Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

First published: 1994

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The 1970’s to the 1990’s

Locale: Haiti and New York City

Principal Characters:

• Sophie Caco, a young girl
• Martine Caco, Sophie’s mother
• Tante Atie, Sophie’s aunt, who raises her in Haiti before her mother sends for her
• Grandma Ife, Martine’s mother

The Novel

Breath, Eyes, Memory tells the story of Sophie Caco from her younger years in Haiti to her mother’s death. Over the course of the novel, Sophie must come to terms with her family, her family’s past, her childhood, and her own identity.

The third-person narrator begins with Sophie in Haiti, living with her Tante Atie, who had moved from her mother’s home to town to assure Sophie’s education. The early part of the novel (part 1) shows the details of Sophie’s world: the close neighborhood, the political turmoil, the struggles of Tante Atie as a single woman in this society, and Sophie’s struggles to understand Atie’s sorrow. During this section, Sophie learns that her mother, Martine, has sent for her to come to America and live.

Sophie’s ambiguous feelings about her identity are apparent when she tries to give Atie a Mother’s Day card, which Atie insists she give to her mother instead—the mother who is only a voice on the tape recordings she sends regularly. When Sophie arrives in New York, she learns that her mother works two jobs to support herself and send money home to Haiti. Sophie also learns that her birth was the result of a rape by a man who kept his face covered; her mother dreams nightly of this horror and the faceless man.

In part 2, Sophie has started college. She and her mother have moved to a larger house; her mother continues to work two jobs, and Sophie continues to struggle with the attitudes of those around her regarding her Haitian heritage. During this time, Sophie meets Joseph, an older musician who lives next door. Martine feels strongly about what she has been taught about a mother’s duty to protect her daughter’s chastity and reputation. When Martine discovers that Sophie is involved with a man, she insists on carrying out a “test” of her virginity—a humiliating ordeal that Martine and Atie also suffered through with Grandma Ife. To escape this ordeal, Sophie bodily injures herself to ensure that she will fail the test. She asks Joseph to marry her and take her with him to Providence; the prospect of living in a town named after the Creator encourages Sophie.

Part 3 begins with Sophie’s return to Haiti with her daughter, Brigitte, to visit Atie and Grandma Ife, a trip she has undertaken without telling her husband. Atie again lives with her mother. Sophie quickly sees the strained relationship between her aunt and grandmother, as Atie has learned to read, drinks rum, and disappears for hours at night. Martine arrives also, having been called by Joseph to report that Sophie has disappeared and having been told by her mother that Sophie had arrived in Haiti. Sophie asks her mother about the test—as she had asked her grandmother—and receives the same reply: They did it because their mothers had done it. While tenuous, a reconciliation does take place between the mother and daughter. In this section, readers learn that Sophie experiences sexual difficulty with her husband and struggles to overcome and understand her past, an attempt that has brought her to her grandmother’s. The interactions among the four generations of women reveal the complex dynamics of the family.

In part 4, Martine and Sophie return to New York, where Sophie spends the night with her mother. Their conversation reveals that Sophie suffers from bulimia and that Martine is pregnant. The child’s father is a long-term partner whom Martine has refused to marry. Her pregnancy surprises her—cancer has resulted in two mastectomies—and brings back many painful memories of the circumstances of her first pregnancy. Sophie reunites with her husband, who finally meets Martine a week later. Sophie belongs to a support group for women who have suffered sexual abuse; she receives counseling, and she struggles with her marriage. Sophie is distraught when her mother’s lover calls to tell her that Martine has committed suicide to end her pregnancy. All of them return to Haiti for the burial, according to her mother’s wishes, and the novel ends with the four generations of Caco women again reunited by the tragic event.

The Characters

Sophie Caco grows from a young girl to an adult woman with her own child. She is the emotional, as well as the narrative, heart of the novel. The third-person limited narration gives Sophie’s often bewildered view of a world over which she feels she has no control. She cannot stop herself from being shipped off to America; she cannot stop her mother’s nightmares and the tests; she cannot understand the circumstances of her own reactions to the events around her. She fights back the only way she knows how: by marrying Joseph and leaving her mother’s house. By the end, she comes closer to understanding her own behavior and the behavior of her family members, but the cost has been great—estrangement from her mother, problems with her husband, and anger at her family. Her relationship with her mother—who moves from a voice on a tape recording to a living presence to a tormentor to a role model—shapes her world in ways she only begins to understand by the end of the novel.

Tante Atie spent years of sacrifice to rear Sophie, only to have her returned to her mother. While she insists that Sophie belongs with her mother, the loss of Sophie greatly affects Atie’s life for the worse. Readers learn that Atie as a young woman planned to marry but that the man left her for someone else. Atie and Sophie live across the street from this man and his wife; Atie watches them at night and cries. When Sophie leaves, Atie returns to care for her mother—the duty of the elder, unmarried daughter. Sophie sees her suffering, but for many years cannot understand it.

