The Influence of Hope Haiti was once a country filled with luscious trees and rich soil. It was a beautiful land before careless explorers came and took advantage of its resources. Years later, Haiti’s inhabitants are still suffering from the damage caused by the greediness of their ruthless leaders. Despite the destruction of their country, hope has been pushing these people to persevere through their struggles. Krik? Krak! By Edwidge Danticat is a collection of stories that gives readers insight on the suffering that Haitians have to face each day. Danticat’s characters show that during times of oppression and pain, a person’s decisions are influenced by hope. Danticat’s first story, Children of the Sea, shows that hope motivates…show more content… Guy, the main character of this story, is a poor worker at the mill. He often dreams about having an adventure and flying on his boss’ hot air balloon. One night he tells his wife, Lili that he can put their son on the list to get a job at the mill. She refuses, saying. “ I don’t want him on the list...For a young boy to be on any list like that might influence his destiny. I don’t want him on the list”(56). Being on the list means having a better chance of a future free of poverty, yet Lili still doesn’t allow her husband to put their son’s name down. She has hopes that he will someday become something great and doesn’t want to ruin that future. Guy has strong hopes for his son as well and he shows this through his suicide. Throughout the story, Guy is longing for something exciting for him to experience. No longer able to cope with being limited to his uneventful life, he gets into a hot air balloon and starts to fly across the town. As his family stands and watches below, he jumps off, landing shortly after, his lifeless eyes still staring at the sky(65). Guy chooses to kill himself because he hopes that his death will be enough to give Little Guy the push needed to avoid a life similar to Guy’s. A Wall of Fire Rising displays the power of hope as it helps Lili when she rejects a meaningless life for her son even though it may protect…show more content… Nineteen Thirty-Seven follows a girl named Josephine and her trips to visit her imprisoned mother who had been accused of having wings of flame, like a monster. Josephine recalls a story about her mother fleeing across the river where thousands were massacred: “On that day so long ago, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river” (42). New life is often seen as hope, and Josephine is that new life and hope. Her mother puts herself through incredible pain to make sure that the next generation lives on. Unlike Josephine’s mother, whose hope was aimed towards the future, Danticat expresses her hope for the people from the past. In the epilogue, she writes about the discouragement she faced as a Haitian author. She also writes about her ancestors who were always with her. She ends the recollection with “And this was [my] testament to the way that these women lived and died and lived again” (196). Danticat wrote Krik? Krak! because she hoped that by doing so, the women who lived before her would never be forgotten and remain as strong influences in her own life. Before she begins her first story, the author quotes Sal Scalora, who wrote “Our stories are kept in our hearts.” The epilogue shows that the stories
