Real Women Wear Red

Alice Walker said, 

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.” 

Edwidge Danticat appears to make a similar statement about the color red in her collection of short stories Krik? Krak!.  Red is one of the most vibrant colors on the spectrum of light and there is an implicit boldness when one wears or sees the color red. 

In Krik? Krak!, the female protagonists of each story must learn how to survive with broken hearts, broken homes, and broken histories.

Through seemingly unrelated, yet interrelated short stories, nine stories total, the author explores several themes; motherhood, abandonment, imprisonment, and death which all figure heavily in the text. However, even through their painful shame of corrupt military occupancy, as Henley writes about in “Invictus,” their heads are “bloody yet unbowed” (line 8), because they have hope. Even the text says,

hope is the bigger weapon of all to use against us. people will believe anything.

Yes, there is despair, but the people never give up hope. And we know: 

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. 

See, writers like Danticat, and Toni Morrison, use the supernatural world to explain the natural. During the military occupation, the murders were so senseless and so numerous that there had to be a reason. Killing a woman because another woman’s child died made no logical sense, so it had to be a result of the woman dealing in witchcraft. A pregnant woman being able to outrun Dominican soldiers was impossible so she had to have flown across the river. There is a literary advantage inherent in magical realism because the author can explain the unexplainable with the supernatural.

In "Nineteen Thirty-Seven," the reader is taken through the narrator's initiation and evaluation process. As she is evaluating the woman she encounters, the woman is evaluating her. She says, 

If she were really from the river [where the Parsley massacre occurred in 1937], she would know. She would know all the things that my mother had said to the sun as we sat with our hands dipped in the water, questioning each other, making up codes and disciplines by which we could always know who the other daughters of the river were:

Who are you? I asked her.

I am a child of that place," she answered. I come from that long trail of blood.

Where are you going?

I am walking into the dawn.

Who are you? 

I am the first daughter of the first star.

Where do you drink when you are thirsty?

I drink the tears from the Madonna's eyes.

And if not there?

I drink the dew.

And if you can't find the dew?

I drink from the rain before it falls.

If you can't drink there?

I drink from the turtle's hide.

How did you find your way to me?

By the light of the Mermaid's comb.

Where does your mother come from?

Thunderbolts, lightning, and all things that soar.

Who are you?

I am the flame and the spark by which my mother lived.

Where do you come from?

I come from the puddle of that river.

Speak to me.

You hear my mother who speaks through me. She is the shadow that follows my shadow. The flame at the tip of my candle. The ripple in the stream where I was my face. Yes. I will eat my tongue if ever I whisper that name, the name of that place across the river that took my mother away from me. 

I know then that she had been with us. 

Edwidge Danticat makes it her personal responsibility to find and give a voice to every woman who lost hers during the occupation. Using a backdrop of magically real and a beautiful city named Ville Rose, Danticat utilizes the strongest color in the red to symbolize the strength of the women to died during the worst massacre in the history of Haiti. She gives these mortal women a gift no army could plunder, immortality through the written word.

This book is about the triumph of the human spirit. How the belief that you can overcome leads to overcoming. Krik? Krik! is encouragement for anyone who believes the road is too rough, the finish line too far: There will be a tomorrow... and your future is looking better than your past.