to have had health attention at all. I had just begun my first job, fresh out of graduate school, as a college professor at a private university in the southern United States. I did not have the time and means to make my way to her side so I wrote to her instead. She did not reply about her pain. As she always did in her letters, she thanked me for thinking of her and wrote of her plans to return to Port-au-Prince for the Christmas holidays. She missed her home. It is clear from the content of the card that she knew her days were numbered. She wrote of how much she loved me. She also wrote advice she had never given me before. A firm believer in the Catholic Church and its teachings, she counseled me to stay close to God. Though I left the Catholic Church at the age of fourteen (objecting to its missionary work in Haiti and other developing countries, sexist hierarchy, and homophobia), I am a strong believer in a greater power. I don't know what form that power takes, but I respect it and I believe I have been able to live up to the spirit of my grandmother's advice if not to its letter. I have faith in the energy that surrounds and guides us in this world. On the back of the card, she tells me that when I need help in the future, to look to my Bible for assistance. I know she wrote this because when I was a child and things in my life were beyond my comprehension, I would write her a few lines, never letting her know exactly what the problem was, but just that I needed some affirmation. Months later, often after I had forgotten the source of my earlier grievance, a letter would appear in response, letting me know that someone in Haiti held my spirit dear and loved me unconditionally despite the distance between us. I knew with finality when I read those lines that she was saying good-bye, just in case, in her own way. She referred me to the Bible, to John: 11. 'There,' she wrote, 'you can read about everything.' I don't know if I turned to that passage then. I don't remember doing so. I may have done so sometime in the haze of the depression that hit me following her death in 1995, three months after I finally had the chance to see her in Haiti, my first trip back to my native land since our family trips had come to an abrupt end in the late seventies. Today, I read this card again, hoping it would provide me with something to pass on to you. And so I turned to John: 11, wondering what was there that could contain the 'everything' Mamie (as I have called her from infancy) wrote about. I found, to my surprise, the story of Lazarus and his resurrection from the dead.
This is how the story goes, Aimee: Lazarus, a close friend of Jesus, was very ill. His sisters sent for Jesus to perform a miracle so that Lazarus would not die. Jesus went to him but by the time he reached Lazarus's home, he had already expired. One of Lazarus's sisters tells him: 'If you had been here, my brother would not have died.' After some discussion, Jesus makes this pronouncement: 'I am the resurrection; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.' After this they enter the tomb of Lazarus, and find the body already in a state of decay. Jesus calls to Lazarus to walk out of the grave and Lazarus emerges, wrapped in his burial cloth, resurrected.
I read this story and realized what my grandmother had been trying to tell me, in the only words she knew inside and out. She was about to die but she believed in a power greater than herself. She knew she would live in an altered state, somewhere removed from the earth-bound, but still with us. Although I have left the Church and I never thought that I would be recounting a biblical story to you in this way, Aimee, I know that my grandmother was wise to point me in this direction. Because the Bible is, like the Torah, the Tao Te Ching, the Koran, and so many others, a sacred text. And although my grandmother did not believe in
Aimee, I am twenty-nine and I have just begun to rise from the ashes of my childhood fears. I was twenty-five when my grandmother passed away and though I had spent most of those years away from her side (seeing her every three or four years), my body is as if tattooed by the imprints of her palms as she bathed me as a child and fed me baby food as I lay between her bosom and arm. Can any touch be more sacred than this? Much has been made of the fact that the body remembers its injuries, its traumas. But what happens to the good touch, especially when that touch occurs early in life, when a child is full of potential and knows nothing of the difficulties of life? I have been thinking that the body must remember such a touch as sacred, and that if one is blessed with it, whatever traumas the body may sustain later on can be more easily overcome. I believe my body remembers its movements in water as my grandmother bathed me as if they were movements in the womb: safe, soundless, magical. I believe that the first touches we experience in life are as sacred as the last ones, the ones that prepare us for the journey home, to Vilokan, Ginen, Dahomey, or to a glorious heaven. I was not there to bathe her in return, to cleanse the feet that had walked many miles for her children and grandchildren, to close the eyelids that had seen more heartbreak in the busy streets of Port-au-Prince daily than most people in developing countries will experience in a lifetime. After she died, part of my own spirit seemed to follow; I felt as if a limb had been taken away; it ached in the absence of her presence. I have come to understand that it was a necessary loss, one that ensured that I would mature in ways that I had not explored because her presence and memory both provided me with the kind of nurture of soul which discouraged my creation of my own sources of sustenance. I was told at her funeral that the day after I had left Haiti, she took to her bed and never rose from it until her death, as if she had just waited for my return and our last encounter. It is enough for me to know that I was there to embrace her, as she had me, in childhood, in the last months of her life. Now that she is gone, something else has come to be in that space of spiritual connectedness that once belonged to us both-a second chance at life, the opportunity to live out the lessons gleaned from observing my grandmother's existence from a distance: how to be a new kind of Haitian woman, one who reveres the old ways and yet knows her own power and is not afraid of putting that power to good use. I am in the fourth year of my own resurrection and every step forward is small but strong.
The great irony of my life is that it is life in exile which has afforded me the luxury of looking back across time, to appreciate all that is Haiti. Living on the outside has enabled me to learn not only about Haiti but about the rest of the African diaspora. As a woman, there are things I have accomplished that I know both of my grand- mothers could not have accomplished in Haiti. No one knows what their dreams might have been, whether one had wanted to be a poet, the other a teacher. They became wives and mothers and their lives were defined by those two words. They sacrificed their personal happiness for their families, never thinking that perhaps they could, by living out those dreams, present them as gifts to their children, especially their female children, as pathways to their own dreams. And yet, it is clear to me that in the strength of their presence in those children's lives, they showed the potential to have accomplished anything they might have set their minds to. They made the most of what they had and this, in itself, makes for a humbling example. Because of their sacrifices, as well as the upheavals in Haiti, I am free in ways that I could not have been there. Yet Haiti remains my compass. How to explain? I think, Aimee, that this, too, will be one of the riddles of your life. But until such time as you may need to consider such a question, I leave you with the parting words of my own grandmother:
With love, your mother,
Myriam Josephe Aimee Chancy
CONTRIBUTORS
Edwidge Danticat is the author of two novels,
Sandy Alexandre was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and is a graduate of Dartmouth College. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in English at the University of Virginia.
