Early the very next morning, by the crow of the rooster in residence, my aunt woke me up to introduce me to the family: my cousins Alex and Tififi, my uncle Yvero, my aunt Madam Ka (Kalix) and my uncle Ka and a whole slew of other relatives. "We are your family," she concluded her introduction. "This is your home." And with that, she took my hand and told me that we were going to the market to get some things that she needed. And so began my exile.
My aunt, her brother, and her two children shared two huts in a big yard that also housed some of my other relatives. I was assigned a bed in the room where my cousins slept. Since I was so familiar with tiled floors, angular walls and ceilings, and indoor plumbing, the room seemed unfinished, makeshift. It was cozy and afforded much comfort in its rustic way. Simplicity and frugality defined life in the Haitian countryside. The cobbled floors of the room were layered with very fine dust. Every day my cousins and I took turns sweeping the floor, although I never understood the utility behind such an everlasting chore. No matter how much my cousins, my aunt, or I swept, the floor always remained slightly dusty.
During my stay, my aunt Venide made me help her cook, buy groceries, wash and iron clothes, feed the chickens and the pig, clean the yard, run errands for and keep company with my elderly aunt. Whatever she did, I emulated to the best of my abilities. Whatever I was told to do, I did. I never disliked doing these chores. I approached them as if they were small adventures. I wanted to prove that I was not as American as I had been accused and convicted of being. I felt a sense of kinship when I sat on a small wooden chair beside my aunt and, imitating her, wrapped my thighs around the little ceramic basin in which she washed clothes. She scrubbed the clothes with masterful skill while I, her apprentice, scrubbed like a madwoman for want of that skill. Under her expert hands, the clothes squeaked relentlessly as if to complain about the pain they suffered from being scrubbed too vigorously. Mante Venide's pursed lips and deeply furrowed brow told me that she was oblivious to their cries. I liked that our laundry detergent was simply a big block of soap. Everything I used, from the outhouse that threatened to swallow me whole to the bed I slept on, was as unpretentious as my cousins, my family, and our living arrangements. After we were done with the wash, I felt a sense of genuine achievement when I saw our whites gleaming on the rocks we had laid them on to dry. I felt important when I carried water from the well without spilling it.
Like all prisoners, at some point I was even allowed recreation. I got to play games and run reasonably wild with my cousins. We played with marbles; we sang songs; we gossiped about a neighborhood hussy whom I never met; we competed to see who could tell the funniest joke to the pig; we played hide-and-seek, and when we were really bored we teased the dangerous "Ti Malis" out of its underground home with cupfuls of water. "L ap mode 'ou—it's going to bite you!" Alex would scream every time the insect showed its annoyed head.
But as acclimated as I may have seemed on the surface, I was still unabashedly American in essentials.
On Sunday morning we went to church. Since I was already familiar with this ritual from my mass-attending Sundays in America, I ironed my favorite green-and-black dress to wear for the occasion. When I went to search my suitcases for a pair of nylon stockings so that I could put the finishing touches to my ensemble, I was annoyed to discover that my mother had not packed a pair for me. I informed my aunt that I could not attend mass without pantyhose. She laughed. It was too hot to wear stockings. I felt wronged and misunderstood. What did practicality or comfort have to do with style? I found her a bit too Haitian, too country, too old-fashioned. My sense of style was being undermined by someone who actually let the weather get in the way of appearance. I was also angry that it was actually hot outside. I knew better than to confront my aunt with my opinions. Because I was still a child, freedom of speech, especially that of dissent, wasn't my right. Unnerved, but still adorned in green-and-black polyester finery, I walked to church alongside my aunt and my cousins. By the time we reached the church, I realized that my dress—unlike anyone else's—bore a sheen that was too immodest, too gaudy for church. I was being loud without having said a word. I stood out when I should have blended in. Bowing my head in prayer, I was glad to discover that my patent leather shoes had turned from conspicuously shiny to humbly dusty. Haiti's dirt redeemed me, but only to embarrass me later that afternoon.
After we had returned home from church and had eaten lunch, my cousins and I went to play hide and seek in the yard. Tififi and I went to hide while Alex counted un deux trois. . . . Still unfamiliar with the area, I found it hard to find a place to hide. Alex was already at quinze and I was still looking for a hiding place. I began to panic. Spotting a kenep tree, I dashed for cover behind it. As I ran toward the tree, I slipped and fell in a small pool of mud. The first word out of my mouth was "Shit!" Alex and Tififi came running. They laughed and pointed in my direction while Alex kept giggling and repeating the word shit over and over again.
I was angry and refused to get up. I was embarrassed for myself and for Alex who, I assumed, would be punished for his imitation of the corrupt, and now contagious, American exile. I lay brooding in the mud. I didn't try to get up. I wanted my aunt to locate the cause of my profane reaction outside of myself. Was it my fault that this part of the yard was so muddy? Maybe if I were more familiar with the yard, I would not have reacted as I did. I relied on my foreignness as an excuse.
