"Between the Pool and the Gardenias"

As the narrator unfolds her family history in “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” we become aware that she is of Josephine’s lineage. Having read “Nineteen Thirty Seven,” the intertextuality is revealing of her arduous and pained history.  Taken within the context of her past, the dead child she recovers then becomes significant not only as a motif of her burdens but the burdens of her past relatives.

Marie, like her mother and her mother before her, suffers for her womanhood. “It’s so easy to love somebody, I tell you, when there’s nothing else around.” (Danticat 96) Based on that statement, we understand that because of her womanhood or her ancestry, Marie has already been rejected by society. All her love is easy to relate to the dead child, whom like her, has been abandoned by a society that either cannot or will not support her. Rose helps Marie vent her problems and either unaware or resiliently ignorant of the child’s condition, Marie comes to believe she is responsible for taking “on her soul as my own personal responsibility.” (Danticat 98) Eventually she is doomed to be wrongly accused of the child’s fate, just like her grandmother before her.

Danticat’s stories are intertwined to best represent Haitian oppression of women regardless of time and place. By relating characters as well as motifs she establishes a genuine sense of history. It also enables us to see a different side to view things through a different point of view. In Nineteen Thirty-Seven the dead baby was a bane to Josephine’s mother; For Marie it provides a mean to release her worries through imagination.    

Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! NY: Vintage Books. Print.