Essay on Krik! Krak! - Between the Pool and the Gardenias

The garden is the vehicle in which the narrator reveals her reluctance to leave behind the imaginary world of childhood and see the realities of the adult world. The evidence supporting this interpretation is the imagery of hiding. The narrator uses the garden to hide from reality and the

There is a reason for the narrator’s “madness” and that is partly due to the fact that she had lost her child earlier in her life. The irony about this whole thing is that the room she is locked in is an old child’s nursery. The husband

Among violence against women and gender inequality, death is a constant factor that runs through the whole story this culture is surrounded by it every day and even when there is drought death is expected, but infant mortality is a constant battle. There are multiple occasions where infants die, mainly because of what they are being fed and how they are treated. It is understood that Monique’s baby’s health is declining throughout the story. The main cause of children

This type of upbringing would lead one to believe that her life would not amount to anything and torn by the fact that she was not residing with her family. However, subconsciously, when she needed reassurance, her paternal mother’s words to her would always surface in her mind, “Sunshine, you’re my baby and I’m your only mother, but you must obey the one taking care of you but she is not your mama”.

She has no major, living role models which are especially hard on her as she is a young girl experiencing one of the most precious womanly gifts that life offers—pregnancy. She is carrying a child, she knows she is a woman. Yet, she has trouble escaping the idea that womanhood is linked with violence. The clearest presence of water in the novel is the looming storm—Hurricane Katrina. The family is warned of the incredible danger they're about to face— destruction at its worst, fear at its most intense. Adding to Esch's uncertainty about herself, Daddy highlights the gender of the storm by warning, "The storm, it has a name now. Like the worst, she's a woman. Katrina" (pg 124). Esch's journey into womanhood parallels with the storm reaching its full force. China teaches Esch that motherhood brings out power from within, often in the form of violence-- something she especially notices when China fights Kilo after giving birth. The hurricane highlights one of Esch's biggest insecurities. Esch views Katrina as the "murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies… Katrina is the mother we will remember," (pg 225). Esch aligns the natural disaster that causes chaos in everyone's lives by uprooting both physical and mental stabilizers with her own chaotic, uncharted life path. As she moves along in her pregnancy, she feels growing instability, yet,

Danticat writes about a daughter and her mother, who has been accused of being a witch. The mother had to cross the river separating Haiti and the Dominican Republic to save herself and her daughter. This real event was a massive massacre with very few survivors. “My mother had escaped El Generalissimo's soldiers, leaving her own mother behind. From the Haitian side of the river, she could still see the soldiers chopping up her mother’s body and throwing it into the river along with many others,” (40). Despite surviving, the mother saw her own mother die in this massacre and likely many more people that she knew. She lost everything while trying to escape, except for her own daughter. This forced them to start their life over in Haiti. And while she did get a chance to start a new life, she went through immense suffering trying to escape and even once she did escape and got to Haiti. After moving to the city, the mother is accused of being a witch and

The thoughts and emotions that occur in connection with water are triggered by the lake, and they help Ruth choose transience over any other form of existence. When water floods Fingerbone, the boundaries are overrun, exposing the impermanence of the physical world, and the world’s own natural push towards transience. Water shifts the margins, warning us that the visible world only shows us part of the whole--or perhaps even a mere reflection of a false reality. After the fantastic train wreck in which Ruth’s grandfather perished, the lake sealed itself over in ice, changing boundaries again, while it concealed, like a secret, the last traces of the victims with the illusion of its calm surface. The lake, a source of beauty and darkness, life and death, is “the accumulated past, which vanishes but does not vanish, which perishes and remains” (172). Water carries the symbolic possibility for rebirth– the flood causes the graves in the town cemetery to sink, “so that they looked a little like…empty bellies," suggesting that the dead were born into the receding waters (62). As water and death are so pre-eminent in Sylvie’s consciousness, in dream, she teaches Ruth to dance underwater, to live a life of transience to be

