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

Aimee, I am twenty-nine and I have just begun to rise from the ashes of my childhood fears. I was twenty-five when my grandmother passed away and though I had spent most of those years away from her side (seeing her every three or four years), my body is as if tattooed by the imprints of her palms as she bathed me as a child and fed me baby food as I lay between her bosom and arm. Can any touch be more sacred than this? Much has been made of the fact that the body remembers its injuries, its traumas. But what happens to the good touch, especially when that touch occurs early in life, when a child is full of potential and knows nothing of the difficulties of life? I have been thinking that the body must remember such a touch as sacred, and that if one is blessed with it, whatever traumas the body may sustain later on can be more easily overcome. I believe my body remembers its movements in water as my grandmother bathed me as if they were movements in the womb: safe, soundless, magical. I believe that the first touches we experience in life are as sacred as the last ones, the ones that prepare us for the journey home, to Vilokan, Ginen, Dahomey, or to a glorious heaven. I was not there to bathe her in return, to cleanse the feet that had walked many miles for her children and grandchildren, to close the eyelids that had seen more heartbreak in the busy streets of Port-au-Prince daily than most people in developing countries will experience in a lifetime. After she died, part of my own spirit seemed to follow; I felt as if a limb had been taken away; it ached in the absence of her presence. I have come to understand that it was a necessary loss, one that ensured that I would mature in ways that I had not explored because her presence and memory both provided me with the kind of nurture of soul which discouraged my creation of my own sources of sustenance. I was told at her funeral that the day after I had left Haiti, she took to her bed and never rose from it until her death, as if she had just waited for my return and our last encounter. It is enough for me to know that I was there to embrace her, as she had me, in childhood, in the last months of her life. Now that she is gone, something else has come to be in that space of spiritual connectedness that once belonged to us both-a second chance at life, the opportunity to live out the lessons gleaned from observing my grandmother's existence from a distance: how to be a new kind of Haitian woman, one who reveres the old ways and yet knows her own power and is not afraid of putting that power to good use. I am in the fourth year of my own resurrection and every step forward is small but strong.

The great irony of my life is that it is life in exile which has afforded me the luxury of looking back across time, to appreciate all that is Haiti. Living on the outside has enabled me to learn not only about Haiti but about the rest of the African diaspora. As a woman, there are things I have accomplished that I know both of my grand- mothers could not have accomplished in Haiti. No one knows what their dreams might have been, whether one had wanted to be a poet, the other a teacher. They became wives and mothers and their lives were defined by those two words. They sacrificed their personal happiness for their families, never thinking that perhaps they could, by living out those dreams, present them as gifts to their children, especially their female children, as pathways to their own dreams. And yet, it is clear to me that in the strength of their presence in those children's lives, they showed the potential to have accomplished anything they might have set their minds to. They made the most of what they had and this, in itself, makes for a humbling example. Because of their sacrifices, as well as the upheavals in Haiti, I am free in ways that I could not have been there. Yet Haiti remains my compass. How to explain? I think, Aimee, that this, too, will be one of the riddles of your life. But until such time as you may need to consider such a question, I leave you with the parting words of my own grandmother: "La paix de Dieu soit avec toi" [May the peace of God be with you]. Whatever gods you may believe in, may they protect you and light your way and may you be a light for others as you have always been to me.

With love, your mother,

Myriam Josephe Aimee Chancy

Edwidge Danticat is the author of two novels, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and The Farming of Bones, and a collection of short stories, Krik?Krak!, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1995. She is also the editor of The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors.

Sandy Alexandre was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and is a graduate of Dartmouth College. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in English at the University of Virginia.

Patricia Benoit is a filmmaker living in New York City.

Jean-Pierre Benoit is Professor of Economics and Law at New York University.

Martine Bury is a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in several publications including Vibe, Jane, Nylon, and The Source.

Jean-Robert Cadet holds a master's degree in French literature and teaches French and American history in Cincinnati, Ohio. Restavec:From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American is his first book.

Anthony Calypso is an actor who writes both fiction and nonfiction. He is a graduate of the MFA program in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College. He is at work on his first novel.

Sophia Cantave is a doctoral candidate in American literature and a lecturer at Tufts University. She is the author of an essay "Who Gets to Create Lasting Images? The Problem of Black Representation in Uncle Tom's Cabin," in Approaches to Teaching Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. She is also author of "Geography, Language, and Hyphens: Felix Morrisseau-Leroy and a Changing Haitian Aesthetic," published in The Journal of Haitian Studies.

Leslie Casimir is a journalist, currently working in New York City at the Daily News.

Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author of Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (Temple University Press, 1997) and Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (Rutgers University Press, 1997). Currently residing in Phoenix, Arizona, she is associate professor of English at Arizona State University, Tempe. She is at work on a novel entitled The Serpent's C/awand on a literary memoir focusing on Haiti and the Latin Caribbean.

Leslie Chassagne, born in Haiti and raised in New York City since the age of nine, studied art and language in the New York City University system and is currently a teacher at the Young Adult Learning Academy and Hunter College's International Language Institute. He is a poet, painter, and musician and has traveled throughout the Caribbean and Colombia.

Marc Christophe was born in Saint Marc, Haiti. He is professor of French and Caribbean literature at Howard University. This excerpt was adapted from his poem "PRESENT PASSE FUTUR" which was published in his 1988 collection of poetry Le Pain de L'Exile (The Bread of Exile).

Joel Dreyfuss is a former senior editor at Fortune and a regular contributor to The Haitian Times.

Phebus Etienne is a poet living in Montclair, New Jersey.

Annie Gregoire is a teacher and an aspiring children's book writer. She teaches second grade at Cush Campus Schools, a private school in Brooklyn, New York. Gregoire received a master's degree in foreign language education at New York University, where she has also done extensive research in cross-cultural studies and children's literature.

Maude Heurtelou is a native of Haiti, where she completed high school. She holds an undergraduate degree from the San Carlos University/ INCAP in Guatemala and a master's degree in public health education. She has written over sixteen nonfiction books in Haitian Kreyol and two novels, LafamiBonplezi and Sezisman, which have been translated into English. She and her husband, Fequiere Vilsaint, are the founders and publishers of Educavision, a publishing company.