Breath, eyes, memory

Sophie grew up far from her mother. In Haiti, her childhood was shaped by the care of her Aunt Atie; thanks to her daily sacrifices and wise words, she grew into a teenager. Her mother remains a handwriting in the letters she receives and the sound of her voice in the recordings that periodically arrive from New York, where she has emigrated. That changes when a letter arrives from New York accompanied by a plane ticket: Martine invites Sophie to come. The planned reunion in the United States is intended to reunite the family, but it also unearths a painful memory that is difficult to bear.

The first tentative steps towards a relationship are followed by a coexistence increasingly weighed down by expectations and fears that manifest as overprotectiveness and attention that stifles life. As a young woman, the mother suffered an act of violence, during which she conceived Sophie. Her trauma, impossible to erase, resists even the attempt to put it into words. It is the bodies that will reveal the dark forces of this event. In her efforts to protect her daughter’s body, Martine ends up violating it herself, repeating a gesture that, for generations, the older women in the family have inflicted upon the younger ones. Thus, the theme of bodies – their vulnerability and their language – is interwoven with that of time that stands still, of a memory which, beneath an affectionate surface, seethes with fear and shame.

Sophie grows up, confronts her own vulnerabilities, loves and is loved. Danticat reconstructs a life as an intertwining of bodies and generations, without reducing it to the dichotomy between victims and perpetrators. The stretch of ocean separating Haiti from New York, rather than severing the link with her origins, unexpectedly leads Sophie towards the deepest question of her own existence. And when grief ultimately overwhelms her mother, Sophie returns to Haiti to confront the site of the violence, examine her own family history and realise that freeing oneself from the past does not mean erasing it. The return thus becomes a confrontation with memory, necessary to prevent it from simply repeating itself. It is not a matter of healing through forgetting, but of transforming memory into something that can finally be recounted, processed and confronted. Where trauma had bent the body under the burden of perpetuation, the spoken word opens up a space in which a legacy no longer need be a condemnation.

Edwidge Danticat
: Breath, Gaze, Memory
. Utopia, 224 pp., 19 euros