THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 15, 1995 TAG: 9510130661
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY FRANCIE LATOUR, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 215 lines
It was like a reunion with a stranger.
Like many children of immigrants born and raised in the United States, I have skated precariously along the hyphen of my Haitian-American identity.
Across that line, I glide with relative freedom. On one side, I bask in the efficiencies of modern life: mail-order catalogs, direct-deposit checking and interoffice envelopes. From the other side, I take the comfort food of Haitian oatmeal and tap into the ongoing debate Haitians love more than any other: politics.
It's an endless menu of traits and qualities that I access and draw from, mixing and matching to fit the situation.
But I knew that my return to Haiti wouldn't allow me to pick and choose as I pleased, and would force me to give something up. My identity would no longer be defined by me; it would be defined by the Haitians around me.
Eleven years had passed since I had visited the many relatives who still live on the island. I longed to see them and store up new, vivid memories to replace the ones time had turned into faded snapshots.
``Why Haiti?'' colleagues in the newsroom asked. Why should a Hampton Roads newspaper report on a third-world Caribbean island? The question made me impatient. Little bombs of ethnic pride went off inside.
Why Haiti?
Because one year ago, Americans changed the lives of its 7 million people by sending in 21,000 troops.
Because one year later, Haitians continue to live with - and in spite of - that intervention.
And because Haiti's social and cultural landscape is far more textured than the images offered by network television: Haitians as boat people, as AIDS carriers, as voodoo zombies.
There was no excuse for Americans to know so little about, or think so little of, a neighbor whose history and future are so intertwined with ours.
Still, as I packed my bags, I felt more like an intruder trespassing onto property that was in no way mine, not a proud descendant carrying the torch back to the mainland. What could I tell Americans about a country whose poverty was not my poverty?
My claim to Haitian-ness was about to be tested. As the airplane touched down onto Haiti's cracked soil, the hyphen that held me together started to feel more like the fulcrum of a seesaw whose plank was about to tip on one end or the other.
Haiti, from the window of American Airlines flight 1291: white sun, blue ocean, brown mountains. Even from this high, the color of the soil is barren and unkind. Since the last time I had this view, much of Haiti's land has been deforested.
Inside, a flight attendant goes into an unusually long explanation about customs forms. She walks through the aisles, where some Haitians flag her down with raised hands. The fact that she is helping them fill out forms they can't read won't come to me until days later.
Outside the airport, the parking lot is a dusty chaos of barbed wire, begging crowds and obliquely parked cars. The boy begging for money by our car is too young to be a hustler. His fingers hang inside my window; the nails are blunt and crusted with coal-colored dirt. As the car begins to pull away, he doesn't let go. He hangs on and runs with the car, pleading.
That is when I make my choice. I stop asking myself how old he is, where his parents are and when his last meal was. I block him out; I make him disappear. It will be the hardest choice of the entire journey, but it's so easy compared with the life this boy must live.
Beth Bergman, a white American photographer who works for the newspaper, is also here.
For Beth, who has never been to Haiti and understands little of its ways, I am an interpreter, a buffer and a bridge.
But to a passerby who eyes us as we make our first forays into the street, I am a traitor. I am the one who has ``brought whites to photograph our trash and ask us how much it smells.''
To a homeless woman washing off her plate with sewage water, I am an opportunity, pure and simple - for money, for food, for water. Here in this isolated country, where electricity and phone lines are chancy, some of the most media-savvy people I have ever met work their spin of survival on the foreign press.
``I have no money,'' she says, coming toward us. ``I built a house and they tore it down. I have to take my son to the hospital and I can't afford it. What are you going to do for me?''
Without knowing why, I start listing my Haitian credentials: my relatives who live here, my trips here as a child. But this woman is too smart and too poor to care. To her, I am still a stranger. An American stranger.
Beside her, her son, no older than 5, looks up into the lens of the camera. Across his face comes the slow realization that he is no longer the same person he was a second ago. He is a commodity now. He's the face of poverty that we will capture and bring back with us to sell newspapers. So he acts accordingly: The liquid brown eyes grow wider, the small hand tugs at mother's skirt, the head tilts with innocence.
I have no right to be surprised at this. As a reporter, I want them to tell me their story; I don't want them to implicate me in it. But how can I fault them? This mother knows already what I am afraid to admit to myself: A one-year anniversary story about Haiti that enlightens Hampton Roads readers won't do anything for her or her baby.
It's 7:10 a.m. Sunday. Beth and I stand outside St. Gerard Church in the cool breeze before the day's punishing heat sets in.
It took hours to pick out the one nice blouse I knew I would need to bring for church. For Haitians, Sunday is the day to worship the Lord. Dressing up is part of that worship, no matter how rich or how poor. Etched in my mind are black-and-white images of my mother as a young girl in a ruffled white dress bordered with lace and cotton socks perfectly folded over.
Today, women file in through the church doors in long, cotton dresses and checkered skirts; the men wear paisley ties and leather shoes.
Just before I take my seat inside, I hear something I can hardly believe.
``They're not going to give you communion dressed like that,'' some women say, pointing at my sleeveless silk shirt. ``You didn't cover your arms enough. You need sleeves.''
Voodoo.
For many Haitian immigrants and their children, it's a loaded word.
Nine years ago, I watched an episode of Miami Vice through what I thought were Haitian eyes. I hated it. In my mind, it invoked pretty much every stereotype of voodoo and the Haitians who practice it.
