Epistolaries are like Waves: Undulating Back and Forth....

     Children of the Sea is a short story written as an epistolary, or a tale told through the sending (or in this case simple writing) of letters. It deals with the struggles of the Haitian people as a whole. The story itself is quite interesting, as it could have taken place during any one of Haiti's troubled time periods, though it was written in 1994, in Edwidge Danticat's book Breath, Eyes, Memory.
     First of all, the writing styles of the two lovers writing back and forth are very different. The man's writing is much more descriptive and sophisticated, and he obviously appears to have been educated. However, the woman's letters, or journal entries, use no capital letters whatsoever and they are dull, lack general description, and use simple language. Her words are also very repetitive. The style of epistolary is also very interesting because the letters are obviously not being sent to one another. There is no way they could be, as he is on a boat and she is stuck on mainland Haiti.
     The story unfolds very easily through the tale the two letters reveal. On Haiti, the military breaks into houses at every turn and arrests and injures people for no good reason. Eventually, the woman/girl's family leaves and finds a place to stay in the mountains, though the girl's father made them become poor by paying the military not to arrest her. This makes her forever in his debt.
     On the ship, the man is traveling near the Bahamas. The boat floods at different intervals, though the holes get patched up with tar, a girl on board gives birth to a still baby and commits suicide by jumping off the ship with her deceased child. The ship is also rank with human waste, which makes the living conditions terrible. Eventually, it is implied that the man joins the sea, or will in a short while, and drowns. In the next letter written by the woman, many black butterflies float down to her, trying to touch her, and she takes it as a sign that her lover is dead, as it is most likely not a coincidence that she heard a boat sunk near the Bahamas on the radio.
     One of the most important quotes from this reading to me was "the sea is endless like my love for you". This was written by both of the lovers, though they hadn't seen each other or received each others' letters. This is what we should all strive for in our relationships--to have this kind of tight chemistry in order to fully understand each other in perfect harmony. This is something these two people obviously experienced, and I hope to in the future as well.
A Presto,
Simon