The Past is Inescapable


In the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, written by Edwidge Danticat, the protagonist's mother, Martine,  was sexually assaulted by an unknown man when she was a teenager living in Haiti. Martine became pregnant and was so haunted by her attack that she attempted to kill the fetus growing inside of her many times. The violence that she was subjected to caused her to have uncontrollable amounts of anxiety and terror during her pregnancy with Sophie.“For months, she was afraid that he would creep out of the night and kill her in her sleep. She was terrified that he would come and tear out the child growing inside her. At night, she tore her sheets and bit off pieces of her own flesh when she had nightmares” (138). The extreme fear that she carried on her shoulders after the pregnancy drove her to madness and extreme depression. Shortly after her daughter was born, Martine moved to New York on her own as an attempt to escape the trauma she had experienced at such a young age. She left her family behind and everything that was familiar to her. In America, she suffered from reoccurring nightmares in which she constantly relived the trauma of that night in the Haitian cane-field. These dreams caused her to scream and thrash in her sleep. When she was reunited with Sophie, the nightmares became worse, because to Martine Sophie was a living reminder of her most painful experience. Although Martine traveled thousands of miles to escape her trauma and find refuge in New York, she only relived it. When she became pregnant with her boyfriend, her past revisited her again and she had an outbreak of mental instability. Martine felt as if the fetus inside of her was haunting her. “Every time I even think of that, the nightmares get worse. It bites at the inside of my stomach like a leech. Last night after I talked to Marc about letting it go, I felt the skin getting tight on my belly and for a whole minute I couldn't breathe” (194). This mental outbreak caused by her pregnancy led to her suicide because of the madness she endured when revisited by her past trauma. The past is truly inescapable. Martine thought that moving to a new country would cause her pain and suffering to vanish, but the past revisited her many times from own pregnancy to her own daughter moving to New York.

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