AYITI CHERIE, MY DARLING HAITI by Nimi Finnigan, B.S, M.F.A A

Home , Golden Brown, Jet Black, Trigger (drums)

AYITI CHERIE, MY DARLING HAITI

Nimi Finnigan, B.S, M.F.A

A Dissertation

ENGLISH

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Approved

Dennis Covington Chair of Committee

Michael Borshuk

Jackie Kolosov-Wenthe

Peggy Gordon Miller Dean of the Graduate School

May 2012

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of people without whom Ayiti Cherie, My

Darling Haiti would never have been completed: Dennis Covington, who not only served as my supervisor but also introduced me to literary nonfiction, as well as Jackie

Kolosov and Michael Borshuk for generously giving of their time and advice and for putting up with me.

And as always, I still have not found the right words to thank and honor

Mousson and Sean, who edited the manuscript for the facts, but more importantly who remind me to just be Nimi Finnigan through everything that I do because that’s enough.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... II

ABSTRACT ...... IV

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1 Creative Nonfiction Overview: It’s All about the Latticework ...... 1 Haitian Latticework: The Many Unseen Cultural & Historical Patterns ...... 4 Internal Latticework: How Am I Haitian? ...... 8

Book Review ...... 14 Memoir, Travel Writing and the Personal Essay ...... 14 Fiction Texts for Nonfiction ...... 18

2. FOREWORD ...... 23

3. DID YOU HEAR THE ONE ABOUT THE MULE-GIRL? ...... 31

4. I SPELL VODOU, YOU SPELL HOODOO ...... 40

5. SHADES OF VODOU ...... 43

6. YOU HEARD THE ONE ABOUT THE DOG? ...... 83

7. THE COLOMBIAN CONNECTION ...... 87

8. WHAT THE DEAD DO ...... 97

9. NEWS FEED ...... 104

10. MADAME COLO ...... 123

11. NEG MAWON ...... 132

12. WE DON'T KNOW ANY BETTER ...... 139

13. FOLKLORE, LEGENDS AND PROVERBS ...... 158

14. WHAT SKIN CANNOT SAY ...... 162

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 172

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

ABSTRACT

When it comes to Haiti, so much has been said; so much has been explored, dissected, and elaborated on, be it in the fields of fiction, nonfiction or poetry. Yet, there still remains a particular silence, a hole within every single one of these approaches – contemporary rural Haiti is rarely considered, if even considered at all.

Given that at least ninety percent of the island is comprised of rural villagers, Ayiti

Cherie, My Darling Haiti , a collection of literary nonfiction essays, brings stories from the Haitian countryside to the forefront and places them alongside current narratives on Haiti.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Creative Nonfiction Overview: It’s All about the Latticework “Our humanity is tied in each other.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Craig Ferguson’s Late Late Show. May 17 2010.

Late night television offers few words of wisdom, but the soft-spoken South

African Archbishop, and friend to Nelson Mandela, captured what is at the core of many, if not all forms of expression: our humanity. How do we live it? What are its shapes, its moments, its vicissitudes? But beyond that, Archbishop Tutu invites a focus on a particular aspect of our existence within a community: the idea that one needs to be surrounded by people to be human (our humanity is not tied to each other but “in each other”). Given the particulars of such a definition, should writers and artists even attempt to represent such a latticework of interwoven existences and experiences? And can we do so accurately?

Poetry has taken part of this discussion to task, in that poetry harnesses the emotive truths of an experience. The line breaks and stanzas of a poem, patterned images and sounds across the page, attempt to evoke the emotional changes within both our mundane daily existence as well as life's abrupt, extraordinary moments. On the other hand, creative nonfiction contends with the latticework of interwoven experiences itself, tracing each detail of the criss-cross patterns of our lives, essentially twinning moments - both their truth and their reality (however complex these may be)

- on the page. In her collection of personal essays A Woman in a Man's World, Crying ,

Vicki Covington claims that we live "storied lives," which implies that the story of our 1

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 lived experiences can not only be captured but that it is the goal of the creative nonfictionist to "hold up the moment, to take it up, to put it to the light with all its prismatic, uncut edges" (Covington 10). This focus on capturing the "uncut" aspect of life is what differentiates creative nonfiction from fiction. Both genres delve into the many facets of human experience, but as defined by the Association of Writers &

Writing Programs, creative nonfiction is “factual and literary writing that has the narrative, dramatic, meditative, and lyrical elements of novels, plays, poetry, and memoir.” In Literature of Fact: Literary Non-fiction in American Writing , Ronald

Weber further defines the genre as “fact writing based on reporting that frequently employs techniques drawn from the art of fiction to create something of fiction’s atmosphere or feeling and that, most important, moves toward the intentions of fiction while remaining fully factual” (1). Thus creative nonfiction explores reality itself, unadorned with the fiction writer's impetus to fabricate facts, events, or people. As

Dennis Covington says it, "the events in a nonfiction piece actually happened; the events in a piece of fiction did not necessarily happen."

Consider Toni Morrison's Beloved , a rich and beautifully complex novel loosely inspired by the African American slave Margaret Garner who killed her own daughter rather than allow her child to live the life of a slave. Beloved is awe-inspiring in its language, its imagery, but more importantly in the ways it asks us to consider the psychological impacts of slavery on identity, on the mother-daughter bond, on the ways our social anxieties are rife with guilt, to name just a few possibilities of interpretation. But what about Margaret Garner? What does a mother who sacrifices

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 her own child in an attempt to free her look like after the act? What does she have to say? Does she say anything at all? If it were possible to interview her, to sit down and interact with her, what would be her story (not Toni Morrison’s)?

By bringing the actual experience to the forefront of the writing, creative nonfiction offers you a possibility of contact, of human contact, but also reminds you that there is an actual tangible being, a mother, a father, a brother, a child, a friend, that neighbor you hate, who has lived this or that particular event. Thus creative nonfiction becomes a magnifying glass, a tool that traces the "uncut edges" of unmediated life experiences, in hopes of revealing the patterns of meaning within our daily existences. Like Barry Lopez says "If you feel grief or rage or love, give it shape so that we as readers will know what you mean, and be able to better understand, better cope with the landscapes of our own grief and rage and love." Prose in both genres of creative nonfiction and fiction uphold the tenets of this quote, but I think fiction designs and constructs "the shape" Lopez speaks of, while creative nonfiction goes and hunts for it in an actual physical person, an actual existing geographic location, a verified concrete moment.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

Haitian Latticework: The Many Unseen Cultural & Historical Patterns My grandmother says "everything begins with history," and around 1492, three caravellas, La Nina, La Pinta and La Santa Maria dropped anchor on the shores of a large island on the Caribbean. Having arrived to what he initially believed to be India,

Christopher Columbus subsequently labeled the natives "Indians." In fact, the island was inhabited by the Taino, a Native American Arawakan people, with several appellations for their homeland including Bohio, Kiskeya, and Ayiti (this last name meaning "Land of Mountains"). Columbus claimed the island for the Spanish crown and renamed it Hispaniola, the Spanish Island. Thus, Haiti's recorded story begins.

Following the years after Columbus's arrival, from 1494 - 1793, Spain,

England and France battled for control of the island; France ultimately owned the western third portion of Hispaniola while the Spanish colonists claimed the reminder of the eastern portion. France renamed the island Saint-Domingue. The Indian Tainos, now slaves, perished from the harsh labors of the colony or from suicide to escape its horrors, and an estimated more than 790 000 black slaves from Africa were introduced to the island (ironically as a compassionate effort to save the Tainos by replacing them with hardier Africans). Near the end of the 18 th century, a group of northern black slaves held a week long Vodou ceremony after which they rose in arms and burnt down a plantation. The fever of the northern rebellion bled through to the South, and from 1793 to 1804, the entire island was racked by violence, massacre, and torture.

British, French, Spanish, and American troops, colored slaves, mulattoes (who fought

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 on both sides) and even some of the few surviving Tainos were involved in the deadly struggle.

On January 1, 1804, Haiti, the first black republic of the western world was born. The many descendants of the African slaves had reclaimed the Land of

Mountains for themselves. In a symbolic gesture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first ruler (and only emperor) of the now independent island, ripped the "white" from the

French tricolor, thus giving birth to Haiti's blue-red flag.

In his collection of semi-fictional tales, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara ,

Ben Fountain offers two descriptions of Haiti which not only evoke the richness of the lived experiences on the island but also suggest the extent to which one's Haitian experience was, is and will always be somewhat "storied." Indeed, Fountain writes

"Life here had the cracked logic of a dream, its own internal rules. You looked at a picture and it wasn't like looking at a picture of a dream, it was passage into the current of the dream" (47), a statement which is echoed by another one of Fountain's characters, who explains to his wife that Haiti is "in your face. [...] a place where everything happened altogether all at once, food, sweat, shit, grace, god, sex, and death, the raw and the cooked of life coming at you without any of the modern veneers" (64). Such characterizations, "the cracked logic of a dream" and the "in your face " quality of the Haitian experience speaks to the composite nature of the island's heritage which involves a latticework of physical and psychological landscapes strongly shaped by myth, ritual, and history. Therefore Haiti is uniquely "storied" because there is the potential of encountering lifestyles in which European and African

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 myths have merged and evolved into new ritual practices; there is the potential of religious customs that are informed by both Catholicism and Vodou; and there is the potential of witnessing cultural habits that have African, European and Native

American antecedents, and all of these elements co-exist simultaneously in a poverty- stricken environment of mountains and valleys marred by a consistent flow of annual natural disasters. Thus, Haitian lifestyles reveal a complex cultural latticework, which also includes practices born solely out of the necessity of having to adapt to the particular environment of the island itself. Ultimately, Haiti is uniquely storied because few will disagree with the fact that there is something both beautiful and extremely raw to one's experience on the island.

Given Haiti's rich and complex history, Ben Fountain's particular tag on the island, the connections between the words "cracked," "logic," and "dream" conjure an interesting atmosphere in which to consider the concepts of identity and place. Within the context of the cluster of ethnicities networking on the island throughout the centuries, how do identity and place intermingle to provide one with not only a sense of place in regards to geographical setting but also to provide one a sense of cultural identity? To what extent does place come to shape and mold identity? In other words, to what extent is the Haitian informed by the colonial traditions of Europe and the native practices of Africa and the Indian Tainos, and is there a possibility of a hybrid identity which collapses these ethnic/cultural multiplicities while simultaneously offering something purely Haitian, purely of the island?

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

Given the complex nature of such questions, I do not think that it is possible to arrive at simple or categorical answers, but it is my hope that the exploration of the questions themselves will illuminate aspects of Haiti and the Haitian lifestyle which up until this point have not been shared with communities beyond the literal boundaries of the island.

In order to achieve this, the creative nonfiction project I proposed presents the daily, habitual routines of the Haitian southerner, and considers the ways in which such routines are consistently influenced or laced with our spiritual and mythical beliefs to the extent that spiritual or magical entities do not belong to the realm of the imagination; rather, they are concrete beings who are actively involved in, and sometimes govern every aspect of life, be it politics, how a mother breastfeeds her child, how you prepare coffee and whether or not you put sugar in it, or how infectious diseases spread from one person to another to name a few.

The stories are not an attempt to categorize or objectively define what it is to be Haitian, rather they are accounts of personal narratives that I have either witnessed or experienced in Camp-Perrin, my village in the rural south of Haiti. As such, these accounts contend primarily with my point of view and expose my conceptions of my country, yet they also hopefully provide an entry into a rich and culturally complex environment to which few outside of Haiti have yet been exposed.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

Internal Latticework: How Am I Haitian? On one of the long drives from Port-au-Prince, the urban capital of Haiti, back to Camp-Perrin, our village in the south, I asked my father kisa m’ ye? "What am I?" I was about six or seven years old and very much upset. My encounter with city life had put me face-to-face with a concept of socialization from which I had been sheltered in my village of mountains, rivers, unpaved roads and mango orchards: social categories and prejudices. In Port-au-Prince, you were and still are defined by so many things: your family tree, your level of education, your skin color, your neighborhood, and the way you speak. Your adherence to these categories determines how you will be treated.

I learnt the expression Moun Monn in Port-au-Prince. “Mountain folk.” The term was being discussed by a group of children. Everyone was laughing. But I didn't understand what was funny about being a Moun Monn. After all, I was one! The way people spoke to their maids also confused me. Most families in Haiti have what one would call a maid. It is a necessity when you live in an environment where nothing is automated (the electricity is too temperamental and in most areas nonexistent), cooking-gas is a rare commodity which means that wood or charcoal is needed to prepare food. Food is bought in markets, not supermarkets, and has to be haggled over and cleaned from its unprocessed state to be ready to cook. The average family is said to spend a total of 6 hours a day gathering the water they need. Regular household tasks are lengthened to hours, even days, so you need help if you want to maintain both a job and a house.

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Back in Camp-Perrin, maids were an extended family. There is an inter- dependency and everyone helps each other out. But the interaction had a different feel in Port-au-Prince. Helpers were given orders, they did not sit at the table with everyone else, and the children of the house spoke to them with a directness that often bordered on cruelty; maids were made fun of because of their inability to pronounce certain words, their inability to read or write, their jet black skin, the fact that they were from rural provinces. But I was never taunted by my mulatto and urban friends, yet it was all too obvious to me that in some ways I too fit the same bill as the maids in their households: I was from a rural province, I had dark skin, and I didn’t have the

Port-au-Prince dialect. I spoke like a villager, a farmer.

It is not my wish to generalize or map my seven-year old feelings on to an entire city and its people, but the behaviors I witnessed as a young child were repeated over the years, and made all the more apparent when I moved from Camp-Perrin to

Port-au-Prince in 1999 to complete my high-school education. I was seventeen years old, doing well at one of the best schools in the city, but constantly trying to figure out why I was never quite at ease in the urban arena of the capital, why I never really let my guard down around the kids from school. Two years later, in 2001, I still had not come up with answers but I had a clearer picture of the problem: I straddled two different environments. Literally.

On the one hand, I was dark-skinned and raised on a farm in a very rural area; therefore, I was a something of a peasant by Port-au-Prince standards. On the other hand, my father was a white British photographer and my mother was a Haitian

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 doctor, who had spent 16 years in Europe before returning to the island to practice her profession; she was also the daughter of Haitian army Colonel Pressoir Pierre, who became the military attaché in Paris. By Port-au-Prince standards, this made me part of the educated elite.

But I am also a Camp-Perrinoise by birth. My birthmother in Camp-Perrin died after I was born. Her eighth child. My biological father could not take care of all of us, so he offered some of his children to neighboring families whom he respected, including the new couple in the village, the doc and her blan husband. I grew up in a purely rural Haitian community with a French-educated Haitian mother and a white

English father who spoke Creole ‘like a native.’ I grew up on stories of the Godess

Erzulie, Vodou possession, kompa (traditional Haitian music and dance) as well as

The Little Mermaid , Nancy Drew, The Lord of the Rings, Tina Turner, Mick Jagger and the Backstreet Boys. I stuttered for a couple of years and the official diagnosis was that I had three languages gestating in my mind: English, French and Haitian-

Creole. My father and I still joke about the fact that I am a Paysanne de Luxe , a

“Deluxe Peasant.” And none of this is apparent when you first meet me.

One question usually pops up when people realize that my father is white: "But you don't look mixed?" Yet, I am. I face the same identity challenges of most children who grew up with mixed heritages, even though there is no evidence of it on my skin or in the way I speak. Genetically, I cannot provide proof that half of my family is white and the other half black. And I do not have an accent; or rather, when I speak

English, I sound like I have always belonged; when I speak French, I sound like a

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

Parisian; and when I speak Creole, I sound like I am from the south of Haiti. I doubt my seven year old self went through this level of introspection, but I do remember the frustration: how could one belong and not belong at the same time? Perhaps the more accurate question is in what ways do I myself present a hybrid identity, laced with cultural multiplicities, yet bound to Haiti?

A Mexican-American friend of mine, and fellow writer, said the term “mixed” is misleading. She believes that one isn’t “half” white and “half” Mexican; rather, one is 100% white and one is 100% Mexican. The math results in a 200% individual who occupies a unique social category because their multiplicity is fully integral to their cultural make-up, and as such, they have the ability to understand and empathize with the cultural differences of their background, yet when it comes to their individuality, they also have the option of picking and choosing cultural elements that they prefer, ultimately fashioning and cultivating a hybrid identity which escapes categorization.

Thus, my particular upbringing as well as my cultural and familial background is an additional reason for my wanting to put together a creative nonfiction project involving personal narratives on the south of Haiti. It is, I think, in part an attempt to understand the parameters of my own identity as well as a unique opportunity to explore the ways in which Haiti itself is a latticework of intertwined cultures.

As someone who also grew up in a household directly influenced by western culture, I can discuss my country in a way that makes it more accessible to a foreign audience. Moreover, shortly before I was born my parents changed their respective careers and became involved in local agricultural and environmental programs,

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 working very closely with the local farming communities. Thus, living in a truly rural neighborhood, I am privy to experiences and stories that are unique to the Haitian south, and my understanding of these experiences is informed by the fact that I lived on the island for most of my life; therefore, I can provide a contemporary perspective on rural Haiti, and also provide insight into certain cultural and mythic Haitian practices beyond the readily available and/or the stereotypical perceptions of the country, especially in the presence of Vodou and the occasional use of black magic in day to day life.

This contemporary insight is vital mainly because there is very little of it on the market. Most news concerning the island, especially within the realm of creative writing, is either dated or focused on Haiti’s troubled history, whereas the lives of contemporary Haitians, the complex nature of the cultural and socio-political troubles of the current generation of people on the island are, for the most part, being ignored.

Moreover, current literary representatives of Haiti such as Dany Laferriere,

Lyonel Trouillot, Guy Dalembert, Franketienne (playwright), Gary Victor and

Edwidge Danticat focus either on the Haitian urban lifestyle or on the diasporic experience of Haitian families and communities outside of Haiti. Only a relatively small percentage of the island’s 12 million inhabitants reside in the major hub cities such as Port-au-Prince or Le Cap, whereas the remaining majority is constituted of rural villagers and farmers. I believe that it is time that our stories about rural life on the island joined the collective narratives on Haiti because we also represent an important facet of the Haitian experience.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

Ultimately, the act of sharing the idiosyncrasies of Camp-Perrin alongside my own experiences underlines the fact that although I am trying to gain a more in-depth understanding of the different socio-cultural aspects at play in my village, the project is very much a process of self-discovery on the many ways one is and can be Haitian.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

Book Review

Memoir, Travel Writing and the Personal Essay

Since the content of my dissertation revolves around concepts of cultural hybridity and self-exploration, I have focused on the creative nonfiction sub-genres of memoir, travel writing and the personal essay because the craft elements and the subject matter of these sub-genres are the best vehicles to portray the vision that I have for the project. The bibliography for the dissertation therefore lists works primarily concerned with the multiple latticeworks involved in the formation of one's identity.

For example, Cette Grenade Dans La Main du Jeune Negre Est-Elle Une Arme ou Un Fruit by Dany Laferriere offers personal essays which explore the themes of power, race, sexuality, and poverty within the context of a Haitian writer very much infatuated with American culture, yet also disappointed by many of his American experiences. The fact that the essays present a contemporary mosaic of locations and experiences in the United States (as well as reflections on September 11, what if

Monica Lewinsky had been a black woman, Walt Whitman) interspersed with Haitian references extends the categorization of Cette Grenade Dans La Main du Jeune Negre

Est-Elle Une Arme ou Un Fruit beyond the boundaries of personal essays on what it means to be American, as Laferriere also attempts to deal with the shadow of his native heritage, and come to terms with the fact that his identity is not tethered to a single reality, but defined by the migratory patterns of his own life.

Similar to Laferriere, Peter Trachtenberg's identity is founded on shifting cultural allegiances which concretize the hybrid nature of his existence. Indeed, 7

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Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh is both a memoir and a travel narrative from New

York to the Borneo Islands. In it, Trachtenberg also draws an emotional/spiritual landscape as he attempts to come to terms with the cultural realities of his identity: he is Jewish and yet he has practically broken every rule in the book. Subsequently, each of his tattoos serves as a narrative framework for his personal forays into drug addiction, Catholicism, New York's fringe cultures, and the world of tattooists' conventions, but more importantly, each of these tales resonate with his need to both define and consolidate the mutually exclusive aspects of his identity.

In her memoir Brother, I am Dying , (along with her novels Breath, Eyes,

Memory and Krick! Krack! ), Haitian author Edwidge Danticat approaches the subject of identity formation from a slightly different angle, and focuses on the cultural gaps that exist between the different generations within the same family: how does a daughter understand her country and the cultural realities of her surroundings versus her father's and uncle's interpretations. Moreover, Brother, I am Dying also brings the cultural tensions between a Haitian man who chooses to live in the United States and one who chooses to remain in his country despite the dangerous consequences of such a decision. These brothers, Danticat's father and uncle, separated by the Atlantic

Ocean, are still bound by the same cultural heritage, and Danticat traces the ways that heritage is sustainable both over time and outside of Haiti.

In terms of content, Dany Laferrire and Peter Trachtenberg’s memoirs contend with identity issues which relate to my cultural explorations of the Haitian identity, but more importantly, these memoirs (along with Margot Singer’s The Pale of Settlement

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 or Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence ) provide one with a sense of place through cultural and physical descriptions of the environment. Conversely, Brother, I am

Dying explores different perspectives on what it means to be Haitian, all the while providing one with a personal biography of Danticat’s life.

Several books on the list also examine the complex cultural and political history of the island. Indeed, Jeremy Popkin's Facing Racial Revolution is one of the best and most in-depth explorations of the events that led to the many slave rebellions in Haiti. One interesting aspect of Popkin's research is his focus on the tenets of the slave rebellions themselves: to what extent were they orchestrated by the slaves? To what extent were they a result of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in France? And to what extent were they a result of the tensions between the two categories of white settlers on the island (those who wanted independence from France and who formed alliances with some free men of color as well as marooned black slaves, and those who wanted the reinforcement of the French monarchy)? Popkin also considers the precarious situation of the growing number of free men of color, who were given their own land and their own slaves versus a number of them who supported the independence movement. Thus, in the 18 th century, the political situation in Haiti was not only extremely complex and rife with machinations and fluid allegiances but it was also a situation on the brink of explosion. And that is still the case today.

Therefore an understanding of the country's political history may shed light on the complicated nature of the current network of politics: a network made all the more elaborate by the presence of religious and spiritual practices.

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Indeed, Leslie Desmangles' The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman

Catholicism in Haiti exposes the ways African and European religious practices have woven a set of indigenous and unique customs that characterize the contemporary religious atmosphere in Haiti: not only do Vodou and Catholicism coexist but Haitians both worship God and honor African deities, to the extent that Catholic symbols are integral to Vodou ceremonies. These ceremonies have been, and still are, important components of any major political decision. The first slave upraising in 1791 led by

Makandal happened during a Vodou ceremony, as well as the subsequent slave rebellions, namely the ones lead by famous slave Boukman. Even President Jean-

Bertrand Aristide is rumored to have mixed Vodou with the politics of running the country, and President “Papa Doc” Duvalier was infamous for taking on the guise of the Vodou lwa/spirit Baron Samedi.

But Vodou also bleeds beyond politics in Haiti. In Divine Horsemen: The

Living Gods of Haiti , Maya Deren furthers Desmangles' exploration of Vodou and provides an in-depth analysis where Vodou is established more as a way of life. As

Gary Victor points out in Banal Oubli , Vodou is the means by which an individual maintains balance, whether it be psychological, emotional or familial. Indeed, Banal

Oubli depicts a fictional character who realizes that he has misplaced himself: he has lost his bon ange , which makes up part of his soul. According to Vodou, the personality and the human soul are wrapped up in the gros bon ange and the ti bon ange, aspects of our minds which govern our actions and desires. Gary Victor's story involves a man's quest to not only find his bon ange but to also rectify the damages his

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 bon ange has done (in other words, the character's id has manifested itself in human form and now is running unchecked).

The inclusion of Vodou references in a project on Haiti is therefore essential because Vodou is part and parcel of the different cultural and social frameworks present on the island, and the Haitian conception of Vodou encompasses more than the typical media associations of evil religious practices and rites. The deities in Vodou are omnipresent, and honoring them helps keep life balanced. Moreover, the powerful spirits in Vodou are believed to be human souls who have ascended to a higher realm, and in that regard Vodou spirits are historical forefathers knotted to our contemporary cultural identities.

Fiction Texts for Nonfiction Since my interests have to do with cultural identity and the extent to which it is linked to a particular setting or environment, I have included in my bibliography several fiction books which revolve around issues of ethnicity and place, such as

Dionne Brand's At The Full and Change of the Moon, in which each chapter captures the voice and experience of a Trinidadian slave and all of her descendants, from her daughter to her great-great-great-great grandchildren. In that way, At the Full and

Change of the Moon not only offers insight into the Caribbean lifestyle but also traces the evolution, both native and immigrant, of a single family tree. Therefore, the novel ultimately exposes the mutative growths of initially colonized lifestyles. Beyond an obvious link to my area of interest, it is the structural characteristic of the storytelling within these novels which I find appealing.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

Indeed, at the level of the language, fiction by Louise Erdrich, such as Love

Medicine , or Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians with their focus on what is it to be

Native American, as well as Ana Menendez’ collection of short stories In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd manipulates language itself to crystallize different voices, settings and beliefs. Margot Singer's Pale of Settlement for instance, presents an exploration of

Israeli identity which involves the histories and life experiences of several characters within the same family. One is therefore confronted with several versions of the same reality (similar to the multiple narratives in Crossing the Mangrove by Maryse

Conde), and although this highlights the possibility that one can never truly know another person, and by extension an entire culture, The Pale of Settlement nonetheless evokes the cultural tensions at work within the many Israeli identities of the characters.

Within creative nonfiction, one should not take on the guise of multiple personae i.e. present the perspective of multiple characters or personalities, when in fact the only perspective present is that of a single person: the author. Rather, one can play with the aesthetic modalities of language (tone, rhythm, diction) in order to establish difference, whether it pertains to emotions, belief or people, thus concretizing the poetic credo “form reflecting content” or "form reflecting meaning" but this time around within the arenas of fact and truth telling. In order to achieve this,

I include three narrative structures in the project: short-shorts; traditional nonfiction pieces with neat, linear narratives; and lyrical writings, like the mosaic essay, which emphasizes fragmentation so that the structural arrangement of the project reflects the

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 multiplicity at the heart of the subject matter. Given that the dissertation revolves around my explorations of my own identity along with my attempts at understanding what it is to be a Haitian living in contemporary Haiti, a number of chapters involve events that are unstudied, undiscussed or subject to multiple interpretations because of their notoriety/gossip factor. Thus, the structural changes from chapter to chapter serve as a metaphor for the story itself.

For example, in my essay “Did You Hear the One about the Mule-Girl?” I explore the important role storytelling plays in our sense of identity by discussing the animal transformation tales in Camp-Perrin and neighboring villages. Later on in the dissertation, this essay is then followed by a short-short, “You Hear the One about the

Dog?” about a thief who is believed to have transformed into a dog during a hot, crowded day at the market. Both structurally and stylistically, this short-short differs from the essay because this second piece is not only shorter, but it is also written in a less straightforward manner, and presents more of a stream of consciousness as I am trying to capture the disorientation as well as the physical sensory overstimulation one experiences in the noisy overcrowded environment of Haitian markets.

