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Given the recent establishment of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ)
and the implementation of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy
(CSME), the theme of this collection--“Where is Here?: Remapping the
Caribbean”--seems timely and prophetic. In terms of timeliness, the
theme‟s attention to “remapping” parallels the attention of CARICOM
to reshaping Caribbean relations and existence through such
institutions as the CCJ and the CSME. The theme is prophetic
specifically for Caribbean letters, however, because it affirms that
Caribbean literary practice needs a re-evaluation of who it is serving
and what, if any, it is contributing to Caribbean good life. Such reevaluation is necessary because, by mainly serving the interests of the
academy, Caribbean literary practice ignores the public and social role
of literature and consequently, remains culturally meaningless for the
masses of the region.
With that in mind, the query “Where is here?” provokes the response
from insiders like this writer that here is where issues such as healing
and restorative justice for political victims remain unacknowledged and
outside the sphere of literary and public discourse. In other words, here
is where a type of indifference shapes how we read ourselves and how
we relate to the suffering around us; indifference to such as Haiti,
where the Duvalier dynastic dictatorship “had forced thousands to
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33
choose between exile and death.”2 “Remapping the Caribbean”--the
titular response--therefore entails, from the perspective of this paper,
drawing attention to literary works from/on the region that stimulate
social conscience and provoke consideration of social trust. One such
work is the butterfly’s way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United
States (2001), edited by Edwidge Danticat, the lead titular metaphor
signifying the capacity of the text to stimulate the reader‟s caring,
compassionate side.
The epigraph of the text therefore cautions, “if you don‟t know the
butterfly‟s way, / you will pass it by without noticing: / it‟s so well
hidden in the grass”(vii). In other words, without the capacity to
feel/empathize--empathy being “an affective and imaginative capacity
to cross over into another‟s experience, identify with the pains and
pleasures of the other, and then return to one‟s self” (Gula 319)--one
would miss the opportunities for care and compassion that inhere in
experiences and circumstances of life such as Duvalierism and forced
exile. They would be missed because they are “so well-hidden,”
meaning that they are not the subject of public discourse; they are not
voiced. However, the stories in the butterfly’s way counter such obscurity,
Danticat herself highlighting two of them and associating herself with
their substance in her declaration that “anyone who has ever witnessed
a gathering of the likes described by Jean-Pierre Benoît in “Bonne
Année” or Barbara Sanon in “Black Crows and Zombie Girls” knows
our voices will not be silenced, our stories will be told” (xvi-xvii).
Gordon Rohlehr theorizes that in Caribbean oral tradition, voices
“signal the constant presence and pressure of people, and the steady
challenge of abstraction by the pure uncerebral force of lived life”
(175). This insight finds literary substantiation in the butterfly’s way
wherein the “voices” of the Haitian dyaspora forcefully emit varying
degrees of psychic pain and agency that call into question Caribbean
apathy towards the victims of Duvalierism. Bearing in mind Danticat‟s
declaration that the text represents a way to “recount silences,” namely,
the hitherto unexpressed/unacknowledged legacy of situations,
circumstances and experiences arising from Duvalierism, the construct
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of “voices” in the butterfly’s way suggests two things: that in terms of
agency, a member of the dyaspora represents all Haitians and speaks
with the authority of a patriot, and that s/he could tell the world about
“the humanity of Haitians, [their] capacity to survive, to overcome,
even to triumph over … poverty, a historical experience [they] share
with so many others in this same Western Hemisphere” (58).
The thirty-three “voices” in the text therefore evoke and disrupt literary
empathy as they resound with the expectation of compassion and of
being taken seriously while illuminating Haitian dyaspora as courageous,
transcending agents who “may have [gone] empty-handed [to the
United States] but certainly not empty-hearted” (Phipps 119). The
“voices” of the butterfly’s way thus implicitly pose a moral challenge to
Caribbean social conscience: listen and act!
