The Art of Death

by Edwidge Danticat

  In his 2004 autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, García Márquez explains how la Matanza de las Bananeras, or the Banana Massacre, and the silencing that followed influenced the corresponding scene in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  Conformists said, in effect, that there had been no deaths. Those on the other extreme affirmed without a quaver in their voices that there had been more than a hundred, that they had been seen bleeding to death on the square, and that they were carried away in a freight train to be tossed into the ocean like rejected bananas. And so my version was lost forever at some improbable point between the two extremes.… I referred to the massacre with all the precision and horror that I had brought for years to its incubation in my imagination.

  In the Paris Review interview, he said, “The massacre in the square is completely true, but while I wrote it on the basis of testimony and documents, it was never known exactly how many people were killed. I used the figure three thousand, which is obviously an exaggeration. But one of my childhood memories was watching a very, very long train leave the plantation supposedly full of bananas. There could have been three thousand dead on it, eventually to be dumped in the sea.”

  García Márquez’s version of the Banana Massacre is described, in part, through the point of view of a child—García Márquez himself was a toddler when the massacre took place. He admits in his memoir that he wanted to write a novel from the perspective of a seven-year-old boy who had survived, but he didn’t think a child narrator would have “sufficient poetic resources” to tell that story. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, José Arcadio Segundo guides us, along with the child, through the horror.

  The captain gave the order to fire and fourteen machine guns answered at once. But it all seemed like a farce. It was as if the machine guns had been loaded with caps, because their panting rattle could be heard and their incandescent spitting could be seen, but not the slightest reaction was perceived, not a cry, not even a sigh among the compact crowd that seemed petrified by an instantaneous invulnerability. Suddenly, on one side of the station, a cry of death tore open the enchantment: “Aaaagh, Mother.”

  Having someone whose mind and thoughts we already know guide us through the bloodshed is very helpful here. This allows us to feel as though we’re equally in danger, or are traveling through the bowels of hell with a friend.

  Time slows down in this passage to let us experience the people’s incredulity at suddenly finding themselves before a firing squad. At first nothing is heard. Then the child takes over the narration. His now “privileged position” on José Arcadio Segundo’s shoulders offers him a view of the slaughter, which he sees in the child-centered visuals of waves and a dragon’s tail.

  The survivors, instead of getting down, tried to go back to the small square, and the panic became a dragon’s tail as one compact wave ran against another which was moving in the opposite direction, toward the other dragon’s tail in the street across the way, where the machine guns were also firing without cease.

  The child too must soon fully come to terms with what is happening, and abandon his innocent image of the dragon’s tail. The adults must forsake their notion of a farce, and realize that the machine-gun fire is very much real. The child becomes José Arcadio Segundo’s sole collaborator when no sign of the massacre remains and no one else in Macondo remembers that it has taken place. José Arcadio Segundo’s other companion in grief is Mother Nature, who cries over Macondo, via torrential rains, for nearly five years.

  I used to think of these scenes when I was writing about the October 1937 massacre of Haitian cane workers in the Dominican Republic in my novel The Farming of Bones. Dominican soldiers and civilians killed between ten to forty thousand people over the course of a few nights. Most of the victims were killed with machetes. I couldn’t accurately tell the story of every dead person or every survivor, so I decided to focus on one fictional witness, Amabelle Desir, who during the time of the massacre had access to different sectors of that society while working as a housekeeper in the home of a military family. I had to count on Amabelle’s singular tale, her microscopic truth, to tell a much larger story.

  In One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez tells microscopic and universal truths, then masterfully writes about death as though it were the only possible subject. Characters die alone, en masse, in wars, massacres, executions, drownings, suicides. They die from miscarriages and during childbirth, from old age—very old age—and disease and, every now and then, of natural causes. Some spend months and years dying and get sprawling death scenes. Others are simply done with in a sentence or two or in a few words. Some return from the dead as apparitions or ghosts. Others remain alive only in memory. Not even the wonders of magical realism can keep them alive forever.

  In one of his final interviews, with the journalist David Streitfeld, García Márquez connected the act of writing these types of stories to his own fear of dying. “I think I write because I’m afraid of death,” he admitted. “If I didn’t write, I would die.”

  Wanting to Die

  “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide …” Albert Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus. “In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.”

  Shadrack, the World War I veteran in Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, openly acknowledges that life is indeed too much for him and the only thing he fully understands is the pull and tug of suicide; thus, he institutes National Suicide Day.

  People contemplating suicide often withdraw from their neighbors. In Shadrack’s case, the community is invited to join in. Shadrack makes suicide public and communal. During National Suicide Day, suicide becomes a performance, real-life community theater.

  On the third day of the new year, he walked through the Bottom down Carpenter’s Road with a cowbell and a hangman’s rope calling the people together. Telling them that this was their only chance to kill themselves or each other.

