 |
 First edition | |
| Author | Edwidge Danticat |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Realistic Fiction |
| Publisher | Soho Press |
Publication date | 1994 |
| ISBN | 0-375-70504-X |
Breath, Eyes, Memory is Edwidge Danticat's acclaimed 1994 novel, and was chosen as an Oprah Book Club Selection in May 1998. The novel deals with questions of racial, linguistic and gender identity in interconnected ways.
Breath, Eyes, Memory was Danticat's first novel, published when she was only twenty-five years old. [1] As she has recounted in interviews, the book began as an essay of her childhood in Haiti and her move as a young girl to New York City.
The novel is written in a first person narrative. The narrator, Sophie Caco, relates her direct experiences and impressions from age 12 until she is in her twenties. Sophie is the product of a violent rape and is raised by her loving aunt in a village near Port-au-Prince for 12 years. At this point, Sophie is unexpectedly summoned by her mother, who lives in Brooklyn having gained asylum and immigrated to the United States. Living with her mother in New York, Sophie discovers the trauma her mother endures inclusive of violent nightmares reminiscent of her experience prior to fleeing Haiti.
The major conflict of the novel is the main character's battle with her inner self. Because she is a child of rape (her mother had been raped at the young age of 16 by an unknown man), she is a reminder to her mother of the wounds that had been inflicted on her. Her mother as a result of the rape remained this wounded but very resilient woman. Her mother came to resent her own self and body and constantly has nightmares about the rape. She grows into a woman who fights a battle with herself as a woman, wife, mother, as well as daughter. She is also in turn fighting the weight of her inheritance, as well as her mother's past experiences.
The rising action of the story is when Sophie leaves Haiti at age twelve to join her mother in the United States in New York. Sophie, despite her mother's warnings to focus on school and no men, falls in love with Joseph, a musician who lives next door to them.
The climax of the story comes after she marries Joseph. Sophie begins to feel frustrated and confused, both by anxieties and responsibilities. To get away from it all, she flees to Haiti along with her infant daughter, without a word to her husband, Joseph, who is away touring.
The falling action is when her mother, Martine, also comes to Haiti. Sophie hadn't spoken to her mother since her mother had thrown her out the house when she had failed the virginity test. That was about two years earlier. It is during that trip to Haiti that both mother and daughter reconcile.
"Testing" has been a Haitian tradition for centuries. During earlier times, Haitians associated the idea of virtue with a woman's virginity. A young woman growing up in a Haitian household is encouraged to value her virtue and virginity. The novel describes how family values and virtue of women are very important to the Haitian culture. The main character, Sophie, is shattered throughout the novel, due to the traumatic experience of her mother's continuous tests. Her mother would often test her vagina to make sure she was still a virgin. These tests leave a dynamic scar on Sophie even after she marries Joseph. She has low self-esteem as a result of these tests. The tests also lead to a deterioration in the relationship between mother and daughter. When she marries Joseph, she is unable to have sex with him because she has a phobia of sex. The only way she is ever able to make love to him is through “doubling”: She must pretend she isn't really there because the very act of sex so repels her.
Virginity is the state of a person who has never engaged in sexual intercourse. The term virgin originally only referred to sexually inexperienced women, but has evolved to encompass a range of definitions, as found in traditional, modern and ethical concepts. Heterosexual individuals may or may not consider loss of virginity to occur only through penile-vaginal penetration, while people of other sexual orientations often include oral sex, anal sex, or mutual masturbation in their definitions of losing one's virginity.
The Tonton Macoute or simply the Macoute was a special operations unit within the Haitian paramilitary force created in 1959 by dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. In 1970 the militia was renamed the Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale. Haitians named this force after the Haitian mythological bogeyman, Tonton Macoute, who kidnaps and punishes unruly children by snaring them in a gunny sack before carrying them off to be consumed for breakfast.
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors.
The Sound of Waves is a 1954 novel by the Japanese author Yukio Mishima. It is a coming-of-age story of the protagonist Shinji and his romance with Hatsue, the beautiful daughter of the wealthy ship owner Terukichi. For this book, Mishima was awarded the Shincho Prize from Shinchosha Publishing in 1954. It has been adapted for film five times.
