SOURCE: N'Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José. “Rewriting Folklore: Traditional Beliefs and Popular Culture in Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!” MaComère 3 (2000): 123-40.

In the following essay, N'Zengou-Tayo investigates how Edwidge Danticat utilizes traditional Haitian stories and beliefs in her work.

In the last pages of Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat, through Sophie Caco, gives us a hint about the part played by Haitian popular culture in her creative imagination: “Listening to the song, I realized that it was neither my mother nor Tante Atie who had given all the mother-and-daughter motifs to all the stories they told and all the songs they sang. It was something that was essentially Haitian. Somehow, early on, our song makers and tale weavers had decided that we were all daughters of this land” (230).

More recently, in an article written for the newsletter of the Association for Haitian-American Development, Danticat confirms implicitly this...