Penier, Izabella - The Formation of Female Migratory Subjects n Edwidge Danticat's Krik Krak! (2011).pdf

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THE FORMATION OF FEMALE MIGRATORY SUBJECTS
IN EDWIDGE DANTICAT'S
KRI K? KRA K!
IZABELLA PENIER
Academy of Humanities and Economics, Łódź
Abstract:
This paper theorizes Edwidge Danticat's book
Krick? Krack!
within the Black
Atlantic framework which Danticat supplements with her focus on the Caribbean region
and female experience, absent from Gilroy's agenda. She goes against the grain of con­
temporary postcolonial criticism by demonstrating that the achievement of positive
female subjectivity is not contingent on exile. Dislocation is not regarded as a virtue in
itself, and readers are reminded that the Black Atlantic is and has always been a place of
perilous human traffic.
Key words:
Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic, Black Diaspora, Caribbean Feminism
This article will explore Caribbean female writing in the context of Black
diasporic criticism most eloquently articulated by Paul Gilroy in his seminal
study
The Black Atlantic.
The Black Atlantic paradigm had a powerful impact on
the narratives of Caribbean feminism which supplemented it with a new focus on
the Caribbean region as well as on female experience and intellectual tradition
that were absent from Gilroy's agenda. Since the early 1990s a number of feminist
critics such as Carole Boyce Davies and Myriam J. A. Chancy managed to deflect
the sway of Black Atlantic criticism,
re-routing
it to the Caribbean and altering its
gender configuration. Their respective books —
Black Women, Writing and Identity,
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GENDER STUDIES Vol. 1 No. 10/2011
Migrations of the Subject
(1994) and
Searching for Safe Spaces, Afro-Caribbean Women
in Exile
(1997) — focus on the figure of the Black Caribbean migrant woman jour­
neying through the Black Atlantic world. Both Boyce Davies and Chancy look
closely at the routes of contemporary postcolonial women from the West Indies
and examine how they construct their identities as hybrid persons straddled
between different worlds. In the words of Chancy (1997: 13): "Afro-Caribbean
women writers in western societies work at self-definition as they recuperate
their histories of lost African cultures, enslavement and exploitation through neo­
colonization in the countries to which they had emigrated." In other words, being
between nations or camps, as Gilroy would put it, and having multi-positional
status makes women more aware of different forms of oppression and enables
them to move from victimization to consciousness. Therefore, as Boyce Davies
(1994: 4) insists:
Black women writing [. . .] should be read as a series of boundary crossings and not a
fixed, geographical, ethnically or nationally bound category of writing. In cross-cultural,
transnational, trans-local diasporic perspectives, this reworking of the grounds of Black
women writing redefines identity away from exclusion and marginality. Black Women
writing/existence, marginalized in the terms of majority-minority discourses, within the
Euro-American male or female canons or Black male canon [. . .] redefines its identity as
it re-connects and re-members, brings together black women dislocated in space and
time.
The purpose of this article is to complement Chaney's and Boyce Davies's
persuasive readings of contemporary diasporic African Caribbean women writ­
ers with my own reading of a number of diasporic tales written by the young and
highly acclaimed Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, who made her lit­
erary debut after Chancy and Boyce Davies completed their studies. I will
attempt to theorize Edwidge Danticat's short story collection
Krick? Krack!
with­
in the Black Atlantic framework. It is my argument that in this short story cycle
Danticat explores a variety of diasporic voices of "black women dislocated in
space and time," to use Boyce Davies's words again, and in this way she "re­
members" and "re-connects" women across the black Atlantic world. Her stories
speak from different places and times and in this way they build bridges between
places and temporal frames. They spin a web of connections between rural and
urban Haiti and between Haiti and its "tenth department" — the diaspora in the
United States. Rocio G. Davis (2001: 73), who calls this collection a mother-daugh­
ter short story cycle, contends that Danticat's protagonists understand their place
in the community "through the bonds with women." They are drawn into a sup­
portive community of mothers, daughters, aunts and sisters who negotiate strate­
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GENDERED DIASPORIC IDENTITIES
gies of survival and identification and pass on to their daughters their feminine
and cultural identity. As Davis (2001: 74) claims:
[the] women [ ...] are primarily responsible for perpetuating culture and bonds with the
lost homeland. The mothers play major roles in the daughters' lives and growth, a role
that provides the daughters with models for self-affirmation. Although the mothers have
different names and individual stories they seem to be interchangeable in that their role
of mothers supersedes all others.
Davis (2001: 76) argues there are many stories in this collection where this
vital bond has been broken, but he nonetheless concludes: "[though] these stories
reflect loss and a sense of a lack of affiliation, the overwhelming movement is
towards reconciliation and pertinence, confirming the necessity and the possibil­
ity of seeking connection even after death."
Re-membering,
which is involved in
this process of making connections, recuperates the past and cures the wounds
on the often
dis-membered
bodies of women.
Danticat, who moved to New York at the age of twelve, is widely considered
a spokesperson for the one million Haitians living in exile in the United States. She
has experienced the feeling of loss and confusion that comes as a consequence of
migration: "when I first came [to the United States]," confessed Danticat, "I felt like
I was in limbo, between languages and cultures" (Farley 1998: 78). However, ulti­
mately, like other diasporic subjects described by Gilroy, Chancy and Boyce Davies,
Danticat (http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/farming_of_bones.htm)
found the condition of "limbo" enabling:
I think being an immigrant, you get to look at both your own culture and the culture you
come to with fresh eyes. This is a great point of observation from which to examine both
cultures, a very good space from which to write. I write both about Haiti and the United
States as an insider/outsider. This makes me work harder to understand both cultures. I
take nothing for granted about either place. Everything I write starts with my own per­
sonal quest for a better understanding of both places and their different culture.
