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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