Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States Read Free

recount our silences—as in Leslie Casimir's "Reporting Silence"—and to say good-bye—as in Patrick Sylvain's "Adieu Miles and Good-bye Democracy." However, we are not saying good-bye to a country, but to a notion that as "Dyaspora" we do not own it and it does not own us. At the same time, we are also saying, in the words of Dany Laferriere's essay, "America, We Are Here." And we are not, as Joel Dreyfuss reminds the world in his essay, "A Cage of Words," just people from "the Poorest Nation in the Western Hemisphere," but also people who "have produced great art like that of Ireland and Portugal. . . great writers and scholars like those of Russia and Brazil." And great heroes like Jean Dominique.
    A few weeks before Jean's death, Patrick Dorismond, a Haitian-American man, was gunned down by a New York City police officer in a Manhattan street across the bridge from where another Haitian man, Abner Louima, was beaten, then sexually assaulted in a Brooklyn precinct by a police officer. I ask myself now what Jean— as he inevitably would have had to report these events on his radio program—must have said about these incidents, which so closely resemble the atrocities that Haitians over the years have fled Haiti to escape. It has not been lost on us that of three black men tortured and killed by police in New York in the past two years, two were Haitian. Reading the essays in this book again after these events impels me to think of the many more pages that could be—and will be written—about our experiences as people belonging to the Haitian dyaspora in the United States. But anyone who has ever witnessed a gathering of the likes described by Jean-Pierre Benoit in "Bonne Annee" or Barbara Sanon in "Black Crows and Zombie Girls" knows our voices will not be silenced, our stories will be told.
    In her essay, poet and painter Marilene Phipps writes, "Painting and Poetry are my battlefields. . . 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." In this collection, the writers define themselves as well as the worlds that define them, through tragedies, like the deaths of Jean Dominique and Patrick Dorismond, but also through celebrations like the New York, Boston, and Miami street parades that followed the end of the Duvalier regime in 1986. Or through voices like that of Joanne Hyppolite turning a sometimes dreaded word in her favor, celebrating her "dyaspora" status, reminding us that we are not alone.
    "When you are in Haiti, they call you Dyaspora," writes Hyppolite. "... you are used to it. You get so you can jump between worlds with the same ease that you slide on your nightgown every evening."
    Guapa!

PRESENT PAST FUTURE
    Marc Christophe
    What will I tell you, my son?
    What will I say to you, my daughter?
    You for whom the tropics
    Are a marvelous paradise
    A blooming garden of islands floating
    In the blue box
    Of the Caribbean sea
    What will I tell you
    When you ask me
    Father, speak to us of Haiti?
    Then my eyes sparkling with pride
    I would love to tell you
    Of the blue mornings of my country
    When the mountains stretch out
    Lazily
    In the predawn light
    The waterfalls flowing
    With freshness
    The fragrance of molasses-filled coffee
    In the courtyards
    The fields of sugar cane
    Racing
    In cloudy waves
    Towards the horizon
    The heated voices of peasant men
    Who caress the earth
    With their fertile hands
    The supple steps of peasant women
    On top of the dew
    The morning clamor
    In the plains the small valleys
    And the lost hamlets
    Which cloak the true heart
    Of Haiti.
    I would also tell you
    Of the tin huts
    Slumbering beneath the moon
    In the milky warmth
    Of spirit-filled
    Summer nights
    And the countryside cemeteries
    Where the ancestors rest
    In graves ornate
    With purple seashells
    And the sweet and heady perfumes
    Of basilique lemongrass
    I would love to tell you
    Of the colonial