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

February 7, 1986, amid massive protests in Haiti, Jean-Claude flees the country. There is a blizzard in New York, but this does not prevent jubilant Haitians from taking to the snowy streets, waving flags, honking horns, pouring champagne. Restaurants in Brooklyn serve up free food and drink. The Duvalier regime has finally come to an end. The New Year's prediction has finally come true. If he leaves, I leave. In July, I fulfill my destiny, more or less. I return to Haiti, on an American passport, for a two-week visit.

  In October the Mets win their second World Series. The city celebrates with a tickertape parade attended by over two million people. A pale celebration indeed, compared to the celebrating that took place earlier in the year.

  HAITI: A MEMORY JOURNEY

  Assotto Saint

  Early Friday morning, February 7, 1986, drinking champagne and watching televised reports of Haitian President-for-Life Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier fleeing for his life aboard a U.S. Air Force plane, I can't help but reminisce about my childhood experiences, and reflect on the current political and social situation, along with my expectations as a gay man who was born and grew up there.

  Having seen, so many times during the AIDS crisis, Haitian doctors and community leaders deny the existence of homosexuality in Haiti; having heard constantly that the first afflicted male cases in Haiti were not homosexual, but alas, poor hustlers who were used by visiting homosexual American tourists who infected them and thus introduced the disease into the country; having felt outrage at the many excuses, lies, denials, and apologies—I am duty-bound to come out and speak up for the thousands of Haitians like me, gay and not hustlers, who for one reason or another, struggle with silence and anonymity yet don't view themselves as victims. Self-pity simply isn't part of my vocabulary. Haunted by the future, I'm desperate to bear witness and settle accounts. These are trying times. These are times of need.

  For years now, Haiti has not been a home but a cause to me. Many of my passions are still there. Although I did my best to distance myself from the homophobic Haitian community in New York, to bury painful emotions in my accumulated memories of childhood, I was politically concerned and committed to the fight for change in my native land. It's not surprising that the three hardest yet most exhilarating decisions I have faced had to do with balancing my Haitian roots and gay lifestyle. The first was leaving Haiti to live in the United States. The second was going back to meet my father for the first time. The third, tearing up my application to become a U.S. citizen. Anytime one tries to take fragments of one's personal mythology and make them understandable to the whole world, one reaches back to the past. It must be dreamed again.

  I was born on October 2, 1957, one week after Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier was elected president. He had been a brilliant doctor and a writer of great verve from the Griots (negritude) movement. Until that time, the accepted images of beauty in Haiti, the images of "civilization," tended to be European. Fair skin and straight hair were better than dark and kinky. Duvalier was black pride. Unlike previous dictators who had ruled the country continuously since its independence from the French in 1804, Duvalier was not mulatto, and he did not surround himself with mulattoes, a mixed-race group that controlled the economy. Duvalier brought Vodou to the forefront of our culture and, later in his reign, used it to tyrannize the people.

  I grew up in Les Cayes, a sleepy port city of twenty thousand in southwest Haiti, where nothing much happened. Straight A's, ran like a girl, cute powdered face, silky eyebrows—I was the kind of child folks saw and thought quick something didn't click. I knew very early on that I was "different," and I was often reminded of that fact by my schoolmates. "Masisi" (faggot), they'd tease me. That word to this day sends shivers down my spine but, being the town's best-behaved child, a smile, a kind word were my winning numbers.

  We—my mother (a registered nurse anesthetist), grandfather (a lawyer who held, at one time or another, each of the town's top official posts, from mayor on down), grandmother, and I—lived in a big beautiful house facing the cathedral. The Catholic Mass, especially High Mass on Sundays and holy days, with its colorful pageantry, trance-inducing liturgy, and theatrical ceremony, spellbound me. And that incense—that incense took me heaven-high each time. I was addicted and I attended Mass every day. Besides, I had other reasons. I had developed a mad crush on the parish priest, a handsome Belgian who sang like a bird.

