Ma tres chere Aimee,
You have not yet even arrived and already I worry about what your life may be like, far from Haitian shores. I can already see it- the day you enter kindergarten, all frills and curls, bright-eyed, with some butterflies making your little stomach queasy: No one will know how to pronounce your name. Aimee, like the pan-Africanist Martinican writer Aime Cesaire, but named for love. Aimee: French for beloved. Will you know to tell your teachers and schoolmates how to pronounce it correctly? They will insist on transforming it into "Amy." Will you wince, misrecognize yourself, crawl into your infantile shell and reemerge as something closer to their expectations as I had done so many years ago only to return, at long last, to my own bright self, name and all? I must pause now and smile at the thought of how long you have been loved and awaited. You are bound to arrive in the next century, not so long from now. I want this letter to be a bridge for you, to people and events already come to pass that you will not have the opportunity to experience, but which are nonetheless yours to hold and have, a part of your heritage.
Our lives may intersect in two different planes, you in the flowering of a new life, me in the wilting of an aging one. I write you this, then, so you will know your mother before she was your mother, when she was young, full of life and dreams-dreaming still about the day you would be in her midst. I want to try and set down some details of what life has been like for me as a displaced Haitian woman, growing up in lands not my own, in places that have demanded my integration and assimilation, a betrayal of my Haitianness and the various heritages that make up that identity; I want you to know some of these things in case you must repeat those lessons and I am not there to speak to, or, in case I become (between now and the moment of your arrival) the kind of adult who no longer knows how to listen to the wisdom of children's voices, who no longer daydreams or draws boxes on scribbling paper with elephants inside, invisible to the naked eye. I write these things to you so that you may know and understand that you are not alone in the things you will experience. You will not be the first and you will certainly not be the last.
I want to begin, briefly, with the story of my family's movements back and forth between Port-au-Prince and North America. From the moment of my birth in 1970 until the age of five, the four of us shuttled back and forth from Haiti to Quebec. At one point, as my parents sought to establish themselves in North America, my brother and I, ages three and one respectively, lived either with an aunt or our grandmother for over a year's time. For this reason, I did not realize until we moved to English Canada in 1975 and I attended school there that we no longer lived permanently in Haiti. Prior to the age of five, after a few months on the continent, I had felt that we would return to Haiti and, eventually, we always did return. Haiti was home: There we were surrounded by family members of all ages. We went to school and had schoolmates. When we returned to Canada, it was the absence of the rest of our family, the smiling aunts and uncles, our grandparents, which weighed heavily upon my child's heart.
All of my childhood, even after the returns to Haiti came to an end at the age of eight, the memories of my birthplace remained the strongest. Those memories have molded my spirit, a certainty I have of what it means to be Haitian; of what it means to me to have been born in a place where I was welcomed by many open arms, into the bosom of a large family that has since become dispersed and fragmented; of what it means to be born in a place where, despite poverty, caste, and colorism, to be of African descent or mixed heritage, to know one's heritage is as important as knowing the names of your grandmothers, as important as remembering the source of your own naming.
Yes, Haiti continues to be afflicted by various problems-social, political, economic. Before the droughts that plagued Eastern Africa occurred in the mid-eighties and caused widespread famine, Haiti was categorized as the poorest country in the world. It is now the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It was also the first black republic in this hemisphere. Yet, while Haiti is often lauded for the triumph of the slave revolt that defeated Napoleon Bonaparte's troops and culminated in independence in 1804, her people are consistently denigrated and forced to endure economic blockades and racialized global trade practices that unduly penalize Haiti precisely because of its early triumph over European imperialism. Still, even diminished, we remain the same prideful people who kept our traditions well-enough alive to organize ourselves and successfully resist enslavement. Despite syncretism and outside influences, Africa remains in our veins as well as in the weathered features of our faces, rainbow hues, Arawak cheekbones, and all textures of hair known to man.
