Breath, Eyes, Memory Themes

In Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, three generations of mothers and daughters wrestle with the generational trauma that has been handed down again and again and has come to define all their lives. The Haitian practice of manually “testing” young women for virginity is a mother’s burden—and, in the case of the Caco women, a daughter’s unraveling. As Sophie Caco, her mother Martine, her Tante Atie, and her Granmè Ifé confront…

“I have heard it compared to a virginity cult, our mothers’ obsession with keeping us pure and chaste.” So says Sophie Caco at a crucial point in the novel as she reckons with the legacy of violence that defines the lives of Haitian women. Throughout Breath, Eyes, Memory, the loss of virginity is seen not as a rite of passage or an entry into womanhood, but as an act of theft, violence, and disgrace…

Toward the end of Breath, Eyes, Memory, Sophie Caco states that she comes from a place “from which you carry your past like the hair on your head.” For the Caco women—and, Danticat suggests, for Haitian women more generally—the lessons, traumas, and stories of the past are as inseparable from a woman’s journey as the hair rooted in her scalp. Over the course of the novel, as the jumble of stories and parables that…