There are women for whom the essence of
life lies in survival. Edwidge Danticat
describes the tenacity of the women of
Haiti, the first black republic in the
western hemisphere to uproot slavery.
One of the first people murdered on our land
was a queen. Her name was Anacaona and she
was an Arawak Indian. She was a poet,
dancer, and even a painter. She ruled over
the western part of an island so lush and
green that the Arawaks called it Ayiti, land
of high. When the Spaniards came from across
the sea to look for gold, Anacaona was one
of their first victims. She was raped and
killed and her village pillaged. Anacaona's
land is now often called the poorest country
in the western hemisphere, a place of
continuous political unrest. Thus, for some,
it is easy to forget that this land was the
first black republic, home to the first
people of African descent to uproot slavery
and create an independent nation in 1804.
I was born under Haiti's dictatorial
Duvalier regime. When I was four, my parents
left Haiti to seek a better life in the
United States. I must admit that their
motives were more economic than political,
but as anyone who knows Haiti will tell you,
economics and politics are intrinsically
related; who is in power determines to a
great extent whether or not people will eat.
I am thirty-four years old now and have
spent more than two thirds of my life in the
United States. My most vivid childhood
memories of Haiti involve sudden power
failures, "blakawouts", we called them.
During blackouts, I couldn't read, study, or
watch television, so I'd sit around a candle
or a kerosene lamp and listen to stories
from the elders in the house.
My grandmother was an old country woman who
always felt displaced in the capital where
we lived. She had nothing but her patched-up
quilts and her stories to console her. She
was the one who told me about Anacaona. I
used to share a room with her, and I was in
the room with her when she died. She was
over a hundred years old. She died with her
eyes wide open; I was the one who closed
them. I still miss the countless stories she
told us. However, I accepted her death very
easily because death was always around.
As a little girl, I attended more than my
share of funerals. My uncle and legal
guardian was a Baptist minister and his
family was expected to attend every funeral
he presided over. I went to all the funerals
in the same white lace dress. Perhaps it was
because I attended so many funerals that I
have such a strong feeling that death is not
the end, that the people we put in the
ground are going off to live somewhere else.
But at the same time I believe they will
always hover around to watch over us and
guide us through our journeys.
When I was eight, my uncle's brother-in-law
went on a long journey to cut cane in the
Dominican Republic. He came back deathly
ill. I remember his wife twirling feathers
inside his nostrils and rubbing black pepper
on his upper lip to make him sneeze. She
strongly believed that if he sneezed, he
would live. At night, it was my job to watch
the sky above the house for signs of falling
stars. In rural Haitian lore, when a star
falls out of the sky, it means someone will
die. A star did fall out of the sky and he
did die.
I have childhood memories of Jean-Claude
"Baby Doc" Duvalier and his wife, Michele,
racing by in their Mercedes-Benz and
throwing money out the window to the very
poor children in our neighbourhood. The
children would nearly kill each other trying
to catch a coin or a glimpse of Baby Doc and
Michele. One Christmas, it was announced on
the radio that the First Lady would be
giving away free toys at the palace. My
cousins and I went to the palace and were
nearly crushed in the mob of children who
flooded the palace lawns.
These stories and memories bring the
questions always buzzing to my head. What is
my place now in all of this? What was my
grandmother's place? What is the legacy of
the daughters of Anacaona, the daughters of
Haiti?
Watching the news reports, it is often hard
to tell whether there are real living and
breathing women in conflict-stricken places
like Haiti. The evening news broadcasts only
allow us brief glimpses of presidential
coups, rejected boat people, and sabotaged
elections. The women's stories never manage
to make the front page. But they do exist.
Over the years, I have known women who, when
the soldiers came to their homes in Haiti,
would tell their children to lie still and
play dead. I once met a woman whose sister
was shot in her pregnant stomach because she
was wearing a T-shirt with an "antimilitary
image". I know a mother who was arrested and
beaten for working with a pro-democracy
group. Her body remains laced with scars
where the soldiers put out their cigarettes
on her flesh. At night, this woman still
smells the ashes of cigarette butts that
were stuffed, lit, inside her nostrils. In
the same jail cell, this woman watched as
paramilitary attaches raped her
fourteen-year-old daughter at gunpoint. When
mother and daughter took a tiny boat to the
United States, the mother had no idea that
her daughter was pregnant. Nor did she know
that her child had gotten the HIV virus from
one of the paramilitary men who had raped
her. The offspring of the rape, her
grandchild, was named Anacaona after the
Arawak queen, because that family of women
is from Leogane, the same region where
Anacaona was murdered, the same region where
my grandmother was born.
