Breath, Eyes, Memory Suffering

Sophie remembers Tante Atie's mythological explanation for a turbulent life. She is just about to leave for New York and has to separate herself from the only family she has ever known (Atie and Ifé). The Caco family stories often center around suffering and endurance, perhaps helping to build that strength of character that Sophie feels such pride in later on in the story.

Danticat makes us aware of the suffering that happens at the personal and political level (which becomes very personal for those directly involved, like this young girl). While the Caco women manage to stay on the fringes of the political upheaval for most of this narrative, we know that Martine's tragic story begins with the state-sanctioned violence of the Tonton Macoutes, the renegade paramilitary force that terrorized Haiti with impunity.

It's important to keep in mind that suffering surrounds the Caco family—it's not just in their heads or part of their family drama. Haiti's political instability causes instant and lasting heartache for its citizens, as we see in the example of Martine's rape and the violent death of this boy's father. Atie points out to a grieving Sophie that she is leaving all this behind. But of course, Sophie knows that this kind of trauma isn't simply geographical—it becomes part of her memory and soul.

Martine tells Sophie that she was not, in fact, born from rose petals as her Tante Atie had claimed. This revelation comes at the tail end of her explanation of virginity testing, which Martine says her mother stopped doing because of the rape. In this moment, Sophie learns more than she ever wanted to know about her mother and the life of the women in her family—and these memories will become part of her own psychological pain as she grows.

Sophie takes on the responsibility of controlling her mother's night terrors. In the process of doing this, she also takes on part of Martine's suffering. By the time she's grown, Sophie feels that the rape is as much a part of her past as it is her mother's. In some ways, she feels complicit in her mother's suffering, since she assumes that she looks like the assailant who fathered her.

Martine continues the pattern of personal violation that was practiced on her and Atie when they were girls. Although Martine understands firsthand the humiliation of virginity testing, she also feels that she needs to be vigilant in this way in order to be a good mother: it's up to her to preserve her daughter's purity. For Sophie, testing not only causes her physical and psychological discomfort, it destroys any positive ideas she could have about sex and her own sexuality.

Sophie doesn't understand why her mother feels she has to perform regular virginity tests on her, but she does know how to make it stop. If she breaks her hymen, Martine will think she's lost her virginity. But what Sophie does is closer to self-mutilation, a reflection of self-hatred that's been brewing since she learned that she was a product of rape and the stuff of her mother's nightmares. Her actions here also show a terrible strength: Sophie is willing to do whatever it takes to preserve herself from more humiliation.

Suffering is not limited to personal or familial grief in this work. All around the Caco family in Haiti is a violent and corrupt governmental system, along with an out-of-control paramilitary force wreaking havoc on the citizenry. Even though Sophie had escaped the initial bouts of violence when she left Haiti as a child, she returns to find that not much has changed for the better.

The brutality of the Tonton Macoutes isn't confined to those who experience it first-hand—stories of their evil deeds sow seeds of terror in the Haitian people and keep them paralyzed in the face of violence. The level of their depravity clearly affects Sophie and the women in her family, who have already been torn apart by the sexual assault of Martine.

Sophie eventually learns the whole story about Martine's rape, and it haunts her especially when she returns to Haiti and witnesses the attack on Dessalines by the Macoutes. Her mother's suffering never seems to end; in fact, it seems to be catching, as Sophie inherits Martine's anxiety through these secondary memories.

Brigitte's ability to snooze helps ease Sophie's fears that her mother's trauma and subsequent mental illness might be somehow genetic. Sophie's not immediately able to free herself from the cycle of suffering endured by the women in her family, which ups her anxiety about her own little girl.

Sophie suffers from bulimia, a condition that she tells her mother is "not so simple" to cure. Her behavior seems at once to be an attempt to overcome her emotions and to purge her anxieties from her mind. This moment is triggered by intimacy with her husband, which causes Sophie both physical and psychological distress despite his best efforts at tenderness.

Sophie knows that she has to break the cycle of abuse and humiliation in her family if she's ever to heal and be free of her burdens. Her sexual abuse therapy group devises a ritual in which each member writes the name of her abuser on a slip of paper and then burns it. Sophie's clear that she doesn't wish more pain to her mother; rather, she wants to be rid of the pain caused by the humiliating virginity tests. She also wants to be free of her mother's nightmares and continuous suffering, which has affected her so deeply.

Ifé can't comprehend what has happened to her daughter. Her inability to look into Martine's dead face is definitely a defense mechanism meant to shield her somehow from the full emotional impact of losing her daughter. Atie doesn't do so well; she falls into convulsions when she sees her dead sister.