Nineteen Thirty-Seven, Danticat

Nineteen Thirty-Seven

            In the book Krik ? Krak! By Edwidge Danticat, a short story narrated by daughter Josephine, who visits with her mother, Manmen, who is imprisoned in Haiti because she was accused of being a witch. In the beginning of the story, Josephine’s mother swam across a river of blood from Haiti to the Dominican Republic which is referenced as the Massacre River, just shortly before giving birth to her. This time coincides with the death of Manmen’s mother and her body brutally butchered in the Dominican Republic and thrown in the river which divides it from Haiti. In this story, Josephine begins to relate to the suffrage of women to include her mother, with hopes for a future but never forgetting the past which allows insight into her own make up.

“My Madonna cried…” is how the story begins. Josephine first meets an old woman who shows interest in the Madonna. The Madonna remains the center of this mother-daughter relationship and the silence of communication between the two. Whenever Josephine visits her mother, she could not speak but would faithfully bring the Madonna statue. The sorrow symbolized as a perfect tear from wax that would drip from the eyes melted from the heat. This spoke volumes without words to amplify the loss Josephine felt or the slow death her mother felt was upon her.

Josephine recalls rituals her mother performed with her at the river each year prior to her imprisonment. Josephine would expect to see the river to be crimson with blood, but when she saw it, it was the clearest water she had ever seen. The water could be seen as both an obstacle and a vessel for the escape from pain and death. The flight for which can be envisioned from the descriptive details of flames, not unlike the accusation that the women accused of being witches could strip their skins and rise in the night as birds of fire. Josephine’s first words to her mother were to ask if she could fly. Deep down it seems Josephine’s believed her mother could use her powers to escape, it would have to be through the river, where that had been hope once before.

Josephine is met by a character Jacqueline, who was a performer of similar rituals as her mother had done. It is Jacqueline who takes Josephine to see her mother’s body burned. They traveled to the prison where Manmen was quartered, and were told by the inmates of the gruesome demise. Clutching the pillow made of her mother’s hair, Josephine then recalls the tales from her mother, the story about how the life of her mother lost yet the birth of her daughter as a symbol of hope. Then Jacqueline tells her, “life is never lost, another one always comes up to replace the last.” The year was nineteen hundred and thirty-seven; her mother took flight in Josephine’s mind, envisioning her leap from the Dominican soil into the water arriving on the Haitian side. Where the clear river water seemed to glow red, and her body covered in blood, looked as though it were covered in flames. The sorrowful moment disrupted by a glimmer of hope that the flights would be joyful.