Sexual traumas link a Haitian mother and her daughter in this
wonderfully self-assured debut by 24-year-old Haitian-American
Danticat. The world of Sophie Caco, her beloved guardian Tante
Atie, and her grandmother IfC the matriarch of this peasant family,
is bounded by the sugar-cane fields of rural Haiti. When
12-year-old Sophie is summoned to New York to live with the family
provider, Maxine, the mother she cannot remember, she is dismayed.
Maxine is perpetually tired after her nursing-home double-shift;
she lives alone and dates a lawyer called Marc. She also tells
Sophie that she is the product of a rape; a stranger forced himself
on Maxine in a sugar-cane field. Seeing her daughter again has
revived memories of the rape, and Maxine is suffering constant
nightmares. Six years later, Sophie, who has never had a boyfriend,
falls in love with their much older next-door neighbor Joseph, a
black American jazz musician. Maxine follows a Haitian tradition
and checks regularly to make sure Sophie is still a virgin.
Horrified by this violation of her body, Sophie deflowers herself
with a pestle and elopes with Joseph, enduring sex because she now
hates her body, though her baby Brigitte is a consolation. Slowly,
through her family's sheltering love on a return visit to Haiti and
the new-world ministrations of her therapist, Sophie comes to
understand her mother ("I knew my hurt and hers were links in a
long chain"), but it's too late: Maxine, pregnant by Marc and
racked by nightmares again, dies during a crude self-abortion.
Danticat keeps graceful control of this difficult material while
adroitly sketching the larger political context and making both
peasants and pediatricians equally convincing. An impressive first
outing. (Kirkus Reviews)
'A vision of female solidarity which transcends place and time'
Sunday Times: Edwidge Danticat's groundbreaking debut. At the age
of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian
village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely
remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child shouldever
know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she
returns to Haiti - to the women who first reared her. What ensues
is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the
supernatural and scarred by political violence. In her stunning
literary debut, Danticat evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache
of her native Haiti - and the enduring strength of Haiti's women -
with vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her
people's suffering and courage.
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