Krik? Krak!

Krik? Krak!  By Edwidge Danticat  224 p.  

Reviewed by Rae C.

From the epigraph by Sal Scalora:

We tell the stories so that the young ones

will know what came before them.

They say “Krik?” and we say “Krak!”

Our stories are kept in our hearts.

I had read some of Danticat’s work on the Haitian diaspora and also a YA book on based on the Arawak natives of Hispaniola before reading  The Dew Breakers. It is a novel-in-stories.  It embedded itself on me so deeply, was true, so honest, so primal, so affecting, that I had to take a break of several months before diving in to “Le Monde de Danticat” again.  (Or I suppose rather, according to Google’s Haitian Creole translator, “Danticat non mond lan.”)

Krik? Krak! is almost a novel-in-stories.  The family legacy, stories of lives told great-grandmother to grandmother to mother to daughter, and cousins, and godmothers.  You will almost drown in the Massacre river; you will emerge blood red, the ghost of a capsized migrant drowned at sea attempting to escape to the U.S.

The titular story and Caroline’s Wedding, A Wall of Fire Rising, and 1937 have the strongest links, and the greatest impact.  1937 in particular will leave you reeling, but have the courage to read it.  Because it will also change your life.  

Between The Pool and the Gardenias is unbelievably shattering. A childless mother and a lifeless child, and a disastrous ending.  Night Women could have easily been titled Night Goddesses.   Danticat gives the men in the story a dignity that they almost do not deserve, that a lesser writer would have withheld.

Beautiful, evocative, heartbreaking, inspiring, sad, happy, aching, and joyful...   The whole of human existence can be found in these pages.  And Haiti itself is there always- the sounds, scents, spices, the ocean and the trees, the breadfruit, the sugarcane.

For any woman who writes- Haitian or otherwise- the last story, Epilogue: Women Like Us, on kitchen poets, is a necessary read. 

You thought that if you didn’t tell the stories, the sky would fall on your head.  You often thought that without the trees, the sky would fall on your head.  You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice. There have been days when the sky was as close as your hair to falling on your head.

This fragile sky has terrified you your whole life.  Silence terrifies you more than the pounding of a million pieces of steel chopping away at your flesh.  Sometimes, you dream of hearing only the beating of your own heart, but this has never been the case.  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.