Oral Presentation 2/8

For my IB Lit performance I decided to take a further look and adapt the stories A Wall of Fire Rising, and Night Women from the book Krit Krat by Edwidge Danticat. 

These two stories come right after one another in the book

 when reading I cannot help think that the two stories are related. 

I believe Danticat strategically placed these two stories when writing Krit Krat. 

A Wall of Fire Rising highlights an impoverished family with three members. 

Guy is the father of the family, Little Guy is his son, and Lili is the mother.  

Through the story we see a lot of tension and disagreement between Lili and Guy about the future that Little Guy should go down. 

Guy can never hold a job and gets fed up with never being heard. He feels emasculated and turns to suicide to escape his problems.  

In Night Women we have main two characters, A mother and young child. 

Danticat never officially names the two characters in the story,  but the two would fit the description of Lili and Little Guy after Guy killed himself. 


Although this is never officially stated, I feel that Danticat does this intentionally to get readers this make this very assumption. 

I thought that the situation that the Night Women story highlighted, a struggling mother having to turn to prostitution in order to support money for her child could be a likely path of work for Lili when Guy died. 

And thats sums up the original text

For our adaptation we decided to connect these two stories  "A Wall of Fire Rising" and "Night Women" due to their similarities and through our interpretation of the book,  we created a scene where an apparitional Guy comes back in the dreams of Lili and Little Guy.

 I played Guy, and my emotions swayed a lot in our scene. I first appeared on stage with a short monologue. (Recite their was so much sadness in my life)

 I say it with a tone of sadness in my voice, making it seem as if I never truly gotten how I was treated as Guy when I was living. I will touch further on this later. 

 In the early scenes of the adaptation, I am angry with myself, and with an angel who looks over my family in the adaptation.

 I as Guy, cannot understand why the angel was not there to help guide me.

So when the angel appears, I quickly turn all the feelings of sadness and regret into hatred towards him due to the fact that we was never present in my life when I asked for guidance. 

Our scene even shows strong feelings of sadness in a part of the scene where there is a physical altercation between the two characters where  I actually slap the angels hands off of me and turn my back to him.

We really wanted to highlight the themes of sadness, hopelessness and frustration throughout our adaptation and the character of Guy 

Throughout the adaptation Guy tries to make peace with his wife and help guide his family through a critical decision in Little Guy's life. 

However,  He continues to struggle with accepting his own fate as a man that amounted to very little while he was living.

In the adaptation Guy wants Little Guy to drop out of school and get a job at the sugar mill so he can start supporting his mother so she will not continue to work as a prostitute. 


Throughout the performance, I am constantly pleading my case but in every effort I make I am constantly deterred off path and can never convince the Angel or Lili to agree that it is the right decision for Little Guy to work at the sugar mill. 

This constant disproval that Guy gets in the after life is similar to the same disproval he received when he was living, in the text of A Wall of Fire Rising. 

However, in the adaptation when Little Guy finds out his father requests of him to work in the sugar mill he is the only one who agrees with his father in thinking that he should get a job at the sugar mill. This decision was made Because little Guy actually believes his father did no wrong in his life, and everyone is being judgmental towards him. He also sees the poverty that he lives in. 

During a dream, Little Guy is faced with the daunting decision whether to stay in school or work, this is when I appear as Guy with a change of heart and actually approve of him to stay in school.

However, I do not believe that Guy's change of heart was genuine. I believe this was only done to please the Angel and Lili. Guy's thoughts where never accpeted in his life or the after life, so this decision that he made for Little Guy was very much driven from outside sources being Lili and the Angel.

And at the end of the performance in our last scene, Lili and Guy are united and hold hands walking off stage. This shows that the two have made peace utliamtly because of the decision to send Little Guy off to school.

So that sums up the outline of the adaptation


For our staging, our group set it up in a way that allowed us to show the poverty that the family lived in. IN fact we had Lili sleep on a blanket, and the decorations are very simplistic and ordinary  

Our group worked well together, only disagreeing at times about minor details on a curtain we wanted to put up to hide Lili's rooms from the audience and Little Guy, but we ultimately decided to trash the idea and highlight both rooms in our performance.


The last thing that I want to touch on is honestly one of the things I was most proud of in our adaptation. It was also one of the most critical decisions we made as a group that put our adaptation really over the top in my opinion

The stage lightning in our adaptation was able to further show changes in emotion,  and  the setting of the scene when set in a dream state or reality. 

We used three different lighting colors. Regular white stage lights were used for scenes that happened in reality. Blue Lights were used to symbolize a dream state where the Angel and Guy interacted with Lili and Little Guy, 

And  red state lights were used in a scene one of the last scenes where Lili killed herself. 

The lights helped tie the themes of magical realism or fantasy into our scene since we decided to take the angel mentioned in the original text  of Night Women and actually make him a character in our scene. 

This was important to do since, in the original text there was always this sense hope from Guy and Little Gut that life could somehow improve.

Even though we were left with the feeling that things did turn out for the worst with Guy committing suicide and with the Night Women showing 2 family members that fits the description of  Lili and Little Guy struggling to survive. 

In conclusion I feel that our adaptation ends on a more light hearted note than many of the original stories that Danticat wrote in "Krit Krat"

But I do feel that Guy never truly thought it was best for Little Guy to stay in school. 

but he made the decision to be reunited with Lili and feel accepted by her and the angel. This behavior Guy shows is common for him always giving into the constant disapproval he got in his own decisions that he made throughout his living life and in the after life.