About the author
My mother might call a loved one and settle a dispute, explain, or apologise. My father would reminisce or advise, telling long stories from which he hoped my brothers and I would learn important lessons, to pass on to our children and they to theirs.
One of my father’s stories was about knowing when to leave. When my father was a young man in Haiti, he worked in a shoe store often frequented by the henchmen of the dictatorship. These paramilitary men, the
would walk into the store, grab the best shoes off the shelf, and walk away, and there was nothing either my father or his boss could do about it. My father got a knot in his stomach whenever one of these men walked in, fearing that one day he might feel compelled to resist and get shot. That’s when he decided he not only had to leave his job at the shoe store, but leave Haiti in order for his family to have a more stable and peaceful life.
tonton macoutes,
One of my mother’s stories was about regrets.
After my mother left my younger brother and me in Haiti, she constantly felt like a terrible mother who had abandoned her children. Eventually though, she felt she was mothering us from afar. Whenever she was eating, she told me, she wondered whether we were eating. Whenever she was about to go to sleep, she asked herself where and how we were going to sleep. She marked her days by our imagined routines, syncing them as much as possible with hers. The only thing that sustained her throughout our eight years apart was her dream of being reunited with us some day. This was one of the reasons both she and my father worked two jobs each, at times, to make our lives and the lives of our two US-born brothers a lot easier than theirs had ever been.
My uncle might no longer recall his early struggle days. He might no longer remember his fear of snow, or his many slips and falls on black ice. He might not fully remember the births of his children or the death of his wife.
Family legacies, my father used to say, are not only about traditions and values passed on from generation to generation. They are also about the actions we take or choose not to take. In the mountain village where my uncle and father were born, a single deed could mark or stain your family’s reputation for generations, placing you in a hierarchy that, if only enforced by gossip or shame, might still decide the fate of your progeny. I am not sure that’s still true, but my father held on to that notion until his death, in part because it was taught to him by his father, who had learned it from his father. This is why they had to leave the ancestral village and move to the capital, my father would say. Although neither he nor his siblings had committed shameful acts, they longed to start over in a new place where the generational burden was less
In Haitian Creole, he said, “which he also meant in a spiritual sense. There is life in her, not something we were necessarily taking for granted. My uncle might also have said, “She has come a long way to be here. She has travelled very far to reach us.”
li”,
weighty. Their new beginning was meant to be a reboot, though, not an erasure.
In the midst of all types of losses, our family has come to experience our most painful moments as opportunities to celebrate as well as to mourn. One of my most gut-wrenching memories with my uncle is of seeing him soon after his wife died giving birth to his youngest daughter. Although he was heartbroken, he also looked relieved that out of that terrible tragedy had emerged a beautiful little girl.
When he was finally allowed to bring his daughter home, my parents and I went to visit them. My tiny infant cousin was curled up in her crib, sucking her index and middle finger intently as though she were nursing. My parents and I looked down at her in amazement. She looked so fragile that we were afraid to pick her up. “Go ahead,” my uncle told me, as if reading my thoughts. “She’s not going to break. She has life in her.”
I picked up my baby cousin and held her close. Her eyes kept fluttering as she half giggled and smiled. My uncle was right. There was plenty of life, and spirit, in her. She had been at that intangible crossroads where she entered this world as her mother abruptly exited. She was filled with both joy and pain.
In Aztec mythology, women who die during childbirth are considered fallen warriors. These women are also believed to travel with the Sun throughout the latter part of the day, settling into sundown. My baby cousin’s sunrise was filled with stories of battles and triumph. Although her presence was also an absence, she represented as much what we had gained as lost. And my uncle had been there to witness it all.
Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti in 1969, during the
dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier (19071971) – a totalitarian regime sustained by his fearsome
paramilitary force, the Tonton Macoute, which indiscriminately killed those it perceived as Duvalier’s enemies. When Danticat was two, her father left to work as a cab driver in New York. Her mother, Rose,
a seamstress, joined him two years later, leaving Edwidge and her younger brother in the care of their uncle, Joseph. She began writing at the age of nine. At 12, she joined her parents in Brooklyn, where
the family lived in a heavily Haitian-American neighbourhood. She studied at the Ivy League Barnard College and, in 1993, gaining a master’s degree in
creative writing from Brown University. Since the publication of her acclaimed first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, in 1994, Danticat has written a number of books for adults and children, many of which explore themes of national identity – including The Farming of Bones (1998), a fictionalised account of the 1937 massacre of thousands of Haitians working as cane-cutters in the Dominican Republic, and The Dew
Breaker (2004), named after the Haitian Creole for a torturer working for the brutal regime of Papa Doc and his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier (1951-2014). Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. Married with two daughters, Danticat lives in the United States
but says she still considers Haiti to be her home.
Li gen la vi nan
“My father used to say that family legacies are not only about traditions and values. They are also about the actions we take”
That night, holding his daughter, my uncle told us he felt as though he had gone into the jaws of hell and yanked her out. It was something that he was also willing to do over and over again if needed, he said.
Perhaps this is what my parents were trying to tell me in that dream the night before my uncle left his house that morning, at dawn. Maybe my parents were reminding me that they too, like my uncle, will always be with me, even when bodies and minds are beyond reach. These days, I have no choice but to hold on to all of them with all my might. That is, after all, what families do.
This article originally appeared in Plough Quarterly, a magazine of stories, ideas, and culture to inspire faith and action; plough.com.