Coming from such a background, transplanted into a Euro-dominated culture, it was a shock then, to find out that the white faces that looked into mine when I was a child were, indeed, white. I assumed, then, that everyone of a lighter hue was a person of color because I had been born to a Haitian mother who, throughout my Canadian childhood, was often taken for white. It was a shock to learn that, in Canada (as in the United States), there is a clear line drawn between those who are of color and those who are considered not to be. It was a shock to be turned away from the next door neighbor's house at age four, to be told by her mother that I could not play with my friend inside her house. The same woman told me later that summer, as she was bronzing herself in the sun, that she wanted to be dark like me. Dark like me? I wondered how she could both envy and loathe me. I thought she was a silly woman then, not understanding that I had had my first encounter with racism. It was in Winnipeg, a prairie city in the middle of the country, that I was to find out categorically what it meant to be black in a country not your own. I was not even ten years old when walking down the street, I could hear young white men muttering under their breaths as they walked by, "Nigger." It was a matter of color and it was a matter of pride. How dare a young, brown woman walk down the street and hold up her head high, and smile, and look people in the eye? This is what I did, not knowing I was meant to look down and away and step aside. Not looking away, however, brought me something else I had not expected, the affirmations of other people of color, especially those who were Native American, Indian, or Arab, who often mistook me for one of their own because of my mixed-race features blending African, Arawak, French, and Spanish lineages. Still, general invisibility-social, political, economic-has a way of putting a brown person in her place, no matter how high she holds her head up, how brilliant her smile, no matter how sure her step down a crowded street or way. These were my Canadian lessons. Yet something in me refused to assimilate.
Even as I learned to speak perfect, standard English at the age of ten, shedding my French accent, I remained Haitian to the core, prideful. I found myself isolated in my refusal to blend in, isolated by my knowledge of what colonialism had done to enslaved Africans dispersed throughout the so-called New World, and isolated by my fervent desire to make that knowledge count.
It is this isolation, Aimee, that I most hope you will not have to relive. It is, in a way, an immigrant legacy. I came into the world as one Duvalier regime neared its end and another was just about to begin. At that time, outside (as inside) of Haiti, one had to be careful of who one got close to: It was clear that foreigners were not to be trusted (who knew who might turn a racist eye toward you or when?). Haitians outside of one's immediate family were also suspect (for who knew when something you might say might be said to the wrong person, an ear of the government or some macoutes who could harm you or your family still left behind?). We lived, therefore, in what was initially a chosen isolation in Quebec City prior to 1975, always being careful who was brought close to the family. After 1975 and our move to English Canada, our social isolation was compounded by a language barrier: Initially, we spoke no English. The cocoon in which we lived then had many layers, both cultural and linguistic; isolation became imposed rather than chosen.
Immigration created a shyness in me that was not natural, and I continue to struggle with it to this day. Since my spirit had remained attached to Haiti, and especially to my maternal grandmother, Alice Limousin, my father's stepmother, I knew without being told directly that there were things happening in Haiti that I was being spared. I remember being warned to be careful of what I said on the phone when speaking to relatives in Haiti: The wires could be tapped. I remember an uncle disappearing one day and the phone calls going back and forth between members of the large family network as we prayed that he would be released from Duvalier's jails. We heard about killings and tortures, and I had nightmares that even as far away as Canada, members of Duvalier's secret police could find me just for thinking the wrong thing. Life was like walking on eggshells. Going home was not an option. Neither was assimilating. I had to create a new reality, one that belonged neither to the new world I had been forced to enter nor to my parents' generation. I began to belong to what I often think of as the lost generation: I identified most clearly with cousins some twenty years older than myself who had been there the day I was born, who had grown up in Haiti before leaving the country (those who could) to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Like them, I could not deny my Haitianness, would not take U.S. citizenship even when I, too, eventually migrated, alone, south of the Canadian border (I had become a Canadian citizen at age five). I regarded my Canadian citizenship for what it was, a passport that allowed me to return to Haiti when I wanted, without hassles; it guaranteed my freedom and allowed me to still belong somewhere, even if that somewhere was not home. Canada did not demand that I strip myself of my identity to remain on her shores as I believe America does. And so I remain a part of a generation born in Haiti during the Duvalier years privy to the memories of parents who had been born in the 1930s, long before that regime dawned, and to those grandparents born before and during the turn of the century. This familial memory has given me a safety net when I fear being overwhelmed by an isolation too unfamiliar to be shared by those around me.
I will be thirty this year, but those in my family with whom I best connect are in their forties and fifties. Because of this intergenerational bonding, I feel as if I have eyes at the back of my head: I stand not between two cultures, one Haitian, the other American, but between generations, one belonging to the pre-Duvalier era and the other belonging to the post-Duvalier era. Sometimes it is like standing in a barren no-man's land, but I know that some of us need to be the in-betweens so the gaps will not bleed, so that the discarded will be remembered and the wounds of forgetfulness staunched.
This year also marks a turning point in my life for I have now reached the age of my mother's orphaning. Perhaps this is also one of the reasons I feel compelled to write this letter, Aimee, because I am aware of living on borrowed time, that every opportunity I have to have a disagreement or a moment of understanding with my own mother is a blessing that ended for her in her twenty-ninth year. She had lost her father earlier at age seven. When she was twenty-nine, her mother passed away. Her loss has led me to think deeply about my own relationship to my mother, to her mother, and to you. What survives? What is forever lost?
