Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak!

Performative Features in Adults' Haitian Creole Narratives

“…This project has documented that narratives of ordinary Haitian adults in HC are rich, highly performative narratives that reflect and, in turn, are reflected in what prior researchers have noted regarding fictional Creole narratives (Benedicty, 2008;Davis, 2001;Gerber, 2000;McGee, 2012;Munro, 2007). The performative features of these narratives were captured by means of an analysis developed to describe the oral narrative literary tradition of Africa (Okpewho, 1992).…”

“…Benedicty (2008), investigating narrational devices in Frankétienne's Les Affres d'un défi , notes that these include unconventional storytelling that is “repetitive and dense,” as well as what Jonassaint hypothesizes is a dynamic way of transmitting a story, one that requires collaboration and communal belonging on the part of narrators, characters, and the audience. There are a few analyses of the fictional writings of Edwidge Danticat (e.g., Davis, 2001; Gerber, 2000) and Madison Smartt Bell (Munro, 2007). There is an analysis of the use of dreams in Haitian Vodou (McGee, 2012), which finds them a “source of liturgical novelty.” McGee (2012) notes that Haitian Creole (HC) speakers have a cultural preference for narrating stories in general in the present progressive (“I am going over here, now I am doing this”) due to a cultural preference for “a particular performative style, in which the story is enacted as though it were happening in that moment” with listeners responding throughout (pp.…”

The science teacher as the organic link

“…A search through multiple resources yielded the following examples: (a) In discussing Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak!, Davis (2001) applied it to describe ''how storytelling, which educates people in imaginative history and community values, provides an organic link between the past and the lives of the people in the present''; (b) Discussing Dr. Martin Luther King, Thomas (1993) wrote in the Amsterdam News: ''As Professor Cornel West has written, Dr. King was a prophetic Christian from the African-American church tradition who also typified the intellectual with an organic link to the community. Dr. King did not just study and talk about us: he ate, slept and lived with us, and ultimately he died for all of us''; and (c) when discussing Ronald Reagan becoming president, the Boston Globe wrote ''One person, who worked closely with Nixon for years, says pointedly that the Nixon relationships with so many people here remain too close and too complicated.…”

Doble conciencia en el cuento “Children of the Sea” de Edwidge Danticat

“…Sobre el segundo señala que, debido a la ausencia, el silencio y la marginalización a la que han sido sometidas, las escritoras caribeñas posicionan la oralidad en sus textos, con lo que subvierten el imperialismo y abandonan lo masculino, lo que resulta en "el destronamiento del texto maestro fálico" 17 (p.4). Rocio G. Davis (2001) especifica que con el storytelling Danticat resguarda "la tradición y la identidad femenina, ya que convierte las historias de opresión en parábolas de autoafirmación y empoderamiento individual" 18 (p.68). Entonces, siguiendo la tradición de las escritoras caribeñas, la estructura de las narraciones orales es central en la obra de Danticat y se revela desde el título del libro: Krik?…”

“…Dicha obra se construye con base en el storytelling, ya que Hodge vincula varias historias, haciendo una "apropiación deliberada de los rasgos estructurales del relato oral" 19 (Davies, 1990, p.6). El segundo libro de Danticat corresponde a esa tradición literaria femenina y caribeña, que ha sido encasillada por Rocio G. Davis (2001) en la forma del short story cycle, ciclo de cuentos cortos, en la que se vinculan unas a otras, pero a la vez son independientes (p.65). Sobre los cuentos y su forma Danticat declara que está en sus raíces: "Es mi primer amor.…”