Lena St. Clair’s mother always looked out for her by reminding her: “‘You must not walk in any other direction but to school and back home,’… ‘A man can grab you off the streets, sell you to someone else, make you have a baby. Then you’ll kill the baby. And when they find this baby in a garbage can, then what can be done? You’ll go to jail, die there’” (106). The strong diction expresses the depth of Ying-ying’s fear for her daughter’s wellbeing. She uses the words “terrible”, “kill”, and “die” which connote fear and pain. The purpose is to accentuate how ridiculous the precautions women have to take just to feel safe are. The importance of these safety measures is shown and made understandable. Tan uses a hyperbole saying that Lena will kill her child and end up dying in prison. The purpose of amplifying the potential outcome is to convey how crucial it is that Lena knows how to stay safe which helps to understand that the vitality of women having these safety regulations. Waverly argues with her mother about her fiancé and attempts to understand her mother’s resentment towards him. Waverly realizes her mother’s fear saying, “…I knew what lay on the other side: Her side attacks. Her secret weapons. Her uncanny ability to find my weakest spots. But in the brief instant that I had peered over the barriers I could finally see what was really there: an old woman, a wok for her armor, a

Again the danger of parenting is depicted through walls’ use of symbolism. Jeannette being a child (three years old) and having to cook and take care of herself is substandard. Having to be surrounded by hardship and

"The Chrysanthemums" introduces us to Elisa Allen, a woman who knows she has a gift for growing things, but it seems to be limited to her garden. Diligently working in her garden, Elisa watches as men come and go, living their lives unconfined, wondering what it must feel like to have that freedom. That emotion is revealed as Elisa gases at her husband and acquaintances talking, "she looked down toward the men by the tractor shed now and then." As she tills the soil for her chrysanthemums Elisa tills the thoughts in her head. The garden she so desperately maintained represents her world. A world that will only flourish if nourished. Emotional nourishment and stimulation is what Elisa lacked and longed for. The garden is limited in space to grow and so is her marriage. The garden is safe, non-threatening and so is her world. The garden contains many different elements that make it what it is, although unseen, and if the proper nourishment is not given it will die, as with Elisa.

him, therefore, she lives with her sister and his husband as a result. This shows the mother’s priorities

"Desiree's Baby" is not a mere tragic short story by which a reader may be entertained by its ironic and catastrophic ending. It is a story of a crime and brutality against women of all generations to come, depicting vividly how a woman may suffer and conceal her anguish for the sake of others. It is a story of innocence slain mercilessly by the unscrupulous power of harshness that directly governs human societies.

Through the novel, Danticat expresses this. In the chapter “Night Woman”, an unnamed woman wants her child to live freely and happily so she goes into prostitution. In “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” two different women talk about their experiences with The Massacre River of their mothers. They both talk about how generations of women have brought light and hope into their lives. In the chapter “Children of the Sea”, a young girl goes into labor, while stranded on a boat sailing to America. The sight of a new child brings hope to the people on the boat. Finally, in the story “Between the Pool and the Gardenias” a woman has experienced much loss and is hopeless. When she holds a baby in her arms, she experiences happiness and hope. These stories illustrate the idea that Haitians can find hope and strength through familial generations, both past and future. Haitians have been able to find light in the wake of disaster through the love of family, and the generations of

Through the mother, we see that dreaming may lead to a painful disappointment. The mother has an unrealistic image of her and her future husband as an idyllic, respectable and happy couple, which is not true in reality. “… avoiding the riotous amusements being beneath the dignity of so dignified couple”. She is trying to make an image of herself as an intelligent, domestic and interesting woman, which shows

This kind of thought makes Camille very hopeful, and she is even able to forget about what had happened to her at university when she unexpectedly fell pregnant. But, it sometimes happens that her child asks her where his father is, or how come she doesn’t live with him. This often kills the positivity in her, which dies and changes into a feeling of guilt and confusion, where she often doesn’t know what to say or how to react. These feelings of uncertainty and guilt are also very negative and cancelled out her initial