Danticat’s Vodou Vernacular of Women’s Human Rights

Abstract

In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat uses a Haitian vernacular of Vodou to represent sexual violence against women as a human rights issue. The term vernacular joins earlier commentary on the novel with current theories of human rights discourse. Critics note that Danticat uses domestic vernaculars such as folklore, storytelling, and cooking to reveal Haiti’s hidden history of sexual violence. Similarly, human rights theorists explain that states and advocates use a moral vernacular to negotiate how to apply human rights principles in particular contexts. I claim that Danticat uses Vodou tropes of the Marasa twins and the lwa Ezili to connect Sophie’s virginity testing and Martine’s rape to the Haitian state’s political violence against its people. In this way, Danticat’s Vodou vernacular links the private and public to demonstrate that sexual violence constitutes a violation of human rights that cannot be bracketed as personal or cultural. The novel thus participates in the transnational feminist movement of the 1980s-1990s that sought recognition for rape as a war crime and as a justification for political asylum. Moreover, the novel’s Vodou vernacular resists the normativizing effects of liberal feminism and Western humanism to constitute Haitian women as human rights subjects.