Luke's Reviews > Krik? Krak!

Everyone knows what the baseline reader is. The body is abstract, the habits of the norm, the names of a conventional origin, the hierarchy unquestioned. To get a hint of the opposite, look at which covers are commissioned for thematic design and which consist of bodies and cultural artifacts. You'll learn about the blackened butterfly of this cover through one of the stories, as well as about the lives of the women that fit the archetype of my alternative cover that the digitized edition does not currently show. A portrait of the author, perhaps? Certainly not of the intended readership. She, with locs and bronze all woven through, is not the socioeconomic poster child of the marketer's design.

The majority of lauded books are written for a mere ten percent of the population of the globe, and the biggest con of capitalism and cultural domination was to call such tomes universal. To subvert such persistent gall requires continual regrounding of what is the usual, what is granted, what is the destiny and what is the choice. No, accommodated reader, you are not white. No, communicated reader, you are not male. No, handheld reader, your world is not of free suburbia but of heritage, revolution on one side and massacre on the other, tales on the kitchen stove and Icarus in the shanty, where liberty and death become far more complicated when the fire has been rising for nine hundred ninety-nine generations and counting. Women come and women go, and there is no telling in this shifting scape of love and loss when a turn around the corner will bring to life a familiar face, when looking back requires a loss forever.

It's easy enough to look Haiti up in the history books and Danticat up in the halls of literary excellence and mix the two together to get a prelude of what is to come from a writer who concerns herself with the death of infants in her homeland and all lost in transit so that they may live. She is not that lazily thrown about enforcement of 'universal', nor can that term be applied to any work in this era of broadcasting the tippy top to the world and calling it the modern normality. She is, however, to those sick of tailor-made literary expectations and open to theories of literature forever on the knife edge of then and now and what is to come, worth reading.