Create Dangerously

by Edwidge Danticat

  I guess I have always felt, writing about you, that I was in the presence of family, a family full of kindness as well as harshness, a family full of love as well as grief, a family deeply rooted in the past yet struggling to confront an unpredictable future. I felt blessed to have encountered this family of yours, the Cacos, named after a bird whose wings look like flames. I feel blessed to have shared your secrets, your mother’s, your aunt’s, your grandmother’s secrets, mysteries deeply embedded in you, in them, much like the wiry vetiver clinging to the side of these hills.

  I write this to you now, Sophie, because your secrets, like you, like me, have traveled far from this place. Your experiences in the night, your grandmother’s obsessions, your mother’s “tests” have taken on a larger meaning and your body is now being asked to represent a larger space than your flesh. You are being asked, I have been told, to represent every girl child, every woman from this land that you and I love so much. Tired of protesting, I feel I must explain. Of course, not all Haitian mothers are like your mother. Not all Haitian daughters are tested as you have been.

  I have always taken for granted that this story, which is yours, and only yours, would always be read as such. But some of the voices that come back to me, to you, to these hills respond with a different kind of understanding than I had hoped. And so I write this to you now, Sophie, as I write it to myself, praying that the singularity of your experience be allowed to exist, along with your own peculiarities, inconsistencies, your own voice. And I write this note to you, thanking you for the journey of healing—from here and back—that you and I have been through together, with every step wishing that both our living and our dead will rest in peace.

  May these words bring wings to your feet,

  Edwidge Danticat

  Summer 1999

  Our last two days in Beauséjour proceed like most reunions, with the awe of reconnecting with a loved one slowly being replaced by daily routine. Uncle Joseph and Nick lose themselves in the details of the school while Tante Ilyana and I talk less and less, to avoid, I suspect, speaking of separation. There are already so many separations in our family, constant departures and returns. We cannot afford to curse or avoid these exits and migrations, however, because they have earned us whatever type of advancement we have made. Tante Ilyana’s son Renel, for example, had to spend most of his life away from her in order to become a dentist, while her daughter Jeanne, who stayed behind with her, died an agonizing and prolonged death, showing Tante Ilyana that some departures are inevitable, which is why Jeanne’s children now live in the capital with their father’s relatives and visit Beauséjour only in the summer.

  The night before we are to leave, I am lying on my back in the bed where Tante Ilyana’s husband used to sleep, listening to her chatter in her sleep. Mid-dream, she laughs and makes promises. “Listen,” she says. “Come back soon. I’ll send you coffee.”

  In the dark, I imagine that from here she can talk to all of us across these long distances, to my father, her parents, my brothers, and their children. And while I am making this silent invocation, Tante Ilyana awakens herself from yet another dream and whispers from across the room, “Edwidge, are you sleeping?

  I say, “No. But it is not you who is keeping me awake.”

  It is the mountains maybe, it being so quiet here at night that you hear everything, the swing of every tree branch, the bubbling of the stream, the footsteps of night travelers and wandering animals. And I listen for everything because I know it won’t always be so. I listen too closely and sometimes the listening gets too loud.

  The next morning as we are preparing to leave, Tante Ilyana presents me with a three-pound sack of coffee beans to bring to my father in Brooklyn.

  “When he has a taste of this coffee,” she says, “it will bring him home.”

  I marvel at the magic of this coffee of which Tante Ilyana is so certain. What if such a thing did exist, an elixir against fading memories, a panacea to evoke images of spaces lost to us, to instantly return us home. I thank Tante Ilyana for the coffee on my father’s behalf by telling her a story, something I knew about him and she didn’t. I tell her of going with my father to a Chinese herbalist in New York who was treating him for psoriasis and of the Chinese herbalist telling my father to stop drinking coffee or he would never be cured. And of my father saying, “Doctor, there must be another way,” because he would never give up coffee. And in one of those strange crossed-wire moments, my story gives Tante Ilyana pause, and she says that perhaps she shouldn’t send the coffee to my father if it means that he’d have psoriasis forever. I must convince her to give me the coffee again, and finally she does.

