Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (12 page)

Dear Daddy,
I am told many black women are attracted to men who are the opposite of their fathers. But I don't believe this because I think you and I are so much alike. You are my most treasured model of humanity—loving and complex. No kind of man represents stability or real love better or worse than you do. Just like you, I've always wanted family and community to see me how I want to be seen. So I have unpacked a bit of my emotional baggage. Above are some things about me I want you to learn. I don't doubt that you accept me, I have never worried much about the world doing so. Thank you for letting me be myself.

MASHE PETYON

Katia Ulysse

It's been seven years since I have been home. I would run a thousand miles now to reach that man who sits on his little wooden stool, day after day, under the scorching Haitian sun, to sell his art in order to buy more supplies with which to quench the undeniable thirst in his heart. Under the cacophony of shrill voices and riotous laughter at Mashe Petyon, the marketplace at the center of Petionville, the artist would spend hours watching the vendors and their customers haggling over the price of sugar and bread. Then, with unchallenged genius, he would wave his brushes across the canvas to capture their movements: the fine lines around the women's eyes, the tiny beads of sweat on their brows.

It would thrill me to join those three sun-baked women, barefoot in one of his paintings, as they wash their clothes in a placid brook surrounded by gigantic
mapou
trees and emerald shrubs. I should have been there, at that perfect moment, when the artist painted blue-and-gold water that made concentric circles around and around the women's ankles, the skirts twisted to one side and tucked into waists to stay dry. Only the heartbreaking melodies of Pierre Cine's acoustic guitar could describe the emotions invoked by the way the scarves are wrapped around the women's heads in hibiscus greens, yellows, and reds.

I would give anything to place my bare hands on the majestic coconut tree that dominates the canvas; its deep green leaves reaching toward the cloudless blue sky, streaked at the horizon with purple, saffron, and amber. At the heart of the shrubs looms the painted shadow of nightfall. Atop it all is a single hut that has one window, one door, and an unseen breeze that gives the thatched roof a permanent sway above which seven black birds hover. Forever.

My friend, who just returned from Haiti, tells me there are few trees left in the mountains; no more lush shrubbery. She says the brooks are parched, leaving rocks buried beneath burning heaps of refuse and mud. The roads are narrow and jagged; many lead to nowhere, and the stench in the streets surrounding Petionville's cemetery is unbearable.

It's been seven years since I have seen my home. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I envision myself lying on the naked earth inside of my great-grandmother's
peristil,
a modest structure of concrete and clay. The walls of the main room are murals dedicated to ancestors and various
lwas,
the memories of whom must never fade. To the right is Our Lady of Czestochowa; the black virgin has three vertical scars on her cheek. She is holding a child. "That is Ezili," my great-grandmother told me in a hushed voice. "She is the vengeful mother. She will leave you alone as long as you don't bother her child. But touch her child the wrong way, and you will pay." Then my great-grandmother began to sing the same little song I catch myself humming sometimes: "Ezili, they say you eat people. How many have you eaten? Those who speak well, my eyes will protect. Those who speak ill, I will devour."

To the left is a mural of Saint Gerard in his clerical dress. He is standing next to a skull and white lilies on a table. My great- grandmother pointed to that wall and said, "That is Gede." Then she sang a different song: "When they need me, they say I am Gede; when they don't want me, they say I am garbage ..."

Those melodies will never escape from my memory.

"There are many, many
lwas,"
my great-grandmother told me. "Each one has a special song." She taught me the names of all the spirits and sang their songs so that I would pass that knowledge to my own great-grandchildren one day.

Today I live in Washington, D.C., thousands of miles and an ocean away from that
peristil,
from the
lwas,
the spirits, and images that inspired my great-grandmother's songs. But sometimes I find myself on that dirt floor and feel the grains of three hundred years against my skin. I see the rainbow of sequined flags decorating the walls and the center altar, covered with calabash bowls, oil lamps, and layers of candle wax that congealed in labyrinthine patterns. Sun rays filter through the holes in the tin roof, dust spirals heavenward; an avalanche of dreams buries me on that dirt floor, and I am born again.

I see the room that my great-grandmother had forbidden me to enter. I was five years old, holding her big hand, feeling safe among the marred faces of old women out of whose throats ancient chants soared above the flames of bonfires that burned for days to the relentless
Kongo
beat of goatskin drums. The elders agreed my eyes were much too young to view the secret room of souls and uncertain crossroads.

