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

lived permanently in Haiti. Prior to the age of five, after a few months on the continent, I had felt that we would return to Haiti and, eventually, we always did return. Haiti was home: There we were surrounded by family members of all ages. We went to school and had schoolmates. When we returned to Canada, it was the absence of the rest of our family, the smiling aunts and uncles, our grandparents, which weighed heavily upon my child's heart.

All of my childhood, even after the returns to Haiti came to an end at the age of eight, the memories of my birthplace remained the strongest. Those memories have molded my spirit, a certainty I have of what it means to be Haitian; of what it means to me to have been born in a place where I was welcomed by many open arms, into the bosom of a large family that has since become dispersed and fragmented; of what it means to be born in a place where, despite poverty, caste, and colorism, to be of African descent or mixed heritage, to know one's heritage is as important as knowing the names of your grandmothers, as important as remembering the source of your own naming.

Yes, Haiti continues to be afflicted by various problems-social, political, economic. Before the droughts that plagued Eastern Africa occurred in the mid-eighties and caused widespread famine, Haiti was categorized as the poorest country in the world. It is now the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It was also the first black republic in this hemisphere. Yet, while Haiti is often lauded for the triumph of the slave revolt that defeated Napoleon Bonaparte's troops and culminated in independence in 1804, her people are consistently denigrated and forced to endure economic blockades and racialized global trade practices that unduly penalize Haiti precisely because of its early triumph over European imperialism. Still, even diminished, we remain the same prideful people who kept our traditions well-enough alive to organize ourselves and successfully resist enslavement. Despite syncretism and outside influences, Africa remains in our veins as well as in the weathered features of our faces, rainbow hues, Arawak cheekbones, and all textures of hair known to man.

Coming from such a background, transplanted into a Euro-dominated culture, it was a shock then, to find out that the white faces that looked into mine when I was a child were, indeed, white. I assumed, then, that everyone of a lighter hue was a person of color because I had been born to a Haitian mother who, throughout my Canadian childhood, was often taken for white. It was a shock to learn that, in Canada (as in the United States), there is a clear line drawn between those who are of color and those who are considered not to be. It was a shock to be turned away from the next door neighbor's house at age four, to be told by her mother that I could not play with my friend inside her house. The same woman told me later that summer, as she was bronzing herself in the sun, that she wanted to be dark like me. Dark like me? I wondered how she could both envy and loathe me. I thought she was a silly woman then, not understanding that I had had my first encounter with racism. It was in Winnipeg, a prairie city in the middle of the country, that I was to find out categorically what it meant to be black in a country not your own. I was not even ten years old when walking down the street, I could hear young white men muttering under their breaths as they walked by, 'Nigger.' It was a matter of color and it was a matter of pride. How dare a young, brown woman walk down the street and hold up her head high, and smile, and look people in the eye? This is what I did, not knowing I was meant to look down and away and step aside. Not looking away, however, brought me something else I had not expected, the affirmations of other people of color, especially those who were Native American, Indian, or Arab, who often mistook me for one of their own because of my mixed-race features blending African, Arawak, French, and Spanish lineages. Still, general invisibility-social, political, economic-has a way of putting a brown person in her place, no matter how high she holds her head up, how brilliant her smile, no matter how sure her step down a crowded street or way. These were my Canadian lessons. Yet something in me refused to assimilate.

Even as I learned to speak perfect, standard English at the age of ten, shedding my French accent, I remained Haitian to the core, prideful. I found myself isolated in my refusal to blend in, isolated by my knowledge of what colonialism had done to enslaved Africans dispersed throughout the so-called New World, and isolated by my fervent desire to make that knowledge count.

