| Yesterday I read Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat. This is a spare but vibrant novel, spare in emotion but vibrant in character, with Haiti being one of the strongest characters, dictating the duality of the other characters. The novel tells the story of a Haitian woman, Sophie, who is both protected and haunted, loved and tortured, by the trio of women who care for her, her grandmother, her aunt, and her mother. This split of care (loved – tortured, protected – haunted) is just one example of duality in the novel. Other dualities include: her aunt is both mother and aunt to Sophie up until the age of 12 when Sophie is sent to America to live with her mother; her mother trembles between sanity and madness; Sophie herself is the good girl she is raised to be and yet betrays her mother’s faith and expectations; Sophie’s mother is black and yet wants her skins to be white; bulimia, the split between wanting food and excising it; the generals that run Haiti can rape and murder and yet go home to be loving to their own wives and children; Haiti and New York both offer one kind of safety and another kind of danger.
The most damaging duality is the one between the sexual self and the self that Haiti culture dictates must remain pure. The probing of a girl’s hymen by the mother (“testing”) is seen as necessary to ensure that a girl is delivered pure to her husband. But what happens when no husband appears? What happens when a girl is raped? What happens when a girl mutilates herself to break the hymen? And what of the child that comes from unsanctioned sex? Must that child bear the taint, the curse, of her origins? The novel explores all of these questions within a simple but forceful narrative that moves chronologically, with little backward introspection. The characters do not look inward except when forced to, but their inner life haunts them through nightmares, physical pain, and madness. At times the novel was too spare, and I felt cut off from the heart of the story. I became disengaged, put off by Sophie’s reserve, by the glossing over of years passing, and by her reporting only the facts but few of her emotions. But the ending of the novel is powerful and pulled me firmly back within the story and its characters, its issues and its immovable facts of mothering, care, duty, and spiritual strength. These women of Haiti had few choices and made the most of what they had, did the best they could, strove to follow the line of duty and carve out space for love and, eventually, peace, for themselves, and for all the women of the family. The novel offers no easy answers or solutions to generations of duality, to the conflict between love and duty, to the resulting pain and anguish, but it does pay due homage to the will of women to fight the dualities. Tragedy is when will fails and circumstances triumph: Sophie’s mother is the victim of Haiti but she is able to claim her own survivors, her mother, her sister, her daughter, and her grandchild. The novel ends with a note of liberation: “Are you free my daughter?“ Sophie is. |
