Reading Order
Krik? Krak! Reading Order
Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak! (1995) is a debut story collection comprising nine stories about Haitian women — under the Duvalier dictatorship, on the boats of the Haitian refugee crisis, and in the New York diaspora. A finalist for the National Book Award, it takes its title from the Haitian oral storytelling tradition: 'Krik?' ('Do you want a story?') answered by 'Krak!' ('Yes, tell us!'), and established Danticat as one of the essential voices of Caribbean literature in English.
Where to start
Krik? Krak!
Complete Krik? Krak! Book List
- 1Buy
Krik? Krak!
Edwidge Danticat·1995·The complete collection. Entirely standalone. - Buy
Breath, Eyes, Memory
OptionalEdwidge Danticat·1994·Sophie Caco from Haiti to New York — Danticat's debut novel; the companion to Krik? Krak! in its portrait of Haitian women carrying trauma from Haiti into the diaspora; overlapping settings and concerns with a more sustained narrative arc. - Buy
The Dew Breaker
OptionalEdwidge Danticat·2004·Nine linked stories about a Haitian torturer in Brooklyn — Danticat's most formally inventive work; thematically continuous with Krik? Krak! in its engagement with Haitian political violence and diaspora life, but organized around a single figure rather than a range of women. - Buy
The Farming of Bones
OptionalEdwidge Danticat·1998·Amabelle surviving the 1937 Parsley Massacre — the historical novel that completes the portrait of twentieth-century Haitian and Caribbean political violence that Krik? Krak! and Breath, Eyes, Memory approach from the personal and domestic level.
Krik? Krak! — Frequently Asked Questions
What does "Krik? Krak!" mean and why is it the title?
Krik? Krak! is the call and response of Haitian oral storytelling: a storyteller who wants to tell a story asks 'Krik?', and the audience who wants to hear it answers 'Krak!' It is the Haitian equivalent of 'Once upon a time' and 'And they all lived happily ever after' — a ritual frame that marks the beginning of a story and the relationship between teller and listener that makes storytelling possible. Danticat uses this frame as the title for her collection to make explicit the tradition she is working within and extending: she is telling stories in the Haitian oral tradition, even though she is telling them in English, in a written form, to readers who may have no connection to Haiti. The final story of the collection — 'Caroline's Wedding' — ends with a mother asking her daughter 'Krik?' and the daughter answering 'Krak!', and the collection as a whole is organized around this dynamic: each story is an offering, and the reader's engagement with it is the answer that makes the offering meaningful. Danticat has said that she thinks of the collection as a way of passing on stories about Haitian women that might otherwise disappear — the stories of women whose lives would not have been recorded in any other form.
Which stories in Krik? Krak! are most essential?
The collection is unified enough that reading it in order, from beginning to end, is the recommended approach. That said, several stories have achieved particular recognition. 'Children of the Sea' — told in two alternating voices, one a Haitian boat person on a leaking vessel in the Caribbean, the other the voice's girlfriend hiding in the countryside during a military crackdown — is the most formally inventive and the most widely anthologized; it introduces the collection's central concerns with sea crossings, political violence, and the impossibility of communication between those who are separated. 'A Wall of Fire Rising' — about a young boy who dreams of flying a hot air balloon owned by a sugar plantation, and his father's relationship to that dream — is the most self-contained and the most taught. 'Caroline's Wedding' — about a young Haitian-American woman marrying a man who is not Haitian, and her mother's grief at the cultural distance this represents — closes the collection on its most domestic and contemporary note, bringing the preceding historical stories into a present-day Brooklyn frame.
How does Krik? Krak! relate to Haitian history?
The stories in Krik? Krak! are anchored in specific moments of Haitian political history: the Duvalier dictatorship and the Tonton Macoutes (the regime's paramilitary force), the boat people exodus of the late 1970s and 1980s, and the military coup that ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991. Danticat does not use this history as background; it is the active force shaping the lives of her characters. The boat people who appear in 'Children of the Sea' are fleeing the coup; the women who hide bodies in 'Night Women' are hiding them from soldiers; the community in 'Between the Pool and the Gardenias' is shaped by the specific cruelties of a dictatorship that used rape and violence against women as political tools. But Danticat is not writing political history — she is writing about the interior experience of people living inside political history, and the stories are organized around what it feels like to be a woman in Haiti during the periods they describe, not around the events themselves.
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