Death in the Work of Danticat, Marshall and Roumaine Essay

Introduction

The Makonde people of southern Tanzania produce a piece of artwork that is called the “Tree of Life” or Ujamaa. The wood carving depicts the members of an extended family, both past and present generations, that seem to be supporting each other around the family ancestor, emphasising the importance of both unity and continuity. African society, even when a member of the family has died, still play an important role in family life and are recognised through rituals. Africans believe that dead or lost loved ones watch over them and participate in their everyday lives.

Death, for many cultures, serves as a new beginning, where reincarnation starts, where heaven or life after death is finally attained or experience. In many kinds of literature and folklore, Africans believe that their dead ancestors look after the living. This has been maintained in their rituals, even as some form of the diaspora has led them to many parts of the world, enmeshed in other beliefs and cultures, as well as embracing and integrating the European’s Christianity with their own ancestral or even voodoo beliefs during the occupation, and even oppression.

This paper shall try to point out what African-Americans or creoles of Haiti descent through the books Krik? Krak? by Edwidge Danticat, Praise Song for the Widow by Paule Marshall, and Masters of the Dew by Jaques Roumaine try to represent death, its connection with the continuity of life, or even afterlife.

Discussion

While at some direct point, Krik? Krak? It seems to be old stories about the Western migration: of impoverished peasants to fearful fugitive to cautious immigrant, and finally, as the end of a torturous marathon race and assimilation, it is also about the unimaginable pain and death. And in between all these, along the way, the stories about man’s inhumanity to man but more importantly, man’s inhumanity to women make us question whether or not the escape from oppression was worth the inhumanity (Edelman, 1995).

These are nine interconnected tales that tell of 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”, “Women Like Us”, “A Wall of Fire Rising,” about an impoverished couple trying to raise their child without filling him with the despair and hopelessness that has infused their own lives, 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 memory and retelling of old stories of struggle and death, the Haitians in Danticat’s tales were able to achieve immortality. The result is an extension to lives that were too often short, brutal and devoid of grace and beauty (Edelman, 1995). The despair of Célianne in “Children of the Sea” as she throws herself into the ocean is felt by the male narrator of the same story when he embraces death and by Grace’s mother in “Caroline’s Wedding” when she goes to a mass for refugees who, like Célianne, died at sea. Guy, in “A Wall of Fire Rising,” tries to defy his hopelessness by stealing a brief moment of glory, even though he knows it would end in death. The mother in “New York Day Women” makes a new life for herself in the United States, but she still has to deal with the suffering she left behind. Stories are passed on from mothers to daughters, preserving a sense of history while creating a record for the future. “The Missing Piece” has Emilie tell Lamort they should write down what has happened for posterity, but Lamort says she has retained posterity in the form of her family as she inherited her mother’s and her grandmother’s experiences, and when she is old, her own daughters will inherit her experiences. Josephine was also told by her mother in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” that her birth made up for her grandmother’s death. While death broke one link in the family chain, a new one was formed, and the characters sense the presence of their dead ancestors and feel connected to their pain. Their place in the world is understood in terms of their mothers’ and ancestors’ experiences, and they pass these experiences on to their children in order to keep the family history alive. The epilogue of “Women Like Us” explains that these experiences fuel her writing, giving her oppressed ancestors a voice.

One of the more notable depictions in Krik? Krak? is hope which has the power to give people strength in times of suffering. However, it also threatens to blind them to reality as most of the characters in Krik? Krak! Hold on to hope in order to keep themselves alive. The narrator in “Night Women” makes up stories about an angel coming to rescue her and her son in order to hide the truth from him at the same time using these stories to escape the harsh reality of her life. Likewise, in “Seeing Things Simple,” Princesse drifts into another realm as an artist and immersing herself in the reality of a foreign painter. The characters continue living by denial and wait for the day when such denial will no longer be necessary, which is quite escapist, at the same time, pathetic. This coping strategy is quite dangerous such as in “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” where Marie’s hope becomes a delusion: she pretends to find the daughter she always wanted, leading her to hold on to the baby even as it begins to rot, of which she is arrested when the pool-cleaner, whom Marie previously thought had cared about her, accuses her of witchcraft. Other characters also find out that too much hope can result in crippling despair when the harsh reality sets in, but they seem to have no choice at all but a delusion of hope or a painful reality.

In Haiti, as represented in these stories, crying represents life always marked by pain, so that as long as Haitians live, they suffer and cry. Both Célianne’s baby in “Children of the Sea” and the dead baby in “Between the Pool and the Gardenias” are dead as they no longer cry. Marie wishes no babies cried because a dead baby cannot feel pain. Josephine’s mother in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” makes the Madonna statuette cry because her suffering has not died. In “Women Like Us,” the narrator’s mother compares the sound of her writing to the sound of crying, and she writes to express her and her ancestor’s suffering to keep their painful stories alive.

