Edwidge Danticat. Krik? Krak! New York: Soho Press, 1994. Distributed by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 230 pages. $20.00.


The idealized, romantic images of Haitian art—happy children dancing along the sea shore, whimsical animals drinking in lush, green rivers, fishermen under swaying coconut palms—are unalterably obliterated by the tragic reality of Haitian life as revealed by Edwidge Danticat in her dynamic, emotionally searing collection of short fiction, Krik? Krak! And the tragedy is intensified that one so young—Danticat is 25 years old—should be that intimate with the horrors described.
For example, in the story, "Children of the Sea," a young woman on a boat bound for Miami records her life. While a 15 year old girl gives birth and her baby dies, the narrator recollects her past: her association with radical university students, her neighbor walking the streets holding her son's head, and her other neighbor, a young boy forced at gun point to "become intimate" with his own mother and then, weeping, is arrested by the Tonton Macoutes for "moral crimes."
In "Between the Pool and the Gardenias" which appeared in The Caribbean Writer in 1993, and won a Pushcart Prize in 1994, the horror is again of dead children. Here a young woman finds an abandoned infant on a "dusty curb": "Her lips were wide and purple, like those African dolls you see in tourist store windows but never could afford to buy." The woman had suffered through several miscarriages and now is incapable of acknowledging this child's death: "Three times a day I visited her with my hand over my nose. . . I knew I had to act because she was attracting flies."
In "The Missing Peace," also originally published in The Caribbean Writer, a young girl, ominously named Lamort, helps an American journalist search for her missing mother. They are both nearly killed by soldiers in a churchyard after witnessing a dead body being dragged: "'You see nothing,' Toto, [a soldier] said, again grabbing her face. . . 'You see nothing,' he said, his voice hissing between his teeth."
One of Danticat's strengths is her irony, subtle and penetrating. In "The Missing Peace," the American woman naively believes her American passport will protect her from people for whom human life has lost all significance. While watching the young woman clutch her dead baby in "Children of the Sea," the narrator takes the time to record that her friend has passed his exams at the university. Danticat shows here how desperately humankind clings to the myths and beliefs of civilized society.
Irony is further enhanced by the use of "krik krak" as the title. While that is the standard ending (sometimes opening) for a Caribbean story, the stories are usually anancy stories and folktales with moral lessons. Danticat's nightmarish tales are a far cry from those, but her tales do carry a moral lesson—about the powerful and the powerless, about the failure of good to triumph over evil.
How to write of such evil and not appear to exploit the horrific happenings for their macabre appeal poses a significant question for readers as it surely does for Danticat herself. Related here is the assumption of reality. While reality is generally an irrelevancy in fiction, in these stories, where a large part of the appeal is our insight into an inaccessible world, we somehow expect the view afforded us to be authentic. We don't want our sensibilities outraged by a fictive world.
That readers welcome insight into Haiti—beyond the idyllic tourist art—is evidenced by the extraordinary response to Danticat's work. Her first novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, which came out last year, was reviewed in nearly every newspaper in the U.S. and met with largely critical success. Reviews of this collection have drawn similar praise. Paule Marshall, for one, speaks of Danticat's "spare, luminous stories that read like poems." Compelling, stirring, while at the same time horrifying, Krik? Krak! is an impressive, must-read collection.