It was an unexpected line that gave me pause...

“Kompe Jako, dome vou? Brother Jacques, are you asleep" (87)?

I stopped, reread the words. Then I began to hum, remembering the song from my own childhood and seeking to remember the rest of the words. In that moment, I felt the true weight of Edwidge Danticat’s message and a deep feeling of understanding about her purpose for writing the short stories compiled in Krik? Krak! 

In each of these stories, beginning with Children of the Sea, Danticat tells a tale of agony, writing of events and states of being that most American born individuals cannot begin to imagine, and, on the surface cannot relate to.  However, in each story, Danticat somehow finds the common element of humanity.  By minimizing individualism through the creation of characters, that, even when they have names, could be anybody, she gives a voice to the masses. Danticat provides an intricate portrayal of humanity and the endless search for a place to anchor our identity—something that is a part of every human experience.

In Children of the Sea, the two main characters—a young man and a young girl—narrate through letters to one another, though neither will ever receive these writings.  Their separation has come in the wake of the creation of the Tonton Macoutes, a military force given nearly full power by President Duvalier (though this actuality is not mentioned explicitly in the story). The young man, who spoke out against the violence and Duvalier’s rule, has escaped Haiti on a boat headed for the United States.  Everyone on board is lacking food and quickly becoming ill; Danticat describe the characters’ condition when she says, “…since there are no mirrors, we look at each other’s faces to see just how frail and sick we are starting to look” (9).  In this line, she truly minimizes the individualism of each character, as each one must look into the eyes of another to understand his or her own state of being.  In their situation, any of the refugees could be any other individual fleeing the circumstances they left behind.

In the other three stories—Nineteen Thirty-Seven, A Wall of Fire Rising, and Night Women—Danticat tells stories of equal, unheard despair.  Women whose heads are shaven in prison, so that “…they looked like crows, like men” (39); a father, who leaves behind a wife and son of whom he is proud, after experiencing a moment of freedom; a mother, who shares the desire of every mother that her son will “…forget that we live in a place where nothing lasts” (86).  And yet, as in Children of the Sea, emerging from each story, through the pain and the sorrow, are the simple moments of beauty, escape, and imagination that sustain us.  And that line—“ Kompe Jako, dome vou? Brother Jacques, are you asleep” (87)?—that connects each and every person, every child who lost a beloved parent, who memorized lines for a school play, who learned that simple madrigal.  In this, every child and every adult has a voice through someone else, and in the first part of Krik? Krak!, Edwidge Danticat emancipates the silenced voice of humanity in Haiti.