  I must have been seven when I realized my attraction to men. Right before first communion, confused and not making sense, I confessed to this priest. Whether he understood me or not, he gave me absolution and told me to say a dozen Hail Marys. Oh Lord, did I pray. Still girls did nothing for me. Most of my classmates had girlfriends to whom they sent passionate love poems and sugar candies, and whom they took to movies on Sunday afternoons. All I wanted to do with girls was skip rope, put makeup on their faces, and comb their hair. I was peculiar.

  Knowing that I probably would never marry, I decided that I wanted to be a priest when I grew up. For one, priests are celibate, and I had noticed that they were effeminate. Some even lisped, like me. I built a little altar in my bedroom with some saints' icons, plastic lilies, and colored candles and dressed in my mother's nursing uniform and petticoat. I said Mass every night. The archbishop of Haiti, Francois W. Ligonde, a childhood friend of my mother and uncles, even blessed my little church when he once visited my family. I was so proud. Everybody felt that I'd be the perfect priest, except my mother, who I later found out wanted me to become a doctor like my father—who I never met, never saw pictures of, never heard mention of, and accepted as a nonentity in my life.

  I used to believe that I was born by immaculate conception, until one day I was ridiculed in school by my science teacher, who had asked me for my father's name. When I told him of my belief, he laughed and got the entire class to laugh along. Until then I had never questioned the fact that my last name was the same as that of my mother, who was not married. It was then that I smelled foul play and suspected that I was the result of sexual relations between my mother and grandfather. I didn't dare ask.

  In the early 1960s, Papa Doc declared himself President-for-Life and things got worse and worse. I remember hearing of anti-Duvalier suspects being arrested. I remember hearing of families being rounded up and even babies being killed. I remember the mysterious disappearances at night, the mutilated corpses being found by roads and rivers the next day. I remember the public slayings, adults whispering and sending my cousins and me to another room so they could talk. Rumors of invasions by exiled Haitians abounded. Some of these invasions were quickly stopped by government forces. The tonton macoutes (bogeymen) were everywhere, with their rifles slung over their shoulders and their eyes of madness and cruelty.

  Poverty was all around me and, in my child-mind, I had accepted this. Some had, some had not. Fate. Cyclones, hurricanes, floods came and went. Carnival was always a happy time, though. Dressed in a costume, I, along with thousands, took to the streets each year with our favorite music bands. Grandmother died during Mardi Gras '65. I was miserable for weeks and kept a daily journal to her. Soon after, mother left for Switzerland and I moved in with my aunt Marcelle and her husband.

  In 1968, my aunt had her first and only child. Was I jealous! I had been quite comfortable and so spoiled for three yean that when she gave birth to Alin, it was difficult for me to accept that I was not her real child, a fact I had, at times, forgotten. That year she gave me a beautiful birthday party. My schoolmates were making fun of me more than ever. I still wanted to be a priest. I said a Mass for Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy when each was assassinated. Duvalier declared himself the flag of the nation and became more ruthless. I took long walks on the beach by myself. It was a year of discovery.

  One afternoon, I saw Pierre swimming alone. He called me to join him. I was surprised. Although we went to the same school and we had spoken to each other once or twice, we were not buddies. Three or four years older, tall and muscular, Pierre was a member of the volleyba
ll team and must have had two or three girlfriends. I didn't have a swimsuit, so I swam naked. I remember the uneasiness each time our eyes met, the tension between us, my hard-on. We kept smelling each other out. He grabbed me by the waist. I felt his dick pressing against my belly. Taut smiles. I held it in my hand and it quivered. I had never touched another boy's dick before. I asked him if he had done this with other boys. He said only with girls. Waves.

  He turned me around and pushed his dick in my ass. Shock. I remember the pain. Hours later, the elation I felt, knowing that another person who was like me existed. In Les Cayes, there had been rumors about three or four men who supposedly were homosexual, but they were all married. Some had no fewer than seven children. Knowing Pierre was a turning point for me. The loneliness of thinking that I was the only one with homosexual tendencies subsided.

