[In the following essay, Chancy examines the manner in which both Magloire and Danticat demonstrate the extent to which Haitian women have been rendered “invisible in a society itself typified through their sexualization and denigration.”]

Moon marked and touched by sun
my magic is unwritten
but when the sea turns back
it will leave my shape behind.

—Audre Lorde, “A Woman Speaks”

Je viendrais à ce pays mien et je lui dirais: “Embrassez-moi sans crainte. … Et si je ne sais que parler, c'est pour vous que je parlerai.”

[I would come back to this land of mine and say to it: “Embrace me without fear. … If all I can do is speak, at least I shall speak for you.”]

—Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal

Je n'ai plus le goût de vivre.

[I no longer have any desire to live.]

—Nadine Magloire, Le mal de vivre

The way to the square is fraught with danger. The dirt roads are rutted not from rain but from the weight of army trucks passing day in and day out. The roads are made of compacted dirt; they wind through the impossible brush, unpaved and unlit. In places, trees laden with leaves hover over the roads like the wild tentacles of many-fingered ogres. On a night like this one, dark like the inner chamber of an unexplored cave, nothing is as it seems in the day. Or so Solange thinks as she walks bravely down the middle of one such road trying to avoid the borders: the invisible line between her path towards the lit square and the dark abyss seems no different now from the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic where two of her cousins disappeared a month ago. Her mother told her they had been stolen to cut the sugar cane. Solange shivers as she feels the cool night air against her skin and imagines the cane leaves cutting through the youthful flesh, blood spilling against the whiteness of the sap oozing from freshly cut sugar stalks. Every noise about her, every whistle of wind, carries with it the sound of fear silenced by the burst of sudden light that comes with the so-early daybreak.

Solange walks quickly in the dark, keeping her eyes wide open. She has heard the stories of the girls and women dragged off in the middle of the night to be beaten and left for dead. But such events are not left only for the night. Solange is not blind. She has watched soldiers break down her neighbor's door and has heard the screaming; she does not know what goes on but it is something terrible, something she hopes will never happen to her. When the screaming stops, the soldiers drag the woman out and Solange watches her friend, the woman's daughter, cry over the heaving mass of her mother's body, and try to cover her where her dress has been torn, the tears forming rivers along the crevices of her sunken cheeks.

The walk to the square seems impossibly long. Solange has been warned about stopping, and cautioned to look out for the bogeymen. Bogeymen here are unlike those anywhere else: they don't live in your mind; they are real and breathing and carry guns in leather holsters against their hips. Here, their names begin with an “m” and they wear dark clothing and gold-rimmed aviator glasses. A few of them are women. The men walk through the crowded streets at high noon like they own everything in sight—even your soul.

The bogeymen smile at Solange from across the street when she gets out of school. Sometimes they try to walk her home as if she were a little sister. Sometimes they try to pull her into the bushes, and this is the moment in which Solange realizes that night and day are more alike than different, that she will never be safe. She wishes for the first time in her young life that she were a boy, that the bogeymen would look at her like they do her brothers, as potential candidates for their ranks. In that case, she could stop after school and join them across the way, learn how to polish the barrel of a gun with gleaming sweat.

Solange finally sees the light of the piazza before her. Her heart beats hard. She looks about; the square is filled with meandering people. She sees some of the schoolchildren already seated on the benches beneath the lights. She chooses the bench next to theirs and sighs heavily. She sits down and opens her book at the beginning of a chapter entitled “The Fight for Independence.” She is seeking answers, some sign that she might be able to leave in a few hours without fearing the long walk home.

DEFYING THE EROTICS OF HEGEMONY

In Haitian creole, the saying “léspoua fè viv” (“Hope makes (us) live”) is a timeless one, reflecting both the tenacious (yet wary) optimism of a populace that has been denied, to this very day, the fruits of hard-won independence. On the heels of that independence followed imperial colonialization in the early 1800s and the concomitant inescapable and harsh realities that continuous neocolonial subjugation bring into being: poverty, hunger, illiteracy. Hope, elusive and ethereal, often seems the only stable source of sustenance in a world where fully accessible and tangible economic and educational opportunity does not exist and where adequate social(ist) programs have not been put into place. “Léspoua fè viv” is a piece of common wisdom, of “mother wit,” which has, of late, been appropriated by those in a position to colonize in order to facilely stereotype the Haitian populace as being the prototype for a “generic” Third World stoicism. The politics of “restoring democracy” to Haiti has resulted in the perpetuation of hardships real people suffer by its rationalizing away the economic and cultural oppression of Haitians. The recent embargo, for example, has had the effect of increasing an already high infant mortality rate and decreasing an already horrifically low GNP: Haitians are hardy, goes the stereotype, so a little more pain, a little more death, justifies the end result, the push toward (Americanized) democracy. How, then, do we begin to unravel this continuously collapsing rhetoric (that which First World nations use in an attempt to impose their ideology on Haiti) so as to render visible the ways in which various subgroups resist their homogenization from without and articulate their positionality within a Haitian ideology? By focusing on the articulation of women's realities in Haitian women's literature we can arrive at an understanding of the ways in which Caribbean identity is not only multiple, along the lines of sex, race, and class, but is also undergoing constant flux in each of these categories.

