Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) (edit title/settings)

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• Tante Atie: Main Character's aunt who was like her second mother.Sophie's maternal aunt and first guardian, Martine's sister and Grandmè Ifé's daughter. Atie is devastated by two great betrayals: in her youth, Donald Augustin promises to marry her and then suddenly marries another woman, and in her old age, Atie's best friend, Louise, leaves for Miami without so much as a goodbye. She is a character of great perseverance, faithfully caring for Sophie at the novel's beginning and for Grandmè Ifé at the novel's end. Yet as the novel progresses, she becomes understandably bitter at a world that has given her all the restraints of being a poor woman, a daughter, and a virgin, with none of its rewards. Illiterate for much of Sophie's childhood, Atie is taught to read by Louise shortly before the latter's unceremonious departure. Bound to Dame Marie by duty to her mother, Atie refuses to join Martine in New York and instead turns increasingly to alcohol. Throughout, Atie remains deeply loyal to Martine and to her mother, and loves Sophie greatly. Sophie, the beloved child, remains one of Atie's few consolations against the cruel and indifferent march of fate.
• Martine: Main Character's Mother - Lives in New York, Tante Atie's sisterSophie's mother, Atie's sister and Grandmè Ifé's daughter. Martine was raped at the age of sixteen by a masked Macoute in a cane field on her way home from school. The rape left Martine with a child, Sophie, and a lifetime of vivid nightmares. Martine's emigration to New York after Sophie's birth, where she works tirelessly at menial jobs, has meant some precious money for the family. It has also meant Sophie's chance to leave Haiti and to get an American education, a chance that Martine invests with all the power of what has been denied her. Martine's continual struggle to be a good mother to Sophie and a sexually adequate lover to Marc remain powerfully informed by the twin violations of rape and of her own mother's practice of testing for virginity. She is a deeply loving and deeply wounded character, hoping to show her daughter a way beyond her own life even though she cannot help but perpetuate some of its troubles.
• Sophie: Main Character. Raised in Haiti with aunt until she moves to New York to live with her mother.Sophie is Martine's daughter, Atie's charge, Grandmè Ifé's granddaughter, Joseph's wife and Brigitte's mother. A child of rape, Sophie is raised in Croix-des-Rosets, Haiti, by her maternal aunt Atie before being called to New York by her mother at the age of twelve. Notably, Sophie does not look like her mother, her face reflecting the unseen face of Martine's attacker. As the child of a poor immigrant in New York, Sophie must take on the full weight of her mother's and aunt's dreams, spending six years doing nothing but studying and attending church. She must also contend with her mother's trauma, insomnia and nightmares, and with her own conflicting roles as independent woman, loving daughter, savior from nightmares, and reminder of the past. As an adult, Sophie's insomnia, bulimia and sexual phobia echo her mother's own problems and insecurities, even as her loyalty, love, determination and strength reflect her mother's, aunt's and grandmother's spirit. Yet Sophie's relentless and honest examination of herself and her inheritance has perhaps paid off: her daughter, Brigitte, is strong and implacable, suggesting both Caco courage and a break with the more destructive patterns of her maternal line.
• Brigitte: Sophie's daughter by Joseph. The infant Brigitte has a remarkable face in which Grandmè Ifé can see the traces of generations of ancestors. She is calm, quiet and sleeps peacefully, signs that perhaps she has not inherited the insomnia and nightmares of her mother and grandmother.
• Marc: Martine's long-time lover in New York. Marc is a stocky, well-dressed Haitian lawyer, in love with his mother's cooking and by his own full name, Marc Jolibois Francis Legrand Moravien Chevalier (the last word meaning knight). He is slightly patronizing of Sophie and treats her as a child throughout the book. He is kind to Martine, though he does not deeply understand her, as symbolized by his ability to sleep like a log during most of her nightmares. Though his affection for Martine seems genuine, he retains the slightly sleazy air of one too well-connected, a lawyer intent on evading blame.
• Joseph: Sophie's first and only boyfriend and eventual husband. Joseph is a professional musician who lives next door to the house where Sophie and Martine move during Sophie's eighteenth year. He is an African-American from Louisiana and can speak a form of Creole, giving him an immediate kinship with Sophie. Though old enough to be Sophie's father, Joseph is honest, gentle, loving and sure, in stark contrast to the violence, sleaziness and treachery of many of the novel's men. He is deeply supportive of Sophie, committed to helping her as best he can, and enormously proud of their infant daughter.
• Louise: A vendor in the marketplace of La Nouvelle Dame Marie. Louise becomes Tante Atie's best friend once Atie returns to Dame Marie from Croix-des-Rosets to take care of the aging Grandmè Ifé. Though Louise teaches the adult Atie to read and write, she remains a troubling influence, implicated in Atie's night wanderings and her increasing alcoholism. Louise's dream is to save enough money to take a boat to Miami, despite the great risks of the journey. She appears as a deeply desperate woman, continually seeking a buyer for her pig in order to raise the money for her trip. When Grandmè Ifé, fed up with Louise's effect on Atie, finally buys Louise's pig, Louise departs without so much as a goodbye to Atie, leaving Atie heartbroken for a second time.
• Madame Augustin: Wife of Donald Augustin. Lotus is a pretty, gossipy and self-important woman whom Donald chose to marry, breaking his engagement with Atie.
• Monsieur Augustin: A relatively affluent and handsome neighbor of Sophie's and Tante Atie's in Croix-des-Rosets, Haiti. Though once in love with Atie, he married another woman, a betrayal from which Atie has never recovered. His post as teacher at the local school distinguishes him in the community as a man with a profession.
• Erzulie: Add a description of this character.
• Dessalines: The poor coal seller in the marketplace of La Nouvelle Dame Marie. Dessalines is capriciously beaten and finally killed by Macoute soldiers during Sophie's trip to Haiti with her infant daughter in Section Three. His name suggests the General Dessalines, born a slave, who fought with Toussaint L'Ouverture against the French to establish an independent Haiti. When L'Ouverture was arrested by the French in 1802, Dessalines became the revolution's leader, winning a decisive battle at Vertieres against Napoleon's armies, declaring Haiti an independent state in 1804 and ruling it until his assasination in 1806. Though he was by no means an unproblematic figure, Dessalines is widely remembered as the father of Haitian independence. The ironic coincidence of the coalseller's name indicates the extent to which the current government has oppressed the Haitian people.
• Marie
• Dada
• Davina: The second member and hostess of Sophie's sexual phobia group. Davina is a middle-aged Chicana who was raped by her grandfather as a girl over a period of ten years.
• Mama
• Buki: One of three members of Sophie's sexual phobia group. Buki is an Ethiopian college student who was ritually genitally mutilated by her grandmother as a girl.

