Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat highlights the various differences in Haitian culture from the American culture we grow up with by showing us various Haitian parables. The use of these Haitian parables not only gives a look into the values of another culture, but their usage explains earthly and unearthly things with an underlying meaning or a moral. By utilizing the parables and their interpretations, Danticat foreshadows a character’s death and reveals the metaphors for a deeper pain in life. Any pain from a large trauma can affect many people on a daily basis with no end or weakening in strength. When pain becomes a regular part of one’s life, present in everything at every moment, the mind often copes by trying to make sure the …show more content…
emotion is masked or replaced with other feelings to disguise the truth. In reality, traumatic pain can make one feel as “If she wanted to stop bleeding, she’d have to give up her right to be human” (Danticat, 87). Danticat utilizes this parable to explain how a trauma, like Martine’s experience of being raped, can affect a person for her entire life, making one feel as though she is bleeding or as though they aren’t human. Being raped as Martine was can negatively affect someone for the rest of her life and change the way she views herself, making her feel less human. The negative views being always present can become the only way she thinks about herself, like making Martine “sound crazy” (191). She can talk about the pain “just like someone stating a fact… Something that already existed and could not be changed” (61). While this distorted image of herself is persisting, she can let that image just sit in the back of her mind and simmer, blaming herself for the experience that is causing her pain. In addition to that, traumatic experiences can stay with a person for a prolonged amount of time and eventually drain her of her hopes and dreams. Indirectly, the pain is ending her life early without her friends and family noticing. Although, a life filled with pain not only negatively affects someone, but can also be a contributing factor to how life ends for her. Enough pain can make one feel as though “The blood kept flowing… drained of all her blood, the girl died.” (155). Martine continuously suffers from many issues of the day the man rapes her until the day she died, including nightmares, distorted body images, and more. The problems that stem from her trauma eventually lead to her death after she becomes pregnant and convinces herself the baby was going to look like the man who rapes her, just like Sophie. Martine has hallucinations that the baby was fighting her by making it so she “couldn’t breathe” (191). Also, Martine avoids confronting her pain because “by the time she began to recover her sanity, she left” (140). Martine also avoids talking about the event and, because of this, it takes Sophie and others a long time “to piece together my mother’s entire story. By then, it was already too late” (61). It turns out that waiting for her mother to be able to talk about the experience is a grave mistake for those around her. Martine doesn’t go to any doctors or therapists because she is “trying to keep one step ahead of the mental hospital” (191) and doesn’t want to have a psychologist “telling me to face it” (190). To escape the nightmares that have been plaguing her since her childhood, Martine “stabbed her stomach with an old rusty knife… seventeen times” (224) to kill herself, claiming she “could not carry the baby” (224). Through the usage of those parables and metaphors, Danticat paints a subtle foreshadowing of the death of a character, Martine, who let pain control her mind and body from the time she was young. Parables have always been a large part of Haitian culture that explain the things that used to have no explanation, like feelings or warnings to give to family members before they leave the house.
Danticat, to her advantage, employs a specific parable to explain how a woman can feel pain. After Martine’s death, Sophie confirms in her mind that her “mother was like that woman who could never bleed and then could never stop bleeding…” (234). Danticat verifies the suspicions of the parable being used to foreshadow Martine’s death. Both Martine and the woman in the parable were bleeding continuously for a long time, but Martine’s was not a physical bleeding until her suicide when she stabbed herself. Martine was bleeding emotionally and mentally because she was “pregnant and half insane” (139) and also “tried to kill herself several times” (139), all because when she would sleep “the nightmares were just too real” (139). In order for Martine to feel as though she’s escaped her nightmares, she ends her life and has to “give up her right to be human” (87), just like the woman in the parable. The parable that Danticat utilizes becomes a metaphor of it’s own with it’s own interpretations. Metaphors can help people relate to events and feelings that they have not experienced in their own time. However, Danticat manipulates Haitian parables to be metaphors that help people understand the pain and suffering Martine goes through. Along with helping one understand Martine’s pain, the parables also foreshadow her death, both mentally and
physically.
As the first poem in the book it sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. The questions posed about the nature of God become recurring themes in the following sections, especially One and Four. The symbolism includes the image of earthly possessions sprawled out like gangly dolls, a reference possibly meant to bring about a sense of nostalgia which this poem does quite well. The final lines cement the message that this is about loss and life, the idea that once something is lost, it can no longer belong to anyone anymore brings a sense...
Poetic testimonies emerge as metaphors defining human
Edwidge Danticat's novel, The Farming of Bones is an epic portrayal of the relationship between Haitians and Dominicans under the rule of Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo leading up to the Slaughter of 1937. The novel revolves around a few main concepts, these being birth, death, identity, and place and displacement. Each of the aspects is represented by an inanimate object. Water, dreams, twins, and masks make up these representations. Symbolism is consistent throughout the novel and gives the clearly stated and unsophisticated language a deeper more complex meaning. While on the surface the novel is an easy read, the symbolism which is prominent throughout the novel complicates the audience's interpretation. The reader is left to look beyond the language and uncover the underlying themes of the novel. Through symbolism Danticat is able to use inanimate objects to represent each of her character's more deeply rooted problems. In order to prove this theory true, I will thoroughly examine the aforementioned symbolic devices and provide a clear interpretation of their significance in the novel.