Both Nadine Magloire's Le mal de vivre (1967) and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) demonstrate the extent to which Haitian women have been rendered invisible in a society itself typified through their sexualization and denigration. In this sense, the “othering” of women within Haiti is the means by which the privileged classes attempt to legitimate the myth of a Haitian national identity anchored in male martyrdom. Sexuality, in both novels, serves as a pivotal symbol of Haitian women's attempts to formulate empowering identities. Whereas the conventional sexual mores that Magloire's protagonist, Claudine, attempts but in the end fails to elude are imposed from the outside in Le mal de vivre, in Breath, Eyes, Memory, these mores are self-imposed and are, further, imposed by women on other women from one generation to the next. In this chapter, I will explore the ways in which both Magloire and Danticat use the novel form to demonstrate the extent to which Haitian women are subject to the same outdated Victorian codes of sexual behavior as their female counterparts in the United States and Europe. Although these two texts, separated by twenty-seven years, portray sexuality in different ways, the authors of both emphasize the necessity of creating a language and a frame of reference through which the Haitian woman can come to represent herself and her sexuality directly, without the need for translations.

An exploration of either text can only be understood, however, in the context of the politics of publishing in the Caribbean and the politics of Caribbean/postcolonial literary criticism. Caribbean women writers have, historically, had difficulty publishing their works and what literature they have succeeded in getting published has received little attention from Caribbean and postcolonial literary critics—this state of affairs explains why issues of literacy, economics, and feminist social intervention feature so largely in literature produced by Haitian women.

In the literature of Caribbean male writers, such as Derek Walcott, René Depestre, Wilson Harris, and Aimé Césaire, women appear as elusive figures who represent cultural loss: they function as symbols of the feminized Caribbean landscape that has undergone pillage and violence. The cultural and geographical “rape” of a feminized Caribbean is linguistically and imagistically rendered in a way that has the effect of sublimating and denying the violence perpetrated against women in both “public” and “private” spheres; Caribbean male writers attempt to represent a “whole” culture, a Caribbean culture that struggles to define itself against European norms and, in so doing, replicate the same hegemonies as those present in colonial thought (the bipolarization of race, sex, class, etc.). Colonial hegemony is constructed as gendered to delineate the colonized (passive, hence female) from the colonizing (active, hence male). Thus, Antonio Benitez-Rojo is able to write in The Repeating Island:

Let's be realistic: the Atlantic is the Atlantic … because it was once engendered by the copulation of Europe … with the Caribbean archipelago; the Atlantic is today the Atlantic … because Europe, in its mercantilist laboratory, conceived the project of inseminating the Caribbean womb with the blood of Africa; the Atlantic is today the Atlantic …because it was the painfully delivered child of the Caribbean, whose vagina was stretched between continental clamps, between the encomienda of Indians and the slaveholding plantation, between the servitude of the coolie and the discrimination toward the criollo, between commercial monopoly and piracy, between the runaway slave settlement and the governor's palace; all Europe pulling on the forceps to help at the birth of the Atlantic. … After the blood and salt water spurts, quickly sew up torn flesh and apply the antiseptic tinctures, the gauze and surgical plaster; then the febrile wait through the forming of a scar: suppurating, always suppurating. (5)

The cannibalization of Africa results in the erotics of hegemony whereby all of the Caribbean is feminized and, consequently, abused: Benitez-Rojo's use of language replicates the historical, colonial moment he describes in which “woman” is made the “other” and colonized, because she is there, useful, and the site of self-replication. This, in the midst of advancing a useful and necessary theory that revolves around the way in which the Caribbean has been annexed to serve the needs of an exploitative global capitalist economy. Such uses of the metaphor of woman as landscape has led to a textual romanticization (even when garishly construed, as in the above) of Caribbean women, which denies them a sense of identity separate from that of island-nations. They are, in fact, denied the possibility of articulating identities divorced from but still relevant to the politics of colonialism.