Quotes edit see section history

• “They are the people of Creation. Strong, tall and mighty people who can bear anything. . . . These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head.”

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• Tante Atie told me that my mother loved daffodils because they grew in a place that they were not supposed to.

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• My flesh ripped apart as I pressed the pestle into it. I could see the blood slowly dripping onto the bed sheet. I took the pestle and the bloody sheet and stuffed them into a bag. It was gone, the veil that always held my mother's finger back every time she tested me.

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• 'I call it humiliation,' I said. 'I hate my body. I am ashamed to show it to anybody, including my husband. Sometimes I feel like I should be off somewhere by myself. That is why I am here.'

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• Tante Atie once said that love is like rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.

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• My mother now had two lives: Marc belonged to her present life, I was a living memory from the past.

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• 'You are going to work hard here,' she said, 'and no one is going to break your heart because you cannot read or write. You have a chance to become the kind of woman Atie and I have always wanted to be. If you make something of yourself in life, we will all succeed. You can raise our heads.'

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• She did not look like the picture Tante Atie had on her night table. Her face was long and hollow. Her hair had a blunt cut and she had long spindly legs. She had dark circles under her eyes and, as she smiled, lines of wrinkles tightened her expression. Her fingers were scarred and sunburned. It was as though she had never stopped working in the cane fields after all.

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• It took me twelve years to piece together my mother's entire story. By then, it was already too late.

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• I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to. My mother was as brave as stars at dawn. She too was from this place. My mother was like that woman who could never bleed and then could never stop bleeding, the one who gave in to her pain, to live as a butterfly. Yes, my mother was like me.

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• I looked at my red eyes in the mirror while splashing cold water over my face. New eyes seemed to be looking back at me. A new face all-together. Someone who had aged in one day, as though she had been through a time machine, rather than an airplane. Welcome to New York, this face seemed to be saying. Accept your new life. I greeted the challenge, like one greets a new day. As my mother's daughter and Tante Atie's child.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Haiti
• New York
• Providence
• Eliab
• Macoutes
• Guinea
• America
• Creole
• Grandme Ife

