Being separated from your own soul

Toswiah tries out a number of ways of understanding herself and who she is, and she says that "all that you have is your soul," and she identifies her soul with the things she loves, but from the beginning of the novel, she has been denied those things, and as a result, she does not know who she is. This creates a strange sort of existence for her, and that form of existence is defined by anguish, as Toswiah tries to orient herself and find something that replaces the world she used to know and the identity it used to give her.

Memory is one of the things that she says constitutes the soul, but Toswiah's memory has been troubled by all the problems that came with the transition to a new life, and those memories are like her father's scars: they show...