Beyond issues of craft or structural organization, the presence of Native

American texts in the booklist is largely due to the cultural similarities between Native

Americans and Haitians. In her book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti ,

Maya Deren, in her exploration of the origins of the warrior/violent spirits present in

Vodou Petro ceremonies, comes to the following astonishing conclusion:

The African culture in Haiti was saved by the Indian culture which, in the Petro cult, provided the Negroes with divinities sufficiently

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

aggressive (as was not true of the divinities of the generally stabilized African kingdoms) to be the moral force behind the revolution. In a sense, the Indians took their revenge on the white man through the Negro. (11)

Thus, from a historical point of view, Deren establishes an incredibly intimate link between the two cultures. A connection whose presence is gradually solidified when one considers the similarities between the nature of the myths and story-telling practices amongst Native Americans and Haitians. Indeed, works by Sherman Alexie and Stephen Graham Jones reflect the organizing (and sometimes disorganizing) principle of folklore within the contemporary Native American community. Although

Alexie is more preoccupied with the urban atmosphere while Jones excavates the rural, suburban lifestyle of Native Americans, the characters from both authors grapple with the constant intrusion of mythical rites, manners, and customs on their everyday activities. Louise Erdrich's Tracks burrows even deeper into the subject when she touches on the cultural tensions and anxieties generated by the clash between

Catholicism and Native American religious beliefs. This particular dance between the

"sacred" and the "profane" is very much a fixture of the Haitian landscape as well, as

Haitians have to contend with both Catholicism and Vodou. Indeed, despite the fact that Catholic and Vodou symbols often occur simultaneously, Vodou still has a certain stigma attached to it in Haiti, and therefore, it is not referenced lightly in public.

Vodou ceremonies retain a sense of reverent but potentially dangerous mystery, and hougans (Vodou priests) are both feared and respected within a community. Moreover,

Vodou is firmly established within the poor communities of Haiti, while those who are

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 financially well off, though they still practice it, rarely discuss the topic and more often than not either openly shun Vodou or discredit it. Thus, there is this sense that

Vodou is not the “right” thing to do, yet at the same time, it is fundamental to both how we understand life and how we go about our daily lives. In Camp-Perrin for example, one goes to the doctor, prays to God to cure an illness, but one also consults the resident hougan for advice or a curative spell, especially if the first two options did not yield satisfactory results. Rarely is the doctor told about the hougan’s involvement or about the hougan’s prescriptions for a cure. Thus the concepts of the “sacred” and the “profane” overlap within a spiritual and religious latticework which is part of one’s

Haitian upbringing.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

CHAPTER 2

FOREWORD When you are from the Caribbean, West Texas is as foreign as you can get: the flat nothingness of the landscape, the roads and highways with their two-day visibility, the brown-orange wind bejeweling your skin and your face in dust particles that ultimately line the sides of your tongue, the back of your throat, and your doorstep.

The only thing quasi -tropical about Lubbock is the sky and its spectrum of cerulean, offering up shades of blue so constant, so clear, that it is a living cliché, a postcard stretched against the heavens. I say quasi-tropical, because the island skies are shifty and fidgety. Lightly blue one minute, one minute suffocating in white clouds, and then the next grey. They are never this static in their beauty. They are never this elegant.

My first visit to Lubbock, in March 2007, I drove down 34 th Street, passed a store, "Bible-Mart" in giant red letters over the top of the front doors, and I said to myself do not do this . The Bible-Mart aside, the plains will swallow you whole. Do not move here. There is nothing, absolutely nothing to tether you to home, to Haiti.

The neighborhoods, the houses, the buildings, even the people. Not a spec of familiarity anywhere.

But then I met Dennis Covington. I came to Lubbock, Texas because I had gotten into the PhD program at Texas Tech University, but I stayed in Lubbock, Texas because of Dennis. Something about this white man from Alabama with the clear blue eyes was very familiar, but I did not know what it was exactly at the time that was so familiar. It was not that he said I should write my story; it was not that he said my

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 story was begging for creative nonfiction, a field I had never even heard of at the time.

Poetry was how I breathed, how I made it through a good day and a shit day; prose was not my forte. Let alone nonfiction.

A year went by before I understood what I recognized in Dennis. We were sitting in a crowd of people, and he told this story about a man and a chicken, about the ways in which southerners can always recognize each other by their stories because they told stories that were awkward, rude, inappropriate, laced with suffering, yet somehow beautiful, and these stories came out with ease, fluid-like, as if it is the most natural thing in the world to have a guy fuck a chicken and discover that fucking a chicken, well, kills the chicken.

The light bulb flashed yellow. Perhaps it is more accurate to say a pilot light.

Not a light bulb, but a pilot light flashed yellow. Something dimmed coming to life. I knew that here was a man who will understand that I am from a place where werewolves are not fictional characters, where a condom could steal your spirit, where a thief could shape shift into a dog. Here was a man who knew what it was like to be branded by a history so famous that everyone wanted a piece of it, because the same way that everyone had a theory on the South, everyone also had a theory on Haiti, an explanation for why this happened or why that happened, and you watch your history slip out of your grasp into the mouths of experts, and researcher, and historians. But as much as they study your birthplace, your origins, their explanations are somehow lacking. Incomplete.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

I listened to Dennis talk about the South, about Alabama, and I heard Haiti humming in the background. When you grow up and you live your years on the periphery of the mystical, the weird, the fantastic, the “gloriously fucked-up” my father likes to say, your stories, and by extension everything about you, slant at an odd angle. Dennis's South reminded me of my Haiti. I could not believe that out of all the tales I had read about my country by actual Haitian authors, Danticat, Laferriere, Gary

Victor, it was stories about the American South that reminded me of home.

Covington's storytelling brought my village back to me. He was talking about the

South he knew, and I realized there were no stories about the Haiti I know.

Leah Reed, a friend of mine from college, believed in a wonderful social theory: she claimed that individuals from different backgrounds, different races and ethnicities actually have the ability to form genuine connections, strong lasting bonds, specifically because their apparent differences are so stark, that they heighten and emboss any similarities between the individuals. In other words, the differences shed a glaring light on the similarities; all that is required from everyone is a modicum of attention. Whereas folk from the same cultural environment, Leah thought, from the same place, with similar backgrounds, similar interests, similar ethnicities or races buy into this idea of “sameness”, they let themselves be blinded by it, and therefore may not realize the extent to which they are in fact different, the extent to which their connections are only surface deep, the extent to which their cohesiveness is somewhat

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 manufactured, fractured, and that deep down in their core, they long for something beyond the boundaries of this sameness.

We were twenty years old at the time, and discussing this topic over Rocky

Road ice-cream in the dining hall of the Mellon House in Chatham College, up in

Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, so I understand that there might be flaws in Leah's reasoning;

I can see the onslaught of counter-criticisms and counter-arguments riding their way toward her at lightning speed; but somewhere in her analysis, there is a gem, a fundamental reality, unpolished as some may believe it to be, but still legitimate.

Ten years later, her words still hold with me. Her theory blends nicely with my understanding of Zora Neale Hurston's "my skin folk are not my kin folk.” From the minute I read it, said it out loud, that line hummed at the root of my consciousness. I would tweak it a little bit. Say my skin folk are not necessarily my kin folk, a statement which does not advocate a rejection of one's community but rather forces one to question: what is exactly my community? Where do I actually belong? With whom do

I have the most in common? Who is telling my story? And are they telling it the way I would?

To that last question, my answer is no. The Haitian authors I knew, the Haitian authors I discovered throughout my years in the United States were not telling the

Haiti I know - rural Haiti, a place of farmers and peasants, of mountains and waterfalls, of foreigners who have lived in the country so long their Creole was better than most Haitians, and their knowledge about the secrets of the country far surpassed that of the native; these foreigners’ souls were believed to have turned Haitian, so we

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 called them blan mannan ; a Haiti of UN soldiers, men not liked, barely tolerated because they stood around a lot, and just watched, even when a child was being attacked right before their eyes, and Dominican whorehouses stealthily built themselves up overnight right next to their barracks, and no one could clearly say what exactly they were doing in the country, or better yet, after all these years, what had they done; a Haiti of US Marines, stopping over on their way to Iraq, troupes of young and seasoned men, mostly young men, tense to the point self-combustion but effective and on-point when it came to the annihilation of a threat, any threat, so they were liked a bit more than the UN soldiers, liked a bit more because they liked our mangoes, morphed into innocent young men again when they peeled back the mango skins; a

Haiti of magic and spirits that had nothing to do with the supernatural, or witches, or black or dark magic, but with every day chores; a Haiti of presidents with a personal

Vodou advisor on staff; a Haiti of subsistence farming, of surviving on one dollar a day; a Haiti of paradoxes like the single farmer, torso and ribs exposed, skin darkening like charcoal, raking over what little piece of land he owns, a black bull pulling him along, as he haggles over the price of the market corn… on his Motorola cell phone; a

Haiti of year-round black-outs yet it never got dark, not because of kerosene lamps, but because of solar powered lights and generators, so there were moments when an entire village was thrumming, literally; or a Haiti where the electric company still sent you a monthly bill even though there had been no electricity for twelve consecutive months; but mostly a Haiti of laughter; laughter through the sadness, laughter through

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 the pain, laughter through the poverty, laughter through tears, laughter after the earthquake of 2010. A today-Haiti; a right-this-minute Haiti.

Papa Doc and Baby Doc mean nothing to me. Bold statement. Yes. But it is the truth, not only for me but for a big majority of the people in my village, for those of us born in or after the late seventies. We have other presidents on our minds. Other men who have led the country in a glory march in the name of democracy, or so we thought. By the time it became evident that we had in fact joined a funeral march, that

Haiti was chewing itself inside out, that we had chosen (or not chosen, democracy is a relative term) appallingly wrong leaders, it was too late. Where is the discussion about these men who have skinned the country and left it like an open sore in the Atlantic?

In her collection of essays, Create Dangerously , Danticat writes that one needs to “rethink facile allegiances,” a statement which echoes Zora Neale Hurston and my friend, Leah Reed. It is not that I believe that Laferriere, or Gary Victor, or

Franketienne or even Madison Smartt Bell are offering inaccurate portrayals of my country, or that these writers are not Haitian enough, hence they cannot write about the island. In the end, there is no such thing as a true Haitian, as a true representative of an entire nation. We are too complex for simplistic thinking like that. It is the equivalent of claiming that one individual represents the United States.

My concern is about what are we paying attention to, a point that Barry Lopez brought up to me when he flat out asked “you may be from the country, but have you been paying attention?” And I suppose there is the rub. Everything I have read thus far leaves me aching for the present, for stories not set a day beyond 2005 (to pick an

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 arbitrary year); I ache for facts because in Haiti, they ultimately tell a story where despair and wonder whirl in and out of each other in wild dervish dance. Nothing needs to be invented about the island; the mere act of putting down the facts will birth a story.

It will be a good story. It will serve its two masters faithfully: it will entertain, it will distract, for a moment it will take you out of your life; but it will also catapult you into a soup-mix of very real issues, it will make you a witness to events that you can later choose to ignore but that hopefully you will not want to ignore, it will remind you of the people at the heart of every story, it might remind you… of you. To steal

Ilan Stavens’ line from On Borrowed Words: a Memoir of Language - "My aim is not to convey my nationality but my translationality” (10).

Beyond sharing the particular colors, the shapes and sinews of my village, of what I understand and imagine when I hear the word Haiti, the process of writing Ayiti

Cherie unveiled a different tether, something that I did not even know existed: my father and I speak to each other through Vodou. And again here, I hear Leah. I hear

Zora Neale Hurston.

Because my mother and I have a natural allegiance. We are Haitian. We are women. We are black. We are undeniably opinionated as hell. And stubborn. We are the same. I would not call our allegiance facile; it is natural. Call it the mother- daughter connection. It simply is. But because the allegiance is there, because it is self-evident, it taints my understanding of Vodou. Taint is perhaps too strong a word.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

Rather, I should say it controls my interaction with Vodou. Because like all Haitians, I approach Vodou with a mixture of fear and profound respect, and I accept it without questioning it, without probing it. There is absolutely no need for analysis or research.

Like my mother and I, Vodou is a fact. It simply is.

But in writing the essay "Shades of Vodou," I realized that I have in a way always wanted to question Vodou, that I have somewhat questioned it, and always kept a weary but very inquisitive eye on it, that I have always, in fact, wanted to research it, and that without even really discussing the subject, my father, a white

Irishman via England, paved the way for my forays into Vodou. He gave me permission to do something that I have always wanted to do: hold Vodou up to a light and look at it. Intently. But not necessarily with reverence or fear or hate or any emotion. Just experience it.

"You need to go to a Vodou ceremony," my dad said when he found out I was writing this book. Right after the words came out of his mouth, two things happened at once: my body jerked backwards and I smiled. I knew that in spirit my mother had jerked with me. She did not have to say anything. I heard her voice, the island's voice, in my head. This is not something to play around with . I should not go to a Vodou ceremony. I should keep my distance. Respect the laws of the island. But deep down inside, I was nodding. Yes !

As Haitian as I am, when it comes to Vodou, I really want to act like a blan , like a foreigner, a white man; I want to see it through my father's eyes, which are in fact my eyes.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

CHAPTER 3

DID YOU HEAR THE ONE ABOUT THE MULE-GIRL? Within the Lubbock Starbucks on the corner of Glenna Goodacre and

University, on this particularly slow-moving Sunday afternoon, it gradually becomes apparent that landscape makes for much of the difference between the United States and the biggest island of the Caribbean. Whenever someone learns that you might be

Haitian, not second or third or fourth generation, but fresh off the boat Haitian, the same questions inevitably spill from their mouths, "How did you end up in

Pittsburgh?" "How did you end up in Texas? West Texas of all places?" "What's the biggest difference between Haiti and here?"

Depending on which coast of the island you departed from, or whether you drove south or north to get to Mais Gate , the only functional (and legal) airport in the country, the answers are shaded with as much variety as Haiti’s twelve million inhabitants. Ultimately, there are too many reasons for why you ended up in the

United States, for why you left the motherland, and more often than not, people are not actually interested in the reasons you left; they want to know how you are coping; they want to know how your country compares to theirs. And from inside this West

Texas Starbucks, with so many accents slow and curved and free-floating, pollen-like, across the room, one can observe the straightness of certain things: the long lanes that make University Avenue, the squat rectangular lanes for the parking spaces; red lights, green lights mounted on metal posts, square-shaped grass lots. Signs marking territory and limit; and the answer to all such questions becomes obvious, almost startling: the

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 difference between here and there? Not so much geographical location, a particular flora or fauna, but rather, visual demarcations of ownership.

The American landscape brims with billboards, real-wood-fake-wood fences and colorful metal constructions signaling this is mine, that is yours, you may walk here but not here. One need simply spread one’s legs, and one is straddling two counties, two states, indicated by a haggard sign with the words "welcome to xxxx," white letters almost fading, or another one reminding you that you are now "leaving xxxx." The awareness of where you are, where you stand, can be estimated within the margins of an inch. Even along single-lane lonely roads, signs remind you not of direction but of place, of territory. Think of Elephant Butte as you head west towards

New Mexico from Lubbock, Texas. Turn off on the exit and be ready to meet the people of Elephant Butte (Elephant Butteans?). Rules apply here in an acutely visual transaction reinforcing "my property," "my front yard," "my backyard," "my land."

Signs, however, don't grow in Haitian soil. Whenever one is planted along the border between, say, the equivalent of two southern counties, for example Chantal and

Lamartinière, it fades into nothingness i.e. one day, it just disappears. One day the border sign simply ceases to exist. Someone eventually asks "What happened to the sign?" The response is usually a shrug, nonchalant.

So, if you happen to be in Haiti, and if you happen to go down south, there is only one way for you to know you have now crossed from Lamartinière into Chantal: you are of the country somehow, and more importantly, you are a Southerner, and as such know the South, you have a feel for the land. You know that mango tree has been

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 around since your grandfather's day, and your grandfather is born and raised Chantal folk. You are in Chantal because of that mango tree.

The corner up the street, the sharp curve of the road, marks the beginning of

Lamartinière in that the minute you pass that corner, you know that people get almost violently upset if you even attempt to mention that one might still be in Chantal. What you develop is a feel for the land, and if enough people say it is so, then it must be true. In Haiti, in the south at least, borders waiver to the left or to the right. Always.

We don't do clear lines. When asked to form a straight line, Haitian men, their women and their children, cluster.

You have to be at the airport three hours prior to a flight's departure because there are no lines, no endless lengths of red thread whose thickness marks the barrier between flights to Miami or to New York, between the 8 a.m. flight or the noon flight, between citizens, residents, and the blans , between American Airlines and the

Caribbean airline LIAT, an acronym which should stand for Leave Island Any Time because your 8 a.m. flight might leave at 3 p.m. for no apparent reason, and you can rush to the airport at 2 p.m. to find that your 4 p.m. flight left at 11 a.m. Again, for no apparent reason (LIAT will soon be celebrating its fifty years of service to the

Caribbean). This throng of human lives thrashes aimless within the off-white walls of

Mais Gate because we cannot do lines, barriers, or departure or arrival hours.

Some of us like to joke that it is something left over from the French ( Blans get blamed for a lot of things). They too have difficulty handling lines whether it be at the opening of a new movie, waiting to purchase tickets on the Champs-Elysées or going

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 through immigration on the day that Charles De Gaulle's airport personnel decides to go on strike, except for three people in three booths. The French men, women and children won't form three lines; they'll gather like a herd of nervous hormonal bulls and stampede. The running joke is that the French colonizers who came to Haiti, then

Hispaniola (or Ayiti for anyone wishing to acknowledge the fact that the native

Indians had baptized their home) must have brought with them this aversion to lines, to barriers. A glance at the aerial view of the road maps in Haiti, la Route National

Numero 1, for instance, one of the island’s main roads (solely paved on the occasions when whoever happens to be president decides to venture outside the capital), confirms the colonial French blans' distaste for straight lines of any kind. A jagged zigzag from the North of the island all the way to the South, la Route National

Numero 1 parallels rivers, cuts across them, curves around the base of mountains (and in the old Arawak language Ayiti means land of mountains), climbs up the side of the hill only to dive down the same side, as if a five-year-old child had been given a marker and told to draw a line from the top of the map to the bottom of the map. From the North to the South, the colonial roads trench the landscape with no respect for the gamut of Haitian soils which run from basaltic, iron-rich red dirt or to off-white limestone rocks. And we kept those roads, nurtured them in our own way into the present and bull-dozed new ones stemming from the same pattern already laid down for us. It’s our cultural inheritance. Thanks to the French, we mistrust the line, the barrier quality of it. There are no signs, no lines, no borders as far north as the capital because the soil has this tendency to eat them up.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

As a southerner, when you drive up from your country, because nowhere else but the South is your country, into Port-au-Prince, eight hours away, there is nothing to signal that you are nearing the capital. You know you've left the South and crossed over into somewhere else because the air is heavy with dull heat, smoke and dust.

How else do you know that Port-au-Prince is near? Refuse. The city is either choking in refuse or vomiting it in waves over the sidewalks, the cement so cracked and shattered in some places you can't help but think of the aftermath of an earthquake.

But the land's inability or unwillingness to deal with street signs or barriers only goes so far. Somehow Haitians, definitively in the case of southerners, manage to remain territorial. Chantal and Lamartinière lands might bleed into each other but you mistake someone form Lamartinière as being from Chantal at your own peril. The

"territorialness" is not authenticated by a fence or a sign, something with an expiration date, something which can fade from time (or from someone going out into the night with a pitchfork and a shovel or, should the sign be attached to a wooden post, with a handsaw) into nothingness; the "territorialness" is bound to the landscape, which itself is tethered to a particular story about the people.

For instance, Chantal folk have mulet stories whereas our stories in

Lamartinière involve bulls or dogs; there no mules in our stories, and there really is no explanation for their absence. Our beasts of burden simply behaved, so there was nothing to tell. But last year, fall 2008, a Chantal story made its way into

Lamartinière: a small dirty grey mulet had turned into a woman. To listen to Madame

Henri tell it, very early on Market day, an old lady (call her Mrs. A) walked over to

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 her neighbor’s house (call the neighbor Mrs. B) to borrow her mulet. Mrs. A was planning on selling a load of avocadoes and mangoes harvested from the previous week, and she had packed everything on top of her mulet, when the damn beast lowered himself to the ground. You see there is some truth to the expression "stubborn as a mule." If they decide to lie on the ground, no amount of shouting, kicking, or thrashing will move them until they decide to do so. The funniest moment to be witnessed on Market day, or anywhere else along the southern road, is a mulet on the verge of bending its hind legs. Watch the owners drop whatever it was they were doing and run to the side of the beast, or if they happened to be riding the mule, the speed at which they jump off the animal's back is almost frightening (especially in the case of the at least 70 year-old hunched-back grandmothers).

In either circumstance, the owners begin this wild gesturing – picture a demented Irish jig – to distract the mule, or they run to the mule's ass and begin pushing. Anything to stop the animal from lying down. You could end up being stranded on the road, in the Market, or wherever the damn animal chose to become an immovable statue, for hours. So, Mrs. A had no choice: she needed to go about her business for the day, and her mulet was useless. Apparently, since Mrs. B rarely went to the Market, Mrs. A headed on over to her house. Mrs. B was happy to lend her friend a hand and the new mulet was saddled, packed and ready to go within minutes.

Here is why this is a Chantal person's story: a few miles up the street (nearing the bend in the road that belongs to Lamartinière actually), Mrs. B's mule stops moving. Now mind you, the mule doesn't lie down. It just stops moving. Mrs. A goes

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 through the motions and shouts, screams, does the Irish jig and even does the ass- pushing thing. Nothing. Finally, she pulls out a switch, a fret from under her long skirt and strikes Mrs. B's mule. This scene would not be altogether uncharacteristic. In the

Haitian countryside, fret and punishment go hand in hand, they are practically synonyms. It's either a mulet or a child on the receiving end of the switch. The ones torn from coffee bushes fret cafe marron, which translates into “marooned coffee switch” or “brown coffee switch,” inflict the most pain. Those coffee frets with their brown reed-like flexible lengths licked your skin, and dented it at the same time.

Mrs. A's story is clearly a Chantal folk kind of story because the minute the fret hit the mule's hide, the animal turned into a woman: dirty and naked. In the telling of the story, Madame Henri doesn't mention the avocadoes or the mangoes. They must have gotten bruised; after all, they must have fallen to the ground. Madame Henri goes on to describe the naked woman on her hands and knees in the middle of the unpaved, pebble-ridden street. She never spoke a word, never looked up and, it turns out, she was Mrs. B's daughter-in-law, who had been missing for the past several days. A crowd gathered around the two women; that's how Madame Henri initially found out about the story. She was part of the crowd. Someone walking past the scene was probably assaulted with comments such as "Was it witchcraft? A witch's evil eye?

Was Mrs. A the witch? Was Mrs. B the witch? Maybe the missing girl's husband? He could be a hougan , a male witch. After all, if his mother is a witch. Just like Chantal folk to not do something about their witches." The story of the mulet woman blazed through the Chantal and Lamartinière counties for several days.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

What happened next to the dirty naked Chantal girl - who, along with her husband, shared the mother-in-law's two bedroom house? A logical question, but not a

Haitian one. Like the missing border sign on the road, people shrug when you ask them this question after the fact. They will tell you the story over and over again.

Chantal folk, or at least those who identify as being from Chantal, tell it with a sense of authority in their voice, or if they're embarrassed, with a low and quick whisper; whereas the Lamartinière people will make sure you understand that this took place in

Chantal (it wasn't near enough to the curve to have happened in Lamartinière and besides the two women involved were clearly Chantal women).

The fate of the naked mulet girl is inconsequential. Not many would ever dream of providing an ending to her story along the lines of actually going to the mother-in-law's house and questioning her directly, or even Mrs. A for that matter.

Location and territory is what one must take away from what happened to the mulet woman from Chantal. The one person, someone from Lamartinière (her house was way past the curve and all), who asked Madame Henri who the girl's family was and what finally happened to her, came up short. Madame Henri waved her hand, sighed and said ah...ou konnen "well...you know," and changed the topic of conversation.

But there are indeed facts to this story. There had been a crowd. A naked girl in the street. The story was talked about for days. More than one person mentioned the naked mulet girl from Chantal. The girl herself was recognized, and the crowd followed her home. To a certain extent, everyone's story added up (there were rumors that the girl might not have been from Chantal, she might have been from Chantigny,

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 another neighboring county to Lamartinière, and there was debate as to whether or not a fret was actually used to trigger the transformation). But whenever you specifically asked for the girl's name or the exact location of her house, the response was unanimous, and silent; as if beyond happening in Chantal, to Chantal folk, the remaining details of the story no longer held any value. It's either a "You simply had to be there" moment, or perhaps another version of the utter distrust you have as a

Haitian toward the straightforward quality of certain things, even storytelling.

A beginning, an end, some kind of thread which ties the pieces of the tale together, whether true or fabricated, reeks of barriers, or rules which are always reminiscent of the line, of the border you shouldn't and cannot cross. And Haitian southerners don't do lines, to the point of not even building their houses straight. We let cement walls and thatch roofs slant to the side, never quite finished, never quite right. Intuition accounts for much that is Haitian. It's the same for our stories, which covalent-bond-like, tether us to the land, a place whose borders expand and retract like waves, without ever crystallizing or acquiring a sense of concreteness, without ever being defined within one specific person or thing. Our 'territorialness,' at least in the

South, extends to the story, but not to its details, not to its structure. Just the event, which may have occurred a little bit to the left, or a little bit to the right. The point is, it (probably) didn't occur here.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

CHAPTER 4

I SPELL VODOU, YOU SPELL HOODOO Voodoo, Vaudoo, Vaudou, Vodun, Vodoun, Hoodoo, Vaudoux . It is only one word, one word, and yet, here we are, forced to choose over the correct arrangement of letters, forced to argue over the correct version – yours or mine?

Vaudoux, Vodoun, Voodoo . It is a severe case of “I say, You say;” it is about how the syllables, the vowels crawl over your tongue and spill out of your lips versus how they do it over and out of mine. Let us say that we are both French, but I am from the Caribbean and you are from Paris, France. We will never sound the same. Or perhaps you speak English. That adds a whole other layer, an additional level of difficulty; yet another way of hearing and funneling sound.

Vodun, Voodoo . Bob Corbett writes, “Each of these is an attempt to spell the word in a way which represents how it is pronounced in Haiti.” I know nothing about

Mr. Corbett, found him via a random online search, but I like his take on things; I especially like that he mentions that nobody – nobody- in Haiti really ever says that word. He is right. In Haiti, especially in rural areas, we talk about lwas, about spirits.

It is mainly a discussion about possession: we talk about the lwa climbing on top of someone; we talk about someone serving the lwa.

But the word will manifest at some point. Vodou, Hoodoo, Vaudoo . I will be honest – nobody is perhaps too radical a stance. So, when we say it in Haiti, how do we say it? Well, it depends on where you are from: Au-Cap up North? Port-au-Prince?