The expectation of compassion and of being taken seriously is
communicated at the beginning of the butterfly’s way when Danticat
informs the reader that she has “the extremely painful task of beginning
[the] introduction on the same day that one of Haiti‟s most famous
citizens, the radio journalist Jean Dominique, [has been] assassinated”
(ix). The revelation, at once captivating but disturbing, impacts
immediately on the reader‟s sense of justice and human worth, the
result being the stirring of a desire for something better for Haitians
and for Haiti, the stirring of empathy. This stirring is intensified by the
pervasive sense of despair and futility that shrouds the continuation of
the introduction as Danticat, under a “full assault of memories”(x),
interweaves her struggle to write an appropriate introduction for the
text with her experience of grief consequent upon hearing the news of
the assassination of her friend/mentor, Jean Dominique.
Danticat therefore discloses that she had meant to “struggle to explain
the multilayered meaning of the word dyaspora … list [her] own
personal experiences of being called “Dyaspora” … recall some lighter
experiences of being startled in the Haitian capital or in the provinces
when a stranger who wanted to catch [her] attention would call out,
“Dyaspora!” … recall conversations or debates in restaurants, parties, or
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at public gatherings where members of the dyaspora would be classified
… give voice to some singular experience of an admittedly small but
wide-ranging fragment of the Haitian dyaspora in the United States”
(xiv-xvi). In light of Jean Dominique‟s assassination, however, and also
of then recent atrocities committed against Haitians in New York City,
Danticat reveals that the text had acquired new significance for her:
“[t]his book for me now represents both a way to recount our
silences…and to say good-bye” (xvi).
Yet Danticat clarifies that the good-bye is not “to a country,” but to the
idea that as “Dyaspora” they “do not own it [Haiti] and it does not own
[them]” (xvi). In other words, she implies the existence of a pervasive
sense of Haiti and Haitian belonging among the dyaspora, a
phenomenon that, given the substance of the butterfly’s way, seems
occasioned by memory‟s capacity to retrieve and refigure. For instance,
one voice laments in retrospect:
It‟s been seven years since I have seen my home. Sometimes
when I close my eyes, I envision myself lying on the naked
earth inside of my great-grandmother‟s peristil, a modest
structure of concrete and clay. The walls of the main room
are murals dedicated to ancestors and various lwas, the
memories of whom must never fade. (110)
Other voices, also reflective, are just as candid but with racial
overtones: “we had not been black before leaving the Caribbean” (23);
“[o]vercoming my insecurity about my dark skin has been my greatest
obstacle” (163). Others voice commitment to the gay cause and to the
unborn as in “Haiti: A Memory Journey” (36-42) and “Lazarus Rising:
An Open Letter to My Daughter” (223-39) respectively, while yet
another confides: “Returning to my homeland with the Haiti Mission
project did do something for my soul: It wounded it deeply” (208). In
some cases, however, memories are extinct: “[y]ou do not remember
Haiti because you left there too young but it does not matter because it
is as if Haiti has lassoed your house with an invisible rope” (9). Indeed,
another voice laconically declares, “I have no memory of Haiti … of
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my crib in Port-au-Prince … of the neighbors‟ children or the house in
which we lived” (31), while yet another rationalizes in “In search of a
Name”:
What is nation? What is my nation? Nation is in part, the
imagination. Nation exists only where we create boundaries.
My nation lives in the waters between spiritual and physical
homes. (151)
The Haitian dyaspora in the butterfly’s way is thus not only a construct of
“voices,” but also a construct of affectivity---attitudes, feelings,
judgments and dilemmas about Haiti, the place that is the spiritual and
cultural locus of the dyaspora‟s identity and solidarity: “Haiti remains
my compass” (239). In fact, the dyaspora is accepted/recognized as
Haiti‟s “Tenth Department” because, as Danticat clarifies in Behind the
Mountains (2002), “Haiti is made up of nine geographical regions or
“departments,” and those living abroad, in the Diaspora, are considered
part of a tenth one” (86), a position of relationality that automatically
extends to the children born to Haitian dyaspora outside of Haiti.
