Fiery red ants.

Departed folk musician Vic Chestnutt once said while some people may prefer writing about "the bling and the booty," he preferred to write about "the pus and the gnats" because to him the latter was beautiful. Danticat evidently follows Chestnutt's philosophy: she finds beauty in situations most people would consider absolutely dismal and hopeless throughout Krik? Krak!'s nine stories. There's a 'doomed romantic' vibe coursing throughout, but in no story is this ying-yang complex more apparent than the first in the collection, "Children of the Sea." The male narrator's first letter is particularly striking:

"I also know there are timeless waters, endless seas, and lots of people in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves. I look up at the sky and I see you there. I see you crying like a crushed snail, the way you cried when I helped you pull out your first loose tooth. Yes, I did love you then. Somehow when I looked at you, I thought of fiery red ants. I wanted you to dig your finger nails into my skin and drain out all the blood."

How many times does the color red appear in "Children of the Sea," let alone in just the male narrator's first entry, and what does red usually represent? Passion. Love. Lust. Even menstrual blood, at a more literal and obtuse level. "White sheets with bright red spots float as our sail" are even guiding the escapees to a hopeful freedom. These "bright red spots" are keeping the male and female narrator's love alive, and in a more linear sense, are bringing the male narrator to a land where he is able to show love towards his soulmate without any forms of oppression, such as the father, the soldiers, or government officials - at least in theory. Essentially, the male found freedom through love. What I absolutely adore about Danticat's writing style is how she can take words or phrases which are not normally seen as such and turn them into an expression of sensuality, like comparing his loved one to "fiery red ants" and the line below:

"When I got on board I thought I could still smell the semen and the innocence lost to those sheets."

Few authors could write a line like this without sounding needlessly crass. Danticat sounds the exact opposite here. She's painting a picture, and while the thought of sheets smelling like semen and lost innocence aren't classy subjects, she infuses them with a bizarre, pus-like poignacy that few authors are able to achieve. However, few of Danticat's male characters possess the same poignancy as the male narrator in "Children of the Sea."

The male characters in Danticat's collection have little complexity to them (I'm still debating Guy). Considering Danticat is writing nearly exlusively about the experiences of Haitian women, however, this isn't surprising. What is surprising, though, is how the male lover in "Children of the Sea" stands as a anamoly in Danticat's literary microcosm. He isn't a breadwinner, he isn't a parental figure, he isn't authority, he isn't a background character; he's a doomed romantic, and in many respects can even be seen as a gender queer amongst his more machismo-addled peers in Haitain society. Yes, while he obviously has a libido ("I think of you and all those times you resisted...sometimes I felt like you wanted to, but I knew you wanted me to respect you."), he isn't rapacious. He thinks the world of his partner, as does she, and it feels like he would do nearly anything to please her in a nearly subservient fashion. I suppose if the "dig your finger nails into my skin and drain out all the blood" is interpreted in a purely sadomasochistic sense, their relationship could be seen in a symbiotic light. While the male might make some of the sexual propositions, the woman still retains control - and in some ways, may even have more control than the male - whenever they make love. In Danticat's other stories, men don't love beyond purely shallow means, which is different from how the male narrator in the introductory story is. But aside from occasional flirtation, as in the soldier who tries to impress himself upon the grandmother's rebellious daughter in a latter story, men are portrayed as oddly asexual beings in Krik? Krak!. Passionless, really, if shallowly horny and bound by duty to their wives and children. They don't know to love, or make love. They only know how to work, fight, protect, have sex; all things which may invoke some form of passion from the male but are absolutely nothing compared to the art of loving or making love. Considering the sexually-aligned language Danticat uses in the diary entries of the male, he's a positive deviant, and is representative of a level of a male-dominated society which is rarely talked about publicly in Haiti, and even the United States.