You a southerner from Camp-Perrin or Jeremie? Each pronunciation is tinged with

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 subtle varieties. Add to that the fact that up until very recently i.e. maybe about twenty-five years ago, Haitian-Creole had no standard orthography. Everything had to do with phonetics, which meant that you wrote it down the way you heard it, the way you said it; so, one word could be spelled five to ten different ways, as long as everyone could read it, mouth out the syllables. (I choose to think that we are quirky on a national level for maintaining this fluid and open approach to language à la

Elizabethan Shakespeare style. On good days, it makes things fun, entertaining. When it comes to reading memos, or going over spelling instructions in a classroom of 4 th graders, things take a different turn.)

I understand the anthropologist’s and the professor’s need to move away from

Hollywood, to move away from what some fiction writers have done to that word, to move away from Voodoo and the sensationalist images and distorted facts those particular set of letters call to mind – the exorcism, the crazy zombies, the blood, the evilness, the over-the-top drama of it all. I understand that. I do. But I also know people, Haitians, who when pronouncing the word actually say Voodoo, drawing out both ‘ooo’ sounds. Perhaps instead of focusing on a series of letters, it might be more effective to simply explain Voodoo, Vaudou, Vaudoux, Vodun , hop on over to the island, experience it through actual senses instead of through lines in book, or a set of arbitrary titles.

The reality here is that, ultimately, how you say it and how you spell it does not really matter. I can hear the collective outcry from researchers and professors on that one, and you can defend spellings all you want, you can re-appropriate as many

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 meanings as you would like, but the truth will always stay the same: nobody in Haiti really cares. We barely say the word. And when we have to spell it, we sound it out, and pick the letters we like. It is as simple as that.

So, I say Vodou. In the rare moments that the word comes out, that is how most of us say it where I am from. And I spell it V-o-d-o-u because that is how I would spell it in Haitian-Creole. In Kreyol , I say Vodou .

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

CHAPTER 5

SHADES OF VODOU History shapes men, and men become ancestors, and when ancestors become lwa the history of the race runs in the blood of the race as part of the psychic heritage which is passed on from generation to generation. ~ Maya Deren

When it comes to possession, there are two kinds of Vodou stories. The ones where you get possessed, and remember; the ones where you get possessed, and don't.

Some of the stories are sad, and scary. Some are funny. Drum beats bring different spirits, different lwas. A master drummer knows this; he knows to invoke spirits from the Rada pantheon because those lwas are about pleasure, and softness, and entertainment; and he knows when to alter the rhythm to bring about warriors, fighting lwas from the Petro pantheon.

Baron Samedi, Erzulie, Legba, you call on these spirits, and they come. These lwas come with all of their proclivities.

THE MOTHER-GODDESSES

Erzulie is the Mother Goddess, the lover. Her vévé is never without a heart.

Whether drawn with white sand spilling from the hands of an expert hougan at a ceremony, or chalked by a novice on the ground, or tattoo-inked on skin, the symbol for Erzulie is all about heart. There is no need to be Haitian, or a Vodou connoisseur to spot that which is Erzulie. Simply trace the lines of the vévé design until you find the heart. This is how Erzulie possessess you. With heart. With love. When the time

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 comes, when the drums syncopate into that sweet spot rhythm, and Erzulie climbs on your back and melts her way through your skin, you move magnetic. All that love streamlining your limbs.

I always thought of her as a superhero, a powerful enchantress, someone between the Lady of the Lake of the Arthurian Legends and Storm, the dark-skinned mutant from the Marvel comics, with silver-white hair, and who could bend the weather to her will. Erzulie could bend us all to her will. But she would do it with a caress, draw you in, and hold you in her gaze and her scent.

The Mother Goddess comes into you heavy with history and divinity: after all,

Erzulie is just one of her names. Mary is the other one. So it is more than love threading its way through your body, it is saintliness. For a fleeting moment, your limbs bear the burden of having known Christ, of having experienced him grow inside you. As the drums crescendo and you dance – you morph into this divine chimera, the ultimate mother, the savior, and you become a new Trinity.

In Divine Horsemen the Living Gods of Haiti, Maya Deren describes the presence of the Goddess: “the tempo of movements become more leisurely, tension dissolves and the voices soften, losing whatever aggressive or strident tones they may have had. One has the impression that a fresh, cooling breeze has sprung up somewhere and that the heat has become less intensive, less oppressive.” The scent of basil 1 sometimes threads the air.

1 In Haiti, Basil is often considered a purifying agent. A number of home remedies prescribe basil in order to cure certain diseases and hougans perform ritual basil baths in order to cleanse the soul and keep malevolent spirits at bay. 44

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I cannot remember a time when I did not draw on my skin. I would pick up a permanent marker, usually black or deep blue, and curve these thick bold lines all over my skin. Usually my ankle or my thighs, a spot where you had to look really close to notice. I would go over the lines again and again, hoping that the word permanent applied to my skin as well as to paper or plastic. But no matter the amount of ink I forced into my epidermis, I could never stain my skin. In a way, I harbored a need for body ink before I had even heard of the word tattoo.

“You should get a vévé of Erzulie,” my godfather said when I was well on my way to having my back canvassed in body ink. I wanted yet another tattoo for my 20 th birthday, number 8, and was agonizing over the design. “At least that kind of tattoo would stand for something.” My godfather was not a fan of my tattoos, or any tattoos for that matter.

I flirted with his idea for a bit. An Erzulie vévé on my lower back – an overt reclaiming of the “tramp stamp,” or perhaps a small one on the side of my neck – an open homage to my heritage, a discussion starter. But in the end, I could never go all the way. I could never bring myself to walk into a tattoo parlor with a vévé design in hand. What would I be summoning by walking around with the sign for Erzulie on my back? Who exactly would I be calling on?

Because one had to beware of Erzulie Ge-Rouge. Red-Eyed Erzulie. Shift the drum-beat a little, an extra tap here, one less there, a pause where there should not be

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 one, and you draw out one of the Mother Goddess’s Doppelgangers from the Petro

Pantheon – the body of lwa singularly common to Haiti, and not Africa, the body of lwa who embrace violence.

The ride with Erzulie Ge-Rouge is just as powerful, but it is destructive.

Erzulie Ge-Rouge is about anger and despair, but in a form so pure, it is innocent. It is raw. To use Deren’s words, having Erzulie Ge-Rouge inside you is tantamount to a

“cosmic tantrum” (41). Erzulie Ge-Rouge shares our anguish, our hurt, our quest to understand why a beloved must die, why bad things happen to good people. She draws her knees up (your knees), tightens her fists (your fists), and weeps, and weeps, and weeps like the five year old experiencing a grief so complete, it is inaccessible to the reasonable adult mind. After she leaves you, your eyes are puffed and red from all that crying, so red that you could almost believe that you damaged a blood vessel.

You can just as easily summon Erzulie-Dantor. Erzulie-of-the-wrong-doings.

Wrong-doings to women that is. Like Ge-Rouge, Dantor needs to be summoned after much careful consideration, after much careful planning. She is a violent lwa as well, but a fierce protector of women. The men in the crowd, the boys at the gathering, need to make immediate peace with whatever woman or girl they have harmed in their lives, because Erzulie-Dantor will suss them out, and she is unforgiving to those who hurt her followers, and this Mother-Goddess is a lover of sharp things: knives, swords.

KEEPER OF THE DEAD

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Baron Samedi is a trickster kind of lwa, a deal maker, a Faustus with flair for the dramatic. He struts about with a fancy cane, a tall top hat, and a cigarette or a cigar. Like the celebrity that he knows he is, he finishes the outfit with dark, smoked round glasses. He is the guardian of the dead. One of the most powerful lwas out there.

You do not die unless Baron Samedi allows you to, and you do not come back from the dead, unless he grants you permission to rise up out of the ground.

RAPE FANTASY

“As a Rada Goddess of love, Erzulie speaks in diminutive, soprano accents; in her

Petro aspect, her voice has a primordial, almost beast-like growl” (Deren 95).

On a day that I cannot remember, in a place that I am not sure of, it could have been somewhere in Maryland or Washington D.C. itself, I was raped by a man I had only known for a couple of hours. Friends had set us up because we were both Haitian

– he left the island when he was a child, about six or seven, and had not been back since; I had been in the States, in Pennsylvania, for a couple of years, about two or three, and had come down to D.C. for a visit.

“You have gone through something traumatic. It is going to come back to you,” said Lisa. She was the resident psychiatrist at my school, Chatham College, an all-women’s college back in Pennsylvania. “You need to prepare yourself. You might dream about it. It might come into your mind at weird moments. And I want you to know that I am here for you. I am here to help.”

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

But that night in Washington never found its way back to me. No flashbacks.

No tremors. No trembling. No tears. I cannot even remember the man’s face. I would not be able to point him out in a line up. He had a beard, short, and soft. I know it was soft because some strands strayed into my mouth when he kissed me. He had a lizard- like tongue; each time it darted in and out of my mouth, his saliva pooled at the corners of my lips with the taste of smoke and tobacco. And he had a small penis. That is all I know. I would not be able to point him out if I bumped into him a crowd, if I sat opposite him, right now, in the Starbucks in Lubbock, Texas where I am writing this.

Lisa said, “That’s probably a coping mechanism.” She is referring to my forgetting. My mind’s ability to completely erase a human being. Alex, one of my close male friends up in Pittsburgh asked, “Are you sure it was rape? I mean you didn’t say anything to the guy, did you? Sounds just like bad sex to me.” And that is the thing about that word. Rape. There exist too many definitions, too many experts, too many theories. Alex and I still talk, but we are no longer close.

While I was down in the Washington, D.C. man’s room, in the basement of his mother’s house, my father, who was several thousands of miles away, told me that he knew something was wrong; he knew that something had gone terribly wrong with his daughter. And that is what scares me. That somehow I sent out this plea for help, that I offered up each word – please help me please help me – and surrendered everything I was into the night air. There was no violence. Simply this calm, concrete knowledge

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 that I was being hollowed out, so I gave up. I asked for help and gave up my soul to the cosmos, and it reached my father, touched him.

If despair has that kind of reach, how far can anger extend its arm? Because that is a real consequence of rape – the untendered need for revenge. Your eyes turning red not from tears but from a desire for destruction, from the certainty that you could surrender your body a second time to the cosmos. Let your heart beat for the drums, and exact revenge the way a deity would, with the force of the island behind her. This is what keeps coming back. Not that night. Or the man. But this dream.

A long dark alley. Tall walls on either side. The red bricks covered in a film of dirt and green-brown ivy, drying out, brittle.

A woman stands there naked, her back against the wall. She's any woman.

She's all women. And she is staring at the body in front of her. The naked male body splayed against the other wall.

She is holding him still by sheer force of will. She holds him spread eagle, his back and buttocks to her. She cannot see his face. He keeps his forehead against the cold bricks. She does not need to see his face. She knows he is scared.

His arms are shaking. She watches his exposed buttocks muscles convulse.

Clench and unclench. Clench and unclench. He peed on himself earlier. She had smiled while the stream stretched its way across the bricks to the ground, snaking this wet path between his left and right leg. She moved closer to him, rested her cheek on his cheek, anticipating his whimper.

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“This is what it's all about, boy. This right here. Not the pain of flesh tearing flesh. But this." She breathed the last word right into his ear. "Raw fear. That knowledge, that certainty so solid that it's almost divine. There is absolutely nothing you can do right now. Nothing. You cannot stop me. You are mine. Not only now, but forever. Each time you hear my voice, see a shadow that looks too much like me, feel a hand that caresses you like this…this helplessness right here will course through you.

You'll pee on yourself. You'll shit on yourself. Erzulie Dantor. Remember me, boy.

Remember. Touch a woman without her permission again, without my permission and

I’ll come for you every time. As you thrust your way into her, I will rise inside her like a wave. I’ll boil your blood inside your veins, peel the skin off your manhood in long smooth strips and keep you conscious through each cut. I’ll keep you like a dog at my feet.”

For a while there, Lisa kept tabs on me. “How are you?” She would ask. And I would always answer, “Fine” because I was. But some nights, I want to call Lisa. I want to ask her if she could stand between me and Erzulie because I have got the shakes, I am on my knees, and I can feel her coming. I want her to.

THE NATIONAL ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

There are some things that you do not talk about in Camp-Perrin. Things, events, people even from the village that should not be acknowledged. The blue-red

Haitian flag poking out of a thatched roof, or planted solid in someone's front yard,

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 their lacou . Do not talk about that. If you noticed the flag while you were driving by the house, or walking by the house, do not point at it, do not mention it; just keep about your way. This flag is a hougan badge. You are passing a house of worship; in there, the hougan could be invoking God or the Devil. Either way, it was not really a good idea to linger.

Vodou is both everywhere and nowhere in Haiti. Take a little road trip, and you are bound to come across a couple of flags here and there, to hear whispers about so-and-so getting possessed, about a pissed of hougan who cast a spell and trapped someone's spirit, or worse, cursed an entire village with AIDS or cholera, but at the exact same time, people will shush you if you mention the word Vodou. If you mention the word Vodou, a sort of unsettledness follows, someone might quickly shake their head at you, the universal sign for you to keep silent, code for "you are in dangerous territory and you'd best drop it now."

In Haiti, at least in Camp-Perrin, Vodou is the national elephant in the room; we all know it is there, we can feel it breathing along our necks, we can hear it wildly stomping in the pitch dark of night, heck...some of our presidents and senators have tamed it, used the animal to guarantee the success of their political campaigns –

President Duvalier loved to go about the town, go about Port-au-Prince with a top hat and round smoked-out, dark glasses. He was notorious for attending meetings and giving public speeches dressed like that. The Keeper of the Dead addressing you directly, the Keeper of the Dead commanding you.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

“That’s one way he kept people afraid,” my father used to say. “Can you imagine it? Seeing a living nightmare walking around? The scariest and strongest lwa as your president?”

But Vodou must not be talked about. Not out in the open. Not with everyone.

Only a trusted, select few. Fact is, one of the unmistakable differences between a foreigner (a blan ), a diaspora , and a natif natal , is their willingness to talk Vodou.

Blans simply do not get it. Some say on account of their foreignness. They are loud with the word, and nonchalant too; they let loose touristy comments like "it would be so cool to videotape a Vodou ceremony" with no understanding of the power behind the words "Vodou" and "ceremony," and their repercussions. They are still putting the word out there, as if its syllables hold no power, as if there is no threat, no possibility of calling something into being.

Diasporas , Haitians no longer living in Haiti, on the other hand, have simply forgotten the lessons of the island. Perhaps a symptom of being away too long, of wanting to forget how crude and raw Haitian living is, or perhaps it is simply the inevitable result of being an exile or an immigrant; you slowly transform because you have to deal with a whole new set of realities, what you used to know about home starts to slant in a different angle, and what you were taught, what you initially believed, is not so much a fact as it is an echo. So you get a little "fresh" with tradition. Start talking "Vodou" as if you did not know any better.

Because you see a natif natal , a native citizen, someone both born of the island and tethered to it, will at some point, come in direct contact with the consequences of

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 that word. And whatever reasoning one ultimately uses - power of suggestion, hypnosis, magic, God, Evil, whatever...What the natif natal cannot forget, what he or she cannot blindly ignore, is the very real human being at the center of all of this. Who can forget that man, with sounds that do not belong to anything human croaking out of his mouth? The housewife, gentle and neighborly, lifting up her skirts, pulling off her underwear, and drawing complete strangers between her legs, even fondling the bull tied to the tree outside? Or the old man who literally snaked up a pole, and when he got up there, the spirit left him and he couldn't figure out how to come back down. An eighty-year old stuck up a pole like the too-adventurous kitten who went up a tree and then could not figure out how to come back down. Who can forget that?

Because you may know these people, you may not. Perhaps you buy your bread from them, maybe they are co-workers, and you hang back with them after work and have a beer, share a mango. Or maybe they are family. Your sister, your wife. Or maybe, it is you. Banging your head on concrete for hours, rolling in the dirt, humming, and then suddenly stopping short once the spirit purges itself from your body, like someone had simply clicked a switch and now you are back. Present, once again. With no memory of the last hours, or even days, sometimes. Spiritually

“rufied.”

A repeated exposure to this creates a form of reverence. The more honest person might even concede to a little bit of fear. Or dread. Vodou stops being a word, a concept, or a game. It becomes reality. It becomes a moment that bears witness to

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 the mystery of man. So when you say Vodou, and you are a natif natal , you let those two syllables out very, very, very carefully.

BARON SAMEDI DOES NOT DRINK COFFEE

Here is one of my favorite Vodou stories. It is a story about Ma Tante, the first maid that my father hired when he came to Haiti in the early seventies. I never met Ma

Tante. "She was before your time," my father says. But I nicknamed her the Dragon

Lady when I was little. There is this black and white picture of her with a very large pipe on the side of her mouth, the smoke rising up to meet her face. Her head is slightly angled to the side, and she is staring at the camera with this look in her eyes, as if she has done or is about to do something mischievous. She looks like she knows this secret, and it might somehow be tied to that pipe.

I heard somewhere about these Chinese ladies who were called Dragon Ladies, probably in a movie, and at the time I was too young to be aware of or even understand what that label actually meant. All I knew was that the Dragon Lady was beautiful, mysterious, and I was fascinated by the way she held on to her cigarette. I could not get over the way the smoke escaped both her nostrils and the tip of the cigarette, and veiled her face in grey wisps. In my mind, that is what a Dragon Lady was, that is what defined her status. So, I always thought that Ma Tante must be our very own version. A Haitian Dragon Lady.

Because it was a black and white photograph, the contrasts between her charcoal skin and the folds of her white head scarf (probably off-white, not a lot of

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 women wore stark white scarves unless it was a Vodou ceremony or a stage performance) was heightened; it made her look even more magical. And that was before my father told me this story.

"Well, we were in the kitchen one day,” he says, "and I had just made a pot of coffee and poured a cup for both of us. I handed it to her, she took a sip, and then spit it out."

Ou pa konen Baron pa bwe cafe sucre? she said. “Don't you know that the

Baron doesn't drink sweet coffee?”

“You can imagine I had no idea what to do. Here I was a proper British chap, and well, I had never met the Baron before, how was I supposed to know how he took his coffee?”

That question right there was what was unique about my father’s take on life; the fact that he wondered about how a lwa took his coffee instead of mulling over the details of what he had just witnessed, instead of wondering what exactly had just happened, what was wrong with this old woman.

"Then what happened?" I asked him.

"She just walked away. Walked out of the kitchen. I was rather taken aback actually. But when she came back the next day, everything was perfectly fine."

Each time I hear this story, what little details there are in the telling of it remain exactly the same. Nothing changes. Nothing. Nothing at all. I even ask "then what happened?" at the exact same spot in the story. The Dragon Lady's story has become a ritual of some kind. My father teaching me something different about

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

Vodou. Each telling of Ma Tante's story gifting me with the knowledge that some moments in life are unexpected, surprising, funny and that there is absolutely no need to explain everything. Through Ma Tante, through his way of remembering her, my father teaches me that Vodou can be laughed at. That all you have to do to ruffle some spirit's feathers is offer him a cup of sweetened coffee.

I never think to ask my father how he eventually got on with Ma Tante after this Baron Samedi incident. I know she worked with him for a long time. “I miss her sometimes,” he says. “You would have loved her. One of the sweetest people.” I know that picture of her is one of his favorite pictures.

WHAT HAPPENS IN CLUB MED STAYS IN CLUB MED

Club Med. Sixteen years old. No parents in sight. The idea was that I was too sheltered, too secluded in the rivers, canals, and fruit orchards of the village; I did not have a real sense of Haiti. I needed to see more of the island, get a different understanding of the country. So Michele – my mother’s friend who has acted like a surrogate parent for most of my life - took me to Club Med, a resort on a beach a few miles north of Port-au-Prince, and several hundreds of miles away from the village in the south.

I was supposed to take in the landscape, sensitize myself to the colors and sounds of each new village, learn the many ways each place was different, and yet still

Haitian. Club Med was the incentive and the reward: road trip for hours through potholes the size of the car, humidity glazing the skin in a coat of sweat, and you

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 would get a week-end at the beach for your troubles. I was game. All I heard was three days at the beach. (Not sure how much thought Michele put into this plan).

The trip must have taken several hours, but I do not remember a single farmer, a particular house or any particular landscape. Like a true teenager, I managed to remain ensconced in my world, my imagination, whatever fancy playing itself out in my mind, completely and unabashedly ignorimg the reality around me. Michele’s music did manage to penetrate my crafted, self-imposed haze: Voulzy belting out flowery French ballads filled with way too much happiness. It was officially time to check out when the chorus of one of the songs blended the hopeful and high pitch voices of children. I leaned back into my seat and closed my eyes.

Club Med was the first time I felt like a grown woman. The first time I tried wine. The waiter brought the bottle to our table, and poured the rosé into my glass. No questions, no hesitations. Perhaps it was the setting: the salt-breeze coming in from the ocean, the almost cerulean twilight holding up the night sky, the coconut trees long, tall, silent guests at each table. Club Med offered up the experience promised in brochures and American commercials, it was more Caribbean than the actual

Caribbean, more tropical than the tropics (most resorts are), and so, in the name of complete and utter relaxation, the waiters did not exercise vigilance. After all, the name of the game was freedom and pleasure. Or so I thought at the time. But the truth was much simpler than that: the waiter did not have to care about my age. There is no age limit for the consumption of alcohol in Haiti, something my mother made a point of keeping from me as long as she could, something I found out much later when I

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 went out clubbing for the first time a year later. As it happened, I did not care for rosé at the Club Med. After the waiter walked away, I tipped the glass towards my lips, feeling like a real woman, and then fought the urge to spit the pink bitter liquid back out.

Strings was the one memorable thing about Club Med. The band was relatively new on the music scene and they were making a name for themselves both in Haiti and abroad. Strings did not play typical Haitian music. No Zouk or Kompa here. The band took our national rhythms, our traditional beats, and combined them with

African, Middle-Eastern, and especially European tempos, yet you could still hear the

Haitian flavor streaming through the flamenco beat, accompanying the Spanish guitar.

Their Haitian un-haitianess was one of the very reasons why I loved them. And they were playing at Club Med. Live!

The stage was set up in an alcove area: a wooden rise with all the instruments on it on one side, a large cement dance floor which spread beyond the alcove until its edges stopped a few inches from the beach. If you stood facing the stage, the sound of the ocean curved against your back, joined in with each of your movements. A body lock-stepping into yours.

Like all performances on the island, Strings was scheduled to start at 10 pm so everyone showed up around midnight. This is something that one learns to do very quickly in Haiti: time adjustment. It is not that time is a fluid concept, rather it is the unspoken understanding that no event, no meeting, no ceremony can actually happen without the guests being present, and so guests have the upper-hand; they take their

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 time. Nothing is more hilarious than to watch a group of foreigners – American,

French, Swiss – set up an official meeting, say at 6.30 pm, and then go through several stages of anger and bafflement as the invited guests start trickling in all nonchalant- like at 7.30 pm, or 7.45 pm. It was even funnier when the foreigners had been warned about the time issues, and chose to ignore the following suggestion: you want people to be here at 6.30 pm, tell everyone the event starts at 5.00 pm, or even better 4.30 pm.

I made it to the alcove again feeling like a grown up, dressed up in a long tight fitted black skirt and the loose flowery white shirt which sat low across the bust. The band started with my favorite song. Joel Widmaer, my crush for the night because of his toasted honey skin and long loose curls, brushed one hand across the taught beige animal hide and with the other hand began to bring the drum to life. I knew all the beats to this song. I could feel the song thrumming into all parts of me. The accents and pitches of the melody, the breaks, the stops, the silences. My hands, elbows, arms, all rose up. And I closed my eyes.

And then there was clapping. The rush of sound threw me off. Clapping. A lot of clapping as if thunder had come down. I opened my eyes. Things came into perspective slow at first. I was in the middle of the dance floor. Everyone else stood at a distance, a couple of yards from me. A horseshoe formation of bodies on one side.

The stage on the other. Me, somehow in the middle. And everybody was clapping. I felt something move behind me. Something pressed up against my shoulders blades. I turned around and there was a blonde lady in a long red cocktail dress standing with outstretched arms. As she closed the gap between us, her dress sparkled. Sequins.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

"You were stunning," she said and kissed me on both cheeks. "I'll dance with you any time. Any time." She hugged me. Tight. We were the same height; so, I felt the entire length of her. Her large breasts flattening my small ones, her taught abdominal muscles solid against my pillowy ones, her moist skin. We were both covered in sweat.

"You are a wonderful dancer," she said. And walked away. Walked into the crowd which was now progressively thinning. The clapping died down, people were leaving. Our embrace – this exchange between strangers – had lasted all but a few seconds, and I turned back to the stage, chucking all of this up to the awkward, not- quite-right men and women who always seem to find their way into concerts, but the musicians were picking up their instruments, wiping them off, laying them gently into cases. The banner at the entrance of the alcove read Strings Tonight 10 pm –

Midnight. This was a two-hour concert, at least. What was going on? I had just gotten here. They barely played anything!

Someone patted me on the back with a “good job.” I kept my eyes on the stage.

My shirt clung to me, my thighs were sticking together, and I felt tired. Exhausted.

And scared. I had heard of blackouts at drunken parties, blackouts from drugs but unless the waiter had slipped a mickey into the rosé bottle, I had apparently missed hours of my life for no reason whatsoever. So I fell in with the stragglers, followed them out of the alcove, and made my way to my room.

Perhaps it was being sixteen and alone for the first time, perhaps it was a shock, but I never spoke up, never asked anyone what had happened exactly . I just

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 shut down. No fear, no excitement, nothing. My emotions tucked themselves away in a corner of my mind and stayed there. I blended in with the crowd and made my way to my bedroom as if it were the most normal of nights.

We were preparing to leave the resort, packing the small suitcases into the truck and such, when the Strings’ musicians came out onto the parking lot. Joel

Widmaer broke off from the entourage of bodies around him and walked up to me, tu danses vraiment tres bien he said before the crowd caught up to him and the wave of people carried him off. At first, his words did not sink in; I was too caught up in the sound of his voice, how tall he was, his curly dark hair against the lightness of his burnt Sahara-desert skin. I liked to fantasize that he was one of those Haitians whose family line did not have a white French colonizer but instead had a Taino whose

Native American blood had survived the centuries, and was now manifesting itself through this tan mulatto musician. As the group moved past me, I had to fight the urge to check to my right and left to confirm that he had indeed been talking to me. Michele had walked away. I was the only one standing there. Yup. That comment was directed at me all right.

I do not really have the chance to meet celebrities. In fact, the only other celebrity I have ever met was Kenneth Branagh. And I would never have gotten his autograph, had my father not literally shoved me in the actor's way while he was heading toward his luggage at the airport. I stumbled across his path, and he caught me. I remember his leather jacket. I remember the softness of his voice, his British accent so similar to my grandfather’s and my father’s, when he said “sure honey, I'll

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 give you an autograph.” In fact, the only reason I still riffle through that copy of A

Wrinkle in Time today is to stare at his handwriting. So a compliment from Joel

Widmaer should have made my day. That I stood out to a drummer as talented as he was should have been one of those moments that ultimately shape your life choices.

Tu danses vraiment tres bien, “you dance quite well,” he had said. But what was he talking about? How is it possible that I not remember two hours of Strings’ music?

How could I not remember a duet with a short, petite blonde stranger in a flashy red dress?

“You had a fun night last night, I take it?” Michele said on the drive home.

“I guess.” I could not think of what else to tell her.

