Cultural criticism of Breadth Eyes Memory

Breath, But Not Voice

As readers we are accustomed to question to whom a writer is speaking, used to asking what the intended audience for a work is. Much less frequently asked is the parallel question: For whom does a writer speak? Edwidge Danticat's novel Breath, Eyes, Memory requires us to think about this question not only because of what the novel itself contains but because of the criticisms of the author that were raised after the book's publication. This paper uses a cultural criticism approach to the novel to explore the role of this genre of literature -- of fiction that tells a certain kind of truth about a group of people who is denied a voice in their culture at large.

The story that Danticat tells is that of Sophie Caco, a Haitian child who has always known that "I come from a place where breath, eyes and memory are one, a place where you carry your past like the hair on your head." The narrator of the novel, Sophie also seems to be something of a stand-in for the author, which is one of the complications presented to us as readers in terms of how to interpret the novel. For we have been taught that fiction and autobiography are different from each other, although we are all certainly aware of the fact that people embroider their autobiographies and any halfway decent novelist allows truth to shine into her fiction. But how are we to interpret a book when we do not know whether truth or fiction is being privileged? And why should this matter?

The novel is as much an ethnography as it is anything else, for as central to the story as are any of the human characters are the history and geography of Haiti. A sense of place is common to a wide range of literary traditions: Dickens's London, or Joyce's Dublin or Rousseau's rural France are also players in their stories. But white men writing from a European perspective use the land as a character in a different way than do young women writers from the post-colonial world. Perhaps the greatest burden that the latter face (although this is true as well for men writing from the Fourth World) is that there is an almost overwhelming expectation from many readers and critics that what they write be representative of "their" culture, without any acknowledgement that no culture is homogeneous and that no one author can speak as a native of a culture as a whole (Charters 42).

The major theme of the book is the that of the weight of sexuality and the ways in which women's sexuality can be used by a patriarchal society can be used -- by women as well as men -- to destroy each new generation of women. The narrator, Sophie, is born from this nexus: She is a child conceived from rape. Her mother has fled from their island, from the pain and shame of rape, from the child who is a constant reminder of her own lack of "purity." Sophie has been left in the care of her Tante Atie, essentially her godmother. The two of them are happy in a small town in Haiti, with Sophie enveloped in the love of a woman who believes in her goodness. But, when Sophie is twelve, Atie has to leave to care for her own mother and Sophie moves to New York to live with her stranger of a mother, Martine.

Sophie is a stranger in New York, and so vulnerable to assaults at many levels and from many directions. Her mother and she live in a maelstrom of sexual horrors in which women cannot be trusted to control their own bodies, in which women can never fail to fail their family's expectations of honor. Even virgins are suspect, and certainly a woman's word about her own sexuality cannot be trusted. In perhaps the key episode of the book, Martine "tests" Sophie's virginity. This testing -- a tradition in Haiti to ensure that women remained virgins until marriage -- consists in the novel of Martine exploring Sophie's vagina with her hand. This act of invasion is highly traumatizing to Sophie, although Martine (who should feel empathy for sexual violation) does not connect her actions to the rape that impregnated her.

Throughout the novel, as well as running throughout certain aspects of Haitian culture, is the idea that what it is that makes girls and women valuable is their denial of their own sexuality. Women as complete humans, as fully realized sexual beings, are not permitted within the official ideology of traditional Haiti as Danticat depicts it. Women can be spoiled, but never redeemed, and sex always damages women -- at least in terms of their larger social value. Danticat suggests that there are other versions of women's lives and women's sexuality. She suggests that women can understand their own sense sexuality as something that is affirming of life and love and individual agency. But this argument that she and Sophie make to push back against the louder voices in the novel that proclaim that women are essentially contaminated is said in a whisper. In the end we hear both voices, but we also know (or think that we know) which voice wins.

Sophie understands that she is caught in a definition of self that she has not agreed to: She faces the bind that everyone who does not belong to a cultural elite recognizes. Those without power in a culture are forced to follow rules that they did not create, that usually do not favor them, and that they are made to feel guilty when they do not want to follow. Women in the developing world so often are pressured to value and validate the traditional value of their cultures because to do so is to honor their own traditions, to reclaim their traditions from the weight of post-colonial oppression, from the unequal access to power and wealth that are still the fate of those who live in the world's economic periphery. To demand equal rights is to be Westernized. And women who live in the post-colonial world, in places like Haiti, are torn between the culture of their fathers (but not so much of their mothers) and their own desires and hopes for themselves.

Sophie is traumatized by her mother's repeated "tests" and yet cannot step away from the patriarchal version of Haitian culture (complicated by the fact that this strain of Haitian culture is embodied in her mother) and refuse to let her mother touch her. So she makes a desperate action, impaling herself on her mother's pestle. The pestle -- used to grind spices to make the traditional foods that her mother cooks -- is a symbol both of women's power and expertise and of a family and political structure that keeps women literally in the kitchen. This penis-shaped kitchen tool represents the complex ways in which sexuality is parsed by the dominant powers in Haitian society during the years in which the novel takes place.

After she tears herself open with the pestle, Sophie fails her mother's next virginity test and is thrown out of her house. She marries, becomes pregnant despite her horror of sex, flees to Haiti, leaving behind her husband. Back in Haiti with her daughter, she comes to some sense of safety and even a tenuous sense of connection with her own body as a source of goodness since it is the source of her daughter's life. She seems to have been able to diminish the power of the dominant Haitian discourse, to raise her voice above a whisper even if not up to the roar of the many, many other Haitian voices that tell her that women's bodies are not their own and that there can never be a world in which women's definition of Haitian culture will ever be anything but a minority model.