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

I'd told my mother. I needed her on my side so she could rally the various family members to speak on my behalf. I still had to be the one to tell my father of my decision to leave his house and go beyond the perimeters he had set for me.

Once I'd told him, two months passed before my father spoke to me again, but when he did he gave his consent. We sat down in his room and he told me that he knew I was a good girl, that I was going to school to study and better myself. I agreed. I had won. Afterward I did something that few Haitian girls my age did: I attended my senior prom and at my father's suggestion arranged to sleep over at my best friend's house to avoid traveling alone late that night. Only when I got to sleep away from home-a serious no-no- did I understand my victory. My father and mother were letting me go.

If I didn't know how to speak to my family before, I certainly couldn't speak to them now. I'd never learned how to talk to my family without being on guard, without always preparing to counteract my father's No in some way. No, Iln'y a pas de text could not explain my foreignness that first year away from home, nor could it explain the place my parents called Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn but I knew as Sunset Park. Back then I wanted to escape the fate of never knowing what I was capable of because I was black, because I was a Haitian girl, because I was poor. That overwhelming desire sustained me through the college years. But in graduate school, I suddenly needed to talk to my mother about what it meant to actually escape. I wanted to speak to her of what I had spent my whole life unconsciously running from: her powerlessness.

During one of my tirades against my family, my mother once asked me, 'If we are these terrible things, then what are you?' Only now can I say, I am my mother. I am my father. I am Fifth Avenue- also known as Sunset Park-Brooklyn. And to do what life and graduate school requires of me, I need to make peace with that. I need to learn to speak with a different part of myself. I no longer write unmailed letters to my mother. I call her and tell her things I didn't know I could say.

During the 1995-96 school year, I went looking for Haitians outside of my family. My whole life I'd never had one Haitian friend. I decided to volunteer my Saturday mornings with other Haitian women mentoring Haitian girls who reminded me of myself. Looking back I wondered what, if anything, the great thinkers like Derrida, De Man, Foucault, or Johnson could say that didn't seem to mock me and the things I had done, the circular search I had been on, had always been on, in language. How could they account for what I knew about living in shadows, in crevices, dying each time I remade myself, surviving in gaps or waiting on that one elliptical mark for a space to enter.

There are people whose spirits are destroyed by not being able to conquer a language, people like my parents for example. They speak in heavily accented English, and must sometimes use their children's voices instead of their own. They do not get to talk about their experiences but hope that their children will even things out in the future and make them right. Perhaps my mother had given birth to me so that I could do all the things that she never did. Only now, as I learn to speak forgotten words, am I beginning to understand her bravery. Even among new Haitian friends, some encountered in Boston and others while I spent hours on the prettiest Haitian beach, in the prettiest Haitian sea, I find myself mourning, for her and for myself. Perhaps to really make things right, I have to accept my own version of Haiti, to become my own Haitian daughter.

MAP VIV: MY LIFE AS A NYABINGHI RAZETTE by Marie Nadine Pierre

I am a Nyabinghi Razette. Most people identify me as a Rastafarian. The Nyabinghi was an army of women and men brought together by Haile Selassie I, the Emperor of Ethiopia, to fight oppression. Among Rastafarians, Nyabinghi means 'death to all oppressors.' Razette was coined by Sistren Jahzinine and it refers to a female Rastafarian. As a Nyabinghi Rastafarian, I believe in the divinity of Haile Selassie I and the Empress Menen.

My life as a Nyabinghi Razette has not earned me friends nor has it brought me wealth. However it has connected me even more to my Haitian self and has given me the aesthetic and spiritual freedom that I have always sought. Some people feel that a Haitian cannot be a Rastafarian. I don't see any contradiction between my lifestyle as a Rastafarian and my ethnic identity as a Haitian. Those who do not see the obvious parallels between us have a narrow view of both Haitians and Rastafarians.

Perhaps the closest analogy that can be drawn between Haitians and Rastafarians is through spirituality. Haitians and Rastafarians share spiritual paths (Vodou and Rastafarl) that have roots in Africa and that continue to act as positive forces in the world. Members of the African diasporas from different countries practice their own forms of spirituality such as Obeah, Condomble, and Santeria, just as there are different groups of Rastafarians, from the Twelve Tribe Rastas to the Nazarite Rastas.

Another issue that promotes the separatist view between Haitians and Rastafarians is language. In the Rastafarian trod, or lifestyle, the English language is prominent. Irits, the Rastafarian language, which is not to be confused with Jamaican patois, is overly influenced by English to the extent of drowning out other languages such as Haitian Kreyol. I am often appalled at the ethnocentric perspective of some English-speaking Rastafarians who go to great lengths to discredit and discourage other languages, especially Haitian Kreyol. A transnational Haitian, I was born in the United States and spent my formative years (age one through eleven) in Haiti; I speak English well enough so that it is relatively easier for me to adapt to Irits. At the same time, I have to recognize that Irits is one way that most non-Kreyol-speaking Rastas identify themselves as other-than-Haitian.

In spite of these struggles in and outside of the trod, my faith as a Nyabinghi Rastafarian could never cancel out my identity as a Haitian. I love Haitian music: mizik rasin, konpa; Haitian food: diri hole and barman peze. Now, as a vegan who does not eat meat, I cook brown rice with peas and I eat tofu and seitan instead of griyo and boulet. In fact, my version of Ital, or Rastafarian cooking, is Haitian food with vegan substitutes. By adopting an Ital or vegan lifestyle, I am fighting the diseases that have plagued many people in my life, including family members, friends, and acquaintances, who have suffered from diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart failure. Without forcing my lifestyle on anyone, I do think that a Rastafarian vegan diet might help many Haitians in the United States who are living under stressful conditions in crowded urban centers in New York, Boston, and Miami or are adjusting from a familiar tropical climate to a cold foreign one.

One of the most treasured manifestations of my life as a Razette and as a Haitian is expressing my love of colors, especially in fabrics, in dresses and skirts, as in the regal dress and headwear that African women wear. I love to wrap my dreadlocks in a beautiful festive Afrocentric fabric, praying for strength as I do from my African and Haitian ancestors.

During Nyabinghis, when Rastafarians gather to chant praises or Isis to the Empress and Emperor of Ethiopia, men are asked to uncover their dreadlocks while women are asked to cover theirs. When I was a 'bald head' or had not yet become a Nyabinghi Razette, I thought that black people, including Haitians, who read the Bible were being brainwashed into accepting white domination. However, as a Razette, I became aware of the fact that many of the people described in the Bible, including the Queen of Sheba, King Solomon, and Jesus, are black Africans. Since contemporary scientific evidence shows that civilization began on the African continent, it follows then that Eve's and Adam's descendants would be black.

Rastafarl, provides me with a space to explore such ideas. Being a Razette gives me the spiritual freedom to create and re-create myself as a woman of physical and spiritual strength and power. My identity as a transnational Nyabinghi Razette, Haitian, working-class, dark-skinned black woman, doctoral candidate, mother, and wife is best captured by the creative and artistic framework of the collage that joins me not only to the immediate Haitian dyaspora in the United States, but to the larger African community all over the world.

My life as a Nyabinghi Razette encourages me to seek the truth about the condition of all black Africans on earth. Both as a Razette and a Haitian, my goal has always been to be free and to be myself. Both as a Razette and a Haitian, I want to live with the truth that black people have been the makers and builders of strong and beautiful