robin friedman's Reviews > Breath, Eyes, Memory

The Story Of Sophie Caco

My local library sponsors a "Black Voices" book group which offers the rare opportunity to read novels exploring black culture in the United States and throughout the world. The group's most recent book was "Breath, Eyes, Memory", (1994) the first novel of the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat (b. 1969) who has subsequent to this book established a substantial reputation. This is the first novel I have read about Haiti and my first book by Danticat. Oprah Winfrey featured "Breath, Eyes, Memory" on her show.

Danticat's book helped teach me about Haiti and about the life of Haitian immigrants to the United States. The book shows the growth in self-understanding and in freedom of a young Haitian woman, Sophie Caco, who narrates the story. In the course of the book, the scene shifts several times between two Haitian villages, Croix-des-Rosets and Dame Marie, about five hours apart driving on poor roads, and New York City.

At the outset of the novel, Sophie is a young girl of twelve who lives with her unmarried Aunt Atie in Croix-des-Rosets and is excelling in school. Sophie's mother, who had moved to New York years earlier under mysterious circumstances, suddenly sends her daughter a plane ticket to join her. Sophie lives under the protective wing of her mother, who works menial jobs, through high school before meeting an older man, a musician named Joseph, and running off from her mother to marry him. Gradually, Sophie learns about her mother's past, especially the brutal rape which resulted in Sophie's conception. Concerned for her innocence, Sophie's mother subjects her to a humiliating series of examinations of her private parts designed to protect her purity. After Sophie's marriage, which alienates her from her mother, and the birth of her own daughter, Bridgette, Sophie travels back to Haiti to try to come to terms with herself and to work through her lack of interest in sexual relations with her husband.

Sophie generally speaks in a simple, flowing style. The book is at its best in the Haitian scenes as the author describes the local people, the troubled political situation and Sophie's family, particularly her aunt and her grandmother. The book describes the local folk religion and the heaven, called Guinea, which awaits people after death. The book is full of stories of various lengths which are fascinating in themselves and which illuminate Sophie's search to come to terms with herself. One of the key stories involves the origin of the family surname, Caco, which derives from the caco bird. As Aunt Attie explains to Sophie:

"Our family name, Caco, it is the name of a scarlet bird. A bird so crimson, it makes the reddest hibiscus or the brightest flame trees seem white. The Caco bird, when it dies, there is always a rush of blood that rises to its neck and the wings, they look so bright, you would think them on fire."

Although the book offers many insights into Sophie and into Haiti, I found it flawed. The story gradually shifts away from Sophie and becomes gendered and polemical. Sophie becomes less a person than a symbol of the sexual and economic woes that the author finds pervade the lot of women, in Haiti and everywhere. The litany includes, besides the rape and emotional frigidity that are central to the story, breast cancer, incest, abortions, and much else. The reader tends to lose track of Sophie and of a shared humanity amidst the welter of women's issues. The author herself expands and loses the focus of the book. In a concluding passage, the author speaks in her own voice to address the character she has created:

"I write this to you now, Sophie, because your secrets, like you, like me, have traveled far from this place. your experiences in the night, your grandmother's obsessions, your mother's 'tests' have taken on a larger meaning, and your body is now being asked to represent a larger space than your flesh. You are being asked, I have been told, to represent every girl child, every woman from this land that you and I love so much. Tired of protesting, I feel I must explain."

Danticat's explanations notwithstanding, Sophie's story is weakened immeasurably when it forgets about a woman and becomes a symbol for everywoman. When the author allows Sophie to speak as an individual and to come to peace with her mother and with herself, she largely succeeds. As a symbol, the story fails. Danticat's first novel was a book of promise, marred substantially by its movement from a person and a place to a gendered symbol.

Robin Friedman