about the social luxury of the white skin
a poem about the rules of the game
and I think back to the keeping it real conference
how we had the rhetoric to deconstruct performance
the performance of blackness and black identities
but we couldn't talk about black privilege
for fear of having to talk about black guilt
like the good doctor says we can't talk
about the fact that we like trashing on the weak
because we don't have the courage to confront the powerful
in this place
in this white power center
this bastion of liberalism
where ANTHROPOLOGY incubates racism
where anthropology INCUBATES racism
where anthropology incubates RACISM
this place of learning who the players are
what the rules of the game are
and how to play and win
How do you play knowing that at every moment in time your identity is in question
How do you win when at every moment in time your identity is in question
I'm criminal
compulsive alertness
always having to be alert
criminal
always ready to answer questions
that never get asked
because of assumptions
that lead to even more questions
coz I'm feeling like a criminal>
How do you overturn four hundred years of history
in less than one century?
Since this is about why I can't wait
I am gonna tell you why I am so tired
why I'm so tired
of not being able to imagine a better world
so I can change my world so we can change the world
why can't we talk about the things that make you wanna
can't talk about the things that make you wanna holler
make me wanna scream
cry
yell
let my people go
let my people go
right here
right now
right here
let me go
how far will we go
when we're still in chains
I can't wait because I am tired
tired of smiling
tired of masking
I'm tired of signifyin'
tired of being on the front line
tired of fighting the same damned isms
daily
I am tired of wearing this suit of steel
I am tired of being weighed down by armor
I am tired of carrying a banner of love
while THE war
still rages
on
FUTURE
LAZARUS RISING: AN OPEN LETTER TO MY DAUGHTER
Myriam J. A. Chancy
Ma tres chere Aimee,
You have not yet even arrived and already I worry about what your life may be like, far from Haitian shores. I can already see it— the day you enter kindergarten, all frills and curls, bright-eyed, with some butterflies making your little stomach queasy: No one will know how to pronounce your name. Aimee, like the pan-Africanist Martinican writer Aime Cesaire, but named for love. Aimee: French for beloved. Will you know to tell your teachers and schoolmates how to pronounce it correctly? They will insist on transforming it into "Amy." Will you wince, misrecognize yourself, crawl into your infantile shell and reemerge as something closer to their expectations as I had done so many years ago only to return, at long last, to my own bright self, name and all? I must pause now and smile at the thought of how long you have been loved and awaited. You are bound to arrive in the next century, not so long from now. I want this letter to be a bridge for you, to people and events already come to pass that you will not have the opportunity to experience, but which are nonetheless yours to hold and have, a part of your heritage.
Our lives may intersect in two different planes, you in the flowering of a new life, me in the wilting of an aging one. I write you this, then, so you will know your mother before she was your mother, when she was young, full of life and dreams—dreaming still about the day you would be in her midst. I want to try and set down some details of what life has been like for me as a displaced Haitian woman, growing up in lands not my own, in places that have demanded my integration and assimilation, a betrayal of my Haitianness and the various heritages that make up that identity; I want you to know some of these things in case you must repeat those lessons and I am not there to speak to, or, in case I become (between now and the moment of your arrival) the kind of adult who no longer knows how to listen to the wisdom of children's voices, who no longer daydreams or draws boxes on scribbling paper with elephants inside, invisible to the naked eye. I write these things to you so that you may know and understand that you are not alone in the things you will experience. You will not be the first and you will certainly not be the last.
RACE LESSONS
I want to begin, briefly, with the story of my family's movements back and forth between Port-au-Prince and North America. From the moment of my birth in 1970 until the age of five, the four of us shuttled back and forth from Haiti to Quebec. At one point, as my parents sought to establish themselves in North America, my brother and I, ages three and one respectively, lived either with an aunt or our grandmother for over a year's time. For this reason, I did not realize until we moved to English Canada in 1975 and I attended school there that we no longer lived permanently in Haiti. Prior to the age of five, after a few months on the continent, I had felt that we would return to Haiti and, eventually, we always did return. Haiti was home: There we were surrounded by family members of all ages. We went to school and had schoolmates. When we returned to Canada, it was the absence of the rest of our family, the smiling aunts and uncles, our grandparents, which weighed heavily upon my child's heart.
All of my childhood, even after the returns to Haiti came to an end at the age of eight, the memories of my birthplace remained the strongest. Those memories have molded my spirit, a certainty I have of what it means to be Haitian; of what it means to me to have been born in a place where I was welcomed by many open arms, into the bosom of a large family that has since become dispersed and fragmented; of what it means to be born in a place where, despite poverty, caste, and colorism, to be of African descent or mixed heritage, to know one's heritage is as important as knowing the names of your grandmothers, as important as remembering the source of your own naming.
