Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States

by Edwidge Danticat

  A few weeks before Jean's death, Patrick Dorismond, a Haitian-American man, was gunned down by a New York City police officer in a Manhattan street across the bridge from where another Haitian man, Abner Louima, was beaten, then sexually assaulted in a Brooklyn precinct by a police officer. I ask myself now what Jean— as he inevitably would have had to report these events on his radio program—must have said about these incidents, which so closely resemble the atrocities that Haitians over the years have fled Haiti to escape. It has not been lost on us that of three black men tortured and killed by police in New York in the past two years, two were Haitian. Reading the essays in this book again after these events impels me to think of the many more pages that could be—and will be written—about our experiences as people belonging to the Haitian dyaspora in the United States. But anyone who has ever witnessed a gathering of the likes described by Jean-Pierre Benoit in "Bonne Annee" or Barbara Sanon in "Black Crows and Zombie Girls" knows our voices will not be silenced, our stories will be told.

  In her essay, poet and painter Marilene Phipps writes, "Painting and Poetry are my battlefields. . . Living in another country, I use my pen or my brush to voice incantations to a particular world that has created me and, to a certain extent, now uses me to re-create itself." In this collection, the writers define themselves as well as the worlds that define them, through tragedies, like the deaths of Jean Dominique and Patrick Dorismond, but also through celebrations like the New York, Boston, and Miami street parades that followed the end of the Duvalier regime in 1986. Or through voices like that of Joanne Hyppolite turning a sometimes dreaded word in her favor, celebrating her "dyaspora" status, reminding us that we are not alone.

  "When you are in Haiti, they call you Dyaspora," writes Hyppolite. "... you are used to it. You get so you can jump between worlds with the same ease that you slide on your nightgown every evening."

  Guapa!

  CHILDHOOD

  PRESENT PAST FUTURE

  Marc Christophe

  What will I tell you, my son?

  What will I say to you, my daughter?

  You for whom the tropics

  Are a marvelous paradise

  A blooming garden of islands floating

  In the blue box

  Of the Caribbean sea

  What will I tell you

  When you ask me

  Father, speak to us of Haiti?

  Then my eyes sparkling with pride

  I would love to tell you

  Of the blue mornings of my country

  When the mountains stretch out

  Lazily

  In the predawn light

  The waterfalls flowing

  With freshness

  The fragrance of molasses-filled coffee

  In the courtyards

  The fields of sugar cane

  Racing

  In cloudy waves

  Towards the horizon

  The heated voices of peasant men

  Who caress the earth

  With their fertile hands

  The supple steps of peasant women

  On top of the dew

  The morning clamor

  In the plains the small valleys

  And the lost hamlets

  Which cloak the true heart

  Of Haiti.

  I would also tell you

  Of the tin huts

  Slumbering beneath the moon

  In the milky warmth

  Of spirit-filled

  Summer nights

  And the countryside cemeteries

  Where the ancestors rest

  In graves ornate

  With purple seashells

  And the sweet and heady perfumes

  Of basilique lemongrass

  I would love to tell you

  Of the colonial elegance of the villas

  Hidden in the bougainvilleas

  And the beds of azaleas

  And the vast paved trails

  Behind dense walls

  The verandahs with princely mosaics

  Embellished

  With large vases of clay

  Covered

  With sheets of ferns

  Pink cretonnes

  Verandahs where one catches

  A breath of fresh air

  During nights

  Of staggering heat

  By listening to

  The sounds of the city

  Rising up to the foothills

  I would love to recite for you

  The great history

  Of the peoples of my country

  Their daily struggles

  For food and drink

  Tireless people

  Hardworking people

  Whose lives are a struggle

  With no end

  Against misery

  Fatigue

  Dust

  In the open markets

  Under the sun's blazing breath

  I would want to make you see

  The clean unbroken streets

  Straight as arrows

  Bordered by the green

  Of royal palms and date palms in bloom

  I would love to make you admire

  The shadowed dwellings

  The oasis of green

  Of my Eden

  I would carry you

  On my shivering wings

  To the top of Croix D'Haiti

  And from there

  Your gaze would travel over

  These mountains

  These plains

  These valleys

  These towns

  These schools

  These orphanages

  These studios

  These churches

  These factories

  These hounforts

  These prayer houses

  These universities

  These art houses

  Conceived by our genius

  Where hope never dies.

  DYASPORA

  Joanne Hyppolite

  When you are in Haiti they call you Dyaspora. This word, which connotes both connection and disconnection, accurately describes your condition as a Haitian American. Disconnected from the physical landscape of the homeland, you don't grow up with a mango tree in your yard, you don't suck keneps in the summer, or sit in the dark listening to stories of Konpe Bouki and Malis. The bleat of vaksins or the beating of a Yanvalou on Rada drums are neither in the background or the foreground of your life. Your French is nonexistent. Haiti is not where you live.

