Edwidge Danticat - Create Dangerously

One afternoon when she came to visit, we sat on the warm sand under an almond tree as two of my cousins played soccer and water volleyball with some of the students in the course. We watched the calm turquoise sea and bare brown mountains in the distance, the clouds shifting ever so carefully above them, rationing sunshine and shade. I knew that Marius would come up at some point that afternoon, and he did.

“I know this is what you do now,” Tante Zi said. “This thing with the writing. I know it’s your work, but please don’t write what you think you know about Marius.”

The truth is that I knew very little about Marius. Even though we were cousins, the same blood, our adult lives-my adult life, his adult death-might never have intersected at all had I not been asked to help return his body home. In the end, there had been very little drama even in this returning of his body. It was all so sanitized, so over-the-phone, nothing Antigone about it.

This type of thing happened all the time, Mr. Freeman and Delens had each explained to me in his own way: faraway family members realize that they are discovering-or recovering-in death fragments of a life that had swirled in hidden stories. In Haiti the same expression, lòt bò dlo , the other side of the water, can be used to denote the eternal afterlife as well as an émigré’s eventual destination. It is sometimes impossible even for those of us who are on the same side of lòt bò dlo to find one another.

“We have still not had a death,” Marquez’s Colonel says. “A person does not belong to a place until someone is dead under the ground.” Does that person still belong if someone died there, but is not buried under that ground?

“You should be buried where you die,” Tante Zi’s older sister, Tante Ilyana, had said. But what if you are all alone where you die? What if all your kin is lòt bò dlo ?

“People talk,” Tante Zi went on. “They say that everything they say to you ends up written down somewhere.”

Because she was my elder, my beloved aunt, I bowed my head in shame, wishing I could apologize for that, but the immigrant artist, like all other artists, is a leech and I needed to latch on. I wanted to quote the French poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé and tell her that everything in the world exists to end up in a book. I wanted to ask her forgiveness for the essay that in my mind I was already writing. The most I could do, however, was to promise her not to use her real name or Marius’s.

She was silent again, momentarily comforted by that tiny compromise. I changed the subject, asking if she wanted to go swimming. Just to relax her body a little, I said, before the return trip back to Port-au-Prince. I thought she would say no. She had turned me down before. Still I hoped that she might surprise me and say yes.

“I can’t,” she began, and then corrected herself. “I don’t want to.”

A large cloud lingered above, casting a hint of gray over us. But it was still sunny over the water, the waves glittering as though taunting the fogginess above.

“Some people come back from the other side of the water, don’t they?” She said, her eyes still fixed on the water. “You’re proof of that, non ?”

She raised her hands high in the air, aiming them at the twinkling sea as if to both scold and embrace it.

“They do,” I said.

“Why didn’t Marius come back?” She seemed to be asking both me and the sea.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“It’s stupid to even ask,” she said, scratching the short gray hair under the white kerchief that covered her head. “How could any of us know the answer to something like that? Only the sea and God know. Right?”

“Right,” I echoed, still treading carefully after her rebuke.

“I suppose I should be glad we didn’t lose him at sea,” she said.

With her eyes still on the water, she got up and peeled off her milky white clothes. Wearing only her red bra and dark panties, she walked toward the ocean for an afternoon swim.

Two hundred years had passed since the Western Hemisphere’s second republic was created. Back then, there were no congratulatory salutes from the first, the United States of America. The new republic, Haiti, had gained its independence through a bloody twelve-year slave uprising, the only time in the history of the world that bond servants successfully overthrew their masters and formed their own state.

The two young nations had several things in common. Both had been heavily taxed colonies, and both had visionary leaders whose words had the power to inspire men to fight. Compare, for example, Thomas Jefferson’s vision of the tree of liberty as one that must be “refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” with that of the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture who, as he was captured by the French and was being taken to his death, declared, “In overthrowing me they have only felled the tree of Negro liberty… It will shoot up again, for it is deeply rooted and its roots are many.”

The fact that the United States of America was not more supportive of its smaller, slightly younger neighbor had a great deal to do with L’Ouverture’s roots, which were African and which were now planted in America’s backyard. Thomas Jefferson, who had drafted the declaration that defined his own nation’s insurgency and who had witnessed and praised the French Revolution, knew exactly what revolutions meant. Their essence was not in their instantaneous bursts of glory but in their ripple effect across borders and time, their ability to put the impossible within reach and make the downtrodden seem mighty. And he feared that Haiti’s revolt would inspire similar actions in the United States. “If something is not done, and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children,” Jefferson wrote about the potential impact of the Haitian uprising.

Haiti’s very existence highlighted the deepest contradictions of the American revolutionary experiment. The U.S. Declaration of Independence stated that all men were created equal, but Haitian slaves and free men and women of color battled what was then one of the world’s most powerful armies to prove it. Yet how could the man who wrote about freedom in such transcendent terms have failed to hear echoes of his own country’s revolutionary struggle, and victory, in the Haitians’ urgent desire for self-rule? Possibly because as a slaveowner and the leader of slaveholders he couldn’t manage to reconcile dealing with one group of Africans as leaders and another as chattel. So Haiti’s independence remained unrecognized by Thomas Jefferson, who urged Congress to suspend commerce with the nascent nation, declaring its leaders “cannibals of the terrible republic.”

Timothy Pickering, a senator from Massachusetts who had served as John Adams’s secretary of state, wrote to Jefferson to protest his refusal to aid the new Haitian republic. “Are these men not merely to be abandoned to their own efforts but to be deprived of those necessary supplies which for a series of years, they have been accustomed to receive from the United States, and without which they cannot subsist?” Pickering asked.

Yet the United States had benefited greatly from the colonial strife next door. Broke after its Haitian defeat, France sold a large region, 828,000 square miles, from the western banks of the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, to the United States for fifteen million dollars. The Louisiana Purchase would prove to be one of the most profitable real estate transactions ever made, nearly doubling the size of the United States at a cost of about four cents an acre. Alexander Hamilton said Napoleon would not have sold his claims except for the “courage and obstinate resistance [of the] black inhabitants” of Haiti.