"If you make something of yourself in life, we will all succeed. You can raise our heads."
Martine tells Sophie that she has a chance of making it in the world if only she tries hard enough and if she works hard in school and towards being a doctor. Martine tells Sophie that through education, she can rise above everyone and be better than Atie and Martine. In a way, Martine puts her dreams and hopes on Sophie’s shoulders and lets her understand that the only way she can be happy is if Sophie will be obedient, listen to her mother, and try her best to learn new things and break the vicious cycle the women in the family found themselves trapped in. Unfortunately, Martine's perspective completely ignores what Sophie wants. Sophie does not like school and she does not want to be a doctor; she admits to Joseph that she doesn't exactly know what she wants. One of the issues, then, between Martine and Sophie is that Martine always sees her daughter not as an individual but as an extension of her own hopes and dreams.
"You want to live your nightmares too?"
Sophie goes back to Haiti at a time when the country is experiencing unrest. The tonton macoutes enforce the regime's directives and spread fear through the populace. They act with abandon, every whim of theirs ostensibly sanctioned by the state. What Grandme and Sophie see in the market is a perfect example of their reign of terror. Sophie cannot help but look back and see their violent treatment of Dessalines, and Grandme urges her to move on. Her words evoke a few different things. First, it is a clear caution that she should not stare because it is dangerous. Second, it references her nightmares, which, interestingly, are Martine's nightmares. Martine was raped by a macoute and the trauma never left her; indeed, it was passed on to Sophie. Grandme's words thus work on two levels—one urging Sophie to move along now, and one acknowledging that the macoutes represent something terrible in their family.
"We come from a place," my mother said, "where in one instant, you can lose your father and all your other dreams."
Martine and Atie talk one night about their father and how he used to tell them stories and make them promises that never came to be. Their mother, however, used to try and warn them by telling the two young girls scary stories meant to make them more aware of the dangers in the world and of the price of being a woman in a world controlled by men. A woman is not allowed to dream without a man by her side because a woman has limited power; a woman in Haitian society depended on the man beside her. Martine’s quote exemplifies just that and how quickly the world can change for a girl when her male guardian is no longer around to protect her and help her.
"She is like a friend to me. She kept me company while we were apart."
After Martine moves to America and leaves her daughter with Atie, she gets a doll that she keeps with her. She brushes her hair, changes her clothes, and generally treats her like a symbolic replacement for Sophie. By leaving Sophie behind Martine demonstrates that she is too unsettled by her presence; interestingly, she also gives the doll, Sophie's replacement, away. At the end of the text, Martine will also decide that she must expel the child within her because it is destroying her. Martine's rape has led her to give up almost everything that matters to her, and she is forced to live on the margins of society.
"When she left you with me, she and I, we agreed that it would only be for a while. You were just a baby then. She left you because she was going to a place she knew nothing about. She did not want to take chances with you."
This brief explanation from Atie points to the main issue for Martine and Sophie—that Martine is, to use Julia Kristeva's term, abjecting her. Critic Masoumeh Mehni uses Kristeva to probe how Martine abjects her daughter in order to prioritize her own individual development. The term means to "physically and emotionally distance [oneself] from that which is horrific and unwanted," and "its most interesting characteristic is its innate ability to unsettle its master... it fluctuates in its ability to attract and repel the abject." Martine first gives Sophie away, then desires her back, then gives away the doll that replaced her, then moves between sentiments of love and expressions of ignorance to who Sophie really is. She also cannot separate Sophie from her own self, as seen in the testing and the fixation on purity and Sophie being a doctor. And at the very end of the novel, Martine does the same thing she did to Sophie when she essentially sends the child away by killing it and herself. She cannot handle that her body is no longer her own; she wants to expel it like she tried to expel Sophie when she was in the womb and then when she left her in Haiti.
"I am a fat woman trying to pass for thin. A dark woman trying to pass for light. And I have no breasts."
In this achingly sad statement from Martine as to why she does not want to marry Marc and have the baby, she indicates just how her trauma has affected her. She refuses to confront what happened to her and so she, as critic Masoumeh Mehni writes, "remains at the margins in all she does. She is a mother who never truly engages in the role and a beloved who never plays her role also." The violation of her body meant the violation and fragmenting of her soul, rendering her incapable of being comfortable with her home, her looks, her relationships, her sleep, and more. Being pregnant is yet another example of how she feels her body is not her own, and she finally takes the only step she can in killing herself.
"You called it home?" he said. "Haiti."
"What else would I call it?"
"You have never called it that since we've been together."
Sophie calls Haiti "home" and Joseph is justifiably surprised, given the fact that she had never done that before. It slips out unconsciousy but it seems like Sophie knows it is right. Haiti is where she was raised by the woman who was a true mother to her—Atie—and where many of the most formative things to happen to her and her loved ones occurred. It is the place of stories and myths and memories that informs her understanding of her place in the world. Tellingly, though, Sophie can only call it home after she returns as an adult and begins to deal with her issues past and present. Accepting Haiti in all of its beauty and flaws is part of Sophie's journey to herself.
A red dust rose between me and the only life that I had ever known. There were no children playing, no leaves flying about. No daffodils.
This is perfect bit of foreshadowing, imagery, and use of one the main motifs in the novel—color. The line acts as foreshadowing because it indicates that not everything is going to be happy and easy for Sophie as she leaves Haiti to live with her mother. The dust and lack and children are disturbing images, and the dust acts as a barrier, albeit a somewhat permeable one, between Sophie's two worlds. Then there is the fact that yellow and daffodils are associated with Haiti and with Martine and Sophie in Haiti. Sophie wears yellow dresses and gives a daffodil to Atie in the Mother's Day card. However, it is the color red that is associated with Martine—red in the hibiscus, red in the apartment decor, red in her clothes, red for symbolic and literal pain and death. These two short lines are exemplars of Danticat's rich imagery.
"You and I we could be like the Marassas. You are giving up a lifetime with me. Do you understand?"
Martine tells Sophie this disturbing Haitian myth while she is testing her, not only to distract her but also to plead with her that there is something larger at stake here. The implication of the story and this quote in particular is problematic for multiple reasons. First of all, this love between the Marassas was not healthy; it was destructive. Sophie needs to have her own identity and make her own choices but by doing this Martine is yoking Sophie to her, is working through her own issues but on the site of Sophie's body. Martine cannot have this perfect mother-daughter relationship she envisions with Sophie because she left her and because now she is carrying out this horrific act that will scar Sophie in innumerable ways. Second, Martine cannot even tell this story without knowing somewhere deep down it is wrong, for she covers her face in shame when she is finished.
It was up to me to make sure that my daughter never slept with ghosts, never lived with nightmares, and never had her name burnt in the flames.
Sophie needs to find healing and peace for herself because she needs to be able to have a fulfilling, safe marriage with her husband, come to terms with her grandmother and mother, avoid nightmares, have a better, safer way of treating her body, and understand who she is and what her place in the world is. She also needs to find healing and peace, though, because of her own daughter. She sees how her grandmother and mother carried out the testing and enforced certain standards and behaviors because it was what they always did, because it was a reflection of what they'd internalized about their culture and themselves. Sophie knows she cannot subject Brigitte to this, and, tellingly she looks ahead to when Brigitte has a daughter of her own and knows that Brigitte cannot do the same. This trauma is inherited by the Caco women and Sophie knows she needs to break it.