I have always wondered if every Haitian secretly wishes he or she would get possessed. A guilty pleasure, of sorts. I know I did. Not because it would get me a story - everyone who’s ever gotten possessed always comes out the other end with a fantastic story, but because I would be that much closer to magic, that much closer to

God. I always saw those two things together, magic and the divine. They were connected, like peanut butter and jelly. I think I was seven, when my father found me jumping up and down on the bed one morning: “Guess what Dad, guess what?"

"Someone's in a good mood."

"I dreamt that Jesus, Aslan, Gandalf and Father Christmas came over for tea."

And I kept bouncing up and down on the bed.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

My father likes to tell this story. I think it is his favorite image of me – his young daughter losing herself in a world made up of her heroes. But now, at almost thirty years of age, I question whether or not I actually dreamed this, or if I simply just made it up, but I confess I do remember the scene - a lovely white tablecloth with embroidered gold thread snaking its way around the edges, a small round table, and

Aslan, Gandalf, Father Christmas and Jesus and me, chatting away like it was a sunny, late, lazy Sunday afternoon. And in earnest, I still get the urge to jump up and down whenever I think about that moment. Just writing those four names down makes me feel better. Something about magic and the divine, how those two things can get you to start smiling without even realizing that the corners of your lips are turning up.

Guess that is what they mean by “it lifts your spirits up.”

But what if the need for magic is such that you actually compel the spirits down to you? What if wishing for magic, wishing for something out of the ordinary with too much intensity ultimately marks your psyche, tags you as a beacon for lwa?

"Darling, that’s nonsense. I think it was ecstasy. You were just high on the music, dear,” my dad says. I told him what happened at Club Med a year or so later.

“It happens you know. The music just gets to you and you ride the wave in complete bliss.” I was not expecting my father to dismiss my experience, to rationalize it away like that because when it comes to Vodou he has never expressed the need to solve anything; he simply accepted the supernatural for what it was: a moment to be experienced. But here he was giving me an explanation. Something did not sound

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 right; he sounded guarded, as if he was trying to convince himself that my experience at Club Med was explainable. He was scared.

Part of my brain believes he is right. It was pleasure. Pure and simple. I was so caught up in the moment, that I forgot myself in the moment. But the other half of me is bristling, stomping, irritated with that explanation because 1). It takes away my one moment with actual magic, with spirits. This one thing that I might have literally shared with the divine. And 2). It does not make sense; it does not hold water. At all. It does not explain away the amnesia. Because wouldn't you remember the ecstasy?

Perhaps not the actual facts of the moment, but that this-is-the-best-time-of-my-life feeling. Doesn't that feeling usually brand itself on your soul?

DIANE

This is what you need to know about Diane. She is from Switzerland and at about six foot, she is tall. Her hair is blonde, and actually silken. A little longer than shoulder length. Light blue eyes, naturally pink-red lips through which escaped a boldness that made many a Haitian quite nervous. Because, in the village, we speak about things indirectly; it takes us a while to get to the point. During discussions, we trail and meander around the topic; we sniff it; we paw it and quickly retreat like a puppy playing with a snake. And because of this, I have never known a meeting involving a group of Haitians to last less than two hours.

“Well, there are social niceties. We take polite to a new level, that’s all,” my mother says. “We’re just extremely tactful.” But tact was not exactly Diane’s forte

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(even by non-Haitian standards). She got to the point. She was blunt. The circumstances, the people present, none of that mattered. She called ‘em like she saw

‘em. At twenty-one, she was like no woman I or my friends had ever seen. She was nothing like our mothers. She used swear words and spoke about sex (even if we were in the room), and she kissed her boyfriend, open-mouthed and often.

Trained as a ballet dancer and gymnast, Diane also moved with a fluid boldness. My friend Cloé Gattigo and I idolized her. We even began to talk like her, using her Swiss-style turn of phrases saying things like “commac” instead of “comme

ça” or “la maison á Claire” instead of “la maison de Claire,” although we knew that the use of the preposition ‘a’ instead of ‘de’ to signify ownership is flagrantly incorrect in terms of grammar. But it rang so smoothly, so cool coming out of Diane’s mouth, and we wanted to be cool too. We began putting a small lilt at the end of our sentences so we sounded like her. We even puckered up our lips when we were reading anything out loud, to match the shape of Diane’s lips, match her cadence when she read to us. Cloé, whose long limbs predicted that she would be a tall girl too, started shuffling her feet like Diane and raising her arms like Diane. A nine year old trying to walk in the footsteps of a twenty-one year old. That’s probably around the time our mothers, at least mine, stepped in.

Bon, ça suffit hein! “All right that’s enough!” she said as Cloé and I were making our way across the living room, walking toward her slowly, and taking languid

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 steps like Diane would. But the warning did not really take 2. We still mimicked Diane every chance we got. In fact we trailed her, tracked her every move; we just learnt to do it at a distance. Literally. One day, we stole Cloé’s father’s binoculars, hid in the bushes and watched Diane and her boyfriend bathing in the canal. At the time, the young couple did not really have running water in the little house they were renting, so they took daily dips in the canal.

“She’s massaging his back,” Cloé whispered to me.

“Oh my gosh. Let me see.” She handed me the binoculars, and there were

Diane and Patrick, sitting on the side of the canal, her hand going up and down the mocha-brown skin on his back. I felt like a detective, an explorer, Indiana Jones on a mission, the enemy factions on our heels, ready to pounce on us any minute. It was a big no-no for us to be playing with the very expensive binoculars. I don’t think our parents knew that our obsession with this woman had gone that far. I am pretty sure

Cloé did not share this with her mother, and I know I certainly did not share this tidbit of information with mine. Diane and Patrick stayed in Camp-Perrin for over 10 years, and for at least half of the time, Cloé and I kept track of their comings and goings. We practically grew into women through Diane. We learnt how to touch our boyfriends through watching her touch Patrick.

“Oh, I knew you girls were following me,” Diane told me when I ran into her in 2009 on a summer trip back to Haiti. We had both returned to the island changed:

2 Much later, when I was about twenty-five or so, my mother told me that there had been a gathering of the families – the Finnigans, the Gattigos, the Sprumonts – to discuss how to best handle this Diane infatuation situation. 66

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 she was a mother with two young children and I was twenty-seven. “You have no idea how pleasant it was to have you two around all the time,” she said. “So pleasant. If it had not been for your mothers, I would have killed both of you.” I wonder if she knew just how around we actually were.

Diane is also the first white woman I have met who has gotten possessed during a Vodou ceremony. "My God she danced. Li te bel oui. Li te bel ." Livy kept saying over and over how beautiful Diane's movements were. I can imagine. I had seen enough movies and heard enough stories to know that possessed folk tended to move in jerks, and burst, contort their bodies in ways that a human could not, or they moved slow and languid, as if they were calmly wadding through non-existent waves.

But Diane had ballet and gymnastic skills. In fact, she used to give Cloé and me gymnastic lessons. She taught us the strength of our own bodies, the lines would could draw in the air with a simple swoop of the arms; she made us realize the power of stillness, of holding a pose on stage and engaging the audience with nothing but our eyes. For years, I did hand-stands against any vertical surface I could find, trying to develop that core strength that would allow me to walk away from the supporting wall, walk on my hands. But how did gymnastics and ballet translate the staccato of a drum beat? The fast and slow, the fast and slow, the slow, the slow, fast, fast, than slow?

During a Vodou ceremony, the drum beats echo Middle Eastern drum solos, the difference being one drum beckons a belly dancer to the stage while the other draws forth a spirit. The same way the belly dancer’s body mimics the doum-tacks of

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 the drum, the spirit is tethered the pace of the drumbeats, a particular sequence ( doum, tack-tack, doum, tack, doum,doum, tack ) animates and entices a specific spirit.

Everyone in the village could not stop talking about it. Diane’s dancing. I had expected to see some change in her, a fundamental alteration to who she was now that a spirit had taken a stroll inside her. But Diane looked like Diane.

“I don’t remember anything,” she said when I asked about the ceremony.

“Nothing at all. It’s weird right?” She turned to Patrick, Patou for short. Patted his arm. Color receded from his light brown skin. He was terrified. He did not answer her. Simply nodded in response.

Patou was mixed. His father was a black Haitian man and his mother was white from Switzerland. I never fully grasped his background, but from what I could gather, he had a younger sister of whom he was fiercely protective, and they both mainly grew up in Europe, with Patou sporadically making short trips back to the island, until he came back with Diane for a permanent stay in Camp-Perrin. To Cloé and me, he was almost as fascinating as Diane. A man who acted like the ideal boyfriend. But he was always also very European in my mind, that is right up until

Diane got possessed. There was something about the fear in his eyes; Diane did not really seem fazed by what had happened to her. In fact, it became an anecdote at parties, or whenever someone would claim that “possession is a myth” or “only

Haitians got possessed, not foreigners,” or “possession was what happened to the uneducated masses,” Diane would be quick to put them to shame, share her story. She was very matter-of-fact about the whole thing, “uh no…blans get possessed too.”

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

There was even a certain lightness to her voice as if what had happened did not register with her, as if it did not bother her that hours of her life had been appropriated by the lwa, the supernatural, the almost-divine. But Patou understood. He understood that our ancestors, like him, had taken a liking to his girlfriend; that they had taken her, body and soul and experienced her in way that he could never hope to. The island had established a bond with Diane. A sacred connection. A tether that he would not even begin to know how to break if he wanted to; something he could not protect her from.

I wonder who the drums at the ceremony were playing for; what spirit was the hougan hoping to bring down amongst us? What spirit took a liking to Diane’s fit, ballerina physique, her fiery personality?

ERZULIE OF THE RED EYES.

A lot of what I know about Vodou comes from photography. I had seen all the movies with their over-the-top Vodou scenes and I had heard story after story about some of the things that a possessed body can do, but what I know about Vodou, my understanding of it without words, how I feel it in my bones really comes from my father - all the pictures of Vodou ceremonies stacked in the big plywood cupboard in our hallway in Camp-Perrin. There are stacks upon stacks of photographs. Possessed individuals caught mid-stride, mid-jump, arms eternally contorted behind their backs in a way that arms should not bend, black skin (mostly thighs) tattooed with the soot and white dust off the floor, the whites of the eyes sometimes staring back at you, too

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 white. I never once asked my father why he took these pictures, why attend so many of these ceremonies. Mainly, because I thought I knew the answer: the pictures were from the seventies, he was new to the island, and he was curious, and so why not? But

I did ask him what it felt like.

"Every place is different. Sometimes, it's just drums playing. But sometimes, you feel something creeping up on you. Like Saut d'Eau 3. Man, that's the real deal. I could feel the hairs on my body rising. And then, there was the back of my neck. This pressure. Like something was pushing down, and pushing down hard."

"Were you scared?"

"Oh yeah. I closed my eyes and I started praying. I don't think I have ever prayed that hard in my life."

Some say the key to not getting possessed is keeping your wits about you.

Some say it has to do with your strength of character, your willpower. Others say it is the strength of your faith in your guardian angel. Guardian angels are spirits that are tethered to us. Spirits that protect us, so no other spirit can claim us. On a rational level, I understood why a spirit taking over your body would not be such a good thing, on account of the loss of control, the loss of free-will; but I was still curious, what would it feel like? Would it really be that bad to end up like one of these men and women immortalized in my father’s photographs?

3 Saut D’Eau is to Vodou what Rio de Janeiro is to carnival. Located in the center department of Haiti, the village is famous for its annual summer Vodou gatherings. Every July, Vodou worshippers, tourists, journalists, photographers both local and international, flock to the sacred waterfalls for a Vodou pilgrimage. 70

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My favorite one is a headshot of a woman in Saut d'Eau. She is half in profile and her eyes are red at the edges. So red that they looked stained (as if with food coloring or red dye directly injected into the aqueous humor of the eye). She probably had been crying for hours, or drinking. You notice her eyes, because the rest of her face, the waves of her chin-length hair, her cheekbones, her neck, collarbone and shoulders, are covered in mud. Not matted or dry mud. This woman is glistening. She is glazed in thick layers of dark brown, wet, mud. Everywhere. Except for her eyes.

Her red-lined eyes, bearing witness to the grounded magic of Saut d'Eau. It had rained that day, and the effluvia coming down the mountain had melted into the waterfall and the pool below; so that the sacred waters had thickened, become sledge-like. It did not stop the ceremony though. Men, women and children still flung themselves into the brown swamp. Or they stood to the side, on the slippery black-brown rocks, head back, arms outstretched, in rhapsody, in dialogue with the lwas. The dried mud on their legs and forearms cleansing both skin and soul.

Do a random Google Images search of Saut D’Eau. Go ahead. Do it . The pictures you will find trace the beauty of the human form, the weighted sinews of heavy breasts – bathing in Haiti is somewhat of a communal act. Showers and bathtubs are not common fixtures of the household (plus they require plumbing and even electricity for the hot water) so everyone ends up in the canal. Men with shorts, women with their panties. So naked torsos are common. Simply from bathing in the canal, I had seen my share of breasts, full apple shaped ones, long flat plantain length

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 ones, some poked with freckles, others pleated in creases, wrinkles that were a testament to old age, to having birthed and breastfed four or eight children; but these anatomy lessons were never about exposure, never about being vulnerable. But the pictures of the naked women in Saut-d’Eau tell a different story. It was the same breasts, the same shapes, yet somehow these women were more…naked. Maybe that is what worshipping does to you, when you worship from the tips of your hair to your last toenail. The act strips you and disrobes you, and as your limbs grow susceptible to the coming of the lwa, as you stretch your arms out, start to sing Hosanna softly, and then more and more loudly, your voice coarse against the waterfall, your body flourishes into a natural wonder, and your breasts no longer map your history or the length of your days; instead, they embellish the moment and flower out of you.

The lady with the red-rimmed eyes is possessed. At least, I like to think that she is. The mud somehow accentuates the serenity of her features. I fantasize that it is

Erzulie in there, emerging from the center of the earth, from the body of the earth unnoticed by everyone, like Shakespeare’s Henry IV (or Mary) choosing to walk amongst her people once more, but in disguise, to see for herself, to hear for herself what her men and women truly think of her. The Mother Goddess does not register to anyone, except my father, this twenty-four year old English white boy witnessing divinity in motion 4.

4 “Divinity in Motion.” This is actually a line from a Michael Jackson song titled “Dangerous.” The first time I heard it, I don’t remember how long ago, I thought of my father’s picture, of the Lady with red- rimmed eyes. And every time that song comes on, I still think of her – Divinity in Motion. 72

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LI MARYE AVEC LWA – HE IS MARRIED TO A SPIRIT

It does not all necessarily end with the Vodou ceremony. Sometimes, spirits like to hang around. They like to linger. He is known as the Frenchman. Any time anyone tells me this story, they say the Frenchman or that guy from France.

"I sure wish I could remember his name. Very nice fellow. Ask your mother," my dad says.

"That was a long time ago. He was a professor of some kind. Teaching at the

University in Port-au-Prince. Extremely bright young guy. Charismatic. Loved his research on native plants to Haiti and their medicinal properties."

But plants were not the only thing that tickled the Frenchman’s fancy. He was heavy into Vodou. He wanted to know as much as he could on the subject; he read everything that he could get his hands on about the ceremonies and the lwas, and ultimately he jumped on the chance of attending an actual live ceremony. At which he got possessed by seven different lwas, one after another 5. All the reports about what the Frenchman did are consistent: it went beyond dance, he jerked, threw his body around; he did flips. Now, no athlete by any stretch of the imagination, the Frenchman flipped backwards and forwards, repeatedly; he did somersaults.

I too wish my parents would remember his name. He moved back to Europe, and I so wish I had his number, so that I could call him. He is the first person I have

5 Consecutive possessions by multiple spirits at a single Vodou ceremony is rare. Usually the people there, and even the hougan himself, will either prevent that from happening or will perform the necessary rituals to chase the spirits out the environment. 73

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 heard of who remembers his possession, who remembers the spirits inside his body, his mind; he remembers every single one of them.

My father told me, “I couldn’t believe it. You know that almost never happens.

Remembering them like that inside. I asked him which one he liked best.”

“And?”

“He said Erzulie. The look on his face. It was unforgettable. Erzulie man, he said. Erzulie by far.”

The Frenchman’s story is a story of firsts. At least for me. After his experience at the Vodou ceremony, he received an invitation to an event at the Habitation Leclerc.

Now, there is no fancier place in Haiti then the Habitation Leclerc in the 70s. It has been called “a lush botanical garden,” “a mini tropical rain forest” situated in the

Carrefour area, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. My mother’s face softens when she describes the place, “it was so beautiful. Heaven-like.” Habitation Leclerc had seen its share of famous owners: Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law Charles Leclerc in the early 19 th century (the name stuck apparently), and then Katherine Dunham from the

40s to the 70s.

Most people are usually beside themselves about the Napoleon connection, that

Haiti would have that intimate of a relationship with the French emperor (Leclerc eventually instigated the downfall and capture of Toussaint Louverture). But finding out about Katherine Dunham was my alleluia moment. I had watched her move across dance floors on television, embodying Lena Horne’s songs, and my breath catches

(still today) to think that she lived in Haiti and in Carrefour of all places.

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If you were to get on a plane right now and come down to Port-au-Prince, you would remember Carrefour: easily a contender for one of Dante’s seven realms of

Hell. What gets you first is the traffic. Bumper to bumper traffic, but also side-door to side-door traffic. In fact, you are lost in a sea of vehicles – trucks filled with sand and cement; buses and pick-up trucks with people and animals inside as well as strapped on the top of the bus or on the top of the pick-up, human legs, goat legs, chicken legs, precariously hanging over the colorful blue, red, indigo painted designs on the side of the vehicles. We call these buses and pick-up trucks taxi-servicing this horde of life forms around tap-taps . They are all over the streets of Carrefour – streets where there are no real lanes.

Moving forward, although only by an inch sometimes, requires pilot navigational skills as you have to avoid the scooter with three people on it, illegally sliding through the non-existent space between the cars on your right, be aware that a

Hummer is about to pass you on your left, avoid the animals loose between the wheels and avoid the young boys lunging for the car with greasy brown rags hoping to clean your windshield for a couple of bucks. These days it is American dollars. Fi dolla . Fi dolla . There are no traffic lights, no stop signs, no yield signs. Nothing. Just the sound of engines humming, screeching, rumbling accompanied by an orchestra of car horns which sporadically crescendo into an acoustic nightmare.

My father always said that a true test of one’s driving skills is making it through heavy Port-au-Prince traffic. In fact, back in the day, the official driving test

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 was exactly that: drive through downtown without hitting a car, a person, or an animal and you got your driver’s license.

But it is not just the traffic in Carrefour that peels the surface of your nerves and leaves you raw, it is also the heat and the piles and piles of refuse in multiple stages of decomposition sprinkled between neighborhood blocks with small children, toddlers, and stray dogs idling by. Lucky travelers roll up the windows, blast the air conditioner and become observers, watch all of this happen as if it was a social experiment in chaos. Unlucky travelers live the chaos with each and every single one of their senses. In describing Valparaiso in his Memoirs , Pablo Neruda writes that

“poverty drapes over Valparaiso like a wave” (3); change Valparaiso to Haiti, and you have Carrefour. Beyond the traffic, the noise, the pavements regurgitating trash, the hills on either side of the road are rolling with shanties, their corrugated sheet metal beckoning to the sunlight. To turn toward mountains and find not trees but rock, rumble and metal alloy, it is almost more painful than everything else. Carrefour pulses with something that has no name, a sprawling madness, an incoherence of thought and feeling that chews at your insides, leaves you with one need: escape.

I could not understand how the place could ever have been beautiful. How it could have harbored an arboretum 6, with luxury residences, with a nightclub (the

Hippopotamus ), with bungalows for celebrities like Katharine Dunham and her guests:

6 A quick Google image search of the Habitation Leclerc brings up an aerial shot of Carrefour: shanties covering every visible surface, except for the very center of the photograph which is green – Habitation Leclerc, clutching what little it still can of nature. 76

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Mick Jagger and Elizabeth Taylor. Mick Jagger in Haiti is already somewhat of a conundrum, a paradox, but Mick Jagger in Carrefour? Elizabeth Taylor?

It is hard to believe that all of this happened in ten years, that in such a short time span, something can transition from beauty to ghetto-pure anarchy because the

Carrefour of today, the one I know, is very much a legacy of the eighties, but in the seventies, it was the place to be my mother says.

So, the story goes: the Frenchman was at a bar in the Habitation Leclerc and ordered a drink, and no sooner had his lips touched the alcohol, he did a somersault leap backward off his chair, and began writhing on the ground. Habitation Leclerc was not a place for lwas. Everyone simply stood around and watched, not quite sure what was happening, what exactly one was supposed to do for the poor man. But the bus boys and the waiters knew a lwa when they saw one; they crowded around the

Frenchman, held him down, sat on him, did everything that was in their power to do to keep him from making a scene, to keep him still, until the spirit was done with his body.

“Well, you can imagine, the story spread like wild fire. Everyone was talking about the guy, about what had happened to him. Some thought it was a seizure, maybe some kind of panic attack, but that somersault, that leap of his chair…there was no doubt, it was a lwa.”

“How did it end?” I asked my mother.

“Well, it does not really end for him. Not really.”

“What do you mean?”

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“He kept getting possessed, you see. Whenever he tried to have a drink, the lwa mounted him like that,” and she snapped her fingers. “It is sad really. Poor guy.”

My mother sighed over his repeated possessions, but I felt like laughing. The irony of it all: of all people, a Frenchman doomed to abstain from alcohol, from wine, which is practically part of every meal in France, even breakfast.

Why was the Frenchman fated to have this happen to him? Li Marye avec lwa.

Apparently, he married a spirit. This process means one of two things: his initial connection to the lwa was so strong, so tethered to the cosmos that every time the

Frenchman does something that the lwa especially likes, the spirit manifests itself to show approval; but the reverse could possibly be true, i.e. the bond between the spirit and the man is such that each time the Frenchman does something that the lwa disapproves of, the spirit makes sure to show up and remind the Frenchman of that fact. Take your pick. Either way, from what I can understand, being married to a lwa is a bitch.

This was about forty years or so ago. I did the math. The Frenchman would be in his late sixties today. And I wonder how many times he has been possessed? I wonder if he is perhaps more lwa than mortal man now? If his facial features still soften at thought of Erzulie?

MY FATHER, BOSS ANDRE AND THE FLYING PIG

“Nimi, remember that big grave in the neighbor's yard? Well, one night, you were tiny back then, just a little baby, there was this God awful howling. Went on for

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 hours. Just howling. Crying. Horrible sounds. The next day, Boss 7 Andre came by and

I asked him if he had heard the noise, if he knew what the racket was about.”

“Oh yeah, Mr. Sean,” he said. “They dug up a baby that died the other day, and when they threw the body up in the air, it turned into a pig.”

“What?”

“I wouldn't have believed it myself, Mr. Sean, but that sort of thing happens all the time. All the time, Mr. Sean. All the time.”

My father stops here. He takes the time to explain to me that as crazy and disturbing as the digging-up the baby and throwing it up in the air and it turning into a flying pig was, that was not really what shocked him about the conversation. It was

Boss Andre’s “all the time.” How matter of fact it was. All the time? This happens all the time?

“Now mind you, Boss Andre is a smart fellow,” my dad tells me. “Very talented. The things he could do with wood. He used to make these wonderful mahogany chairs with leather seats. Everything by hand. Everything. He'd work the lathe by hand and that's pretty physical work. Kept him in shape. Well, until the business got a boost and he got himself an automated lathe, and a sander and the like.

The more gadgets he got, the more fluffy he got around the middle.”

7 In Haiti, “Boss” is a titled assigned to anyone in the business of wood crafting, metal work or masonry. The title became part of your name, and whether or not you kept up with the trade, in all likelihood you would addressed as “Boss” followed by your first name for the rest of your life. 79

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I have met Boss Andre a couple of times, but I do not remember him. I was too young. But I feel like I know everything about him. Almost all of my parents’ stories that involve construction or artwork also carry Boss Andre’s name. He was somewhat of a Renaissance man: artistic and handy. He helped build the house we currently live in and he helped put together the wooden shelves that line one side of my bedroom.

He was a good friend of my father’s, and together they shared some of the oddest conversations.

“You know Madame's little purple Volkswagen, Mr. Sean? I bet you we could put a couple of propellers on the tail end of it and fly it to the moon, couldn't we?”

“I could see he was serious,” my father says. “So I said the only thing that came to mind, which was …but Andre, what about space? We would run out of air.”

“No? We would? No.”

“Yes. There's no way for us to breathe up there in space. No oxygen.”

Apparently Boss Andre thought about that for a bit, and then said, "Well, that wouldn't be a real problem, sir. We could just roll up the windows."

“But, Andre, do you realize how far the moon is? I mean think Camp-Perrin to

Port-au-Prince. That's a couple of hours right? So take that, and multiply it by like a thousand, a million. Andre, it would take us years to get to the moon in that

Volkswagen. Nap mouri grangou . We’ll die of hunger. What would you do for food?”

Andre looked down at his hanging belly and said Ma kembe . "I'll hold."

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

FEM PA DRA

It is a natural rock formation hovering over one of the main roads in the south of Haiti. Imagine if you will a tunnel, or an archway hanging off the side of a mountain with a road going through it. Nobody knows how it happened. How the mountain hollowed itself out this way, creating this organic passageway for the road.

It was almost mystical. As if it pulsed with a little bit of magic, and each time you drove through Fem Pa Dra, made your way through the insides of the mountain, you carried bits of the magic with you for a while.

But if you were to come down to Haiti today, right now, there would be no magic at all. There would no Fem Pa Dra. President Preval blew up it. Why? Well, here are the three most popular theories.

Theory One. President Preval is quite well-traveled. And on one of his many trips, he went to Africa, not only the birthplace of Vodou, but also where you will find the most powerful of hougans. One of which prophesied that any president in Haiti who drove through Fem Pa Dra would lose his power.

Theory Two. President Preval got wind that the people of the department of

Grand d'Anse were not going to vote for him in the next presidential election. He did not want them to come down and pollute the minds of the folks in the adjacent department, so he cut off the main means of travel between the two jurisdictions.

Theory Three. The road going through Fem Pa Dra needed to be widened. A professional team of national and international engineers had surveyed the terrain and assessed the strategic locations where dynamite could be used without compromising

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 the integral structure of Fem Pa Dra, yet still widen the road. But the president went up with his own team and simply thought it best to add some more dynamite here and there.

Today, that section of the road looks like an off-white open soar. The archway is gone but there are these bits and pieces still coming out of the side of the mountain which just looks hurt. Now, as you drive on the wide road, you are no longer held in the cool darkness of the mountain; you get to see the sky and everything around you; and everything, everything that was green or brown, is encrusted with white limestone dust.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

CHAPTER 6

YOU HEARD THE ONE ABOUT THE DOG? Did you hear the one about the man-dog up in the Marché?

Each time I think of the Marché, someone's standing next to me, sweating. The

Marketplace. Its rhythm, the beating heart quality of the thrumming, and the heat.

Pulsing. It never reminded me of a heart though. Ants. The Marketplace here reminds me of ants. Think giant red killer ants that have spotted a human body. The throng, the rush for the meat. Thousands of them bringing that body down in agony, to its knees

(like you see in some movies). The shroud of killer red ants swallowing the body hole into the ground. Freeze those minutes. Play them back in slow motion. The throng, the rush of those hungry ants for meat, the sound they must make. That throng sound.