The last time I was home I went into that room. My great-grandmother had been dead for years; I felt that I had her permission somehow. The mystery quickly unfolded before my eyes. I had imagined that there would be more substantial things than the altars of cracked cement upon which stood small clay jars covered in layers of orange-colored dust, pieces of deteriorating fabric and broken black and red bead necklaces. The room itself was decaying. Several aluminum plates and containers made from dried calabash shells still bore the traces of disintegrated offerings: corn, sweets, yams and
malanga
just like they sold at Mashe Petyon, a picture of which hangs on my living-room wall.

It has been seven years since I have been home, but I visit Mashe Petyon every morning when I get out of bed with the scarf still tied around my head that keeps my dreams from falling. I look at the wall in my apartment and there they are: an ocean of black women squatting before their wide wicker baskets, their colorful skirts tucked between their legs. These women chatter among themselves, arguing and laughing with sheer abandon.

Sometimes, if the night before was easy, I'm right in there with them laughing as the morning sun travels across the sky, across the straw roof, along my black skin. I rest my head against the wall the way the sugarcane leans against the poles that hold the tent up above the marketplace and keep the invisible lines that divide secure. I know these women who sell bright yellow plastic plates, aluminum skillets, dried codfish, fried plantain, and charcoal. I recognize every one of their faces. Even when the painter exaggerates their features and makes their limbs like giraffes', I get inside the wooden frames and haggle with them the way my great-grandmother did when she took me along to buy the sugar she would sprinkle over sliced tomatoes for breakfast. With a hand cocked on her hip, a serious tone of voice, and steady vigilance in her smoky age-grayed eyes, she would ask for fifty cents' worth of oil, spices, a cup of rice, a pound of beef, and two eggplants to prepare the white-rice-and-legume supper.

It's been a lifetime since I was the little girl-child who sat on the porch at twilight with my great-grandmother, Madan Deo, to listen to her stories about women who shed their skin and took to the skies during the darkest hours of night. Madan Deo told me about the tall man who roamed the streets at midnight and spoke to no one.
Met Minwi
was his name, Master of Midnight. I always sat at her knees and faced her so that I would not have to look at the shadows which our little cotton tree threw onto the unpaved road. Shadows and the lamplight often resulted in such a macabre duet.

"Tim tint?"
she would say before telling me a riddle.

"Bwa sech,"
I would answer, giving up quickly because my efforts to solve her riddles would rob me of the chance to hear more of the stories that her own grandmother must have told her. I wish I had asked her why she kept the old dress in which her mother, Madan Zepherin, had died. That dress hung on the wall for many years like a favorite picture.

One night, Madan Deo looked right past me toward the street beyond the porch and said,
"Tim tim?"

Before I could answer, my great-grandmother stood and walked into the house. She said something about getting a cup of water and that she would return soon. She closed the door behind her to keep the insects from flying inside. Time went by and she did not return. I went to the door and tried to open it. It was locked.

"Bwa sech."
I cried.

I turned to look at the dark road beyond the porch. The long shadow lingering at the foot of the porch told me that someone was there. I pounded on the door and called out to Madan Deo.
"Bwa
sech.
Let me in. I give up. I am afraid."

It has been a lifetime since I was the little girl-child who huddled in the corner of the porch hiding and hoping that
Met Minwi
would not see me. I dared not breathe. The shadow waited at the porch. It had a pulse. Someone was there. 1 dared not look. I wanted to run inside the house, where Madan Deo would keep me safe throughout the night even if a hundred flying, skinless
lougawous
fell through the tin roof.

I opened my eyes for a brief moment. The long shadow stood still from behind the cotton tree—a few feet from where I was. I covered my eyes again and held my breath.

"Tim tim?"
Madan Deo asked.

At last, she had come to save me. I took her hand and tried to pull her into the house. She shook me loose and told me, as she had done many times before,
"Dyab pe dyab; dyab pa manje dyab."
She told me there was nothing in this world to fear.
Devils fear one another
but one cannot destroy the other without destroying himself.
I looked into the street and saw the long shadow inching away. It passed before the porch but I did not see him.

"I wanted you to see him," my great-grandmother whispered. "I wanted you to see him the way Madan Zepherin made me see him. Because until you look him in the eye and learn that you can still survive, you will always be afraid of something in this life."

It's been seven years since I walked by the melting black candles and plates of food offerings at the shrine of Baron Lakwa on the way to visit my great-grandmother's grave at Petionville's cemetery. I thought of the stories Madan Deo recounted about Baron, a
lwas
who stands guard at the crossroads between this life and the other. I thought about the Gede, the spirit that danced in my grandmother's head. They say Gede Nimbo, the protector of children, was her favorite. One of the rooms in the
peristil
was dedicated to him. When I held her hand as a child, during the ceremonies, people often called her Papa Gede. And they would point at me and say, "That child is Gede's granddaughter."

"Devils may fear one another," I can hear Madan Deo say from beyond, "but one cannot destroy the other." And I wonder . . .

