Response to night women

I read "Night Women" by Edwidge Danticat and I thought it was interesting. It wasn't what I thought it was going to be about. I figured it was about women who got away from their day jobs to be their "real" selves at night. But it's about a single mother who is trying to care for her son by being a prostitute and her fight to not let her boy find out.

Her struggle of being a prostitute kills her, because she hates that she has to do it, which is why "the night is the time [she] dreads most in her life." She tells her son lies and half-truths to protect him from what is really going on. She feels in between a normal "day" person and a normal "night" person. She wants to work a normal job but can't and she hates the job she has.

I love how much she cares for her son that she makes sure he is truly asleep and can't hear what is going on so he grows up like a normal child. She shields him from the ugliness of the world and tries to make sure all he sees and hears are good things. That love makes her a pleasant character.

Overall, I think the story is well written and gives off good ideals. But even though the language is not extremely strong, it still gives off his points in powerful ways. "Night Women" is better than expected.

Response to "The Girl with the Blackened Eye"

The story is all about the narrator. She gives us vision into her story and also the audio to it. Her point of view is the first of the victim, then of an accomplice, then of just of someone looking into the past.

We learn about her character through the different traumatic events that happen to her. When she is abducted we learn she has spirit because she is scared and resisting at first. Then as she is held captive for a length of times she becomes almost like a paralytic. She didn't talk nor did she move much, but if she did it was very slowly. But in the end when she is looking back at all of it she is a completely different person. She shows us that our past doesn't define who we are but how we live our lives in the present does.

The physical conflict versus the psychological conflict is very present. The physical conflict is in this story all of the physical beatings and the rape that happened to her body, but the psychological is what those events and things did to her mind. Her body was showing all those different marks for a short period of time in her life. Lasting maybe a month in the span of time, but the trauma to her mind never went away even though she moved past it. You can tell this because even years after the event she still thinks back to it, As well, she never told anyone about it. Not her husband nor her kids. She keeps it locked away like an old vault that is never to be opened. You know it still affects her because if it didn't she wouldn't mind telling her husband at the very least. But she doesn't. She moved on but never moved past it.