That's the Market in Haiti. The Marché. The people, mostly their arms and their hands.

So many disembodied arms and hands. All over the place. Someone screaming, a child, a newborn (in this heat?) Disembodied guttural sounds haggling, haggling (not the ones with the accents though, the ones trying to speak Creole: if you tell the blan one mango is fi dolla, he will not barter. He will simply hand you five dollars), patched up trucks quilted with metallic patterns foraging through the crowd beep beeping, a bicycle beep beeping at a different frequency: one that makes you want to jerk your neck. A cow, maybe a bull, and chicken sounds. So many chickens sounds, being run over, being chased away from fruit stands, being shooed away from the corn harvested a couple of days ago (I imagine), being chased simply because that is fun when one is bored. Everything pulsing simultaneously. Even the yelps of the yellow

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 concentration-camp-survivor looking dogs. Tails mostly between their legs (rabid or simply without hope), ribcages on the verge of piercing non-existent yellowing hides.

And you can smell it too. The pulse. Cheap perfume, fresh brown vetiver to the point of making you nauseous and cow dung and sweat. Not new sweat. Not the one pooling on your upper lip under the sun or cooling down the ridges of your spine under the white cotton shirt. Not the lascivious kind exposed so bluntly over that old man's naked chest and his wrinkled man-tits, wrapped around that fat man's double layer of black neck skin, not the rivulets streaking the twenty-year old's biceps. It is old sweat that is pulsing in the Marché. The stagnant kind that becomes someone's scent, unwashed days after having been out in the fields: corn-sugarcane-pepper picking.

And the heat, the sun, too desperate and engraving themselves in your bones.

So did you hear about the dog? They had him in jail for three days. Mais oui.

Mais oui. Yeah. Yeah. Three days. Just the other day. A dog in prison. Happened on

Thursday. One of them ugly yellow dogs, you know? Some thief. Up to his old thieving tricks again in the Marché. But God wasn't on his side this time. Probably thought no one could catch up with him. Man, the marchandes chased that yellow dog all over the

Marché, actually caught up to him, wrestled him to ground. Surprised nothing snapped, you know how fat those women are. It screamed. You could hear the man screaming through the dog's throat.

Stories. They go on, here. The tale dragging (coaxing?) your mind towards thieves, yellow man-dogs. I had seen them in their man forms often enough: you could always find them in the Marché, reed-thin fingers wrapped around something they had

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 not paid for. The heat, the sweat, the people and the over-ripe rotting fruits: magical illusions under the haze of the Marché, ideal opportunities for some sleight of hand

(thieves probably thought). I thought so too; all this heat and the chicken corpses.

Beheaded, barbed-wire or sometimes this thick black thread, which didn't feel like thread but rubber, tied around yellowish-orange chicken legs, and the headless chickens hanging upside down from a pole in twos or threes. With a slight turn of the head, you could spot some fresh carcasses, newly decapitated, still leaking red in this heat which had the balding blan in Bermuda shorts speaking in tongues (foreigners never do well with this heat): the opportune moment to steal a piece of fried okra from one stand and/or a blue plastic toothbrush made in the United States from another

(foreigners are always good distractions). The Marché begs for thievery. But one should never underestimate the marchandes. The fierce women of the Marché in blue or lilac muumuus made all the more fierce by their matching head scarves. Crouched down low behind their stands, they are the guardians of the bruising avocadoes, the second-hand pair of shorts (from the United States), the coffee beans (roasted dark brown and almost caffeine-less) and the plastic blue and red toothbrushes. Fi Dollar.

The heat, the Marché, graze their skins just as much as it would mine or the balding crimson head of the blan (so ready to hand over his five American dollars). But the marchandes are guardians. And they see you and the thieves, recognizing them on sight (thieves tended to go for the food). One time, I watched one marchande, probably fired up by weeks of thieving, throw around her weight and trail after a thief through the crowd. (How long would she run for an unpaid-for piece of fried okra?)

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

So they learnt to shape shift. The men in their thievery learnt to shape shift. One got caught though.

What happened?

The ugly yellow-man dog was dragged through the streets of the village up to the cazerne. Three armed men with rifles stood guard over him in the cazerne, waiting for the mayor. Someone with authority (always the mayor) to command the man inside the animal to show himself, shape shift back into a man. Three days. The mayor came every day to the jail and pleaded. All that dog did was stare back at him from the cement floor. So, they began beating him with the butt of their rifles, the armed men

(their dark sunglasses probably still poised over their noses. That's how you recognized law enforcement in the village. More than just the simple uniform, and beyond the long rifle at their side, it was those dark, opaque shades reflecting your fear back at you that marked these men as officers of the law. As a young woman, you learnt early on to smile at them. Flash something American whenever they stopped you on the road. American driver's license, ten American dolla). Then they used their booted feet, some their fists. (The cazerne can become a very public place in Haiti. Jail cells on display for anyone interested). They beat the yellow man-dog for three days.

Did he ever show himself? (I had to ask).

No. He just bled and died.

And we don't know who he was? (I couldn't help myself).

Might have been Jacques or Dani. Haven't seen them two thieves up in the

Marché for a while now.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

CHAPTER 7

THE COLOMBIAN CONNECTION Sometime between midnight and five a.m., you heard the propellers. Their sound so low, you almost believed the helicopters were perched on the roof, right above your bedroom. Colombians.

I can't remember the exact date when that word spilled out of everyone's mouth, when it came into vogue in the village. 1990? 1992? But once it was out, it was all over Camp-Perrin. Even in the hustle and bustle of the market, the chickens losing their minds around your ankles, your skin melting off your bones from the people-heat-humidity combo, some young child screeching in some corner, and white road dust levitating to eye level whenever a bicycle or a car tried not to hit someone, even in all of that, you caught snippets of conversation, "flying real low this morning,"

"must be trying to avoid radar," "ain't no radar here. That's a blan thing." Even at the dinner table, mom and dad joked about the pilot missing the drop zone, "probably lost or something. Couldn't make one mango tree for another!"

The Colombian connection didn't just stick to conversation, it bridged on over into the actual landscape of the village: mansions started to pop up here, and there, and everywhere. Brick, cement giants with gargantuan windows and ornate second floor balconies randomly cropped up in the En-Haut-Camp area, or you could spot one on the outskirts of the village, alone in a field of yellow-orange wheat. These houses looked like Hercules or a throng of slaves built them, such was their height and sheer structural mass, but something about the design, the curves and angles of the wrought-

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 iron balconies, or the shape of the windows and door frames always struck me as being odd: it was as if the mansions couldn't decide which architecture to embrace.

Roman, Gothic, Gingerbread, Oriental? Somehow all of these styles erupted on the surface of the houses, and the neighborhood had no choice but to sporadically offer up these schizophrenic behemoths as if some prince or famous Hollywood actor, deep in the manic phase of his eccentricity, thought it a grand idea to build a palace or two somewhere in the boonies, of Haiti.

In the 1990s, you also heard about packages falling from the sky, about ghost men, people who you never really see, but who must have passed through because by the time you checked the spot where the packages should have hit, the packages were always gone. Woosh. Vanished. As if that thing you saw falling from the sky was ethereal, made to evaporate on contact with solid earth. You heard about money coming in, someone - who hadn't gambled at borlette in a while - having the money to build their dream house, overnight. You heard about a donation made to the hospital, anonymous and big enough for a new wing. You heard about this diaspora guy who hadn't been back to the island since he was a child, but who out of the blue, was now wiring money to build a three-story house. By 2010, the face of Camp-Perrin had morphed, and transitioned from wild flowers, coconut, mango and avocado trees, thatched and tin-roofed houses leaning in different directions to slabs of concrete. All because of the Colombians.

This is the Camp-Perrin I know, a place where nature has to compete with drug-money, but back in the 70s, the place was a bona fide jungle Nirvana. To hear

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 my parents tell it, green was everywhere. Shades of green that boiled over under the noon sunlight. It wasn't just the fruit trees; it was all kinds of leafy wilderness, some of them with no names, free to claim practically every inch of the village because there really wasn't anyone there. Fact is, traffic was all of about five cars. My dad liked to say you could be sitting on your front porch reading a book, and you wouldn't have to look up to know who was coming down the street, you could tell by the sound of the vehicle alone. There were about all of three trucks and three motorcycles, and everyone knew everyone else’s schedule. The sound of a car you couldn’t recognize was an official event.

“Oh, that drove me crazy,” my mother said. “There you’d be, having a nice chat, and the conversation would come to a dead stop, because everyone would scramble to catch a glimpse at who was coming down the street. They’d still be talking about it the next day. Did you see the car? Did you see the car? Who was it? I heard it was so-and-so? You think some visitor got lost?”

My parents were young (I like to say certifiable) 24 year-old newlyweds when, in 1975, they made the decision to move from Port-au-Prince, the site of civilization, to the wild south. By trade, my father is a photographer, but what he really does, what he has a knack for, is getting lost in the unknown, any kind of unknown, in any place.

He is the blan , the white guy who went trekking through India (penniless), who roamed the mountains of Haiti on a whim, (and again penniless), for days. Fact was, he almost died on Morne La Selle.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

“See, with the way I was smoking back then, being at about 6000 feet above sea level didn’t quite sit well with me,” he said. “The footpaths are almost vertical, you see. There were a couple of chaps around, and at one point I told them to kite m’ mouri la. ” Let me die here. I chuckle at this part of the story. The image of this young, lanky, redhead in the wilderness of the mountains telling everyone around him “let me die here” is funny because everyone was much, much older than my father.

One guy, along with an old marchande with about what looked like a hundred pounds on her head, laughed and said, “Blan ou pa ka mouri la.” Blan, you can’t die here. “La pli ap vini”, it’s going to rain. There were misty clouds blowing upwards from the deep valleys below, the tropical air was growing steadily colder and indeed, within an hour, a three-day rain began.

My father tells me he survived because the old marchande pushed him up the mountain until they found a place with food and shelter. I can just imagine her, supporting my father’s weight with both arms, her heavy basket balanced on top of her head, smiling and slowly shaking her head from side to side at the crazy blan who thought he was ready for Morne La Selle.

I like to think my father’s luck in Haiti had a lot to do with his appearance. His long red-brown locks and beard had an uncanny similarity to the pictures of Jesus hanging in almost every Haitian living room. Add his long flowery shirts to the mix, and his walking around the forest hills of Haiti was like the second coming; some kids actually used to trail behind him, screaming “Jesu Kri! Jesu Kri!” Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!

Jesus was back, and he was sporting an English accent to boot.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

I don’t know what held my father still once the South came into view. My mother, probably.

"It was the water," she said. "That body of running water, always there. I wanted to live next to that."

And they did. They bought a small, one bedroom house, about a hundred meters away from the canal, for $1600. They had no plumbing, no electricity, and the small shed in the yard was an outhouse. My memory of it is fading, but the thought of the outhouse makes me squirm, a little, still. It's not that the space itself was confining, it's that it was all kinds of dark. And when you looked down the pit, an abyss offered itself up to you. I used to hold my nose and whisper into the darkness, and wait for a distorted echo to find its way back to me. Going to the bathroom was a silent process.

Peeing produced no sound. It was like you were releasing something into oblivion.

Taking a dump had a particular beat to it: push, wait, wait, wait, wait , splat. A hollow, far away splat as if your body had absolutely no connection, no ties to that sound.

But Mom did her best. She bedazzled the outhouse: night blooming jasmine planted all around the shed. Truth be told, I don’t know whose idea the jasmine was, but I like to think that it was my mother’s. Jasmine somehow jives so smoothly with the way she blended European, Asian, American and Haitian into something that was entirely of her own making, even down to the clothes she wore: sarong or tunic pants from India mixed with loose but fitted Wal-Mart halter tops and handmade sandals fashioned out of Haitian wood. And yet, she never looked like the cultural chaos her description suggests. I always envied her ability to be both natural and quietly

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 memorable. In a way, she is the oddest black woman I know: strongly tethered to the island, yet perfectly at home in so many far off places. Jasmine around the outhouse had to be hers.

Even the pit itself was unique. Not your usual hole in the ground (which you typically had to squat over with some tissue or some very carefully chosen leaves crumpled in your hand), but more of a cement tower, a mini Citadelle la Ferrière, King

Henri Christophe’s fortress, or a mini Tower of Pisa, minus the lean, with an actual white toilet seat over the open-mouth pit. Smells and odors were never an issue in our outhouse. This is a little ironic when you think about it, but I suppose the Columbians, with their ‘generosity’, are doing their part to modernize the area; apparently some of the palaces have plumbing.

Now back in the day, the lack of plumbing also meant that you grabbed soap and towel, and headed on down to the canal. You wanted clean? You had to face the cold rushing waters beyond our backyard. Be it morning, noon, or night, you had to immerse yourself in a stream so strong and so cold, laying down in it to wash off the soap suds was a work-out: your core muscle fibers clenched against the current, the cold. You couldn’t make them stop. To relax, you had to cleave your mind from your senses, practically evolve to a seventh-level yogic state. Still today, when I slide down against the cement edge of the canal, and my skin hits water, I am reminded of how alive the body is, of the dozens of receptors that blanket my skin, of how each one of them has the potential to be awakened raw and accompany my litany of "Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit." Nowadays I go for a dip because I

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 want to, because of the need to find relief from the heat, but back then, my parents didn't have a choice.

I supposed they developed some kind of tolerance, even love for the experience. My dad's accent gets this wishful bent to it when he speaks about the canal: "We'd bring a basket of mangoes, and eat them right there in the water. Your mom and me." As if this was nostalgia for the shores of his own island, for London or the white cliffs of Dover, and not mango juice, staining the crevices between your fingers, outlining your lips, even your cheeks, orange while you push the hard seed further into your mouth, gnawing at the flesh, mango juice snaking down your palm and your arm into the cold, crystalline watercourse below.

The canal is the one fixture of the southern landscape that is immovable. It looks almost exactly as it did when the French colonials built it in 1759, and in 2010, its now cemented curvatures have not expanded nor retracted from within the soil.

Even the Colombians didn't get to it. The canal's reputation remains what it has always been: an irrigation system for the lands of the South plains, a decadent bathtub, a water lullaby streaming through all your childhood memories. Same thing can't be said for la

Ravine du Sud though, the other body of water familiar to anyone who comes down south to Camp-Perrin; that river has morphed right along with the village.

My father remembers the water opening up into deep pools. His six foot one frame could leap off a boulder and dive right in. In my memories of the ravine, when I am about eight years old or so, the water is up to my armpits. Today at 29, the shadow of 30 uncomfortably close, I can stand in la Ravine du Sud and nothing makes it past

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 my knees. The water level decreases with each day, with each hurricane and torrential rain storm that pushes the mountains to vomit out a million tons of rocks, and bleed their soil into the riverbed, making the waters flow brown, violent, and destructive for days, then draining the river to a third of its depth. But the waters remain though: so far, they always remain.

On its good days, la Ravine du Sud was a great place for firsts. It’s odd, but as transparent as the liquid canopy was, it managed to accomplish wonderful feats of camouflage: holding a boy’s hand for the first time, playing footsy in the mud-sand, or skinny dipping for a quick minute, than scrambling to put the bathing suits back on. La

Ravine kept all of that secret, and more.

On the week-ends, especially Saturdays, you could go down to the ravine and watch rows and rows of women sitting in the shallow water, hand-washing clothes and linens. On Saturdays, la Ravine du Sud became this organic laundromat: the clean shirts, skirts, jeans, and bed linens were stretched out over all the rocks, so that instead of a riverbank of grass, pebbles and dirt, what you saw was a mosaic of color. It looked like the soil had given up on earth, mud and dirt, and opted instead for growing cloth.

On these laundry days, the women cleaned with long, dark-brown generic bars of soap which always smelled like hospital disinfectant. But some ladies cleaned with

Fab. I loved that. The white powder came in tiny, transparent plastic bags, no bigger than a Ziploc bag, and not only did it do wonderful things with the stains, but the scent of lilac marked the air. To me, Fab was this magic cleaning thing. Precious. You only

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 used it when you absolutely had to. You opened the plastic bag, and sprinkled a handful of the white particles on the clothes, and got to scrubbing. It never once dawned on me what Fab actually was. I never made the connection between Fab and the laundry detergents I saw on American television commercials, or that I myself later used in college to clean my clothes.

Fab remains this unique dust. This secret that women shared with each other in la Ravine du Sud. A discreet packet that they pulled from within the folds of their dresses, and offered up to us younger girls, teaching us just how much magic to pour on a stain to make it dissipate. La Ravine du Sud became a place of initiation. But the

Colombians got to it.

The story goes: on one particular cleaning day, packets of Fab began falling down from the sky. The ladies scrambled to get them. Fab from the Heavens! They ripped open the square packages and sprinkled Fab over the cloths, and scrubbed, and scrubbed, and scrubbed. But the Fab didn’t exactly smell right. Second, it didn’t foam over the stains; this heaven-dust caked in the creases of the fabric, the more you sprinkled, the more it caked. And once you rinsed the clothes, twisted them in the water and then allowed them to unfold in the current, the stains were still there.

“What is God thinking sending this stuff down?”

“Worst Fab ever.”

“Genlè se ou vye stok, se jete-l, li tap jete-l” must be a bad batch, he was just getting rid of it, must be he was just getting rid of it.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

I can’t help but smile every time I hear this story. Every time my mother, or one of her friends, brings it up. Someone actually brought one of these packages of

Fab to Jean, our neighbor and family friend, a Belgium agronomist, who like my father, had found his way to Haiti in the seventies.

“Several kilos of pure, undiluted cocaine,” Jean reported. Jean is that kind of person who knows a lot about everything, a walking encyclopedia, but I always wondered how he knew that this was pure cocaine. A small fortune at his fingertips,

Jean turned all of it in to the policemen at the caserne. According to him, that single packet was worth a million dollars on the street, although a little Google research reveals that a kilo of cocaine sells for about $35,000-60,000 in the US.

Talk about missing the drop zone! I mean picture it. Picture the dollars floating down the stream all because of a stain. Picture the sun going down behind the mountains, orange and blood-red, picture the shallow waters of the ravine flecked with more and more silver with the climbing blue-grey moonlight. The silver being part natural reflection, part pure cocaine in the midst of dissolving.

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012

CHAPTER 8

WHAT THE DEAD DO Seventeen and alone on top of the hill; the only adult supervision: my grandfather's grave. I closed my eyes. I leaned in. I was ready for the kiss.

"Wait." Tony put his index finger against my lips and pushed back. "Not like this. Not here."

"Why not?"

He cocked his head backwards, the movement slight; I was not sure I had in fact seen it.

"The grave?" I knew he could hear the judgment in my voice. "Papi's tomb?

You afraid of my grandfather? He’s dead you know?"

"You don't know much about the dead, do you?"

Graves are these natural fixtures in the Haitian landscape. On a drive to anywhere outside of Port-au-Prince, the countryside offers up several shades of green, colors coalescing from light lime greens to boiling deep greens, but it is also punctuated with these oblong cement boxes. As a child, and at times still today, I was convinced that along with plants, the earth in Haiti grew big cement flowers.

I suppose the graves became flowers in my child-mind because each one of them offered a palette of colors, pink and magenta, garnet reds, indigo and cyan blues

(my grandfather's white and blue grave flanked against the mountain in our backyard) along with these intricate designs, the cement somehow sculpted with gingerbread

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 shapes woven into the concrete fabric. Some graves were tribal works of art (or flowers) displayed against the land and sky.

We honor our dead above ground like they do in New Orleans but unlike the

Blans of New Orleans, our graves are not restricted to a particular space, a particular plot of land. Instead, the graveyard is broken piecemeal and scattered throughout the country: three to four large graves next to someone's house, two small ones (barely the length of my legs) behind the pink rosebushes lining the asphalt between Aquins and

Les Cayes and one in random solitude on a nameless beach, under a coconut tree.

Wherever you go in Haiti, this pattern, or something similar to it, repeats from house to shanti, from mango to avocado tree, from canal to river. Sometimes, if the wind is blowing right, or if you park the car on the side of some snaking dirt road, you can even spot a grave on the golden-brown edges of a wheat field (they hide in cornfields too). But graves also go beyond being sole resting places for the dead; in fact, their cement surfaces somewhat come in-handy on Saturday mornings, laundry day.

At around noon on Saturday, and the hours onward, cotton sheets (I always noticed the large white ones) and t-shirts, and baby-clothes, and pants (even socks, the little girl kind with the fancy lace on top) are tethered to every exposed inch of grave by rocks taken from the river or the street or by your feet; carefully inspected for dust and mud (and ants). It is as if even in their passing, the dead can still prove themselves useful; or maybe it is a more concrete form of not letting go (I like to think so);

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 keeping a sister, a child, or husband close by putting them to work: having them help with the laundry.

Only young children know this: graves also make the coolest playgrounds.

During those evenings when time sort of takes a backseat to life, the subtle hours on the cusp of dusk when there is nothing to do, and grown-ups are either on their way home or snoring in the shade of some tree, three-feet tall girls and boys, mostly boys, usually escape to the graves to practice perilous cartwheels (who will fall off the cement edge?) and intricate hand-stands (the idea being to hold the pose without resting against the tombstone).

So I did not understand Tony’s reaction. I did not understand his reluctance to kiss me; I did not understand where the fear was coming from. "Why is it so bad for us to do this in front of Papi Pressoir's grave?"

Tony tells me that I am lucky, that the only grave I have ever touched was my grandfather's, that lucky kids never experience the consequences of toying with the dead; that when he was about six years old, the dead decided to punish his cousin,

Pouchon.

Pouchon was one of those willowy boys, his thin light-brown frame swaying in the wind. He was also a naughty child, the one who would take off his clothes in church because he was hot (who cares where he is?), the one who would walk down the street and fart as much as possible if, for whatever reason, he did not like the people walking behind him. Something that he still does today. At the age of 29.

Pouchon also had the habit of swearing in not-quite-a-whisper, just loud enough for

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 his grandfather (or any adult) to hear himself being called an "asshole." He was always the first to get the belt amongst his siblings. Essentially trouble trailed behind him like a vestigial tail.

Never one to obey rules, Pouchon apparently wandered on to a neighbor's property one day and spent an entire afternoon practicing katas from his karate class.

He climbed on top of the graves and went through the motions of each position.

Having taken self-defense classes with Pouchon, I can imagine his loud hi-ya! as he pretended to fend off an invisible assailant with quick round kicks in the air. He was not alone in his adventures: Denis, another boy from karate class soon joined him, and together, they attacked the sides of the grave, practicing their front kicks, side-kicks, and sweeping side-kicks. Each blow landing with a thud on the cement.

Following this, the boys went home and the day ended with its usual speed, daylight somehow swallowed in one gulp by darkness around six p.m. And that is when Pouchon became constipated, severely constipated. He was in the outhouse for over thirty minutes when Tony walked into the backyard with a flashlight and banged on the door. Not one for being shy, Pouchon told him flat out that he needed to go real bad but could not push anything out.

“Push harder,” Tony said.

“I can’t. I am tired. And it’s starting to hurt.”

At this point of the story, I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. I had completely backed out of Tony’s arms. Excrement of any kind was not one of my

100

Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 favorite discussion subjects, and I was not sure I wanted to find out how all of this tied back to my grandfather’s grave. But Tony kept on with the story.

Throughout the night, things got worse. Pouchon eventually left the outhouse and made his way back to the house and climbed into bed. Since Pouchon’s mother had moved to the U.S. and his father was not really in the picture, he had permanently moved in with Tony’s family. He even called Guerda, Tony’s mother, mom. Both boys shared the same room, and Tony could hear Pouchon moaning from his bed.

“I could tell his was crying but he didn’t want to show it. But the moaning got so bad at one point that I got out of bed and told him to go get mom.”

Tony and a tearful Pouchon explained the situation to Guerda who promptly took Pouchon back to the outhouse. Exact same scenario. Except this time around it was worse.

“Whenever he tried to push, it hurt so bad that he screamed. Mom and him were inside and I was standing right outside the door.” Here Tony stopped talking, and kept his head down.

“And? Well, what happened?” He was not meeting my gaze. I could see that he really did not want to keep going, that he was regretting his decision to talk about this. So, I did what any curious girlfriend who do. I once again moved into the frame of his body, and placed both hands on either side of his face, and lifted his head up.

“It’s okay, baby. You can tell me.”

“It’s real embarrassing.” But he kept on talking. Apparently Guerda took matters into her own hand. Literally. She took the boys further into the backyard, into

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 the woods, sat on a log, draped Pouchon’s body across her lap and inserted her fingers into his anus, trying to pull whatever she could out. As supportive as I wanted to be, I could not keep my eyebrows from climbing up my forehead. Tony’s arms tensed around me, jerked me a little closer to him as if to say please do not say anything right now. Nothing at all . I got the message.

Guerda’s efforts did not work. Pouchon squirmed and started screaming louder and louder, the sound reaching back to the house, and waking up the entire household

– Tony’s dad, his grandfather, and his little baby brother.

“He stayed in Mom and Dad’s bed that night, and I don’t think either of them slept. Later in the week, they took him to a dokte fey .” Although I had never met a dokte fey , I had heard of them in the village. Essentially a Medicine Man (although some people liked to call them witch doctors). The diagnosis was swift, immediate:

Pouchon had disrespected the dead, and so mo marel , and so the dead had tied his insides, twisted him up in knots to teach him a lesson. I kept my face blank and asked,

“had you gone to any other doctors before going to the dokte fey ?” I tried to keep the implication out of my voice, but it was there all the same; I was asking had they considered an actual doctor, and Tony knew it.

“Of course we did. But nothing they prescribed worked. They just kept saying that it was a bad case of constipation; the worst they had ever seen. It got to the point where Pouchon was crying all day and mom couldn’t take it. There was nothing she could do to help him. We didn’t have a choice really. Who else could we go to?”

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True to his moniker, fey literally translates into “leaves,” the dokte prescribed an assortment of leaves which Pouchon not only had to chew on, but also had to include in his bath water and make sure to bathe with them three times a day. He also had to go to the grave and apologize to the dead.

“I’m telling you, Nimi, it took about a day. Just a single day of following the dokte’ orders and Pouchon went to the bathroom just fine. Never got constipated again in fact. It was the dead. He pissed them off.”

“Well, what about the other kid? Denis?” I asked the question less out of curiosity and more out a need to undermine the dokte fey .

“Same time as Pouchon, he got real bad headaches and nosebleeds. They just had him do the same thing Pouchon did, had him apologize to the grave too and everything cleared up just like that. Same as Pouchon.”

I did not know what to say, what to respond to a story like that. Half of my mind was fighting with me, needling me to make Tony consider that maybe the prescribed meds had just taken some time to kick in, had a delayed effect, or maybe the plants prescribed by the dokte fey simply had high concentrated doses of the same chemicals that were manufactured in the pills. But I could not say all of that to him. So

I did the only thing I could. I took his hand and dragged him down the hill, away from my grandfather’s grave. Once we reached the bottom, I turned to him and asked, “All right if we kissed here?”

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CHAPTER 9

NEWS FEED On May 18 2009, Radio Metropole announced that a woman in Les Cayes had just given birth to a fish-baby. It was not the station’s entertainment hour. There was no joke in the commentator's voice. "Un bebe poisson-raie," he called it. A stingray baby.

