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 their family’s—and their culture’s—dark inheritance, Danticat ultimately suggests that unless female pain, trauma, and cruelty are directly confronted, these practices will continue to harm and oppress generations of women and girls.
Over the course of the novel, Danticat explores how generational trauma affects four women who are members of the Caco family—Granmè Ifé, her daughters Martine and Atie, and Martine’s daughter, Sophie. When readers first meet Sophie, she is a bright and happy girl living in the Haitian village of Croix-des-Rosets with her Tante Atie, who is looking after her—until Sophie’s mother Martine, who has gone on to New York, sends for her. “A child belongs with her mother,” one of Sophie’s neighbors says, congratulating Sophie on getting the chance to journey to America. But as Sophie travels to New York and the novel begins to unfold, Danticat shows how just being with one’s mother, without together facing the generational, structural, and emotional traumas of family and culture, is simply not enough.
Upon arriving in New York, Sophie meets the mother she has not seen since she was an infant—and learns several secrets that reveal the generational trauma festering within the Caco family. Sophie realizes that Martine is battling deep, intense traumas that take the form of violent night terrors, and then shoulders the burden of rousing her mother from her nightmares. Sophie also learns that her mother was, as a girl, subjected to “testing” at the hands of her mother Granmè Ifé—and Tante Atie was as well. As Martine describes her own mother testing the vaginas of her and her sister with her fingers to see if they were still virgins, a fuller portrait of the generational trauma passed down through the family emerges. Finally, Martine tells Sophie that her violent nightmares are the lingering results of a rape she suffered as a girl—the rape that resulted in Sophie’s birth. Though the 12-year-old Sophie is overwhelmed and apparently numb to many of these realizations—and what they mean for her own future—Danticat shows her readers just how deep the traumas in the Caco family are.
As Sophie grows into her late teens and begins covertly developing a relationship with a next-door neighbor, an older musician named Joseph, Martine starts testing Sophie nightly. Sophie learns to “double,” or dissociate, in order to escape the trauma of the tests—and yet she and her mother never discuss what is happening, and neither does Martine apologize for hurting Sophie physically or emotionally. Martine is just doing to Sophie what her own mother did to her—she doesn’t see how the generational trauma and cycles of abuse are trickling down, and she can’t recognize that she is inflicting upon her own daughter the same feelings of shame and violation that she herself has suffered for years as a result of her own violent rape.
When Sophie returns to Haiti as an adult—with her own infant daughter Brigitte in tow—she confronts Granmè Ifé about the legacy of testing, and the women discuss it in earnest for the first time. Granmè Ifé insists that the practice represents mothers trying to look after and do right by their daughters, but at the same time, she confesses to Sophie that her heart “weeps” for what “we”—perhaps meaning the untold numbers and generations of Haitian women before them—have done to Sophie, and to countless girls like her. In confronting one of the core generational traumas at the heart of her existence, Sophie is able to begin to heal—though judging from Sophie’s conversations with her therapist, Rena, about her reluctance to confront her own emotions about her trauma or discuss them with her husband, Joseph, Sophie still has a long way to go.
The novel ends with Martine’s death by suicide—a result, Rena suggests, of her inability to confront the traumas inflicted upon her by her rapist and her own mother alike. But Danticat also suggests that Sophie, at least, is ready to look their legacy in the face, confront the trespasses that have been done unto her, and begin the process of liberating herself from the spiral of generational trauma by confronting her pain. Martine’s death is a tragedy, but it is also a turning point for the Caco women, and it suggests that there is hope for Sophie’s daughter, Brigitte, and all the women in the Caco line still to come.
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Mothers, Daughters, and Generational Trauma ThemeTracker
Mothers, Daughters, and Generational Trauma Quotes in Breath, Eyes, Memory
[Tante Atie] took the card from my hand. The flower nearly fell off. She pressed the tape against the short stem, forced the baby daffodil back in its place, and handed the card back to me. She did not even look inside.
“Not this year,” she said. […] “It is not mine. It is your mother’s. We must send it to your mother.
“Ou byen? Are you all right?” I asked her.
She shook her head yes.
“It is the night,” she said. “Sometimes, I see horrible visions in my sleep. […] Don’t worry, it will pass,” she said, avoiding my eye. “I will be fine. I always am. The nightmares, they come and go.”
