Critical Analysis "Ou Libere"
Critical Analysis "Ou Libere"
Sophie began her childhood like most of the children within the combines of her village in Haiti. She was young and innocent. Her aspirations were simply to enjoy the pleasantries of being a child. Education, love, and a strong family bond were the essence of her sweet beginnings. All that she had ever known was the unconditional love of her Tante Atie. It was an unsettling, but eager sense of unwavering devotion that forced her to leave her almost perfect world in an effort to regain and rekindle a relationship with a biological mother that she hardly knew, nor initially wanted to know. The circumstances of her maturation, once she arrived to her new world, eventually weaved a tangled web of dark secrets and improprieties that eventually would cost her vast amounts of mental and physical anguish that in turn was reciprocated through those that she eventually came care about. Sophie’s existence was eerily patterned after events that were relayed through three Haitian folktales within the novel; the story of the inseparable “Marassa” told to her by her mother, the story of a woman who visited a deity in an effort to end her uncontrollable hemorrhaging, and the story of a man who consummated his marriage while eventually committing murder. These occurrences initially caused her to keep secrets, yet may have been the eventual causes that led to her freedom.
Her mother told the story of the Marassa to Sophie at the time that she was experiencing the beginnings of a new type of love - a love different from that of a mother and daughter. Sophie was engulfed in a quagmire of mixed emotions because of the unyielding and blinding power of this new type of love. It was unfortunate that the new love she was feeling was for a man - an older man. In discovering that Sophie’s love was being compromised, the jealousy that overwhelmed her mother, because she realized that her daughter was deceiving her, forced her to revert to performing an ancient Haitian tradition of what is now considered sexual child abuse by today’s standards. In “testing” Sophie, her mother believed that she was exercising her parental right to protect a daughters’ purity. “The love between a mother and a daughter is deeper than the sea. You would...