"Learning To Breathe" by Janice Lynn Mathers

I read “Learning To Breathe” (2018) to prepare Episode 2 of my podcast Karukerament. The theme of this episode was the representation of love and sexual awakening for young Caribbean girls. Just like in the film “Rain”, this novel takes place in the Bahamas. As usual whenever I need to write a review, it took me some time to verbalize everything I felt.

[TW] This book deals with strong themes such as rape and sexual assault of minors. I do think the author writes in a delicate and sensitive way without shying away from the true matter at hand. I’ll humbly try to do the same, but there will be a few spoilers.

Written by Janice Lynn Mather, “Learning To Breathe” tells the journey of 16-year-old Indira as she’s abruptly propulsed into adulthood. She’s pregnant and she needs to make decisions that will change her life forever. This is about fighting to win back agency when society, family included, is against you.

Body control

The title couldn’t be more accurate. By learning how to breathe, Indira figures out how to reinvest her body in two different ways. The acceptance of her pregnancy is the first step. The first pages of the novel describe the physical changes she feels in and sees on her body. These are changes she can’t quite understand because she has very little knowledge of how a woman’s body functions. With no adult around that she can trust, she’s on her own and can rely only on an old anatomy book her grandmother gave her right before Indira was sent to live with her aunt. In this book, Indira reads the grandmother’s annotations wrote to describe her pregnancy years before. This indirect dialogue is the perfect illustration of the deafening silence around sex ed in the Caribbean. It’s taboo. Janice Lynn Mather goes against the usual accusing speech we get on teen pregnancy. She gives us a contemporary insight in which the girl’s health is the priority. In the last pages of the novel, Indira gets to consult a doctor who doesn’t judge her and who expresses the comforting behavior any woman should get. The moment Indira decides to keep the baby marks the end of the process to gain back control over her body.

The second way for her to reinvest her body is a visual metaphor spread throughout the story. Learning the basic steps of yoga literally teaches Indira how to breathe. We see her try many times to practice yoga as she looks for some inner peace. To no avail. The more she tries to do yoga, the more she fails at it, the more she realizes how hard it is for her to stay focused on herself. The moment Indira finally finds this inner equilibrium is also when the plot is ready to reach its conclusion. Being finally in control over her body shows how she freed herself from mental chains.

Mind control

With the innocence of her age, Indira describes the assault scenes without getting into details. Besides, these moments are usually told in a flashback manner so we don’t get to read present experiences as we get the clues to figure out how she ended up in this situation. The narration reflects the mental protective mechanism Indira trigger when her cousin wants to force her into having sex with him. The shock makes her mind freeze. This is her instinct taking over. What’s interesting is that we get to read about how the character deals with the emotional and physical trauma on their journey to find inner peace.

Which future can Indira aspire to? In her quest to understand her past and her present, she expresses her vulnerability without being seen as someone weak. Her vulnerability is what allows her to be strong and assert herself. Her grandmother and her mother also went through what we can imagine to be similar traumatic experiences, they both dealt with their issues in a different way. Indira doesn’t want to be a fanm potomitan (pillar woman) like her grandmother. Indira doesn’t want to be a woman running away from her responsibilities liker her mother. This story is about her figuring out who she wants to be and which life is right for her. Learning to breathe is also taking caring of her mental health. Although it’s never verbalized that way, the fact that Indira forces herself to practice yoga, regardless of her own skepticism, opens the discussion of the place of mental health in Caribbean societies. As she takes back control over her body and her mind, she takes back control over her life.

Life control

Teen pregnancy is such a trope in coming-of-age stories in the representation of young girls. As if the existence of women was limited and defined by motherhood. The dreams, the ambitions, the personal development of teenage girls are usually barely explored, but this is an issue to talk about another day. However, how much of a trop teen pregnancy is, “Learning To Breathe” presents it with simplicity and honesty. We first encounter Indira as she’s beginning to accept her pregnancy. Step by step, she manages to verbalize all the violences she was subjected to. Not only she puts the situation into words, but she also acts on to make things right. So yes, she has people around to help her, to give her advice, but they listen to her first. Escaping a toxic family, keeping a baby conceived through a trauma, confronting her assailant… Each action of Indira is based on her free will. For her, learning to breathe is also about learning she’s allowed to make mistakes and that she can overcome obstacles coming her way.

I struggled with this review. At first, I wanted to talk about the representation of Caribbean families around the grandmother/daughter/granddaugther relationship and the violence in their interactions with men. However, I would have probably written exactly what I said in my podcast about the film “Rain” by Maria Govan, so I decided to go with the author’s approach: focusing on the emotionally charged plot built around the main character. Indira is an ordinary girl. I’d have called her resilient at first, but is it really resilience when you turn your whole life around and there’s no way of turning it back? Her desire to live throughout the story highlights even more her vulnerability expressed in a 1st-person form. Her strength comes for her doubts and her weaknesses. Taking on the teen pregnancy trope, Janice Lynn Mather develops a multidimensional character living in a cultural reality created through the clash between a traditional vision and a contemporary vision of what growing up while being a Caribbean young girl is.

N.B : you may read the original review in French here.