The Pain We Bear

NOTE: The following blog post contains some opinions on sensitive topics. I tried to be as empathetic as possible while writing this, but I understand if some people may get a little upset while reading this post.

2020 in a nutshell

Wow, what a year. A start to a decade so bad that it’s probably going to be up there with the Great Depression on a future list of “Worst Starts to a Decade in History.” A year that for many people, was a year of pain and suffering that they’ve never felt before. A year that changed everything for the foreseeable future. A year that the next generation will be reading about in their history textbooks (or whatever they’re going to get their course material from in the future). A start to a decade that will affect the next few decades to come.

As we reel and (try to) recover from the devastating effects of a year that we want to but can’t forget, the aftereffects rear their heads every day of the week. Schools continue to operate online, who knows what is going on with the government, there’s new strains of COVID-19 popping up left and right, it almost seems like a continuation of the horrid year of 2020. Which, to be fair, it would be a bit unwise to assume 2021 would be a magical reversal of fortunes, but at this point I think everyone is a bit tired of suffering from all the havoc of the past year. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to get by without any issues, but I know the same cannot be said for many, many people. As we try to return to normalcy, we’re constantly reminded of the permanent effects of such an emotionally painful year.

Oh how things have changed...

Pains like these leave scars that will never go away. Scars that will be visible for everyone else to see for the rest of one’s life. The marks left by these trying times and pains become a part of a person, a reminder of the past and an indicator of the future. They can be anything - good or bad - but they never go away. People and their pain are like a piece of clay and its potter: pain shapes a person, for better or for worse. A scar from pain can build up or destroy a person, but the effect of traumatic pain is always there for everyone to see.

As I contemplate this thought, my mind constantly wanders over to Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory. A story that is built on the idea of the pain of the past’s relentless pursuit of the present day, it was a story that was almost prophetic in how it represented pain. A family torn apart by the horrific pains of a culture. That same family reunited by those exact same pains. The effects of pain were clear as day, even when the pain was from so long ago. The piece of clay is molded by the pain until it becomes what it is today. The effects that the pain and trauma of the past leave, both good and bad, are permanently engraved in the present day design of every human being.

Sophie Caco, the main protagonist of Breath, Eyes, Memory, is a victim of a culture that placed an emphasis beyond reason on the sexual purity of young girls. This overemphasis means that young girls are regularly subjected to virginity testing once they’re old enough (which really isn’t that old). The painful experience of “testing” lives through every girl and the daughters they bear. Though “testing” is traumatic for every woman that endured it, the mothers still do it to their daughters because it’s a part of their culture, and it’s really the only way they know how. The reader shares Sophie’s feelings as she is put through this “purity ritual” by her own mother, someone who was also a victim of this treatment. In doing so, the reader can see that “Sophie inherits her mother's fear, sexual guilt, and nightmares” (Novels for Students) in addition to those of the generations that came before her. With this huge burden to bear, Sophie is scarred, both physically and psychologically.

There were always going to be the physical scars resulting from the routine sexual assault known as “testing,” but what really affected Sophie was the mental scars that she bore, even in a safe environment in her marriage with Joseph. She bore the scars from her youth in the bedroom, where she is unable to perform due to her past trauma with “testing.” She is only able to have a child through the act of “doubling,” which for Sophie means that she essentially has to mentally distance herself from her own body while she is physically intimate with Joseph in order to retain any semblance of mental sanity during this re-exposure to something that has been so traumatic to her in the past. It should be noted that the process of doubling applied to many people differently. Sophie doubled during sex, but for many others (in the novel, Danticat mentions former Haitian presidents/dictators), it was how “they could murder and rape so many people and still go home to play with their children and make love to their wives” (Danticat 155). Despite these differences, what was common about doubling was that it involved splitting oneself into two, usually to do something that to the person that is doubling is either despicable or uncomfortable. The fact that Sophie had to go to such means, even in a safe environment with Joseph, even after a good amount of time had passed by, demonstrates the irreparable damage that is caused through emotionally traumatic events like those that Sophie endured. With this kind of damage, it’s understandable why many people are permanently wrecked by it, like in the case of Sophie’s mother, Martine.

In the case of Martine, her pain was even worse than Sophie’s. She also underwent testing, but it stopped earlier than it did for most girls. However, the only reason why was because she was raped and became pregnant with Sophie, thus stripping her of her “purity.” This haunts her to the point where she has to move to New York to try and get away from the place of her worst nightmare. Martine tried to cover up her scars; however, when she sent for Sophie to live with her, she was faced with a living reminder of her rape, essentially slashing the wounds open again. Throughout the book, Martine tries to cope with this while still trying to be a good mother to Sophie. However, despite her own past trauma, she still tests Sophie, which damages what was already a somewhat cold mother-daughter relationship, and in the process unintentionally shares all of her trauma with Sophie.