  The people of the Bottom hold particular beliefs about death that make them receptive to Shadrack, whose biblical name alludes to his ability to survive, no matter what inferno he might be thrown into. Like the other residents of the Bottom, Shadrack doesn’t believe in accidental death. Life might be accidental, but “death was deliberate.” So the Bottom’s residents are perfect candidates to “follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light,” as Camus invites his readers to do. Except there is no flight from light. Rather there’s flight into light, as in Morrison’s National Book Critics Circle Award–winning third novel, Song of Solomon.

  Song of Solomon follows the journey of Macon “Milkman” Dead III—the surname “Dead” symbolizing the erasure of his family history—as he uncovers his family lore and a spectacular instance of flight that some might interpret as suicide. The novel opens with the very public death of Robert Smith, an insurance agent, who kills himself because he hasn’t held up his part of the bargain of being a member of the Seven Days, a group that avenges the deaths of black people murdered by whites.

  As Robert Smith falls from the cupola of the town hospital, Pilate, Milkman’s aunt, breaks into song (O Sugarman done fly away / Sugarman done gone), foreshadowing Milkman’s future leap off the same cliff that one of his ancestors jumped off decades earlier. In both Robert Smith’s and Milkman’s leaps we see echoes of the stories of Africans jumping off the decks of slave ships hoping to fly back to the places they’d once called home.

  Suicide was common among enslaved people who sought their freedom in the afterlife. Their deaths were more than physical cessations. They were transitions, spiritual journeys to places from their past, homes that had become idealized—in their minds. Suicide was also the most effective way of nullifying their designation as property. Showing that they could decide whether to live or die was one way of affirming their humanity.

  Suicides and othe
r forms of death cast a long shadow in Toni Morrison’s novels. In Song of Solomon, Pilate—like Rebeca in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—spends years carrying what she believes are her dead father’s bones. A ghost comes to life in Beloved. In Jazz, a man murders his teenage lover. “They shoot the white girl first” is the memorable opening salvo of Paradise. “We courted death in order to call ourselves brave,” Morrison’s narrator tells us in her first novel, The Bluest Eye. Still, none of Morrison’s seemingly suicidal characters fit into easy categories. Morrisonian deaths are too nuanced and complex.

  “Dying voluntarily,” Camus writes, “implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, … the uselessness of suffering.”

  Literature thrives on suffering. What creates tension and conflict in most works of fiction is some type of useful, even if initially seemingly senseless, suffering. And by useful I don’t mean useful to the sufferer but to the writer of the story. We put our fictional characters through the wringer so that we might write (tell others) about it. If we are too afraid to let them suffer, or even die, then we might fail. We also write of our most painful experiences hoping that bringing these horrors to light might serve some greater purpose. Our most humble, and perhaps most arrogant, wish is that our writing might help others feel less alone. Our suffering, or our characters’ suffering—be it internal or external, physical or psychological—is never wasted. It often directs us somewhere, even if inevitably to death.

  In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, all the characters suffer in their own way. Anna Karenina’s story was inspired by that of Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, the mistress of one of Tolstoy’s neighbors. Pirogova threw herself under a train after being abandoned by her lover. Tolstoy is said to have gone to the train station to see her mangled body, and that image stayed with him, as did those of the other deaths he’d witnessed throughout his life.

  Anna Karenina is introduced in a death scene, and exits the novel with her own. A watchman is run over by a train as she arrives in Moscow. The watchman’s death is, of course, a bad omen, as is Anna Karenina’s recurring dream of a peasant carrying a sack. (A sack also appears in Ivan Ilyich’s dreams in The Death of Ivan Ilyich.) In life, as in novels, death is sometimes preceded by mysterious visions.

  When my father was dying, he would tell my mother that he couldn’t sleep, because he’d see shadows circling his bed. Sometimes he would even see his long-dead parents, most frequently his mother, who he said was wearing a celebratory red dress.

  “They’ve come for him,” my mother said. My father died a few days later.

  The weekend before my mother died, she was sleeping an average of eighteen hours a day. One afternoon she woke up and appeared extremely alert and surprised to see me. Looking right past me, she said, “What are you doing here?” in a tone of voice I immediately recognized as the one she used to speak to my father.

  The scythe-bearing, hooded grim reaper is only one manifestation of the angel of death. There are plenty of others. In Anna Karenina, it’s a muzhik, a peasant carrying a sack, a “dirty, ugly muzhik in a peaked cap, his matted hair sticking out.”

  Though it is foreshadowed and ends up feeling inevitable, Anna Karenina’s suicide does not proceed as she expects. Having always heard about this pivotal scene in the novel, I was surprised to see, when I actually read the book some years ago, that Anna Karenina shows some ambivalence and even repents at the end. I shouldn’t have been surprised. A novelist as great as Tolstoy would not throw a woman under a train without having us suffer through the entire excruciating experience with her.

