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

fell through the tin roof.

I opened my eyes for a brief moment. The long shadow stood still from behind the cotton tree-a few feet from where I was. I covered my eyes again and held my breath.

'Tim tim?' Madan Deo asked.

At last, she had come to save me. I took her hand and tried to pull her into the house. She shook me loose and told me, as she had done many times before, 'Dyab pe dyab; dyab pa manje dyab.' She told me there was nothing in this world to fear. Devils fear one another but one cannot destroy the other without destroying himself. I looked into the street and saw the long shadow inching away. It passed before the porch but I did not see him.

'I wanted you to see him,' my great-grandmother whispered. 'I wanted you to see him the way Madan Zepherin made me see him. Because until you look him in the eye and learn that you can still survive, you will always be afraid of something in this life.'

It's been seven years since I walked by the melting black candles and plates of food offerings at the shrine of Baron Lakwa on the way to visit my great-grandmother's grave at Petionville's cemetery. I thought of the stories Madan Deo recounted about Baron, a lwas who stands guard at the crossroads between this life and the other. I thought about the Gede, the spirit that danced in my grandmother's head. They say Gede Nimbo, the protector of children, was her favorite. One of the rooms in the peristil was dedicated to him. When I held her hand as a child, during the ceremonies, people often called her Papa Gede. And they would point at me and say, 'That child is Gede's granddaughter.'

'Devils may fear one another,' I can hear Madan Deo say from beyond, 'but one cannot destroy the other.' And I wonder…

Had I not covered my eyes on that warm night so long ago, I would not wake up every morning in search of shadows between the brushstrokes of a painter's version of Mashe Petyon. And perhaps I would not be so afraid to go home today.

POUR WATER ON MY HEAD: A MEDITATION ON A LIFE OF PAINTING AND POETRY by Marilene Phipps

GAME OF HEARTS

We all know that to live is to fight. There are two kinds of battles: the ones life demands of us, and the ones we demand of life. Painting and Poetry are my battlefields. And to be honest, I don't know whether they are what I demand of life or what life demands of me: There are days when it is clear that it doesn't make a bit of difference in the world whether I do the work or not-and those days are like rain upon fire-and there are days when it seems clear I have a life mission-and those are wind in the sail.

To me, painting and poetry are living entities, at times unconscious ones, who relate to each other and to me like people in a 'relationship'-living parallel lives that occasionally, and hopefully often, intersect intensely and meaningfully, all the while preserving the potential to remain fully independent of each other.

Becoming a painter and a poet had not been a planned, carefully thought-out affair. This persona crystallized after much 'meandering.' In the years before going to Philadelphia for an MFA at Penn, I had been an undergraduate student in anthropology at Berkeley. It was then that I returned to Haiti and began research in the Vodou religion. I wanted to understand the mysterious hushed stories of my childhood. I became initiated.

During this return to Haiti I began to paint. The paintings of that period were probably my first ones to express a kind of exile, a longing for an internal, mythical Haiti-my paradise lost.

WAITING FOR PRAYER

It is clear that all art forms share the same technical concerns, such as form, composition, texture, rhythm, balance. All art forms share the same need to express mood, vision, ideas, and life experience. All art forms require a constant editing so that harmony and tension can work interestingly together. What fuels the creative process are an individual artist's themes, all of which affect the trademark characteristics by which we recognize a work.

Instant recognizable trademark for me: Haiti! I was born in Haiti and growing up Haitian is most of the worth I have. I feel fortunate because Haiti is a place of rich cultural and visual uniqueness. I am a painter from Haiti and I am proud of it. Yet I am sometimes leery of being called a Haitian painter, because this can become a label used to ghettoize.

HAITIAN PASTORALE

I grew up near water, collected tadpoles at a river where women came to wash themselves, their children, their clothes. Men, too, came to wash, and brought their animals to bathe and drink. Water brings life and is used in rituals to evoke spiritual cleansing, renewal, transition to another world:

… Pour water on my head

so the sun might glimmer

on me. It is for hope that God

will pull them up by the hair to heaven…

Water is part of my vocabulary of exile and of longing. Houses speak of home lost and rebuilt; they shelter the body's memory of life, of dreams, and of God. Doors suggest and allow passages. Windows offer vision, the lure of light, outward or inward.

CARIBBEAN COLLAGE

With my work I try to take people to Haiti-the place where I was born, where I grew up, where my sensibility was formed, my first impressions made. And I take people inside of Haiti, beyond the exotic facade of blue sky, palm trees, beaches, bright colon, and smiling natives; beyond politically disheveled Haiti, economically depressed Haiti, international-aid Haiti, brandishing-sticks-and-machetes Haiti, boat-people Haiti; beyond the America-has- had-enough-of-these-unruly-blacks kind of Haiti. I take people into Haiti's depth, its originality, its richness, its source of strength and creativity, its heart, psyche and soul, its religion, its Vodou.

I have often been asked how I can paint such a luminous, exuberant and bright Haiti when all news about Haiti abounds with accounts of the distress of Haitians, and particularly that of the boat people. My response is that I am not an illustrator for Newsweek. I am an artist. I don't have to focus on the same events journalists are meant to report. Yes, Haiti is poor and suffers from terrible economic and sociopolitical problems. But that is not all that Haiti is. If either painting or poetry can be seen as a form of prayer, one could say that the brightness in my images is a prayer for Haiti itself. Praying for the color of light is what I am able to do for Haiti with my work as well as challenge the multitude of negative stereotypes the world has been taught about its people.

PRAYER HOUSE

Unique in so many ways, Haiti is the place of another kind of prayer house. Everything in Haiti is permeated by the complex world of Vodou. It is the essential filter and fabric of Haitian culture. When I enter the myths and religion of Haiti, I enter a world of exquisite lyrical imagination and freedom, yet of exacting, elaborate, and minutely structured rituals created only to allow timeless wisdom and intelligence to reveal itself to us in spirit possession. Vodou's spirits are gathered and ordered within specific families, numbers of which are recognized by and