The Dew Breaker is a collection of linked stories by Edwidge Danticat, published in 2004. The title come from Haitian Creole name for a torturer during the regimes of François "Papa Doc" and Jean Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier.
Nāmūs is the Arabic word of a concept of an ethical category, a virtue, in Middle Eastern patriarchal character. Literally translated as "virtue", it is now more popularly used in a strong gender-specific context of relations within a family described in terms of honor, attention, respect/respectability, and modesty.
Farming of Bones is a work of historical fiction by Edwidge Danticat, published in 1998. It tells the story of an orphaned young Haitian woman living in the Dominican Republic who gets caught up in the carnage of the Parsley massacre during the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo.
A virginity test is the practice and process of determining whether a girl or woman is a virgin; i.e., to determine that she has never engaged in, or been subjected to, sexual intercourse. The test typically involves a check for the presence of an intact hymen, typically on the flawed assumption that it can only be torn as a result of sexual intercourse. It has been practiced since ancient times but its recent use in the United Kingdom dates back to 1970s. It is still legal for doctors in the United States to perform virginity tests.
Krik? Krak! (ISBN 0-679-76657-X) is a collection of short stories written by Edwidge Danticat and published in 1996. It consists of nine short stories plus an epilogue. The stories are tied together by similar plots of struggle and survival within the Haitian community.
Brother I'm Dying, published in 2007 by Alfred A. Knopf, is a family memoir by novelist Edwidge Danticat. In 2007, the title won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was also nominated for the National Book Award.
An Imaginative Experience (1994) is a novel by British author Mary Wesley. The story concerns a young mother who has lost her husband and son in a car crash and the guilt and self-reproach she has to go through as a consequence of her loss.
Laura Chapman Hruska was an American lawyer, novelist, and co-founder and editor in chief of the Soho Press.
Gabriel Mac is an American author and journalist. From 2007 to 2012, he was a staff reporter at Mother Jones, eventually in the position of human rights reporter. He has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and other publications.
Contracted is a 2013 American zombie-body horror independent film written and directed by Eric England. It was first released on November 23, 2013, in the United States and stars Najarra Townsend as a young woman that finds herself suffering from a mysterious sexually transmitted disease after a rape. It has been compared to the 2012 film Thanatomorphose, with which it shares similarities. Twitch Film has criticized the movie for its marketing, in which England describes the character Samantha's rape as a "one night stand". A sequel featuring the original cast of the first film titled Contracted: Phase II, written by Craig Walendziak and directed by Josh Forbes, was released in September 2015.
Medieval female sexuality is the collection of sexual and sensual characteristics identified in a woman from the Middle Ages. Like a modern woman, a medieval woman's sexuality included many different aspects. Sexuality does not only refer to a woman's sexual activity, as sexual lives were as social, cultural, legal, and religious as they were personal.
Elsie Augustave is a Haitian-American author. Her debut novel, The Roving Tree, follows a young Haitian adoptee, Iris Odys, through various journeys across the world. Odys is the rejected daughter of a Haitian maid and of the middle-class Haitian man who employs her. In addition to the struggle for identity of cross-cultural adoptees, the book explores themes of class, color and religion in Haiti. McArthur prize winner Edwidge Danticat described the book to The New York Times as "a gorgeous new novel about a Haitian adoptee finding her way in many different corners of the world."
Incest can be found in many varieties of literature, from popular forms to serious fiction, either as an important thematic element or as an incidental element of the plot. Incest is human sexual activity between family members or close relatives. This typically includes sexual activity between people in consanguinity, and sometimes those related by affinity, adoption, clan, or lineage.
Incest as an either a thematic element or an incidental element of the plot, can be found in numerous films and television programs.
Évelyne Trouillot is a Haitian author, writing in French and Creole.
The Virtues is a 2019 British drama series written by Shane Meadows and Jack Thorne, starring Stephen Graham, Niamh Algar, and Helen Behan.