  The next morning at five a.m., we start out, Uncle Joseph, Nick, and I, for our journey down the mountain. Our plan is to be halfway down by eleven a.m., before the sun gets too high in the sky, making it too hot to walk without fainting. We will stop briefly for lunch at the house of a friend of my uncle’s and then hike the rest of the afternoon, which would mean that we’d be in Port-au-Prince around seven or eight in the evening.

  The trip up took us two days, but Nick and Uncle Joseph assure me that it will be faster going down since we are not stopping for the night. Besides, with gravity it is always easier to descend than to climb, even with a three-pound sack of coffee in my backpack.

  My way of saying good-bye is always the same. I pretend that later in the day or the next day or the day after I will see the person to whom I am bidding farewell. It is the only way I can endure separations, large and small, without becoming totally incapacitated with sadness. Tante Ilyana’s way is more abrupt and formal and perhaps healthier. We kiss each other on the cheek as she lists the names of all the family members in New York to whom I should give her regards. She and Jeanne’s boys walk with us for a mile or so and then they stop walking and we continue on.

  The journey down is, as my cousin and uncle predicted, much easier. Rather than walk in a straight line, I zigzag through the difficult roads, forming invisible Zs with my feet all over the mountain roads, which is, my uncle tells me, the way the peasants climb and descend these mountains with relative ease. This is why they don’t look as tired and burdened as I do when I finally reach Dabonne and climb with great relief into my cousin’s open-backed truck. That and the fact that they are used to it, my uncle says. “If you did this often enough you too would get used to it.”

  I begin to worry about Tante Ilyana on the car ride back to the capital, imposing on her life visions of extreme comforts that are lacking even in mine. I imagine her having her own helicopter in which to travel to and from the market. I think of her bypassing the stream baths for a Jacuzzi. I see her on vacation, visiting the Statue of Liberty, Disney World, the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower. By some standards, she’s seen little of the world, but perhaps, I tell myself, her world is larger than all of these places. I remind myself that at least she has a simple life, which I have at different times attempted to replicate in arbitrary ways, by not buying too many clothes, too much furniture. At the same time, Tante Ilyana’s life seems far from simple. Her vocation is nothing less than to maintain our family’s physical legacy, to guard a very small house in the ancestral village, to sustain a faraway world to which we could return, if we wanted to, and find traces, however remote and faint, of who we are.

  When I find out a year later that Tante Ilyana is dead, I am at my parents’ house babysitting my sixteen-month-old nephew Ezekiel, who had recently learned to run. It is no longer easy to keep Ezekiel still on my lap during serious conversations, as he wants to use his newly discovered mobility as much as possible: by skipping from spot to spot, from my father’s knees to mine, from the living room sofa to the window curtains to the television set, which, with his safety in mind, we have placed on the floor rather than on a teetering table. Ezekiel is also exercising his newly discovered oral abilities by shouting nonsensical words, and my father must compete with him as he says, “I had a call from Haiti just now and the
y told me Ilyana died.”

  The grief on my father’s face is clouded with logistical figurations. It had taken a whole day for news of the death to travel to Port-au-Prince and then by telephone to us, which means that Tante Ilyana’s funeral has already taken place. Attending is not even an option.

  Ezekiel shrieks with pride when he finally succeeds in turning on the television set by himself, and I’m grateful for the distraction, for having to run and save him from discoveries for which I fear he’s not ready.

  Ezekiel squirms as I hold him in my lap and try to quiet him down, and I find in my efforts to keep him still—whispering his name in his ear, promising him sweets he’d never get, singing the alphabet song he loves so much—that he is the one who is momentarily saving my father and me from our sadness.

