The Role Of Memories In Edwidge Danticat's Nineteen Thirty-Seven

Stories are the way histories are handed down, tales that tell of where people have been, where they wanted to go, where they ended up. Memories are the sister of stories, looks cast over shoulders again and again in an attempt to return to the past. When your history is everywhere, stories and memories are allowed to fade, safe in the assurance that younger generations will look to books and museums to see the past. If your history is shut away, stories become the chief mechanism with which to hand down your culture. Storytelling is integral to Haitian culture as a way with which to preserve pieces of Haitian identity that would otherwise be lost, as becomes evident in Edwidge Danticat’s short story “Nineteen Thirty-Seven.”

Memories dictate
“I am a child of that place,” they say, “I come from that long trail of blood” (Danticat 38). These women come from a history of trauma, from the women who were there to the daughters of the women who crossed the river and bear their horror in the form of memories. This place has marked them so significantly that it is their place of origin, where their lives began. Even in stories, they “come from the puddle of that river” (Danticat 39). For these members of society, their story begins at Massacre River. Anyone who listens and understands can hear Josephine’s mother “who speaks through her” in these call and response questions, can see their shared history flowing down from daughter to daughter. Josephine’s mother lost her own mother in the massacre, and has created these questions and this group for women who have undergone the same. In both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the Parsley Massacre was erased from history for a long while. This river that had stolen so much from them continued to flow onward, unacknowledged with the exception of their stories. They have to keep the story going, to let their children and their children’s children know what happened here, let them know that their dead will not be forgotten, that their history matters.