  In 1969, man walked on the moon. I was happy. Pierre and I met each other three or four times (once in my grandfather's study, and he almost caught us). I didn't say anything about this to anyone, not even at confession. I didn't pray as much. I passed my certificat, which is like graduation from junior high school in the U.S. Mother moved from Geneva to New York City, where I visited her in the summer of 1970. To me, New York was the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, hot dogs and hamburgers, white people everywhere, museums, rock music, twenty-four-hour television, stores, stores, and subways.

  I remember the day I decided to stay in the U.S. A week before I was to go back to Haiti, my mother and I were taking a trip to Coney Island. Two effeminate guys in outrageous short shorts and high heels walked onto the train and sat in front of us. Noticing that I kept looking at them, my mother said to me that this was the way it was here. People could say and do whatever they wanted; a few weeks earlier thousands of homosexuals had marched for their rights.

  Thousands! I was stunned. I kept thinking what it would be like to meet some of them. I kept fantasizing that there was a homosexual world out there I knew nothing of. I remember looking up in amazement as we walked beneath the elevated train, then telling mother I didn't want to go back to Haiti. She warned me of snow, muggers, homesickness, racism, alien cards, and that I would have to learn to speak English. She warned me that our lives wouldn't be a vacation. She would have to go back to work as a night nurse in a week, and I'd have to assume many responsibilities. After all, she was a single mother.

  That week, I asked her about my father and found out that they had been engaged for four years while she was in nursing school and he in medical school. She got pregnant and he wanted her to abort. A baby would have been a burden so early in their careers, especially since they planned to move to New York after they got married. Mother wouldn't abort. She couldn't. Though the two families tried to avoid a scandal and patch things up, accusations were made, and feelings hurt. Each one's decision final, they became enemies for life.

  BLACK CROWS AND ZOMBIE GIRLS

  Barbara Sanon

  Gendarme Janeau, the officer at the Casernes de Jeremie—the local military jail house—had been summoned by the neighbors to come save our house from evil. All was quiet, for his two prisoners had been fed their daily dose of cornmeal and beans, so Janeau ran, baton and rifle in hand, to our gate. And there it was, a large black crow circling over our roof. I held on tightly to my mother's skirt to see if it would shield me until some miracle put an end to the bird's targeted prowling. Unable to find another solution, Gendarme Janeau fired into the air. The sound lingered for minutes while I hid myself behind my mother as she screamed.

  The black crow bled to death in front of the large oak tree where I often played with my sisters. Gendarme Janeau, still wallowing in his triumph, convinced my mother that the crow was indeed a lustful evil spirit.

  "Keep a watch out for it," he told my mother. "If it is restless, it might return. It does not get enough pleasure at night so it comes in the heat when the sun shines brightest to continue its seduction."

  My mother, alone in a house with five children and a husband in New York, trembled as she took my hand and led me inside the house. For years, the townspeople would recount the tale of the black bird and Gendarme Janeau's ability to shoot anything that looked him in the eye too directly.

  Janeau became the town hero and secretly my terror. That night, I dreamt of the gendarme again killing the black crow. I dreamt of his large hands around the black crow's neck as it screeched. In the dream, I draped my mother's skirt to cover the bird's blood on the ground, but the blood seeped through the cloth and Janeau, watching, smirked, amused by my naivete.

  The next day, I cringed as I rushed past the Casernes on my way to school, fearing that I would have to stand still, frozen in place, during the Casernes' 8:30 a.m. salute when Gendarme Janeau raised the black-and-red Duvalierist flag that he would kill for.

  Every night after that, I saw the shadow of Janeau's hand moving above my head. Somewhere, through the window in the distance, a light would flicker on and off and I would think that it was him reminding me that even in my house, in my own bed, I could not escape him. He became the bogeyman and I was his prisoner. My sister would tell me to close my eyes under the covers in order to prevent him from seeing me.

  "Let the bad spirits pass by on their way and not look at us," she would say. "For any contact with them will make us their victims forever." My mother could not help us for she, too, was afraid. So we lay quietly in the dark, waiting for the evil to pass.

