Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (24 page)

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:
"La paix de Dieu soit avec toi"
[May the peace of God be with you]. Whatever gods you may believe in, may they protect you and light your way and may you be a light for others as you have always been to me.

With love, your mother,

Myriam Josephe Aimee Chancy

CONTRIBUTORS

Edwidge Danticat is the author of two novels,
Breath, Eyes, Memory,
and
The Farming of Bones,
and a collection of short stories,
Krik?
Krak!,
which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1995. She is also the editor of
The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by
Women and Men of All Colors.

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.

Patricia Benoit is a filmmaker living in New York City.

Jean-Pierre Benoit is Professor of Economics and Law at New York University.

Martine Bury is a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in several publications including
Vibe, Jane, Nylon,
and
The Source.

Jean-Robert Cadet holds a master's degree in French literature and teaches French and American history in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Restavec:
From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American
is his first book.

Anthony Calypso is an actor who writes both fiction and nonfiction. He is a graduate of the MFA program in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College. He is at work on his first novel.

Sophia Cantave is a doctoral candidate in American literature and a lecturer at Tufts University. She is the author of an essay "Who Gets to Create Lasting Images? The Problem of Black Representation in
Uncle Tom's Cabin,"
in
Approaches to Teaching Stowe's Uncle Tom's
Cabin.
She is also author of "Geography, Language, and Hyphens: Felix Morrisseau-Leroy and a Changing Haitian Aesthetic," published in
The Journal of Haitian Studies.

Leslie Casimir is a journalist, currently working in New York City at the
Daily News.

Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author of
Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-
Caribbean Women Writers in Exile
(Temple University Press, 1997) and
Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women
(Rutgers University Press, 1997). Currently residing in Phoenix, Arizona, she is associate professor of English at Arizona State University, Tempe. She is at work on a novel entitled
The Serpent's
C/awand on a literary memoir focusing on Haiti and the Latin Caribbean.

Leslie Chassagne, born in Haiti and raised in New York City since the age of nine, studied art and language in the New York City University system and is currently a teacher at the Young Adult Learning Academy and Hunter College's International Language Institute. He is a poet, painter, and musician and has traveled throughout the Caribbean and Colombia.

Marc Christophe was born in Saint Marc, Haiti. He is professor of French and Caribbean literature at Howard University. This excerpt was adapted from his poem "PRESENT PASSE FUTUR" which was published in his 1988 collection of poetry
Le Pain de L'Exile
(The Bread of Exile).

Joel Dreyfuss is a former senior editor at
Fortune
and a regular contributor to
The Haitian Times.

Phebus Etienne is a poet living in Montclair, New Jersey.

Annie Gregoire is a teacher and an aspiring children's book writer. She teaches second grade at Cush Campus Schools, a private school in Brooklyn, New York. Gregoire received a master's degree in foreign language education at New York University, where she has also done extensive research in cross-cultural studies and children's literature.

Maude Heurtelou is a native of Haiti, where she completed high school. She holds an undergraduate degree from the San Carlos University/ INCAP in Guatemala and a master's degree in public health education. She has written over sixteen nonfiction books in Haitian
Kreyol
and two novels,
Lafami Bonplezi
and
Sezisman,
which have been translated into English. She and her husband, Fequiere Vilsaint, are the founders and publishers of Educavision, a publishing company.

Joanne Hyppolite was born in Haiti. Her family settled in the United States when she was four years old and she grew up in Boston. She has published two popular children's books,
Seth and Samona
(De-lacorte Press, 1995), which won the Marguerite DeAngell Prize for New Children's Fiction and
Ola Shakes It Up
(Delacorte, 1998). Her fiction addresses the Haitian-American experience.

Dany Laferriere was born in Haiti, where he practiced journalism under Duvalier. He went into exile in Canada in 1978; soon after, he began working on his first novel
How to Make Love to a Negro,
which became an instant bestseller in both the original French and in English and was made into a feature film. He now divides his time between Montreal and Miami.

Marie-Helene Laforest currently makes her home in Italy, where she teaches postcolonial literatures at the Instituto Universitario Orientale, Naples.

Francie Latour is a journalist, currently working at
The Boston Globe.

Danielle Legros Georges is a writer living in Boston. Her work has been anthologized in
The Beacon Best of 1999.

Miriam Neptune, age twenty-three, was born in the United States and raised in Los Angeles. She has taken an active interest in Haiti/ U.S. relations since the start of the 1991 coup, and hopes to produce documentary work on this subject. She is now a graduate student in New York University's Media and Culture program.

Nikol Payen received her B.A. in journalism from SUNY New Paltz and her MFA in creative nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College. She was an assistant editor at
Essence Magazine,
where her writing has been featured. Other publications where her work has appeared include
The Daily News Caribbeat, The Crab Orchard Review, Third
World Viewpoint, New World,
and a host of newsletters. Currently she is a professor of public speaking at Kingsborough Community College and is working on her forthcoming book,
Something in the
Water.

Marilene Phipps is a painter and poet. Author of
Crossroads and Unholy
Water,
a collection of poetry published by Southern Illinois University Press, she is the winner of
The Crab Orchard Review
Poetry Prize and the Grolier Poetry Prize. She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Harvard's Bunting Institute, and the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions. Her paintings have been exhibited in gallery and museum shows in Haiti, the United States, and throughout the world.

