On Revelations: Looking at Drummond and Danticat

A revelation is a powerful thing. In Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, a revelation often always came from God and, as such, held great power over the person to which it was revealed and the people he or she chose to share it to. During the Enlightenment, when reason was championed as the supreme truth, revelations also held great power since it came into fruition under one’s own capability and intellect. Hundreds of years later, personal revelations such as these hold the same power over us than that with religious themes. It is such not specifically because we as a society have forgotten our religions and replaced them with secular reason but because it holds much more gravity on us as a whole since it can apply to everyone, not just a believer. Laurie Lynn Drummond’s revelation is one such example.

In Drummond’s narrative piece “Alive,” from the get go, we are submerged into her world of thoughts with an opening paragraph that sets the tone. Her writing reads like a Jo Ann Beard piece with its short bursts of sentences, using simple but evocative language to attract and maintain a reader’s attention. Drummond’s piece narrates her experience in Baton Rouge where she was stalked by someone that we can only assume to be the serial killer she mentions in the first paragraph. Her narrative is incredibly fluid even with the short sentences and gives the reader a sense of continuity with the seemingly chronological depiction of events (I don’t think she could have told the story any other way). In the piece, Drummond was quite successful in translating her fear and paranoia into words in a way that would make it easy for the reader to grasp. However, as one reads through the piece, it is a little difficult to ascertain what Drummond’s motives were for writing down her experience. There was no specific declaration of purpose in any of her paragraphs until the last one. In this paragraph, Drummond connects all the pieces of her narrative and completes the thought in her essay when she finally realized her personal revelation:

“And that’s when I finally get, really get, what I have always known.
Alertness, tolerance, compassion, suspicion: none of it matters.
I am vulnerable simply because I am alive.”

By this virtue, Drummond’s “Alive” is also reminiscent of Mimi Schwartz’s “My Father Always Said” since the structure (though Drummond told the story in a more chronological manner) is quite similar. Both Drummond and Schwartz narrated a story by bits and pieces, pieces that, by themselves, could not stand alone. They both wait until the last paragraph (in Schwartz’s case, last segment) to unfurl the purpose of the essay.

In Edwige Danticat’s “Westbury Court,” the same sense of personal revelation is also present, but perhaps in a less explicit way. Danticat’s piece on growing up in 1980’s Brooklyn takes us through a “traumatic” event in her life in which a fire in her apartment building ravaged her neighbor’s apartment across the hall. The fire was a traumatic event Danticat even though she (and her little brother) was not affected directly by the flames. It was traumatic to her even though those who lived in the apartment that caught on fire were not people she knew (she didn’t even know their names) but she had seen the damage that was done. It was traumatic to her even though she didn’t even know the apartment was on fire until firemen smashed through her door because she was too preoccupied (General Hospital). It was a traumatic event for Danticat because she, in her mind, thought that she could have helped those who perished (two you boys) had she not been entranced by the convoluted plot lines of a popular soap opera. Not only was the fire a traumatic experience for Danticat, but it is also marked the beginning of a cycle of tragic (mildly to severe) events in her neighborhood. In a somewhat chronological way, Danticat lists the tragic events that followed the fire (intertwined with somewhat happy memories of the Parent Brothers). During the same year of the fire, she lost two more neighbors, both to disease and violence. They were also burglarized (her father’s camera was stolen; he never took a photo ever again after the event). A man was also shot and killed right across the street from their apartment. Like Schwartz and Drummond, Danticat writes us a loosely connected set of paragraphs that, on its own, would not stand. And like Schwartz and Drummond, Danticat also waits till the end to unfurl to us her purpose. The last few lines of Danticat’s piece reveals to us, though not quite as explicit as Schwartz’s “My Father Always Said” and Drummond’s “Alive”, her purpose for writing the essay. In my somewhat imaginative mind, (maybe less imaginative, more hallucinatory) perhaps Danticat’s purpose was to reveal to us her revelation: Life is a fragile gift that could, in a moments notice, be taken away by fire, gunshot or disease and because it is so, “sometimes, it is too late to say ‘I shouldn’t have.’”