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

1986

In the fourth grade, we presented our family stories to the class. I announced that my parents were from Haiti. I repeated what my mother had taught me in singsong tones, "Haiti shares an island with the Dominican Republic. It is next to Puerto Rico and Cuba." My classmates laughed. They had already decided that I was an alien. The only Haiti they could imagine was an island where "everybody hates each other."

1986 was the year my father left. I remember he drove by our house in Los Angeles on his way to New York with his new family. He sent for me during Easter. I remember not caring. Maybe a father was like a first cousin-someone you played with once a year.

On one trip my father and I explored the city together, recording everything we saw. There is still a magic that takes over when I remember holding his camera for the first time. As we stood on the edge of Central Park, I narrated, "Here we are in New York City, across from the Natural History Museum, and Central Park. Let's see how many interesting things there are. There are dogs, there are bus-waiters, and fathers." As I zoomed in on his face, he cautioned, "I think you are little bit too close."

1986 was also a big year for Haiti. Mommy and I watched as Baby Doc and his wife fled with the national treasury in a silver Mercedes. Baby Doc really was a big baby-a boy, whose father made him president at nineteen, who ran away when his toy soldiers began to burn.

I finally thought to ask my mother how long it had been since she was home. "Twenty years," she replied. I could not imagine time that long.

1989

When I turned thirteen, I was finally allowed to watch The Serpent and the Rainbow, the horror movie everyone had seen but me. I remember feeling captivated by Marielle, the young Haitian doctor who guides an American on his journey to find the "zombie drug." I was taken in by her elegance, her ability to move so fluidly between this world and the beyond. She was a dancer, the embodiment of Erzulie Freda. This was the type of Haitian woman I wanted to be.

My dream ended when I viewed her making "love" to the American, scratching at him gently like a lioness eating her pray. I understand now that Marielle is just another black exotic, and the story is not about her. I searched for other images. What I found was the Haiti of an American imagination, an island of a million horrors. Haitians were zombies, mobsters, and angry witches. The movies I found failed to depict the true horror: that we were a prideful people being eaten by the shadow of colonialism, unable to speak for ourselves.

1991

At fifteen, I started to care more about Haitian politics. I read everything I could about Aristide. He was like my Nelson Mandela. I saw him as the only hope for democracy in Haiti. I watched as he rose from champion of the poor to president of the nation, then was plucked from his pedestal and muzzled like a rabid dog. I learned not to put all of my eggs in one basket.

On my fifteenth birthday, my father reappeared. He brought me more rice and beans and cake than I could eat. He told me the story of how he met my mother at a wedding in Brooklyn-she was wearing an orange dress.

We took a picture together, and for the first time I realized our smiles were the same. My mother accused me of betrayal. "Your father's family are Duvalierists," she said, warning me that he could not be trusted.

1994

In the middle of the coup, my mother taught me to speak out about the way we were treated. She put me on stage one night a meeting of peace activists, and told me to describe what I knew about the raping and killing of dissenters in Haiti. My voice cracked and my knees shook as I felt her pass on the burden to me, to represent us.

I thought of taking my mother's name, Bateau. Boat. I imagine the boat, floating on the seas with no place to land. How could I take that name when even she chooses not to associate with the father who gave it to her?

1995

Twenty years have passed, and now it is my turn to go home. As I board the plane to Port-au-Prince, I am suddenly conscious of my bent shoulders and drab clothing. The woman ahead of me in a bright blue dress holds her head high, despite the weight of the sacks she grips in each hand. If someone at this moment were to ask me who I am, I would not know how to respond.

When we arrive, a small band plays ballads on the runway. The man checking my passport stares at me then decides to speak English instead of Kreyol. I am an election observer, an American who brings some semblance of justice by recording the voting process. We hover over college students as they count ballots at midnight in Les Cayes. We count them again, and write down our results. The answer is easy: Rene Preval has won. Twenty percent of voters have voiced their opinion. The other eighty percent watch silently as "democracy" changes hands.

The morning after the elections in Les Cayes, a man approaches me to ask my name. I tell him, "Miriam Neptune." He says I am his second cousin, the daughter of his first cousin. The Neptunes live here, he tells me. I smile at the coincidence, but cry inside because the name is only a name, not a family.

1998

Does name determine lineage? The only lineage I embrace is the one that raised me: my mother, her mother, and the mothers who created her. What is nation? What is my nation? Nation is in part, the imagination. Nation exists only where we create boundaries. My nation lives in the waters between spiritual and physical homes.

I make a living by telling other people's stories. These people are all strangers to me, a newspaper reporter, yet I am often able to convince them to pour out some of their most intimate thoughts, dreams, and miseries-details that are usually shared between close relatives, passed on from grandmother to granddaughter, mother to daughter, father to son. I can look grieving women in their watery eyes and ask them to describe their murdered sons or husbands- their ambitions, their scent. And amazingly enough, they will comply. I am moved to tell their stories for I am not certain of my own.

Details about my family have avoided me all of my life. In my twenty-nine years, I have been trained not to expect to learn much about the women and men who came before me. They are dead, my only surviving grandmother often insists. What would be the point in raising the dead? Leve mo. This is an expression I have heard over and over again. An expression I have grown to accept. A phrase that angers me. Frustration from not knowing much about my family, frustration that is now making me numb. For I have learned those words have helped shield my grandmother from pain and regret, as if their spirits would come back to haunt her and me.

From losing her home to a cyclone to struggling to put food on the table, her life's wounds still are fresh. And this American-born girl, this ti ameriken, who in recent years has professed a committed interest in Haiti, has no right-I suppose-to expect my grandmother to accommodate my curiosity as to her life before coming to America, the promised land, where money could supposedly be found on the streets and in public fountains, ready for the taking. When she got off that plane from Port-au-Prince nearly thirty years ago, she left behind a part of herself. And I cannot blame her for discarding a painful past. But it is not only her life she is guarding, it is mine as well, one that is filled with gaps and vague accounts of things, information scooped up along the years through passing mentions and aunts' conversations at the kitchen table. I can't get my grandmother to even mention my late grandfather's name above a whisper. Jotting down his name on pieces of paper helps me to envision this faceless man. I keep his name written in all my journals- otherwise I would forget.