Passage Explication from the novel Krik? Krak! By Edwidge Danticat

Why must the life of a writer be hard and even harder if they are women? Why is that when you tell your mother that words would be your life’s work, like the kitchen has always being hers, she does not understands? Why being a nurse in more suitable than being a writer for women? In Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat suggests that writing is the most beautiful thing, because it is the remedy to a lonely little girl. Most importantly, Danticat shows the strength that a woman has for putting up with society despite their nonsense tradition which is encompass through her nine short stories from her novel. By being such a talented and a captive of a writer, Danticat expresses what it likes for her to play around with words and the joy that she gets from it. For her it’s just like braiding someone’s hair.

Danticat’s tone change in this chapter which make the readers see how seriously does she takes her writing as she compare it, to something form her culture. “Writing is just like braiding your hair” (220) every times we take a “handful of coarse unruly strands” we attempt to do one thing which is “bring them unity.” In our world today, finding something that shows unity is very rare. Yet, Danticat in our chaotic world was able to find writing which a collection of sentence which is made up of words. Danticat word of choice a handful of coarse unruly strands shows that words is just as uncontrollable as someone hair under the obedience of a strong wind. It is up to us to take that handful of improper things to organize them, where it is then it can be united. One cannot take their dirty clothes and mix it up with their clean clothes. It only after some order are establish by doing something with those dirty clothes that they can be united with the clean clothes in the dresser.

Danticat continued as she shows the different kind of sentences that can be make a variety of words. She shows us even though those sentences are united, that does not mean they are the same because our “fingers have still not perfected” that task. This is the reason why “some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women in your family” (220) those are the variety of sentence that can be found. All of them are here to stay, just like those diverse women in your family. It is those differences that make us stand out from the crowd. Those women who took a risk and fit you in the world problem as they say Krik? And you respond with that Krak? It is those women, people like your mother as you sat in front of her, between her legs and she starts braiding your hair.

It is only from those women who’s “fables and metaphors, whose similes, and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup by ways of their fingers.” However, Danticat shows those are the same women that still resist taking a pen because they think that maybe others, but “no, women like you” meaning their kids “don’t write.” They are good at carving “onion sculptures and potatoes statues” As we sits “in dark corners and braiding and twisting your hair “in other to control the stiffness, the unruliness and the rebelliousness.”(221) where else can we control stiffness, the unruliness and the rebelliousness? Through writing but they do not know that braiding that they love so much require the same function as writing.

To conclude, writing is of the three things that a mother would tell their kids not to be involved in because not only it will stands in the way of that kid to learn how to cook but also, as Danticat reminded us they are “called lying whores, then raped and killed. If you write you are a politician and we all know what happens to politicians.”(221)