Unsilencing Défilés Daughters: Overcoming Silence in Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!

Abstract

Nearly everything that Edwidge Danticat writes engages with issues of globalization and its effects—immigration, identity, and borders—and she implies that it is sometimes necessary for her Haitians to leave Haiti to talk about and talk to Haiti. In the following article, I explore ways in which Edwidge Danticat's 1994 novel Breath, Eyes, Memory and 1996 collection of short stories Krik?Krak! illustrate how her characters are silenced in Haiti by violence and social pressure. Moreover, I contend that her narratives illustrate how this silence not only disrupts what Edouard Glissant describes as the continuum of history, but also prevents any mediation of trauma and retards positive change in these people's lives, both inside and outside of Haiti. Although this silence is not always broken when her Haitians leave Haiti, Danticat intimates that it can be, if those emigrants become fully functioning hybrid citizens. Unfortunately, as both of these books illustrate, immigrants often face linguistic challenges that often retard their successful hybridization, and a too successful assimilation can cut them off from their shared histories. Like the characters in these books, Danticat the hybrid globalized hyphenated citizen is empowered to speak from abroad and return to Haiti. I contend that it is globalization that makes mediation and recovery possible for her Haiti, but only if the result is a transnational hyphenated and hybridized citizen who tells their stories, speaks out, an…