How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Page)
Quote #7
It was up to me to avoid my turn in the fire. 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. (31.203)
Sophie knows that part of her healing will happen when she loses her anxiety about becoming an abuser herself. Her therapy group encourages her, through ritual, to let go of her obsessive attachment with the pain that her mother felt and passed on to her—to begin to forgive. In doing so, Sophie is already one step ahead of the women in her family who came before her.
Quote #8
"I feel like I could have been Southern African-American. When I just came to this country, I got it into my head that I needed some religion. I used to go to this old Southern church in Harlem where all they sang was Negro spirituals. Do you know what Negro spirituals are?" she said turning to Marc. (33.214)
Although Martine never seeks the help she really needs to deal with her psychological suffering, it's clear that she's tried to settle something about her identity. This comment is an interesting about-face for Martine, who seemed so against Sophie hooking up with Joseph, who is African-American. She has a kindred feeling for the suffering expressed in Negro spirituals, a genre of music that is not part of her birth culture. Whether she says this just to make nice with her son-in-law or to express an authentic longing of her spirit, we don't know.
Quote #9
Listening to the song, I realized that it was neither my mother nor my Tante Atie who had given all the mother-and-daughter motifs to all the stories they told and all the songs they sang. It was something that was essentially Haitian. Somehow, early on, our song makers and tale weavers had decided that we were all daughters of this land. (35.230)
Danticat wants us to understand that she's not just artificially stacking the odds in the favor of female characters in her book. She's got a deeper reason for doing so. In the folktales that Sophie recalls and the stories told by the women in her family, the characters and motifs are decidedly feminine. Danticat claims that this is because all Haitians are daughters of the land. Perhaps it is also because the experience of the women in this work sums up the human condition so well: complex and difficult, filled with beauty, terror, and a deep, longing sadness for freedom.