The fiction of Paule Marshall Praise song for the Widow is considered as an imaginative reconstruction of African history and culture connecting all peoples of African descent that emphasizes cultural patterns and American materialism. In Praise Song for the Widow (1983), the focus is on how the language of dialectic and oral storytelling establishes a communal cultural epistemology, how concentric structural patterns and deliberate overlaps of time and place reflect traditional African values. Likewise, traces of African ritual, rite and folk belief show how a foundation for cultural unity and action within fragmented social settings is created. But more importantly, the book points out how woman-centred African communal values promise spiritual transformation and a more powerful black female identity. Denniston (1995) considers Marshall’s abiding concern for how confusion about and alienation from one’s cultural groundings may bring the very meaning of New World existence.

The story of Avey Johnson, an engaging protagonist, took her on a journey from a confused, troubled widow on an expensive cruise to a liberated woman with a deeper understanding of her cultural and familial heritage interspersed with recollections of her relationship with her dead husband. Johnson begins to have symptoms of both mental and physical illness in her Caribbean cruise as well as discovering the importance of knowing and remembering her past. Avey was haunted by her husband’s memory, a hardworking and ambitious man who would do the work of two persons in order to survive. And at the end of the day, he makes impassioned love to Avey as if it would cleanse away whatever shame or depiction he presented in the department store he works at. After climbing the proverbial ladder of success, Jerome had a fit and shouted: “The trouble with half these Negroes out here is that they spend all their time blaming the white man for everything. He won’t give em a job. Won’t let em in his schools. Won’t let em in his neighbourhood. Just won’t give em a break. He’s the one keeping em down. When the problem really is most of em don’t want to hear the word work.’ If they’d just cut out all the good-timing and get down to some hard work, put their minds to something, they’d get somewhere”.

But Avey reminds him that he had been turned away from jobs because of his colour. And he became overworked where another could take his credit. Jerome Johnson was not moved, instead of showing the strain of the past that has taken a toll on him. But he now returns home without the groomed moustache of his youth, proud of his accomplishments in a world that had once denied him. He failed to realize that in pursuing success in the Caucasian world by pretending to be someone other than himself, he left a piece of himself behind. The burden of colour is masked, and that mask has become his face that even Avey had come to mourn the loss of the man he once was, of whom she loved and cared for. This man she failed to recognise anymore until the final years before Jerome Johnson’s own death.

Governors of the Dew, by far the most known work of Rumanian Jacques, is a novel that reveals the country life, evokes the Haitian enchanted landscape. This is a story centring on the return of Manuel, a “prodigal son”, to his once-thriving home community– we have found that the promised land is the home that we grow up in. But the community is now in the midst of drought and hard times. As a result, the community has lost its sense of togetherness, and a long-standing family feud mars any chance for reconciliation. The people who stayed behind have undermined the world that has provided for them in the search for life, and now there is no more water with which to keep up their fields and their lives. With the return of the “columbite”, Manuel obtains water, but at the cost of his life, and by taking it from yet another forest.

Conclusion

In consideration of the above novels, I may conclude that through Krik? Krak? by Edwidge Danticat, Praise Song for the Widow by Paule Marshall, and Masters of the Dew by Jaques Roumaine, Haitian novelists of African descent have inherited an oral tradition, as well as defied death itself as they maintained to keep the memories of their ancestors alive. By writing, death was conquered.

As for life, while death seems to have been inevitable in all of the novels, there is the continuity of struggle, the experience of pain, crying, and a variety of expressions of hope, both positive and negative. Nevertheless, these are all signs of life, hope, and evolution.

It is then through the writings of these authors that eternal life is achieved, not only for them but for their source of inspiration and stories, orally and by memory, both experienced, passed on to them and recited. While the first two used a solid influence and relationship with their mothers or grandmothers or even an old woman stranger, the other one indicates the passive, accepting role of a woman as the lead character is a man. Somehow, Praise Song for the Widow by Paule Marshall evolved on the life of a couple who evolved from poverty to beyond their fellow’s reach, of which only memories were left of a wonderful man Avey loved, and of which not even death, symbolised here twice as there was the death of Jerome Johnson as the man Avey loved and the physical death of Jerome as the man she no longer recognised.

Ironically, death is symbolized by silence, of having to stop crying. It is also of note that water may serve as a new symbol for life but also serves to take life. All throughout, there is the depiction on the importance of African oral tradition, ancestral belief and loyalty, as well as the continuity of life through another generation, of which was passed on the preservation of culture and belief that the ancestors have their link with life through them, the living.

References

1. Edelman, David Louis (1995). ‘Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat: book Review” Baltimore City Paper, 1995.
2. Denniston, Dorothy Hamer (1995). The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press