  A few years later, in my mother's bedroom in New York, I would see the bogeyman again. Like the lustful crow, he, too, appeared in the daytime in the form of my mother's boyfriend—the man who was supposed to replace my father. This man, my mother's boyfriend, wrapped his familiar arms around my frail ten-year-old body, drawing me with his warm smile toward his lap. How paternal he seemed, pretending that he was offering me a warm place to sit—a warm place to be a child. In that moment, as he fondled my body, I decided that I was dead. My body was as ice cold as all the dead relatives' foreheads we children were made to kiss at family wakes. I heard voices but they could not hear me, for I was choking on the dirt my mother's boyfriend threw on my corpse as his nails kept on digging, digging—restless—until he reached my skeleton.

  I was dead but no one realized it. People were too busy reviving the favorite Haitian pastime called political discussion. The ousting of Duvalier and the stories surrounding the event inevitably found their way into all community functions, baptisms, communions, weddings, and funerals.

  Maybe one day, I thought, there would be stories also told about me, the girl who was attacked by the bogeyman in her own mother's bedroom in broad daylight. There was no room for my own horrors in the midst of the political tales though. Mine was a story that could only be told through silences too horrific to disturb.

  When family and friends assembled for gatherings, there was always a little girl there that I would recognize, a girl who would have her head down, her eyes lowered a certain way. I could always experience with her the pain of her bruised genitals hidden under immaculate petticoats that pressed her into her girlhood and kept her there so she would shut up. She was always so quiet, that girl, so confused, so egare, that people would joke that she was a zombie. A zombie, who in the midst of the endless political discussions on right and wrong was not allowed to disclose the bad things she swallowed.

  In the mythical world, a zombie is someone who is buried alive while comatose and is then revived to serve others in whatever way they want, without questioning. A zombie is someone who has lost her soul, her will, her good angel, someone who can only regain her true self once she's been given a taste of salt. But outside this mythical world, zombies howled for their salt. Whether it was the political prisoners, the protagonists of all the political fables recounted, or the little girls whose secrets I knew too well, all these zombies were howling for their life back. Some of the political prisoners were finally beginning to be heard because of the pressure from a tenacious mass. The little girls I knew,
however, were dumped deeper in their coffins by adults who were supposed to have been safeguarding them.

  For the girl down the street, whose school principal demanded that she be taken away from her home for a reason none of us wanted to talk about, there was no salt. The principal said she was raped by her stepfather. But there was no mythical element to that story, nothing like the black crow spirit who had come to our house.

  At least with Duvalier, we could pinpoint his kind of evil, for he smirked at the howling of the corpses under his feet. But this raped girl? Why did she need to be conquered? Why was she made a zombie? And the other girl I knew, who actually had a child by her uncle, why her? Why even talk about them, these zombie girls? Their tales were not mythical enough. Their zombification was harder to explain.

  And me, without even a clear narrative, without a scar as obvious as those of the other girls, or of the political victims who could point to their burnt flesh or bullet wounds, what to make of my story? A man who had vowed to my mother and our family that he would protect us from the abandonment of my natural father, chose instead to impose his need for power on me. So, I became possessed by my fright and my shame. I had become the zombie at the dinner table, at the baptisms, the wedding receptions, the funerals. I had become the girl who sat quietly with her head lowered, her eyes on the ground, and her silence intact.

  I was not alone though. We had a collective, we zombies. We began to know each other. At parties, in school, in our nightmares, we dreamt of saving each other. In some cases, this zombie state was even inherited. We were children of zombie women, a matriarchal line of silence. Whether it was 1957 or 1987, our situation had not changed. Our zombie dance began with a first outing, our first lace dress for church, our first communion, our first dance. It started with the immaculate way the white talcum powder around a girl's neck suppressed the heat and ended with a dress torn and soiled with a patch of blood. It ended with our mothers chanting softly, hoping a kinder, less lustful spirit would save us both. It ended with our mothers' careful sewing of undergarments and secretly scrubbing blood off panties long before we ever reached puberty. It ended with our mothers washing, bleaching, even boiling our panties in order to make their husbands, their cousins, their lovers, their town judges, their military officers, seem clean.