie Brown. New York: Garland, 1995. 295-310. Kennedy, J. Gerald. "From Anderson's Winesburg to Carver's Cathedral: The Story Sequence and the Semblance of Community." Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. Ed J. Gerald Kennedy. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. 194-215. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982. Ordofiez, Elizabeth J. "Narrative Texts by Ethnic Women: Rereading the Past, Reshaping the Future." MELUS 9.3 (1982): 19-28. Richardson, Brian. "The Poetics and Politics of Second Person Narrative." Genre 24 (1991): 309-330. Shea, Renee. "Belles Lettres Interview: Edwidge Danticat." Belles Lettres 10.3 (1995): 12-15. This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:37:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Map Within: Place, Displacement, and the Long Shadow of History in the Work of Edwidge Danticat Author(s): Patti M. Marxsen and Patti M. Marxen Source: Journal of Haitian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring 2005), pp. 140-155 Published by: Center for Black Studies Research Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41715295 Accessed: 10-10-2018 01:23 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Center for Black Studies Research is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Haitian Studies This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 140 The Journal of Haitian Studies, Vol. 1 1 No. 1 © 2005 Patti M. Marxsen Boston Research Center for the 21st Century The Map Within: Place, Displacement, and the Long Shadow of History in the Work of Edwidge Danticat A place on the map is also a place in history. -Adrienne Rich The literature of Haiti in the twentieth century is a literature of exile. From early novels such as Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew) to the Magloire-era novels of Jean Métellus to Dany Laferrière's Un autobiographie américain (An American Autobiography), major themes inevitably include the disintegration and reconfiguration of relationships and society. Stories inhabited by displaced people migrating in a world anchored by France, the United States, the Caribbean, and Canada define and connect the terrain of the Haitian writer. 1 On this journey, historical references are inescapable as characters alive in the present learn to speak out of what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has referred to as the "silencing" of Haiti's past.2Even non-Haitian writers of Haitian literature, like Madison Smartt Bell, are compelled to confront the "non-event" of the Haitian Revolution3 and the essential Haitian dilemma of displacement. In the third and final volume of his triology, The Stone that the Builder Refused, Bell richly imagines Toussaint Louverture's death in a prison cell in France as the culmination of a long and tortuous history. In fact and fiction, such cruel dislocations are the substance of the Haitian experience. Onto this dark landscape, a new and distinctive voice appeared in the 1990s. Not only is Edwidge Danticat distinctive for being young and female, or for writing in English rather than French, or for living in the United States, or for attracting the attention of Oprah Winfrey and an audience of mainstream readers; she is also distinctive for the ways in which she works new magic with old themes and, in fact, advances them onto new terrain. Early in her career, she was praised as Haiti's "literary voice."4 More precisely, she is the voice of the Haitian-American Diaspora, a far-flung This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Map Within: The Work ofEdwidge Danticat 141 community of approximately 3 1 5,000 souls.s As the literary voice of people, Danticat has joined Laferrière in liberating Haitian literature the local boundaries of Hispaniola, the island it shares with the Domi Republic. In so doing, her work is redefining the meaning of past, pre and place for a new generation. In an early interview focused on her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memor Danticat identified migration as one of her major themes.6 With the s of Krik? Krak!, her second novel The Farming of Bones, and throug her most recent collection of stories titled The Dew Breaker, Dantic characters have continued to move from place to place like a flock of in search of a safe nesting ground. But migration is more than a phy journey. This paper interprets Danticat's approach to the theme of migrat as an experience that encompasses a deepening relationship with his In Danticat's work, the search for place in the present is anchored i awareness of the past. Furthermore, the absence of a sense of place - or the reduction of plac in Danticat's stories to spaces that are restrictive, marginal, temporary alienating7 - will be explored. As Danticat's characters struggle with unresolved past, one psychic option is to transform Haiti through memoiy individual or collective - into a lifeless symbol inhabited by heroes strangers. By breathing life into Haiti's historical past and linking it t living reality of today, Danticat offers a way out and a way forward. Placemaking in Haitian Culture What constitutes a sense of place? How do we come to know wher belong in the world? Does the idea of "home-place" rely on relation with people, a familiar landscape, language, religion, or our knowledg cultural practices? Do we feel more "rooted" if we live in close proxim to those who share our personal memories? If we live apart from fam how do we keep the memory of our personal and collective history a To what extent do monuments, historic buildings, commemorative p and museums solidify our sense of