women of the night trail

Edwidge Danticat spent the first twelve years of her life in Haiti, toward the end living with her aunts, separated from her parents, who had preceded her in emigrating to the United States. She was an imaginative child in a land of  night strange religious voodoo rites, myths about spirits and ghosts, and customs that many outsiders can scarcely comprehend, and her work reflects those early years. Her upbringing presents a sharp contrast with her later life in the United States, which involved a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College in 1990, membership in a sorority, and a master’s of fine arts from Brown University three years later. This duality of outlook can be seen in her writing. watch more

women of the world brief

In “Night Women,” among other concerns, Danticat touches on the problems of unemployment (high in the impoverished island of Haiti) and the beguiling choice of prostitution as a solution. There is also a hint of the author’s reaction to the social breakdown that turns part of the heroine’s life into something that she dreads.

“Night Women” is one of nine stories and an epilogue that make up Krik? Krak! Some of the other stories in this collection are much more bitter and socially aware. For example, “Children of the Sea” chronicles a failed attempt by a party of refugees to escape to Florida in a leaky boat, and “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” is about a woman dying from conditions of her incarceration in the state prison. What is simply mentioned in “Night Women” is more centrally emphasized in these works. watch more

women of the night movie

The doctor-lover Emmanuel is due tonight. She applies Egyptian rouge to her cheeks; the sparkles in the mixture help the women of the night doctor find her in the dark. The doctor reaches his climax, and she must cover his mouth to stifle his screams. At dawn he leaves. She returns to her son’s bed, placing her face next to his lips to feel the heat from his mouth. He awakens and asks, “Mommy, have I missed the angels again?” She rocks him back to sleep, telling him, “Darling, the angels have themselves a lifetime to come to us.”
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women of the night cast

The narrator, a twenty-five-year-old Haitian prostitute, provides a first-person account of a night in her life as a night woman. It is a hot tropical night, the time of day she most dreads but must endure in order to live. She has just put her young son to bed in her tiny one-room house, with only a curtain separating his “bedroom” from her place of business. She has let him wear, as usual, his Sunday clothes in bed, along with her blood-red scarf, worn in the daytime to tempt suitors; thus he will always have something of hers near him when her face is out of sight. In the dark, for a moment, she almost mistakes him for the ghost of his father, a lover long gone.watch more