Google "fish-baby" and "Haiti," and there is Susan Westwood's blog Cry Haiti .

There is a post for Friday May 22 2009 titled "a Fish-Baby and People Who Fly by

Night." Susan Westwood, a pediatric nurse, has been working in an orphanage in the

Kenscoff Mountains since 2008. She writes that her mission "is to care for some of the orphaned and abandoned, the sick, malnourished and premature infants of this beautiful but beleaguered Caribbean nation." I love Susan Westwoods’s description. It is accurate. “Beautiful but beleaguered.” Haiti in a nutshell. The landscape curves around fantasies and nightmares, and sometimes you get a little bit of both.

But Susan did not see the fish-baby talk coming; she could not have known the ease with which the magic and the supernatural chase after you in Haiti. After all, she was recovering from a lougawou discussion from the day before, when she had to explain to her Haitian colleagues that there were no lougawous in Scotland (where she is from). No werewolves. No people with powerful abilities who could fly out into the night sky.

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"Magic is neither black nor white. It is in the heart of the witch," a line from the movie The Craft with Neve Campbell. The words stayed with me. Because this theory about magic is the same in most Haitian villages: it is not so much the magic, as it is the person casting the spell that one should be focused on.

Elizabeth, a commentator on a random blog, writes about the arrival of the fish-baby as well. To paraphrase her thoughts - she is worried that it is a Vodou curse.

That the mother who had just given birth to the stingray-like baby must have done something horrible, something unmentionable, to have a hougan put such a horrible curse on her. Or even worse, what if the mother was a witch, a bad witch, and this was karmic retribution for all the things that she had done. Because this baby could only be the result of a curse. How else would this come out of a woman?

Doctors came down to Les Cayes, to the hospital in the South of Haiti. Haitian ones and Blan ones too. The Nouvelliste devoted an entire section of the national newspaper to the event, to the possible mutation: possibly phocomelia. In the

Physician's Desk Reference , Jean Erich Rene writes about this rare genetic disorder.

Apparently, the joints and bones and tissues do not connect the way they should in the womb. Babies end up with contorted spines, with faces where the eyes are lopsided, where the outer corners of the eyes look like they are melting toward the cheekbones.

Sometimes, the limbs do not form. But there are more virulent cases. There are times when the disease targets the very early stages of life, those moments when we are warm inside our mothers, when the curves and lines of our bodies mirror those of an

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 amphibian. Phocomelia locks us in that state and forces our shape further and further away from anything human-looking.

Google Images has pictures of people living with phocomelia. Infants, babies with twisted misshapen bodies. There are also a couple of snapshots of Les Cayes' stingray baby, and they are hard to look at. The brain does not know how to process these snapshots because the bloody mass looks both foreign and familiar. There seems to be a long center-spine with a sheet of flesh rounding out on both sides of it. A stingray. But not. Because that sheet of flesh is bruised in purples, maroons, and reds.

It is too much like flesh. It is too much the color of intestines, freshly pulled from a living organism. It is too placenta-like, infused with blood. And so the snapshots of the stingray baby create anxiety. Subtle, but there all the same. As if one instinctively recognizes human remains, no matter how battered, bruised, cut up, or shapeless.

Jean Erich Rene is quite convinced. This is an advanced stage of phocomelia.

Dr. Ernst Desir is on board with the genetic mutation theory as well, but he is citing a severe case of sirenomelia instead, where the lower limbs fuse together and we come out with what looks like a fishtail as the bones of the legs fuse together. Sirenomelia, also known as the mermaid syndrome, although a rare mutation is a disease made famous by an adorable face: little Shilop Peppin, whose first ten years of life were documented and broadcasted on American television. The second longest survivor of sirenomelia, Shiloh died on October 2009. In regards to the case in Les Cayes, we were simply witnessing a non-viable fetus suffering from the same disease according

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 to Dr. Desir. So both reports – phocomelia and sirenomelia - are official, and crystal clear. No magic. Just science. Nature sadly gone awry.

But Google phocomelia again, look it up in the medical annals in the library, stare at the images of those children, those babies with contorted bodies. Do the same thing with sirenomelia. Add the word the fetus to your search. And you realize that the most important thing about Rene's article and Dr. Desir’s statement is the word

"severe." It must indeed be a “severe” case because nothing, absolutely nothing you find looks like a damn stingray. Nothing. No other cases. None of the pictures of either disease echo the wet fleshy blob in the photographs taken at the hospital in Les

Cayes. Out of the dozens of photographs cropping up on the screen, or dozens of reports on either sirenomelia or phocomelia, there is no mention of anything stingray- like.

Suddenly, you feel like putting Rene and Dr. Desir in the same room, and have them explain how exactly phocomelia syndrome relates to sirenomelia syndrome.

Because again, beyond both of them being genetic mutations, the two syndromes are not connected. One clearly affects the legs and the other one affects the entire body, even the formation of the blood vessels. So, which one is it? Which one are we dealing with in the situation in Les Cayes? What tests had they conducted to conclude with certitude that this unexplainable red mass which slipped from between a woman’s legs was the result of that disease or this disease? And where were the medical reports?

What did the other doctors have to say about this?

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Depending on how bad the main road was, on whether or not it had rained, or whether or not a president or senator was coming down for a visit, the drive from

Camp-Perrin (my village) to Les Cayes took twenty minutes or forty-five minutes. Les

Cayes was not necessarily as bad as Port-au-Prince, slightly less crowded, not so many medleys of awkward smells, but it still was not one of my favorite places to be. Plants had to fight their way through the cracks in the pavement, the cracks in the walls covered in dust, and although the ocean was near, a mere walking distance from the center of the city, it was always a sorrowful sight to see. The beaches had been neglected after each hurricane, and the growing number of Cayiens citizens were encroaching on the sands, slowly turning them from yellow-white to brown. I remember the day I gave up on the beach in Les Cayes: I was floating on my back, eyes closed; enjoying the then still clear waters, when something nudged the side of my neck. I opened my eyes, looked to the side and swam back to the shore as fast as I could, and kept running once I hit sand. Human feces. Large, dark-brown pieces of human feces.

But it was still necessary to go to Les Cayes from time to time. The city had one of the biggest street markets for rice, beans, vegetables, and it also had the only supermarket with canned goods, body lotions, reliable toothbrushes, and so forth. And although the village had its own hospital, the medical facilities in Les Cayes were more sophisticated. In general, one got the sense that those who lived in Les Cayes believed themselves to be superior to the mountain folk, the mounn monn , those of us

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 who lived on farms far away from the hustle and bustle of the city, those of us who were small-minded, always getting ourselves in magic related nonsense.

The look in people’s eyes was mostly why I liked to avoid Les Cayes; the way you were looked up and down, “tsked” at whenever you mentioned that you were from

Camp-Perrin. But the thing is, most of the men and women in Les Cayes had migrated there from the surrounding villages, many of them from Camp-Perrin even, relocating to the city in hopes of finding a job that did not involve manual labor. And they brought the magic-related nonsense with them.

In fact, when it came to magic, Les Cayes was notorious. Not only was the city brimming with the supernatural, it was the dark kind of supernatural. The stories from

Les Cayes always had an edge to them, an aftertaste of violence. After all, whenever there was trouble, any kind of trouble – protests, road blocks made out of wood and burning tires, mobs – it always started in Les Cayes. Trouble simply took root there.

And people living in the city had a tendency to disappear. No reason. No explanation.

Just one day gone. You never heard of bodies turning up though. It was like the individuals willed themselves into nothingness. Rumor has it, Les Cayes was home to some very powerful hougans. Magic warfare lined the multiple one-way streets of the city. The hougans were not only busy creating curses aimed at individuals who displeased them, but they were also doing battle with each other, and innocent victims sometimes got caught in the supernatural crossfires. For me, that was the last strike against the city. Bad vibes.

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"What happened?" I asked my mother the first time I saw the pictures of the stingray baby. It was early morning, and I had just walked in on her having breakfast at the dining room table.

"A baby born with a genetic mutation apparently. It's so horrible how they are parading those pictures around."

"Wow. That's disturbing. I am not even sure what I am looking at." I pulled the article closer, flipped the image on its side, held it right side up again, and finally put it back down on the table. My mother had not said much. "Mom, you all right?" I could not read her face.

She nodded. "Fine. I am just hoping that she is okay." She emphasized the she .

"Who? The mother?" Another nod. "There's no news about her," I said scanning the Nouvelliste article one more time. "What is there to be worried about?"

"The fact that there is no news about her. She's gone missing, you know.

Everybody is focused on the fetus, but nobody's talking about that fact that both she and the midwife who assisted the birth haven't been seen for days."

She was right. There had simply been one line in the newspaper about the fact that mother and midwife could not be found. Neither woman was even named in the article.

"That's probably for their protection though, the anonymity,” my mother said.

“Can you imagine what might happen if everyone knew who this was? Where she lived? That's really what worries me. It's sad about the baby, but think about it. All the

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 rumors about a curse. About her being a witch. What if they've done something to her?

To them?”

I did not know how to answer her. I did not know what to answer. It never occurred to me to consider the mother, to consider the thought that someone might have a grudge against her, might have harmed her, might have substituted her child with God knows what. I had gotten too caught up in the God knows what, in the weirdness of it all, in the potential for magic. I forgot to consider the humans in the equation.

Here are the Yahoo discussion forum threads about the Les Cayes Fish-baby:

No way that can happen unless she raped a fish. Three “likes” next to that one.

Don't mess with them Haitian women. Look at where voodoo'll get you. No response to that one.

Enough of this magic talk. The poor woman simply miscarried. Probably wasn't getting regular check- ups, so there was no way for to know that her [sic] had mutated to the point of not being viable. I liked this one. I agreed with this stranger.

This must have been a miscarriage. This fish resemblance was simply due to a mutation, any mutation. Had she had a regular doctor, things would never have gotten this far.

The Nouvelliste mentions that we Haitians are strong believers in magic. The newspaper even hints at a possible substitution: could the real baby have been

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 swapped and replaced with this? The article leaves you with this question before moving on to discuss the disastrous floods resulting from the river overflowing earlier in the week. No further inquiries, research, interviews. This is where the fish-baby's story ends.

Some Vodou rituals require some kind of offering. Something to entice the spirit to manifest itself, to feed the spirit once it does come around. It could be coffee, a piece of cake, the spirit's favorite drink (which usually involves rum). Sometimes, it is a chicken. A blood offering. The blood offering might need to be potent, powerful.

It might need to be human. Hollywood likes the allure of the human blood offering. It is the right amount of macabre to draw in viewers. So Vodou has grown synonymous with sacrifice, usually human, whenever the plot thickens in fictional tales. But such blood sacrifices are extremely rare. And they are about power. A lot of it. Regular

Haitian farmer Joe does not include this as part of his Vodou worship.

Common Fact: President Duvalier was infamous for having Vodou ceremonies in the white house.

Common Rumor: President Aristide, whose father was a noted hougan who was burned alive in front of his young son, had a ceremony in the white house. One of his body guards, posted outside the door of the President's office, reported the story about what happened in there. Apparently, the president had cleared the place of

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 everyone except for his bodyguards and trusted advisors. It was night. The body guard let in someone with a baby into to the office and stood in front of the closed door. He reported that he heard the child crying. Then there was silence. Sometime later, the men, including the President, walked out of the office. The person who was carrying the baby walked out with a large heavy-looking bag stained in crimson. The body guard resigned after that.

"I was afraid of what the President might do. I was afraid of him," the body guard confided.

I think about this stingray baby being born in the United States. Some hospital in Florida or in the plains of West Texas, or the Magee's Women Hospital in

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. How the birth would probably make the news. There would be an on-going investigation about the nature of the genetic disorder. There would probably be interview clips by two or three experts, their names, their credentials and the institution they work for labeled in white on the bottom left side of the screen. The news would make CNN. You know Yahoo would have a catchy title for you to click on and get a synopsis of the event. It would be replayed on FOX and CBS, and ABC.

No doubt you would catch something about it on NPR. The mother would of course be kept anonymous. Doctor-patient confidentiality. HIPPA Laws. The mid-wife would not really be a fixture in all of this. Perhaps a ten second clip of her explaining the birth. But nothing beyond that. The story of the stingray baby would not simply end and fall off a cliff into oblivion as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

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“There is an on-going investigation,” an official-looking person would say.

Vodou lwas remind me of the Gods of the Greek Pantheon. Each one of them so complex, so unique, that it is difficult to write about them without getting caught up in the colorful existence of the gods themselves, of the spirits themselves. The focus shifts from those who worship Zeus to Zeus himself, from Vodou practioners to just

Vodou. These Gods may be divine and other-worldly but we need to remember that they echo our humanity, magnify our strengths and weaknesses, and reflect it all back at us.

When I was ten, I loved magic tricks. I would spend hours in front of the television trying to figure out how the magician pulled it off.

"Just enjoy the moment, dear," my dad would say. "Enjoy what's happening on stage."

But I knew better. I knew that magic was all about misdirection. Watch the magician, I told myself over and over again. Watch the magician. Watch the magician.

It is not about the trick. It is about the man. It is about the very human psyche behind the trick. This ability that we have, this art some would say, to manipulate.

Hougans like to take credit for a lot of things that happen in Haiti. A particularly damaging storm, rubble coming off the mountain, an unexpected pregnancy, an incurable disease; all of it is their doing. It is about establishing their

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 street cred. This reminded the rest of us that as normal as a hougan's everyday life might seem, they are still beings of power, infinite power at that. They can not only summon spirits, but they also can control them, have them do their bidding.

United Nations’ soldiers - the Minustah - are not liked in Haiti. Mention them and you will get jokes or anger. The problem has to do with the peacekeeper label; I think it gets everyone off on the wrong foot because it is not clear what ‘peace’ these men are supposed to be keeping exactly. You see, the Minustah are mostly a presence in Haiti. Nothing more. Nothing less. You see them standing on street corners, standing in front of buildings, standing in the middle of the market while a little girl gets assaulted by a group of men. The Minustah just stand erect with their riffles at the ready like warrior statues, or wax figures, or shells brittle and hard that merely look human.

I have seen them morph into people only once. On the beach at Port- Salut.

Four of them on the beach, with loud radios and beer coolers. Three tall blonde

Americans, and a short darker skinned man who rolled his Rs when he spoke English.

Usually the men of the Minustah either did not speak at all. Only a few Kreyol words escaped their lips from time to time. Sak pase was a favorite. "What's up? How's it going?"

Sak pase had this way of becoming popular with all blans . Maybe because it is a short expression. Easy to remember. Easy to say. But I like to think that the attraction to Sak Pase, the popularity of these two words had more to do with how you

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 said them. They syllables came out with enthusiasm. Pep. It's the "what's up, bro?" equivalent between two friends who had not seen each other for a long time. Sak comes out quick and rapid. But you draw Pase out. Sak Paseeee!

When I go to the beach in Port-Salut, I never fail to trail the sand, walk along the shore until my feet are so familiar with the sugar texture beneath my soles, that it feels like I am wearing comfortable shoes. Nothing more comforting than being swallowed up by this yellow-white version of earth. I spotted the group of men up ahead clustered on my right, and the plan was to just keep walking, go right past them.

"Sak pase ?"

I turned around. One of the tall blonde ones, standard crew cut, his chest, shoulders and the bridge of his nose developing pink streaks, was making his way toward me.

"M'pa pi mal," I said and kept walking. “M'pa pi mal” is another favorite which foreigners learnt quickly. Doing good, I am okay, not too bad. It was the standard response to “Sak Pase.”

The blonde Munistah caught up with me and held out a beer bottle. "Want to hang?" English this time. I smiled up at him. Guess “Sak Pase” was the extent of his

Kreyol. I shook my head, tried to make my way around him, but by then the rest of the men had crowed around us, and I felt tiny and fragile – a dwarf in a gathering of giants, their exposed chests and arms, the veins lining their muscles spoke of a masculinity, a level of physical strength that could break me. All they had to do was reach out.

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"You speak English?" This from another blonde giant behind me. He stepped closer to me with each word. My blood quickened in my arteries. My voice came out fast and clipped "Yeah. I do." The one with beer, the one on my right, raised his eyebrows "You American?"

"Nope."

“Where are you from?”

“Here. I am from here,” and I snaked my way through an opening between the short dark-skinned man, who was still taller than me, and the third blonde American one in front of me. “Nice talking to you guys, but I have to go.” I am pretty sure one of them said hope we see you around. I don’t know which one. I didn’t look back. I couldn’t.

I always wondered what would have happened if my English was not as it was, if I had spoken the language with an accent, if I had not sounded like an American because these young men away from home had a tendency to not act like fathers, brothers, sons or husbands in Haiti. Some of them embraced an atavistic side, did some molesting of their own and the local women aside, the Minustah never failed to needle their way into a village without trailing a line of prostitutes behind them. In fact, bordellos seemed to be the cornerstones of the soldiers’ military bases. What made matters worse was the ladies in these establishments were usually from across the border – Dominicans. This did nothing to ease local tensions, appease the need to spit or throw rocks at these mock-soldiers who seemed to be on some sort of state-

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 mandated vacation where they got to play out their fantasies while the villages and the cities around them erupted in a volcano of violence and political unrest.

In July 2011, the Center for Disease Control along with a team of researchers from the Harvard Medical School confirmed that the source of the cholera epidemic that began rustling through Haitian citizens like a wind through leaves in October

2010 was a group of United Nations soldiers from Nepal. The men had brought the virulent strain with them from Nepal (notorious for its cholera outbreaks) and transmitted the disease to the local population of the Artibonite and Center departments. In a matter of days, the disease had mapped itself onto the south of Haiti, and this on the heels of the earthquake. We had not even begun clearing the rumble; the bodies decaying under dislodged pieces of cement had not even been identified when they were joined by fresh corpses – skeletal and emaciated, void of moisture, void of all the precious fluids so necessary to life, to the functioning of our organs.

It is actually very easy to treat cholera. If you are lucky, you simply get a steady intake of fluids and electrolytes; if the vomiting is too bad, the option is intravenous fluids and electrolytes for an unpleasant three to four days before going back to your normal self; if you are unlucky, if fluids and electrolytes are hard to come by, hard to obtain in a consistent manner, not only will you be vomiting, but it will feel like your bowels are being liquefied out of you in a steady stream until you die of severe dehydration. Some people were just shitting water in the end, someone told me.

"An earthquake, and now this? What did we do to deserve this?" my friend

Cloé wrote to me in an email. I didn’t know how to answer her. Perhaps we were

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 indeed a cursed folk. In a past life, the entire nation had committed some odious crime, and now we had to face karmic retribution on galactic scale. I didn’t know what to think. I still do not know what to think. How was cholera justifiable a mere nine months after one of the deadliest earthquakes? How much more could the island handle? How much more could the people handle?

That last question worried me, had in fact being worrying me for years. It was

October 2010, and I was in Walmart at two a.m. in Lubbock, Texas stocking up on hand-sanitizers – I need you to come down with at least a full suitcase , my mother said over the phone as I was getting ready to fly down to Haiti for my grandmother’s funeral. As many as you can honey , she said. As many as you can . I want to put them in every room in the office, at every table, at the front door – when I froze in the aisle.

I realized that things could actually get worse. The CDC’s findings, announced on the ABC News and published in American medical journals, could leak through the controlled professional environment of research to the villages in Haiti, to the ears of the tired and the grieving, so ready to transition from sadness and despair to anger, to rage.

Just the thought of the U.N soldiers upset me, the mere fact of their existence irritated me, and I was thousands of miles away in the lost plains of West Texas. But what about my neighbor whose wife had died from cholera? Who saw the standing

Minustah every day on his way to work? Saw them doing nothing besides eating their special foods and fathering a generation of mulattoes who won’t know anything about their father besides the fact that he was a blan ? And now, this band of standing blue-

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 helmet men had unleashed cholera? There would be blood. There. Would. Be. Blood.

The men and women, the slaves from two hundred and twenty years ago would unhinge our jaws and climb back into our bodies and ask for blood.

But it never reached that point. It came close. There were reports of people spitting at the Minustah, picking up rocks on the street and throwing them at the men, but it did not go beyond that. Mainly because a group of hougans in Jeremie, in the southern peninsula of Haiti, boasted that they were the ones who had unleashed the disease. The epidemic was at their behest. Cholera was theirs to control, to disseminate, and they wanted to give everyone a taste of their powers.

It was a good move. In theory. Excellent guerilla tactics. Because the cholera epidemic had fundamentally altered our way of life. After centuries of kissing each other on the cheek, of shaking hands, of hugging each other, everyone had become suspicious, overnight. The body, a site for pleasure, a vessel for the divine, was now something to be feared, to be rejected. There was no trust. Someone so much as coughed, and everyone would jump back. Every abnormality, any hint of sickness was cholera. And even if you looked fine, even if you exhibited no hints of anything whatsoever, the thought of contagion still lingered. Where were you from? From what part of Haiti? Who did you hang out with last night? Didn’t someone in your family die recently?

Being the mastermind behind such profound changes was impressive, definitely noteworthy. But where the hougans failed was in underestimating the population’s need for retribution. After what the earthquake had done, after so many

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 lives lost for no reason, 250 000 people and still counting, and with such brutality, there was probably a silent furry thrumming within the core of everyone’s chest. Fear was no longer an option. And in December 2010, in the Latin America and Caribbean

News, the BBC announced that at least forty Vodou priests had been killed. They were stoned. They were attacked with machetes. And then publicly lynched. “What did the crazy fucks think was going to happen? You can’t put something like that out there in these times,” a family friend said. People were indeed out for blood. Hougan blood. The killings threatened to spill beyond the borders of the Jeremie area, to spill to all of Haiti as Vodou priests were believed to be the ones spreading the infection (it even got to the point where they were being blamed for the earthquake). Prior to 2010, there had been no incidents of cholera in the country for over a hundred years. The disease was completely foreign to Haitians, so no one understood how it was transmitted.

“We need to stop this,” my mother said. “We need to educate them, create awareness about the disease. God, this has nothing to do with Vodou!”

And I agreed with my mother. There was a need for education. Cholera is a water-borne disease, a bacterium, which results in severe diarrhea and dehydration if untreated. Poor sanitary conditions, such as the ones found in the tent cities of Port-au-

Prince after entire buildings and houses were destroyed and over one million people gathered under pieces fabric, contributed to the rapid spread of cholera.

Prevention messages were sent out to all Haitian news outlets: 1. Drink and use safe water; 2. Wash your hands often using soap and water or disinfectant; 3. Cook

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 food well, keep it covered, and eat it hot; 4. Peel fruits and vegetables; 5. Use latrines or bury feces and do not defecate in any body of water. Apparently, number five did not seem that important to the Minustah, fresh from Nepal, who were seen dumping their raw sewage into the tributary of one of Haiti’s largest rivers.

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CHAPTER 10

MADAME COLO Some sounds follow you all your life: your father’s voice, the original rendition of “Broken Arrow” with Rod Stewart’s voice rasping through the stereo, the song blasting while you shower. One man I met in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania hated summer. The heat on his skin, the way the white simply melted off his arm, the scent of his red hair turning crimson under the sunlight. He was haunted by the sound of the ice cream truck.

“I wake up sweating to that fucking jingle,” Michael told me once over a beer.

“Whenever you hear the little fuckers running down the street, you know summer’s officially here." He was right. As the humidity level rose in Pittsburgh, so did the frequency of the ice-cream truck’s drive-bys. One summer, I heard it five times throughout the day as it drove around the Highland Park neighborhood, as it went up and down Highland Avenue, each time sounding off right under my balcony.

Like the ice-cream truck jingle, water sounds haunt me: a river, the ocean, the caress of a hurricane over a lake or a pond, but mostly the river. Or the faucet, if I let the water run long enough. Water-river sounds bring women to mind. The women just beyond the back gate of our property in Camp-Perrin. Half-naked women, the sun beating down on their bare backs, marking their skin brown, black, charcoal, darkening them in shades of tar. The Saturday women of the village, waist-deep in the canal on laundry day.

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For as long as I can remember, laundry day has always been on Saturdays.

Truth be told, Saturday mornings were official “cleaning moments” in the Finnigan household. Brooms and mops would come out and blue buckets filled with brown waters moved and sloshed about the corridors. At the end of the day, the pillows in the living room were fluffier, the floors evolved from wet to damp (the musk scent of settled water was inescapable) and the aroma of freshly baked bread flooded all the crevices of the kitchen. We baked on Saturdays as well. Round fat loaves of white bread, which I could (and quite often did) polish off in one sitting.

But Saturday mornings would find me slipping through the kitchen door and heading towards the canal sounds just beyond our back-gate. The canal, built by the

French colonials in 1759, irrigates the land in the Plaine des Cayes, over 2 000 hectares worth of farm land and as my father puts it, “Haiti's breadbasket for corn, beans, hot peppers and other staple crops.” There is always the fear that the constant hurricanes and tropical storms will one day inundate the canal system with too much sediment, gradually burying the canal beneath alluvium.

Another functional use of the canal? Adults bathe in it, teenagers fool around in it and the little ones dive in it, come back out and dive in again. In fact, between the ages of ten and thirteen, I used to wrap my arms under Reflex’s mid-section, lift him until his paws were dangling, and jump into the freezing running water. During those years when he was alive, our night-black lab must have also been haunted by water sounds. But what I mostly liked about the canal, what I would sneak out of the house to go see was all the women getting their laundry done, especially Madame Colo.

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Madame Colo was short. Very short. I am barely five foot tall, and her head did not go past my ears. It might have been her posture though. Like the Hunchback of

Notre Dame, her spine arched forward, but not because she was disabled; she simply had bad posture, she liked to walk around with her head bent, her spinal column pushing outwards at the back of her neck, scanning the ground for who knows what.

Madame Colo was a fixture of the village. Ask anyone. Nobody knew how old she was, she herself did not know (I had asked her and instead of answering me, she started singing) but what was a certainty was that she had always been around.

Always. There was not one person in the village who remembered a time when

Madame Colo was not roaming the streets – either the main road or the canal – wearing the same dress day in and day out.

“She must be a hundred years old. At least,” my mother says. And not only had she been wearing the same dress for what seemed like a century, but she also looked the same. Her features, her wrinkles, the pleats of her skin were locked across her face, frozen. She was the only ageless old woman. But she was an agile old woman. Even though she was never without her cane, actually a long piece of wood about the length of body, she used to dance as she walked down the streets. She would shimmy her hips, then do a little hustle, stop, turn around, thump her cane on the ground, and keep on walking. And start the routine all over again. Shimmy. Hustle left. Hustle right.

Stop. Turn around. And again. I had never seen this old woman walk without dancing.

This also explained why it took her an inordinate amount of time to get anywhere.

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But Saturday mornings were the times to see her, really watch her. There were all kinds of women all over the canal on those days. Short, skinny, fat, tall and everyone one of them was at different stages with their laundry. Some ladies were unwrapping their cloth bundles, about to begin the day’s work, while other ones were sitting in the waist high basins of the canal, soap suds flowing down the stream as they wrought out their sheets. And there was singing. Usually someone would start if off with a hum, a soft minor sound churning in the middle of their throat that would eventually spread to all the women; they would pick up the tune and amplify it until the whole place, the whole day shimmered with the sound of their breath climbing out through the back of their throats and escaping through their nostrils into the air. Their bare breasts would rise and fall. Rise and fall with the melody, with their scrubbing, scrubbing. They never managed to drown out the sound of the canal, but they came close. And then one of them would break into song, as if on cue, as if that particular moment required words. But Madame Colo was the one to watch.

