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

I will be thirty this year, but those in my family with whom I best connect are in their forties and fifties. Because of this intergenerational bonding, I feel as if I have eyes at the back of my head: I stand not between two cultures, one Haitian, the other American, but between generations, one belonging to the pre-Duvalier era and the other belonging to the post-Duvalier era. Sometimes it is like standing in a barren no-man's land, but I know that some of us need to be the in-betweens so the gaps will not bleed, so that the discarded will be remembered and the wounds of forgetfulness staunched.

This year also marks a turning point in my life for I have now reached the age of my mother's orphaning. Perhaps this is also one of the reasons I feel compelled to write this letter, Aimee, because I am aware of living on borrowed time, that every opportunity I have to have a disagreement or a moment of understanding with my own mother is a blessing that ended for her in her twenty-ninth year. She had lost her father earlier at age seven. When she was twenty-nine, her mother passed away. Her loss has led me to think deeply about my own relationship to my mother, to her mother, and to you. What survives? What is forever lost?

When I was eight years old, I met my father's grandmother, my great-grandmother. I remember it as the first time we met though this cannot be possible. The woman I met when I was eight years old was nearing a hundred years of age, small-boned, frail. Yet she saw clearly and spoke a Kreyol that seemed to me to be unlike that of my parents; it contained more of Africa in it, more of the rural in it. Because of this, we could hardly communicate; I was afraid of her too, not because she could do me harm physically, but because I could feel her strong spiritual presence. I remember that she had a kenep tree in her front yard, full of the small, green-shelled fruit that became (and remains) my favorite fruit of all. She encouraged my brother and me to grasp handfuls from the old branches and to eat them on the spot. That afternoon, she also gave us dous to eat, a homemade square confection that resembles fudge. I dream of the taste of it sometimes; I have never tasted anything like it since. When she passed away a few years later, the recipe died with her. Now that I am older, always trying to understand better the history and cultural legacy of this place I call home but can only visit from time to time, I think of the conversations we might have had, of the version of Kreyol she spoke that she could have taught me. Although her birth certificate has been lost, she must have been born in the late 1880s, not even a century after the Haitian Revolution. What could she have told us about her childhood memories, of life then? So, you see Aimee, much has already been lost. Like her, but some hundred years after her birth, I am witnessing a century come to a close and I will live the bulk of my life in the next. With this writing, I hope to leave you something for your own days of wonder; something, perhaps, to answer the questions I hope you will have.

As I write to you today, resting next to me is a packet of letters my mother gave to me a year or so ago. Some of the letters are written in her mother's hand. This is all I have by which to know her. They are the last letters penned by her my mother received. My mother had just left Haiti for graduate law study in Paris. Her mother intended to visit her there-it would be her own first journey off of the island. The letter paper is thin, the ink beginning to fade in places. The first letter, dated December 1, 1961, begins:

Les chants de Noel avaient commence a me jeter dans I'angoisse; tu sais ce n'est pas du sentiment - quand on les entonne Us me vont droit au coeur et me donnent un frisson de coeur qui agit sur tous mes membres est-ce pourquoi je ferai tous mes efforts pour realiser mon voyage. II parait que ce sera la ma guirison aussi j'ai commence sens m'illusioner a confectionner mes linges; il est encore tot mais cela uaut mieux.

[The Christmas carols had begun to throw me into a deep state of anguish; you know, it isn't nostalgia that I feel, when they are sung they go straight to my heart and send a chill through it that permeates all of my limbs. Thus, I have decided to do all in my power to bring about my voyage; it seems that it will be my cure and so I have begun, without giving in to disillusionment, to make my travel clothes; it is still early for such things, but it is preferable to do so.]

I read these lines and feel the deep emotions my grandmother must have felt at being separated from her youngest daughter. I see in her words also the heart of a poet. I see myself in these lines, knowing how sensitive I am to change of any kind, how deeply loyal to those I love, always missing those who are at a distance. Mama Fofo, as she was called, was an artist of a kind, a seamstress. She was, thus, literally planning to make her clothes for the voyage, in the same loving way that she had made her own daughters' dresses, the same way she had dutifully put fingers to needle, to thread, to cloth in the making of wardrobes for others, back curved over her Singer sewing machine, in order to make a living for herself and her family. She was a single mother raising four children in Haiti from the late 1920s through the 1930s.

Reading Mama Fofo's letters help me to restore some missing links in my own life; they help me to recapture a connection to a woman whom I never met but from whom I have inherited some personality traits: warmth, sensitivity, but also a tendency, at times, not to take best care of myself. Through these letters, I better understand both her and my own character.

Mama Fofo is preparing to go on this voyage which both lifts her spirit and creates great anxiety in her. She does not have the money to go and is trying to call in loans made to friends in need. Many of them refuse to return the money, sums at times as low as twenty dollars. They do not seem to think that the trip is so serious; they do not realize her true need. Mama Fofo's money is lost, so it seems, and in the midst of trying to realize this dream of crossing the Atlantic in order to see her daughter, she finds out that she has placed her trust in the wrong people. She writes: "reellement on ne doit compter quesursoi" [really, we can only count on ourselves]. The letters then detail, over the course of a few weeks, what money she has been able to put aside or reclaim. There are gifts from her other children and also from my mother. Mama Fofo was sixty-five at the time she wrote this letter. And I, some thirty years after her death, have just begun to learn such lessons, to be generous without expense to oneself.

I read a meditation today that speaks of this, a Taoist teaching on the theme of caring. It was written by Deng Ming Dao in his book, 365 Tao. Let me set it down for you here:

Those who follow Tao believe in using sixteen attributes on behalf of others: mercy, gentleness, patience, nonattachment, control, skill, joy, spiritual love, humility, reflection, restfulness, seriousness, effort, controlled emotion, magnanimity, and concentration. Whenever you need to help another, draw upon these qualities. Notice that self-sacrifice is not included in this list. You do not need to destroy yourself to help another. Your overall obligation is to complete your own journey along your personal Tao. As long as you can offer solace to others on your same path, you have done the best that you can.

I believe that Mama Fofo embodied most of the above but it was in the last moments of her life that she realized that she did not need to destroy herself in order to help others. Had she learned this lesson sooner, would she have made it to Paris? Would the last moments of her life have been less fraught with the fear of never seeing her daughter again? Or had she already realized that she was losing a battle against time, losing that battle to her penury, her lesson learned too late?