Krik_ Krak! - Edwidge Danticat [55]
"Ma, if we were painters which landscapes would we paint?" I asked her.
"I see. You want to play the game of questions?"
"When I become a mother, how will I name my daughter?"
"If you want to play then I should ask the first question," she said.
"What kinds of lullabies will I sing at night? What kinds of legends will my daughter be told? What kinds of charms will I give her to ward off evil?"
"I have come a few years further than you," she insist-ed. "I have tasted a lot more salt. I am to ask the first question, if we are to play the game."
"Go ahead," I said giving in.
She thought about it for a long time while stirring the bones in our soup.
"Why is it that when you lose something, it is always in the last place that you look for it?" she asked finally
Because of course, once you remember, you always stop looking.
epilogue:
women
like us
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. Your mother had two rules for living. Always use your ten fingers, which in her parlance meant that you should be the best little cook and housekeeper who ever lived.
Your mother s second rule went along with the first. Never have sex before marriage, and even after you marry, you shouldn't say you enjoy it, or your husband won't respect you.
And writing? Writing was as forbidden as dark rouge on the cheeks or a first date before eighteen. It was an act of indolence, something to be done in a corner when you could have been learning to cook.
Are there women who both cook and write? Kitchen poets, they call them. They slip phrases into their stew and wrap meaning around their pork before frying it. They make narrative dumplings and stuff their daughter's mouths so they say nothing more.
"What will she do? What will be her passion?" your aunts would ask when they came over to cook on great holidays, which called for cannon salutes back home but meant nothing at all here.
"Her passion is being quiet," your mother would say. "But then she's not being quiet. You hear this scraping from her. Krik? Krak! Pencil, paper. It sounds like some-one crying."
Someone was crying. You and the writing demons in your head. You have nobody, nothing but this piece of paper, they told you. Only a notebook made out of dis-carded fish wrappers, pantyhose cardboard. They were the best confidantes for a lonely little girl.
When you write, it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women in your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes, and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.
You have always had your ten fingers. They curse you each time you force them around the contours of a pen. No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.
You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother. You remember her silence when you laid your first notebook in front of her. Her disappointment when you told her that words would be your life's work, like the kitchen had always been hers. She was angry at you for not understanding. And with what do you repay me? With scribbles on paper that are not worth the scratch of a pig's snout. The sacrifices had been too great.
Writers don't leave any mark in the world. Not the world where we are from. 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