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

admittedly small but wide- ranging fragment of the Haitian dyaspora in the United States. After his death, I find myself cherishing the fact that the people whose lives are detailed and represented here do travel between many worlds. This book for me now represents both a way to recount our silences-as in Leslie Casimir's 'Reporting Silence'-and to say good-bye-as in Patrick Sylvain's 'Adieu Miles and Good-bye Democracy.' However, we are not saying good-bye to a country, but to a notion that as 'Dyaspora' we do not own it and it does not own us. At the same time, we are also saying, in the words of Dany Laferriere's essay, 'America, We Are Here.' And we are not, as Joel Dreyfuss reminds the world in his essay, 'A Cage of Words,' just people from 'the Poorest Nation in the Western Hemisphere,' but also people who 'have produced great art like that of Ireland and Portugal… great writers and scholars like those of Russia and Brazil.' And great heroes like Jean Dominique.

A few weeks before Jean's death, Patrick Dorismond, a Haitian-American man, was gunned down by a New York City police officer in a Manhattan street across the bridge from where another Haitian man, Abner Louima, was beaten, then sexually assaulted in a Brooklyn precinct by a police officer. I ask myself now what Jean- as he inevitably would have had to report these events on his radio program-must have said about these incidents, which so closely resemble the atrocities that Haitians over the years have fled Haiti to escape. It has not been lost on us that of three black men tortured and killed by police in New York in the past two years, two were Haitian. Reading the essays in this book again after these events impels me to think of the many more pages that could be-and will be written-about our experiences as people belonging to the Haitian dyaspora in the United States. But anyone who has ever witnessed a gathering of the likes described by Jean- Pierre Benoit in 'Bonne Annee' or Barbara Sanon in 'Black Crows and Zombie Girls' knows our voices will not be silenced, our stories will be told.

In her essay, poet and painter Marilene Phipps writes, 'Painting and Poetry are my battlefields… Living in another country, I use my pen or my brush to voice incantations to a particular world that has created me and, to a certain extent, now uses me to re-create itself.' In this collection, the writers define themselves as well as the worlds that define them, through tragedies, like the deaths of Jean Dominique and Patrick Dorismond, but also through celebrations like the New York, Boston, and Miami street parades that followed the end of the Duvalier regime in 1986. Or through voices like that of Joanne Hyppolite turning a sometimes dreaded word in her favor, celebrating her 'dyaspora' status, reminding us that we are not alone.

'When you are in Haiti, they call you Dyaspora,' writes Hyppolite. '… you are used to it. You get so you can jump between worlds with the same ease that you slide on your nightgown every evening.'

Guapa!

CHILDHOOD

PRESENT PAST FUTURE by Marc Christophe

What will I tell you, my son?

What will I say to you, my daughter?

You for whom the tropics

Are a marvelous paradise

A blooming garden of islands floating

In the blue box

Of the Caribbean sea

What will I tell you

When you ask me

Father, speak to us of Haiti?

Then my eyes sparkling with pride

I would love to tell you

Of the blue mornings of my country

When the mountains stretch out

Lazily

In the predawn light

The waterfalls flowing

With freshness

The fragrance of molasses-filled coffee

In the courtyards

The fields of sugar cane

Racing

In cloudy waves

Towards the horizon

The heated voices of peasant men

Who caress the earth

With their fertile hands

The supple steps of peasant women

On top of the dew

The morning clamor

In the plains the small valleys

And the lost hamlets

Which cloak the true heart

Of Haiti.

I would also tell you

Of the tin huts

Slumbering beneath the moon

In the milky warmth

Of spirit-filled

Summer nights

And the countryside cemeteries

Where the ancestors rest

In graves ornate

With purple seashells

And the sweet and heady perfumes

Of basilique lemongrass

I would love to tell you

Of the colonial elegance of the villas

Hidden in the bougainvilleas

And the beds of azaleas

And the vast paved trails

Behind dense walls

The verandahs with princely mosaics

Embellished

With large vases of clay

Covered

With sheets of ferns