Hence, in Joanne Hypolite‟s “Dyaspora,” the second narrative in
Danticat‟s the butterfly’s way, the narrator opines that the word, “which
connotes both connection and disconnection, accurately describes
[one‟s] condition as a Haitian American” (7), while in Francie Latour‟s
“Made Outside,” the first-person focalizer confides about skating
“precariously along the hyphen of [her] Haitian-American identity” like
“many children of immigrants born and raised in the United States”
(125).
Precariousness imbues the butterfly’s way with an inescapable palpability,
the compilation of narratives stimulating literary empathy with their
recounting of crises of dislocation and disempowerment due to
Duvalierism, forced migration, and fractured family relations. The
effect is not far-fetched as the appeal of the narratives accords with that
expressed by Danticat about the Haitian women‟s narratives in Beverly
Bell‟s Walking on Fire (2001). To quote Danticat about the latter, “what
makes these narratives so exceptional and their telling so valuable is
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their attempt at defining the undefinable, their recounting, in a few
sentences, phrases, and paragraphs, experiences that are not only
segments of individual lives but also indispensable sections of the larger
fabric of Haitian history” (Bell x). Similarly, in the foreword to Like the
Dew that Waters the Grass: Words from Haitian Women (1999), Danticat
lauds the “voices” of the women “who everyday scramble to conquer
the scars of dictatorial repression, unshakable poverty, continuing
illiteracy, crippling domestic abuse and political rape,” but “who at the
same time maintain an enviable fighting spirit, akin to watchful
guardians constantly rescuing young ones from beneath the rails of a
hundred speeding trains” (Racine 1).
This concern for the guardianship and enlightenment of the next
generation organically permeates Danticat‟s publications, its
concretization appearing in Danticat‟s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) when
Tante Atie counsels the young Sophie that the “young should learn
from the old. Not the other way” (4). In fact, the circumstance of
children being left in the care of the grandmother until their parents
send for them is central to the cultural ethos of Danticat‟s texts,
Sophie‟s life paralleling that of Danticat‟s who migrated from Haiti with
her young brother at age 12 to join their parents in New York.
Similarly, the young diarist/narrator Celiane in Danticat‟s Behind the
Mountains (2002) records that her father “was supposed to go [to New
York] for only a few months but then he stayed,” leaving her mother,
brother and herself behind in Haiti. However, according to Celiane‟s
diary note, three years later they received their papers and were able to
join their Papa in New York where, upon their landing at the airport,
the sound of Papa‟s presence is shown to stimulate recollection and
recognition:
We heard him before we saw him, a deep voice calling our
names. We looked around everywhere trying to find him; then
all of a sudden he was right there, a few feet away. He hadn‟t
changed much except for some gray hairs and a beard he
hadn‟t had before. I rushed to him and grabbed him, almost
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coming up to his chest, which was a little strange since the last
time I saw him. I was only as tall as his belly. (85)
Such poignant scenes seem designed to impact the reader‟s affective
capacity, Celiane‟s telescopic appraisal of her height relative to Papa
symbolizing both the removal of distance that living apart had
occasioned and the stimulation of autobiographical memory, hence the
emphasis on details of change both in herself and Papa. In that regard,
John Kotre contends in White Gloves: How we create ourselves through memory
(1995) that emotion “has a paradoxical effect on memory” (99),
stimulating a “string of details” most of the time, but also sending
memory into a daze on occasions when the emotions are overwhelming
(98). Consequently, in recent years, the phrase „false memory‟ has
attained currency with its coinage suggesting that memory can either be
fabricated and/or distorted. Unreliable memory is thus also possible,
although first-person remembrances that contain factual, verifiable
details of time and circumstance, as in the case of the butterfly’s way, are
likely neither to be mistrusted nor rejected. Thus, in depicting the
principles of memory as a chain, Edmund Blair Bolles asserts in
Remembering and Forgetting: Inquiries into the Nature of Memory (1988) that
we “remember what we understand; we understand only what we pay
attention to; we pay attention to what we want.” (23)
The conflation of memory/no memory in the construction of the