Martine Caco also lives her life according to her duties. She works long hours to support herself, to send money to her mother, sister, and daughter, and to enable her to send for Sophie. She has endured many hardships, from the rape that resulted in Sophie’s birth to cancer to nightly terrors in her sleep. Martine desperately wants a better life for her daughter than the one she has lived.

Grandma Ife takes her role as matriarch seriously, never hesitating to instruct, correct, bully, and lead her family. Sophie comes to understand her wisdom, her ability to hear things others cannot, and her fear for the future of her family, but she holds her responsible as well for some of the indignities of her life, such as the “test.”

Sophie’s husband Joseph and Martine’s lover Marc also fit into the story, but both are presented as relatively flat, static characters. Both support the women in their lives and care deeply about them.

Critical Context

Breath, Eyes, Memory achieved both critical and popular success. The characters, the lyrical prose, and the interweaving of myth, tradition, experience, and knowledge all combine to create a powerful novel.

Danticat draws on her Haitian American heritage; she, too, stayed behind when her parents went to New York City for work, living with relatives until the age of twelve, when she also moved. The Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti during her childhood provides the novel’s political backdrop, evoked by the fear of the citizens, the brutality of the soldiers, and by Sophie’s encounter with a boy who has lost his father to the violence. Danticat has said that part of her attraction to writing stemmed from her wish to break the silence imposed on Haiti; she was also drawn by the inherent danger of such an activity.

Sophie’s quest requires her to come to terms with her own history, the strength in her own family, and the beauty, as well as the hardships, of Haitian society. She must also balance her two identities, American and Haitian. She faces prejudice from Americans and questioning by the Haitians when she returns. A small but intriguing example of this occurs when she goes jogging on her last visit to her grandmother, as the people working in the fields wonder, “Is this what happens to our girls when they leave this place? They become such frightened creatures that they run like the wind, from nothing at all.”

Danticat’s themes of political repression, feminism, and cultural identity all coalesce in the attention to storytelling. Readers hear the stories passed down from mother to child for generations, both to delight and to terrify. After her mother’s funeral, Sophie hears the following from Grandma Ife: “There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear your mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: Ou libere?’ Are you free, my daughter?” For Sophie, Martine, Atie, Grandma Ife, Haiti, and America, the question echoes throughout Danticat’s novel.

Bibliography

Campbell, Elaine. The Whistling Bird: Women Writers of the Caribbean. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998. Includes a useful discussion of Danticat.

Casey, Ethan. “Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Callaloo 18, no. 2 (Spring, 1995): 524ff. Sees the novel as an important literary introduction to Haitian culture at a time when Haiti’s political turmoil was in the news. Notes that the coded reference to politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s party, Lavalas, is a subtle statement of Danticat’s hopes for a post-Duvalier Haiti.

Charters, Mallay. “Edwidge Danticat: A Bitter Legacy Revisited.” Publishers Weekly 245, no. 33 (August 17, 1998): 42-43. A profile of the novelist. Discusses the experiences that led to the writing of Breath, Eyes, Memory and her other novels.

Corelli, Marie. “Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women 10, no. 1 (Fall, 1994): 36ff. Argues that the novel serves two important purposes: It is a celebration of a Haitian culture likely to disappear in the not-too-distant future, and it is a plea for mothers to welcome their daughters into the world the same way they welcome their sons, to stop the cycle of abuse that they perpetuate because of their own suffering at the hands of their own mothers.

Francis, Donette A. “’Silences Too Horrific to Disturb’: Writing Sexual Histories in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 2 (Summer, 2004): 75ff. Provides the history of the women’s movement in Haiti, which is seen as closely tied to the U.S. occupation and Duvalier regimes. To make her case for the relationship between scenes of sexual violence and the postcolonial state, Francis closely examines five key moments of abuse, beginning with the rape of Martine in a cane field.

Loichot, Valerie. “Edwidge Danticat’s Kitchen History.” Meridians 5, no. 1 (2004): 92-116. Sees food as the central link between the individual and community, claiming that Martine’s loss of Haitian recipes, like Sophie’s bulimia, results from her cultural isolation. Places Danticat in the company of other feminist writers who use food as a metaphor for the female body and who equate literacy and writing with female power.

N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José. “Rewriting Folklore: Traditional Beliefs and Popular Culture in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!” Macomère 3 (2000): 123-140. Explains many of the novel’s allusions to Haitian myths and the meaning of names used for characters and places. Translates key Creole words, identifies important Haitian proverbs, and offers an analysis of dreams and omens.

Shea, Renee H. “The Dangerous Job of Edwidge Danticat.” Callaloo 19, no. 2 (Spring, 1996): 382-390. Includes an interview with Danticat in which she discusses her feelings toward Haiti, her preoccupation with mothers and daughters, and the translation of Breath, Eyes, Memory into French.

Shea, Renee H. “Traveling Worlds with Edwidge Danticat.” Poets and Writers Magazine 25, no. 1 (January-February, 1997): 42-51. An overview of Danticat’s life and writings.

“Three Young Voices.” Interview with Edwidge Danticat, Veronica Chambers, and Sheneska Jackson. Essence, May, 1996. Danticat discusses her childhood and her life as a writer.