place? Franz Fanon analyzed colonialism and its psycho-social implicatio in his famous 1961 treatise: "This world divided into compartments, world cut in two, is inhabited by two different species. The original the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality, and the imm differences of ways of life never come to mask the human realities." coexistence of two "human realities" described by Fanon was, in the nature of life for the enslaved and colonized people of Haiti (form Saint Domingue) for a century prior to the Black Revolution that w This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 142 Patti M. Marxen independence cultures share situation slavery and of of in from a sense Haiti Saint recovery is from colonialism u Domi in its Hait One measure of th of Haitian Independ population In a this was illitera environment, sense of property place and m simp estates a Violence, poverty, an structures and landsc the surroundings unr of public money, inv and developing count such as plumbing, elec inaccessible to over h people. in Thus, more external stable becomes countrie internal, eve in a landscape of priv imaginative reservoir, a complex relationship a synthesis of rich, i realities. It is to the h The Limits With drew her upon of Geog first her novel person Danticat came to New opens, young Sophie p aunt pushes it away, e not for her. But Soph on that same day, that mother, of love, place and its identity, dreams and learn to relate to a woman she has never known: This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms im and The Map Within: The Work ofEdwidge Danticat 143 Am I the mother you imagined? She asked, with her eyes half-closed. As a child, the mother I had imagined for myself was like Erzulie, the lavish Virgin Mother. She was the healer of all women and the desire of all men. She had gorgeous dresses in satin, silk, and lace, necklaces, pendants, earrings, bracelets, anklets, and lots and lots of French perfume. . . I could always count on her, like one counts on the sun coming out at dawn. (59) But a deeper problem emerges when Sophie's mother becomes obsessed with her daughter's sexuality and insists on "testing" her purity and wholeness by feeling for her hymen on a regular basis. This invasion of her body causes Sophie to become estranged from her mother, her lover Joseph, and, in a sense, from herself. She is a young woman without an identity. Life in the rural Haitian village of Dame Marie was much simpler. Viewed through the context of placemaking, this early work was largely concerned with physical space and geography. In a sense, Sophie's body is the only physical space she can claim as her own, and yet her newfound mother invades it with her probing fingers.13 We might also read this novel as a feminist "tract" in which mothers, daughters, aunts, and grandmothers learn to understand and forgive each other and, in so doing, build a community of strength. Indeed, the daughter's sexual and emotional dysfunction can be attributed to maternal abandonment, abuse, and neglect so easily traced to the sheer existence of Sophie whose face resembles that of her violent father, a rapist. But the deeper we delve into Breath, Eyes, Memory, the more clearly we see how the mother/daughter emotions explored in this story are rooted in history, in the dehumanizing violence of Duvalier 's secret police, in the destabilizing effects of such violence on families, on the ways in which historical and political violence is internalized and played out in the most intimate relationships. In the sum of its parts, the plot of Danticat's first book explores far more than one mother/daughter relationship; it explores how relationships are shaped by history and, in Haiti, by the disorienting violence of history. As a means of coping, Danticat articulates the phenomenon of "doubling" in her first novel, and relates it to historical events. For Sophie, "doubling" is a trick of consciousness that allows her to be here and not here at the same time. Related to Vodou and the twinned spirit named Marassa, "doubling" is, in effect, a state of dual-consciousness. As Sophie says, This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 144 Patti M. There had Marxen were presidents and many doubled. part ca Followin were shadow. actu Tha and rape so many p their children and m Sophie's achievement wholeness from you a can lightly. The that place carry . she where your .without Living r br pa pain, Past In a world where th fulfilled, its violent a negotiated through li evolved, she has incre Haitian people of history witness to live in th linking past an by humanizing histor a path of empathy alo to the lives of women beyond "heroic histor As we have Memory. framed the and the seen, Her within title.14 the b second a mythi Among thes in a variety of ways. in which a powerless as Boukman in a schoo slave uprising in 1791 priest and slave leader Haitian people. The lin the sorrow that fueled the Haitian Revolution: A wall of fire is rising and in the ashes, I see the bones of my people. Not only those people whose dark hollow faces I see daily in the fields, but all those souls who have gone ahead to haunt my dreams. At night I relive once more the last caresses from the hand of a loving father, a valiant love, a beloved friend. (56) This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Map Within: The Work ofEdwidge Danticat 145 This confession of emotion and its motivating force runs parallel to th emotions growing in the weary heart of Guy, the boy's father who ha trouble finding work. In the course of the story, he feels shamed when t best job he can find amounts