She had her spot. The canal extended throughout the southern landscape for several miles, but it was not all flat surfaces: there were dips and groves, every couple of yards or so, changes in depth which basically created mini-waterfalls across the entire length of the canal. There were two such waterfalls behind my house. Not tall ones. The change in height was about the distance from my hipbone to my ankle, but the current was strong, it came down with force – kneel in the basin under the fall, and it could wash you away .

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Madame Colo liked to position her herself next to first waterfall. She bundled up her skirts, exposing calloused loose-skinned knees, and crouched on the cement edge of the canal, and watched the foaming waters dive into the basin underneath.

Given her age, how she managed to lower herself into that position and stay there always puzzled me. I held my breath, always expected her to get stuck like that, to not be able to get back up. But every week-end the ritual was the same. She shimmied her way over to her spot, shooed or attacked anyone who happened to be in her spot with her cane, and watched the waves crashing downwards.

Then she stood up and took her dress off, a maroon dress with white polka dots which were never really white. She slipped out of her dress, pulled out a bar of soap from one the pockets, held the dress in the canal for a bit, and then crouching back down again, she dragged the wet cloth over onto the pavement. Older women bathed in the canal, but beyond a certain age, you no longer saw them washing themselves in public. I suppose a certain level modesty had set in. And when it came to laundry day, the women were never entirely naked: they had on shorts, loose skirts or panties, and they were usually either sitting on the grass, the lower half of their bodies nestled in yards of clothes or sheets that needed to be washed, or they were in the canal, their lower body disappearing into the foaming stream.

Not Madame Colo. She crouched down on the pavement, naked, her single dress between her thighs, and rubbed the soap over every surface of the garment. Then she sat down, straightened her legs out to the sides in front of her, and began the business of scraping the dress over the stubbled-cement surface of the canal’s edge.

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None of the other women ever said anything. Never looked at Madame Colo sideways, or inched away from her. None of them ever seemed to pause over her lack of modesty or the fact that she was not actually getting that dress clean. But I could not help but stare at this old woman. This woman who came over to my house on a daily basis during the week, and insisted on cleaning the yard, picking up every single mango and coconut leaf.

“Madame Colo, please. You don’t have to do this, dear. Won’t you come inside? Won’t you come and sit down?” My mother held on to the tiny woman’s shoulders, towered over her.

“No. Leaves need to be picked up. This won’t do. It won’t do.” Fol pwop, fol pwop, fo lacou pwop , she kept on saying. “It needs to be clean, it needs to be clean, the yard needs to be clean.”

There was no one to call, no family, no social services. There was no way of stopping her, restraining her. When my parents realized that she would keep sneaking unto the property, keep coming to clean the yard (she sometimes did too good of a job and chopped the rosebushes and the orchids down), they decided to pay her.

“Make sure to leave a bowl of food for her as well,” my mother said to Livy.

So every afternoon, once Madame Colo was done with the yard, or if there was not enough leaves on the ground, once she was done killing all the flowers, she would reach in through the kitchen and grab her bowl of rice and beans off the kitchen counter.

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One time, Livy stood in the kitchen, crossed her arms over her chest and tsked at Madame Colo through the window. “All that money Madame is giving you, and you wear that same thing every day. What’d you do with the money, old woman?”

Zafe gade-w. “Mind your own business,” said Madame Colo, and she turned around, pointed her butt up in the air, slapped it, and walked back into the yard, where she would chase the chickens away, throwing her arms up in the air, or taking aim and throwing rocks at the animals who would zig zag across the property, jump over the fence, squeeze themselves through the fence. And Madame Colo would get to working on picking up the stray feathers.

Tet li pa finn dwat non . “You know, she’s not quite right in the head.” Livy might have been right. Perhaps Madame Colo was too old. Perhaps this was dementia, but aside from her quirkiness, which has always been there, the old woman was completely functional. I always knew when she was coming into the yard because she yelled, Manmi! at the top of her lungs from our back gate. And if my mother was around, if she was sitting in the living room, she yelled back Oui Madan Colo, m’la.

Ou met vini ! “Yes, Madame Colo, I’m here. You can come on in!” And Madame Colo would make her way to the front of the house, poke her tiny head through the living room window, and smile a toothless grin, Bonjou Manmi . “Bonjou, Madan Colo,” my mother would say back to her, as if this was the most natural of exchanges, as if she was indeed Madame Colo’s Mom.

We never found what she did with the money. I paid close attention to her on

Saturdays, waiting to see her arrive with a new dress some day, with fabric of a

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 different color, but she never did. She pounded her dress into the ground with both hands, grunting as she moved forward and backward, forward and backward, her backside rocking along with her movements,

In 2009, Madame Colo died. “Her time had finally come, I guess,” my mother said over the phone. It makes absolutely no sense, but I had thought time would not touch her. She was a creature out of my fairytales – a modern day Rip Van Wrinkle with no need for sleep, the real wise woman with immortal powers which one would never fully grasp.

On those Saturday mornings, her body taught me so much about what it meant to be a woman, how the turning of minutes into years iron the skin, stretch it, thin it, then abandon it letting it hang loose and shapeless; how aging leeches the fat from the breasts and butt cheeks, pours itself within each pubic hair which lengthens from black to white, yet puffs up the labia, pushes the genitals to bloom.

Madame Colo’s body taught me that she was beautiful, that my own grandmother – she too was beautiful; so that when the time came that I had to help my mother undress her mother, our four hands roaming over the mother-matriarch with a damp washcloth, when the time came for me to spread my grandmother’s legs and her own puffed lips and wipe the excrement from her body like one would for a toddler, I was ready. I did not repeat those actions out of obligation, because my grandmother was 85 years-old and an invalid, because bathing and changing her diaper had become a necessity. No. What my mother and I were doing, as death slow-waltzed toward my grandmother, what I was doing, was an acknowledgement that we women were

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 flowering into each other. By learning Madame Colo’s body, I learnt my grandmother’s body and my mother’s body; I learnt my body, my own skin and curves.

Nowadays, Madame Colo would not be happy with the state of the front yard.

The lacou is covered in brown, green and yellow leaves and overrun with chickens.

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CHAPTER 11

NEG MAWON I have always hated Port-au-Prince. I don’t think I have ever owned up to that quite so bluntly; but it is the truth. Something about the capital always felt foreign to me, as if something about the roads, the houses, and even the people just did not quite seem right, did not quite seem like home. Even before I understood the feeling or had chosen that particular word “hatred,” Port-au-Prince always had this alienating effect on me.

In fact, whenever we had to travel to Port-au-Prince from Camp-Perrin, I remember always asking my parents “when were we going back to Haiti?” It was a young 5-year olds’ slip of the tongue but evidently even at that age, I had already begun drawing this line between the capital and rural village life in the south of Haiti.

Guess at heart, I was just never a city girl. But it is more than that.

Port-au-Prince is a battered city broken in bruises. I always thought it needed fixing, needed healing. In fact, when the words poverty and Haiti come up, I have never once in my life thought of my neighbors, many of them farmers surviving on one dollar day, eating only breakfast so that something was left over for the rest of the day, something that could be parceled out to the kids, who by nightfall where always hungry. That something, usually being an avocado, a mango. Yet I never thought of the people of my village as poor. Camp-Perrin has never been and will never be synonymous with poverty. Perhaps because when you are surrounded by nature, the means of survival although scarce, are always blooming. Or perhaps, it is simply that

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 trees and orchards, lakes with deep green pools and rivers are comforting. Not in the romanticized nature-soothes-all-wounds-and-struggles kind of way, but perhaps in the mere fact that hope is always a planting season away. And no matter how you look at it, no one can deny how good it feels to lose yourself under a waterfall; allow the cold liquid curtain to pound the day off your skin, momentarily strip your worries away droplet by droplet.

But the city does not offer this; it cannot offer it, and so, in my mind, Port-au-

Prince is poverty. It is the dirt, the cracked pavements, the medley of smells - a bouquet of refuse, decomposition, soap and cooking oils gestating, burnt - and the combination of buildings and shanties, people living on top of each other in a practically forced and inescapable intimacy. All of this gestating and slow-cooking in humidity and heat, so much heat. The city is a pressure-cooker always on the verge of exploding. And that is the image of Haiti which floats up to the surface whenever someone mentions the poverty level of the country.

My mother tells me that I said my first words while we were driving into Port- au-Prince. I must have been around two or three years old, and I stood up on her lap in the car, looked out the window and said "kaka kaka kaka kaka." I was practicing my sounds, those initial consonants that young children on the verge of words repeat over and over again.

“You were just having fun, staring out the window and babbling away. You had no idea what you were saying but I had to hold myself back from putting my hand over your mouth. I mean what are the odds that when you look at Port-au-Prince, the

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 first words out of your mouth are shit, shit, shit, shit.” These first words are my mother and my private joke. She tells me the story over and over again, and I listen. I laugh at the end. But part of me also wants to believe that even at such a young age, I saw the city for what it was: crappy.

I can hear my parents' voices in the back of my head. "Be fair, Nimi. There are some breathtaking sights in the city. And anyway, it wasn't always like that." Perhaps not. Perhaps I am being unfair in my assessment, but I did not know Port-au-Prince in the seventies like my parents did, I had not seen its pristine streets, its colorful gingerbread houses, and I have yet to meet one individual who lives there now who isn't hungering for the country side, who doesn't have an eye trained on the roads out of the city. Besides, neither of my parents would ever even consider living there. "You would have to pay me a lot of money. A lot!" my father says.

And yet, here I am in mourning. That must be the word for this. This slow, ever so slow burn that creeps from my neck, and then just rests on my chest. Kind of like a caress but one that brings pain. Goudougoudou . That is what they called the earthquake of 2010. Goudougoudou . That was the sound coming from the center-belly of the earth, the epicenter of the earthquake, the sound coming up from under your feet as the buildings began to oscillate, shimmy and crumble.

We are not known for our ability to mark time in Haiti. We are always late. In fact, time is somewhat of a fluid concept. National holidays are celebrated, but beyond that, dates and time are relative. Most of the people I know are not even sure of their age – “about 30 years old, give or take a couple of years” or “I was either born in 1975

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 or 1977. Wait, it could possibly have been 1973.” But Goudougoudou changed all of that. Some of us will start keeping time as of Tuesday, January 12, 2010. There will be a Haitian equivalent to “where were you when Kennedy was shot?” or “where were you when the towers came down?”

"It was like the earth had a real bad stomachache," someone told me when I asked him where he was during the earthquake, when I asked him to describe the event. "I'll never forget it. I thought it was the end of the word."

And so did many others. At first, people went outside, they were curious, what was that sound , what was going on , but when the goudougoudous grew louder, when the end of the world seemed imminent, practically everyone rushed back into their houses.

"That's why the death toll is so high. They were scared. And they didn't know.

They didn't know," my mother repeats over and over. “They thought they would be safe inside their homes.”

I find myself doing this back and forth thing: thinking about the dead of Port- au-Prince, the shame endured by their bodies, their loved ones forced to sleep outside

(next to the rubble, what used to be their homes) and then there are the days, the minutes like now, when I start thinking about trivial things really. Our White House of all the oddest things. Those pillars. What had they seen throughout the years? What could they have told us of stories, of hidden secrets, of lovers, the crazy political tales typical of the country? Because our White House is no more. And I never, ever, would have believed that that building had somehow come to define Haiti in my mind, that

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 such a building had become part of me. It had. And now that it is crushed, lopsided, I feel like I am missing a limb. Or that I am in the wrong place, perpetually lost because my bearings have evaporated.

Some people see the destruction of the White House as divine intervention;

God taking revenge on a place that had fostered corruption, under-the-table deals, and president after president who further fracture the country as if it was a race to destruction, a competition to leach this half of the island of all of its resources, leave the citizens this side of the border exposed on bare rocks. And you could almost believe that it was true; that God was fed up and had enough, because apart from the

White the House, everything else on the block had withstood the earthquake.

“The White House has fallen but all the statues of our national heroes are still standing,” my mother told me over the phone. I had not realized that I had been holding my breath, until she said that, until I let it out.

After the earthquake, once the panic had subsided and I knew that my family was alive, I watched the images of Port-au-Prince on CNN, FOX, ABC, sitting as close as I possibly could to the screen as if mere proximity could propel me from

Lubbock, Texas to those survivors buried under rocks and slabs of cement. I flipped from channel to channel, and scenes from the city slid across the television set like a merry-go-round. Nothing was recognizable. And I thought about those statues.

Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture.

The memory of the Neg Mawon statue burnt the most. I did not even know if it was still there, still standing. I was scared to ask. Amidst all the devastation, all

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 those people living through a sorrow that I could not begin to acknowledge, how could

I possibly call someone and say “hey, do you know if the Neg Mawon statue is still standing?” as if to say, take a break from your pain and go find out if this piece of black rock is still around. There were puffed up bodies blooming all over the streets, cries escaping from corner after corner for days and nights so that it seemed that Port- au-Prince had found a voice and decided to howl; and I was inquiring about inanimate objects?

But the truth of it is that I cannot imagine Port-au-Prince without that statue. I don’t want to. Somehow this piece of rock (I don’t even know what it is made out of), this sculpted man marooned within the heat and smells of Port-au-Prince comes to embody something essentially Haitian, as if our hearts, at least mine, were tethered to this runaway slave; his Queen Conch shell singing, reminding us what type of people we were and what type of people we are. If it had fallen, that would indeed have been a sign from God. A terrifying one. My grandmother used to tell me this story about these cursed people that lived on an island; the story was apparently from the bible

(although I have never ever heard it referenced by anyone else), and she was convinced that it was a reference to Haitians.

“Come here m a rose des déserts perdues, ” she would say. “Sit by me. We are cursed you know,” she would say to me from her rocking chair. “God wants us to suffer. It says so in the bible. We have not done good things. We’ve wasted his gifts.”

She suffered from dementia, and I could always tell when she was in the middle of one

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 of her episodes because she became poetic, called me ma rose des deserts perdues , my lost desert rose.

I never believed we were cursed but I thought of her words when I heard about the earthquake; I shuddered at the possibility when I thought that what we had left of our national heroes had been reduced to cinders, that the proud, black marooned slave, with his cold tar skin glazed in sunlight, no longer stretched his limbs in the center square in front of the White House. The Neg Mawon was (and is) our brown rebel, reminding us of the slaves who escaped into the mountains, reminding us of the men in hiding, wild men who gathered into an army and shifted history, the conch shell singing a need for freedom across the landscape; how could we (I) survive without him? As I much as I loathed (or thought I loathed) this city, I never realized what she had given me, what she has always been giving me: my entire history, blossoming.

I never thought I would come to miss Port-au-Prince. To miss all those things I never got a chance to see because I either did not realize they were there or I simply took them for granted never thinking that there would be this day, a day when broken pieces and stories told from memory are the only tangible remnants, echoes of a past which I could have touched, breathed, smelled, tasted, if I had only bothered to pay attention yesterday.

Dear Port-au-Prince, I am so sorry. Forgive me. Forgive me.

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CHAPTER 12

WE DON'T KNOW ANY BETTER Sunken cheekbones. Collarbone fighting against skin, and winning - a visual reminder of our rigid insides, our calcium core. A short stature and an underdeveloped frame. These are the broad characteristics, the general strokes of malnutrition in Haiti.

What happens to the body when you live in abject poverty. But you can also curse these things into being. I did. At least, I think I did. I am terrified at the thought, but I think I disrespected some primordial law, abused some kind of island magic, and dumped it on my best friend. We were eleven, when I cursed her.

It was late afternoon. We were in the front yard, a few feet away from the grandfather mango tree holding up my tree house, and Aliette's knuckles had just left five tiny indents on my spine, right between my shoulder blades. She had punched me, and she had punched me hard. I stayed there on the ground, hands and knees deep in the brown soil, studded with off-white rocks and wild grass, and watched her run away with the purple dress clenched in her fist. She rounded the corner around my house, and was gone. Then I began to scream. I don't know how long I stayed there, inches away from the front door, screaming. It might have been a five minute howl or a five second one, but it was filled with the kind of fury only an eleven-year old can muster up. It wasn't that she had snatched the dress from me, or that she had punched me. It was the Amitie vine. The damn thing hadn’t worked. There had been no vine magic.

Nothing at all. And I wanted her to pay for that.

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About a week earlier, our sociology professor had decided that it would be much more useful if we studied something that had to do with the traditions of the country, and not the far away land of the blan ; Jean loved to use that word. Blanc. The

Haitian-creole word for both white man and foreigner, which was a little funny at times because, well, Jean himself was a white man, and technically a foreigner twenty- five years ago when he came to the island from Belgium. The sudden change in the lesson plan was not unfamiliar to us. Jean had been teaching us for over six years, and

I had yet to recall a single day when he actually followed the chapters in any manual, sociology or otherwise.

"It's time you learnt about life," was one of his favorite phrases. He would take his glasses off, wipe the lenses with the same blue handkerchief, and we knew that once he put them back on, the topic of discussion would have nothing to do with the outlined lesson plan. That is how we began talking about old wives' tales, or tabous to used Jeans's word, on a random day in the Fall of 1993.

Jean held the science book in one hand, snapped it shut, and leaned back in his chair, the book balanced on his rounded belly. My classmate, and best friend, Cloé and

I huddled closer to him, and he began telling us about these weird expressions,

“popular sayings.”

1. Mache avek ou pe soulye, manman-ou ap mouri. Walk with one shoe and your mother will die.

2. Men-ou grate-ou, lajan ap vinn sou ou. Your hand itches, money is coming your way.

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3. Si zandolit tonbe sou pie-ou, wap ansent. If a lizard falls on your feet, you will get pregnant.

In one single hour, Cloé and I wrote down what felt like over a hundred of these. Though the actual number is likely closer to twenty or thirty. Some of them we could not stop giggling over, the ones about penises and condoms and how the latex could drain a boy’s soul. Others were a bit puzzling: how exactly could staring at a particular flower under the moonlight give away the upcoming lottery numbers?

"The most important thing to remember is that none of this is true," said Jean at the end of class time, as we were packing up for the day and getting ready to leave.

"Then why do people believe them?" I asked.

"They don't know any better."

That afternoon, I decided to walk home by way of the canal. Unlike the main road, the canal was a small, dirt pathway, barely wide enough to hold two people walking side by side. It ran parallel to an actual canal with a constant stream of rushing water, hence the expression to mache sou cannal or fe sou cannal , meaning

"walk on the canal" or "take the canal," to indicate which road you were about to use: the main one or the dirt pathway. Wherever it was you were going in the village, the main road, la ru , would typically get you there faster, but I preferred to "take the canal." You never had to deal with white dust flaring up, and hitting you in the face whenever a car drove by, and the canal was lined with mango and citrus trees, bushes, and all kinds of flowers. It felt like taking a stroll through a forest. But that afternoon,

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I wasn't into the red or magenta bougainvilleas. I was thinking about Jean's “they don't know any better.”

The minute I spotted my house, I headed for the kitchen, for our maid, Livy.

She was hunched over the stove with her back turned to me.

"Do you know any tabous?" I used the French word for old wive's tales that

Jean had taught us in class.

"What do we say, young lady?" She kept her back toward me and kept stirring whatever was boiling on the stove. Judging by the smell, black bean sauce. I rolled my eyes and moved closer to her. Livy never answered you, nor even bothered speaking to you until you had properly greeted her. Bonjou was for the morning, basically any time before noon, and bonsoi was for the afternoon but only between noon and nightfall. After six pm, once it was pitch-dark outside, one had to use bonn nui .

"Sorry. Bonsoi. Do you know anything about tabous?"

She turned around, wiping her hands on her apron and scratched the top of her head, making sure not to disturb the fold of her scarf. She had on a blue one with white polka dots tightly set against her charcoal brown forehead. Although Livy had been working with the family for several years, I was never sure about the exact shade of her hair. Was it grey strands, short braids or long locks hidden beneath all of those scarves?

Once my mother told her, "I know you have beautiful hair under there. Why do you insist on hiding it?" and snatched the scarf right off Livy's head and ran from the

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 kitchen. Livy squealed in response and immediately placed both hands over her head, and went chasing after my mother around the living room.

"Madame, please give it back! It's unsightly to see an old lady's hair during the week."

"I am older than you by quite a few years, and you still will never catch me wearing a scarf!" My mother rounded the coffee table, scarf still in her hands, and

Livy on her heels.

I watched them go up and down the living room, laughing. It was true. Unlike most women in the village, my mother never hid her hair. I don't think I have ever even seen her wear a hat. Whether a big 10-inch afro, permed soft long curls, or two rows of loose cornrows parted in the middle, my mother's hairstyles were out there for all to see - a clear extension of her face, her light brown skin.

"But Madame has beautiful hair." Livy had stopped running but she kept her hands on her head. "You have good hair. You comb it every day. I don't do that. Only for church on Sunday, Madame. It's just not right for my hair to be seen during the week."

My mother walked up to Livy and placed her hands over Livy's, and gently dragged them down until both of their arms were hanging by their sides, and there was the top of Livy's head with short tight braids, barely the length of thumb, peppered with silver strands. Each braid was pulled so tight that you could spot a smooth expanse of scalp glistening between each individual braid. It looked neat. Tidy. And painful. Like your scalp was an elastic band, stretched and on the verge of snapping.

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Livy kept her head bent. My mother took the scarf and slowly wrapped it back around

Livy's head.

Her voice came out softly, almost a sigh. "There you go. It's back where it belongs.”

"Mesi," said Livy. The creole “thank you” coming out of her mouth while she tightened the knots at the nape of her neck, and practically Irish jigged her way back to the kitchen with a grin on her face. My mother sighed a second time and slowly shook her head; she had a smile on her face too. That was the last time I saw Livy’s head naked, and as she stood in front of me, scratching her scarf, I wondered if the braids were now silver all around.

She leaned against the fridge and crossed her arms over her chest. "I don't know what you are talking about, Miss! Tabous?" When Livy called me Miss that was the warning that I was on the verge of annoying her, but I ignored it. I let my backpack slide of my shoulders, sat right on the kitchen floor, and took out my notebook.

"Have you ever heard of them?" I looked up at her. She placed both hands on her hips and stared back down at me.

"Listen to this one: Mache avek ou pe soulye, manman-ou ap mouri."

Her face lit up. "I know plenty of those! But you shouldn't pay attention to these things. You know what your mother says about townsfolk silliness," and she turned back to the stove.

"Townsfolk silliness" or some variant of the words spilled out of my mother's lips on a near daily basis. She said "townsfolk siliness" when there was talk of the dog

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"townsfolk silliness" bounced off the walls of our house when she explained how newborns were swaddled in blankets, kept in the dark, without being bathed or breastfed for their first fourteen days of life in order to keep them safe from evil spirits, and I vaguely remember the expression floating around the morning after my grandfather's funeral: Livy couldn't get over the fact that my mother wasn't wearing black. She explained that after the passing of a close family member, you had to wear black clothing, and only black clothing, for the next seven years. After seven years, you could move up to purple.

Whenever my mother said "townsfolk silliness" though, it came out gentle and calm, in the same tone that she took with me when I had been warned not do to something, chose to do it anyway, and then got caught. I was a young adult when I finally identified the tone - exasperation. But at eleven, I didn't exactly understand the nature of this "silliness" that she always went on about, and I definitely didn't see how it applied to my current list of tabous; so I ignored Livy's comment and went on with my questioning.

"So you don't believe in tabous?"

"Oh, Miss." She shook her head from side to side and in a soft voice said, "I've heard things, seen things." She turned around, bent down and placed both hands on my shoulders. "Now your mother would not like us talking about this, but you know how things are." She pulled me in, and I caught a whiff of her breath. I winced. Black bean

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 breath is almost as nasty as onion or garlic breath. Then, she told me about one of her daughters, Vania, who got pregnant. She told me about the lizard that was next to

Vania's feet while she was sweeping dust off the cement floor of her house.

“The lizard made her pregnant? Si ou zandolit mache sou pie-ou wap ansent works?”

“It’s island law.”

It was weird but I was both excited and annoyed, and I wasn't quite sure why. I locked eyes with Livy, and she cocked her head to the side, looked at me out of the corner of her eye, then quickly looked down. She put both hands on her knees, pushed herself back up, joints creaking one after another, and went back to cooking.

For several days after, I read over the list in my notebook and considered asking other people what they knew about tabous. Perhaps there were some other ones that Jean didn’t know about? Maybe I could find someone who could explain if they were real or not? But I didn’t get very far with my plans. In fact, all things tabous evaporated when my mother handed me an envelope. I recognized the handwriting.

Ariel.

"It's from you-know-who.” I could hear the smile in her voice.

The actual letter was all but four lines: Dear Nimi, How are you? Haven’t seen you in a long time. When are you coming up to Port-au-Prince? Hope to see you soon.

Ariel.

I read the lines over and over again, to the point where I could stare at the ceiling fan from my bed and repeat each line, word for word. The boy with the long-

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 lash green eyes whom I had a not-so-secret crush on since I was four wanted to see me! But was this a real invitation? Was he just being polite? Did his mother make him write this? I needed to be sure about the letter. I needed reinforcements. So, I headed on down the road to Cloé’s house.

“Definitely an invite,” Cloé said. “Are you going to ask your mom to drive you up to Port-au-Prince?” We were sitting at her dining room table, toes barely touching the floor.

“I think so. Do you think he’s serious?”

“We should do the petal test. My cousin told me about it this summer. It works. It’s the best thing, if you want to know if someone loves you.”

I trusted Cloé. She always had all kinds of cool insights; especially, when she came back from visiting her cousins in Switzerland. We were seven, I think, when she taught me how to find cellulite on my thighs. She leaned over my leg, her blonde hair covering her face. Pinch your thigh just so. See the bubbles, the ripples? That’s all the fat you have. That’s your cellulite. I was only seven but something hollowed out inside my chest while I watched my friend’s small white fingers crumple up my skin into brown papier-mache. There were a lot of bubbles and a lot of ripples, and I worried about what that meant. Would Ariel like a girl with fat thighs? At thirteen, I remember Cloé dragging her index finger from my ankle to my knee and saying “all the girls in Europe have smooth legs. My cousin said that he would never, ever, date a girl with hairy legs.” The next morning, I shaved for the very first time. Cloé got me the razor. I came out of the shower proud, feeling like a woman, but all my mother

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 said when she found out what I had done was, “now that you have gone and done that, you will be doing it for the rest of your life.”

According to Cloé, for the petal test to work, you had to find a flower with a lot of petals. So all the flowers between my house and her house, a good fifteen minutes worth of walking, were targeted for destruction. The rules for the petal test went beyond the “he loves me, he loves me not” approach. Basically, the French version had four levels, il m’aime un peu , beaucoup , a la folie , pas du tout i.e. “He loves me a little bit,” “a lot,” “to madness,” “not at all;” and you didn’t want “pas du tout” to slip out of your mouth when you got to the last petal. With all the steps and all, Cloé’s test felt completely and utterly reliable, and I went about plucking petal after petal, lining the dirt behind us in rainbow shades of bougainvillea and hibiscus.

