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 the 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 someone 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 discarded fish wrappers, panty-hose 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.

-from Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat