Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (17 page)

Becoming a teacher has been therapeutic for me, helping me to feel more comfortable in my skin. This has helped me to foster confidence and self-esteem in elementary-age students, particularly black students. As a result of working with young people who have greater obstacles to face than the shade of their skin, I am more concerned with preparing children to gain a keener understanding of social problems inherent in all societies—intolerance, war, illiteracy, hunger, poverty, health issues, environmental troubles, abuse, and violence. Every day as I stand before these students, my greatest hope is that they will learn to see beyond stereotypes and misconceptions, respecting each other for who they are as human beings.

HOME IS

Sophia Cantave

I've thought about going home, collapsing into my mother's arms and asking
her, without speaking, to comfort me, to tell me that the bad world won't get
me. But I know that if I go home
—
yeah, she'll hold me for a few seconds, but
then she'll let out a sigh, with that look in her eyes, that look of decades of
working, and worrying and she'll say, "Daughter, since you've been
gone
..."
beginning her own narrative before I can say,
"Manman,
I'm
tired of being alone. I don't speak their language. They don't understand
me." But then I would remember that our vocabulary never included words to
explain my loneliness or my sense of fear and if I suddenly started crying because
of an unspeakable loss, she would offer to do whatever she could to make
me "happy" again. In the end I would say "I'm fine really. That was nothing.
I'm just tired." In this way, our vocabulary never expanded. I would
take a deep breath and suck in the tears, the fear, the reason why I came home
in the first place, and listen to her instead. Afterward, I would prepare to go
back to the world, still feeling lost and alone despite her promise to pray for me
and a reminder to keep the Notre Dame amulet on me always. I would go
back into the world with the overwhelming desire to turn around and say
"Manman,
I still don't speak their language." But home and my mother's
arms were always beyond reach and unable to hold me for very long because we
had never really developed a vocabulary to discuss what was asked of me.

I wrote these words on the back page of Barbara Johnson's
Wake
of Deconstruction
on October 16, 1994, during my first semester in graduate school. Suddenly, in a theory class about language, I found myself without a true language of my own. In previous environments, ones that called for a different English, I had responded by code switching, quickly learning the jargon and hastily falling in line. This was an invaluable skill and one that I knew, even as early as seventh grade, could push me beyond the limitations of Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn—where I grew up the daughter of Haitian immigrants— to the halls of higher learning at Tufts University. Of course, there was a sacrifice. Only years later would I seriously think about what my sacrifice had been: my mother tongue. I wasn't sure if that language was
Kreyol.
I just knew I needed to speak something that had eluded me for years. English was not my mother tongue, but I made myself believe it was. I could not remember a time when I didn't speak English.

II n'y a pas de text.
There is no text. This small French sentence had become all the rage. I had lived with this concept my whole adult life and suddenly I didn't want to anymore.
II n'y a pas de text
seemed to clash with my translation of the French words on the Haitian flag:
L'union fait la force.
In union, there is strength. I set about writing myself into being.

Going through the journals and letters I've written over the years, I see myself expressing over and over the same anxiety about language, the quest to maintain some essential part of myself while shape-shifting and searching for total fluidity. Making simultaneous translations for myself of everything from ways to speak to my mother to the creed on Haiti's flag, I felt myself floating between fragments that I was always rearranging. To keep track of these fragments, I kept journals. I believed then and now that the written word, in whatever form, would ground me and make my fragmented self whole. The words I wrote in my journal were inscribed in secret. These were words I rarely shared with my family, words that I hid even harder once my father asked to know what it was that I was always writing about. I would have had to read it to him and then do the translation. The English that he and my mother had encouraged me to speak and perfect also helped to increase the distance between us.

The truth hit me in theory class one day: I was not just a black girl but a Haitian girl and for the first time I longed for home and home was a bunch of people and a culture I knew by name, accepted at face value, but did not know intimately. Using the back pages of Johnson's
Wake,
I sent a psychic call to my mother, imagining that only she could explain why I didn't speak anybody's language. I sent out the call and heard my own voice ask why I didn't have any way to
speak
to my mother about my loss and all that was tearing at me.

I was not blaming my mother but searching for a mother tongue. I had surprised even myself with the words I'd scribbled out of frustration and fear in the back of Johnson's book. I was admitting that my mother and I did not speak the same language and yet I knew that it was my language barrier, not hers, that kept us from understanding each other. I wanted to find a bridge; I wanted to learn to speak a forgotten tongue.

August 1997 Journal Entry:
I
have always had language issues, have always felt that my voice leaves
too much room for misunderstandings, misinterpretations. Having to
always negotiate when and where to use my voice often left important
things about me unsaid. I think of Billie Holliday with all her problems,
living in fragments, breaking down and whispering "Hush now,
don't explain." Not having to explain myself or create whole new fictions
about who I am or what I want is what I long for, like Billie.

But in my journals I keep trying to explain me, my Haitian family, and our place in this country. Before I started graduate school, my mother asked me when I was going to visit "my country." It took me a moment to realize that she meant Haiti, the place we had all migrated from when I was five years old. Until then, I had never realized that Haiti was a place that people returned to. It was never spoken of except as a place people left or from which they had to be sent for. Rarely did my mother talk about the daughters that she had left behind in Haiti, sisters I remembered vaguely or not at all. All my life, Haiti had seemed an even more distant, mythical place than the lost Africa of African Americans. I never denied being Haitian-born, but it also made sense for me to be considered an African American. After all, Haiti is in the Americas and I am of African descent. Only I knew more about African America than I did about Haiti. In graduate school, I was pursuing formal training in African-American literature, history, and culture. I had mistakenly believed that being Haitian didn't require formal study or inquiry. Haiti was in my name and in my home. Only I kept going farther and farther away from home and I hadn't yet learned how to go back and choose what to hold on to and what to let go of. A crisis was inevitable—and since I had been studying words and language, my crisis came in the classroom. After all those years, I still did not own a particular language. I had to go back to my beginning, yet I didn't want the academic in me to turn my personal dilemma into research. This journey was going to come by way of my mother. I had to humbly step down from my scholarly perch to see what my people could give me—if I asked. To begin fixing my language problem, I had to do the impossible, return home and "step in the same river twice."

I had left home to get a degree and now I wanted to return. I knew it would sound crazy to people who spoke heavily accented English, who often had to ask their children to translate for them or accompany them on appointments that required "good" English. In my family, going back never seemed to be an option. Going back home without a degree was unimaginable. For all my parents' hard work, they needed the children of the new country to do things they'd only dreamed of. I was the first of the new, the fifth child of both my parents but their first together. I had to do more than Fifth Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn allowed and surpass their tentative dreams.

Once I caught myself wondering if my mother ever had dreams that didn't include being the caretaker of a large splintered family. I wondered if she constantly talked to herself like I talked to myself about my future, about the path that I wanted to choose for myself instead of what was expected of me. I was afraid of what I would find out; it was easier to plan in secret for my future than to ask her about her hopes as a girl.

I knew my father conflated U.S. schools with what he remembered of Haitian schools. In his Haiti, school was reserved for the selected few. I knew that my father never forgave his father for forcing him to stop his formal education in order to work. At the beginning of my senior year in high school, out of love and duty, my father had sat me down and said, "Sophia, you can go to whatever college you want."

My heart had contracted and I said "I can?" He took my hand in his and said, "Yes, any college in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, anywhere the bus or the train can take you." My heart had plunged. The world I wanted was bigger than the five boroughs my father offered me.

I'd worked on my applications to faraway colleges at school and forged his and my mother's signatures where necessary. In the spring I received a letter of acceptance from my first choice university in Boston and took that as a sign that I was meant to leave. I'd shared the good news with my teachers and friends. So I wouldn't back out, 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.