Blog Post #6

The Voice From Haiti

The author of Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat says that “I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles.” She wants to tell the world that the people of Haiti want the freedom of chasing their dreams. But those people are powerless to let the world notices them, so she “rais the voice”. In the story of Nineteen Thirty-Seven and A Wall of Fire Rising, Danticat shows reader two Haitian families overcome their obstacles and chase their dream freely.

Nineteen Thirty-Seven tells the story of a daughter and her mother. The mother practiced a religion called voodoo, which was banished in Haiti during that time. People around the mother thought she was a witch, then when a neighbor's baby died, the mother was suspected of killing the baby. The story begins with the daughter went to visit the mother. During their conversations, the mother kept saying that she has a wing of fire. The fire wing is symbolized escape, power and more importantly, freedom. All the bias from the country to the voodoo religion is like those poison guards throw cold water to the prisoner. The prisoner's’ body were too cold to grow the wings of fire. In my opinion, the wish to be free to believe a religion is an important theme in the story. The voodoo was the major reason to let the mother get in the poison. A person has his or her right to chose a good religion, as long as they do not hurt other people, there is no reason to limited their freedom to believe. The mother in the story believes in her religion from the beginning to the end. I can see this from every time she asks the daughter to bring the Madonna, and she kept saying that she had a wing of flame. As the daughter says at the end “Let her flight be joyful”, maybe death is a release to the mother. She won’t be judge by what she believe; there won’t be anyone to replace the love ones, and she will be free.

Another story A Wall of Fire Rising tells a short life of Guy. Guy, Guy’s wife Lili and their son little Guy lived in a small village. Their lives were poor and powerless, they lived in a small place and struggled to live all the time. As the man in the family, Guy was frustrated because he has no work for months, he did not feel he was a good husband, a good father. Then when Guy got a job in Sugar Mill, which was a big company owned by Assad family, there was a conflict between Guy and Lili. Guy wanted his son to get into the line for the jobs, but Lili thoughts their son could do better than that by education. Then Guy saw a balloon that owned by Assad family, he dreamed of flying the balloon to restart his life somewhere and left all his frustrated behind. Comparing to the mother and daughter in Nineteen Thirty-Seven, Guy appeared to be free, but his life was still limited by his responsibility to his family. At the end, Guy fled the balloon on the sky, he succeeded to part of his dream, then he jumped out of the balloon.

Danticat describes the lives of those small Haitian people so well that both of these stories make me have a strong will to help them. All of the characters in the story were small people that have no power to fight. They were the small ones that drown by the bigger ones, the soldier, the prison guards, the Assad family. But all they wanted were simple lives, they wanted to live freely, either to believe the religion she chose or to have the power to make some change in his family. Danticat notices many unfair things in Haiti, besides freedom, she also mentions about women’s right in the stories and many others. she wants to raise the voice of those Haiti people who are suffering by the compressors, and she expresses their wills in her writings.