Krik? Krak!

Across the collection, flight appears as a powerful motif demonstrating the resilience of the Haitian people. In “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” the narrator’s mother is imprisoned for “having wings of flame” (35); the narrative suggests that this is a spurious charge designed to suppress dissent. However, the narrator insists that that her mother does have the power of flight, and that it saved their lives during the 1937 massacre: “weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from the Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river” (49). The motif of flight here is used to demonstrate the narrator’s mother’s resilience in the face of extreme violence. In “A Wall of Fire Rising,” the possibility of flight represents an opportunity for a new beginning for Guy. He tells his wife that “I’d like to sail off somewhere and keep floating until I got to a really nice place with a nice plot of land where I could be something now” (73). For Guy, the hot air balloon represents a chance to escape the poverty and struggle that define his life. Although his determination to pursue that escape ultimately leads to his death, the recurring motif of flight is strongly associated with the more hopeful theme of resilience.