On the Ancient Egyptians and Mourning - Essay Example

We get a sense that this is so, that the mummies are really representative of artifacts of guilt and shame, and in some ways of the actual terror and cruelty that his father, as a “dew breaker”, inflicted on many people during his watch as a prison guard. There is a sense in some analyses of the novel, for instance, that point to this way that Danticat portrays the guilt and the terror that people, both victims, and perpetrators, feel all the way to the present, even though they try so hard to live new lives and to escape from their past.

This paper asserts that the fascination with the grieving process, and the reference to mummies living on for thousands of years, is in fact a symbolic representation of how, for the torturers like his father, and for the victims of that torture, there is no escaping the past, because the past lives on, like mummies which will not disintegrate and be completely forgotten. This paper asserts that this is a valid point to make. As far as victims go, for instance, there is the story that seems to mirror the father's fascination with the past, and with it an unseen bag of bones, so to speak, that hides in the father's psyche, a bag of bones made up of guilt.

In the chapter on the seamstress, the old woman, carrying with her the terror of being persecuted and being followed by a dew breaker all his life, carries with her that terror wherever she went, and could not escape it psychologically, no matter how hard she tried, and no matter how far she traveled to escape. “Yet, during the interview and especially in the seamstress account of her fear of the dew breaker, we get the deep feeling sense of what it would be like to have lived with that terror all one's life and have it never go away” (Corbett).

To her mind, there had been no escape, because wherever she went the dew breaker trailed her. From here we judge the validity of equating the fascination with mummies, grieving, and museums on the part of the father to that equally persistent underlying sense of carrying the guilt and the shame of having been a dew breaker (Corbett; Danticat).To put it another way, the fascination with the grieving process and with mummification hints at a psychological/psychic reality that reflects the state of the father's soul/psyche.

There is support for this kind of reading of the anecdote and the book in analyses, for instance, that view the book from a psychoanalytical point of view. “Racked with guilt, Ka's father cannot bear to tell his daughter the truth of his past. He tries to give her subtle hints as shown in his preoccupation with the Ancient Egyptians” (Chansky 11). Indeed, the fascination with museums and the way the Egyptians of old grieved is not a trivial detail but underscores a seething emotional and psychological turmoil within the father (Chansky; Corbett; Danticat).