It is this isolation, Aimee, that I most hope you will not have to relive. It is, in a way, an immigrant legacy. I came into the world as one Duvalier regime neared its end and another was just about to begin. At that time, outside (as inside) of Haiti, one had to be careful of who one got close to: It was clear that foreigners were not to be trusted (who knew who might turn a racist eye toward you or when?). Haitians outside of one's immediate family were also suspect (for who knew when something you might say might be said to the wrong person, an ear of the government or some macoutes who could harm you or your family still left behind?). We lived, therefore, in what was initially a chosen isolation in Quebec City prior to 1975, always being careful who was brought close to the family. After 1975 and our move to English Canada, our social isolation was compounded by a language barrier: Initially, we spoke no English. The cocoon in which we lived then had many layers, both cultural and linguistic; isolation became imposed rather than chosen.

Immigration created a shyness in me that was not natural, and I continue to struggle with it to this day. Since my spirit had remained attached to Haiti, and especially to my maternal grandmother, Alice Limousin, my father's stepmother, I knew without being told directly that there were things happening in Haiti that I was being spared. I remember being warned to be careful of what I said on the phone when speaking to relatives in Haiti: The wires could be tapped. I remember an uncle disappearing one day and the phone calls going back and forth between members of the large family network as we prayed that he would be released from Duvalier's jails. We heard about killings and tortures, and I had nightmares that even as far away as Canada, members of Duvalier's secret police could find me just for thinking the wrong thing. Life was like walking on eggshells. Going home was not an option. Neither was assimilating. I had to create a new reality, one that belonged neither to the new world I had been forced to enter nor to my parents' generation. I began to belong to what I often think of as the lost generation: I identified most clearly with cousins some twenty years older than myself who had been there the day I was born, who had grown up in Haiti before leaving the country (those who could) to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Like them, I could not deny my Haitianness, would not take U.S. citizenship even when I, too, eventually migrated, alone, south of the Canadian border (I had become a Canadian citizen at age five). I regarded my Canadian citizenship for what it was, a passport that allowed me to return to Haiti when I wanted, without hassles; it guaranteed my freedom and allowed me to still belong somewhere, even if that somewhere was not home. Canada did not demand that I strip myself of my identity to remain on her shores as I believe America does. And so I remain a part of a generation born in Haiti during the Duvalier years privy to the memories of parents who had been born in the 1930s, long before that regime dawned, and to those grandparents born before and during the turn of the century. This familial memory has given me a safety net when I fear being overwhelmed by an isolation too unfamiliar to be shared by those around me.

I will be thirty this year, but those in my family with whom I best connect are in their forties and fifties. Because of this intergenerational bonding, I feel as if I have eyes at the back of my head: I stand not between two cultures, one Haitian, the other American, but between generations, one belonging to the pre-Duvalier era and the other belonging to the post-Duvalier era. Sometimes it is like standing in a barren no-man's land, but I know that some of us need to be the in-betweens so the gaps will not bleed, so that the discarded will be remembered and the wounds of forgetfulness staunched.

This year also marks a turning point in my life for I have now reached the age of my mother's orphaning. Perhaps this is also one of the reasons I feel compelled to write this letter, Aimee, because I am aware of living on borrowed time, that every opportunity I have to have a disagreement or a moment of understanding with my own mother is a blessing that ended for her in her twenty-ninth year. She had lost her father earlier at age seven. When she was twenty-nine, her mother passed away. Her loss has led me to think deeply about my own relationship to my mother, to her mother, and to you. What survives? What is forever lost?

When I was eight years old, I met my father's grandmother, my great-grandmother. I remember it as the first time we met though this cannot be possible. The woman I met when I was eight years old was nearing a hundred years of age, small-boned, frail. Yet she saw clearly and spoke a Kreyol that seemed to me to be unlike that of my parents; it contained more of Africa in it, more of the rural in it. Because of this, we could hardly communicate; I was afraid of her too, not because she could do me harm physically, but because I could feel her strong spiritual presence. I remember that she had a kenep tree in her front yard, full of the small, green-shelled fruit that became (and remains) my favorite fruit of all. She encouraged my brother and me to grasp handfuls from the old branches and to eat them on the spot.