Women Like Us

        For the last story, the author used the second view to tell her story.  A lots of paragraphs start with the sentence, "You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother.  Your mother who looked like your grandmother and her grandmother before her," to show how the tradition and heredity flow in her blood.  Haitian women always head down, so her family, her mom asks her to head down as well. They refused the author to be a book writer, so writing actually brought a lot of pains to her.  She also admitted that being a writer does not end well.

       "In our world, writers are tortured and killed if they are men.  Called lying whores, then raped and killed, if they are women. In our world, if you write, you are a politician, and we know what happens to politicians.  They end up in a prison dungeon where their bodies are covered in scalding tar before they're forced to eat their own waste."

       Someone thinks the sentence telling above might be too extreme, too cynical.  However, I believe what author mentioned is true. People judge an art or literature easily, and usually, they incline to judge or criticize the artists or writers easily through seeing their works.  They feel litterateurs are unreasonable, and they criticize the litterateurs just because litterateurs show something that they do not want to see. People will pretend the bad never happened because they are far away from the tragedy; the victim will keep silence because they are afraid to recall the mournful memories.  In addition, the society asked for silence, then no one will speak but the writers. Writers found the truth, poke the knife into hearts and unripe it, so that the readers can feel the same feelings that writers want to tell. It is truly a torture for writers.

       Lastly, I would love to quote these sentences.  I think they are pretty good.

       "This fragile sky has terrified you your whole life.  Silence terrifies you more than the pounding of a million pieces of steel chopping away at your flesh.  Sometimes, you dream of hearing only the beating of your own heart, but this has never been the case. You have never been able to escape the pounding of a thousand other hearts that have outlived yours by thousands of years."

       I cannot assert I totally understand the words, but I think what the author wants to tell us is the strong connection between you and your ancestor, the strong connection between individual and the whole society.  In other words, what you decided and what you felt were probably influenced by the culture and your ancestor in a great content, and what you did would decide the next generations. You think you are alone, feeling or suffering your own things, but it is never be true.  You think you are special, but actually you just transfer a thought or behavior from your ancestors.