Breath, Eyes, Memory Identity

Sophie is getting a double dose of anxiety in her new homeland. She's hitting the ground at a place and time where to be Haitian-American is particularly difficult. Sophie will have to endure prejudicial comments from white Americans, including the sense that she's dirty or contaminated. On the other side of things, there is a kind of protective self-segregation that will keep Martine and Sophie reliant on the Haitian community in Brooklyn. Though Martine wants Sophie to learn English quickly, there's never a sense on either side that she'll ever "blend in": her mother won't hear of her dating an African-American man and those outside the Haitian community can't see her as anything but "other."

Sophie recalls the story of the woman who could not stop bleeding and who chooses to end her suffering by becoming a butterfly. It is telling that Erzulie asserts that to be human—and especially to be a woman—is to bleed. Sophie understands by this that to be human is to feel pain—overwhelming, uncontrollable distress that can only be stopped when the human condition is left behind. That's bleak.

Ifé introduces Sophie around Dame Marie when she returns with Brigitte. Before Sophie can even self-identify, her grandmother claims her for Haiti. While she may have spent the last decade in the U.S., it's clear that Sophie's roots can never be shaken—for better and worse.

Atie explains her position (and disappointment) to Sophie. While she knows her duty, Atie wonders how it is possible for her to have done everything right up to this point and yet still not have anything of her own. She is not a mother or wife in her own right, the only two things besides daughter she can really be in her society. Atie feels this failure deeply and never really recovers her spirits by the end of the work, though she is able to endure.

Sophie has asked her mother why Martine performed virginity tests on her, even though she and Atie hated them so much themselves. Martine tells Sophie that she will speak of it only once (don't ask again, kid), but Sophie's concerned for Brigitte. She doesn't want to continue this cycle of violation with her own daughter, and she feels that she might need more than one explanation to lift herself out of it.

Sophie has had to deal with the fact that her life began through an act of violence, one that continues to haunt her mother every night of her life. The sorrow of this is made worse when Sophie realizes that she doesn't look like her mother (ergo, she must look like her rapist father). But Martine does her best to release from this torment by making Sophie understand that she's her own woman. She doesn't have to feel contaminated by her difficult beginnings because she is making a life of her own—and that is reflected in her face.

Sophie knows that part of her healing will happen when she loses her anxiety about becoming an abuser herself. Her therapy group encourages her, through ritual, to let go of her obsessive attachment with the pain that her mother felt and passed on to her—to begin to forgive. In doing so, Sophie is already one step ahead of the women in her family who came before her.

Although Martine never seeks the help she really needs to deal with her psychological suffering, it's clear that she's tried to settle something about her identity. This comment is an interesting about-face for Martine, who seemed so against Sophie hooking up with Joseph, who is African-American. She has a kindred feeling for the suffering expressed in N**** spirituals, a genre of music that is not part of her birth culture. Whether she says this just to make nice with her son-in-law or to express an authentic longing of her spirit, we don't know.

Danticat wants us to understand that she's not just artificially stacking the odds in the favor of female characters in her book. She's got a deeper reason for doing so. In the folktales that Sophie recalls and the stories told by the women in her family, the characters and motifs are decidedly feminine. Danticat claims that this is because all Haitians are daughters of the land. Perhaps it is also because the experience of the women in this work sums up the human condition so well: complex and difficult, filled with beauty, terror, and a deep, longing sadness for freedom.

These are Sophie's concluding words, as she tries to reconcile herself to the loss of her mother and to confront the terror of the past. She understands that Haiti is an integral part of who she is because of what she has experienced there herself and what she has inherited from her mother through stories and secondary memories. Sophie can't escape any of it—the good or the bad—since it is a visceral part of her. It's quite literally in her DNA, a basic part of her identity that she can't shed and will live with every day of her life.