Danticat's words resonate with Edward Said's (2001:186) conceptualization
of an exilic awareness that is "contrapuntal":
Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware
of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous
dimensions, awareness that — to borrow a phrase from music — is
contrapuntal.
Danticat's collection
Krick? Krack!
consists of nine stories that are held
together by recurrent characters and motifs such as violence, migration and sur­
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GENDER STUDIES Vol. 1 No. 10/2011
vival. The book begins in Haiti with a poignant story entitled ‘"Children of the
Sea/' reporting the fate of two lovers separated by the political turmoil following
the military
coup d'etat
which deposed President Aristide from power in 1991. It
closes with "Epilogue: Women like Us" in which the narrator probably Danticat
herself, pays homage to her female ancestors — the kitchen poets, which is also
an obvious allusion to Paule Marshall — Danticat's literary foremother. In
between, there are several interlocking stories that are set in different places: the
Haitian village of Ville-Rose ("Nineteen Thirty-Seven," "The Missing Peace,"
"Seeing Things Simply"); in Port-au-Prince or its shantytown ("Between the Pool
and Gardenias," "A Wall of Fire Rising," "Night Women"); or in the United States
("New York Day Women," "Caroline's Wedding"). All the stories are about
Haitian women trying to understand their difficult and troubled relationship to
their motherland.
The narrative structure that brings their distinct voices together creates a
collective protagonist — a community of women who are linked by their person­
al tragedies and by their struggle to survive in various adverse circumstances in
and away from Haiti. In this way the form and composition of the book enhances
the hybrid character of Danticat's diasporic subjects. As Davis (2001:72) observes,
"the short story cycle is itself a hybrid, occupying an indeterminate place within
the field of the narrative, resembling the novel in its totality, yet composed of dif­
ferent stories." The short story cycle can be seen as a "form that itself vacillates
between two genres" (Davis 2001: 72) and thus mirrors the concept of cultural or
ethnic hybridity. The cycle has an episodic and un-chronological method of nar­
ration and a non-linear plot — different temporalities and characters are inter­
twined into a network that unites several generations of women with different
experiences but similar traumas. In Evans Braziel's words (2005:80), this network
is "a
dyaspora
across space and times, across geographical boundaries and histor­
ical, temporal divisions."
Even though Danticat rarely joins in theoretical debates about "creolization,
transculturation, hybridity and diaspora" or "contact zones of nations, cultures
and regions" (Clifford 1994: 303), she does seem to endorse in her writing the
ethos of
"maroonage culturel"
(René Despestre's expression). In one of her inter­
views Danticat stated: "I'm maroonage" (Shea 1997:49). The motif of the maroon
that signals the migration of black people across five hundred years of Caribbean
history also taps into the dialectic of the Black Atlantic. Maroonage then can be
seen an alternative descriptor to creolization, and thus it can be viewed as anoth­
er way of conceptualizing and grounding the discussion of the diasporic move­
ment and displacement of the Caribbean people.
Krick? Krack!
maps a politics of cultural identity that is embedded in
Maroonage and mobility: "Our identities expand," claims Danticat (1995: 6), "the
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GENDERED D1ASPORIC IDENTITIES
more places we go, the more it expands, the more we add to our own Creolite."
Danticat's female protagonists not only cross national boundaries but also move
between the rural and urban setting. A number of tales in this collection narrate
the stories of country women who abandon their villages in search of a better life
in the city of Port-au-Prince, where they encounter prejudice and oppression.
They are often suspected of being
vodouissants
practicing black magic and are
accused of "[flying] in the middle of the night, [slipping] into slumber of innocent
children, and [stealing] their breaths" (Danticat 2001:37-38). In these tales the vil­
lage appears to be a secure environment associated with a more ethical and
meaningful African cosmology. The city, on the other hand, is associated with
modernity and the Western ideals of the homogeneous nation state that strives to
impose uni-centricity on the Haitian cultural melting-pot. With each move
Danticat's characters make, they are faced with new ideas and values which they
have to come to terms with, and the stories often capture their moments of nego­
tiation between their folkloric past and a new set of assumptions associated with
the urban center. Their dislocation results in severing the connections to their
mothers who stand guard over Haitian cultural sovereignty. The daughters try to
find their bearings in a world that is growing increasingly more complex as a
result of displacements and separations by finding their agency in re-membering
their mothers and re-connecting with their rural, ritualistic world. Numerous sto­
ries in this cycle emphasize the importance of looking back to one's cultural past
through matrilineal connections, female bonding and the tradition of storytelling
that "educates people in imaginative history and community values, [and] pro­
vides a link between that past and the lives of the people in the present" (Davis
2001: 69). In this way storytelling celebrating matrilineal connections becomes an
important component in the new migratory location of culture that bridges the
gap between the folkloric past and the urban/nationalistic or metropolitan/dias-
poric present and contributes to the hybrid identity beyond cultures.
In
Kri k? Kra k!
there are numerous stories of the imprisonment and politi­
cal persecution of women by the Haitian government in its strivings to suppress
the indigenous culture in order to win respectability in the eyes of the white
world. These stories are interspersed with episodes of flight, escape, and agency.
These forays are successful provided that the migratory subjects are able to take
with them all the vital parts of their cultural past as they embark on their jour­
neys. What Davis (2001: 76) says about the impact of exile and displacement
seems to be true for all Danticat's female protagonists, for those who traverse
both local and national boundaries:
[exile], which implies the loss of an original place, banishes belonging to memory and
often causes dislocation form both the old ways and the new home. The process of diasporic self
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