Yes, Haiti continues to be afflicted by various problems—social, political, economic. Before the droughts that plagued Eastern Africa occurred in the mid-eighties and caused widespread famine, Haiti was categorized as the poorest country in the world. It is now the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It was also the first black republic in this hemisphere. Yet, while Haiti is often lauded for the triumph of the slave revolt that defeated Napoleon Bonaparte's troops and culminated in independence in 1804, her people are consistently denigrated and forced to endure economic blockades and racialized global trade practices that unduly penalize Haiti precisely because of its early triumph over European imperialism. Still, even diminished, we remain the same prideful people who kept our traditions well-enough alive to organize ourselves and successfully resist enslavement. Despite syncretism and outside influences, Africa remains in our veins as well as in the weathered features of our faces, rainbow hues, Arawak cheekbones, and all textures of hair known to man.
Coming from such a background, transplanted into a Euro-dominated culture, it was a shock then, to find out that the white faces that looked into mine when I was a child were, indeed, white. I assumed, then, that everyone of a lighter hue was a person of color because I had been born to a Haitian mother who, throughout my Canadian childhood, was often taken for white. It was a shock to learn that, in Canada (as in the United States), there is a clear
line drawn between those who are of color and those who are considered not to be. It was a shock to be turned away from the next door neighbor's house at age four, to be told by her mother that I could not play with my friend inside her house. The same woman told me later that summer, as she was bronzing herself in the sun, that she wanted to be dark like me. Dark like me? I wondered how she could both envy and loathe me. I thought she was a silly woman then, not understanding that I had had my first encounter with racism. It was in Winnipeg, a prairie city in the middle of the country, that I was to find out categorically what it meant to be black in a country not your own. I was not even ten years old when walking down the street, I could hear young white men muttering under their breaths as they walked by, "Nigger." It was a matter of color and it was a matter of pride. How dare a young, brown woman walk down the street and hold up her head high, and smile, and look people in the eye? This is what I did, not knowing I was meant to look down and away and step aside. Not looking away, however, brought me something else I had not expected, the affirmations of other people of color, especially those who were Native American, Indian, or Arab, who often mistook me for one of their own because of my mixed-race features blending African, Arawak, French, and Spanish lineages. Still, general invisibility—social, political, economic—has a way of putting a brown person in her place, no matter how high she holds her head up, how brilliant her smile, no matter how sure her step down a crowded street or way. These were my Canadian lessons. Yet something in me refused to assimilate.
Even as I learned to speak perfect, standard English at the age of ten, shedding my French accent, I remained Haitian to the core, prideful. I found myself isolated in my refusal to blend in, isolated by my knowledge of what colonialism had done to enslaved Africans dispersed throughout the so-called New World, and isolated by my fervent desire to make that knowledge count.
It is this isolation, Aimee, that I most hope you will not have to relive. It is, in a way, an immigrant legacy. I came into the world as one Duvalier regime neared its end and another was just about to begin. At that time, outside (as inside) of Haiti, one had to be careful of who one got close to: It was clear that foreigners were not to be trusted (who knew who might turn a racist eye toward you or when?). Haitians outside of one's immediate family were also suspect (for who knew when something you might say might be said to the wrong person, an ear of the government or some macoutes who could harm you or your family still left behind?). We lived, therefore, in what was initially a chosen isolation in Quebec City prior to 1975, always being careful who was brought close to the family. After 1975 and our move to English Canada, our social isolation was compounded by a language barrier: Initially, we spoke no English. The cocoon in which we lived then had many layers, both cultural and linguistic; isolation became imposed rather than chosen.
Immigration created a shyness in me that was not natural, and I continue to struggle with it to this day. Since my spirit had remained attached to Haiti, and especially to my maternal grandmother, Alice Limousin, my father's stepmother, I knew without being told directly that there were things happening in Haiti that I was being spared. I remember being warned to be careful of what I said on the phone when speaking to relatives in Haiti: The wires could be tapped. I remember an uncle disappearing one day and the phone calls going back and forth between members of the large family network as we prayed that he would be released from Duvalier's jails. We heard about killings and tortures, and I had nightmares that even as far away as Canada, members of Duvalier's secret police could find me just for thinking the wrong thing. Life was like walking on eggshells. Going home was not an option. Neither was assimilating. I had to create a new reality, one that belonged neither to the new world I had been forced to enter nor to my parents' generation. I began to belong to what I often think of as the lost generation: I identified most clearly with cousins some twenty years older than myself who had been there the day I was born, who had grown up in Haiti before leaving the country (those who could) to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Like them, I could not deny my Haitianness, would not take U.S. citizenship even when I, too, eventually migrated, alone, south of the Canadian border (I had become a Canadian citizen at age five). I regarded my Canadian citizenship for what it was, a passport that allowed me to return to Haiti when I wanted, without hassles; it guaranteed my freedom and allowed me to still belong somewhere, even if that somewhere was not home. Canada did not demand that I strip myself of my identity to remain on her shores as I believe America does. And so I remain a part of a generation born in Haiti during the Duvalier years privy to the memories of parents who had been born in the 1930s, long before that regime dawned, and to those grandparents born before and during the turn of the century. This familial memory has given me a safety net when I fear being overwhelmed by an isolation too unfamiliar to be shared by those around me.