  Your house in Boston is your island. As the only Haitian family on the hillside street you grow up on, it represents Haiti to you. It was where your granmk refused to learn English, where goods like ripe mangoes, plantains, djondjon, and hard white blobs of mints come to you in boxes through the mail. At your communion and birthday parties, all of Boston Haiti seems to gather in your house to eat griyo and sip kremas. It takes forever for you to kiss every cheek, some of them heavy with face powder, some of them damp with perspiration, some of them with scratchy face hair, and some of them giving you a perfume head-rush as you swoop in. You are grateful for every smooth, dry cheek you encounter. In your house, the dreaded matinet which your parents imported from Haiti just to keep you, your brother, and your sister in line sits threateningly on top of the wardrobe. It is where your mother's andeyb Kreyol accent and your father's lavil French accent make sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrible music together. On Sundays in your house, "Dominika-anik-anik" floats from the speakers of the record player early in the morning and you are made to put on one of your frilly dresses, your matching lace-edged socks, and black shoes. Your mother ties long ribbons into a bow at the root of each braid. She warns you, your brother and your sister to "respect your heads" as you drive to St. Angela's, never missing a Sunday service in fourteen years. In your island house, everyone has two names. The name they were given and the nickname they have been granted so that your mother is Gisou, your father is Popo, your brother is Claudy, your sister is Tinou, you
are Jojo, and your grandmother is Manchoun. Every day your mother serves rice and beans and you methodically pick out all the beans because you don't like pwa. You think they are ugly and why does all the rice have to have beans anyway? Even with the white rice or the mayi moulen, your mother makes sbspwa— bean sauce. You develop the idea that Haitians are obsessed with beans. In your house there is a mortar and a pestle as well as five pictures of Jesus, your parents drink Cafe Bustelo every morning, your father wears gwayabel shirts and smokes cigarettes, and you are beaten when you don't get good grades at school. You learn about the infidelities of husbands from conversations your aunts have. You are dragged to Haitian plays, Haitian bah, and Haitian concerts where in spite of yourself konpa rhythms make you sway. You know the names of Haitian presidents and military leaders because political discussions inevitably erupt whenever there are more than three Haitian men together in the same place. Every time you are sick, your mother rubs you down with a foul-smelling liquid that she keeps in an old Barbancourt rum bottle under her bed. You splash yourself with Bien-etre after every bath. Your parents speak to you in Kreyol, you respond in English, and somehow this works and feels natural. But when your mother speaks English, things seem to go wrong. She makes no distinction between he and she, and you become the pronoun police. Every day you get a visit from some matant or monnonk or kouzen who is also a tnarenn or parenn of someone in the house. In your house, your grandmother has a porcelain kivet she keeps under her bed to relieve herself at night. You pore over photograph albums where there are pictures of you going to school in Haiti, in the yard in Haiti, under the white Christmas tree in Haiti, and you marvel because you do not remember anything that you see. You do not remember Haiti because you left there too young but it does not matter because it is as if Haiti has lassoed your house with an invisible rope.

  Outside of your house, you are forced to sink or swim in American waters. For you this means an Irish-Catholic school and a Black-American neighborhood. The school is a choice made by your parents who strongly believe in a private Catholic education anyway, not paying any mind to the busing crisis that is raging in the city. The choice of neighborhood is a condition of the reality of living here in this city with its racially segregated neighborhoods. Before you lived here, white people owned this hillside street. After you and others who looked like you came, they gradually disappeared to other places, leaving you this place and calling it bad because you and others like you live there now. As any dyaspora child knows, Haitian parents are not familiar with these waters. They say things to you like, "In Haiti we never treated white people badly." They don't know about racism. They don't know about the latest styles and fashions and give your brother hell every time he sneaks out to a friend's house and gets his hair cut into a shag, a high-top, a fade. They don't know that the ribbons in your hair, the gold loops in your ears, and the lace that edges your socks alert other children to your difference. So you wait until you get to school before taking them all off and out and you put them back on at the end of your street where the bus drops you off. Outside your house, things are black and white. You are black and white. Especially in your school where neither you nor any of the few other Haitian girls in your class are invited to the birthday parties of the white kids in your class. You cleave to these other Haitian girls out of something that begins as solidarity but becomes a lifetime of friendship. You make green hats in art class every St. Patrick's day and watch Irish step-dancing shows year after year after year. You discover books and reading and this is what you do when you take the bus home, just you and your white schoolmates. You lose your accent. You study about the Indians in social studies but you do not study about Black Americans except in music class where you are forced to sing Negro spirituals as a concession to your presence. They don't know anything about Toussaint Louverture or Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