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• The Male World's Debilitating Obsession with Female Purity: The dominant culture's problematic obsession with female purity is best witnessed by the pair of Martine and Atie. Growing up, the sisters' purity was carefully guarded by the humiliating practice of testing. Yet Martine was raped at age sixteen, while Atie, betrayed by her fiancé, never married. Neither achieved the womanhood for which she was groomed, suggesting at first that this is the source of their unhappiness. But the ultimate force of their stories reveals a troubling commonality between 'pure' and fallen women. The sisters' twin tragedies evidence the toll of a lifetime ofdoubling, of living in an environment which keeps the woman uncomfortable in her body.The cult of female purity centers on an obsession with the woman's body, as it is elevated to the status of sacred object. It is no longer the woman's own, but instead a symbolic vessel of honor, whose utility and purpose are decided by others. In this context, the woman is alienated from her body, trapped by the weight of her woman's flesh. Martine's rape gives way to madness, nightmares, hallucinations and voices, as violence done to her body is perpetuated by her body's continual violence against her soul. The details of Martine's suicide suggest an attempt to destroy the rapist's body, which has become indistinguishable from her own. Thus, while Martine's experience represents a more dramatic version of the imprisonment that her female contemporaries feel, it is a difference only of scale. Atie's turn to alcohol represents a similar escape, an attempt to negate the physicality of her failed womanhood and the broader physical trap of being stuck in Dame Marie. The residual effects of the virginity cult are visible in Sophie's inability to have sex without doubling, and her own difficulty with her body in the novel's final sections. It is Sophie's conscious attempts to address this split, to reconcile her body and soul via therapy, narrative and love, which evince a power to move beyond the tragedy of her mother's and aunt's experience.
• Myth and Parable as Mediators of Pain and Violence: Just as Sophie doubles during testing, freeing her mind from her body's pain, the novel's characters use the symbolic language of myth and parable to mediate the horrific violence of history and of the physical world. The most immediate example is provided by the Macoutes, secret police who are widely referred to by the Creole word for 'bogeyman.' As agents of terror and irrational violence, the Macoutes' presence and action cannot be reconciled with the rational world. Instead, they are explained and described as mythical monsters, liminal figures whose capricious cruelty is not of this world. But though the language of myth allows the honest person to speak of Macoutes without succumbing to despair, it also suggests that only supernatural remedies can remove them. The popular opinion that neither God nor the Devil invented the Macoutes locates them as figures without an origin, and correspondingly without an end. Still, myth encodes the hope of liberation, even as it attests to its difficulty, as in Grandmè Ifé's story of the werewolf in the cane fields, whom one can escape only by running in a rage through the cane fields while shouting a list of the werewolf's crimes. (126)On a more local level, stories are used between characters when straightforward conversation becomes too painful. A classic example is Sophie's attempt to confront Grandmè Ifé about testing in Chapter 23. As the two sit listening to the night's sounds, Grandmè Ifé tells Sophie of a girl, Ti Alice, who is rushing home after a rendezvous with a boy and will betested on arrival. The women discuss testing in increasingly personal terms. But when Sophie attempts to explain that testing was the worst experience of her life, as a result of which she hates her body and cannot be with her husband, Grandmè Ifé retreats to her story, replying that Ti Alice has passed her examination. Later, as they walk inside, Sophie's grandmother apologizes for the pain they have caused her. The scene represents the deep roots of stories in real life, as well as the technique of moving between symbolic and straightforward language when negotiating a difficult topic, a technique that echoes the splitting and reconcilation ofdoubling. At the same time, it attests to stories' universal power, allowing the novel's characters to safely make sense of their hurt by comparing it to an abstract experience.
• The Burden of Inheritance: Reflecting its emphasis on the physical manifestations of love, loss, despair and happiness, the novel explores the troubling influence human beings on one another through the language of inheritance. At times, this inheritance is purely physical. The body can bear witness to the past, as when Sophie discovers that her unusual face echoes unseen face of her mother's rapist. Inheritance can take the form of physical tendencies of disintegration or weakness, as when Sophie compares her grandmother's deformed back to her mother's mastectomy. Though inheritance spans traits and attitudes as well as physical characteristics, its effect is always manifested on the body. A crucial example comes in the novel's climax, Section Three, which centers on Sophie's return to Dame Marie to confront the psychological burdens she has inherited from Martine. Martine'stesting, phobias and anxieties have left Sophie terrified and ashamed of her body. She feels no desire, hates her fatness, has become bulimic, and is only able to have sex while doubling to distract herself. The difficulties provoked by testing suggests the range of ways in which inheritance can happen. Not simply a matter of genes or birth, inheritance includes a child's wider reaction to environment, experience and trauma over the course of her development as a human being. Ultimately, inheritance becomes a cipher for the symbolic fact that a mother and daughter have shared the same body. Though the infant physically leaves her mother's womb, their continued physical connection manifests in a constant, intimate struggle with each other's phobias, experiences, demons and dreams. When Grandmè Ifé tells Sophie at novel's end that a daughter is not fully a woman until her mother dies, she connects Sophie's liberation from the burdens of inheritance with Martine's relinquishing of their common physicality. Her mother's death frees Sophie to take stock of her own choices, and to consciously prevent her own daughter's inheritance of the Caco troubles.
