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I decided to read it now because recent events made me want to deepen my understanding of Haiti. One final note: I mooched Breath, Eyes, Memory a few months ago because I loved Dandicat’s introduction to Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. This is a story that repeats itself time and again, all over the world, to this day and beyond. They were punished for being sexual beings, and yet expected to be sexual beings at the same time. All of them were made to feel, overtly or in more subtle ways, that their sexuality was dirty that they weren’t allowed to inhabit their own bodies. My heart broke for Sophie, for her mother, for her aunt, for her grandmother before them. What remains unspoken poisons these women’s relationships with themselves, with their bodies, and with one another. More than anything, it shows the consequences of silence, of shame, of not being allowed to talk about what desperately needs to be talked about. But it’s also an immensely sad and upsetting book. Sadly (but understandably), these beliefs are so ingrained that even women who have had their lives ruined by this mindset will perpetuate it when their turns comes to raise the following generation.īreath, Eyes, Memory is a nuanced and forgiving book, in the sense that it doesn’t present Sophie and the women in her family as enemies, as victims or villains, but as women trying to navigate the same system of oppression. So a woman who has been abused, even if not blamed in the traditional why-were-you-out-late-why-did-you-wear-that-short-dress sort of way, is still considered “damaged goods”, and is still made to feel that she has brought shame on herself and her family. It’s also one (again, as many many others) in which female virginity is highly valued. Sophie’s culture (as many other cultures) is one in which sexual “purity” defines of a woman’s worth. I don’t want to say how exactly it plays into the story (not that it’s exactly hard to guess after the first few chapters), but I needed to tell you this so I can talk about the book more openly. But spoiler-y or not I wanted to tell you that the book deals with sexual abuse-not so you’ll avoid it, but because I know this is a delicate topic for many people, and that countless readers have good reasons to want to know beforehand if they’re going to pick up a book about it. This is possibly a spoiler, so feel free to skip ahead. I didn’t really know much about the plot, and it turned out to deal with themes I feel quite strongly about. I’m being a little bit vague, I know, and the reason why is that Breath, Eyes, Memory really surprised me. But this doesn’t mean she stands apart from them, of course. Of course, in many ways it also is an immigrant story: Sophie’s upbringing in New York distances her enough from her homeland and family that she can see them from a new angle. More than a story about a young girl adapting to a new country, this is a story about the lingering effects of certain events. It allowed the story to say what it was meant to say more clearly than a more traditional narrative would. At first, the time jumps distanced me a little bit from the story, but in the end, I felt that the structure worked very well. After some time with her mother, Sophie uncovers a secret that has been kept for years, after which she has to find a way to come to terms with the consequences this silence has had on her own life, as well as on the lives of those she loves.īreath, Eyes, Memory is divided into several parts, with years-long gaps between each.
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Breath, Eyes, Memory opens when twelve-year-old Sophie finds out that she soon has to leave her native Haiti and the aunt who has raised her since she was a baby to go live in New York with a mother she barely remembers.