I will be thirty this year, but those in my family with whom I best connect are in their forties and fifties. Because of this intergenerational bonding, I feel as if I have eyes at the back of my head: I stand not between two cultures, one Haitian, the other American, but between generations, one belonging to the pre-Duvalier era and the other belonging to the post-Duvalier era. Sometimes it is like standing in a barren no-man's land, but I know that some of us need to be the in-betweens so the gaps will not bleed, so that the discarded will be remembered and the wounds of forgetfulness staunched.
This year also marks a turning point in my life for I have now reached the age of my mother's orphaning. Perhaps this is also one of the reasons I feel compelled to write this letter, Aimee, because I am aware of living on borrowed time, that every opportunity I have to have a disagreement or a moment of understanding with my own mother is a blessing that ended for her in her twenty-ninth year. She had lost her father earlier at age seven. When she was twenty-nine, her mother passed away. Her loss has led me to think deeply about my own relationship to my mother, to her mother, and to you. What survives? What is forever lost?
When I was eight years old, I met my father's grandmother, my great-grandmother. I remember it as the first time we met though this cannot be possible. The woman I met when I was eight years old was nearing a hundred years of age, small-boned, frail. Yet she saw clearly and spoke a Kreyol that seemed to me to be unlike that of my parents; it contained more of Africa in it, more of the rural in it. Because of this, we could hardly communicate; I was afraid of her too, not because she could do me harm physically, but because I could feel her strong spiritual presence. I remember that she had a kenep tree in her front yard, full of the small, green-shelled fruit that became (and remains) my favorite fruit of all. She encouraged my brother and me to grasp handfuls from the old branches and to eat them on the spot. That afternoon, she also gave us dous to eat, a homemade square confection that resembles fudge. I dream of the taste of it sometimes; I have never tasted anything like it since. When she passed away a few years later, the recipe died with her. Now that I am older, always trying to understand better the history and cultural legacy of this place I call home but can only visit from time to time, I think of the conversations we might have had, of the version of Kreyol she spoke that she could have taught me. Although her birth certificate has been lost, she must have been born in the late 1880s, not even a century after the Haitian Revolution. What could she have told us about her childhood memories, of life then? So, you see Aimee, much has already been lost. Like her, but some hundred years after her birth, I am witnessing a century come to a close and I will live the bulk of my life in the next. With this writing, I hope to leave you something for your own days of wonder; something, perhaps, to answer the questions I hope you will have.
EPIPHANY
As I write to you today, resting next to me is a packet of letters my mother gave to me a year or so ago. Some of the letters are written in her mother's hand. This is all I have by which to know her. They are the last letters penned by her my mother received. My mother had just left Haiti for graduate law stu
dy in Paris. Her mother intended to visit her there—it would be her own first journey off of the island. The letter paper is thin, the ink beginning to fade in places. The first letter, dated December 1, 1961, begins:
Les chants de Noel avaient commence a me jeter dans I'angoisse; tu sais ce n'est pas du sentiment—quand on les entonne Us me vont droit au coeur et me donnent un frisson de coeur qui agit sur tous mes membres est-ce pourquoi je ferai tous mes efforts pour realiser mon voyage. II parait que ce sera la ma guirison aussi j'ai commence sens m'illusioner a confectionner mes linges; il est encore tot mais cela uaut mieux.
[The Christmas carols had begun to throw me into a deep state of anguish; you know, it isn't nostalgia that I feel, when they are sung they go straight to my heart and send a chill through it that permeates all of my limbs. Thus, I have decided to do all in my power to bring about my voyage; it seems that it will be my cure and so I have begun, without giving in to disillusionment, to make my travel clothes; it is still early for such things, but it is preferable to do so.]
I read these lines and feel the deep emotions my grandmother must have felt at being separated from her youngest daughter. I see in her words also the heart of a poet. I see myself in these lines, knowing how sensitive I am to change of any kind, how deeply loyal to those I love, always missing those who are at a distance. Mama Fofo, as she was called, was an artist of a kind, a seamstress. She was, thus, literally planning to make her clothes for the voyage, in the same loving way that she had made her own daughters' dresses, the same way she had dutifully put fingers to needle, to thread, to cloth in the making of wardrobes for others, back curved over her Singer sewing machine, in order to make a living for herself and her family. She was a single mother raising four children in Haiti from the late 1920s through the 1930s.
Reading Mama Fofo's letters help me to restore some missing links in my own life; they help me to recapture a connection to a woman whom I never met but from whom I have inherited some personality traits: warmth, sensitivity, but also a tendency, at times, not to take best care of myself. Through these letters, I better understand both her and my own character.
Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States Page 20