worshipped for their very distinct personality traits and functions.
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.
Technically speaking, I can paint any place, but if I choose one place, it has to do with its meaning-art is an act and effort of communication. Art cannot survive as only a self-indulgent endeavor. Haiti offers me items of meditation into which, because of my particular connection to the country, I can tap and develop further. Cambridge, where I now live, offers me a nurturing environment. Populations of the world are no longer being confined to their original shores. Different cultures are colliding with each other in close quarters and entering each other's consciousness. Through people like me, a Haitian-born painter and poet, foreign imagination is entering the American consciousness and system of reference. Many of us, the uprooted, may have come empty-handed but certainly not empty-hearted. I came with all that I had been and felt before. With all that my parents had been and felt before. With all that my ancestors had been and felt before. With the company of Spirits. So I continue to live and fight even in those days when there is no wind in my sails. I continue to
… Pour water on my head
so the sun might glimmer
on me…
On all of us.
HALF/FIRST GENERATION
CHAINSTITCHING by Phebus Etienne
After I buried my mother, I would see her often,
standing at the foot of my bed
in a handmade nightgown she trimmed with lace
whenever I was restless with fever or menstrual cramps.
I was not afraid, and if her appearance was a delusion,
it only confirmed my heritage.
Haitians always have relationships with the dead.
Each Sabbath I lit a candle that burned for seven days.
I created an altar on the top shelf of an old television cart.
It was decorated with her Bible, a copy of
freesia, delphinium or lilies if they were in season.
My offering of her favorite things didn't conjure
conversations with her spirit as I had hoped.
But there was a dream or two where she was happy,
garnets dangling from her ears,
and one night she shuffled some papers,
which could have been history of my difficult luck
because she said, 'We have to do something about this.'
She hasn't visited me for months.
I worry that my life is an insult to her memory,
that she looks in and turns away
because I didn't remain a virgin until I married,
because my debts will remain unforgiven.
Lightning tattoos the elms as florists make
corsages to honor living mothers.
I think of going to mass at St. Anne, where she was startled
by the fire of wine when she received her first communion.
But I remember that first Mother's Day without her,
how it pissed me off to watch a seventy-year-old daughter
escort her mom to sip from the chalice.
Yesterday, as the rain fell warm on the azaleas,
I planted creeping phlox on my mother's grave,
urging the miniature flowers to bloom larger next year
like the velvet petals of bougainvillea that covered our neighbor's gate.
I crave a yard to plant lemon and mango trees as she did.
Tonight, I mold dumplings for pumpkin stew,
add a dash of vinegar for spice as she taught me, sprinkle my palms with flour before rolling the dough between them.
I will thread my needle and embroider a coconut tree on a place mat,
keep stitching her presence in my life.
MADE OUTSIDE by Francie Latour
I
It was like a reunion with a stranger. Like many children of immigrants born and raised in the United States, I have skated precariously along the hyphen of my Haitian-American identity. On one side, I bask in the efficiencies of American life: mail-order catalogs, direct-deposit checking, and interoffice envelopes. From the other side, I take the comfort food of Haitian oatmeal and tap into the ongoing debate Haitians love more than any other: politics. It's an endless menu of traits and qualities that I access and draw from, mixing and matching to fit the situation. But I knew that my return to Haiti wouldn't allow me to pick and choose as I pleased. My identity would no longer be defined by me; it would be defined by the Haitians around me.
Eleven years had passed since I had visited the many relatives who still live on the island. I longed to see them and store up new, vivid memories to replace the ones time had turned into faded snapshots.
'Why Haiti?' colleagues in the newsroom asked. Why should a Hampton Roads newspaper report on a third- world Caribbean island? The question made me impatient.
Why Haiti? Because one year before, Americans had changed the lives of its seven million people by sending twenty-one thousand troops there. Because one year later, Haitians continued to live with-and in spite of-that intervention. And because Haiti's social and cultural landscape is far more textured than the images offered by network television: Haitians as boat people, as AIDS carriers, as PWoH-enthralled zombies. There was no excuse for Americans to know so little about, or think so little of, a neighbor whose history and future are so intertwined with theirs.
Still, as I packed my bags, I felt more like an intruder trespassing onto property that was in no way mine, not a proud descendant carrying the torch back to the mainland. What could I tell Americans about a country whose poverty was not my poverty?
