Children of the Sea

Edwidge Danticat has a unique writing style. She tells it just how it is, no BS, but yet even though she is blunt, her words have a certain poetic flow to them. She is great at imagery, and while reading Children of the Sea, I was able to create some extremely powerful and vivid visuals. Children of the Sea was not only an interesting and genuinely good piece of writing, I learned about Haitian life as well.

The characters in the story grew up in Haiti underneath the Duvalier regime, a dictatorship. She describes some of the horrors her neighbors and friends experienced during that time. In the other part of the story, she wrote a character on the boat, escaping away from life in Haiti if it was the last thing he did. I didn't imagine the characters to be that much older than us, so I tried to imagine growing up in a place like that, and not knowing if my friends were in Haiti, dead or had escaped somewhere else. It's a very scary thought.

To both of these characters, America represented a new start, and hope. Anything was better than in Haiti, and if you had to die trying to find a better place to live, so be it. The Haitian attitude toward death is something I found very intriguing, and I like it. Times are different now, and I'm saying this having lived in the US my whole life, but I think people these days have such a negative view on death. I'm not saying it's happy, but maybe we as Americans could try to make it seem less... bad, overall. Anyway, back to what America represents. No one knew exactly what they might run into when they got there, but they flung themselves out into the ocean with only hope carrying them forward. Hope is what kept them on the boat. These people had great faith that something great was out there. I'm not sure what to call that quality, but it certainly is admirable.

I look forward to reading more of Danticat sometime soon. Any suggestions, Mr. McCarthy?