Tag: Haiti

Breath, Eyes, Memory

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Edwidge Danticat
Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction
Pub. Date: Apr. 1994 (read Mar. 2022)

Breath, Eyes, Memory has been on my TBR for a very long time. It’s a modern classic and I finally picked up a copy last year in a second hand bookstore. I put it on my backlist books for this year to finally try and find the motivation to read it.

It blew me away. It was not at all the book I was expecting and I wish I had seen some trigger warnings for it because it is a heavy, emotional book. So TW for rape, sexual assault, eating disorders, and suicide. It was a hard book to read, but I can’t stop thinking about it since I read it and I know it’s a book that will stay with me.

Breath, Eyes, Memory tells the story of Sophie Caco, a young Haitian girl who has grown up with her Aunt while her mother tries to make a living in America. Her mother sends for her at the age of 12 and Sophie leaves behind everything she knows to move to America. I thought it was going to be a straightforward coming-of-age story about immigration, but it was so much more than that. At its core, this is a book about generational trauma.

Sophie grows up in America, but struggles to find herself there. The women in her family have been taught strict ideals about sexual purity that are enforced down from generation to generation. When Sophie has a falling out with her mother, she returns to her homeland to see her Aunt and Grandmother and try to make sense of the trauma that has been passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. At the same time, her mother is grappling with her own childhood trauma and the two women struggle to be there for one another, despite needing each other.

This is Danticat’s debut and she has a simple writing style, but I still found it to be extremely compelling. She doesn’t get caught up in side stories and every idea has its own place and meaning. It’s quite an emotional punch for how short the book is. It’s a very sad story and I ached for each one of the characters; questioning, but understanding how the cycle of violence always repeats itself. I’ve never heard of the kind of purity test that has been inflicted on the women of Haiti and I think it will forever haunt me, so I can’t imagine what it’s like for the girls who experience it. I don’t think I could re-read this book because it is quite upsetting, but I do feel better for having read it.

American Street

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Ibi Zoboi
Genres: Young Adult, Magical Realism
Read: Jan. 2018

Ibi Zoboi! Way to rip my heart out and stomp on it! What even? I was not expecting this.

This was the last book in my January Challenge to read 3 books about immigration. I read Girl in Translation and Pachinko earlier this month and loved both of them. American Street was a whole different kind of story, quite unlike either of the others. It was probably my least favourite of the 3 books, but still really good.

Fabiola Toussaint was born in America, but raised in Haiti because her mother didn’t have citizenship. Her Aunt Jo and her 3 cousins, Chantal, Pri, and Donna all live in Detroit and regularly send money back to Haiti to help out Fabiola and her mother. When Fab is entering her junior year of high school, they send enough money for her and her mother to finally move to America for good. Fab has American citizenship, but her mother has to get all the necessary visas to “visit” America. Unfortunately, when they enter America, Fab’s mother is detained at the border and she is forced to go on to Detroit without her.

Her aunt and cousins live at the corner of American Street and Joy Road. Fab has been desperate to come to America to live in the land of the free, but she doesn’t feel very free with her mother detained in an immigration prison in New Jersey and navigating her cousins’ world is scary and overwhelming. Her cousins are notorious at school and a little rough around the edges. Fabiola is pulled into their world and discovers the dark underside of what it costs to chase after the american dream.

Like I said, this was really different from any of the other immigration books I’ve read this year. I think Zoboi really captures Fab’s Haitian spirit and what it’s like growing up black in Detroit. She intertwines some cultural elements, like Haitian vodou, which is very much a spiritual thing for Fab, but is usually interpreted more like witchcraft in modern society. She weaves in some magical realism which surprised me and first, but I thought really worked with the story.

Voice was key for me in this novel. I’m a privileged white girl who grew up in a predominantly white town, so I definitely can’t relate to Fabiola or her cousins, yet their voices rang so true. I had no trouble believing in Zoboi’s characters. Fab’s uneasiness when she first arrives at her aunt’s house; Chantal’s desire to chase education but her reluctance to leave her family; Donna’s inability to say ‘enough is enough’; and Pri’s fierce and protective love for her sisters. My only complaint would be that Zoboi didn’t actually go deep enough into each of these characters. She formulated some really excellent characters, I just wanted more of them.

I really wasn’t anticipating where the plot of this story went. I thought it was mostly going to be about Fab trying to re-unite with her mom. While this was definitely an underlying conflict throughout the entire novel, Zoboi tackled a lot of other issues in this story. Although I would have liked to have heard her mother’s story as well and learn about what it’s actually like to be detained. I never really knew where the story was going and felt quite out of my depth with some of the content, much as I imagine Fabiola must have felt arriving in Detroit and trying to fit in with girls attacking each other over boyfriends and drugs passing hands on the sly. But Zoboi was quite unflinching in her delivery. I really did not see the end coming in this book and parts of it and brutal.

So like I said, probably my least favourite of the 3 books that I read, but actually very complimentary because this offered a totally different perspective than the other two. The characters in Girl in Translation and Pachinko are very meek and I loved Fabiola’s strength in this novel. She makes some pretty big mistakes, but she’s not afraid to chase after what she wants and she is very brave and courageous. Her culture shock was quite different and I liked getting another perspective. She could have let herself be pushed around, but she wouldn’t stand for it and decided to make her own place. Family is a central theme to this novel and I enjoyed the messiness that was the Francois sisters and Fabiola’s relationships with them.

Way to go Zoboi, this is a great debut novel!