“The past is like hair on your head…” quote immediately stood out to me and made me think of the second story from “Krik? Krak!” I can only imagine that what happened to Josephine's mother would play a big role in her life. Despite her mother’s death and not having to bare witness to the mental and physical tolls her mother took from being accused a witch, Josephine herself, can never escape the brutal reality of watching her mother be effected from society’s harsh treatment of her mom. In that, and the quotes's sense, it seems to me that Josephine would never be able to escape, let alone get closure, to what happened to her mother. Despite the quote being about Danticat’s own recognition of her origins, I think this applies to Josephine's self-knowledge that she is her mother’s daughter, and her mom’s experiences will always have an effect in her.
“It is the calm and silent waters that drown you” made me think back to the first story we read in class. I found the hardest part of that story to read was when one of the narrator’s mother wants to help protect her neighbor from being killed by the macoutes. Because she was forced to be silent (in order to save her own life), she felt guilty about the neighbor’s death. Knowing that if you were to speak up, you could have saved some one, is an incredibly difficult thing to live with. In this quote, it states that staying silent, and doing nothing, can make a person feel awful, and in this story, I believed it did.
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