Sunrise, Sunset by Edwidge Danticat

Name Institutional Affiliation Course Code/Title Instructor Date Sunrise, Sunset. ‘Sunrise, Sunset’ is an article by Edwidge Danticat that appears in The New Yorker. The article talks about the relationship between Carole and her daughter, Jeanne. They have a strenuous relationship which is brought to light by their perceptions of one another in the article. The article’s title is obtained from a game that Carole often played with Jeanne as she was growing up and later with her grandson, Jude (Jeanne’s son). Where she would drape a sheet on Jude’s playpen and announces that it was sunset and upon taking the off the sheet it turns sunrise. Carole suffers from dementia, where gets memory loss. She is also prone to episodes of violence. Despite the fact that she is unwell, she cares for Jude, her grandson who is a toddler. Her daughter is mentally fragile and spends most of her time in the bedroom (Danticat, n.p). She does this in the pretext that she feels overweight and is self-conscious. Therein lays the misunderstanding between Jeanne and Carole. Carole has feelings that Jeanne is not much concerned with the affairs of Jude. She merely shows any affection to her son. This leaves Carole to take care of Jude together with Grace, the mother in law to Jeanne. Carole has the responsibility of singing songs and playing Peekaboo games with Jude despite the evidence that she is losing memory. Jeanne rarely leaves her bed to go and be with her son, even though his son is not colicky or tough, she is afraid that she might drop him or embrace him too casually and overwhelm him. When Jeanne was growing up, her mother used to play peekaboo games with her such as Alo, Bye. Yet Jeanne would not join Jude to play. Carole feels that Jeanne does not appreciate how lucky she is living in the United States. Carole grew up without her father and with only her mother in Haiti, a country with a dictatorial government. She grew up poor and her mother worked had a menial job, working as a cleaner (Danticat, n.p). Carole protects her children when they are growing up from such a life. Jeanne does not understand that there are a lot of people who face challenges such as hunger, suffer on the whims of a tyrant and suffer from natural disasters such as hurricanes. Carole grew up in a tin roofed house while Jeanne can now afford to live in a condominium yet she does not appreciate this. Carole is frustrated by how Jeanne acts. She keeps retelling herself that Jeanne is still not fully mature. At the initiation ceremony, Carole observes that Jeanne does not even look at her own son, further displaying her failure as a mother to be interested in the wellbeing of her son. Jeanne and Carole have a distant relationship, as indicated by the fact that Carole’s husband, Victor, who understands what Carole is undergoing. He is the one that has seen her through her worst episodes which include mood changes and anger followed by total silence. In the end Carole regrets that she had never told Jeanne the first time ever that her husband had to take her t...