Breath, Eyes, Memory

"Breath, Eyes, Memory" (ISBN 0-375-70504-X) is Edwidge Danticat's acclaimed 1994 novel, and was chosen as an Oprah Book Club Selection in May 1998.

Plot introduction

Edwidge Danticat’s first novel, "Breath, Eyes, Memory" was published when Danticat was only twenty-five years old. As she has recounted in interviews, the book began as an essay of her childhood in Haiti and her move as a young girl to New York City.

The novel is about the coming of age and self-discovery of a Haitian woman named Sophie. Sophie grows up in Haiti with her aunt but must leave as an adolescent for New York to be with her mother. She and her mother become estranged when Sophie becomes involved with an older American man. Sophie later goes back to Haiti to quell some of her self confusion.

Plot summary

Young Sophie spends her childhood with her aunt, Tante Atie, in Croix-des-Rosets, a small village in the impoverished island nation of Haiti. Sophie deeply loves her aunt, the woman who has taken care of her as if she were her own, but from the beginning, Danticat makes clear that Sophie’s mother is sending for her. Martine lives in New York, and has left Haiti, ostensibly, to carve out a better life for her family in America. Her reasons for leaving are more desperate that that, but the reader does not discover that truth until later when Martine reveals to young Sophie the circumstances of her birth. Early on in the book, Tante Atie tells Sophie to pack her bags for her journey to New York. While there is nothing she can do to stop her aunt from sending her (or her mother from calling on her), she does not want to leave the only woman whom she loves and trusts. She does not want to leave Haiti, her home. Nevertheless, she boards the plane and begins the journey that will shape the character she becomes by the end of the book.

Sophie’s life with her mother in New York is strained from the beginning. Upon her first night in Martine’s apartment, Sophie wakes up to her mother’s frantic screams from a nightmare, something she suffers from constantly. She must also adapt to a new language (an English that seems to have little patience for her Creole), a new city (one that moves at a fundamentally different pace from village life in Haiti), and bigotry. At school, students mock her and other Haitian immigrants by shouting, “H.B.O.,” which stands for “Haitian Body Odor.” She struggles to find identity in her community, particularly because she feels alienated from the one person with whom she wants to connect: her mother. This palpable divide between mother and daughter is made worse by Martine’s assertion that she will begin “testing” her daughter for her purity. This act is a traditional one, perpetrated by mothers upon their daughters, whereby the mother inserts her finger into her daughter’s vagina to “test” that she is, indeed, a virgin. Testing is a permanent source of shame for Sophie, and an act that drives many of her actions later in the novel......

Martine’s past explains many of her dealings, and she reveals her painful secret to young Sophie early on: she was raped as a teenager, probably by one of Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes, and became pregnant with Sophie. The memories of the rape haunt her throughout the text – it is the reason for her nightmares – preventing her from being the kind of mother and partner (to Haitian attorney Marc Chevalier) that she longs to be. It seems that to deal with her pain, she inflicts shame upon her daughter by “testing” her. This sort of victimization certainly is not uncommon among perpetrators who have been traumatized themselves. Regardless, Martine ultimately drives her daughter away. Sophie becomes involved with a sensitive musician named Joseph, and they eventually marry. Marriage is difficult for her because of what she has endured, and after the birth of their daughter Brigitte, Sophie returns to Haiti to try to begin to understand who she is.

Haiti as “motherland” is an important concept because it serves as matriarch for the women characters in the novel. Sophie returns to Haiti to search for the thing she desperately wants: a mother/daughter relationship. She reconnects with Tante Atie, who implicitly is involved with another woman, Louise, who is teaching her to read and write. She also visits her grandmother, looking for answers to her past. They do not come until tragedy happens. After becoming pregnant with Marc’s child, Martine becomes obsessed with the idea that this baby is the rapist, returning to haunt her. While Sophie and Marc make several attempts to help her, Martine decides that the baby must be taken. She performs a desperate act of mutilation on her body by trying to “cut out” the fetus with a rusty knife. She bleeds to death. Not until her mother’s death does Sophie understand what she must begin to do to heal. She begins therapy with a Santeria priestess and returns to Haiti to bury her mother’s body. While there, she confronts the field where her mother was raped, and cuts down the stalks of cane that represent the painful secret that held her mother, therefore Sophie, hostage. This final act is one of revelation for Sophie, but it also emblematizes the power of the female voice to disrupt the silence that has been forced upon them for too long. Through the book, Danticat creates an environment perpetuated and protected by women.

Major themes

The novel deals with questions of racial, linguistic and gender identity in interconnected ways.