Edwidge Danticat - The Butterfly's Way - Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States

We all know that to live is to fight. There are two kinds of battles: the ones life demands of us, and the ones we demand of life. Painting and Poetry are my battlefields. And to be honest, I don't know whether they are what I demand of life or what life demands of me: There are days when it is clear that it doesn't make a bit of difference in the world whether I do the work or not-and those days are like rain upon fire-and there are days when it seems clear I have a life mission-and those are wind in the sail.

To me, painting and poetry are living entities, at times unconscious ones, who relate to each other and to me like people in a "relationship"-living parallel lives that occasionally, and hopefully often, intersect intensely and meaningfully, all the while preserving the potential to remain fully independent of each other.

Becoming a painter and a poet had not been a planned, carefully thought-out affair. This persona crystallized after much "meandering." In the years before going to Philadelphia for an MFA at Penn, I had been an undergraduate student in anthropology at Berkeley. It was then that I returned to Haiti and began research in the Vodou religion. I wanted to understand the mysterious hushed stories of my childhood. I became initiated.

During this return to Haiti I began to paint. The paintings of that period were probably my first ones to express a kind of exile, a longing for an internal, mythical Haiti-my paradise lost.

It is clear that all art forms share the same technical concerns, such as form, composition, texture, rhythm, balance. All art forms share the same need to express mood, vision, ideas, and life experience. All art forms require a constant editing so that harmony and tension can work interestingly together. What fuels the creative process are an individual artist's themes, all of which affect the trademark characteristics by which we recognize a work.

Instant recognizable trademark for me: Haiti! I was born in Haiti and growing up Haitian is most of the worth I have. I feel fortunate because Haiti is a place of rich cultural and visual uniqueness. I am a painter from Haiti and I am proud of it. Yet I am sometimes leery of being called a Haitian painter, because this can become a label used to ghettoize.

I grew up near water, collected tadpoles at a river where women came to wash themselves, their children, their clothes. Men, too, came to wash, and brought their animals to bathe and drink. Water brings life and is used in rituals to evoke spiritual cleansing, renewal, transition to another world:

… Pour water on my head

so the sun might glimmer

on me. It is for hope that God

will pull them up by the hair to heaven…

Water is part of my vocabulary of exile and of longing. Houses speak of home lost and rebuilt; they shelter the body's memory of life, of dreams, and of God. Doors suggest and allow passages. Windows offer vision, the lure of light, outward or inward.

With my work I try to take people to Haiti-the place where I was born, where I grew up, where my sensibility was formed, my first impressions made. And I take people inside of Haiti, beyond the exotic facade of blue sky, palm trees, beaches, bright colon, and smiling natives; beyond politically disheveled Haiti, economically depressed Haiti, international-aid Haiti, brandishing-sticks-and-machetes Haiti, boat-people Haiti; beyond the America-has-had-enough-of-these-unruly-blacks kind of Haiti. I take people into Haiti's depth, its originality, its richness, its source of strength and creativity, its heart, psyche and soul, its religion, its Vodou .

I have often been asked how I can paint such a luminous, exuberant and bright Haiti when all news about Haiti abounds with accounts of the distress of Haitians, and particularly that of the boat people. My response is that I am not an illustrator for Newsweek. I am an artist. I don't have to focus on the same events journalists are meant to report. Yes, Haiti is poor and suffers from terrible economic and sociopolitical problems. But that is not all that Haiti is. If either painting or poetry can be seen as a form of prayer, one could say that the brightness in my images is a prayer for Haiti itself. Praying for the color of light is what I am able to do for Haiti with my work as well as challenge the multitude of negative stereotypes the world has been taught about its people.

Unique in so many ways, Haiti is the place of another kind of prayer house. Everything in Haiti is permeated by the complex world of Vodou . It is the essential filter and fabric of Haitian culture. When I enter the myths and religion of Haiti, I enter a world of exquisite lyrical imagination and freedom, yet of exacting, elaborate, and minutely structured rituals created only to allow timeless wisdom and intelligence to reveal itself to us in spirit possession. Vodou's spirits are gathered and ordered within specific families, numbers of which are recognized by and worshipped for their very distinct personality traits and functions.

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.

Technically speaking, I can paint any place, but if I choose one place, it has to do with its meaning-art is an act and effort of communication. Art cannot survive as only a self-indulgent endeavor. Haiti offers me items of meditation into which, because of my particular connection to the country, I can tap and develop further. Cambridge, where I now live, offers me a nurturing environment. Populations of the world are no longer being confined to their original shores. Different cultures are colliding with each other in close quarters and entering each other's consciousness. Through people like me, a Haitian-born painter and poet, foreign imagination is entering the American consciousness and system of reference. Many of us, the uprooted, may have come empty-handed but certainly not empty-hearted. I came with all that I had been and felt before. With all that my parents had been and felt before. With all that my ancestors had been and felt before. With the company of Spirits. So I continue to live and fight even in those days when there is no wind in my sails. I continue to

… Pour water on my head

so the sun might glimmer

on me…

On all of us.

After I buried my mother, I would see her often,

standing at the foot of my bed

in a handmade nightgown she trimmed with lace

whenever I was restless with fever or menstrual cramps.

I was not afraid, and if her appearance was a delusion,

it only confirmed my heritage.

Haitians always have relationships with the dead.

Each Sabbath I lit a candle that burned for seven days.

I created an altar on the top shelf of an old television cart.

It was decorated with her Bible, a copy of The Three Musketeers,

freesia, delphinium or lilies if they were in season.

My offering of her favorite things didn't conjure

conversations with her spirit as I had hoped.

But there was a dream or two where she was happy,

garnets dangling from her ears,

and one night she shuffled some papers,

which could have been history of my difficult luck

because she said, "We have to do something about this."