Home Theme Analysis

In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Sophie Caco leaves her home in Haiti at the age of 12 to join her mother in New York. “Home” becomes a complicated concept in the novel as the overwhelmed, disoriented Sophie struggles to adjust to life in Brooklyn, all the while missing the family and friends she left behind. As the novel progresses and a return to Haiti becomes more and more vital, necessary, and inevitable for Sophie, Edwidge Danticat argues that perhaps a real, physical sense of “home” doesn’t exist—instead, home consists of the metaphorical, existential places one can never return to, try as one might.

Throughout the novel, as Sophie—reluctantly, at first, and later restlessly—roams around in search of a place to call home, Danticat shows how the “homes” people long to return to are often less about a physical place and more about a feeling or a state of mind. For Sophie, home is the innocence and peace of her childhood—a time before she encountered the trauma, violence, and despair of womanhood. Early in the novel, Sophie’s childhood in Haiti is presented as relatively idyllic—even in the face of poverty and violence in her own village and the country more largely, Sophie has a close and loving relationship with her Tante Atie, a sense of gratitude for their relative economic stability, and pleasurable, comforting small moments throughout each of her days. When Sophie moves to New York to be with her mother, Martine—who has been there, saving money and working, since Sophie’s infancy—Sophie’s life is uprooted swiftly and unceremoniously, and her arrival in a gritty, dingy neighborhood of Brooklyn overwhelms and disorients her. Sophie’s notion of “home” is disrupted early on in the novel, and Haiti—her first home—becomes a place from which she is stripped away without her consent. This inspires an intense longing in Sophie that never goes away, no matter how she tries to tamp it down and move forward with greeting the “challenge” of her new life—a longing which comes to shape her fractured definition of what it means to feel at home somewhere.

In the second part of the novel, Sophie is 18 and well-adjusted to life in Brooklyn—she is not as happy as she could be, and often feels constrained by her mother’s expectations of her, but New York is more or less her home. After Sophie falls in love with Joseph, an older musician who lives next door, things at home go from tenable to miserable as Martine begins “testing” Sophie’s virginity each night. Sophie, realizing that she does not feel safe in her mother’s house anymore, violently severs herself from her mother by mutilating her own vagina with a pestle from the kitchen. She flees next door to Joseph, accepts his longstanding marriage proposal, and moves with him to Providence, Rhode Island. When she was brought to New York from Haiti, Sophie was told that her true home was with her mother, because daughters always belong with their mothers. For a while, this seemed true enough, and Sophie grew to accept her mother as a proxy for home. Wherever Martine was, home was there, too. However, as Martine turns suspicious and violent towards Sophie and begins sexually violating her on a regular basis, Sophie realizes that this definition of home doesn’t work, either, and seeks to make a new home with Joseph far away from her mother.

Toward the end of the novel, Sophie is dissatisfied in her marriage with Joseph—who insists on having regular sex with her even though she dissociates during the act due to physical and emotional trauma. She decides to take a spontaneous trip to Haiti to visit Tante Atie and Granmè Ifé, bringing her infant daughter, Brigitte, along with her. Sophie is only in Haiti for a few short days, but the time she spends there feels vital, grounding, and informative. Sophie learns about the generational trauma the women within her family suffer, and she even reconnects with Martine—the two resolve to begin their relationship fresh. When Sophie returns home to a worried Joseph, who asks her about the trip, she refers to Haiti as “home”—a word choice that perturbs Joseph. Joseph reminds Sophie that she has never called Haiti home in the time he’s known her—home for Sophie, he reminds her, has always been her mother’s house, the one place she “could never go back to.” This final twist in Sophie’s journey to find “home” shows that home, for Sophie—and, Danticat suggests, for many—is not defined by any one physical place. When Sophie was a teenager, Haiti was her home because it was the place she could never return to; as an adult, that place has become her mother’s house, because she was similarly barred from returning there. Now that Sophie has reconnected with Martine and spent a night in her childhood home in Brooklyn, she has realized—perhaps unconsciously—that “home” is constantly in flux, and the places people think of as the homes where they belong are often the places where they feel most forbidden from going, or where they’re most acutely unable to recapture the security of their youth. 

At the end of the novel, when Sophie returns to Haiti a second time to bury her mother, villagers and neighbors in La Nouvelle Dame Marie greet her as though she has “lived there all [her] life.” Sophie has returned physically to the “home” she’s been longing to get back to since her girlhood—but Sophie, now a wife and a mother with “very American” thoughts and tendencies, is forced to realize that her idea of home is unfixed and unmoored. Sophie, whose “homes” have now encompassed Haiti, Brooklyn, and Providence, realizes that there is no physical place that will make her feel the security she felt in her youth: she must learn to make a new home, within—and for—herself.