Kirk? Krak!, was a very inspirational book to Haitian's and Women. The most influential part to me though is the common thread of motherhood. Edwidge Danticat tends to tie this thread through a Madonna a lot. A Madonna is actually another name for Mary, the mother of Jesus. When you usually see or hear of a Madonna who is holding a baby (as you do several times throughout the book) it is referring to Mary holding Jesus. Thus, meaning a mother’s love and dedication to her child. In the short story Nineteen Thirty-Seven it talks about the Madonna a lot. In this story it symbolizes the ownership of a mother. Manman is using the Madonna as a remembrance and replacement of the love and belonging of her mother who was brutally killed in the 1937 Massacre while she escaped with her child. When Manman dies at the end of the story she tells her daughter to use the Madonna to hopefully always have a mother with her.

"When I am completely gone, maybe you will have someone to take my place. Maybe you will have a person. Maybe you will have some flesh to console you. But if you don't, you will always have a Madonna."

 With this topic I could go on and on but I don’t want to focus on the Madonna too much. Motherhood is my keep topic therefore in every story Danticat told she mentioned a mother figure. Every mother in almost every story gave their daughter history, obedience, loyalty and some since of words of wisdom that they too should pass onto their future children. One example of this would be in The Missing Peace:

“That I already have posterity. I was once a baby and now I am an old woman. That is posterity.” (pg. 108)

Page 120 links to the previous quote and shows that the young girl actually learns from her grandmother:

“We already had posterity,” I said.
“When?”
“We were babies and we grow old”
“You’re still young,” she said. “You’re not old.”
“My grandmother is old for me.”

These examples that I have given you are only a very little bit of the vast knowledge through motherhood that Danticat is trying to portray but there are very more. If the class called for a five to ten page essay on just this one topic then I could most definitely keep on writing but, it doesn’t.  So I hope you guys keep on reading!

Night Woman was truly an inspirational story to me; it showed the innocence of a child as well as the care and loving of a mother through hard work, sacrifice, and dedication.

When reading this story I got the feeling that although the mother was sleeping with all these men to make ends meet, she was also doing it to fill a void in her. Maybe it was the loving and belonging of a male figure in her life.

Although I truly feel this way based on these quotes I also know for a fact that she doesn't really like what she is doing to herself; she opens up her story by saying:


She talks about how much she hates it and then closes the paragraph off by saying that she must depend on it in order to live to show that she needs to do it to take care of her family (son). Based on the bible, as a woman you are the one to take care of the house; cooking, cleaning, loving, etc. Danticat expresses this throughout various writings in Kirk? Krak!

Another thing that Edwidge Danticat does in this short story that I liked very much was the imagery that she placed in the story. It's almost like she painted a picture of son like a goddess or of the highest person known. This is how you know that the character is suppose to be focused on more therefore the innocence of a child. I'm only going to give one example of this: