Restoring Haitian Women’s Voices and Verbalizing Sexual Trauma in Breath, Eyes, Memory

Abstract

A figurative dark presence representing the Duvalier era looms over Edwidge Danticat's central characters in Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), manifesting in their relationships with men and with each other. The Caco family consists of four generations of women who pass down names and traditions, as well as their burdens, to the next in line. The story is narrated by Sophie Caco, a young girl raised until adolescence by her single, childless aunt in Croix-des-Rosets, Haiti. Her time with her Tante Atie abruptly ends when Martine, her mother in New York, sends a recorded message to Atie, along with a one-way plane ticket, summoning Sophie. As the twelve-year-old settles in with Martine, whom she knows only through photographs and cassette tapes, Sophie learns about the nightmares that disrupt her mother's sleep. Each night, Martine relives the brutal perpetrated more than a decade ago by a masked man, likely a tonton macoute, and the fear and violence the memory evokes.1in Danticat's novel, the reconstruction of memory involves the disclosure of Black female trauma and a revision of Haiti's official history of resistance and triumph. Revolutionaries such as Boukman, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and their predecessor, the mystical Makandal, who led a rebellion more than thirty years prior to the Haitian Revolution, are often celebrated for their contributions in making Haiti the first independent Black republic. Yet there is little mention of the countless women who, for more than two centuries, have fought alongside their fellow countrymen for freedom. For example, Cecile Fatiman, a mambo who purportedly officiated over the Bois Caiman ceremony, is usually omitted from narratives about the Haitian Revolution-a major historical event that she helped to launch.2 In sources that do mention her, she is either a young, green-eyed mulatto who later became the wife of Jean-Louis Pierrot, the fifth president of Haiti, or an old African woman 'with strange eyes and bristly hair,' whose ferocity was more frightening than Boukman's.3 Compared to the actions of her male counterparts in what would be the largest and only successful slave revolt in the Americas, Fatiman's role has been treated as inconsequential.Other female revolutionaries such as Suzanne Belair, Marie-Jeanne Lamartiniere, and Defilee have also been largely ignored. Belair served with her husband, Charles, in Louverture's army and was promoted from sergeant to lieutenant. After her capture, Belair refused to be blindfolded before her execution by French troops, showing unyielding courage and strength to the very end. Lamartiniere subverted gender roles by donning a soldier's uniform as she led a group of Haitian rebels in the Battle of Crete-a-Pierrot.4 Among the heroines, Defilee, a former slave typically described as a madwoman, is perhaps the better known, as she has become mythologized in Haiti as a symbol of courage and freedom.3 She is celebrated for collecting Dessalines' remains in order to give him a proper burial after he was murdered. However, Defilee's personal narrative as an enslaved woman regularly subjected to by her owner before claiming her freedom has been appropriated as the figurative rape of Haiti and its people by colonial powers. As a way to restore Defilee's personal narrative, Danticat reimagines her as the foremother of a generation of Haitian women silenced by gendered violence in her short story Nineteen Thirty-Seven.6 In essence, these are the omissions in Haiti's history that Danticat draws upon in shaping her fictional female characters. Although Haitian women have been systematically excluded from social and historical discourse even as they actively engage in the fight for change, Danticat proves through her characters that revolutionaries come in many forms.The myths embedded in the country's historical narratives are rewritten in Breath, Eyes, Memory so that Haitian women are unsilenced. …