Had I not covered my eyes on that warm night so long ago, I would not wake up every morning in search of shadows between the brushstrokes of a painter's version of Mashe Petyon. And perhaps I would not be so afraid to go home today.

POUR WATER ON MY HEAD:
A
MEDITATION ON A LIFE OF PAINTING
AND POETRY

Marilene Phipps

GAME OF HEARTS

We all know that to live is to fight. There are two kinds of battles: the ones life demands of us, and the ones we demand of life. Painting and Poetry are my battlefields. And to be honest, I don't know whether they are what I demand of life or what life demands of me: There are days when it is clear that it doesn't make a bit of difference in the world whether I do the work or not—and those days are like rain upon fire—and there are days when it seems clear I have a life mission—and those are wind in the sail.

To me, painting and poetry are living entities, at times unconscious ones, who relate to each other and to me like people in a "relationship"—living parallel lives that occasionally, and hopefully often, intersect intensely and meaningfully, all the while preserving the potential to remain fully independent of each other.

Becoming a painter and a poet had not been a planned, carefully thought-out affair. This persona crystallized after much "meandering." In the years before going to Philadelphia for an MFA at Penn, I had been an undergraduate student in anthropology at Berkeley. It was then that I returned to Haiti and began research in the
Vodou
religion. I wanted to understand the mysterious hushed stories of my childhood. I became initiated.

During this return to Haiti I began to paint. The paintings of that period were probably my first ones to express a kind of exile, a longing for an internal, mythical Haiti—my paradise lost.

WAITING FOR PRAYER

It is clear that all art forms share the same technical concerns, such as form, composition, texture, rhythm, balance. All art forms share the same need to express mood, vision, ideas, and life experience. All art forms require a constant editing so that harmony and tension can work interestingly together. What fuels the creative process are an individual artist's themes, all of which affect the trademark characteristics by which we recognize a work.

Instant recognizable trademark for me: Haiti! I was born in Haiti and growing up Haitian is most of the worth I have. I feel fortunate because Haiti is a place of rich cultural and visual uniqueness. I am a painter from Haiti and I am proud of it. Yet I am sometimes leery of being called a Haitian painter, because this can become a label used to ghettoize.

HAITIAN PASTORALE

I grew up near water, collected tadpoles at a river where women came to wash themselves, their children, their clothes. Men, too, came to wash, and brought their animals to bathe and drink. Water brings life and is used in rituals to evoke spiritual cleansing, renewal, transition to another world:

. . . Pour water on my head

so the sun might glimmer

on me. It is for hope that God

will pull them up by the hair to heaven . . .

Water is part of my vocabulary of exile and of longing. Houses speak of home lost and rebuilt; they shelter the body's memory of life, of dreams, and of God. Doors suggest and allow passages. Windows offer vision, the lure of light, outward or inward.

CARIBBEAN COLLAGE

With my work I try to take people to Haiti—the place where I was born, where I grew up, where my sensibility was formed, my first impressions made. And I take people inside of Haiti, beyond the exotic facade of blue sky, palm trees, beaches, bright colon, and smiling natives; beyond politically disheveled Haiti, economically depressed Haiti, international-aid Haiti, brandishing-sticks-and-machetes Haiti, boat-people Haiti; beyond the America-has-had-enough-of-these-unruly-blacks kind of Haiti. I take people into Haiti's depth, its originality, its richness, its source of strength and creativity, its heart, psyche and soul, its religion, its
Vodou.

I have often been asked how I can paint such a luminous, exuberant and bright Haiti when all news about Haiti abounds with accounts of the distress of Haitians, and particularly that of the boat people. My response is that I am not an illustrator for
Newsweek.
I am an artist. I don't have to focus on the same events journalists are meant to report. Yes, Haiti is poor and suffers from terrible economic and sociopolitical problems. But that is not all that Haiti is. If either painting or poetry can be seen as a form of prayer, one could say that the brightness in my images is a prayer for Haiti itself. Praying for the color of light is what I am able to do for Haiti with my work as well as challenge the multitude of negative stereotypes the world has been taught about its people.

PRAYER HOUSE

Unique in so many ways, Haiti is the place of another kind of prayer house. Everything in Haiti is permeated by the complex world of
Vodou.
It is the essential filter and fabric of Haitian culture. When I enter the myths and religion of Haiti, I enter a world of exquisite lyrical imagination and freedom, yet of exacting, elaborate, and minutely structured rituals created only to allow timeless wisdom and intelligence to reveal itself to us in spirit possession.
Vodou's
spirits are gathered and ordered within specific families, numbers of which are recognized by and 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.

POUR WATER ON MY HEAD

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.