  There is little to say, or neither my father nor I can find the words, so I offer a confession instead. This revelation also seems to interest young Ezekiel as he watches my trembling lips.

  I tell my father that on the last day of my visit to Beauséjour, Tante Ilyana had given me three pounds of coffee for him, coffee that had been confiscated as “illegal agricultural transport” by customs officers at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. I hadn’t told him about the coffee previously for fear that he would needlessly mourn something that in the end he’d never have. There is perhaps more I want to confess, but I know these disclosures will also not help with his sorrow or mine. I should have stayed much longer in Beauséjour, spoken more to Tante Ilyana. I should have pretended I was the journalist she believed me to be, asked her many more questions about the family, about herself. I shouldn’t have seen the visit as routine, as my uncle and cousin, who were then living in Haiti, had. I should have foreseen that it might be the last time I’d see Tante Ilyana. After all, she was old and far away. But all these regrets might have been as painful to ponder then in the mountains as they are now.

  “You should have told me about the coffee,” my father says, while reaching over and rescuing Ezekiel from my tight grasp. “We sure need that coffee now.”

  We certainly could have used it that day, Tante Ilyana’s magic elixir, to help us remember and forget.

  After managing to hold Ezekiel still for a while, my father puts him back on the floor. Ezekiel runs from us and immediately returns to the TV set, which he turns on again with glee. He stands there and stares in awe at the eye-level faces on the screen, and then trots over to touch them. He seems heartbroken to discover that the people are flat and cannot respond to him. Then he steps back and walks back to my father, grabbing his knee and burying his face in his pant leg.

  As my father strokes young Ezekiel’s head, consoling his brief frustration, I realize that my way of saying good-bye, at least to Tante Ilyana, would never again be the same. I could no longer pretend that later in the day, or the next day, or even the following year I would ever see her or hear her call me a jounalis again.

  CHAPTER 3

  I Am Not a Journalist

  I began writing this essay on Monday, April 3, 2000, the morning that one of Haiti’s most famous journalists, the radio commentator Jean Dominique, was assassinated. That morning, I awakened to a series of alarming phone calls, the first simply reporting a rumor that Jean might have been shot while arriving at his radio station, Radio Haiti Inter, at six-thirty that morning for the daily news and editorial program he coanchored with his wife, Michèle Montas. The next few callers declared for certain that Jean had been shot: seven bullets in the head, neck, and chest. The final morning calls finally confirmed that Jean was dead.

  The following hours would slip by in a haze as I went to teach my classes at the University of Miami, where I was a visiting professor that spring. When I came back to my office that afternoon, there were still more phone calls and e-mails from relatives, friends, and acquaintances, who could not believe what had happened. In those real and virtual conversations, the phrase that emerged most often was “Not Jean Do!”

  During the varying lengths of time that many of us had known Jean Dominique—either as a voice on Haitian radio or in person—we had all come to think of him as heroically invincible. After all, he had survived the Duvalier dictatorship, during which his older brother Philippe had been murdered while participating in yet another failed invasion attempt to topple François Duvalier by taking over the military barracks across the street from Duvalier’s residence at the national palace.

  Unlike his brother, Jean had survived several arrests and their resulting exiles, and had lived to return to Haiti to open and reopen his radio station, where being the owner and director allowed him a kind of autonomy that few hired journalists could manage in a volatile political climate. Jean had expressed his opinions freely, seemingly without fear, criticizing groups as well as individuals, organizations, and institutions who’d proven themselves to be inhumane, unethical, or simply unjust. Of course, Jean’s life was too multifaceted and complex to fully grasp and make sense of in these very early hours so soon after his death. What seemed undeniably compelling and memorable about him at that moment was his exceptional passion for Haiti and how that passion had finally betrayed him.