It is no surprise, then, that, though recent scholarship in the area of Caribbean and postcolonial studies has begun to focus on literature produced by women (Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Fido's Out of the Kumbla and Selwyn Cudjoe's Caribbean Women Writers are salient examples), women writers continue to be underpublished, as well as underrepresented in the general study of Caribbean literature. In no Caribbean country has this been more true than in Haiti. As I have alluded to above, in comparison with the publishing patterns of women writers in Martinique and Trinidad, Haitian women writers find themselves represented only one-fourth as frequently as women writers in either of these islands. The fact that Haitian male writers such as Jacques Roumain have accrued considerable recognition since the emergence of the indigénisme movement in the 1920s—popularized by the publication of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1947), the “seminal” text of négritude—has not resulted in the fostering of female literary talent in Haiti. …

SEARCHING FOR THE MOTHER/GODDESS

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 during the Duvalier years of terror. Danticat also makes use of the principles of palé andaki, a practice of code switching particular to Haitian creole, to underscore the complex dimensions of Haitian women's survival in varied social contexts. Danticat thus engages the challenge of Haiti's cultural doubleness in order to emphasize the need to reformulate the traditional Caribbean novel genre to reflect the particularities of Haitian women's lives.

In Breath, Eyes, Memory, narrative acts ironically as a metaphor for the absence of writ social existence; in this way, the physical text becomes the manifestation of the social forces at work in Haiti over the span of three generations of Haitian women. It also provides a vital link to indigenous languages while using the vehicle of literary production to supply the context for female liberation. The Cacos of Danticat's novel are a family of women from the working classes who struggle both to maintain continuity from one generation to the next, and to reshape through education the fate of the younger generation, represented by the narrator and protagonist, Sophie. Throughout the novel, education, and, more specifically, literacy, are posited as the only means to salvation; ironically, access to literacy is connected to a life of exile, to a move from valley to city for the older generation within Haiti, from Haiti to the United States for the younger. Resisting this movement, the older generations, represented in part by Sophie's grandmother, cling to their sense of Haiti's “glory days,” an invisible African past that is textualized in the novel through the oral folk tales the older generations tell to the younger ones. It is through the thematization of secrecy that the damage resulting from generational disruption is unveiled. The language of the ancestors, which grows increasingly difficult to access, is the key to each woman's freedom.

Sophie is alienated from her natural mother by the latter's memory of the rape of which she is a product, an act that is duplicated by her mother who abuses her sexually in adolescence under the guise of protecting her from future harm. Martine, who wants to make sure that Sophie remains sexually “whole,” persists in describing her acts of sexual abuse in terms of a spiritual “twinning” of souls. Presented as a ritual enacted between mother and daughter through the generations, the “testing” that scars Sophie for life is a product of the suppression of female sexuality and the codification of women's bodies as vessels for male gratification in marriage. The Cacos perpetuate this ritual, although none of the women in the family has ever married, in what Danticat terms a “virginity cult.”

It is because she has internalized the ideology of female inferiority that Sophie's mother is capable of abusing her daughter. Taught to despise the female body for itself and to covet it only as a means by which to acquire a male mate, Sophie's mother commits incest against her daughter, rationalizing her behavior as necessary to her daughter's survival. Social worker and therapist E. Sue Blume notes in Secret Survivors that it is rarer for women to incest their children than it is for men. She writes: “Incest often manifests itself in a manner consistent with gender socialization: for a man, the abuse is generally overtly and directly sexual; for a woman, it may be more emotional, more focused on relationship and bonding, or perhaps manifested through care of the child's body, her primary domain” (7). The incest motif overwhelmingly present in the literature by women of the African diaspora—in the works of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Joan Riley, Maya Angelou, to name the most notable—clearly demonstrates that Danticat's portrayal of incest between mother and daughter should not be taken as evidence that Haitian women are any more apt than other individuals to commit acts of incest against their daughters and that men are hapless bystanders to such abuse. Rather, Danticat demonstrates (as do the aforementioned women writers) through this aspect of her text the extent to which the subjugation of women has led to one mother's sexual oppression of her own daughter. The effect of this subjugation is that the mother believes that she is taking “care of the child's body” when she is in fact subjecting it to very abuse from which she is hoping to save it.