When I was eight years old, I met my father's grandmother, my great-grandmother. I remember it as the first time we met though this cannot be possible. The woman I met when I was eight years old was nearing a hundred years of age, small-boned, frail. Yet she saw clearly and spoke a Kreyol that seemed to me to be unlike that of my parents; it contained more of Africa in it, more of the rural in it. Because of this, we could hardly communicate; I was afraid of her too, not because she could do me harm physically, but because I could feel her strong spiritual presence. I remember that she had a kenep tree in her front yard, full of the small, green-shelled fruit that became (and remains) my favorite fruit of all. She encouraged my brother and me to grasp handfuls from the old branches and to eat them on the spot. That afternoon, she also gave us dous to eat, a homemade square confection that resembles fudge. I dream of the taste of it sometimes; I have never tasted anything like it since. When she passed away a few years later, the recipe died with her. Now that I am older, always trying to understand better the history and cultural legacy of this place I call home but can only visit from time to time, I think of the conversations we might have had, of the version of Kreyol she spoke that she could have taught me. Although her birth certificate has been lost, she must have been born in the late 1880s, not even a century after the Haitian Revolution. What could she have told us about her childhood memories, of life then? So, you see Aimee, much has already been lost. Like her, but some hundred years after her birth, I am witnessing a century come to a close and I will live the bulk of my life in the next. With this writing, I hope to leave you something for your own days of wonder; something, perhaps, to answer the questions I hope you will have.
As I write to you today, resting next to me is a packet of letters my mother gave to me a year or so ago. Some of the letters are written in her mother's hand. This is all I have by which to know her. They are the last letters penned by her my mother received. My mother had just left Haiti for graduate law study in Paris. Her mother intended to visit her there-it would be her own first journey off of the island. The letter paper is thin, the ink beginning to fade in places. The first letter, dated December 1, 1961, begins:
Les chants de Noel avaient commence a me jeter dans I'angoisse; tu sais ce n'est pas du sentiment-quand on les entonne Us me vont droit au coeur et me donnent un frisson de coeur qui agit sur tous mes membres est-ce pourquoi je ferai tous mes efforts pour realiser mon voyage. II parait que ce sera la ma guirison aussi j'ai commence sens m'illusioner a confectionner mes linges; il est encore tot mais cela uaut mieux.
[The Christmas carols had begun to throw me into a deep state of anguish; you know, it isn't nostalgia that I feel, when they are sung they go straight to my heart and send a chill through it that permeates all of my limbs. Thus, I have decided to do all in my power to bring about my voyage; it seems that it will be my cure and so I have begun, without giving in to disillusionment, to make my travel clothes; it is still early for such things, but it is preferable to do so.]
I read these lines and feel the deep emotions my grandmother must have felt at being separated from her youngest daughter. I see in her words also the heart of a poet. I see myself in these lines, knowing how sensitive I am to change of any kind, how deeply loyal to those I love, always missing those who are at a distance. Mama Fofo, as she was called, was an artist of a kind, a seamstress. She was, thus, literally planning to make her clothes for the voyage, in the same loving way that she had made her own daughters' dresses, the same way she had dutifully put fingers to needle, to thread, to cloth in the making of wardrobes for others, back curved over her Singer sewing machine, in order to make a living for herself and her family. She was a single mother raising four children in Haiti from the late 1920s through the 1930s.
Reading Mama Fofo's letters help me to restore some missing links in my own life; they help me to recapture a connection to a woman whom I never met but from whom I have inherited some personality traits: warmth, sensitivity, but also a tendency, at times, not to take best care of myself. Through these letters, I better understand both her and my own character.
Mama Fofo is preparing to go on this voyage which both lifts her spirit and creates great anxiety in her. She does not have the money to go and is trying to call in loans made to friends in need. Many of them refuse to return the money, sums at times as low as twenty dollars. They do not seem to think that the trip is so serious; they do not realize her true need. Mama Fofo's money is lost, so it seems, and in the midst of trying to realize this dream of crossing the Atlantic in order to see her daughter, she finds out that she has placed her trust in the wrong people. She writes: "reellement on ne doit compter quesursoi" [really, we can only count on ourselves]. The letters then detail, over the course of a few weeks, what money she has been able to put aside or reclaim. There are gifts from her other children and also from my mother. Mama Fofo was sixty-five at the time she wrote this letter. And I, some thirty years after her death, have just begun to learn such lessons, to be generous without expense to oneself.
I read a meditation today that speaks of this, a Taoist teaching on the theme of caring. It was written by Deng Ming Dao in his book, 365 Tao. Let me set it down for you here:
Those who follow Tao believe in using sixteen attributes on behalf of others: mercy, gentleness, patience, nonattachment, control, skill, joy, spiritual love, humility, reflection, restfulness, seriousness, effort, controlled emotion, magnanimity, and concentration. Whenever you need to help another, draw upon these qualities. Notice that self-sacrifice is not included in this list. You do not need to destroy yourself to help another. Your overall obligation is to complete your own journey along your personal Tao. As long as you can offer solace to others on your same path, you have done the best that you can.
I believe that Mama Fofo embodied most of the above but it was in the last moments of her life that she realized that she did not need to destroy herself in order to help others. Had she learned this lesson sooner, would she have made it to Paris? Would the last moments of her life have been less fraught with the fear of never seeing her daughter again? Or had she already realized that she was losing a battle against time, losing that battle to her penury, her lesson learned too late?
Her last letter is dated January 4, 1962, three days after Haitian independence is celebrated. Her first lines reveal that she has finally gathered nearly all the money necessary for the voyage. She is missing only eighty-five U.S. dollars. At this point, she hopes that the trip will take place in the coming summer. She writes of possibly selling her house as some businessmen have made her an offer for the property. She hesitates to sell her children's childhood home and is afraid that the affair "causera ma mort" [will cause my death]. There are three more letters in the packet, dated the eighth, ninth, and tenth of January 1962. Each recounts the final moments of Mama Fofo, who passed away on Epiphany, the sixth of January 1962, after some days of complaining that her heart was tight as a fist. Did she die of a broken heart? Of a heart attack? This is something only she knew. The letters written by other hands reveal how loved she was by her children and closest family friends, how much love she had during the course of her hard-working life, even though, in the end, she could not make her way to one, among the others, whom she loved greatly.
My mother received Mama Fofo's last letters along with the announcements of her death. How deep her shock, her loss-I cannot imagine. At this age, still reaching out toward my own dreams, I cannot imagine my life without my mother and father even though I see my own parents rarely, living as we do in different countries. I was born eight years after her death, but I am very much like her. My mother and I have had the opportunity to give life to aspects of a relationship that was taken away prematurely, in reverse. I can learn from my grandmother's errors and build on her legacy. Her generosity need not be forgotten. The fact that she passed away on Epiphany, the day on which Catholics celebrate the adoration of the Three Kings bearing gifts for Christ, impresses upon me the necessity of remembering that even within the most humble of beings and across racial, class, and gender lines-there can be a noble heart. It is that heart that I celebrate and want to nurture in myself. It is not lost upon me, too, that Independence Day had just been celebrated and that she could not, as a working-class, single, Haitian woman of a certain age, secure her own independence.
Aimee, when I sense the pain in Mama Fofo's letters, I think that if there is only one thing I can teach you, it would be this: to value and to take the best care of yourself. Without this grounding in your own center of being, the world you are about to enter will be all the more difficult. I have only begun to enact this lesson. It remains my greatest challenge.
I want to tell you about another Haitian woman, my paternal grandmother, Alice Limousin, whose care for me in my earliest years has left a permanent impression upon my mind, body, and soul. When I began to write you this letter, I reread the last card she wrote me. She was seventy-five years old when she wrote it; she had been undergoing chemotherapy treatment for advanced breast cancer in Miami. Because of the absence of preventive health care in Haiti, her cancer was discovered too late-yet as a member of the working middle class, she was lucky to have had health attention at all. I had just begun my first job, fresh out of graduate school, as a college professor at a private university in the southern United States. I did not have the time and means to make my way to her side so I wrote to her instead. She did not reply about her pain. As she always did in her letters, she thanked me for thinking of her and wrote of her plans to return to Port-au-Prince for the Christmas holidays. She missed her home. It is clear from the content of the card that she knew her days were numbered. She wrote of how much she loved me. She also wrote advice she had never given me before. A firm believer in the Catholic Church and its teachings, she counseled me to stay close to God. Though I left the Catholic Church at the age of fourteen (objecting to its missionary work in Haiti and other developing countries, sexist hierarchy, and homophobia), I am a strong believer in a greater power. I don't know what form that power takes, but I respect it and I believe I have been able to live up to the spirit of my grandmother's advice if not to its letter. I have faith in the energy that surrounds and guides us in this world. On the back of the card, she tells me that when I need help in the future, to look to my Bible for assistance. I know she wrote this because when I was a child and things in my life were beyond my comprehension, I would write her a few lines, never letting her know exactly what the problem was, but just that I needed some affirmation. Months later, often after I had forgotten the source of my earlier grievance, a letter would appear in response, letting me know that someone in Haiti held my spirit dear and loved me unconditionally despite the distance between us. I knew with finality when I read those lines that she was saying good-bye, just in case, in her own way. She referred me to the Bible, to John: 11. "There," she wrote, "you can read about everything." I don't know if I turned to that passage then. I don't remember doing so. I may have done so sometime in the haze of the depression that hit me following her death in 1995, three months after I finally had the chance to see her in Haiti, my first trip back to my native land since our family trips had come to an abrupt end in the late seventies. Today, I read this card again, hoping it would provide me with something to pass on to you. And so I turned to John: 11, wondering what was there that could contain the "everything" Mamie (as I have called her from infancy) wrote about. I found, to my surprise, the story of Lazarus and his resurrection from the dead.