“You’re a good girl, aren’t you? […] You understand my right to ask as your mother, don’t you? […] When I was a girl, my mother used to test us to see if we were virgins. She would put her finger in our very private parts and see if it would go inside. Your Tante Atie […] used to scream like a pig in a slaughterhouse. The way my mother was raised, a mother is supposed to do that to her daughter until the daughter is married. It is her responsibility to keep her pure.”
As she tested me, to distract me, she told me, “The Marasas were two inseparable lovers. They were the same person, duplicated in two. […] What vail lovers they were, those Marasas. Admiring one another for being so much alike… When you love someone, you want him to be closer to you than your Marasa. Closer than your shadow. […] You would leave me for an old man who you didn’t know the year before. You and I we could be like Marasas. You are giving up a lifetime with me. Do you understand? There are secrets you cannot keep.”
The story goes that there was once a woman who walked around with blood constantly spurting out of her unbroken skin. This went on for twelve long years. […] Finally, the woman got tired and said she was going to see Erzulie. […] After her consultation, it became apparent to the woman what she would have to do. If she wanted to stop bleeding, she would have to give up her right to be a human being. She could choose what to be, a plant or an animal, but she could no longer be a woman. […]
“Make me a butterfly,” she told Erzulie.
“Some people need to forget. […] I need to remember.”
“Who would have imagined it?” [Tante Atie] said. “The precious one has your manman’s black face. She looks more like Martine’s child than yours.”
“Your husband? Is he a good man?”
“He is a very good man, but I have no desire. I feel like it is an evil thing to do.”
“Your mother? Did she ever test you?”
“You can call it that.”
“That is what we have always called it.”
“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.”
I had spent two days in the hospital in Providence and four weeks with stitches between my legs. Joseph could never understand why I had done something so horrible to myself. I could not explain to him that it was like breaking manacles, an act of freedom.
“They train you to find a husband. […] They poke at your panties in the middle of the night, to see if you are still whole. They listen when you pee… If you pee loud, it means you’ve got big spaces between your legs. They make you burn your fingers learning to cook. Then still you have nothing.”
“If it is a boy, the lantern will be put outside the shack. If there is a man, he will stay awake all night with the new child. […] If it is a girl, the midwife will cut the child’s cord and go home. Only the mother will be left in the darkness to hold her child. There will be no lamps, no candles, no more light.”
“Now you have a child of your own. You must know that everything a mother does, she does for her child’s own good. You cannot always carry the pain. You must liberate yourself.” […] [Granmè Ifé] walked into her room, took her statue of Erzulie, and pressed it into my hand. “My heart, it weeps like a river,” she said, “for the pain we have caused you.”
“The new lady,” [Eliab] said, “does she belong to you?”
“Sometimes I claim her,” I said, “sometimes I do not.”
“I did it,” she said, “because my mother had done it to me. I have no greater excuse. I realize standing her that the two greatest pains of my life are very much related. The one good thing about being raped was that it made the testing stop. The testing and the rape. I live both every day.”
After Joseph and I got married, all through the first year I had suicidal thoughts. Some nights I woke up in a cold sweat wondering if my mother’s anxiety was somehow hereditary or if it was something that I had “caught” from living with her. Her nightmares had somehow become my own. […] I looked back at my daughter, who was sleeping peacefully. […] The fact that she could sleep meant that she had no nightmares, and maybe, would never become a frightened insomniac like my mother and me.
“My grandmother was preparing her funeral,” I said. “It’s a thing at home.” […]
“You called it home?” [Joseph] said. “Haiti.”
“What else would I call it?”
“You have never called it that since we’ve been together. Home has always been your mother’s house, that you could never go back to.”
“Because of you, I feel like a helpless cripple. I sometimes want to kill myself. All because of what you did to me, a child who could not say no, a child who could not defend herself. It would be easy to hate you, but I can’t because you are part of me. You are me.”
“Your mother never gave him a face. That’s why he’s a shadow. That’s why he can control her. I’m not surprised she’s having nightmares. […] You and your mother should both go there again and see that you can walk away from it. Even if you can never face the man who is your father, there are things that you can say to the spot where it happened. I think you’ll be free once you have your confrontation. There will be no more ghosts.”
“There is a place […] where the daughter is never fully a woman until her mother has passed on before her. There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear your mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: ‘Ou libere?’ Are you free, my daughter?”
My grandmother quickly pressed her fingers over my lips.
“Now,” she said, “you will know how to answer.”