After having been raised for most of her early life by her mother's sister. Tante Atie, in Haiti, Sophie is summoned to New York by her mother. The community rejoices at what appears to be a “natural” turn of events, the reclamation of a daughter by her mother. As grandmother Ifé says to Sophie: “You must never forget this. … Your mother is your first friend” (24). Sophie, however, knows her mother only as an absence; she reacts to her dislocation by withdrawing from the world which until this time had seemed so familiar, so unchangeable. When she is told that she will have to leave Haiti for her mother's New York, she says: “I could not eat the bowl of food that Tante Atie laid in front of me. I only kept wishing that everyone would disappear” (14). Only later do we learn that her inability to eat the bowl of food is symptomatic of what will become a cycle of bodily abuse; once she is in the United States—a place her mother describes to her as a sort of paradise—Sophie becomes bulimic.

For Sophie, the United States is not a garden of Eden; instead, it is a place in which she hungers for the comfort of her true mother, Tante Atie, whom she honors in a poem as a brilliant, delicate, yet nonetheless hardy, yellow daffodil. That image is connected to Erzulie who is the “Goddess of Love, the divinity of the dream. … [t]o Haitian women, the goddess …signifies escape from a life in which women carry a greater share of work and suffering” (Steber 110). Thus Sophie recalls:

As a child, the mother I had imagined for myself was like Erzulie, the lavish Virgin Mother. She was the healer of all women and the desire of all men. She had gorgeous dresses in satin, silk, and lace, necklaces, pendants, earnings, bracelets, anklets, and lots and lots of French perfume. She never had to work for anything because the rainbow and the stars did her work for her. Even though she was far away, she was always with me. I could always count on her, like one counts on the sun coming out at dawn. (59)

Sophie's mother can never be Erzulie, who is herself most often imaged as a mulatta of the upper classes (Desmangles 132), and whose power—defined as both erotic and sexual—is derived from these combined class and race distinctions. She nonetheless seeks Erzulie's elusive powers, attempting to transcend Haitian barriers of class, race, and color by exiling herself to the United States, where she appears to find love with Marc Chevalier, a lawyer and a member of the Haitian elite. “In Haiti,” she explains, “it would not be possible for someone like Marc to love someone like me. He is from a very upstanding family. His grandfather was a French man” (59). Marc idolizes Erzulie and decorates his home with small busts of her image (56); it would appear that Sophie's mother has begun to access Erzulie's world. Danticat, however, quickly undermines the association of the mother with Erzulie.

In The Faces of the Gods, Leslie Desmangles writes that “[i]n combination with Damballah, Ezili guarantees the flow of human generations,” and that “[s]he is believed to have given birth to the first human beings after Bondye [the supreme Being] created the world” (131-132). Erzulie, or, as Desmangles writes, Ezili, is the mother of us all, that is, of all Haitians, male and female; as such, she is all-powerful and all-controlling. Her power over men is legendary, as is her power over other vodou loas [gods] (Desmangles 133). She is often shown wearing a crown or a halo, “a symbol of her transcendent power and of her radiating beauty” (Desmangles 144). It is crucial to note that Erzulie's power is defined in terms of her relationships, primarily to male deities and human male subjects: she is concubine to all but subjugated to none; she is beyond containment. As much as she seeks to transcend temporality by emulating Erzulie, Sophie's mother is bound to self-negating mores of womanhood embedded in nineteenth-century ideals; for this reason, Sophie is the painful memory of what she perceives to be her failure as a woman.

Sophie's mother never comes to term with the fact that the man who raped her in her late teens robbed her of her sexual autonomy; she perceives herself as “damaged,” incapable, in fact, of being Erzulie, because she is no longer “virginal,” or “chaste,” a status the Caco women associate with social mobility. It is through marriage that freedom from poverty, and endless toil, can be achieved; marriage, however, is an institution that, historically, has been socially constructed in such a way as to benefit men and deny women their autonomy. Thus, Danticat's protagonist recalls the story of a man who bleeds his young wife to death in order to be able to produce the soiled, bloody sheets of their first marriage night: “At the grave site, her husband drank his blood-spotted goat milk and cried like a child” (155). On the surface, it seems as if Sophie is being led away from such a tragic fate. In the United States, she will be freed from the constraints of class that attend marriage in Haiti; she will gain an education and no man will be able to reject her as one Mr. Augustin rejected her Tante Atie because of her illiteracy. That possibility, however, is as elusive as Erzulie's loyalties, for Sophie knows only what she is in the process of losing. As she leaves Haiti behind, she imagines the friend/twin she has never had: “Maybe if I had a really good friend my eyes would have clung to hers as we were driven away” (31). Sophie has no point of contact, no shared sight, with another human being who can complete for her her sense of self. Identity, Danticat appears to say, is inextricably linked with community, and the image of the twin, the true friend, is the vehicle for communal (re)identification.

