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

I saw so much poverty and injustice in Haiti, but I also watched Haitians who were struggling and surviving despite these limitations. In Haiti, I visited my grandmother's and great-grandmother's homes. Painted in bright pastel colors, their houses stood in the middle of a grassy field surrounded by fruitful plants. There I was also introduced to my mother's cattle, branded with her initials. In the swarming heat, I sat with my cousins, who reminisced about their memorable childhoods in Haiti on our family's land as well as their escapades riding into town on mules and donkeys. I imagined myself climbing the Haitian mountains while carrying heavy baskets atop my head; I envisioned myself bathing in flowing streams while others washed their clothes in the rivers. Nevertheless, my imagination inevitably turned to reality as I remember the people struggling in their daily lives. Wading in the warm, clear-blue waters along a Haitian beach resort, I found comfort in knowing that my mother and siblings were still present in my life.

Overcoming my insecurity about my dark skin has been my greatest obstacle. I have always been proud of my Haitian background, never ashamed of my Haitian roots; never hiding my Haitian identity whenever the topic of AIDS emerged; never silencing the African sounds of the Haitian Kreyol ; never feeling disgraced by the Haitian refugees who were risking their lives in choppy waters to come to the United States. Likewise, I have always found warmth in embracing the spiritual drive of black people. However, for a long time, believing that my dark skin was inferior often prevented me from living openly; walking along the beach; dancing wantonly at school parties; feeling attractive in a deep red dress; or laughing at someone's joke. Keeping quietly to myself, I hoped to attract as little attention as possible.

Becoming a teacher has been therapeutic for me, helping me to feel more comfortable in my skin. This has helped me to foster confidence and self-esteem in elementary-age students, particularly black students. As a result of working with young people who have greater obstacles to face than the shade of their skin, I am more concerned with preparing children to gain a keener understanding of social problems inherent in all societies-intolerance, war, illiteracy, hunger, poverty, health issues, environmental troubles, abuse, and violence. Every day as I stand before these students, my greatest hope is that they will learn to see beyond stereotypes and misconceptions, respecting each other for who they are as human beings.

I've thought about going home, collapsing into my mother's arms and asking her, without speaking, to comfort me, to tell me that the bad world won't get me. But I know that if I go home - yeah, she'll hold me for a few seconds, but then she'll let out a sigh, with that look in her eyes, that look of decades of working, and worrying and she'll say, "Daughter, since you've been gone …" beginning her own narrative before I can say, "Manman, I'm tired of being alone. I don't speak their language. They don't understand me." But then I would remember that our vocabulary never included words to explain my loneliness or my sense of fear and if I suddenly started crying because of an unspeakable loss, she would offer to do whatever she could to make me "happy" again. In the end I would say "I'm fine really. That was nothing. I'm just tired." In this way, our vocabulary never expanded. I would take a deep breath and suck in the tears, the fear, the reason why I came home in the first place, and listen to her instead. Afterward, I would prepare to go back to the world, still feeling lost and alone despite her promise to pray for me and a reminder to keep the Notre Dame amulet on me always. I would go back into the world with the overwhelming desire to turn around and say "Manman, I still don't speak their language." But home and my mother's arms were always beyond reach and unable to hold me for very long because we had never really developed a vocabulary to discuss what was asked of me.

I wrote these words on the back page of Barbara Johnson's Wake of Deconstruction on October 16, 1994, during my first semester in graduate school. Suddenly, in a theory class about language, I found myself without a true language of my own. In previous environments, ones that called for a different English, I had responded by code switching, quickly learning the jargon and hastily falling in line. This was an invaluable skill and one that I knew, even as early as seventh grade, could push me beyond the limitations of Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn-where I grew up the daughter of Haitian immigrants- to the halls of higher learning at Tufts University. Of course, there was a sacrifice. Only years later would I seriously think about what my sacrifice had been: my mother tongue. I wasn't sure if that language was Kreyol . I just knew I needed to speak something that had eluded me for years. English was not my mother tongue, but I made myself believe it was. I could not remember a time when I didn't speak English.

II n'y a pas de text. There is no text. This small French sentence had become all the rage. I had lived with this concept my whole adult life and suddenly I didn't want to anymore. II n'y a pas de text seemed to clash with my translation of the French words on the Haitian flag: L'union fait la force. In union, there is strength. I set about writing myself into being.

Going through the journals and letters I've written over the years, I see myself expressing over and over the same anxiety about language, the quest to maintain some essential part of myself while shape-shifting and searching for total fluidity. Making simultaneous translations for myself of everything from ways to speak to my mother to the creed on Haiti's flag, I felt myself floating between fragments that I was always rearranging. To keep track of these fragments, I kept journals. I believed then and now that the written word, in whatever form, would ground me and make my fragmented self whole. The words I wrote in my journal were inscribed in secret. These were words I rarely shared with my family, words that I hid even harder once my father asked to know what it was that I was always writing about. I would have had to read it to him and then do the translation. The English that he and my mother had encouraged me to speak and perfect also helped to increase the distance between us.

The truth hit me in theory class one day: I was not just a black girl but a Haitian girl and for the first time I longed for home and home was a bunch of people and a culture I knew by name, accepted at face value, but did not know intimately. Using the back pages of Johnson's Wake, I sent a psychic call to my mother, imagining that only she could explain why I didn't speak anybody's language. I sent out the call and heard my own voice ask why I didn't have any way to speak to my mother about my loss and all that was tearing at me.

I was not blaming my mother but searching for a mother tongue. I had surprised even myself with the words I'd scribbled out of frustration and fear in the back of Johnson's book. I was admitting that my mother and I did not speak the same language and yet I knew that it was my language barrier, not hers, that kept us from understanding each other. I wanted to find a bridge; I wanted to learn to speak a forgotten tongue.

August 1997 Journal Entry:

I have always had language issues, have always felt that my voice leaves too much room for misunderstandings, misinterpretations. Having to always negotiate when and where to use my voice often left important things about me unsaid. I think of Billie Holliday with all her problems, living in fragments, breaking down and whispering "Hush now, don't explain." Not having to explain myself or create whole new fictions about who I am or what I want is what I long for, like Billie.