butterfly’s way mirrors the mechanics of the autobiographical memory
system wherein memory functions both as archivist and mythmaker,
and the self operates as subject and object. In its archival role, memory
functions as a conscience and is reputed to “strive for accuracy and
revise itself to conform to historical truth” (Kotre 116). The restavék in
the story of the same name thus openly asserts that while everyone
“had a story to tell,” even him, his stories “were all made up” (Danticat
the butterfly’s way 20), the restavéks being “slave children who belong to
well-to-do-families” and who “receive no pay and are kept out of
school” (15). Yet, from the perspective of archiving and conforming to
Haiti‟s historical truth, the implied author in the butterfly’s way recalls that
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[s]ince the emancipation and independence of 1804, affluent
blacks and mulattoes have reintroduced slavery by using
children of the very poor as house servants. They promise
poor families in faraway villages who have too many mouths to
feed a better life for their children. Once acquired, these
children lose all contact with their families and, like the slaves
of the past, are sometimes given new names for the sake of
convenience. The affluent disguise their evil deed with the label
restavék, a term that means “staying with.” Other children taunt
them with the term because they are often seen in the streets
running errands barefoot and dressed in dirty rags. (15-16).
In its role as mythmaker, memory will construct a story about itself, a
personal myth that “seeks to know the truth and generate conviction
about the self, about who I am” (Kotre 117). Hence, in the poem
“Lost Near the Sea” (191-92), which opens the penultimate section of
the butterfly’s way, the persona searches for such truth by adamantly
confronting his country as signified by his friend with the declaration,
“I came here to find you again,” the anaphora extending throughout
the four stanzas of the poem to imprint a deep sense of estrangement
and loss on the reader‟s psyche:
Your voice is a sword under my bed
with our stories etched on the blade,
stories told in your dossu-marassa voice
a voice that stutters
with the maleficent jingle of exile (192)
The inability to connect and to know also causes frustration as revealed
by the autodiegetic narrator in “Reporting Silence” (152-55), wherein
the narrator, “a newspaper reporter” (152), laments the uncertainty of
her past because of her family‟s reluctance to voice it:
Details about my family have avoided me all my life. In my
twenty-nine years, I have been trained not to expect to learn
much about the women and men who came before me. They
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are dead, my only surviving grandmother often insists. What
would be the point in raising the dead? Leve mò. This is an
expression I have heard over and over again. An expression I
have grown to accept. A phrase that angers me. Frustration
from not knowing much about my family, frustration that is
now making me numb. For I have learned those words have
helped shield my grandmother from pain and regret, as if their
spirits would come back to haunt her and me … But it is not
only her life she is guarding, it is mine as well, one that is filled
with gaps and vague accounts of things, information scooped
up along the years through passing mentions and aunts‟
conversations at the kitchen table. (152-53)
Danticat‟s introduction to the butterfly’s way and the stories in the text
therefore seem designed to stimulate interplay between the affective
power of the text and the reader‟s normative judgment thereby
impacting empathy and social conscience in the process. On the one
hand, in an affirmation of archival literal memory, the introduction
acknowledges the reality of Jean Dominique‟s precarious existence as a
Haitian radio journalist, and by extension, the fragility of life--the
existential notion that centres the thirty-three stories in the text. On the
other, in keeping with mythmaking literary memory, the introduction
embodies a transformation wherein the collection acquires new
meaning and purpose as Danticat situates the notion of dyaspora within
a painful context of remembering and recounting that is deliberately
associated with the butterfly‟s “way,” given the title of the text. The
thirty-three stories thus champion the indomitable spirit of the Haitian
self, the process of recounting and remembering serving to underscore
the function of narrative in answering the question, who am I? For, as
one scholar proposes, “we tell our stories to preserve what we must
have: an ongoing record of who we are and what we know and value,”3
such preservation being encoded in the association of the collection
with the butterfly‟s process of metamorphosis.
