Sounding displaced memories: Narrative soundscapes in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!

Abstract

In her short story collection Krik? Krak!, the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat realizes new formal strategies that integrate vernacular orality into her writings. She does so to construct evocative narrative soundscapes through which difficult memories can be processed. This article examines Danticat’s approach to otherness, migration, and displacement in an attempt to disentangle the function of language, sound, and memory in the development of authentic Caribbean identities and literatures. It aims to trace the workings of sound and mobility in the literary spaces Danticat creates to revisit colonial and patriarchal history and, in so doing, reroot and reroute cultural memories previously lost to violence and organized forgetting. In crossing and replicating the oceanic routes in which past and present intersect, Krik? Krak! opens critical sites of (d)enunciation that rework personal and collective memories of displacement by means of language and sound.