In a cane field her mother had been raped by a Tonton Macoute. At school, Haitians are taunted with having HBO – Haitian Body Odour – and are accused of carrying Aids because only the “Four Hs” catch the virus – heroin addicts, haemophiliacs, homosexuals, and Haitians. For six years Sophie studies hard while her mother scrapes a wage at a nursing home One day Sophie learns the awful secret of her birth. Sophie’s mother, Martine, is desperate to adopt the ways of white America yet half in thrall to voodoo. This mythological figure appears in Haitian nursery stories as the bugaboo that kidnaps wicked children in his straw bag under cover of dark. The undertow of folklore in Danticat’s book recalls Haiti’s most celebrated novel, Masters of the Dew by Jacques Roumain (1944) which describes the legendary Valhalla of Guinea where the voodoo spirits reside and to where the souls of dead Haitians return. This vision of heaven as ancestral Africa haunts Danticat’s young heroine, Sophie, as she leaves her beloved aunt Atie and Grandma If in Haiti to live in New York with a mother she scarcely knows: “I come from a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head.”Danticat gives a sad picture of Haitians exiled in New York: overcrowded tenements have replaced the gingerbread houses of the Caribbean.

In Breath, Eyes, Memory we learn how Tonton Macoute means “Uncle Knapsack” in Creole patois. Danticat describes voodoo as a peaceable creed – not Fleming’s satanic cult of darkness. For the majority of Haitians, it is still the only way to rise above poverty and political oppression.
Folk wisdom invades every area of Haitian life. Edwige Danticat was born in Haiti during the dictatorship of Papa Doc. Then, as now, voodoo is all that remains for the voiceless poor of this beautiful, bedevilled country. Remember Ian Fleming’s Mr Big in Live and Let Die? He worshipped the malevolent totem of Baron Samedi.

In voodoo this is the God of Death who stalks the cemeteries in topper and tails, puffing a large cheroot: President Franois (Papa Doc) Duvalier was happy to resemble this graveyard Groucho Marx Whooo! Haiti can really put the frighteners on you. But underneath all this, John David Morley gradually reveals the reciprocal envy and guilt that lie undetected at the heart so many families. He stares right in at some of a child’s most unthinkable fears – what if my mother didn’t love me? what if my big brother wanted to kill me? – and watches how they twist and warp people as they grow up.. Haiti has always had a bad press when it comes to voodoo. Victor Hugo’s Haitian novel, Bug-Jargal, featured ritual decapitation, and this sort of shock-horror fiction established the country as a land of satanic darkness with devil dolls and ceremonial tom-toms Things got even more spooky. Morley brings the camera far too close for comfort, switching focus between the cool precision butchering on the table and the young brother’s racing emotions. Kiddo slides in and out of subjectivity – one moment he is simply looking at a corpse on a slab, the next the pathologist pulls out the tongue and it is irrefutably, horribly, that of his brother.There are moments when the narrative machinery creaks and grinds in the effort to engineer a denouement, and the scenes of Kiddo’s low-life stunts tend to lack both pace and purpose.