45 pages • 1 hour read
Edwidge DanticatKrik? Krak!
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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“A Wall of Fire Rising” Summary
“A Wall of Fire Rising” tells the story of Guy, Lili, and Little Guy, a family living in an unnamed Haitian shantytown in the shadow of a sugar mill. Guy bursts into the family home with exciting news, but is stopped by his young son, Little Guy, who has news of his own: He has been cast in a school play. Little Guy has been cast as Boukman, the Haitian revolutionary who is the hero of the play. Guy struggles to see the script in the dim light of their kerosene lamp, and to read the play’s difficult language. As the family prepares for dinner, Little Guy practices his lines, which describe the horrors of slavery before the Haitian revolution. Lili and Guy are deeply moved by their son’s performance. After dinner, Guy picks a wild mushroom growing outside of the family’s tiny shack and puts it in Lili’s hair like a flower. That evening, the family walks past the crowds congregating to watch the state-sponsored news to a hill behind the sugar mill, where they watch the sky. Guy’s favorite spot on the hill is near an old hot air balloon. Guy tells Lili that he thinks he can fly the balloon.
Later, when the family is home, Guy watches Lili undress and thinks about how long it has been since they were intimate. He tells Lili his good news: He secured a few hours of work cleaning latrines the next day at the sugar mill. It has been six months since he has last gotten work at the sugar mill, which offers good jobs that people are slow to give up. Guy complains that he is still 78th on the waitlist for people seeking full-time employment at the sugar mill, and wonders if he should add Little Guy’s name to the list, so that he can have a secure job as an adult. Lili immediately rejects the idea, insisting that putting his name on the list will negatively affect his destiny. Guy assures her that he is also capable of greater things than cleaning latrines, and repeats his belief that he can make the hot air balloon fly.
The next morning, Lili walks multiple miles to a public fountain to get water. When she returns, Guy is preparing to take Little Guy to school and then go to work. Lili begins looking for food to prepare their dinner. That night, Little Guy announces that he has been given more lines in the play, as a reward for his quick memorization. In his new lines, Boukman calls for Haitians to join together, take up arms in the revolution and give their lives in the fight against slavery. Guy is overcome with emotion, and leaves the shack. After feeding Little Guy, Lili takes him to the hill behind the sugar mill, where she knows Guy will be. Guy admits that he wants to fly the hot air balloon away from their shanty and start a new life. She tells him that she wants him to stay, and asks if she and their son feature in his fantasies of a new life. That night, Guy participates in his wife’s nightly ritual of rubbing lemon on her knees. He tells her that he never wants to be remembered as a poor, struggling man like his father.
The next day, Lili is returning from collecting water when Little Guy tells her that Guy has taken the hot air balloon. Lili rushes to the hill, where a crowd has gathered to watch Guy fly the hot air balloon higher and higher. The owner of the hot air balloon and the sugar mill foreman struggle to figure out how to contain the situation. As Little Guy and Lili watch, Guy climbs out of the hot air balloon basket and falls to his death. Little Guy stands over his father’s body and begins to recite his lines from the play as he cries. The foreman covers the body, but Lili pulls it back so that she can look at his face. She keeps his eyes open, explaining that he likes to watch the sky.
“A Wall of Fire Rising” Analysis
“A Wall of Fire Rising” contains some of the collection’s most vivid depictions of poverty in Haiti. The claustrophobia and despair evoked by these sensory details is contrasted with the formal and explicitly colonial language of Little Guy’s play lines, which recur throughout the story. In the story’s opening line, Danticat describes the family’s home as a “tiny shack” (53). Conditions within this “one-room home” are tight: Little Guy jumps to greet his father “nearly stepping into the corn mush and herring that his mother had set out in a trio of half-gourds on the clay floor” (53). The sensory details in this passage create a sense of claustrophobia even in this sweet family moment. When the family can’t afford food, they boil sugarcane pulp in order to make “what Lili call[s] her special sweet water tea. It was supposed to suppress gas and kill the vermin in the stomach that made poor children hungry” (58). A repeated reference to this “hunger vermin” (58) demonstrates the pervasive physical influence of hunger on the lives of this family. The fact that Lili learns of Guy’s death after she has walked several miles in order to retrieve water for her family further emphasizes the physical impact of their poverty.
These sensory depictions of poverty are contrasted with the formal language of Little Guy’s lines from the school play both literally and figuratively. In the text, these lines are visually differentiated from the family’s reality through the use of italics, which indicates that Little Guy is quoting another text. When Little Guy first performs his speech for his parents, Danticat notes that “it was obvious that this was a speech written by a European man, who gave to the slave revolutionary Boukman the kind of European phrasing that might have sent the real Boukman turning in his grave” (56). Boukman’s speech is full of abstract references to “a wall of fire rising” (56) and “their gods […] our gods” that evoke the history of Christianity and colonialism in Haiti and contrast the stark reality of the family’s present. The fact that both of Little Guy’s parents find the performance of his speech deeply inspiring and affecting highlights the complexity of their relationship to colonialism in Haiti and also signals the power and Importance of Art in the Face of Violence and poverty.
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By Edwidge Danticat