Even during the night, surrounded and disguised by utter darkness as I was, I was every bit a foreigner. To my unsympathetic cousins, I had no qualms about revealing my fears of the zombie population that I was certain inhabited Haiti's nights. When my cousins ventured into the yard away from the house to play and tell stories, I pleaded for them to stay on the porch with me. Haiti's nights had a quality that loomed too huge and formidable in relation to my physical size, my naivete and my city-girl upbringing. The porch was solid and dependable. The nights, on the other hand, were a bit too dark, a bit too quiet... a bit too vast and intangible. Haiti's nights made you think that you could have nightmares with your eyes wide open, so that you'd want to close your eyes just to situate yourself in your own darkness—too afraid to blend in and get lost in a darkness that wasn't your own ... a nightmare that wasn't your own. Here in Haiti, I easily (if even unfairly) equated good and evil with things diurnal and nocturnal. Whenever the sun set, I felt taunted by a darkness that knew me as a foreigner ... a Haitian darkness that sensed my fears and had no pity for the American me.
For two weeks, my life as a stranger in a strange land continued in this manner. I didn't feel at home. I wanted to go back to school. I wanted to return to my mother.
The Monday following the second week of my stay in Haiti, my uncle Yvero claimed to have received a letter from my mother. "If you think that you have truly reformed, your mother says that she would like you to return home. So do you think that you've reformed?" my uncle asked.
Of course I have, I thought to myself, especially if it means that I can go back home. But for the sake of seeming sincere and apologetic, I hesitated in my response. I wanted my uncle to understand that I was using this moment of silence to reflect on my wrongdoings. Finally after a few minutes I bowed my head in contrition and said, " Wi, I have reformed." And after a long speech from my uncle and my aunt about how lucky I was to have a mother who cared about me and how deeply foolish I was not to cherish and appreciate that fact, I was told to go and say good-bye to the rest of my extended family. I was going to be leaving for Florida the next day. My stint as an exile was over.
Although I am the only girl that I know of who has had such an experience to recount, I am certainly not the only Haitian American who has an exiled-to-Haiti-for-reform story, for I know several Haitian-American boys who (like me) have been sent to Haiti to change their potentially self-destructive behaviors. Like my mother, the mothers of these young men relied on the tried-and-true effect of stubborn love, pride, and hope to discipline their children. Because we seemed caught in a
frenzy to fit in, our mothers attempted to rescue us, if not by superseding, then by tempering the present with the past, the modern with tradition, America with Haiti. With each child that a Haitian mother has to raise in America, she has to deal with the triple-consciousness of its Haitian, American, and Black identities. In junior high school, I was known to my black peers as the just-got-off-the-banana-boat refugee or the Vodou queen. I fit into neither of their notions of what it means to be Black or American. Out of ignorance of my own culture, I let those insults sting. Out of ignorance of what it truly means to be Haitian, I let those insults define me. Not now. Not ever. Years later, while on a study-abroad trip to China, although I knew no Swahili nor had ever been to Africa, I was referred to as "the African." While visiting one of the autonomous regions in Northern China, I met a little girl who, pointing in my direction, greeted me as "Kunta Kinte"—the protagonist of Alex Haley's Roots. The television movie series had just been shown there. My black face summoned the association with the only other black face this little girl had ever seen. I wasn't an individual, nor did the fact that I am female, and Kinte male, matter. I was just Black. In China when I insisted I was American the Chinese raised skeptical eyebrows.
I questioned my identity then, but wouldn't now because of what I've learned about myself. When you come to know and embrace yourself—whether you have two, three, or four identities to reconcile— you understand that you have everything to gain from those experiences that challenge your justifications for being who you say and think you are. In fact, the lessons learned from these experiences help you achieve the power to shape rather than be shaped by your own future experiences.
As extravagant a form of punishment as my exile seems, I've decided that it was most necessary and most justifiable and certainly most Haitian. By being consistently rude to my mother, I demonstrated my ignorance of the value of respecting my parents and, in extension, my elders. I dared to challenge a philosophy of living that is steeped in common sense and tradition. I dared to think that I was immune from Haitian lore and Haitian justice by virtue of being born in the U.S.A. At twelve years old, I became a walking manifestation of an imperialism that my mother would not endure; with every backtalk, head-wag, eye-roll and "So?", I denied, attacked, and decried everything my mother understood to be Haitian. I was a Haitian American trying to suffocate (whether consciously or not) the Haitian part of my identity. My mother would not tolerate this murder of both her culture and my identity.
My mother was always one step ahead of me and my siblings because she parented vigilantly and ceaselessly (and still continues to do so). I am grateful that she was slicker when I was just slick. For each failed attempt at deceiving her or preempting her authority, I grew to realize and finally accept the intrinsic contrast between my role as the bumbling child and her role as the experienced parent. I am grateful that she knew the limits of her own tolerance. How else can a mother diagnose and then treat an intolerable child if she has not first defined, for herself and eventually her children, what is tolerable? I am grateful that she intervened on my behalf every time I showed signs of becoming less than the decent human being that she wanted me and my siblings to be. My mother has given me a story that I love to tell; it is a "Go to your room" story, Haitian-style.