VODOU AND THE EXPLOITATION OF WOMEN'S SEXUALITY

In vodou culture, the marassas are endowed with the power of the gods. Twins are mystères (mysteries), who, since they can never be deciphered, must be held in high esteem and revered. As Alfred Métreaux writes: “Some even contend that the twins are more powerful than the loas. They are invoked and saluted at the beginning of the [vodou] ceremony, directly after Legba.”¹⁸ This is no small thing, for Legba is the sun god, the keeper of the gates; he is thus associated with Christ and, as the “guardian of universal and individual destiny” (Desmangles 110), with St. Peter as well. Twins are believed to “share a soul”: “Should one die, the living twin must put aside a bit of all food he [sic] eats, or a small part of any gift given him [sic], for the other” (Herskovits 204). Sophie's inability to eat, then, can be understood as having been caused by her separation from the unknown twin, the best friend she wishes she had had in Haiti. On the other hand, because she has been deadened by her loss of family, Sophie can in some sense be regarded as the twin who has died. Her “living twin” on this reading would be the Haitian landscape to which she had last looked to for comfort in her departure from Haiti; it stores away its resources while awaiting her return. Sophie's mother, however, insists on figuring herself as her daughter's marassa. The image of her mother as her marassa only serves to terrorize Sophie and alienate her from her identity, which becomes both sexualized and demonized in its association (by the mother) with vodou.

In the United States, when Sophie has her first love affair, clandestine and innocent, with an older man, Joseph, her mother suspects her of ill-doing; this is the occasion for Sophie's first “test.” Characteristically, Sophie prays to the “Virgin Mother” Mary/Erzulie while her mother tells her a story about the marassas, “two inseparable lovers … the same person duplicated in two” (84). At first, the story seems to be a warning to Sophie to resist her desire for sexual union with a man. Her mother says: “When you love someone, you want him to be closer to you than your Marassa. Closer than your shadow. You want him to be your soul. The more you are alike, the easier this becomes.” In the story, then, the union between man and woman is presented as a bond that can only be a pale imitation of the union between the marassa, who are described as reflections of oneself: “When one looked in the mirror, the other walked behind the glass to mimic her.” The story, as does the testing, ends chillingly as Sophie's mother tells her:

The love between a mother and daughter is deeper than the sea. You would leave me for an old man who you didn't know the year before. You and I we could be like Marassa. You are giving up a lifetime with me. Do you understand? There are secrets you cannot keep. (85)

Secrecy is central to the image of Haiti created by Danticat, suggesting that holding on to a sense of renewed options is a narrow, almost non-existent possibility. Secrecy, in the above passage, refers to Sophie's inability to keep her body to herself: it is positioned as her mother's reflection and is consequently not her own. But the truly unkeepable secret is the act of abuse itself, which Sophie attempts to exorcise through the only thing she feels she can still control: food.

Sophie's bulimia is a manifestation of her sexual abuse. As E. Sue Blume explains, eating disorders are manifestations of the ways in which women who have been abused attempt to regain control over their bodies; ironically, these attempts at regaining control perpetuate the cycle of abuse. Blume writes: “Most men can achieve mastery in the real world, but many women can exercise total control only over their own bodies. Additionally, rigid social expectations define women through their appearance. Body size relates to power, sexuality, attention, self-worth, social status and the aftereffects of incest” (151). Unlike anorexics, who try to rid their bodies of the sex characteristics they feel (consciously or unconsciously) have led to their victimization, bulimics attempt to maintain the sex characteristics they feel they must possess in order to achieve a “perfection” which will put a stop to their abuse (Blume 152–153). Sophie becomes the prototypical sexual abuse survivor described by Blume as she attempts to control her body—which remains the only socially sanctioned site for her rebellion—precisely because it has fallen beyond her control. She binges and purges in an effort to cleanse herself of her violation.

Sophie's eating disorder will not, however, erase the abuse she has suffered. Through the “testing,” Sophie loses her mother a second time and instead of becoming her twin becomes her victim. She clings to an elusive image of perfection, of Erzulie, which neither she nor her mother can attain. Like Nadine Magloire's protagonist Claudine in Le mal de vivre, Sophie cannot reclaim her identity because her Haitiennité demands that she deny her desires as well as her need for sexual autonomy. This implicit denial of self, as I will demonstrate below, leads Danticat to reject those cultural markers most associated with Haitian Afrocentricity, such as vodou and matriarchal family structure, because they signify oppression rather than liberation; this is not to say that, in so doing, she abandons what those markers represent. Rather, Danticat shows that in order to reclaim the landscape of the female body and of Haiti, both must be redefined. Thus, the novel introduces at its start a set of seeming dichotomies that will be reshaped and reimaged as the plot advances: mother versus daughter, food versus starvation, language versus silence, ritual versus violation, marassa versus life partner. Each of these seeming dualities reflect the rigid sex roles Haitian women are taught to desire, even though they defy those social sanctions through their very acts of daily survival.

