Breath Eyes Memory
by Edwidge Danticat
A Haitian girl carries her mother's trauma in her own body.
For you if
you want to understand intergenerational trauma before you had a name for it
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Sophie grows up in Haiti with her grandmother, then joins her mother in New York — a mother she barely knows, traumatized in ways she can't speak about. Danticat writes about the female body as the site where Haitian history is stored and transmitted — the testing, the silence, the nightmares that pass from mother to daughter. Her debut novel. The dispatch from inside the Haitian immigrant experience that introduced Danticat to the world and introduced the world to what Haitian women carry.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Haiti • Caribbean
- Voice
- Written by a Haitian author
- Topics
- haitian immigration
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
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Why it’s here: Punk in refusing to let athletic triumph erase institutional abuse — Saul's hockey talent doesn't heal the residential school system that tried to break him. Pedagogical in showing how trauma and skill can coexist in the same body without cancelling each other out.
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Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