Background: Chronic pain results when there is delayed healing. Grumbine claims that chronic pain ‘produces a fear in the patient and a panicked feeling that the pain will
The bringing together of Sophie and Martine does not improve the lives of either one of them. Their discomfort with each other is foreshadowed by the nightmares Sophie has of her mother before going to live with her in New York. In the nightmares Martine has "arms like two long hooks" (Danticat, p. 28, ch. 4) and is chasing her, trying to catch her. Sophie's nightmares of her mother resemble her mother's nightmares of her father. Despite their differences, they are bound together by the sa...
Danticat's Krik? Krak!, are a collection of short stories about Haiti and Haitian-Americans before democracy and the horrible conditions that they lived in. Although it is a mistake to call the stories autobiographical, Krik? Krak! embodies some of Danticat's experiences as a child. While the collection of stories draw on the oral tradition in Haitian society, it is also part of the literature of diaspora, the great, involuntary migration of Africans from their homeland to other parts of the world; thus, the work speaks of loss and assimilation and resistance. The stories all seem to share similar themes, that one story could be in some way linked to the others. Each story had to deal with relationships, either with a person or a possession, and in these relationships something is either lost or regained. Another point that was shared throughout the short stories was the focus on the struggles of the women in Haiti. Lastly they all seem to weave together the overarching theme of memory. It's through memory and the retelling of old stories and legends that the Haitians in Danticat's tales achieve immortality, and extension to lives that were too often short and brutal.
Metaphor is an underlying element used in this memoir to depict the relationship between family and nature, and the profound understanding of oneself, through the sequence of life and death, and the rebirth that proceeds. Using metaphoric references, Williams explores the continual unpredictab...
Detachment from reality is what the main characters in both Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” express. “The Things They Carried” is the collection of interrelated short stories of Lieutenant Cross and his experiences throughout the Vietnam War. “The Masque of the Red Death” is the story of a prince who fears the “Red Death” who hides himself, along with some townspeople, to escape from the terrible disease. Each character, despite having two very different roles in their lives, have to face reality. In order to fully understand the relationship between these two works, each of these factors in turn.
During the process of growing up, we are taught to believe that life is relatively colorful and rich; however, if this view is right, how can we explain why literature illustrates the negative and painful feeling of life? Thus, sorrow is inescapable; as it increase one cannot hide it. From the moment we are born into the world, people suffer from different kinds of sorrow. Even though we believe there are so many happy things around us, these things are heartbreaking. The poems “Tips from My Father” by Carol Ann Davis, “Not Waving but Drowning” by Stevie Smith, and “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop convey the sorrow about growing up, about sorrowful pretending, and even about life itself.
Trauma is an incident that leads to a great suffering of body or mind. It is a severe torture to the body and breaks the body’s natural equilibrium. It is defined as an emotional wound causing a psychological injury. American Psychological Association, defined trauma as an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape or natural disaster. Immediately after the event, shock and denial are typical. Longer term reactions include unpredictable emotions, flashbacks and strained relationships. J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis assert, “Trauma is an event in the subject life defined by its intensity by the subject’s incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization” (qtd. by Hwangbo 1).
Metaphors are used by Chesterfield, whereby he uses them to portray his son’s values. Chesterfield builds his son up, and provides all the obstacles that could come into his life in the near future. He takes his time to warn his son about the problems, and struggles that he is to face in the future through a metaphor where he says, “thorns and briars which scratched and disfigured me in the course of my youth” (Stanhope 91). He refers to these problems as thorns and briars. He was frightened that his son was going to make the same mistakes he made while he was a youth and so, he had to warn him in advance of what awaits him. He uses metaphors in his warnings just to emphasize his points. Later on, in his warnings to his son; Chesterfield also uses anastrophe in contradicting his points. He uses anastrophe as an understa...
Pain is a complex and subjective phenomenon that involves biological, psychological, social factors, and cultural. It is interpreted and perceived in the brain. Each individual responds differently to pain because every person has different pain thresholds and tolerances. According to Porth (2009), pai...
The Haitians that I am speaking on the Haitians who are from Haiti, also known as The Haitian Republic. Haiti is a Caribbean country that takes up one third of the island of Hispaniola), and it resides near the Dominican Republic (Central Intelligence Agency, 2014). Haiti is linguistically affiliated with France as its official language is French (Every Culture, 2014). Haitians are also known to speak Creole and Patwa, and some Haitians are able to speak English as well. There is a lot of diversity within the community of Haiti, which consists of nearly 10 million people (Central Intelligence Agency, 2014). Everyone is unique and individual and has their own style.
People can experience traumatic events in many different ways; divorce, war, moving or even rape. A traumatic event is an incident that causes physical, emotional, spiritual, or psychological harm (Cafasso, 2016, para. 1). Traumatic events may not particularly happen to you directly but can affect those around you in various ways. From my previous work experience numerous individuals can handle a traumatic event in a healthy manner and others may experience depression, anxiety, difficulty concentrating and even changes in appetite. Such events can be managed either by seeking out professional or spiritual help. Those who experience traumatic events can be affected in countless ways but have the opportunity to seek out professional help to receive
An unknown exposure to a situation in which a person is confronted with an event involving death or a serious injury is known as Trauma (Baird & Kracen, 2006). After a traumatic event, people experience emotional and physical aftershocks or have stress reactions periodically over time. The way an individual copes with crisis depends on his or her own history and prior experiences. Traumatic events are so painful that professional assistance may be inquired to cope with the circumstance (AAETS, 2014).