Children have a bigger chance of having a better future than their parents or ancestors. In the novel “Krik? Krak!”, the author Edwidge Danticat uses the motifs of babies/children and generations to illustrate that Haitians survive off of hope for the future and for change. She does this in order to present the idea that Haitians create their own hope, or false hope, in order to get through hard times. When Haitians lose hope, they lose their will to live. In the chapter “Children of the Sea” a boy, who tries to escape Haiti on a boat, is writing to his girlfriend who is stuck on the island. He tells her about the horrors of the sea, and how a girl about their age had a baby. The baby died; depression and disbelief overtook Celianne. The baby was her hope, and then died a little while after she gave birth. She …show more content…
In “Between the Pool and the Gardenias”,there is a woman who finds a baby on the sidewalk and decides to take her for herself. She names the baby and cares for her, but the baby isn’t alive. To her, the baby is hope which she had with her own baby, but she died. Now with this new baby, she doesn’t want to accept the fact that the baby is dead and she can’t take care of her, “She looked the same as she did when I found her. She continued to look like that for three days. After that, I had to bathe her constantly to keep down the smell... It seemed like she had aged in four days as many years as there were between me and my dead aunts and grandmothers” (pages 84-85). Even though the baby is showing all these signs that she is decomposing, she still wants to keep her since the baby is her only hope. She knows that if she loses all hope, she won’t have a reason to keep living. She had her own hope once, but since her baby died, she needs to find another way to get hope. So she finds a dead baby and tries to wash and take care of her. The woman creates her own false hope to keep her