Graves
Ti-Jean and His Brothers is threaded through with images of the grave. After the end of the first act, the grave of first Gros Jean, and then Mi-Jean as well, are always present on stage. The script also lingers with the grave. The bird tells Mi-Jean, “your brother is a little heap/of white under the bamboo leaves,/Every morning the black beetles…come and bear a piece away.” Similarly, Mother tells Gros Jean that his father and grandfather are “bury in small grass,/Just the jaws of the ant/Stronger than them now.” All of this imagery emphasizes the presence of physical corpses, rotting away under the earth. Rather than a comfortable symbol of death in the abstract, the grave becomes a marker of the very literal physical reality of death and decay.
Nature
Nature is important in the play from the very beginning lines, when the animals open the play. Their calls of “Greek-croak, Greek-croak” immediately introduce the auditory sounds of the natural world to the stage. At the end of the play, natural imagery becomes central. While Ti-Jean watches his mother die, the firefly says, “All around you, nature/Still singing. The frog’s/Croak doesn't stop for the dead;/The cricket is still merry,/The bird still plays its flute,/Every dawn, little Ti-Jean . .” Again emphasizing specifically the sounds of nature, the firefly’s speech reminds Ti-Jean of the constant, beautiful presence of nature, despite the suffering inherent to life.
