Breath, Eyes, Memory | Lespoua fe viv: Female Identity and the Politics of Textual Sexuality in Nadine Magloire's Le Mal de Vivre and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory
In the following essay on Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, author Myriam J. A. Chancy discusses the concepts of female and sexual identity within textual and cultural contexts. Chancy shows the reader that the literary structuring used in Danticat's work serves as an illustration of and framework for both Haitian social culture and the alienation of women from themselves, their bodies, and each other. This emphasis on the novel's structure, according to Chancy, further underscores the important theme of the function of literacy for the women in Danticat's novel.
In Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, Haitian women are represented through images drawn from folk traditions. The subtext of the story of three generations of the Caco family involves a careful subversion of Haitian tropes of identity. Danticat uses the symbol of the marassa, the cult of twins in vodou, to highlight the divisions that are created between women who have been brought up to deny their sexuality as well as each other. In invoking vodou traditions, she strives, moreover, to disassociate them from their prevalent use as tools of state control...
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