Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women's Literature

3: Daughters of This Land: Genealogies of Resistance in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory

3 / Daughters of This Land: Genealogies of Resistance in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat published her debut novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, in 1994, a pivotal moment in Haitian history. That same year the nation’s first democratically elected president in decades, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, returned to office with great fanfare after having been ousted in 1991 by a military coup. For some, Aristide, a former Catholic priest whose political philosophy invoked liberation theology, seemed to offer a radical shift in Haitian politics.1 After years of dictatorships and weak interim governments, Haiti seemed poised to reject its previous authoritarian political history for a new, more egalitarian government with Aristide at the helm. This shift would presumably affect all aspects of Haitian society, including family life, as the family is a social construct that often reflects the workings of the state. Thus it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that Breath, a novel so concerned with challenging cultural narratives of family in the Haitian Diaspora, with rewriting a history that far too often has relegated women to the sidelines, if not made them invisible, appears in this moment of great political change. Indeed, in a sense, Breath arises out of the burgeoning liberatory sentiment also reflected in the major, albeit brief, political shift in Haiti.2 Nonetheless, the novel is not a buoyant take on the possibilities of a new Haiti, but rather a staid and thoughtful meditation on the collision and collusion of the prevailing repressive discourses of respectability on women’s lives and in their families in Haiti and its Diaspora. Danticat’s novel Breath, like texts from fellow contemporary Black women writers in the Caribbean and United States, advances DAughTERS Of ThIS LAND / 75 contemporary discourse about the legitimacy of particular types of Black families; in this case, the novel invites critiques regarding the legitimacy of normative notions of female-headed households in an era pointedly concerned with respectability politics. In an interview, Danticat admits: “I wanted the book to have a matriarchal family. In my experience, I had seen many matriarchal families. . . . A lot of men were away—in the city, in the neighboring Dominican Republic working in the cane fields, or working in other countries. I wanted to explore how a family of rural women passes things down through generations ” (“Interview” 186).3 Breath depicts a family of single, workingclass women living across the Haitian Diaspora in New York and the Caribbean who seek to ameliorate their social status by strictly adhering to respectability politics; namely, they employ a rigid understanding of propriety and family relations in an effort to compensate for the perceived shame of their lack of respectability due to their class and marital statuses and their sexual histories. Martine and Grandmè Ifé, in particular, are entrenched in an especially egregious manifestation of respectability politics: they actively reify dominant power structures within their family by routinely centering their perceptions of men’s desires, using folklore and mother wit to suppress dissent among women, and perpetrating sexual violence on one another in both Haiti and the United States in the name of family honor. To be clear, I am not suggesting that the specific practices the Caco women engage in, such as virginity testing, are particularly Haitian rituals. Rather, the novel’s depiction of virginity testing as a consequence of respectability politics draws attention to how structures of dominance can manifest within a family, even when that family consists primarily of women, and even as they migrate across the Haitian Diaspora.4 Recognizing the role of the paradox of respectability and the possibility for an ethic of community support and accountability is critical to a gaining a fuller understanding of Danticat’s debut novel. Thus Breath does not indict the absence of men or the women’s failure to live up to the rules of the “virginity cult”; instead, it compels a critique of the paradox of respectability, for the Cacos hold a stern allegiance to the ideals of respectability politics while finding it difficult or impossible to actually conform to these ideals. That paradox of respectability makes the Cacos’ connections to one another ambivalent—for example, fostering both a sense of duty to one’s family and extreme resentment about performing that duty—and ultimately threatens to destroy these connections altogether. 76 / CLOSE KIN AND DISTANT RELATIVES However, the novel’s characterization of Atie and Sophie also...