to a few days of employment cleaning latrin at the local sugar mill. As his son swells with the reenacted revolutio spirit of Boukman, the father's thoughts are fixed on a hot-air balloon belongs to the owner of the mill. The hot-air balloon is a French inve and, as such, represents power as well as the power to move, to rise and beyond the harsh life of Haiti. As a symbol, the hot-air balloon brilliant evocation of a glorious past and a hopeful future echoed in child's continuing recitation: There is so much sadness in the faces of my people. I have called on their gods, now I call on our gods. I call on our young. I call on our old. I call on our mighty and the weak. I call on everyone and anyone so that we shall all let out one piercing cry that we may either live freely or we should die. (71) The father hears these hollow words deep in his angry soul. In the his despair over the long struggle for freedom leads him to break fr his life and fly the balloon alone. He dies violently in the process, fa to the ground before the eyes of his son and his wife. In this story sky is a liberating space but the only liberation available is death. In historical context of Guy's dilemma, hope and hopelessness collide i tragic moment. Time has collapsed. There is no longer a past, nor is t a believable future. In "Wall of Fire Rising," the sky beckons to Guy as a means to freedom. In "Children of the Sea," the liberation of death comes from drowning. This now famous story follows the thoughts of young lovers torn apart by political violence in Haiti. The epistolary structure of the story relies on an imaginary exchange of letters between a radio journalist who has become one of the "Haitian boat people" sailing to America in a small boat with 36 others while the girl he loves remains in Haiti, protected by her powerful father.16 Through the device of letters, we feel the immediacy of their dilemma. He writes of the voyage and of the others on the boat. He tells of a young woman who gives birth to a stillborn baby on the boat but will not let anyone throw the body of the dead child overboard. He writes of seawater coming into the boat. He rethinks his life and professes his love. In alternating segments written in lowercase letters, the girl replies in a mixture of French and English. She has destroyed most of his tapes, but kept a few, writing that "... i still have your voice." It is through her This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 146 Patti words "a that group were Marxen we of learn of students you went all. to the the t got demonstrating calling who M. fo rad morgu She tells of Macoutes l that head was her dinn And so the story unf family moves away fr has a new life filled with butterflies and a view of the mountains, "i feel like all those mountains are pushing me farther and farther away from you," she says. (26) She is right, of course, for he is traveling on, embracing his fate. 'The other night I dreamt that I died and went to heaven," he writes. 'This heaven was nothing like I expected. It was at the bottom of the sea." In his last letter he says, "Perhaps I was chosen from the beginning of time to live there with Agwé17 at the bottom of the sea." (p. 28) Likewise, her last missive and the last lines of the story speak of "... a sea that is endless like my love for you." (29) As this story suggests, the sea occupies an important place in Haitian history and culture. Not only does the sea serve as a key to economic life, it carries with it historical, spiritual, and cosmic meaning. In many ways, the sea in Haitian life is equivalent to Christian concepts of Heaven as a place where all ancestors reside. It was, after all, the sea that brought the ancestors from West Africa, often called Guinin or Guinea. And it is to the sea that all ancestors return. In Vodou, the mirror is symbolic of the sea and its ability to reflect all time: The connection of mirrors, water, and Guinin, the home of the spirits, makes a complex, uroboric point. Gazing into the water, a woman sees her own reflection, and through it, simultaneously, she sees the Iwa. Superimposed on the faces of the Iwa, she sees the faces of her ancestors, because an ancestor returns to the living in the form of the Iwa he or she revered most during life. Thus, Haitians gazing into the mirror surface of the ocean that separates them from Africa see in intermingled reflections the Iwa , the ancestors, and themselves.18 Danticat herself has written about how "[t]he past is full of examples when our foremothers and forefathers showed such deep trust in the sea that they would jump off slave ships and let the waves embrace them. They This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Map Within: The Work ofEdwidge Danticat 147 too believed that the sea was the beginning and the end of all things, road to freedom and the entrance to Guinin."19 In "Children of the Se the sea encompasses past and present as the young man and many ot are presumably swallowed in a tragic fate. The socio-political conditio in Haiti, so well described by the girl's letters, drove these people aw from the only home they had ever known, making each of them a victim history. In the end, the sea is a way out, and a way into the deep free of eternity. Another story in Krik? Krak! that also relies on historical events for its framework is titled "Nineteen Thirty-Seven." In this tale of rebirth, Josephine's mother is in prison in Port-au-Prince for witchcraft because she knows how to make a Madonna statue weep by placing wax and oil in the corner of the eye. But the real meaning of the Madonna's tear has to do with an important