The Theme Of Freedom In Edwidge Danticat's A Wall Of Fire Rising

How can people escape poverty and retrieve freedom while being faced by oppression? The disturbing deeds of those who endure and experience the disputes of Haiti prompts the normal lives of an average Haitian. Despite the troubles the characters must go through, the novel Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat proposes that sacrifices for freedom allow hope for the next generation, but result in brutality and a loss of innocence for the current generation. In the short story “A Wall of Fire Rising” Guy, a father, and a loving husband creates a public scene of his perception on freedom by jumping out of a balloon and committing suicide. Working hard hours, he endeavors a job at the sugar mill and later flies the balloon from the sugar mill. When Guy implies the idea of escaping their home to his wife Lili, he says, “Sometimes, I just want to take that big balloon and ride it up in the air. I’d like to fly off somewhere and keep floating until I got to a really nice place,”(61). Guy not only wants to escape his current situation, but he wants a better future for his family and especially his younger son Little Guy. Guy
realizes that he won’t be getting the job at the sugar mill, so he begins to lose his sanity indefinitely. Guy states “I remember my father, who was a very poor struggling man all his life. I remember him as a man that I would never want to be” (63). Guy reflects on his father’s legacy and how he would not want to live a life just like his father did. In the short story “Night Women” the mother of a child facades her identity of being a prostitute from her son to keep his future bright. The woman explains to her son that the men that come in at night are angels to keep her son innocent and lies of what she does for a living to make money. The woman says, “We put on his ruffled Sunday suit and I tell him that we are expecting a sweet angel and where angels tread, the hosts must be as beautiful as a floating hibiscus” (74). The boy’s mother is certainly didactic when coming down to her son because she only wants what’s best for him. The woman makes sacrifices by working as a prostitute to preserve her son’s innocence. Not only does the women tell her son that the men that come visit her at night are angels, but she also says they can come whenever they want so the boy is not frightened by the presence of the strangers. The women also says to her son, “Darling, the angels have themselves a lifetime to come to us” (75). The women convinces her son that all the men that come visit her at night are angels to keep him innocent. The mother of this boy makes sacrifices so he is not exposed to the sick, demented world they live in at such a young age.
In the last example, “Nineteen Thirty Seven,” a woman named Josephine visits her mother often to soon realize all the sacrifices, and brutality her mother endured while she slowly died in prison.
Josephine’s mother Manman explains that, “she had never talked very much about the future. She had always believed more in the past” (34). Manman is concerned about her daughter’s life after fleeing to Dominica with her daughter to keep her future bright. Jacqueline helps Josephine after finding her mother dead by embracing the same traditions as her mother. Jacqueline says that “life is never lost, another one always comes up to replace the last. Will you come watch when they burn the body?” (41). Jacqueline is trying to notify that what happened to Josephine’s mother is tradition and her sacrifice of her own life would be an important part of their
tradition.
Haitians must retain their current situation by creating freedom and hope for the next generation. In each short story Danticat conveys a message: the current situation must involve brutality but the outcome could allow freedom for the next generation. Haiti’s current situation is a global phenomenon that must be aided in the future.