The infant Anacaona has a face which no
longer shows any trace of indigenous blood,
but her story echoes some of the first
incidents of bloodshed in a land that has
seen so much more than its share.
There is a Haitian saying that might upset
the aesthetic sensibilities of some women. "Nou
led, nou la, " it says. "We are ugly, but we
are here." Like the modesty that is common
in rural Haitian culture, this saying makes
a deeper claim for poor Haitian women than
maintaining beauty, be it skin-deep or
otherwise. For women like my grandmother,
what is worth celebrating is the fact that
we are here, that against all the odds, we
exist. To women like my grandmother, who
greeted each other with this saying when
they met along a trail in the countryside,
the very essence of life lies in survival.
It is always worth reminding our sisters
that we have lived yet another day to answer
the roll call of an often painful and very
difficult life. It is in this spirit that to
this day a woman remembers to name her child
Anacaona, a name which resonates both the
splendour and agony of a past that haunts so
many women, and men, today.
When they were enslaved, our foremothers
believed that when they died their spirits
would return to Africa, most specifically to
a peaceful land we call Ginen, where gods
and goddesses live. The women who came
before me were women who spoke half of one
language and half another. They spoke the
French and Spanish of their colonizers mixed
in with their own African language. These
women seemed to be speaking in tongues when
they prayed to their old gods, the ancient
African spirits. Even though they were
afraid that their old deities would no
longer understand them, they invented a new
language with which to describe their new
surroundings, a language from which
colourful phrases blossomed to fit the
desperate circumstances. When these women
greeted each other, they found themselves
speaking in codes.
- How are we today, sister?
- I am ugly, but I am here.
These days, many of my sisters are greeting
each other far away from the lands where
they first learned to speak in tongues. Many
have made it to other shores, after
travelling endless miles on the high seas,
on rickety boats that almost took their
lives. On October 29, 2002, a woman,
weakened by a long ocean journey, spotted
land and leapt into the shallow tide. Others
followed, including little girls and boys
who risked breaking an arm or a leg rather
than separate from their parents. These are
only some of the thousands who reach
American shores each year, only to be
rounded up, shackled, and taken away, often
sent back where they came from.
Eleven years ago, a mother jumped into the
sea when she discovered that her baby
daughter had died in her arms on a journey
that she had hoped would take them to a
brighter future. Mother and child, they sank
to the bottom of an ocean which already
holds millions of souls from the middle
passage, the holocaust of the slave trade.
That woman's sacrifice moved many of us to
tears, even while it reminded us of a slew
of past sacrifices made previously for all
of us, so that we could be here.
The past is full of examples of our
foremothers showing such deep trust in the
sea that they would jump off slave ships and
let the waves embrace them. They believed
that the sea was the beginning and the end
of all things, the road to freedom and their
entrance to Ginen. These women, women like
my grandmother who had taught me the story
of Anacaona, the queen, have been part of
the very construction of my being ever since
I was a little girl.
My grandmother believed that if a life is
lost, then another one springs up replanted
somewhere else, the next life even stronger
than the last. She believed that no one
really dies as long as someone remembers,
someone who will acknowledge that this
person had, in spite of everything, been
here. We are part of an endless circle, the
daughters of Anacaona. We have stumbled, but
have not fallen. We are ill-favoured, but
still we endure. Every once in a while, we
must scream this as far as the wind can
carry our voices. "Nou led, nou la!" We are
ugly, but we are here!
And here to stay.
Jennifer Browdy de
Hernandez teaches literature and gender
studies at Simon's Rock College of Bard,
USA.
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian author who
migrated to the United States when she was
12. She has written The Farming of Bones,
Krik?Krak! and Breath, Eyes, Memory.
This is a collection of essays by 18
acclaimed writer-activists from Latin
America and the Caribbean who are connected
by their struggle against injustice. The
topics covered are art, feminism and
activism. |
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