event in twentieth-century Haitian history: the slaughter of Haitians in the Dominican Republic by General Trujillo in November of 1937. We learn that in that massacre Josephine's mother narrowly escaped death by leaping through the bloody water from the DR to the other side. Josephine, still in her mother's womb at the moment of escape, was born in Haiti on the same day. Furthermore, Josephine's grandmother died that day. Throughout her life, Josephine has known the Massacre River. The slaughter itself and her frequent return to the river to bear witness have formed Josephine's identity and linked her life to her mother's suffering, and the suffering of her people: We were all daughters of that river, which had taken our mothers from us ... We came from the bottom of that river where the blood never stops flowing, where my mother's dive toward life- her swim among all those bodies slaughtered in flight- gave her those wings of flames. The river was the place where it had all begun. (41)20 As the story unfolds, Josephine's pilgrimage from present to past continues as she makes regular visits to her mother, who is ill. This border crossing, of sorts, echoes the past. When an old woman comes to Josephine, they go through a mysterious series of questions and answers beginning with an essential understanding of where they locate themselves: "Who are you?" I asked her. "I am a child of that place," she answered. "I come from that long trail of blood." (44) This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 148 Patti M. Marxen 'That place" is history made a community and spirituality born of after her mother's dea has their bodies, like angels chrysalis is inescapable. contained in this story mother's The courage Farming "Nineteen of behind Massacre finds theme of the works a the there "homeless" Javier, The on of the the f ri "home man border. As Domin Amabelle kind in Bon 1937.22 in River.23 her The of h Thirty-Seven" slaughter left gave Her cane is s who e conv fields, "Sometimes the peop and angry, they say "They say we are the b They say some peopl us. I say we are a gro She recalls her childh playing in the "deserted rest of the world from that From were the meant safety to of hol these green mountains, the r sixty-five doors down i the queen's court acros Thus, history is evoke the world is viewed an Independence, the vision of of which space, freed enters the psyche of A Though other reference the "Yanki occupation," This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Map Within: The Work ofEdwidge Danticat 149 authority (1914-1934), Amabelle is particularly rooted in her memo the Citadel and in the heroes of Haitian Independence, whose names spirits are evoked throughout the novel. From the beginning of this story, place forms the focus of Amab thoughts and is a primary topic of conversation with characters at all lev of society. This is partly due to a rumor emerging that Generalissim Rafael Trujillo wants to get rid of any Haitian not working in a cane A Haitian woman in Amabelle's village expresses anxiety about not ha any "papers in my palms to say where I belong."25 Reflecting on conversation, Amabelle's thoughts run along similar lines: I had no papers to show that I belonged either here or in Haiti where I was born. The children who were being taken to school looked troubled as they glanced up at their parents' faces, which must have seemed- if I remembered the way a parent's face looked to a child- only a few inches from the bright indigo sky. I found it sad to hear the non -vwayajè Haitians who appeared as settled in the area as the tamarind trees, the birds of paradise, and the sugarcane- it worried me that they too were unsure of their place in the valley. (70) As the story evolves, General Trujillo's army does, indeed, butch Haitian people, committing atrocities that are unforgotten to this d Amabelle escapes, miraculously, to the other side with Yves. Many fr die in the process and her beloved Sebastien is lost forever. She can love Yves, though they live together for many years. In a poignant ef to regain herself, Amabelle visits the Citadel and joins a tour group "white foreigners" who learn the story of Henri Christophe's life, ri power, and suicide. She returns to the river, and even to the Domin Republic where she pays a visit to her former employer, Señora Vale Her motive is to find Sebastien, or at least to find out what happene him. Instead, she finds nothing but a deeper understanding of herself child of the 1937 massacre: The slaughter is the only thing that is mine enough to pass on. All I want to do is find a place to lay it down now and again, a safe nest where it will neither be scattered by the winds, nor remain forever buried beneath the sod. (266) In the final pages, the "place to lay it down" is the river itself. We step into the water with Amabelle and feel her buoyancy as she floats on her deep and painful past. Magdalena Cohen's thoughtful analysis of the baptismal This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 150 Patti power to a ease kind M. of water the of Marxen in pain The of peace.26 lif 1 and rebirth to be found in water- whether it be river or sea- is a sense of place, a kind of heavenly homecoming to which one can return when all else fails and be soothed by the waves of time. Like The Farming of Bones, the Romanesque collection of stories gathered under the title The Dew Breaker is an historical work. The nine stories "woven"27 around the central, nameless figure of the "dew breaker" explore the reality and impact of the Duvalier era in Haiti (1957-1986). Through these stories, we meet an assortment