Professor: Cantice Greene
August 29, 2012
Edwidge
Danticat’s narrative essay “Between the Pool and the Gardens” (2012) Danticat
portrays that the effects of having miscarriages are very scaring to a women’s
mind and can lead to physiological break downs. She wanted a child of her own
so bad, she took in and cared for a deceased baby she found on the side of a
curb after many failed attempts of having children. Danticat took in the
deceased baby as her own in order to fill the deep void in her life. It is
apparent that she reaches out to women who have ever suffered a miscarriage or
loss of a child.
I felt a little disturbed at the fact that Danticat took a deceased baby home.
For several days she cared, clothed, and even talked to the baby as though the
baby was still alive! At the same time I empathized with her distraught
situations in her life such as the many miscarriages and her husband’s cheating
and being negligent. Danticat seemed to have drifted into her own perfect world
after the first citing of the baby. Whether or not her experience is demented
or uncommon depends on how you view a dead child. I agree that nobody can just
find a beautiful deceased child and immediately throw them away without taking
a second of sympathizing for him/her. In Danticat’s case she just went too far
and her actions can be viewed as insane.
Word choice and bluntly eerie reasoning made this narrative very different from
usual writings. The narrative takes you into a person’s world that is filled
with death and void and how they try to cope with the two. Danticat give
records of all the unusual deaths that happened in her family, use words like
“flesh,” and “little corps,” and expounds vividly on her experience with the
deceased baby. Sentences like “I swayed her in my arms like my own sleeping
dove” seemed to express Danticat’s romantic love for children which counters
and overpowers her imbalanced acts with the child. Overall love and sympathy is
the main morals in this narrative.
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