Summary
The Book of Miracles focuses around a family of three, the
mother Anne, her husband, and her daughter. The story takes place in New York
on Christmas Eve. Anne and her husband pick up their grown daughter at her
apartment and drive the far journey to their church for Christmas Eve Mass.
During the car ride, we learn that Anne has a very strong dislike or fear of
cemeteries because when she was young and living in Haiti, her brother drowned
while they were at the beach. As they pass a cemetery, Anne's daughter attempts
to comfort her, but at that moment Anne is reminded how distant her and her
daughter are from each other. They arrive at the church and Anne sees many
other small reminders that her daughter doesn't understand how important Mass
is to her.
Later during the ceremony, Anne and her daughter see a man
in a row nearby them that resembles a man who was convicted of mass murders and
horrid crimes against the people of Haiti. He fled from Haiti to New York
before the trial occurred. As they notice him, Anne becomes visibly upset, as
does her daughter and her husband. Upon further subtle investigation, they
conclude that it is not him.
I believe the central question(s) of this story is simple:
How do we come to understand our loved ones? How can we show sympathy even if
we do not understand their experiences?
Important Quotes from the Text
"Once again, Anne hoped that the Virgin would choose
her young brother to go up to heaven and sing with the choir of angels.
Technically he was not sleeping, but he'd never been buried, so his spirit was
somewhere out there, wandering, searching..." (Page 77).
This quote is important to me and to the development of my
central questions because it shows Anne's desperate search for closure, not
just for her, but for her brother.
"It was only a mass. Nothing more. It's never as
fabulous as one of your miracles." (Page 86)
This quote is important to the development of my central
questions because Anne's daughter struggles to connect with her mother. She
also doesn't enjoy Christmas Eve Mass as much as her father. In this quote,
however, we see her daughter attempt to connect with her. Anne always tells
stories, or "miracles", as she calls them. Anne doesn't seem to
believe that her "miracles" have any impact, but her daughter is
shwoing now that even though Mass isn't important to her, her mother's
"miracles" played a very important role in her life. This might be
just enough for Anne to know that she matters and maybe she and her daughter
aren't as distant as she believed.
Connection
I believe Danticat does a fabulous way of exploring how
families connect and help each other get through tough times. In the first
story, The Book of the Dead, we meet Ka, a sculptor who sculpts only her
father. "My whole adult life, I have struggled to find the proper manner
of sculpting my father, a quiet and distant man..." (Page13). Ka struggles
to understand her father and why he is the way he is. In the story, The Book of
the Dead, We see Anne's Daughter struggle with "sculpting", or understanding,
her mother and her mother's experiences.
I really like how you connect Anne and her daughter throughout the story, how you believe that the daughter understanding her mother's past is very important in the story because I completely agree with you. I also like how you were talking about family as a connection through the first four stroies because I also wrote about that too. I agree with you that the most important thing to these characters is family and that they need it to get through tough times but also how some of the characters are without their families and how that is affecting them. Just understanding you family for what they are is very important, knowing the truth about them, even though it may be a loss of innocence it is still very important to know eventually.
ReplyDeleteMost of what you believe about the story I agree with but I just have a few more ideas to add. I agree with you that understanding you family's past is very important throughout this story but also the daughter's ignorance towards her mother and towards her experiences is very important I believe too, I feel as if she doesn't understand what her mother has gone through therefore she doesn't know how to connnect to her mother and some of her comments rub off the wrong way. I also think that the distace away from the families is also a very big part in this story and in the other stories because some of the characters need their family in order to survive and without it, it's a big gap in their lives. It's not easy to understand what our family has gone through and what their feelings are about those experiences but they need to show comeplete vulnerability in order to achieve the interconnectedness with the others in the family.
I really like your main interpretation of the story reflecting the attempt of all of us to understand our loved ones. This sort of empathy can be hard to find, as Anne sees. Your exploration of she and her daughter's relationship is very enlightening, showing the reasons for their distance.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing I liked from your post is your discussion of Anne and her miracles. She is always talking about these amazing miracles, but as her daughter points out, they are always miracles happening in some foreign country far from their home in New York. I think if the reader sees Anne and her family and the same family from "The Book of the Dead", Anne's belief in miracles and her reluctance to explain a "real" miracle to her daughter becomes more obvious. A true miracle seen by Anne was the change in character of her husband: revealed in "Dead" to have been a guard in a Haitian prison, now changed into a kind and gentle man. Her daughter, presumably Ka, has not yet learned this information, and continues to distance herself from her parents, having "concluded early in life that this, like many unexplained aspects of her parents' life, was connected to 'some event that happened in Haiti'" (72). Your main idea, however, about family connections and empathy still ring true, even across different interpretations.