Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Breath, Eyes, Memory, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Mothers, Daughters, and Generational Trauma
Virginity and Violence
Home
Memory, Storytelling, and the Past
Summary
Analysis
Before Sophie leaves Haiti, Tante Atie brings her to La Nouvelle Dame Marie—Granmè Ifé’s village—to receive her grandmother’s blessing. The two of them walk up the rough roads to Granmè Ifé’s house, passing cane fields full of workers, thatched huts full of women cooking, and a farm owned by a woman named Man Grace. As Tante Atie and Sophie walk up to the house, Granmè Ifé hurries to embrace them, promising to cook them all the things they like best.
Though generational trauma is passed down through mothers and daughters, this passage shows how blessings, happiness, and encouragement can also be handed down through generations, even in difficult times.
Themes
That night, over supper, Tante Atie and Granmè Ifé talk about all the good fortune Sophie will have in New York. Sophie’s grandmother urges her to remember that Martine was—and is—her “first friend.” That night in bed, though, Sophie resists falling asleep, afraid of having one of her nightmares about her mother stealing her away.
Even though Sophie’s aunt and grandmother try to comfort her and get her excited about New York, she has a bad feeling about reuniting with her mother and about living in a new place. Nightmares are an ongoing symbol of lingering trauma throughout the novel, and the fact that Sophie is having a nightmare leading up to her departure foreshadows future emotional pain for her in the U.S.
Themes
Sophie and Tante Atie’s visit to La Nouvelle Dame Marie is short—the next day, they leave to return to Croix-des-Rosets. Granmè Ifé says it’s good that their trip has been quick—if they were to stay too long, she says, she might suffer from chagrin (which she sees as a “genuine physical disease”) upon parting from them. On the van ride back to Croix-des-Rosets, Sophie asks if chagrin can kill a person, and if there’s any way to keep it from visiting. Tante Atie says there’s no way to prevent chagrin—and that, in fact, when one is suffering heavy burdens in life, it means they have been “chosen to carry part of the sky” atop their heads.
This passage shows that Granmè Ifé, and all of the women in Sophie’s family, associate emotional pain with real physical distress and illness. Even though Sophie comes from a place where pain is taken seriously, however, the novel is about to open up issues in which women’s pain is discounted and shoved aside, leaving them to carry their heavy burdens alone and in misery.
Themes