Haitians have a term "san manman" that literally means motherless. But "san manman" does not necessarily mean that one doesn't have a mother, but that one behaves as though one didn't have a mother, as if one were raised without guidance, morals, without the principles that perpetuate culture and a strong community.
And it was because of my mother's fear that I was losing or taking for granted these same ancient properties that she sent me to Haiti so that I could reacquaint myself with them. She wanted me to witness, firsthand, those ancient properties of unconditional self-respect and respect for others shown by the paradigmatic "children of Haiti," through the struggles that my aunt endured raising two children in the poor countryside, through the dignity and respect with which they lived their lives despite the odds, through the interactions between mother and child, the elders and the young, the womenfolk and the menfolk.
I've said that my mother has given me a wonderful story, but I must also acknowledge what I understand to have come before that story, what always was, before the story ever began—the moral. My mother started with a moral and had me trace a path to it with my own story. She has given me a lesson of life that I practice every day. I respect my elders and all others not out of terror of further banishment, but out of an understanding of myself in relation to America, Haiti, and the larger world. It would be foolish to think that I had actually reformed after that one exile to Haiti. Of course, I hadn't. It takes more than a "go to your room," even if that room is actually another country, to discipline a child. My understanding came like most do—through a gradual process of trial and error. But I know that I am most fortunate that my mother refused to remain complaisant about her child's moral development.
In a world where insults still exist and still can sting, there must be culture. In a world where only one may parent where two, three, four, and seven used to, there must be history. In a world where fitting in may mean selling out, there must be keepers of the past, reminders of the ancient ways. James Baldwin, who understood the value of the past in sustaining a stable and dignified present, alluded in his Notes of a Native Son to his envy of some Haitians' ability to trace their history back to regal roots. There are rewards of dignity, pride, and honor that proceed from being placeable and traceable.
My siblings and I didn't have our own rooms growing up. We were poor enough so that a curtained partition in the living room served as our makeshift wall. So, one can understand on that superficial level why my mother couldn't just send me to my room. Economics didn't allow it. But neither did the enormity of my crime— dishonoring my mother—allow it. Instead my mother sent me to her room, her mother's room, her grandmother's room, her great-grandmother's room. How could I act as I did knowing from what traditions, what roots, what culture I had sprung? How could I desecrate when I had no right to? And upon my return to the States— whether it was days later or years later—I had to ask myself these questions: And if I still want to fit in, how has the need to do so transformed? How has my newly acquired self-understanding and self-respect altered the way that I choose to fit in? Once I acknowledged that by dishonoring my mother I dishonored myself and my culture, I accepted and understood the reasoning that went behind such an extravagant punishment. If at twelve years old I could not comprehend the gravity of my crime against my mother, I could at least extrapolate, from the gravity of my punishment, that I had finally done the abominable. I needed that—to know that I could actually be held accountable, to know that I was wrong. I needed to know that my insult to her merited retribution and maybe even wrath. But above all, I needed to know that at least this much was true—that I was not "san manman," either literally or figuratively.
RETURN
LOST NEAR THE SEA
Leslie Chassagne
I came here to find you again
to walk where you walked,
to see if you outlived the house
with the broken planks,
that beach house that once let in
fingers of moonlight, giving wasps
their final dance
I came here to find you again
to stand on a jagged rock
waiting for the light of each wave
to be sucked into the sand
the distant tattoos of the trees
to be scraped by the glowing armor
of the clouds and the majestic and tender palms
I came here to find you again
there have been nights when I have slept soundly
but still I hear you
yelling waist deep in the sea
"throw me the mask, there's a shadow there
quickly, quickly," not wanting to miss
any life in the water
<
br /> Now the sea is turning your ghost into a blue crab
a hunter who looks for things
that curl up and die in the sand
and I too am now looking for your ghost
near the sea
I came here to find
you again you wearing the blue plate of the sky
Your voice is a sword under my bed
with our stories etched on the blade,
stories told in your dossu-marass
a voice a voice that stutters
with the maleficent jingle of exile
ADIEU MILES AND GOOD-BYE DEMOCRACY
Patrick Sylvain
Prior to mid September 1991,1 can honestly say I was a happy man. I was twenty-five years old, an activist, a teacher living in Avon, Massachusetts, a recently married poet, and my son, Kamil, was soon to celebrate his first birthday. In addition to all of this personal bliss, it was the first time in the history of my country that a democratic government, led by a popular nonconformist priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, had been elected.
Unfortunately, my own exhilaration and Haiti's jubilee was only to be a temporary affair. On September 29, 1991, I was heading to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to do a poetry reading when all of a sudden, a solemn voice from National Public Radio came through my car radio announcing the death of my favorite trumpeter, Miles Davis. I immediately pulled over and rested my head on the steering wheel, having flashes of my father, reminding me that Miles had spent some time in Haiti. Before long, my body started shaking and I knew that something else was about to go wrong. I found myself crying as I drove toward Harvard Square to visit a friend before my reading.
Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States Page 17