Krik By Edwidge Danticat: The Danger Of The Single Story

The danger of the “single story” can be found in everyone. There are stereotypes and flawed storytellers about every country, group, opinion, and person, though it often gets overlooked or accepted. Edwidge Danticat challenges the “single story” of Haiti by writing ten chapters and an epilogue that show the stories of multiple different lives found in Haitians in her book Krik? Krak! To Danticat, there is no single story of Haiti, but a group of stories that can form unity. The novel Krik? Krak! threatens the “Single Story” because it isn’t limited to one perspective, it shows a diverse series of experiences. For Danticat to have the most authentic, diverse group of stories, she would have to embrace all viewpoints, including those who have

Out of all ten stories Danticat tells in Krik? Krak!, two chapters stand out as the stereotypical, oppressed life of a Haitian. Chapter two, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven'', shows a daughter watching her mother being arrested and abused due to an action she did not commit. The soldiers are cruel, harmful, and unjust and the mother is weakened and near death in her jail cell, “When I rushed out I saw a group of people taking my mother away. Her face was bleeding from the pounding blows of rocks and sticks and the fists of strangers,” (34). This can be a version of the single story of Haiti, while it doesn’t show much poverty, the mother is being oppressed, going through the hardship of being treated unjustly in her jail cell. Danticat tells this story at the beginning of the novel, the second chapter of the book, giving the reader a start that they are more familiar with, rather than digging into the stories no one hears about. In “A Wall of Fire Rising '', chapter three of the

Krak!, enunciates the importance of telling stories for everyone and why she wrote the novel, to dispute the single story of Haiti. In her last chapter, “Epilogue”, she tells her own story of writing this novel and why she wrote it. She uses the analogy of braids as writing, “Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity,” (192). The braid itself is Krik? Krak!, each section of hair is the story, and the individual strands are each people who have different experiences, “Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women in your family,” (192). This part shows Danticat’s intentions with the book, the whole chapter talks about her experiences and why she wrote Kirk? Krak! She had the intention of breaking the single story, for readers to have a deeper understanding and viewpoint on the experiences that Haitians go through. Talking about the differences in the strands of hair that go into the braid shows how everyone's individual story is different and how it cannot be forced to be the same as the