Krik Krak blog post/#30

In Danticat's work, Krik? Krak!, there are diverse stories telling about different stories of Haitian people living in different countries. All of the stories are like reflections of her many pieces of memories. These stories, according to her epilogue at the end of the book, are very like "braiding hair", that you "sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness" (Danticat 192). Writing these stories are the same as braiding the "unruly strands into one unified braid". Danticat writes them in order to reflect the Haitian history, and to memorize the past pain.

As an author, Danticat knows that working as a writer is considered as "unacceptable" by her mother and other Haitian people. In the epilogue, the author's mother thinks that women should be good at housework, but not writing something on a notebook. Jobs other than housewife are worthless and improper: "With scribbles on paper that are not worth the scratch of a pig's snout. The sacrifices had been too great" (Danticat 193). What is thought to be a good and proper woman is what Lili in A Wall of Fire Rising does. She is a traditional Haitian housewife, accompanying her husband Guy and feeding her son, the Little Guy. Although her family is poor, there is no critic on her. In contrast, in Night Women, the mother is a prostitute, which is a job that she herself doesn't want her little son know any of it because of the "shame". The mother in New York Day Women has the same condition as the mother in Night Women does. She has to be a piece-worker in New York and be a babysitter taking care of others' children but to leave her own daughter alone. These two women, have no choice but to sacrifice their lives in order to support their own families. The sacrifice seems "too great", but it worths enough.

It's quite similar for Danticat to be a storyteller, a encouraging and creative writer. And yet, she argues that it is the voice of those 999 hard-working and traditional women who died before her urge her to "speak through the blunt tip of your pencil" (Danticat 193), which means to record their stories into a book and to draw a vast picture of Haitian history reflecting the diversity of suffering under the tough generation. These 999 women hope the author to tell her mother that women like them actually do speak, even if it’s in a language hard to understand.

The meaning of the title, Krik? Krak!, is also discussed in the epilogue. That "over the years when you have needed us, you have always cried 'Krik?' and we have answered 'Krak!' and it has shown us that you have not forgotten us" (Danticat 194). Once a person has ever talked about a piece of Haitian history, it proves that someone still remembers all the pain gained from the past. All the Haitians could leave the past where it belongs, but they wouldn't forget the things left behind the pain and the suffering. 

There is always a need of someone to record the history. Danticat does this because in her original country no one could've done it better than her. The purpose of writing this book is to braid the unruly strands history into one unified form that highlights the suffering. Women don't have to be limited in a tiny kitchen doing cooking stuff; they can do more things to stand out of the painful history and their traditional role.