Memory, Storytelling, and the Past Theme Analysis

Toward the end of Breath, Eyes, Memory, Sophie Caco states that she comes from a place “from which you carry your past like the hair on your head.” For the Caco women—and, Danticat suggests, for Haitian women more generally—the lessons, traumas, and stories of the past are as inseparable from a woman’s journey as the hair rooted in her scalp. Over the course of the novel, as the jumble of stories and parables that defined Sophie’s youth mingle with the painful tales from her female relatives’ pasts, Danticat suggests that while one can indeed seek to be liberated from their past, one must never forget that past—memory is a heavy burden, but a necessary one.

Throughout the novel, Danticat uses stories, fables, and folktales—often violent or disturbing in nature—to show how the women of Haiti try to keep the past alive. Though the past is full of unpleasantness and violence, the Caco women and their friends and neighbors cling to its stories desperately, unwilling to forget the collective past that has shaped them. Edwidge Danticat relays a combination of original tales and Haitian folklore throughout the novel—stories which all feature, at their hearts, lessons about the follies of girls and the pain of becoming a woman. In one story, a little girl agrees to accompany an attractive red bird to a distant land, only to realize the bird wants to feed her heart to a foreign king. In another, a woman who cannot stop blood from spontaneously spurting out of her skin visits the Vodou goddess of love, who tells her that in order to stop the bleeding, she must renounce her humanity and become a butterfly—a fate to which the woman quickly agrees. The literal stories of the past that populate the novel are often violent as well—from Martine’s story of her rape at the hands of a paramilitary soldier (or Tonton Macoute), to the stories and memories Granmè Ifé and Tante Atie trade with Martine via cassette tapes mailed to and fro, to Sophie’s musician husband Joseph’s artistic preoccupation with slave songs and spirituals that tell stories of hope in the face of violence and despair. All these stories, which in many ways define Sophie’s life, add up to a horrible weight—but ultimately, as Sophie chooses to carry them with her through her life, Danticat shows that bearing that weight is worth the struggle. Though Sophie inherits pain and trauma from the women who came before her, she also inherits a sense of solidarity, purpose, and wisdom. “Young girls,” Tante Atie says at one point in the novel, “they should be allowed to keep their pleasant stories.” Women, on the other hand, must shoulder the pleasant, the unpleasant, and everything in between in order to be the arbiters of their familial and their cultural pasts.

Breath, eyes, and memory are, to Sophie and the women in her family and her community, one “place”—a place from which the past must be dragged onward through life. Breath represents vitality, eyes represent witnessing, and memory represents the duty of carrying the past forward into the future. Sophie knows that the temptation to answer “Yes” to the common Haitian question, “Ou libere,” or “Are you free,” is strong within her—but at the same time, she knows that to truly liberate herself from the burdens of her past, her family, and her people’s stories would be to discard and discount them. By the end of the novel, in spite of all the painful stories from the past she has had to remember and carry with her, Sophie realizes that doing so is a kind of gift. “There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear your mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: ‘Ou libere?’ Are you free, my daughter?” As Sophie mourns her mother, Granmè Ifé speaks to her this sentence, which is in many ways like a story or riddle in and of itself. Sophie’s grandmother is trying to remind her that even in the midst of great pain, the stories and memories of one’s mothers, elders, and ancestors must be remembered.

In a final moment of pain and revelation towards the end of the novel, Sophie at last understands that the women in her life, particularly those in her family, are just like the women in the stories she grew up hearing. Sophie is like her mother, and her mother is like the women in the folktales—therefore, she sees that stories, the past, and cultural memory are all connected to the present as living, breathing things. Sophie is ultimately able to free herself from much of the pain with which her mother left her—but she also realizes that being liberated doesn’t mean forgetting who she is, where she comes from, or the stories and legacies of her culture.