of people whose lives have been touched by the torturer, a man described as "fat," with a distinctive "widow's peak," a man whose daughter Ka was raised to believe that his role in the politics of Haiti had been good, even noble and courageous. But in the opening story, 'The Book of the Dead," Ka learns otherwise. Danticat is adept at choosing a place that reflects the alienation of her characters. In this pivotal story in which Ka learns of her father's true identity as a torturer, the rented motel room is a keen contrast to the home and life of the Haitian actress, Gabrielle Fonteneau, a place that blends all spaces into a luxurious homeplace complete with a garden and loving parents. In a characteristic Danticat irony, Ka's father spoils the moment or, more to the point, the silent, violent past in which he participated spoils the moment. In the end, both Ka and her father are perceived as intruders, impostors, out of place as the "plot" shifts in place from Haiti to New York to the motel room in Florida to the Fonteneau home. This story anchors the book and announces the outcome of the dew breaker's life in America. In 'The Book of Miracles," we once again encounter the idea of the vwayjè who figures so prominently in Danticat's stories. The dew breaker is such a character, and by association, so is his wife Anne, whose attachment requires that she renegotiate places and spaces as a way of life in light of the historical past. After tense moments at church on Christmas Eve, she decides that she will not return to the church with her husband, the torturer who might be recognized by one of his victims. She will come alone next time. We also meet wanderers in "Night Talkers." In this story, Dany, a young man who now lives in New York, makes a pilgrimage to his village in Haiti to visit his blind, elderly aunt.28 Estina Estèrne is delighted to see him in the light of day, but it is in darkness that they share "noctural habits." He too spoke his dreams aloud in the night, sometimes to the point of jolting himself awake with the sound of his own voice. (98) This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms w The Map Within: The Work ofEdwidge Danticat 151 In the village, Dany meets the hip Americanized Claude, who has co back to Haiti from New York, grateful to live in the country instead o Port-au-Prince "... eating crap and sleeping on the street." Claude has b in prison for murdering his own father. After learning this, Dany dre of his parents' murder by a fat man with a widow's peak who shot them front of their house. He remembers the event vividly; he was six years and there to watch it, pulled back from the shots and pinned to the gro by his now elderly aunt. Not long before his visit to Haiti, Dany paid a visit to the barber believes to be the man who murdered his parents. This is the dew break and when a room becomes available in the basement of his house, Dan rents it with the intention of killing him. He comes close, stands over snoring barber in the middle of the night, prepares to choke him to de and then retreats. He talks to Tante Estina all about this, but then wak up realizing that he has only been talking in the night while his aunt awake nearby. "Da, were you dreaming of your parents?. . . You were calling their names." "Was I?" He would have thought he was calling the barber. "You were calling your parents," she said, "just this instant." (108) They skirt the truth with a conversation about what Dany's paren were doing that led to their deaths. Were they involved in politics? W did they do to deserve their fate? To Dany's questions, Tante Estina rep " I don't know, Da. Maybe they were mistaken for all of us. There's a be that if you kill people, you can take their knowledge, become everyth they were."29 Before this story ends, Dany's aunt dies and Claude confesses his crim to Dany, declaring himself to be "the luckiest fucker on this goddam planet."30 Dany cringes in the knowledge that Claude can speak nightmares in daylight. For him, the childhood victim of murder, th horrors belong to the noplace of the night. It is in the final story, "The Dew Breaker," that we come to underst how history swallowed the murderer of Dany's parents into the militi the "Papadocracy" and how, in a startling twist worthy of Greek trag three completely disparate forces- his final murder, a deep wound to h face, and a woman propelled by a spiritual seizure- become the combi This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 152 Patti impetus murder breaker M. to Marxen purchase tw of the preache finds himself walls that is, in fact, dwells in sickening vio as if to purge himself an outward sign that h moment, into like him. been She taken a is meteor away to Unknown to her, breaker. The fury past-present, s dressed Ca this of life-death and nurses his wounds. "What did they do to you?" she asked. This was the most forgiving question he'd ever been asked. It suddenly opened a door, produced a small path, which he could follow. (237) Out of this strange moment of empathy an unspoken agreement is formed, almost instantly. It is not romantic love; or perhaps it is more than romantic love. These two will go to New York together, build a life, have a daughter. And one day the daughter will learn of her father's role as a Tonton Macoute and ask her mother the unanswerable question, "Manman, how do you love him?"31 It is at this point that 'The Dew Breaker" picks up the thread of 'The Book of the Dead," for the question is asked when Ka calls her mother from the motel room in Florida after learning the truth of her father's past. The continuity is artful and