Kincaid Vs Danticat

In various countries, women are to live a certain lifestyle through what society places them in. Many novelists, from foreign areas such as the Caribbean’s and Africa, write stories that are heavily influenced by their lifestyles they had when growing up or watching someone else go through the same lifestyle. The stories Women Like Us by Edwidge Danticat and Girl by Jamaica Kincaid, are both a perception on women. However, while Danticat’s story lean more on the subject of women and writing, Kincaid’s story is more about women and femininity. Kincaid and Danticat both have unique backgrounds that influence these stories, and they express the importance of womanhood through theme and figurative language.

Jamaica Kincaid is a Caribbean American

Kincaid sets the story up in a manual on how to look, behave, and perform various duties that woman is expected to fulfill. Throughout the story, Kincaid starts to add in tradition with certain tasks she is advising her daughter on, mainly on cooking and appearance. “Cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil”, “Soak salt fish overnight before you cook it”, “Always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach” “Don’t sing benna in Sunday school” (Kincaid 163). Readers can infer that these tasks are most likely handed – down traditions that depicts on what a woman should do, whereas to the daughter it is just old traditions that her mother is trying to bring in the new

In Girl, Danticat uses repetition to express how the mother doesn’t want her daughter to fall in the hands of the modern day society, “On Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming”, “This is how you hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming”, “This is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut have warned you against becoming” (163). In Women Like Us, Kincaid uses many similes, as well as repetition when trying to convey her message in the story. For example, she compares writing to braiding hair, “When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity” (159). She also uses repetition, repeating the phrase “You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother and her mother before her” (160). Your initial thought maybe “Why does she repeats this phrase? What’s the significance?”. She answers these questions my detailing that the women in the narrator’s family are a representation on her braids. “A thousand women urging you to speak through the blunt tip of your pencil… These women, they asked for your voice so that they could tell your mother in your place that yes, women like you do