Edwidge Danticat’s “Krik? Krak!”

This book review was originally published in the Baltimore City Paper on August 23, 1995.

It’s the old story of the Western migration: From impoverished peasant to fearful fugitive to cautious immigrant and finally, like the end of a torturous marathon race, assimilation. Adaptation. Conformity.

But for those who’ve lived it, as acclaimed Haitian author Edwidge Danticat (Breath, Eyes, Memory) reminds us in Krik? Krak!, sometimes the great migration is a Trail of Tears. Sometimes there is unimaginable pain and death along the way that makes you question whether or not the escape from oppression was worth the inhumanity.

The title comes from a responsive Haitian chant that inspires the various characters of the book to tell us their stories. The nine interconnected tales of Krik? Krak! follow the inhabitants of the Haitian town Ville Rose across several generations, from the woman imprisoned and starved during a witch hunt in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” to the young man scribbling his plight on scraps of paper in a refugee boat in “Children of the Sea” to the Brooklyn-raised daughters that suffer their mother’s intolerable Old World superstitions in “Caroline’s Wedding.”

Through all of this Danticat weaves the overarching theme of memory. It’s through memory and the retelling of old stories and legends that the Haitians in Danticat’s tales achieve immortality, an extension to lives that were too often short and brutal and seemingly devoid of grace and beauty. The stories are a built-in defense mechanism for Haitian women caught in the savage games of the Papa Doc Duvaliers and the Raoul Cedrases, as the spirits of the dead say in “Women Like Us”:

“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.”

There’s not a bad story in the bunch, but my favorite was probably “A Wall of Fire Rising,” in which an impoverished couple try to raise their child without filling him with the despair and hopelessness that has infused their own lives. The son’s adoration of the slave revolutionary Boukman and his reverential incantation of the great man’s declarations of freedom only cause the boy’s father to see the irony in his own lack of achievement.

Writing in spare, elegant language, Danticat’s Krik? Krak! is a moving testimonial of man’s inhumanity to man — especially man’s inhumanity to woman — that you cannot leave untouched. Moving beyond the frustratingly ephemeral considerations of presidential politics, Danticat’s poetry of pain is an indelible portrait.