45 pages • 1 hour read
Edwidge DanticatKrik? Krak!
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Beta“Epilogue: Women Like Us”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“Epilogue: Women Like Us” Summary
Danticat writes the final story in the collection as a second-person address to an unspecified “You” describing the experiences of her past. She lists the rules her mother taught her to live by: Learn to cook and clean, and abstain from sex before marriage. She was forbidden from writing as a child because her mother thought she had better work to do. She says despite her mother’s disapproval, writing was her companion as a lonely child.
Danticat compares the act of writing to braiding hair, bringing unruly chaos into order and alignment. While braiding her own hair, she thinks that she looks like her mother, who was disappointed when she became a writer, because women writers are raped and killed in her country. She says women in her family are connected by their violent deaths, by the sacrifices they have made to ensure their own survival and that of their daughters. Telling their stories is Danticat’s way of keeping them with her. When her mother was braiding her hair, she told her to repeat their names. Danticat wrote them down instead.
“Epilogue: Women Like Us” Analysis
Unlike the rest of the stories in the collection, the Epilogue is written in the second person and filled with sentences beginning with the words “you” and “your.” The narrative presented in the Epilogue aligns with Edwidge Danticat’s experiences as a child in Haiti, and the epilogue can be read as Danticat’s older self speaking to her younger self about her experiences as a young writer. Simultaneously, the epilogue’s point of view positions Danticat’s experiences as the reader’s, compelling the reader to take on the perspective of the Epilogue as their own. This stylistic choice is particularly effective for readers who don’t share Danticat’s subjective position. For readers who may be unfamiliar with the histories and experiences described in the collection, the repeated use of the second person “you” serves to reinforce the humanity and Resilience of Women in the Haitian Diaspora. This is especially important in instances describing difficult topics like sexual assault: “Most of the women in your life had their heads down. They would wake up one morning to find their panties gone” (223). The use of the second person here signals that sexual assault is not a uniquely Haitian problem, but a problem that unites all women, pointing to the theme of Gendered Violence and Female Solidarity. The use of the second person reminds Danticat’s readers that, regardless of their background, they are also intimately intertwined with the lives of these women.
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By Edwidge Danticat