  I couldn’t sort out fully, under this full assault of memories, the exact moment when I had met Jean Dominique. As a child in Haiti, I had heard his voice on the radio many times, sometimes blaring from ours or neighboring houses at the highest possible volume. As an adult in New York, I had seen him at so many different Haiti-related gatherings that I can’t even pinpoint our first in-person meeting. I do, however, remember the first time we had a lengthy conversation. It was at an art exhibit at Ramapo College in 1994. The exhibit was curated by our mutual friend, the filmmaker Jonathan Demme, and featured three emerging Haitian artists. The night of the exhibit, Jean was in exile yet again, after some U.S.-trained colonels leading the Haitian military had deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and had raided and destroyed Jean’s radio station. The night of the art exhibit, Jean and I talked at length about the strikingly colorful paintings on display and the extreme nostalgia that they evoked in him, the hunger to return to his home and his radio station in Haiti as soon as he could.

  A few weeks later, Jonathan Demme asked Jean and me to work with him on a project about the history of Haitian cinema. Every week, the three of us would meet on the Ramapo College campus to discuss Haitian cinema while some communications students watched and videotaped us. I said very little at those sessions, feeling rather shy sitting between two obsessive cinephiles. My job was to find prints of the films that we could discuss. Jean’s was to help us all understand them by putting them in context as Jonathan questioned him about technique, content, and style.

  During the dictatorship, in the early 1960s, a young Jean had created a cinema club, hosting weekly screenings at the Alliance Française in Port-au-Prince. There he showed films such as Federico Fellini’s La Strada, which is, among other things, about a girl’s near enslavement as a circus performer.

  “If you see a good film correctly,” Jean said, “the grammar of that film is a political act. Every time you see Fellini’s La Strada, even if there is no question of fascism, of political persecution, you feel something against the black part of life.”

  Another favorite of his was the Alain Resnais documentary Night and Fog, which describes the horrors of concentration camps. “To us, Auschwitz was Fort Dimanche,” he said, referring to the Duvalier-era dungeonlike prison where thousands of Haitians were tortured and killed.

  In 1964, the year Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin were executed, the Ciné Club was shut down by the Haitian military after a screening of Night and Fog at the Alliance Française. Jean then briefly turned to filmmaking, codirecting and narrating a short tongue-in-cheek documentary, Mais je suis belle (But I Am Beautiful), about a Haitian beauty pageant. This was, it is said, one of the first films made by Haitians in Haiti.

  The task of finding the prints for the Haitian films being discussed in our Ramapo History of Haitian Cinema c
lass proved herculean, as many of the filmmakers, including Jean, had lost track of their own prints during nomadic lives in exile. In our videotaped sessions, however, each time we’d mention a film title to Jean, he would proceed to describe at length not only the plot of the film but also extensive details of the method of its distribution and the political framework surrounding it. The film Anita, for example, made by Jean’s contemporary Rassoul Labuchin, told the story of a servant girl who is abused by the city relative to whom she’d been given by her peasant parents.

  According to Labuchin, during the Ciné Club days, Jean had held conferences for aspiring filmmakers, encouraging them to view the seventh art as being essential to the majority of Haitians, particularly those who could not read. The most recent studies suggest that only about 56 percent of Haitians are literate. The actual figure is probably lower than that if one defines literate as, for example, being able to read an entire book. Perhaps this is why the visual arts have flourished in Haiti. Painters do not necessarily need to know how to read or write. This is what Jean had hoped filmmakers would do with film—make it, like radio and painting, a medium that would be not only open and available but also welcoming to those who were shut off from other means of information communication and entertainment. “Jean asked us to develop screenplays,” Labuchin would later say, “that meant something to the Haitian people.”

  During our Haitian cinema class, Jean told us how he and Labuchin had traveled together with Labuchin’s film, Anita, screening it throughout the Haitian countryside to discourage peasants from giving their children away to better-off families in the city. The film, which begins as a harshly realistic treatise on the restavèk child labor system in Haiti, ends as a musical fantasy in which the child servant is rescued by a pale Haitian woman who becomes the girl’s fairy godmother.