Children of the Sea

Angels and Drifting Dreams

One aspect in the story "Night Women" that really stood out to me was the  feeling of fake mending of the reality the characters live in. In this particular reading, a prostitute describes her lifestyle and work habits. She hopes that her son can grow up with aims and greater dreams. She tells her son that the men who come at night are angels and that they will stay for some time, but he never wakes up to see them. She "[wants] him to forget that [they] live in a place where nothing lasts"(86). In these stories, everything disperses and the future is unknown, this is why she has "grown to learn"(85) that the only thing that is certain is that she must satisfy with what is available that day. 

The truth about her state is that the only aspect of her life that is consistent is the men who come, but their company does not last because they leave in the morning. That is the only thing she can truly know. This is why she makes them seem as divine creatures that come from another world that are difficult to comprehend, so that her son "...dreams of angels skipping over his head"(87) . She creates a reality that is hard to comprehend by creating "angels" so that her son does not look to the unlashing and inconsistent reality that they live in. 

In the end, she says that the angels have "a lifetime to come to [them]"(88), so that the not lasting transforms into hope that one day her child might wake to see the truth in a good way and to see her suiters as angels and not as what they truly are. 

The Song in Literature

In this weeks reading of Knik? Knak?, by Edwidge Danticat covered two different short stories. The overall setting of the book is Haiti, where in the first story, a boy is immigrating illegally to Miami in a small boat filled with other people. He writes letters to his girlfriend who is still in Haiti. She writes back. They both use informal language and tell what they are feeling and express some detail about their surroundings. One song that I would consider appropriate for this part of the text would be "My Heart Will Go On", from the Titanic. I feel that the lyrics and the way the two lovers in the book talk about their eternal longing and reaching to "move on" into a better world relates to the song. The lyrics also talks about distance "near, far, wherever you are". In this story, the magnitude of their separation haunts the letters constantly, but their love seems to be eternally strong, no matter how far away they are from each other. 

The second story is about a family, where a little boy has to recite some lines that he would present in a school play.  He learns his lines considerably well and really fast, which make his parents proud. They go out to see a big air-ballon and the father expresses his longing to go up to the sky and go somewhere new, where he could start a new life. He finally decides to set off this ballon and sets off alone. His wife and son go out to the yard when he is already far off into the sky. Suddenly, he jumps out of the machine and lands a few feet away from his family, covered in blood and killed by the fall. They cry and the boy recites his lines, which were rebellious since he had taken the character of a famous rebel. A song that would add meaning to the story would be "Freedom" by Pharrell Williams. The lyrics of this song evidently is about freedom and the impulse to "use your wings" to fly away to the place where you want to be. The song also has a suddle "mocking like" attitude towards the way to obtain your path and how much of it is suppressed by the thought of "believe<ing> in everyone". The story talks about a suffocated dream, to be free and to create a better life for the family. The boy has the potential to succeed, but does not have the resources to walk away from his current situation. The belief in the people that surround you and having faith, in this case, will not give you what you need; the family has to work hard to get enough to eat due to a corrupt system and a low amount of good jobs.The theory of relying on others will only take you where that person wants you to go, not where you want to end up.