By the third commercial break, voodoo serum had turned detective Tubbs into a zombie. Dazed by the pounding chants of crazed Haitian worshipers, the rogue cop became possessed. He twitched miserably with fever. Even his partner, Crockett, couldn't snap him out of it.
From the TV in the basement of my parents' house, I smoldered in anger. No one watching this would understand the symbolism of the many gods who make up the hierarchy of voodoo. And no one would ever guess that Haiti was overwhelmingly Catholic.
At the entrance to the main cemetery in Port-au-Prince, a sign in black letters reads, ``You are nothing but dust.'' On any given day here, solemn processions of mourners draped in rosaries prop each other up as they walk beside caskets.
But today, what we find is an angry woman determined to curse an enemy. It's the first voodoo ceremony I've ever seen, and I can't make sense of it.
She splashes clear moonshine and dark rum around a charred, stone cross. On a straw chair in front of the cross, a flame burns inside a metal bowl. Her thin, tough arms tie a rope around the cross into a tight knot. Later, she will toss salt and crack eggs around the cross to ward off any bad spirits that could interfere with her mission.
``She's calling on the god Baron,'' Faubert, our driver, tells me. I have to believe him. No one else here will talk to me.
``Baron is a voodoo god,'' he says. ``When she ties the rope around the cross, it's like she's tying it around a person. And from now on, when that person tries to do anything, they won't do it right. They can do nothing good anymore because Baron has that person tied up.''
Beside me, Beth is crouched down, snapping pictures. I hear the opening and closing of the shutter in slow-motion, and my thoughts split off in all directions.
How is my lens any different than the view from Hollywood cameras that once enraged me? I try to unravel the symbols and chants, but I keep hitting a cultural wall. I don't have the knowledge.
Part of me wants to laugh. The idea of wielding so much vengeance on another person isn't funny because it's so far removed from everything I know. It's funny because there are at least two people in my life on whom I wouldn't mind inflicting some spiritual punishment along these lines. It's the Tonya Harding in all of us.
In the warped recesses of my mind, I ask myself this question: If I were ever put on trial by a Committee for Haitian Authenticity, how would I defend myself? How would I explain what has led me and my friend to this place, scribbling and shooting furiously for an American audience?
A battery of questions awaited me at my grandmother's house in Petion-Ville, a wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince.
Was I doing well in my career? How is my older brother, her godson? Did I have a boyfriend? Would I ever bear her great-grandchildren? And why did I cut my hair so short?
``You've accomplished too much in your young life to be walking around with a head like that,'' she says, inspecting my closely cropped cut. ``You've got to think about getting married.''
When I used to come to Haiti with my family, this is where we would stay. Each step through the house brings back another memory: the blue-green bathroom tiles where I nursed mosquito bites with Caladryl and cotton swabs; the kitchen where my grandmother stirred long sticks of cinnamon and vanilla extract into the oatmeal at breakfast time; my uncle Eddie's room off in the corner where no one was ever supposed to go.
Standing over the dining room table, she shows us pictures of her cruise on the Queen Elizabeth II and her journeys in the Spanish countryside. ``I am 80 years old,'' she says, ``and I have lived a good life.'' That is all she wants for her children and her grandchildren.
When I graduated from college three years ago, my grandmother came for the long day of ceremonies.
When they called my name to receive my diploma, my grandmother shouted louder than anyone else. I could actually hear her as I climbed the steps and reached for my degree.
I am the granddaughter who has succeeded in America.
``You were made outside.''
That is the way many Haitians speak of those who were born or grew up in the United States. For Haitians, it is as much a badge of pride as it is a stinging resentment.
The ones outside have proven how well Haitians can flourish in the land of opportunity. But, in all our successes, we have also abandoned them.
For Haitians who have struggled through the poverty and terror of daily life, there is no room for hyphens in a person's identity. Because I have not suffered with them, I can never be of them.
The best I could hope for was to make my journey count. To take everything I was told and shown and tell a story in which both Haitians and Americans could see a sliver of themselves and of each other. A story that didn't tell the truth, but told the many truths I could never tell alone. ILLUSTRATION: COLOR PHOTOS BY BETH BERGMAN
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: A group of Haitians at a voodoo site in a
Port-au-Prince cemetery invoke the help of the voodoo god Baron to
set a curse on those who angered or betrayed them. While
Catholicism is the dominant religion in Haiti, voodoo is widely
practiced. A boy walks his horse up a road in Jacmel, Haiti. The
road, made nine years ago by a group of organized peasants and
priests, was almost destroyed by Hurricane Gordon. A woman carries
her wares through Port-au-Prince. Women make up the majority of
street vendors in Haiti, carrying or displaying food or other
goods. Francie Latour speaks with Rose-Anne August, who runs a
clinic for women in Port-au-Prince.
Photos
BETH BERGMAN/The Virginian-Pilot
``Create in me a clean heart, oh God, and put a new and right spirit
within me,'' reads Jocelyn Joseph, a Seventh Day Adventist, to
12-year-old Jean Reny, who received a concussion after he was hit in
the head by a rock.
Gina Xavier recovers from an automoblie accident at the state
University Hospital in Port-au-Prince. With no one to pick her up
and no beds to spare, Gina lies in the hallway, discharged with no
place to go.
by CNB