Garry Pierre-Pierre is the publisher and founder of
The Haitian
Times.
He has worked as a reporter for
The New York Times
and
The
Sun Sentinel.

Marie Nadine Pierre is currently living in Miami, Florida. She is a doctoral candidate in the Comparative Sociology Department at Florida International University. Her dissertation will examine issues of body, foods, and dress for Haitian women in the Miami area.

Assotto Saint, (ne Yves Lubin) was born in Haiti in 1957. He moved to New York in 1970 and was a performer with the Martha Graham Dance Company for many years. His
nom de guerre,
Assotto Saint, is derived from the combination of the name of a
Vodou
drum and that of Haitian Independence leader Toussaint Louverture, one of his heroes. An AIDS activist, he died in 1994, when he was thirty-seven years old.

Barbara Sanon is a Haitian-American filmmaker living in New York City.

Patrick Sylvain was born in Port-au-Prince Haiti and immigrated to the United States in 1981. He works as a bilingual education teacher in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in several literary magazines, including
Callaloo, The Caribbean Writer, Compost, Agni,
and
Ploughshares
as well as in the anthology
The Beacon Best of 1999.
He is the author of several books of poetry in Haitian
Kreyol,
including
Mazakwa, Zanzet,
and
Twoket Lavi.

Marie Ketsia Theodore-Pharel, born in Haiti, currently lives in Jupiter, Florida, with her infant daughter and husband and teaches at West Palm Beach Community College.
I'll Fly Away,
her first picture book, was published in 1999 by Educavision Publishing Company. Her short stories have been published in magazines. "The Mango Tree" appeared in
Compost
magazine in 1994; "Soup Joumou: Diary of a Mad Woman," in 1996; and "Light Chocolate Child," in
African Homefront
in 1995.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot is the author
of Peasants and Capital: Dominion
in the World Economy
and
Haiti, State Against Nation: The
Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism.
"Looking for Columbus" is the epilogue from his book
Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of
History,
published by Beacon Press in 1996.

Gina Ulysse was born in Haiti in 1966. When she was twelve, her family migrated to the East Coast of the United States. In 1991, she earned a B.A. in English and Anthropology at Upsala College in New Jersey. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1999. She is currently assistant professor of African-American Studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, as well as a committed social activist and spoken-word artist.

Katia Ulysse lives in Washington, D.C. "Mashe Petyon" is part of a book manuscript inspired by her collection of Haitian art.

Babette Wainwright is a licensed psychotherapist and a painter. She has lived in Madison, Wisconsin, since 1985.

GLOSSARY

Aba Ouvalier
Down with Duvalier!

akra
malanga fritter (malanga: edible root)

andeyo/peyi andeyo
the Haitian provinces, the countryside, home of the Haitian peasantry

bal
dance party

bannann peze
sliced and pressed fried plantains

blan
white person, but also used to refer to foreigners in general

bonnanj
soul, basic life source

Bouki/Malis
opposite characters in Haitian folktales-(Bouki the fool and Malis the shrewd)

Bwa chech
dry wood, also used as a reply in riddles to the interjection (Tim, tim!)

boulet
meatballs

diri kole
rice and beans cooked together

djondjon
black mushrooms primarily used in a rice dish

dous
sweet confection, often with the consistency of fudge

egare
lost, dumb, confused

granme
grandmother

griyo
fried pork

gwayabel
light embroidered shirt worn primarily by men

kremas
a sweet coconut and milk-based liqueur

kenep
Spanish limes

ki jan ou ye?
how are you?

kivet
washbasin

kolon
colonist

konpe
friend, pal, also godfather of someone's child

konpa
variety of modern popular dance music

kouzen
cousin

I ap mode ou
It will bite you

lavil
the city, downtown

leve mo
raising the dead

lougawou
woman who is human by day and vampire by night

lwa
spirit of the
Vodou
religion

madansara
tradeswoman, vendor, merchant

manman
mother

mapou
large tree with magic powers according to popular belief

marenn
godmother .

marasa
twins, also
Vodou
spirit

matant
aunt

matinet
a whip constructed with a piece of wood at the end of which are attached thin leather strips

mayi moulen
cornmeal dish

mesye sara
a male variation of madansara. Not very commonly used, but used here to indicate that some males now do participate in the intricate trade and travel network of local and international madansaras

mesi
thank you

mizik rasin
modern music influenced by
Vodou
and
ram

monnonk
uncle

moun
person, human being

m pa pi mal
I am fine, literally "not doing so bad"

mwen menm
I, as for myself, as far as I am concerned

parenn
godfather

pen patat
sweet potato-based desert

peristil
place of worship in
Vodou

pikliz
a hot relish often made with hot peppers, chopped cabbage, vegetables and vinegar

pwa
beans

rara
an informal musical band parading

restavek
unpaid child servant often treated as the slaves were in colonial time

san manman
motherless, used pejoratively to insult someone displaying bad behavior

tchaka
dish of cornmeal with beans and meat

ti
little, often used before someone's name to form a nickname

Tim, tim!
interjection used before posing a riddle

vagabon
rascal, shameless person

vaksin
musical instrument made out of bamboo reed

veve
ritual design traced on ground of
Vodou
worship places to invoke a specific spirit

Yanvalou
dance or
Vodou
rhythm

French Words

certificat
state exam at the end of elementary school

gourde
Haitian currency

G riots
storytellers in West Africa

gendarme
policeman, a member of the Haitian Army until 1995