“I knew my hurt and hers were links in a long chain and if she hurt me, it was because she was hurt, too” (Danticat 207).

She eventually does reconcile with Sophie, as Sophie eventually understands that the pain that they share is the same, that Martine has endured Sophie’s trauma and more, and that both of them endured that trauma as a result of the culture they were raised in, not because of Martine. The same pain that first tore them apart brought them back together after so long. This was a pain that was enduring, but through the shared burden, at least allowed Sophie and Martine to begin a new relationship based on their shared scars as opposed to their previous estrangement.

However, Martine’s scars from her traumatic rape were not ones that Sophie could directly relate to. As difficult as it would have been to do, Martine was never able to find closure with her worst experience. By moving to New York and thus away from the site of her rape, Martine tries to heal the scars herself by essentially forgetting about her past trauma. She didn’t seek any therapy or confide in anyone, not even in her boyfriend Marc, who as a result didn’t seem to understand what Martine had and was going through. Though it had seemed to work initially, once she was faced with Sophie (who looked like her father), it seemed as if everything was happening again for the first time, something that Martine struggled badly to cope with. Though Sophie never experienced her mother’s rape, she is still badly affected by it as she is a living, breathing reminder of it to Martine. Martine eventually commits suicide when she becomes pregnant again, as the pregnancy opens up the mental scar to a point where the pain was no longer bearable. The worst scars of the past, if not dealt with correctly, can become infected and grow larger until it gets to the point where the damage is not only irreversible, but fatal.

Right before her mother’s suicide, Sophie had been seeking help in therapy. Through her therapist and her sexual phobia therapy group, she is able to further understand her scars and her mother’s suffering. Though it turned out to be too late to save her mother, after her mother’s funeral in Haiti, Sophie is able to find closure for both her and her mother by visiting the site of her mother’s rape, confronting the source of her mother’s (and thus her own) pain. Through this experience, Sophie is finally “liberated from the burden she ha[d] carried for so long” (Winters).

“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” (Danticat 207).

Quick context of the name burning: Sophie and her therapy group had written the names of their abusers on pieces of paper and burned them.

The scars never went away; however, those scars no longer served as a reminder of her pain and suffering. Rather, they now represented hope for the future. Sophie is able to use those scars in her relationship with her own daughter to make sure her daughter doesn’t have to endure the tremendous suffering and pain that she and all her ancestors had to endure. Through her husband’s understanding of her situation, her therapist, and the lessons she learned from her own mother’s experiences, she is able to see what needs and doesn’t need to be done in raising her daughter. She still bears the scars of her and her family’s past, but without those scars she would not have known what was good for her daughter. Though the scars from the past will never go away, when dealt with correctly, it’s possible for the scars to become integrated into a piece of art that is more beautiful than it was before the scars existed.

A real world example of the lingering pain I've been talking about is the suffering of many war veterans after they finish their service. The PTSD of war veterans remains with them for essentially their whole life, and it shows itself well after the veterans stop serving. At several screenings of Saving Private Ryan, the realisticness of the combat scenes caused several World War II veterans to have PTSD flashbacks of their service (“‘Ryan’ Too Real For Some Vets”). The mental scars from those traumatic events stayed fresh in the minds those veterans over fifty years after the war had ended. Trauma creates scars that remain in place forever, and recovering from them is a difficult process that many aren’t able to fully finish.

Traumatic memories never do go away, not even a half-century later

They say that time heals all wounds. In the case of a significantly traumatic event like those that take place in Breath, Eyes, Memory, I would say that that saying is not true. A traumatic event is something that never goes away; the scar always remains there despite any effort to get rid of it. Trying to repress the painful memories is like trying to pick at a scab from the scar: it only makes it harder to recover, and likely makes things worse. Really, the best way to deal with it is probably to confront and, in a way, embrace the event. By embrace, I mean accept that it will always be there no matter what. It sounds a bit cliché, but it’s true: trying to avoid the problem instead of facing makes it worse, as it did in the case of Martine. By accepting the past and confronting the source of her family’s past trauma, Sophie is able to finally free herself of her family’s past trauma. The pain is still there, but it no longer haunts her. Instead, she is now able to use it as a driving force for improvement for the sake of her daughter. It’s not easy and never will be, facing something like this, but finding some degree of closure is the only way one can be freed from the burden of the pain in order to use the pain for good. It’s a scar that will always be there, but with the right treatment, can be turned into a gorgeous tattoo.