On Breath, Eyes, Memory

After the lachrymose ending of The Farming of Bones, I hesitated to open another book by Edwidge Danticat, especially after my sister warne d me that this one also ended with tears. But I had Breath, Eyes, Memory from the library, and it’s short. I started paging through, I couldn’t stop. The characters are again thin and shadowy instead of fully formed, and the plot, well, the plot is more anecdotal memories than action – Danticat’s writing is more lyrical than narrative, but perhaps she is trying to draw attention not to the people but to their relationships – in this case 4 generations of Haitian women.



Sophie, the third generation, is the central character. She is the child of an act of rape, raised by her aunt after her mother went to America to avoid going mad, Sophie goes to America at the beginning of the book while the aunt returns to her home town to be with her mother, Grandmother Ife. The aunt mourns the loss of Sophie and the occasional brushes with the married man she is in love with but does her duty and encourages Sophie to do the same, even though both of them have suffered from abandonment by Martine, Sophie’s mother/Tante Atie’s sister, and the actions of their mothers: “I must tell you that I do love your mother. Everything I love about you, I loved in her first. That is why I could never fight her about keeping you here . . . It would be a shame if the two of you got into battles because you share a lot more than you know.” says Tante Atie to Sophie.


The rest of the book is mostly vignettes of mother/daughter/sister relationships showing how these tightly knit women hurt and cling to each other. Sophie’s mother struggles to make a living, while Sophie falls in love. Danticat gives the impression that Haitian mothers are very concerned with their daughters’ virginity. Various violations – testing, the rape, betrayal – cause the women of the story to be haunted by ghosts and self-loathing, but they keep clinging to each other. On Sophie’s first night with her mother, Martine has a nightmare because Sophie has the face of her father, the unnamed rapist.


When Sophie finally does leave her mother for her husband, it is only through an act of violence after her mother continually antagonizes her, while saying things like “the love between a mother and daughter is deeper than the sea. You would leave me for an old man who you didn’t know the year before. You and I we could be like Marassas (doubles). You are giving up a lifetime with me. Do you understand? … There are secrets you cannot keep.” But Sophie can’t have a healthy relationship with her husband until her relationship with her mother and her mother’s past is healed. She even goes to therapy, which was surprising when she at one point seems to live on the edge of poverty, while her mother never gets help exorcising her demons, but finally runs back to her aunt and grandmother in Haiti.

In Haiti, we find out how difficult mothers can make life for their daughters, but also how strong the ties between them are. The grandmother looks at Sophie’s baby Brigitte and comments on connection between generations: “’Do you see my granddaughter?’ she asked tracing her thumb across Brigitte’s chin. ‘The tree has not split one mite. Isn’t it a miracle that we can visit with all her kin, simply by looking into this face.’”

This reminded me of how my family acts when a new baby is born: everyone sits around looking at this scrunched, red face making pronouncements about whom the newborn looks like before his face even has time to recover from a trip down the birth canal that makes him look like everyone other newborn, not great-uncle Joe or whomever. Brigitte is an older baby, though, a quiet, good baby, and she acts as a bridge between the previous three generations, pulling them closer so they can heal.




Later Sophie’s grandmother says “Your mother is your first friend.” – to which there is an unspoken “although” – although she left you with her sister, although she tried to kill you in utero, although she would make you feel guilty and dirty for leaving her to marry. Martine shows up in Haiti, too, and Sophie begins to understand how her mother’s behavior towards her was formed by her past, by her culture, by her own sufferings. There is no sobbing lovefest reunion, but Sophie and Martine go back to New York together with baby Brigitte reconciled to their fuller understanding of each other.


Sophie is also able to reconcile and continue in her relationship with her husband, largely because she realizes how her mother was formed by her mother and her mother before that. She holds no anger toward her Grandma Ife, but appreciates her many stories, one of which is about the people who carry the sky on their heads “They are the people of Creation. Strong, tall, and mighty people who can bear anything. Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong. 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.”


(That sounds like my Bible study leader, who was sexually abused by her stepfather, has been in more than one near fatal accident, nearly died of blood clots, has a mother who had a brain tumor, a brother who is a drug/alcohol abuser, and now just found out her husband has a brain tumor. Yet she remains generous and cheerful with others. She certainly carries a bit of sky.)


But Martine is unable to get over her past, even though she too, has a man who wants to marry her. She can’t accept the love of him or of his child and finally gives into the demons that have haunted her since her rape. So Sophie has to go back to Haiti, this time for a funeral, so her mother’s spirit can finally rest, so she can finally be a grown woman herself.

The book seemed to leave a lot of holes, and sometimes it seemed that these women shouldn’t have been so damaged by their mothers’ attempts to keep them pure. But then passages like this made me want to keep reading:

“Listening to the song [at the wake] I realized that it was neither my mother nor my Tante Atie who had given all the mother-and-daughter motifs to all the stories they told and all the songs they sang. It was something that was essentially Haitian. Somehow, early on, our song makers and tale weavers had decided that we were all daughters of this land.” and “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.”



And then the grandmother asks, to Sophie, to Martine, “Ou libere? Are you free my daughter?”


Perhaps it is not just in Haiti where mothers and daughters comfort and torment each other. I remember wanting nothing more than to get away from my mother when I was a teenager. She never did anything to deserve my scorn – just danced when it embarrassed me, punished me when I was smart alecky, made me brush my hair and dress neatly when I thought I was being stylishly unkempt. I wanted independence, not from an abusive, clinging relationship, but freedom nonetheless.



And what daughter doesn’t want to be free of her mother’s judging eye? I can already see that I hold my daughters to a different standard than my sons: their misbehavior angers me more, like I expect they should never misbehave. I take a stronger hand with them, trying to mold them into the young ladies I want them to be, but I feel like I have less influence with them than with my sons.



Or perhaps I find fault with Sophie’s suffering because I sympathize with her mother too much – and thus my mother too. What mom doesn’t want her daughter to remain pure, not just physically, but emotionally, too, so she will not have to know the pains of love, only its joys. Both my girls are very much themselves, not similar to me, but perhaps because it is so clear how easy it is for girls to fall into trouble, I don’t want them make my mistakes. And I appreciate more fully how my mother must have felt when I betrayed her as an adolescent.



I may have pushed her away at that age, but now I’m trying to make up for it. Maybe it is because I am a mother myself – the first and each subsequent time I headed to the labor unit, a part of me repeated “I want my mom, I want my mom,” with each contraction (sorry, husband, I wanted you, too, on one side, and Mom on the other…).



And that refrain still comes to mind when life becomes difficult, and becoming childlike is the only way to approach some struggles. Thanks, Mom, for hearing it.