  In your neighborhood when you tell people you are from Haiti, they ask politely, "Where's that?" You explain and because you seem okay to them, Haiti is okay to them. They shout "Hi, Grunny!" whenever they see your grandmother on the stoop and sometimes you translate a sentence or two between them. In their houses, you eat sweet potato pie and nod because you have that too, it's made a little different and you call it pen patat but it's the same taste after all. From the girls on the street you learn to jump double-dutch, you learn to dance the puppet and the white boy. You see a woman preacher for the first time in your life at their church. You wonder where down South is because that is where most of the boys and girls on your block go for vacations. You learn about boys and sex through these girls because these two subjects are not allowed in your island/house. You keep your street friends separate from your school friends and this is how it works and you are used to it. You get so you can jump between worlds with the same ease that you slide on your nightgown every evening.

  Then when you get to high school, things change. People in your high school and your neighborhood look at you and say, "You are Haitian?" and from the surprise in their voice you realize that they know where Haiti is now. They think they know what Haiti is now. Haiti is the boat people on the news every night. Haiti is where people have tuberculosis. Haiti is where people eat cats. You do not represent Haiti at all to them anymore. You are an aberration because you look like them and you talk like them. They do not see you. They do not see the worlds that have made you. You want to say to them that you are Haiti, too. Your house is Haiti, too, and what does that do to their perceptions? You have the choice of passing but you don't. You claim your dyaspora status hoping it will force them to expand their image of what Haiti is but it doesn't. Your sister who is younger and very sensitive begins to deny that she is Haitian. She is American, she says. American.

  You turn to books to lose yourself. You read stories about people from other places. You read stories about people from here. You read stories about people from other places who now live here. You decide you will become a writer. Through your writing they will see you, dyaspora child, the connections and disconnections that have made you the mosaic that you are. They will see where you are from and the worlds that have made you. They will see you.

  RESTAVEK

  Jean-Robert Cadet

  "A blan (white person) is coming to visit today. He's your papa, but when you see him, don't call him papa. Say 'Bonjour, monsieur' and disappear. If the neighbors ask who he was, you tell them that you don't know. He is such a good man, we have to protect his reputation. That's what happens when men of good character have children with dogs," said Florence to me in Kreyol when I was about seven or eight years old. Before noon, a small black car pulled into the driveway and a white man got out of it. As I made eye contact with him, he waved at me and quickly stepped up to the front door before I had a chance to say "Bonjour, monsieur." Florence let him into the house and I disappeared into the backyard. Almost immediately I heard him leaving.

  At the age of five I had begun to hate Florence. "I wish your manman was my manman too," I told Eric, a little boy my age who lived next door. One day while we played together, Eric's mother pulled a handkerchief from her bra, wet its corner on her tongue, knelt down on one knee, and wiped off a dirty spot on her son's face. Eric pushed her hand away.

  "Ah, Manman, stop it," he said.

  I looked at her with bright eyes. "Do it to me instead," I said.

  She stared at my face for a moment and replied with an affectionate smile, "But your face is not dirty."

  To which I answered, "I don't care. Do it to me anyway." She gently wiped at a spot on my face, as I grinned from ear to ear.

  My biological mother had died before her image was ever etched in my mind. I cannot remember the time when I was brought to Florence, the woman I called Manman. She was a beautiful Negress with a dark-brown complexion and a majestic presence. She had no job, but earned a small income from tenants who leased her inherited farmland. She also entertained high government officials as a means to supplement her income. Her teenage son, Denis, was liv
ing with his paternal grandmother and attending private school. Florence claimed that her husband had died when her son was ten years old, but I never saw her wedding pictures.

  I came into Florence's life one day when Philippe, her white former lover, paid her a surprise visit. He was a successful exporter of coffee and chocolate to the United States and Europe. Philippe lived in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with his parents, two brothers, and a niece. He arrived in his Jeep at Florence's two-story French country-style house in an upper-class section of the city. A bright-eyed, fat-cheeked, light-skinned black baby boy was in the backseat. Philippe parked the car, reached into the back seat, and took the baby out. He stood him on the ground and the baby toddled off. I was that toddler.

  Philippe greeted Florence with a kiss on each cheek while she stared at the toddler. "Whose baby is this?" she asked, knowing the answer to her question.

  "His mother died and I can't take him home to my parents. I'd like you to have him," said Philippe, handing Florence an envelope containing money.

  "I understand," she said, taking the envelope. He embraced her again and drove off, leaving me behind. Philippe's problem was solved.

  My mother had been a worker in one of Philippe's coffee factories below the Cahos mountains of the Artibonite Valley. Like the grand blans of the distant past who acknowledged their blood in the veins of their slave children by emancipating and educating them, Philippe was following tradition. Perhaps he thought that Florence would give me a better life.