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

But in my journals I keep trying to explain me, my Haitian family, and our place in this country. Before I started graduate school, my mother asked me when I was going to visit "my country." It took me a moment to realize that she meant Haiti, the place we had all migrated from when I was five years old. Until then, I had never realized that Haiti was a place that people returned to. It was never spoken of except as a place people left or from which they had to be sent for. Rarely did my mother talk about the daughters that she had left behind in Haiti, sisters I remembered vaguely or not at all. All my life, Haiti had seemed an even more distant, mythical place than the lost Africa of African Americans. I never denied being Haitian-born, but it also made sense for me to be considered an African American. After all, Haiti is in the Americas and I am of African descent. Only I knew more about African America than I did about Haiti. In graduate school, I was pursuing formal training in African-American literature, history, and culture. I had mistakenly believed that being Haitian didn't require formal study or inquiry. Haiti was in my name and in my home. Only I kept going farther and farther away from home and I hadn't yet learned how to go back and choose what to hold on to and what to let go of. A crisis was inevitable-and since I had been studying words and language, my crisis came in the classroom. After all those years, I still did not own a particular language. I had to go back to my beginning, yet I didn't want the academic in me to turn my personal dilemma into research. This journey was going to come by way of my mother. I had to humbly step down from my scholarly perch to see what my people could give me-if I asked. To begin fixing my language problem, I had to do the impossible, return home and "step in the same river twice."

I had left home to get a degree and now I wanted to return. I knew it would sound crazy to people who spoke heavily accented English, who often had to ask their children to translate for them or accompany them on appointments that required "good" English. In my family, going back never seemed to be an option. Going back home without a degree was unimaginable. For all my parents' hard work, they needed the children of the new country to do things they'd only dreamed of. I was the first of the new, the fifth child of both my parents but their first together. I had to do more than Fifth Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn allowed and surpass their tentative dreams.

Once I caught myself wondering if my mother ever had dreams that didn't include being the caretaker of a large splintered family. I wondered if she constantly talked to herself like I talked to myself about my future, about the path that I wanted to choose for myself instead of what was expected of me. I was afraid of what I would find out; it was easier to plan in secret for my future than to ask her about her hopes as a girl.

I knew my father conflated U.S. schools with what he remembered of Haitian schools. In his Haiti, school was reserved for the selected few. I knew that my father never forgave his father for forcing him to stop his formal education in order to work. At the beginning of my senior year in high school, out of love and duty, my father had sat me down and said, "Sophia, you can go to whatever college you want."

My heart had contracted and I said "I can?" He took my hand in his and said, "Yes, any college in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, anywhere the bus or the train can take you." My heart had plunged. The world I wanted was bigger than the five boroughs my father offered me.

I'd worked on my applications to faraway colleges at school and forged his and my mother's signatures where necessary. In the spring I received a letter of acceptance from my first choice university in Boston and took that as a sign that I was meant to leave. I'd shared the good news with my teachers and friends. So I wouldn't back out, I'd told my mother. I needed her on my side so she could rally the various family members to speak on my behalf. I still had to be the one to tell my father of my decision to leave his house and go beyond the perimeters he had set for me.

Once I'd told him, two months passed before my father spoke to me again, but when he did he gave his consent. We sat down in his room and he told me that he knew I was a good girl, that I was going to school to study and better myself. I agreed. I had won. Afterward I did something that few Haitian girls my age did: I attended my senior prom and at my father's suggestion arranged to sleep over at my best friend's house to avoid traveling alone late that night. Only when I got to sleep away from home-a serious no-no- did I understand my victory. My father and mother were letting me go.

If I didn't know how to speak to my family before, I certainly couldn't speak to them now. I'd never learned how to talk to my family without being on guard, without always preparing to counteract my father's No in some way. No, Iln'y a pas de text could not explain my foreignness that first year away from home, nor could it explain the place my parents called Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn but I knew as Sunset Park. Back then I wanted to escape the fate of never knowing what I was capable of because I was black, because I was a Haitian girl, because I was poor. That overwhelming desire sustained me through the college years. But in graduate school, I suddenly needed to talk to my mother about what it meant to actually escape. I wanted to speak to her of what I had spent my whole life unconsciously running from: her powerlessness.

During one of my tirades against my family, my mother once asked me, "If we are these terrible things, then what are you?" Only now can I say, I am my mother. I am my father. I am Fifth Avenue- also known as Sunset Park-Brooklyn. And to do what life and graduate school requires of me, I need to make peace with that. I need to learn to speak with a different part of myself. I no longer write unmailed letters to my mother. I call her and tell her things I didn't know I could say.

During the 1995-96 school year, I went looking for Haitians outside of my family. My whole life I'd never had one Haitian friend. I decided to volunteer my Saturday mornings with other Haitian women mentoring Haitian girls who reminded me of myself. Looking back I wondered what, if anything, the great thinkers like Derrida, De Man, Foucault, or Johnson could say that didn't seem to mock me and the things I had done, the circular search I had been on, had always been on, in language. How could they account for what I knew about living in shadows, in crevices, dying each time I remade myself, surviving in gaps or waiting on that one elliptical mark for a space to enter.

There are people whose spirits are destroyed by not being able to conquer a language, people like my parents for example. They speak in heavily accented English, and must sometimes use their children's voices instead of their own. They do not get to talk about their experiences but hope that their children will even things out in the future and make them right. Perhaps my mother had given birth to me so that I could do all the things that she never did. Only now, as I learn to speak forgotten words, am I beginning to understand her bravery. Even among new Haitian friends, some encountered in Boston and others while I spent hours on the prettiest Haitian beach, in the prettiest Haitian sea, I find myself mourning, for her and for myself. Perhaps to really make things right, I have to accept my own version of Haiti, to become my own Haitian daughter.

I am a Nyabinghi Razette. Most people identify me as a Rastafarian. The Nyabinghi was an army of women and men brought together by Haile Selassie I, the Emperor of Ethiopia, to fight oppression. Among Rastafarians, Nyabinghi means "death to all oppressors." Razette was coined by Sistren Jahzinine and it refers to a female Rastafarian. As a Nyabinghi Rastafarian, I believe in the divinity of Haile Selassie I and the Empress Menen.