Rena Kob's Imagery

Rena Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses the imagery in "Children of the Sea."
At the age of twenty-six, young for a writer, Edwidge Danticat has many honors credited to her name. Aside from publishing two books, the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory and a collection of short stories, Krik? Krak!, she has also received much critical acknowledgment. Her novel earned her recognition by the New York Times as one of the "thirty young artists to watch," and it was nominated for a National Book Award in 1995. KriW Krak! drew as many rave reviews; Publishers Weekly writes that it "confirm[s] Danticat's reputation as a remarkably
He wants his daughter to get rid of her radio show tapes because they would incriminate her. When Madan Roger is attacked by the secret police, he refuses to go to her aid because he knows he cannot protect anyone. While he is presented as a man too willing to submit to the injustices of Duvalier's regime— "you can let them kill somebody because you are afraid, they are the law. it is their right," he says — he does have a reason for being so paralyzed. The mother tells the daughter that the Tonton Macoutes were "going to peg [her] as a member of the youth federation and then take [her] away." To save his daughter's life, the father bribed them with the family's money, home, and property. Her lover, unable to keep secrets, sacrifices himself to his beliefs But her father, who keeps even this a secret, "gave everything he had" to save someone else. While the father is willing to find a way to live in Haiti, the young man, though he does not "want to be a martyr," cannot keep his feelings to himself. The young woman is torn by the polar opposites the two men represent. At first she feels frustration at her lack of self-determination and her separation from her lover; then she takes out this frustration on her father instead of on the true culprit, Duvalier. After she learns of her lover's death, however, she gets ready to take on a more active role in her future as she acknowledges "1 don't
For the young man, the sea increasingly welcomes him. While he had first imagined he was "going to start having nightmares once we get deep at sea," he instead dreams of dying and going to heaven and heaven is at the bottom of the sea. By the time the ship is about to sink, however, he knows he will "live life eternal, among the children of the deep blue sea, those who have escaped the chains of slavery." With these words he draws the link between Haitians under Duvalier's regime and the Africans who were forced from their homeland centuries ago. His speeches have hinted at this connection—"Yes, I am finally an African" because the sun has darkened his skin, the passengers go to the bathroom "the same way they did on those slave ships years ago"—but only when he has finally given himself to the idea of death does he accept that he has been "chosen" for this destiny because it is the only way to escape oppression. The sea is a vast, open space, and though it is far away from the young woman, they both 'know the sea is "endless like my love for