• The Connections Between Language, Affiliation and Belonging: From Martine's first exhortation to the newly arrived Sophie to learn English lest she be mercilessly teased, Sophie's English becomes a metaphor for her negotiation of the new world. Lost at first in the sea of unknown words, Sophie gains a foothold by finding French words that are semantically the same but pronounced differently. The actual point at which she achieves fluency is lost in the six years between the end of Section One and the beginning of Section Two. Her offhand remark at the beginning of Section Two that she has, despite speaking French at school, become an English speaker, attests to the subtle magnitude of this change. Likewise, Sophie's access to French Creole brands her as an authentic Haitian. When she returns to the island with her infant daughter, the van driver notes approvingly that she has not forgotten her mother tongue, as have many other immigrants. Language ties Sophie to the past, even as it attests to her continued engagement with her aunt, grandmother and maternal line. Throughout, language affects a form of symbolic kinship. Joseph's knowledge of Louisiana Creole symbolizes his common ground with Sophie and his wider attempt to understand and speak her language.The novel's politics of language are perhaps most strikingly evident in the fact that it is narrated in English. French Creole phrases are given in italics, and paraphrased when their meaning cannot be intuited from context. This use of language-within-a-language has several effects. First, it locates the novel firmly in Haiti, balancing the story's wider political and social message with the particulars of Haiti and the Haitian diaspora. Second, it represents a local dialect to which the average reader has little access, a constant reminder of the reader's own dependence on Sophie as translator, narrator and mediator between worlds. Third, it provides a concrete example of the novel's play with vocabulary and narrative style, which spans psychoanalysis and folk wisdom as well as the more obvious 'languages' of English, French and Creole.
• Place as a Mediator of Memory: The novel's continual emphasis on flight, movement, imprisonment and return attests to the powerful role of place as mediator of memory. For Martine, a return to Haiti represents a return to the scene of her rape, and experience so psychologically painful that she becomes physically ill. For Atie, her confinement to the remote village of La Nouvelle Dame Marie is a physical exile which parallels her psychological exile from life's happiness and its rewards. For Grandmè Ifé, the promised convenience of city life cannot compare with her familiar, old-fashioned village home. For Sophie, reconciling with her mother's ghosts requires physically returning to the land of Martine's trauma and, ultimately, to the site of the rape itself. Just as the women attempt to engage with history by returning to important places, their attempts to escape its weight involve physical flight. Sophie flees her mother, her mother's nightmares, and her mother's relentless testing by eloping with Joseph to Providence. Martine, with the help of a rich mulatto family, obtains emigration papers to America where she will try to forget the memory of her rape. On a more local level, the protagonists' avoidance of and return to particular houses, beds, rooms, cars and restaurants mimic the less drastic, daily attempts to reconcile the horror of the past with the comfort of the familiar.
• Parallelism and Doubling: The novel's emphasis on parallelism and doubling is reflected in its continual juxtaposition of characters, situations, narrative accounts, bodies and time. The pain passed on from mothers to daughters, like that oftesting, is often a matter of unconscious repetition, hurt inflicted by mothers who had been hurt themselves. Sophie's sexual phobia and anxiety echoes Martine's own, even as both are set against Brigitte's untroubled sleep. Likewise, reconciliation becomes a matter of reenacting the past, of consciously altering its course by playing out familiar actions with a new understanding of their consequences. Sophie's flight into the cane field during her mother's funeral represents an attempt to physically and symbolically fight back against her mother's rape, just as Martine's own suicide suggests a willful destruction of the rapist who has come to possess her own body. Narrative parallelism is often reflected in a temporal split, as when a newly-arrived Sophie becomes aware, over dinner with her mother and Marc, that Marc embodies Martine's present life even as Sophie represents her past. Further, the twin spirits of Marassas,invoked throughout the book to suggest the inseparability of two people's bodies, souls and destinies, are set against the vaudou practice ofdoubling, in which the body and spirit split under unbearable pain. Finally, the novel's emphasis on parables informs its sense of meaningful abstraction, the suggestion that local events are incarnations of a broader truth.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by Black and Blue, and followed by I Know This Much Is True.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Edwidge Danticat (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PS3554.A5815 B74 1994
• Dewey: 813.54

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › United States › African American › Danticat, Edwidge
• Books › Travel › Caribbean › Haiti
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Women's Fiction › Domestic Life
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history