This is how the story goes, Aimee: Lazarus, a close friend of Jesus, was very ill. His sisters sent for Jesus to perform a miracle so that Lazarus would not die. Jesus went to him but by the time he reached Lazarus's home, he had already expired. One of Lazarus's sisters tells him: "If you had been here, my brother would not have died." After some discussion, Jesus makes this pronouncement: "I am the resurrection; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die." After this they enter the tomb of Lazarus, and find the body already in a state of decay. Jesus calls to Lazarus to walk out of the grave and Lazarus emerges, wrapped in his burial cloth, resurrected.
I read this story and realized what my grandmother had been trying to tell me, in the only words she knew inside and out. She was about to die but she believed in a power greater than herself. She knew she would live in an altered state, somewhere removed from the earth-bound, but still with us. Although I have left the Church and I never thought that I would be recounting a biblical story to you in this way, Aimee, I know that my grandmother was wise to point me in this direction. Because the Bible is, like the Torah, the Tao Te Ching, the Koran, and so many others, a sacred text. And although my grandmother did not believe in Vodou, as I have begun to in my adult years (not firsthand but through extensive reading), this story reminds me of African beliefs in the rebirth of the spirits, the idea that spirits never die. I know that my grandmother lives on in me and so shall she in you. As long as our memories are alive, so is she and all of the ancestors who preceded her own life. At the end of the card, she expresses concern that I work too hard and live my life alone. She hopes these words will bring me solace in times of loneliness. As I said earlier, though I can't remember if I read the story of Lazarus rising when I received this card or shortly after her death, now, four years later, I am thankful for it as I acknowledge my own rebirth. I am claiming my Haitianness in the United States, an identity made especially suspect in this country by racism and xenophobia. I am claiming my solitude and the memories isolation affords me the privilege of revisiting.
Aimee, I am twenty-nine and I have just begun to rise from the ashes of my childhood fears. I was twenty-five when my grandmother passed away and though I had spent most of those years away from her side (seeing her every three or four years), my body is as if tattooed by the imprints of her palms as she bathed me as a child and fed me baby food as I lay between her bosom and arm. Can any touch be more sacred than this? Much has been made of the fact that the body remembers its injuries, its traumas. But what happens to the good touch, especially when that touch occurs early in life, when a child is full of potential and knows nothing of the difficulties of life? I have been thinking that the body must remember such a touch as sacred, and that if one is blessed with it, whatever traumas the body may sustain later on can be more easily overcome. I believe my body remembers its movements in water as my grandmother bathed me as if they were movements in the womb: safe, soundless, magical. I believe that the first touches we experience in life are as sacred as the last ones, the ones that prepare us for the journey home, to Vilokan, Ginen, Dahomey, or to a glorious heaven. I was not there to bathe her in return, to cleanse the feet that had walked many miles for her children and grandchildren, to close the eyelids that had seen more heartbreak in the busy streets of Port-au-Prince daily than most people in developing countries will experience in a lifetime. After she died, part of my own spirit seemed to follow; I felt as if a limb had been taken away; it ached in the absence of her presence. I have come to understand that it was a necessary loss, one that ensured that I would mature in ways that I had not explored because her presence and memory both provided me with the kind of nurture of soul which discouraged my creation of my own sources of sustenance. I was told at her funeral that the day after I had left Haiti, she took to her bed and never rose from it until her death, as if she had just waited for my return and our last encounter. It is enough for me to know that I was there to embrace her, as she had me, in childhood, in the last months of her life. Now that she is gone, something else has come to be in that space of spiritual connectedness that once belonged to us both-a second chance at life, the opportunity to live out the lessons gleaned from observing my grandmother's existence from a distance: how to be a new kind of Haitian woman, one who reveres the old ways and yet knows her own power and is not afraid of putting that power to good use. I am in the fourth year of my own resurrection and every step forward is small but strong.
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