Breath,
Eyes, Memory. New York: Soho Press, Inc.,
1994. 240 pages.
A recent assessment of Haitian women novelists
by Régine Latortue notes that "women writers have begun to assume
their own voice and to create their own authority through the text in
Haiti. . . . [T]hey have earned their rightful place in the literary canon
of their country by creating often unconventional but always rich and
diverse Black female characters with pivotal roles." With this first novel,
an intimate and lyrical portrayal of four generations of the diverse women
of the Caco family, Edwidge Danticat, an exciting and courageous Haitian-American
writer, secures a "rightful place" in this canon.
The impetus for this poignant novel is Danticat's
powerful memories of the Haiti she left at age twelve. Specifically, she
recalls, in a prepublication release, that one of her most disturbing
memories is of "young women who limped rather than walked because they
were repeatedly 'locked' or 'tested' " for proof of their virginity. The
novel's narrator, Sophie, is subjected to this abuse when she comes of
age and leaves Haiti to join her mother, a woman she knows only from a
photograph, in New York—yes, there is a strong autobiographical sub-stratum
to this story. It is in part to escape the pain of her subsequent sexual
phobias that Sophie returns to Haiti with her baby daughter.
Here we meet Sophie's grandmother, still dressed
in black, as part of her deuil to mourn
her long-dead husband. These are not one-dimensional stereotyped women;
for instance, Grandmè Ifé's devotion is tempered by pragmatism.
"The black," she says, "is easier; it does not get dirty." Then there's
Sophie's aunt who raised her in Dame Marie, a southeastern coastal town,
and who has returned to the village of Croix-des-Rosets to care for her
aged mother. The aunt's uneasy accommodation to these domestic duties
and constraints is marked by rebellion, aloofness, and mysterious disappearances.
The family reunion is complete with the somewhat implausible return of
Sophie's mother, certainly the most glamorous and perhaps the most scarred
of the Caco women. The aunt compares them to the people in Guinea who
carry the sky on their heads. They are the people of Creation. Strong, tall and mighty people who can bear anything. . . . These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head.
The undeniable strength of this novel lies
in its intense compression of emotion and its startling yoking of images.
For instance, Sophie's personally traumatic separation from her aunt,
when she is compelled to leave Haiti as a child, is juxtaposed with a
violent riot at the airport. Sophie dispassionately describes the carnage
in a flat, almost matter-of-fact monotone. Shortly afterwards, on board
the plane, she witnesses an intense and disturbing confrontation as passengers
try to seat and restrain a hysterical boy whose father, it turns out,
had just "died in the fire out front." These tragic external events mirror
Sophie's own distress and grief. Later in the novel when Sophie reveals
that she has mastered the psychic process of doubling—"splitting
the body into two—part flesh and part shadow"—in order to endure
pain, it not only shocks us, but it also illuminates the apparent lack
of affect in the narrative and compels us to revisit the text with deeper
compassion.
Danticat's stories, five in previous volumes
of The Caribbean Writer, have appeared in
over twenty publications to date and have already gained national recognition—with
a 1990 award from Seventeen and a 1993 prize
from Essence. Also, in 1992 and 1993, two
of her plays "The Creation of Adam" and "Dreams Like Me" were produced
at Brown University, where she obtained her MFA in creative writing.
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Copyright © by Roberta Q. Knowles