Juxtaposition In Night Women

While on the way to work in your car, you pass by a homeless woman. You see her every day, same clothes, same spot, begging for a redo in life. This makes you appreciate all that you have but also hope for a new start to a new life for that woman. Danticat explains the lives of many different people all around Haiti during the reform. These tones open your eyes to the struggles. In the book, Krik Krak, a series of short stories, the author Danticat utilizes juxtaposition to create desperate characters that in return create the overall mood of hope throughout the book. The specific examples that best display desperate characters, creating an overall sense of hope are by a prostitute, motherless child and a childless mother. In “Night Women”, Danticat creates juxtaposition between a desperate women’s job and her son’s survival. “Emmanuel will come tonight. He is a doctor who loves big buttocks on women, nut my small ones will do. He comes on Tuesdays and Saturdays” (Danticat 87). Sadly, she despises doing the job, especially while her son is sleeping. On the other hand, the mother does all of this for her son. “I want him to forget that we live in a place where nothing lasts” (Danticat 86). The life of her son makes the mother desperate and resorts to any possible job thus giving the reader hope that her son has a future.

For example, she stays in a hotel and asks a fourteen year old employee, Lamort, about the overthrown in Port-au-Prince. Emilie was hoping there weren’t shootings during the coup because her mother was also a journalist and people told her that her mother might be in the region. “Did a woman come to your door? Did anyone ever say that a woman in a purple dress came to their door?” (Danticat 104). Therefore, Emilie was in a state of anxiety to find her mother safe. This situation gives the reader belief that Emilie is finding her