metaphorical. History is alive in the present and passed on, generation to generation. The power of historical place is inescapable. Healing the Wounds of the Past As these stories demonstrate, Haitian people today are drawn into a complex and violent history, as actors and victims. Thwarted from within and without for over two centuries, they continue to migrate, driven from their island in search of a home that does not exist. But they do not migrate alone. As Danticat's work demonstrates, the things they carry include personal and collective histories of shared suffering and codified courage. As the stories and themes discussed here suggest, there is a reckoning with history in Danticat's work that recognizes the necessity of making a place that honors history, even in the midst of migration. This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Map Within : The Work ofEdwidge Danticat 153 "To know who you are means knowing where you are," says James Clifford. "Your world has a center you carry with you."32 For Haitians a Haitian-Americans, the center will always encompass the tragic legacy of slavery, colonialism, revolution, invasion, massacre, and imperialism Just as Danticat's characters live with individual and collective memories of Boukman, Henri Christophe, the "Yanki" Invasion, the slaughter of 1937, the horrors of the Duvalier Era, and the losses of the "boat peopl so do members of the living Haitian Diaspora. Placemaking in the long shadow of such a history is destined to be a difficult necessity. Humaniz and dignifying that history through the power of literature is one way ease the pain and, perhaps, find a way to heal it. By telling the stories a drawing the map within, Edwidge Danticat is becoming a cartographer reconciliation. Notes 1 Jane Evans Braziel proposes a concept of "trans-American" identity to describe the complexity and unity of the North-American aspect of this experience. 2 Edwidge Danticat also refers to the problem of silence. "Migration silences you," she explains, as a result of distance and language. See her interview with Renée H. Shea in The Caribbean Writer , Vol. 18. 3This is Trouilloťs term. See Silencing the Past for his analysis of how the "archival power" of history rendered the Haitian Revolution "invisible" and irrelevant to western civilization. 4 Paule Marshall is quoted on the 1995 cover of the first edition of Breathf Eyes , Memory with this statement. 5 Florida, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey account for over 267,000 of this number. See the 2000 U.S. Census for a state-by-state breakdown. If we include Canada in the Diaspora population, the number increases to nearly 500,000 with 100,000 Haitians in the Montréal area alone. 6 Danticat, 1995. 7 Consider the prison space in "1937," the overcrowded boat in "Children of the Sea," or the motel room at the beginning of "The Book of the Dead." Such marginalized spaces are characteristic of Danticat's work. 8 Franz Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth. Constance Farrington, Trans. New York: Grove Press, p. 39 9 Note that it was 1835 before France recognized Haitian Independence and only then when a 150 million franc "indemnity" was agreed upon to avoid another French invasion. It is also relevant to this discussion to note that the impoverishing effects of this debt, which was reduced to 60 million francs but still took over a century to pay off, prolonged the legacy of colonialism in Haiti. This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 154 10 Patti See M. Marxen Trouillot more recent French were for his study by L not prepar 11 The deforestation of and is expected to reach is the devastating effec the Central Plateau. Se 12 Consider the iconic p the Lincoln Memorial, f 13 While this is cultural context problematic. an acce and jux 14The question/answer a story?" "Yes, give us 15The 1791 uprising is a ceremony in August 17 plantations were presen marked with outrageou Nord was burned, thou property, 16 In the and over 1990s, it 10,0 is overcrowded boats. 17 Agwé is the spirit of the sea 18 McCarthy Brown, p. 284. 19Danticat, Edwidge, 1996b, p. 141. 20 In this context, see Magdelena Cohen's article, which extends the healing power of the sea to include water in general. 21 Danticat, p. 47. It is worth noting here that prisons occur frequently in Danticaťs work. 22 It is estimated that between 20,000 and 30,000 Haitians were butchered in the slaughter. 23 The river is so named for the killing of French buccaneers by the Spanish in the 18th century, not for the 1937 event. 24 At the time independence was declared, Christophe was a black general in the north. He built the Citadel as a fortress after he declared himself king in 181 1. 25 Danticat, 1998, p. 70. 26 See Cohen, 2004. 27 Danticat has referred to herself as a "weaver of tales." See Danticat 1995. 28 Note that pilgrimage back to one's origins or source of pain is a theme that appears in many of Danticaťs stories and in both of her novels. Also, it is worth mentioning that characters with infirmities, handicaps, and missing parts frequently appear in her work. This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms es The Map Within : The Work ofEdwidge Danticat 155 29Danticat, 2004, p. 109. 30 Danticat, 2004, p. 120. 31 Danticat, 2004, p. 239. 32 Clifford, 1989, p. 4. Bibliography Bell, Madison Smartt. 2004. The Stone that the Builder Refused. New Yor Random House. Braziel, Jane Evans. 2005. '"C'est moi, l'Amérique' Canada, Haiti, and Dany Laferrière's Port-au-Prince/Montréal/Miami textual transmigrations of the hemisphere." Comparative American Studies : An International Journal 3, no. 1: 29-46. Brown, Karen McCarthy. 