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

tempering the present with the past, the modern with tradition, America with Haiti. With each child that a Haitian mother has to raise in America, she has to deal with the triple-consciousness of its Haitian, American, and Black identities. In junior high school, I was known to my black peers as the just-got-off- the-banana-boat refugee or the Vodou queen. I fit into neither of their notions of what it means to be Black or American. Out of ignorance of my own culture, I let those insults sting. Out of ignorance of what it truly means to be Haitian, I let those insults define me. Not now. Not ever. Years later, while on a study-abroad trip to China, although I knew no Swahili nor had ever been to Africa, I was referred to as 'the African.' While visiting one of the autonomous regions in Northern China, I met a little girl who, pointing in my direction, greeted me as 'Kunta Kinte'-the protagonist of Alex Haley's Roots. The television movie series had just been shown there. My black face summoned the association with the only other black face this little girl had ever seen. I wasn't an individual, nor did the fact that I am female, and Kinte male, matter. I was just Black. In China when I insisted I was American the Chinese raised skeptical eyebrows.

I questioned my identity then, but wouldn't now because of what I've learned about myself. When you come to know and embrace yourself-whether you have two, three, or four identities to reconcile- you understand that you have everything to gain from those experiences that challenge your justifications for being who you say and think you are. In fact, the lessons learned from these experiences help you achieve the power to shape rather than be shaped by your own future experiences.

As extravagant a form of punishment as my exile seems, I've decided that it was most necessary and most justifiable and certainly most Haitian. By being consistently rude to my mother, I demonstrated my ignorance of the value of respecting my parents and, in extension, my elders. I dared to challenge a philosophy of living that is steeped in common sense and tradition. I dared to think that I was immune from Haitian lore and Haitian justice by virtue of being born in the U.S.A. At twelve years old, I became a walking manifestation of an imperialism that my mother would not endure; with every backtalk, head-wag, eye-roll and 'So?', I denied, attacked, and decried everything my mother understood to be Haitian. I was a Haitian American trying to suffocate (whether consciously or not) the Haitian part of my identity. My mother would not tolerate this murder of both her culture and my identity.

My mother was always one step ahead of me and my siblings because she parented vigilantly and ceaselessly (and still continues to do so). I am grateful that she was slicker when I was just slick. For each failed attempt at deceiving her or preempting her authority, I grew to realize and finally accept the intrinsic contrast between my role as the bumbling child and her role as the experienced parent. I am grateful that she knew the limits of her own tolerance. How else can a mother diagnose and then treat an intolerable child if she has not first defined, for herself and eventually her children, what is tolerable? I am grateful that she intervened on my behalf every time I showed signs of becoming less than the decent human being that she wanted me and my siblings to be. My mother has given me a story that I love to tell; it is a 'Go to your room' story, Haitian-style.

Haitians have a term 'san manman' that literally means motherless. But 'san manman' does not necessarily mean that one doesn't have a mother, but that one behaves as though one didn't have a mother, as if one were raised without guidance, morals, without the principles that perpetuate culture and a strong community.

And it was because of my mother's fear that I was losing or taking for granted these same ancient properties that she sent me to Haiti so that I could reacquaint myself with them. She wanted me to witness, firsthand, those ancient properties of unconditional self-respect and respect for others shown by the paradigmatic 'children of Haiti,' through the struggles that my aunt endured raising two children in the poor countryside, through the dignity and respect with which they lived their lives despite the odds, through the interactions between mother and child, the elders and the young, the womenfolk and the menfolk.

I've said that my mother has given me a wonderful story, but I must also acknowledge what I understand to have come before that story, what always was, before the story ever began-the moral. My mother started with a moral and had me trace a path to it with my own story. She has given me a lesson of life that I practice every day. I respect my elders and all others not out of terror of further banishment, but out of an understanding of myself in relation to America, Haiti, and the larger world. It would be foolish to think that I had actually reformed after that one exile to Haiti. Of course, I hadn't. It takes more than a 'go to your room,' even if that room is actually another country, to discipline a child. My understanding came like most do-through a gradual process of trial and error. But I know that I am most fortunate that my mother refused to remain complaisant about her child's moral development.

In a world where insults still exist and still can sting, there must be culture. In a world where only one may parent where two, three, four, and seven used to, there must be history. In a world where fitting in may mean selling out, there must be keepers of the past, reminders of the ancient ways. James Baldwin, who understood the value of the past in sustaining a stable and dignified present, alluded in his Notes of a Native Son to his envy of some Haitians' ability to trace their history back to regal roots. There are rewards of dignity, pride, and honor that proceed from being placeable and traceable.

My siblings and I didn't have our own rooms growing up. We were poor enough so that a curtained partition in the living room served as our makeshift wall. So, one can understand on that superficial level why my mother couldn't just send me to my room. Economics didn't allow it. But neither did the enormity of my crime- dishonoring my mother-allow it. Instead my mother sent me to her room, her mother's room, her grandmother's room, her great-grandmother's room. How could I act as I did knowing from what traditions, what roots, what culture I had sprung? How could I desecrate when I had no right to? And upon my return to the States- whether it was days later or years later-I had to ask myself these questions: And if I still want to fit in, how has the need to do so transformed? How has my newly acquired self-understanding and self-respect altered the way that I choose to fit in? Once I acknowledged that by dishonoring my mother I dishonored myself and my culture, I accepted and understood the reasoning that went behind such an extravagant punishment. If at twelve years old I could not comprehend the gravity of my crime against my mother, I could at least extrapolate, from the gravity of my punishment, that I had finally done the abominable. I needed that-to know that I could actually be held accountable, to know that I was wrong. I needed to know that my insult to her merited retribution and maybe even wrath. But above all, I needed to know that at least this much was true-that I was not 'san manman,' either literally or figuratively.

RETURN

LOST NEAR THE SEA by Leslie Chassagne

I came here to find you again

to walk where you walked,

to see if you outlived the house

with the broken planks,

that beach house that once let in

fingers of moonlight, giving wasps

their final dance

I came here to find you again

to stand on a jagged rock

waiting for the light of each wave

to be sucked into the sand

the distant tattoos of the trees

to be scraped by the glowing armor

of the clouds and the majestic and tender palms