Child of the Sea was a powerful story displayed in journal entries between two young lovers. Their passages were filled with descriptive and emotional stories of what their day to day lives had become after the terrible turmoil in their country of Haiti. I truly enjoyed the stories between both the young girl and young boy. But I believe that Danticat added in the Celianne for a certain element of the story.
Celianne is a fifteen year old who was on board the ship with the boy narrator. While Celianne never spoke to the readers directly her story had great importance an emotional mindset of the reader. Earlier before the truth about Celianne’s pregnancy was revealed the girl narrator spoke of the fact that soldiers had been breaking into people’s homes and had been forcing the mothers or fathers to rape their children. At least for me personally, when this was first spoken of, disbelief of such horrors made me almost try and look past it. But with the story of Celianne, it was impossible to do so. She was proof of these real life horrors because that is how she was impregnated. Celianne added the element of reality to the story. The horrors that our narrators had been worrying about, death, rape, and being alone is what Celianne was confronted with.
After Celianne’s child was born still-born, she held onto her dead body until she herself couldn’t feel anymore. And took her own life. Danticat had Celianne’s story implanted into an already deeply tragic set of circumstances to bring even more of a gruesome reality of what the people in Haiti had to suffer.
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