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Chapter 21
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Breath, Eyes, Memory, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Mothers, Daughters, and Generational Trauma
Virginity and Violence
Home
Memory, Storytelling, and the Past
Summary
Analysis
The next morning, Granmè Ifé powders her face with ashes and goes to the cemetery to pay her final respects to Dessalines. As Tante Atie and Sophie watch her go, Sophie asks Tante Atie about her relationship with Louise, and whether she’ll be sad when Louise leaves. Tante Atie states that she will miss Louise “like [her] own skin.”
Tante Atie seems to know that in spite of how much she loves Louise, she will leave Atie for a better future in a heartbeat. Louise’s notion of home, then, does not seem to align with that of the Caco women—whereas Atie and her kin value shared cultural roots and family and community bonds, Louise seems only to idealize the relative prosperity and safety that the U.S. promises, even if that means making the journey alone.
Themes
That afternoon, Eliab brings Granmè Ifé back home. Tante Atie is out with Louise, and doesn’t come home for supper. As Granmè Ifé and Sophie eat in the yard, Sophie’s grandmother points out two spots of light on a distant hill. She explains that a baby is being born. If the baby is a boy, the lights will stay on, and the father will stay up all night with the child. If it is a girl, however, the lights will go out, and the mother will be left alone in the darkness with her child. Sophie waits with bated breath for over an hour, even as her grandmother drifts off to sleep—eventually, the lights go out.
This passage serves as a sad, painful metaphor for the ways in which Haitian society isolates, undervalues, and mistreats its women. While the birth of a baby boy is a joyous occasion marked by light and company, the birth of a baby girl results in the newborn and her mother being left alone in the dark with only one another. Gender roles are clearly strictly enforced by Haiti’s social customs, and this difference in the valuation of male babies versus female babies will only continue and worsen as they grow up into men and women, respectively.
Themes