The odds were looking good. Ariel loved me “beaucoup” most of the time, with a couple of “a la folie” thrown in the mix. But as we got closer to my house, one pink hibiscus petal swayed single between my index and thumb on “pas du tout.”

“Oh. My. God.”

“Don’t worry about it. Look, if we average all the other ones we’ve gotten so far, technically everything should be fine. He likes you.” We both stopped moving, and Cloé put one hand on my shoulder. “Nimi, it’s all right.”

I don’t remember what happened next, how she and I ended the day; but I do know the eleven year old girl in me was in no way satisfied with those odds. So, the next day, I went over to Aliette’s, my second best friend. There wasn’t a hierarchy between Cloé and Aliette on the friendship scale; we were more of a triumvirate, a

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Venn Diagram of sorts, me being the middle. The muddled middle, if you will. When my father installed the second satellite dish in the village (Jean had the first one but it only received European channels), Cloé and I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and we understood that the vampire Angel from the series was the perfect human, and would make the perfect husband. But David Boreanaz didn’t really touch Aliette in the same way. She didn’t scream once at the actor’s tall, dark, and handsome. She wasn’t even around when Cloé and I rewound the Dirty Dancing VHS tape over and over and over and over again, pretending to dance with our own Patrick Swayze in my living room in the middle of nowhere Haiti. Our personal best viewing record: the final dance scene. Seventeen times in row. An entire Saturday with the lyrics now, I’ve had the time of life rising up, incessantly.

Like my parents, Cloé’s parents had all kinds of music lying around the house, from Rod Stewart to Mozart by way of Bob Marley; but one of our all time favorites was Adriano Celentano. Think Elvis Presley, if he were Italian. There we were, in her backyard, jivin’ and gyratin’ to Italian style Jailhouse Rock tunes; the coconut trees, the mountain in the distance and the coming dusk our loyal dance partners.

Play time with Aliette had a different feel to it. She and I discovered that hibiscus flowers made the best make-believe soups. Grind a bunch of them up in a bowl with a rock, and pretty soon, you’d get this colored-scented slime which you could pour through a strainer (without Livy knowing) and serve up to guests. When we played house, I was the Dad, Aliette the Mom, and Cloé our child. This order was clear to Aliette and I. Instinctive. We understood each other without words. Cloé was

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 never too happy about it, but Aliette and I were two years older than her, and we were both born in 1982; that gave us veto power.

But what really brought Aliette and I together, what kept us almost sisters, were secrets. Aliette knew things, things that people in the village had said or done.

She told me how most people in the village called Cloé’s parents blan behind their backs, even though they had been living in Haiti for years. Neither of us shared this with Cloé; somehow, we knew this information would hurt her because Camp-Perrin was, is and will always be her home. Aliette explained to me that my family was spared the word, even though my father is white, because of my mother and me. Now,

I didn’t fully understand what she meant, and I don’t think she herself fully understood what she was trying to say, but we both grasped that something about us (my mother and me) was of the island, and we tethered my father to it. He wasn’t Haitian but he wasn’t quite a blan either.

Around Aliette, and especially her family, I felt like I was learning things that were beyond my parents and their friends. I was part of this wonderful clandestine community: in the afternoons, we hand-washed dishes in canal water and chatted about how we would decorate our own houses, we cooked on charcoal and rocks the size of bowling balls, and the kitchen wasn’t part of the house; it was outside, made out of wood and smoke-darkened thatch. It took hours to get the coal going. Aliette’s mother woke at four a.m. every day to get it started, and Aliette would deal with the actual breakfast-cooking later on in the morning. Whenever I was there early enough,

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 we would spend our morning crouched around pots with sweetened yellow polenta bubbling and erupting like lava, smoke marking our hair and skin.

The food was different. Not necessarily tastier, but richer. More salt, coconut water in the rice, coconut shavings in the black bean sauce, boiled plantain marinated in a tangy-sweet fish sauce for breakfast (not lunch), hibiscus and lemongrass tea with a ton of sugar, and meat. The Finnigan household was a meat-free zone.

“Imagine the pain and suffering you are causing the animal,” my father said.

“Do you see the chickens outside with their baby chicks?” This from my mother. “Would you be okay with killing their mommy?” She always used animals that I was familiar with, animals that I loved, to keep me a vegetarian, to keep me from going over to a friend’s house and accepting a plate of meat. I let her believe that her plan worked, but my not eating meat had more to do with Aliette: All kinds of animals were slaughtered in her backyard on the weekends.

The men would come around – fathers, uncles, cousins – and hold the animal down, rope it still, but there was nothing to be done about the sound – fear gurgling out of the goat’s throat and nose, or the smell – a mixture of shit and blood that sat in your nostrils all day. On the days when they killed a pig, they would cut him open lengthwise and I would watch Aliette and her mother pull the wet organs out, make a pile with those that were going to be salted and stored in the big clay urn because they didn’t have a fridge, and another pile with the organs that were going to be eaten that day. The pig intestines hanged on a thin clothline tied between two trees, drying throughout the day like laundry.

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“You know you want to have some bacon,” Aliette’s dad said. I always said no, but he always put the plate in front of me. Ou pa ka manje fey selmen non . “You can’t live on leaves alone now.”

“This is especially for you gals,” he said on the day of Aliette’s and my first communion ceremony, and pushed a plate covered with dark-red gelatinous blobs my way. “This is what you need to keep yourself pure today.” I watched him sprinkle salt on the plate before I understood what I was staring at. Cooked blood. They had cut a goat’s throat earlier, and I had run out of the yard into the house, just as Aliette’s mother came over carrying a corrugated tin basin to collect the blood.

“Good idea, honey. We wouldn’t any of it getting on your pretty white dress.”

I never imagined that she was going to cook the blood. Never thought such a thing was possible. Aliette’s father held the plate right under my nose.

“Go ahead. Have some.”

“I have to go.”

“You okay?” Aliette asked.

“I have to go.”

But I came back. I always came back. As much Cloé’s place felt like home,

Aliette and her parents were also family. There were differences between Cloé, Aliette and me. I saw them, felt them; but they didn’t really register. It was all just normal.

Just the way things were. It was only natural that I feel Aliette in on the Ariel situation.

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“I know what you can try,” she said, and grabbed my hand and pulled me off her bed. We walked for a while along the canal. Every now and then, she would stop beside a bush and rifle through the leaves.

“What are you doing?” She kept pushing aside bushes, digging through the foliage up to her elbows.

“Seriously, what are you looking for?”

“This!”

She held up a small, orange-brown vine, barely the length of my palm.

“A twig?”

“L’Amitie. Hold it in your hands for a minute and think of Ariel. It has powers.

Island law magic. If you put it on a tree, and it begins to grow, that’s a sure sign that

Ariel loves you.” She handed me the l’Amitie, literally meaning friendship. I just stared at her hand.

“Try it. Look, Mr. Samson’s rose bushes. If the Amitie starts growing there, then we know Ariel has a thing for you. Trust me. It worked for my sister.”

Every day, I religiously checked on Mr. Samson’s rose garden as if I had planted each of the roses myself. And every day, absolutely nothing happened. The l’Amitie vine was right where I had left it, a static unmoving piece of still life. But the petal test had word. Several times, even. Clearly Ariel had feelings for me. Aliette and her island law lore magic were just plain wrong. She didn’t know any better than to believe that if “if the Amitie vine grows, he will love you forever.”

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“You are wrong, you know,” I told her one afternoon. “About the Amitie. It’s just silliness.”

“No it’s not. He doesn’t love you, is all.”

“He does love me. He does. You’re just a tabou-believer. It’s a tabou!” We were sitting on the couch in my living room, and I grabbed my notebook off the coffee table and threw it at her lap.

“There!”

“What is this?”

“Bunch of them. Tabous. Like your Amitie thing.”

She flipped through my notebook. “My mom told about this one. It’s real dangerous.” She tapped the sentence with her index finger.

“No it’s not. Passe anba bra, ou pap grandi?”

She nodded in response. “You’ll stay the way you are forever.”

I watched her begin to turn the pages again, and I fought down the urge to slide over and bite her. Bite down on her honey-brown skin until I drew blood. How could she be this stupid? Island law telling me that Ariel doesn’t love me?

“I am gonna go get that dress that I borrowed ages ago, okay?” I got off the couch and I was out of the living room before she could answer. She really didn’t know any better, and I was going to prove it. To her. I came back into the living room with the purple dress crumpled up in one hand.

“You do know that walking under someone’s arm will do nothing to you right?

It won’t stunt your growth. Here, walk under my arm. I bet you’ll still grow fine.”

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Aliette stood up, walked toward me, and grabbed her dress out of my hands.

“It does too stop you from growing.” She turned and headed toward the door.

“I am going home.”

I followed her outside and snatched the dress from under her arm. She wasn’t going anywhere until she admitted that she didn’t know what she was talking about.

With my left hand, I hid the dress behind my back and lifted my right arm parallel to the ground.

“Walk under here, and I will give it back to you” I said, my head leaning to the right. Aliette faced me, her slender arms crossed against the narrowness of her chest.

“C’mon,” I used the same tone of voice I used on our dog Reflex when I wanted him to do a trick.

Aliettte closed the distance between us, and I inched a little bit to the left so that the top of her head was right in front of my extended right elbow. All she had to do was bend her head slightly, and take one more step forward. But instead of going under my arm, she pushed me. Hard. And I fell backward. She used the moment to bend down, grab her dress, and run. I don’t know how I did it, but I got up, and was on her within a space of seconds. She had her back to me, so I threw my arms around, and pulled her back by her throat.

“Lagem!” Let me go.

“Not until you do this.”

We twisted, tugged and pulled against each other, her trying to escape, me bent on forcing her head under my arm. We were of equal height and weight and Aliette

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 had siblings: a brother and a sister. She had moves I didn’t even know about. She maneuvered around me and landed a solid punch on my back.

That fight with Aliette still troubles me. At twenty-eight, she looks exactly the same.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother says. “She is at least a couple of inches taller. And everybody is short in that family and you know how malnutrition works in this country.”

But Aliette is barely two inches taller, if even that. She is stuck in time. In

1993. Island Law weighs on me. Especially since Mr. Samson told my mother about the parasitic vine that had choked up his roses. Latin name: Cuscutta, or as they say in

Haiti, Amitie.

“So there you have it. It’s not Island Law, dear. Wherever you put the thing, it’ll grow,” my father says. “Along with the condom soul issue, this sort of explains the over-population problem.”

I want to laugh with him, but I can’t. Not only did the vine spread its latticework of tangles over Mr. Samson’s rosebushes, but Ariel and I orbited each other’s lives for years; sometimes as friends, sometimes as more than that. The petal test worked. So did the Amitie. It was luck, I tell myself. Just luck. I tell myself to let it go. It’s nothing more than a simple coincidence that a child’s game and a parasitic organism happened to map out my love life. But I still stay up some nights, wondering

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 about that fight with Aliette; wondering did she go under my arm or not , trembling a little at the thought of Island Law and its magic. I know I should know better.

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CHAPTER 13

FOLKLORE, LEGENDS AND PROVERBS I grew up on tabous, old wives’ tales – an odd list of do’s and don’ts, advice which followed me around everywhere I went. I realize now that what I had been carrying around for all these years were in fact proverbs, metaphors trying to communicate useful information. And they did. It is just that sometimes in the village, we took the metaphor literally. And depending on the nature of the metaphor, that kind of approach could be, well…tricky.

I went on an internet search and found www.haitianproverbs.com , and my days as a child in Haiti came back to me. So I put together a small list of some of the ones that I heard in Haiti, in hopes that it paints a picture of the village, captures something about us in the south, in Camp-Perrin.

Tanbou prete pa janm fè bon dans - A borrowed drum never makes good dancing

Ti chen gen fos devan kay met li - A little dog is really brave in front of his master’s house.

Ti moun fwonte grandi devan baron - An impudent child grows up under Baron's eyes.

Ravet pa janm gen rezon devan poul - Roaches are never right when facing chickens.

Sonje lapli ki leve mayi ou - Remember the rain that made your corn grow.

Moun pa se dra - A protector is like a cloak

Nan tan grangou patat pa gen po - In times of famine, sweet potatoes have no skin

Ou konn kouri, ou pa konn kache - You know how to run, but you don’t know how to hide.

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Sel pa vante tèt li di li sale - Salt doesn’t boast that it is salted

Se bon kè krapo ki fè l san tèt - It is because the toad is too kindhearted that he has no intelligence.

Se nan chimen jennen yo kenbe chwal malen - If you want to catch a wild horse, find a tight corral

Piti, piti, zwazo fe nich li - Little by little, the bird builds its nest.

Konstitisyon se papie, bayonet se fe - The constitution is paper, bayonets are steel.

Rache manyok bay te a blanch - Uproot the manioc, and clear the land.

Bel anteman pa di parad - A beautiful funeral doesn't guarantee heaven.

Bondye Bon - God is good.

Dye mon, gen mon - Beyond the mountains, more mountains.

Sak vid pa kanpe - An empty sack can't stand up.

Neg di san fe - People talk and don't act.

Bondye fe san di - God acts and doesn't talk.

Pale franse pa di lespri pou sa - Speaking French doesn't mean you are smart.

Bourik swe pou chwal dekore ak dentel - The donkey sweats so the horse can be decorated with lace.

Bourik ap travay bay chwal galonnen – The donkey works while the horse galops freely

Makak pa janm kwe petit-li led - A monkey never thinks her baby's ugly.

Si travay te bon bagay, moun rich ta pran-l lontan - If work were a good thing the rich would have grabbed it a long time ago.

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Mapou mouri, kabrit manje fey li - When the mapou (oak-like tree) dies, goats would eat its leaves.

Manman pa janm mode pitit li jouk nan zo - A mother never bites her child to the bone

Pise gaye pa kimen - Spread piss doesn’t foam.

Sa ki pa touye ou, li angrese ou - That which doesn't kill you makes you fat.

Kreyol pale, kreyol konprann - Creole Spoken is creole understood

Santi bon koute che - Smelling good is expensive.

Bay kou bliye, pote mak sonje - The giver of the blow forgets, the bearer of the scar remembers.

Woch nan dlo pa konnen doule woch nan soley - The rock in the water does not know the pain of the rock in the sun.

Bwe dlo nan ve, respekte ve - (If you) drink water in the glass, respect the glass

Si se Bondye ki voye. Li peya fre ou - If it is God who sends you, he'll pay your expenses.

Sa ou fe, se li ou we - What you do is what you see.

Se met ko ki veye ko - It is the owner of the body who looks out for the body.

Bondye do ou : fe pa ou, M a fe pa M - God says do your part and I'll do mine.

Ou we sa ou genyen, ou pa konn sa ou rete - You know what you've got, but you don't know what's coming.

Famn se kajou: plis li vye, plis li bon - Woman is like mahogany, the older the better.

Fanm pou you tan, manman pou tout tan - Wife for a time, mother for all time.

Lanne pase toujou pi bon - Past years are always better.

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Sa k rive dend a, ka rive kok tou - What happens to the turkey can happen to the rooster too.

Nanpwen lapriye ki pa gen "Amen."- There is no prayer which does not have an

"Amen".

Apre dans tanbou lou - After the dance the drum is heavy.

Men anpil chay pa lou - Many hands make the load lighter.

Le yo vle touye chen yo di'l fou - When they want to kill a dog they say its crazy.

Kreyon pep la pa gen gonm - The peoples pencil has no eraser.

Milat pov se neg, neg rich se milat - A poor mulatto is black, a wealthy black is mulatto.

Kou ou prese; kafe ou koule ak ma - When you are in a hurry your coffee has grounds in it

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CHAPTER 14

WHAT SKIN CANNOT SAY Lubbock, Texas. Parking lot, Marble Slab Creamery. 10:30 pm.

It is cold outside. The breath crystallizes in puffs of white and grey. The parking lot is empty except for a green Toyota RAV 4, with four women inside. Two in the front and two in the back. All of these women have one thing in common: they have displaced themselves, distanced themselves from home, family, what they know, to come to Texas Tech University. There is the raven-haired Mexican-American trumpet player. Sharing the space alongside her on the back seat of the green Toyota

RAV 4, is the mother. Out of the four lives breathing inside this one vehicle, this brown-haired poet from New Orleans is the only one who has experienced her uterine muscles distending to fit the shape of a child. Three children in fact: a boy and two girls. The front seat cushions the shape of a fierce personality, the youngest woman in the group, an African-American literature major amongst three creative writers. I am the last of the women in the Toyota RAV 4, and I am sitting in the driver’s seat. The motor is off. We have just had ice cream. But it is cold outside, so we are in my car: four women.

I do not know how this topic of conversation came about, but in the almost empty parking lot, late at night, we were discussing clothes: what to wear, what not to wear, and our own particular styles. Now keep in mind, that during this exchange, I was less of a participant and rather preferred to play the role of the observer. My concept of someone’s style involved my taking note of the colors at play within a

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 particular fabric. One socio-economic constant that is rarely mentioned about the present-day Caribbean is the presence of Indians, specifically Sikhs. The majority of the shops – those on Front Street in St. Maarten, the boutiques in Montego Bay in

Jamaica and the diamond specialty shops and gift stores in Curacao - were all owned by Sikhs. Even in Haiti, the supermarkets, the shopping the centers, and the video rental shops in Port-au-Prince had Indian owners. And I knew several of the families.

They had been living in the islands for generations, and their children, my friends, were sometimes more West Indian than Indian. I knew them because my parents loved to island-jump. In fact, I see my life as one long unforgettable night where each island is a bar, a new territory to be experienced. I had been bar-hopping since the age of five. Haiti was my favorite. Like Cheers , it was the place where everybody knew my name.

Within each of these places, I experienced the shades and shapes of India. My favorite top was the Salwar kameez: a tunic that reached to mid-thigh or past your knees with two slits on the side that could snake as high as your waist. Instead of wearing mine with the traditional loose pants, I would wear the tunic over jeans or a skirt. And, of course, there were the saris. At each Indian ceremony I attended, my breath never failed to lodge in my throat at that first sight of color. The curvature of bodies molding and pressing against a myriad of deep purples, evanescent lilacs or shades of oranges so bright, the colors were palpable.

But in Lubbock, Texas, we were discussing style in terms of labels.

Apparently, the African-American lit major had an East Coast style whereas our

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 mother-poet had more of a bohemian West Coast style. My idea of bohemian involved the Indian embroidered shirts my mother used to wear in the ‘60s, most of which were passed down to me. As far as I could see, our mother-poet wore clothes that matched, were color-coordinated, with truly unique shoes. Always. Was that what made her

West Coast? Perhaps it was her jewelry. As the night wore on, my understanding of style grew more and more muddled.

Our trumpet player explained to me that “pink is a summer color and you shouldn’t wear summer or spring colors in the winter.” I had on pink corduroy pants.

I know I must have offered a blank expression since even now I still fail to comprehend the reasoning behind colors according to the seasons. I had not realized that such intensive thought should have been devoted to my choice to wear pink corduroy pants for the day. Back in my village in Haiti, it was important that your pants not hug your thighs too tightly or your shirt not end above your bellybutton, exposing bare flesh because these were signs that you were an easy woman. They were signs of prostitution. Color never factored into our style choices. My grandmother used to say everything looks good against black skin .

“It would be nice if you added some variety to your wardrobe, a pair of black pants for example.”

I do not remember who suggested the black pants, but I remember nodding, having decided earlier in the week to purchase a new pair of jeans. Black would do just fine. The ladies also discussed how I should wear my hair, the stores where I

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 should go shopping, and a vote was passed on the habit I had of rolling up my pants whenever they were too long.

“Now, you need to stop doing that,” the lit major said.

“That went out of style a couple of years ago,” our trumpeter added.

“Look,” I said, “I do have other clothes. I have a full wardrobe of stuff that I haven’t worn yet. It’s just that there are certain outfits I wear in Haiti that I would never dream of wearing here.” I knew this was a meager defense even before the words came out of my mouth. These women were fashionistas; they were clearly out of my league.

“We should go over to your house and dress you,” suggested the poet.

I imagined all three of them in my bedroom. I saw myself in nothing but my underwear which they would eventually make me change until both bra and panties matched. My arms outstretched, and me waiting to be made into a style.

“What we are trying to say is….You know how foreign you look sometimes: we can do something about that.”

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Mellon Hall Cafeteria, Chatham University. 9:00 am.

I liked Turiq. To me, she was one of those characters straight out of those funny TV sitcoms or movies, the individual with the brassy, sassy attitude. Turiq was five-foot-eight, “big-boned,” and always spoke her mind. At least it appeared to be so to me. She would comment on anything or anyone, and I found her lack of restraint fascinating.

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You see Haitian folk never address an issue upfront. We like to circle the topic, not like vultures preparing for the instant when they can seize their prey, attack and feed off of it, but more like a puppy facing a slithering snake. It’s a curious thing.

We follow it, sniff after and around it. But then, this thing snaps and hisses at you.

Best to turn around and be on your way and hope it does the same. Eventually, the issue would take care of itself. So the unexplained went on being explained in Haiti, and issues with the potential to create disturbances, issues that could possibility cause anxiety went unacknowledged.

I had been living in the United States for about a year, and I found Turiq’s in- your-face attitude refreshing. That morning in the cafeteria, along with Emi, Turiq’s ever present cohort - I had been living on campus for three semesters, and I had yet to see those two apart, the “big-boned,” incredibly imposing black girl, and her short, extremely skinny sidekick, Emi. They owned this particular section of the cafeteria - we had begun discussing the subject of religion, eventually ending up on the topic of

Israel.

“Only the descendents of the twelve tribes of Israel are going to Heaven, and they’re black,” Turiq said across the table. As she explained it to me, Israelites were the proven ancestors of modern day African and Latino-Americans.

“We’re the chosen people of God,” she said. “The other nations are cursed.

Especially white people. But you’re good. All of y’alls black in Haiti right?”

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“So Caucasians are going to hell?” I fought to keep the skepticism down in my throat. But I knew, even as I asked the question, that the facial muscles on my forehead were twitching, anticipating the frown I was trying so hard to conceal.

“Says so in the Holy Scriptures. We ain’t got nothin’ to worry about. Makes you feel good, don’t it?”

“The idea of my father going to Hell does not make me feel good.”

“Your dad’s white?”

I nodded.

“I thought you said he lived in Haiti?”

“He does. He’s a white guy who lives in Haiti.”

“But nothing about you seems mixed. I mean, the nose, the lips, everything pretty much screams Africa.”

“Turiq!” This from Emi.

“What?” Turiq turned towards Emi. It was as if I was no longer even sitting at the same table. “I mean where are the white genes? They sure as hell ain’t in her booty!” Turiq yelled this out to the entire student population of the cafeteria.

I remember everybody around the table laughing at that last comment. I joined in, genuinely sharing in the mirth of the moment. But I’m not exactly sure what I found funny. I wanted to ask Turiq about the fate of mixed children. There was a time when one ounce of black blood condemned you to slavery. Was she now telling me that one ounce of black blood assured divined salvation? I wanted to ask, but I laughed instead.

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Camp-Perrin, Haiti. My Village. 1:30 pm.

Haitians are xenophobic by nature. We don’t much care for strangers. In fact, true Haitians, what we call natif natal , were born and more importantly bred in Haiti, alongside the soil. Despite the fact that many Haitians aspired to the “American lifestyle” they saw portrayed on television, there was this constant fear that once you left the mother-island, you left some essential Haitian part of yourself behind. Those living abroad became known as diaspora , someone who used to be Haitian but had forgotten the ways of the island and adopted the mannerisms of the blan , the foreigner.

You called a person diaspora once she had her back turned, and you said it with a particular inflection of the voice, as if you were whispering traitor, traitor. On my last day in the village, twenty-four hours before I was to board a plane to Port-au-Prince then fly on to the United States, my boyfriend’s uncle warned me about the influence of the blan .

“You’ll turn into one of them,” he said, waving his index finger in front of my nose. “You’ll become a true diaspora . An Old Navy loving, can’t hand wash my underwear, can’t speak a lick of Creole without slipping in some damn English, diaspopo . That’s what you’ll become. Probably won’t even know how to eat, let alone cook black beans and rice.”

Lubbock, Texas. English Department, Texas Tech University. 12:00 pm.

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Peter and I were in the same grading group. I was a First-Year Composition class instructor, and he was a document instructor, meaning he was my assistant and had the maddening responsibility of helping me grade all of my students’ assignments.

All in all, there were three of us in the group (two document instructors for one class instructor), but Peter was the only one that I had met face-to-face. As a group, we tended to communicate mainly via email. Peter took it upon himself to introduce me to his officemate, the other grader in the group.

“This is Nimi Finnigan,” he said as we both entered the office space.

“Who?” asked the middle-aged blonde woman sitting at a desk. She had long, frizzy hair swept up in a high ponytail. It was not the frizziness that overpowered her face, nor the large, thick-rimmed glasses; it was the color of her hair: yellow. Not sandy blonde, faded blonde or even platinum blonde, but pure, undiluted yellow.

Peter repeated himself, “Nimi Finnigan. The class instructor for our group.”

I stepped past him and held out my hand.

“Oh, yes!” she said, grasping my hand without shaking it. That always made me uncomfortable, people cocooning my hand between their palms. Only two syllables had come out of her mouth, but I could hear the accent. Distinctively

Southern. “I am sorry. With the name Finnigan, you know, I was expecting a fiery redhead with a mad temper.”

“And instead you got me.” I kept my voice flat and smiled back at her.

“It’s odd. I always thought the name Finnigan was Irish.”

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“Yes it is.” I chose to ignore the subtext of her comment. I guessed the look of confusion on her face before it was actually detectable. My skin. It was the wrong color. “My father’s family is Irish, so think of me as the last remaining black Irish by way of Haiti.”

“Tahiti?”

“No. Haiti.”

“Oh. So you’ve got some fiery heat in ya after all, huh?”

I smiled.

*******

Camp-Perrin, Haiti. Home of My Friend Cloé. Dusk.

Oddly enough, we ended up having sleepovers whenever Cloé’s parents were out of town. In the evenings, I would make my way on the canal to her house. Like most homes in the village, our houses were surrounded by wild bushes and citrus trees. But what I really liked about Cloé’s house was the group of coconut trees growing right in her back yard: long brown figures that made our own private coconut orchard. Right before the sun disappeared behind the mountain, we used to take her parents’ stereo into our orchard, crank up the volume, and blast whatever sound we were in the mood for. The trees, coconuts, clementines and all were our dates for the evening. The most memorable dance night happened when we discovered Adriano

Celentano. His Italian rock’ n’ roll blasted through the air, and there we both were - me, black, and Cloé, white - side-stepping and two-stepping to the Elvis Presley beat of an Italian ‘60s song. We held on to the coconut trees, swung our heads left to right

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Texas Tech University, Nimi Finnigan, May 2012 and back again, twirled around the thin trunks until our skirts floated up around our waists. Sometimes our small bodies would come together, and barefoot, in the fading light of day, we would practice traditional Haitian Kompa dance steps, insert them into

Celentano’s soft rhythm and blues till our coordinated movements mixed smoothly with the slow, insistent beat.

As the night crept forward, we circled around each other. We had not yet learned that we were made up of differences, that our friendship was going to be all the more fragile once I got my period the following week, and become everyone’s

“little woman;” once she stole my boyfriend, and I called her blan for the first time.

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