As Ira P. Lowenthal points out in his essay “Labor, Sexuality and the Conjugal Contract,” Haitian women of the rural working classes appear to have some power equity due to the fact that many are market women (handling booths at the market, money, trade) while their male counterparts work the fields. Lowenthal writes: “men make gardens for someone and that someone is invariably a woman. … she is a socially recognized spouse of the man. The control of produce, then, as opposed to production itself, falls to women—as men's gardens mature” (18). Lowenthal points out that this seeming inversion of sex roles does not guarantee women's economic autonomy. Instead, it suggests a potential that is never realized because male and female sex roles are maintained in such a way as to prevent an equal division of labor. Women continue to have to sustain the home even as they manage the commerce: “domestic labor is overwhelmingly the responsibility of women and … [w]hen men cry out, as they sometimes do—especially when actually faced with the unsavory prospect—that they ‘can't live without a woman’ … it is to these basic domestic services provided by women that they primarily refer” (20). Put more bluntly, in Haiti, as in other parts of the Caribbean, even though a quasi-matriarchal system seems to be in place, it is one “that represses women” (Kurlansky 135): “women are stuck running the household, and if they are tough and strong it is because their children would starve if they weren't” (Kurlansky 134). The Caco women thus represent the sort of matriarchal family formation that has been celebrated in many Caribbean women's writings (most notably in Audre Lorde's Zami and Michelle Cliff's Abeng, both semi-autobiographical novels), but which, in most Haitian contexts, is one born both out of necessity and out of the legacy of African social formations where quasi-matriarchal societies did indeed flourish and empower women.¹⁹

In the Caribbean context, where identity resides at the crossroads of creolization or métissage, matriarchal society is a product of a disrupted society (or societies). Sexuality takes on a striking importance in a repressive matriarchal society for it is the ultimate site of women's subjugation and is, by extension, the site of possible empowerment. As Lowenthal explains,

[f]emale sexuality is here revealed to be a woman's most important economic resource comparable in terms of its value to a relatively large tract of land. Indeed, when discussing their relations with men, adult women are likely to refer to their own genitals as interèm (my assets), lajan-m (my money), or manmanlajan-m (my capital), in addition to tèm (my land). The underlying notion here is of a resource that can be made to work to produce wealth, like land or capital, or that can be exchanged for desired goods and services, like money. (22)

Lowenthal insists, however, that, just as women wield full control over the goods balanced precariously in weaved baskets upon their heads for sale at market, they have full control of the ways in which their bodies are exchanged or marketed. Yet, if women did, in point of fact, have full control over their bodies and their sexuality, one would expect that they would be endowed with power in whatever social strata in which they were born; this, of course, is not the case. Thus, when women attempt to control their sexual interactions with men, they do so precisely because social and sexual power is taken out of their hands from birth: theirs is an unrelenting struggle.

Danticat's very carefully exposes this truism as one would expose a frame of film to light. The result is not often clear or pleasing to the eye, but it reveals part of what has been obscured by inadequate representations of the difficulties faced by women in Haiti and elsewhere. Haitian women are not immune to what Catharine MacKinnon has called the “body count [of] women's collective experience in America,” by which girls are taught to suppress their own ambitions in order to fulfill the sexual needs of men (23). As Danticat shows, even in a family in which men do not “exist,” the threat of sexual violence and subjugation remains a reality too immediate to be ignored.

LEARNING THE MOTHER TONGUE

In many ways, the novel's true heroine is Tante Atie who gains a sense of self and identity only as she grows older. Rejected by a suitor, Augustin, because of her illiteracy, Atie's social role becomes that of caretaker to her aging mother, Ifé. Nonetheless, Atie rebels against her position in the family, and when she has to give up her role as Sophie's surrogate mother-figure, she begins to construct for herself a new life. Her life is reactivated through her being taught to read and write by a market woman, Louise, with whom she develops a strong love relationship. Although both Atie and Ifé have worked diligently to give Sophie and her mother the means to escape the endless cycle of work, poverty, and exploitation, Ifé strongly resents Atie's newfound independence at the same time that she covets it. Through Atie, Danticat presents literacy as a metaphor for the fulfillment of identity and yet she also demonstrates that freedom for the Haitian woman cannot be achieved solely through education; she must also be able to control the passage of her body through a society that rejects her presence and demonizes her sexuality.