1991. Mama Lola: A Vodou priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: Universtiy of California Press. Cohen, Magdalena. 2004. "The ability of water to heal and unify in Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones and 'Children of the Sea,"' The Caribbean Writer 18: 201-224. Clifford, James. 1989. "Traveling theories, traveling theorists." Inscriptions 5. Santa Cruz, CA: Center for Cultural Studies. Danticat, Edwidge. 1994. Breath , Eyes, Memory. New York: Soho Press. randomhouse.com/vintage/danticat.html. Dubois, Laurent. 2004. Avengers of the New World Revolution. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Farmer, Paul E. 1995. The Uses of Haiti. Monroe Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Constance Farrington Trans. New York: Grove Press. Kidder, Tracy. 2003. Mountains beyond Mountains. New York: Random House. Laferrière, Dany. N.D. Books: Le cri des oiseaux fous by Dany Laferrière. at www. frenchculture.org Roumain, Jacques. 1997 [1944]. Gouverneurs de la rosée. Coconut Creek, Florida: Educa Vision. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Wed, 10 Oct 2018 01:23:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE FLYING AFRICANS: EXTENT AND STRENGTH OF THE MYTH IN THE AMERICAS Author(s): Lorna McDaniel Source: Nieuwe West-Indische Gids / New West Indian Guide, Vol. 64, No. 1/2 (1990), pp. 28-40 Published by: Brill on behalf of the KITLV, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027305 Accessed: 05-10-2018 00:02 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027305?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms KITLV, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Brill are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Nieuwe West-Indische Gids / New West Indian Guide This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Fri, 05 Oct 2018 00:02:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Lorna McDaniel THE FLYING AFRICANS: EXTENT AND STRENGTH OF THE MYTH IN THE AMERICAS The theme of human aerial flight permeates the mythology of America. Examples of the metaphor are found in major musical myths and poetry in Black cultures that span the Caribbean and so North America, embracing generations to testify to the depth o cosmological and conscious projection of systems of flight escap homeland return. While the theme of human flight does not occu significant proportion in West African mythology related them transformation and pursuit do appear. However, in African thou witches and spirits possess the power of flight; a flight that can be bl by the use of salt. The belief in spirit flight, ubiquitous in the Black d of the New World, parallels that in African thought, but in the New it is enlarged to include humans as possessors of the capability of In the Haitian tale, "Pierre Jean's tortoise" (Courlander 1964:29), present the tortoise with feathers, but at the moment of danger, them, leaving the tortoise to sing: "If I could fly, ehe, What a t I have no wings." The South Carolinian story, "All God's children wings" (Hughes 1958:62) repeats the notion of the repeal of the of flight. The story begins: "Once all Africans could fly like bir gift of flight was repealed, but freedom and escape through the to fly is again awarded the besieged slaves who soar above the sl heads accompanied by their own singing. In both stories song or m words precipitate or accompany freedom and in the several vari the myth (Georgia Writers Project 1940:150, 116, 117), where son employed, code words facilitate flight. The most recent published of the story forms the title piece of a children's book of African/Am This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Fri, 05 Oct 2018 00:02:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE FLYING AFRICANS 29 tales called The people could fly by Virgini One can find thousands of variants th older folk who know the myth, tale Africans") and who express the actualiz Ritual songs use the same metaphor of h in recondite language. On Curaçao the fo from Papiamento by Frank Martinus, i African who bids farewell to his friend I am in trouble I am in trouble, man I am in trouble If you see god Give my compliments to him. (Martinus 1988) Richard Price, in First-Time, documents many bea histories of the Saramacan past. Among these is the fo ...he could walk in a wink from here to the river ..., and walk if it were solid ground. ...They say that Vuma could fly like a human being. He'd prepare the obia till it was just right, push tip of his thumb, suuu, like this (motions). That's what let him wa his parrot feather, specially prepared. He'd tie his belt like this- vauu piiil ... (Price 1983:112) The story above uncovers the u to conjure flight. In Guiana the simply put themselves into a ho in place and fly back to Africa (Liv by Miguel Barnet in his edition o an ex-slave in Cuba: "...what hap bodies and wandered about over a snail leaves its shell and goes in (Montejo tucked 1968:131). under their Some armpits stori (Elder around to induce flight. Tobago journey of Canga Brown, "a m of fire (Roach 1955). Each mode of travel projects, in a system of flight. Whether the sea shell or on a leaf, soared on walked upon the water, they had This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Fri, 05 Oct 2018 00:02:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 30 LORNA MCDANIEL of water) represents the obstacle ag of deterrence in much of the lore song from Carriacou, Grenada, ov and the barrier to return - the se the Bongo dance type, traditionally Caribbean African-type dance ritu is French