Themes 1

1. Migration
As in so much of Caribbean literature, migration and its consequences are a
key theme. The reader is familiar with the letters form ‘away’, the occastional
special packages, the money sent home to buy school clothes or pay for house
repairs, and the cherished photographs. Danticat shows us, too, the pain of
separation and the awkwardness of being reunited after years apart. She lets
us know of the insults that immigrants have to deal with and the degrading
jobs they are forced to take. The nostalgia of those who have left their
homeland is evident in the eagerness with which they share Haitian food,
savouring the familiar spicy aromas. For most migrants from the Caribbean,
the push factor is economic, but for Haitians, an even more compelling factor
has been the need to escape the brutality of unjust and corrupt political
regimes. The killing of Dessalines by the Macoutes makes this point clear.

2. Language
One aspect of Sophie’s alienation in New York is that she does not speak the
language, nor does New York understand her. So she needs to learn English,
but that does not mean she rejects her own language; indeed, the novel is rich
with the use of patois: bouret, tet-gridap, aeroport, manman, konbit, oubyen.
Importantly, Joseph, an African American raised in Louisiana, also speaks
patois. He and Sophie, then, ‘speak the same language’- they readily connect
with each other. By insisting on the use of patois, Danticat asserts that the
language of the Haitian people is unique, and is just as valid as that of the rest
of the world.

3. Female sexuality and ‘testing’

Danticat draws the reader’s attention to inequalities between the sexes. In the
society that Danticat describes, a woman’s inferior role is prescribed for her
from birth. She is trained to prepare for marriage, and to that end she is
required to guard her virginity. She is merely a commodity-marketable only if
she is ‘pure’.
Grandmother Ife points out to Sophie a light glowing across the valley and
explains to her that at birth, boys are welcomed into the world, but not girls. If
 a boy is born, the lantern will remain lit all night in celebration, but if it’s a girl.
“ There will be no lamps, no candles, no more light”.
Women must have ten fingers, says Tante Atie: “ Mothering,Boiling, Loving,
Baking , Nursing, Frying, Healing, Washing, Ironing, Scrubbing”. No fingers left
for herself! In other words, the woman exists only to serve, not to find self-
fulfillment or to attain self-actualisation.
Since a girl’s virginity must be carefully guarded, mothers and grandmothers
become abusers. Haitian girls, after puberty, are subjected to ‘testing’- a
weekly ordeal in which the mother or grandmother tries to insert her little
finger into the girl’s vagina to check whether the hymen is still intact. On the
wedding night, the husband must be able to hang the blood- stained sheet out
of the window to let the world know that his wife was ‘pure’. His triumph is at
the expense for her humiliation!
The practice of ‘testing’ has dire psychological effects: Atie hated and dreaded
the invasive examinations, and Sophie is unable to enjoy sexual relationship
with her husband because of how she was traumatized as a teenager. Martine,
Sophie’s mother, suffered sexual abuse not only from her mother’s ‘testing’ but
also when , as a teenager, she was brutally raped by one of the Tonton
Macutes. She suffered a mental breakdown from which she never fully
recovered.
4. Oppression of women as a global phenomenon
Danticat focuses on Haiti, but makes the point that violence against women is
a worldwide phenomenon. Haiti is not the only place where women suffer at
the hands of both women and men. At her sexual phobia group, Sophie meets
an Ethiopian woman, Buki, whose grandmother subjected her to a painful
cultural practice of cutting off her clitoris and sewing up her labia in order to
ensure that she remained a virgin until marriage. She also meets Devina,
whose grandfather raped her over a period of ten years.