Atie defies social convention by severing her relationship to her mother (whom it is supposed she will take care of as she ages since Atie is yet “single”) in order to have a primary relationship with Louise. Her relationship with Louise is, in fact, subtly coded as a lesbian love relationship. Although there is the merest hint that the two are not sexually involved, suggested through numerous scenes in which Louise leaves at sundown and in which the two only come together at daylight, theirs is undoubtedly an erotic relationship. They embody the power of the erotic as theorized by Audre Lorde who writes:

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experience it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves. (54)

This reflects Atie's experience with Louise as she grows in her “sense of self,” escaping the strict confines of her role as dutiful daughter and becoming more literate in her own (woman's) language. Access, through education, to both the past and to the future provides an increasingly empowering double-sightedness imaged through the twinning of these two women. Louise's descriptions of her relationship with Atie imply as much. She says: “We are like milk and coffee, lips and tongue. We are two fingers on the same hand. Two eyes on the same head” (98). In the end, these two women are the true marassas of the novel. Danticat deftly and subtly inverts the linguistic terms with which relationships between women can be described in the Haitian context in a manner akin to that involved in palé andaki (as described more fully below), the process of code switching within creole (the equivalent, perhaps, to what Zora Neale Hurston has defined as “specifyin” in Black English). Through this code switching, Danticat appears to reject the identifiable markers of vodou and to reformulate them in terms which are inclusive of its origins but that also encapsulate the exigencies of working-class and impoverished women. Creole is the mother tongue that links these two women to their Haitian identity, and, thus, to each other, through the process of literacy. Through creole, that literacy retains its oral roots.

Why should literacy be linked so explicitly to Haitian women's process of self-actualization? The languages in which we speak, write, and communicate are signifiers of the societies and/or cultures we live in. Haitians, male and female, have, since Haiti's tragic beginnings, been made to feel as if our ways of speaking are deficient. Creole, to this day, is often referred to as a “bastard” tongue, “denigrated as a lesser language of French” (Lawless 100), even though it has certainly always been the “dominant” language of the country despite efforts to enforce French as the language of the polished, accomplished, upper classes. For the last several decades, creole has been taught in the schools and used as the common language of the untutored in various literacy programs. It is a living language that is continuously changing; it accurately reflects a culture that is constantly in flux both socially and politically.

Cultural sociologist Ulrich Fleischmann notes in his article, “Language, Literacy, and Underdevelopment,” that in rural Haiti, where the older Caco women live, creole culture distinguishes itself from those “recognized” in Western contexts in that it “cannot be considered as culturally integrated …for each member is in some way aware that his [sic] culture seen from a socially more elevated position appears as a ‘lower variant’ of the dominant culture.” Haitians are acutely aware of the ways in which linguistic creolization is perceived to be a deviation, but they are also ardently opposed to assimilating.

Fleishmann describes oral creole as follows:

[T]hough a nationwide intelligible form of Creole speech exists, there is a continuous change and generation of meanings in the narrow local context. Therefore, Creole speech can take on double and even multiple meanings. The information it conveys can vary considerable according to the social context. The diligent use of contradictory explicit and implicit references, for instance, is a highly esteemed art which Haitians call palé andaki. (109)

In effect, Danticat's novel is speaking andaki to those who are open to the possibilities of cultural doubleness. A little more than halfway through the text, readers are made aware that they have been reading in another language. When Sophie's mother comes to Haiti to reclaim her daughter for a second time, Ifé and Atie complain about their use of English. “Oh that cling-clang talk,” says Ifé, “It sounds like glass breaking” (162). What should, in effect, be broken in the reader's mind is the illusion that s/he has been reading an English text; the narrative reveals itself to be a masquerade, and the unevenness that is palpable in the passages of dialogue between the Caco women (between those who have stayed in Haiti and those who have emigrated) can be seen as evidence that the text is in fact a creole one.²⁰

Danticat's Atie becomes the translator of the camouflaged text, a translator to rival the Dahomean god Eshu, the trickster figure who has become the focus of some phallocentric, Afrocentric criticism, such as in Henry Louis Gates' The Signifying Monkey. Like the poeticized women of Dahomey in Audre Lorde's poetry collection, The Black Unicorn, Atie embodies a marginalized ancient African woman-identified culture in which “[b]earing two drums on my head I speak / whatever language is needed / to sharpen the knives of my tongue” (Lorde 11). Atie's language is one of covert resistance as she appropriates the French language through creole translations when she learns to read and write and as she appropriates the image of the marassa to constitute her own Haitian female identity.