Creole. Oyo, Mama, Bel Louise oh Nu kai alé nâ ginî pu kotwé pawâ mwê lame bawé mwê We shall go to Africa to meet my parents The sea bars me (Pearse 1956:5) "The Flying Africans" myth is also pe by Zora Neale Hurston in this way: ...salt is not given because it is heavy. It h can not fly and departs if he has salt. Once ate salt. Many of them were brought to J slaves. They flew back to Africa. Those be slaves, because they were too heavy to fly (Hurston 1938:62 Salt as Symbol The item above introduces a significant theme that merges with and ext the significance of the sea symbol. Salt, like the watery saline bar blocks flight. Just as people intent upon return abstain from the ingesti of salt so also do spirits and witches avoid salt. The use of salt as a protec agent against flying witches is found in the folklore throughout the sou part of the United States as well as in the Caribbean; and in West A too, similar patterns of belief exist, "...the witch leaves her skin beh on going out, and among the Vais it is thought that salt and pepper spri in the room will prevent her from getting back into her hide" (Puc 1926:155). It is reported that during the 1920s in Nigeria people tho that malevolent spirits of sleeping humans prowled during the nigh would succumb at the presence of salt and be annihilated, not being to reinhabit the body (Da Costa 1984). This belief is mirrored in the This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Fri, 05 Oct 2018 00:02:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE FLYING AFRICANS 31 thought of Carriacou that embraces the i the lougarou and soucouyan, who shed their skin outdoors, can be apprehended by spreading salt. Salt obstructs the reentry of their spirits into the covering. Grains of sand from the fine-sanded neighbor island, Sandy Island, may also be scattered on the door-step for the sand deters the witch that must count every grain before its exit. Other Caribbean cultures retain similar folk beliefs with only minor variations exhibiting belief/practices too wide-spread to have been invented in isolated areas (Puckett 1926:155). On West Coast Africa in the Sudanic and Saharan regions, salt, gold and cola nuts were major pre-colonial trade commodities and from those early times the significance of salt was most likely imbued with symbolic strength. Salt was a precious item whose weight was at times exchanged equally for gold. One can easily perceive the New World extension of the salt metaphor in African legends and in history where the distasteful, salty and death laden Atlantic Passage could have logically reinforced the association of salt with death and the spirit world. The sea is the physical barrier and salt, in its association with the sea, also inhibits return, but in an alternative way. It is the abstinence from salt that could permit flight or "confer special powers like those of witches..." or even make one "powerful enough to fly back to Africa" (Schüler 1980:96). Food in the 18th century Caribbean was preserved in the sea-like brine and reeked of the infamous salt. Weekly allowances of salted codfish, mackerel, herring or pork constituted the new and foreign food culture of the enslaved that was dictated by the Beneficent Clauses of the Code Noir and British slave laws. No doubt the acceptance of salted food implied to the slave the acceptance of bondage from which he could not "fly". The significance of salt permeates African-type religious ritual throughout the Caribbean as an ingredient abhorrent to the spirit world. In modern ceremonies perpetuated throughout the Caribbean that are staged in hono of ancestral memory, salt is withheld from the food cooked in honor o the old parents. Victor Turner (1967:30) suggests that symbols may operate on severa levels and in polarized dimensions, being at once, "sensory" (affective, easily recognized, and physiological) and at the same time "ideological" (stressing a larger societal value). The physiological connotation of heav ness and groundedness is easily recognized in the physical effect of salt on the body, while the cultural and mythological meanings are less evident and more difficult to discern. However, in the social ownership of the symbols the multiple and sometimes conflicting metaphors mingle, bein This content downloaded from 164.106.248.203 on Fri, 05 Oct 2018 00:02:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 32 LORNA MCDANIEL accepted by some on its sensory a The sensory explanation of magica the same poem introduced above, What give Canga Brown that He don't eat salt nor sugar, His flesh like Ibo yam, power? His blood like clean rain water". (Roach 1955) The Igbo Tale "The Flying Africans" myth/tale as a whole, granting a polarizatio meaning, alludes not only to the imagination of supernatural power the soul's return from exile, but also to the ideological choice of su that was often made by enslaved Africans. This logical and defiant of rebellion actualized the return to Africa. The Igbo most often m that choice for, as it was reasoned, he suffered from a state termed "fix melancholy". Eighteenth century literature describes the Igbo as h ...timidity and despondency of mind;" and a "depression of spirits... (it) gives them an air of softness and submission, ...which (causes) them frequently to seek, in a voluntary death, a refuge from their melancholy reflections. (Edwards 1794:76 Igbos, coming from a highly individualistic society were probably extrem perplexed at their condition under slavery, and being assured that would consummate their existential notion of the inseparabi...
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