Krik Krak Quiz 3

In our adaptation of performing one of the plot based on Krik? Krak!, I am playing the role as the mother in New York Day Women. In our setting, the mother is going to take care of her friend's little kid, Caroline, for one day on the weekend in the New York Central Park. And the daughter of the mother has already figured out what her mother is doing during the day and has planned to go with her to see how she will work during the day. When our group was discussing about how to make the family of New York Day Woman relate to the family in the story of Caroline's Wedding, we found that both these two families are immigrants leaving Haiti and moving to the United States. This gave us a lot of ideas on how to set up our plot. When creating my dialogue, I tried to reveal the theme of relief after a previously struggling life and remind the audience of the Haitian painful history. 

In Scene I, when the daughter tells the mother that she has already known what the mother is doing for the day, the mother hesitates for a while and then replies "Well, you don't need to know that much" in order to refer that the job is kind of "shameful" and she does not want her daughter know any of it. After the daughter insists to go with the mother, she sighs and ultimately agrees, because she thinks her daughter is already an adult and has the right to know her job; but still the mother says "I bet you don't, but it's up to you". Then in Scene II, after meeting up with little Caroline, the mother gives her a tin of soda as a gift or wish, for Caroline needs to drink bone soup every day and pray to grow the missing arm at night. The bone soup is a reflection of Haitian tradition. The most meaningful dialogue of the mother occurs in Scene III, where she tells her daughter how she met Caroline's mother in prison while the little girl's mother was pregnant at that time. This part kind of reverts to the original story in Caroline's Wedding in order to show a part of the Haitian immigrants' history. In this case, the mother is able to go back to the piece of memory and expresses her feeling of desperate struggle when in jail. Thus, the situation of Haitian immigrants under that generation is shown in the dialogue. When the daughter says "Oh, poor Caroline. But lucky", it not only refers that the daughter is saying that the other kids have taken away her mother, but also to some extent shows that the hard life has ended.

The Haitians all ever had a tough life, struggling with how to make a living. Although some Haitians moved to the United States which is a relatively safe place, they still had to sacrifice a lot to have a better life and become a legal citizen. Their history is painful, and it can't be forgotten. This is also the purpose that our adaptation want to reveal.