  And just at the moment when the midpoint between the two wheels came even with her, she threw the red bag aside and, drawing her head down between her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and with a light movement, as if preparing to get up again at once, sank to her knees. And in the same instant she was horrified at what she was doing. “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?” She wanted to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and implacable pushed at her head and dragged over her. “Lord, forgive me for everything!” she said, feeling the impossibility of any struggle. A little muzhik, muttering to himself, was working over some iron. And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been in darkness, sputtered, grew dim, and went out for ever.

  The moment she finds herself at eye level with the train’s wheels is probably the first time Anna Karenina realizes the finality of her action, yet there is no turning back now. So she discards the red bag, as if to make herself lighter. Before that light goes out forever, though, Tolstoy fills the page with as much information as possible, some of it ambiguous. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m interpreting the words “as if preparing to get up” as a sign that she might be changing her mind. If I were standing on the train platform and watching this scene, for example, I would see it as a clear sign that she no longer wanted to die, that she wanted to be saved and was perhaps trying to save herself.

  I would find further confirmation of this when Tolstoy grabs me off the platform and places me inside her head. For just a few short sentences, Tolstoy sheds all distance offered by the third person and goes straight to Anna asking, “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?” But before she can “rise” and “throw herself back”—back in time as well, I presume—it’s already too late. The train hits her head, then drags over her body, details Tolstoy might have obtained from his research about the similar death of Anna Stepanovna Pirogova.

  Like Morrison’s character Sula Peace, Anna Karenina gets a momentary reprieve after forsaking her struggle with death to offer some final thoughts. Hers are “Lord, forgive me for everything!” Someone else’s thoughts might have involved less surrender and been more spiteful, someone who was surer about wanting to die than Anna Karenina appears to be at the end. And here we have a candle—the dying of the light—which again we might call out as an easy metaphor, except it is a candle by which Anna Karenina, a voracious reader and a writer herself, remembers or imagines reading a book, possibly an English novel. However, a more fitting read for her might have been Flaubert’s Madame Bovary—a book also filled with torrid infidelity, betrayal, and suicide.

  Tolstoy seemed to consider suicide immoral. In “Letter on Suicide,” written to a friend in 1898, he told the story of a paralyzed monk who could move only his left hand. This monk lay on the floor of a monastery for thirty years and never complained, but instead maintained a “spark of life” that allowed him to inspire the thousands of people who visited him. Tolstoy closed his letter by adding, “While there is life in man, he can perfect himself and serve the Universe.”

  “Suicide,” as author and psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison counters in Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, “is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy.” It is also saturated with ambivalence. As Jamison puts it, “The line between suicidal thoughts and action is not as clear as it might seem. A potentially deadly impulse may be interrupted before it is ever acted upon, or an attempt with mild intent and danger of death may be carried out in full expectation of discovery and survival.”

  I have written two fictional suicides in my work. The first one is in my novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, which I began writing when I was eighteen years old and finished when I was twenty-four. In the novel, the narrator’s mother, traumatized by having been raped by a stranger in Haiti and giving birth to the narrator, Sophie, commits suicide when she becomes pregnant with a second child. The suicide happens offstage and Sophie hears about it from a telephone conversation with her mother’s boyfriend. During the phone call, Sophie tries to concentrate on anything but what her mother’s boyfriend is telling her, which is how my younger self imagined I might react if I were getting similar news. Sophie remains calm. The mother’s boyfriend is blunt and passes on information coldly, in part because he is in shock. At this point both Sophie and the boyfriend are in shock.
To convey this, I stripped down the language as much as I could, even reducing dialogue tags.

  “Is my mother in the hospital?”

  “Non. She is rather in the morgue.”

  I admired the elegance in the way he said it. Now he would have to say it to my grandmother, who had lost her daughter, and to my Tante Atie, who had lost her only sister.

  “Am I hearing you right?” I asked.

  “She is gone.”

  I was trying not to be sentimental and melodramatic, not to overdramatize the reaction to a death that already seemed over-the-top. Still, I wish now that I had included more confrontation, so that it wouldn’t seem as though Sophie had immediately accepted her mother’s death.

  When Sophie pushes her mother’s boyfriend for further details, he tells her that he woke up in the middle of the night and found her mother lying on the bathroom floor on a pile of bloody sheets. She was still alive when he found her but later dies in the hospital from her seventeen self-inflicted stab wounds.

  If I were writing this novel now, I would inflict the mother with fewer stab wounds. Still, I keep thinking of Hospital Tommy saying in Song of Solomon that “every killing is a hard killing.” A manic episode–induced suicide might be a particularly hard killing. Still, I feel guilty about the mother’s death at times, as though I had conspired to murder an actual person.

  The second fictional suicide scene is in a short story called “Children of the Sea” in my story collection, Krik? Krak! After Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown by a coup d’état in 1991, a military junta took over the country and instituted a reign of terror that led to thousands of people fleeing by boat to the United States and elsewhere. Many of these boats were intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Haitian men, women, and children onboard were taken to Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba, where terrorism suspects would later be detained.