As she becomes literate, Atie creates a new language in order to write down her thoughts in her notebook; Louise “calls them poems” (103). At times, Atie reads to the family from her notebook; one of her most significant creations is an adaptation of a French poem, which remains unidentified in the novel, given to her by Louise. Her poem serves a dual function—one can assume, first, that it is in creole, and secondly, it tells the same story as that of the young husband who kills his young bride because he wants to prove her virginity, or purity, to the community. The important difference, of course, is that the story is now told in Atie's voice:

She speaks in silent voices, my love.
Like the cardinal bird, kissing its own image.
Li palé vwa mwin,
Flapping wings, fallen change
Broken bottles, whistling snakes
And boom bang drums.
She speaks in silent voices, my love.
I drink her blood with milk
And when the pleasure peaks, my love leaves.

(134-135)

The line Danticat leaves untranslated suggests the interconnectedness of like spirits: she speaks my voice, thus, she is my voice. And since Atie's tongue is creole, it can never be entirely translated, nor does her love attempt that transmutation. The last two lines of the poem echo the traditional tale except that Atie has taken the place of the male hero; she occupies his position but is not male-identified.

This latter distinction leads us to the key element of Atie and Louise's relationship: the partings that figure so prominently in the text are metaphors for the non-acceptance of their union in their community, which denies that women can choose one another as their primary sources of emotional and erotic support. This societal rejection is verbalized by Atie's mother, Ifé, who continuously opposes the relationship, saying “Louise causes trouble” (137) and “the gods will punish me for Atie's ways” (167). But Atie defies her mother and the community: “After her reading, she and Louise strolled into the night, like silhouettes on a picture postcard” (135). And after Louise hears that one of her fellow market workers has been killed, Danticat chooses to reveal the women's closeness in an overtly erotic image: “Their faces were so close that their lips could meet if they both turned at the same time” (138). Their lips “could meet” but do not; what keeps the women from “turning” at the same time is the overt misogyny of Haitian society that Danticat exposes in the shattering of Martine (Sophie's mother) and Sophie's own life; their lives are kept out of view, and silenced. The many departures that occur in the novel symbolize, like the last line of Atie's poem, these women's stifled desires. Their partings culminate in Louise's emigration to the United States; she leaves without saying goodbye to Atie, an event that surprises Sophie (171). Atie, however, speaks the same language as Louise: there is no need for the articulation of goodbyes, for she knows already the loss she is about to experience: “I will miss her like my own second skin” (145). For Atie and Louise, options are few. They are denied all but each other, but cannot live for and with each other in Haitian society and expect to survive the consequences of that transgressive choice.

In the end, Nadine Magloire's Le mal de vivre and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory resist the romanticization of the Caribbean, and of Haiti specifically, as a culture within which the infinite play of meaning, of subjectivity, can be achieved through the recognition of cultural creolization and/or métissage. Magloire reveals the novel genre as inadequate for the textual representation of Haitian women's lives at the same time that she convincingly represents the social and psychological mores that prevent her protagonist from being able to express her own identity. Claudine occupies a position at the crossroads of cultures but is not enabled by that positionality; hybridity, then, can only become a useful force if it is used in the service of disrupting rather than maintaining social and class privilege. Magloire's novel reveals that Claudine's inability to survive is ultimately a function of her being a woman in Haiti; as a woman, she is denied most privileges, and it is for this reason that she clings so fiercely to those privileges that class alone can provide. Similarly, Danticat's Sophie is caught between her memories of happiness in Haiti among women immobilized by their illiteracy and her exile to the alienating U.S. landscape, which will alleviate the oppressions that attend female existence in Haiti. Danticat's use of andaki strategies of doubling within the novel form also underscores the need to reformulate the traditional Caribbean novel genre. It is up to us, as readers, to realize that both Magloire's and Danticat's heroines lose “le goût de vivre” because Haitian/North American culture has relegated them to the margins of a text they cannot forcibly rewrite. In that resounding silence, in the absence of textual representations of identity that reflect a vision of hope, we should hear the “cri du coeur [cry of the heart]”²¹ of all Haitian women whose bodies are subject to endless commodification in art, in literature, in everyday domestic life. If we fail to do so, then perhaps not even their shapes upon the sea shores will be left behind; their magic will remain as yet unwritten.