Consequently, the butterfly’s way opens with a poem entitled “Present
Past Future” in which a father‟s act of recounting and remembering
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illuminates Haiti‟s physical and metaphysical contours for his son, the
father‟s “eyes sparkling with pride” (3) as his unfurling voice intones:
I would carry you
On my shivering wings
To the top of Croix D‟Haiti
And from there
Your gaze would travel over
These mountains
These plains
These valleys
These towns
These schools
These orphanages
These studios
These churches
These factories
These hounforts
These prayer houses
These universities
These art houses
Conceived by our genius
Where hope never dies. (6)
Such hope is contextualized in the sequence of chapters in the butterfly’s
way which delineates both the determinancy and uncertainty/transiency
of the Haitian dyaspora‟s life cycle as informed by literal and/or literary
memory, the sequence also providing the text with coherence and
familiarity. The text thus begins with “Childhood,” continues with
“Migration,” “Half/First Generation” and “Return,” then concludes
with “Future,” the trajectory literally and metaphorically conflating the
motifs of Haitian individuation under Duvalierism with the movement
of the butterfly‟s life cycle as depicted by Semia Harbawi‟s in her essay
entitled “Writing memory: Edwidge Danticat‟s Limbo Inscriptions.”
The correspondence with the structure of Danticat‟s the butterfly’s way
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being highlighted in the following extract with the titles of the sections
in Danticat‟s text:
from being a larva tethered to the ground, it unfolds its wings
in a gesture that heralds the union of earth and sky
[“Childhood”]. With its spasmodic fluttering, it performs a
“kinetic pantomime” that is no less than a choreography of
fragmentariness [“Migration”]. The flitting patterns it
sketches in midair makes its capture an arduous task
[“Return”] … its wings are distended by drawing on the pool
of blood it accumulated in its abdomen. Next it exudes any
surplus fluid and pauses awaiting its wings to become stronger
before outspreading them to start the cycle afresh
[“Future”]. (45)
The structure‟s meaningfulness, however, is not only reflective of “an
undulating, unpredictable course” (Aubourg 347); rather, its openendedness seems to suggest that the world of the dyaspora is awaiting
closure, is awaiting redress as symbolized by the rhetorical questions
occurring at the end of the story “Haiti: A Cigarette Burning at Both
Ends” in Danticat‟s the butterfly’s way:
Why don‟t we see that the things we tell ourselves and our
children become part of them, and part of us? When will we
realize that all of Haiti‟s children belong to one family, the
family of humanity? Why do we teach resignation in our
churches? Why do we not respect our ancestors‟ words and
legacy? Why don‟t we truly honor their sacrifices by treating
ourselves and our poorer neighbors more humanely? Will we
one day find the answers to those questions, or will we always
remain a cigarette burning at both ends? (87-88)
Like the term “historical crime,” those questions remain smoldering in
Caribbean discourse, the voices that comprise the butterfly’s way implicitly
challenging the Caribbean community to confront the term and initiate
a healing process, the thinking here being very much in concord with
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the advice given to Sophie by her therapist in Danticat‟s Breath, Eyes,
Memory (1994): “I think you‟ll be free once you have your
confrontation. There will be no more ghosts” (211). The challenge
implicitly voiced by the stories in the butterfly’s way therefore underscores
the capacity of literature to generate empathy and to stimulate the
reader‟s ethical sensibilities. For, as Daniel E. Lee recognizes in
Navigating Right and Wrong: Ethical Decision making in a Pluralistic Age,
“[w]hen the humanity of others registers on our consciousness, the
ethical framework within which we operate is redefined and
restructured [and] in the process, we become different sorts of
persons” (Lee 107).
ENDNOTES
“The one who gets hurt remembers.” (Kreyòl)
Jean Dominique, as quoted in Edwidge Danticat (ed.) the butterfly’s
way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (New York:
Soho Press, 2001), xv.
3 Ann B. Dobie, “On the uses of memory.” Memory: Past and Future. Ed.
Lewis-Pyenson. (The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2000), 4.
1
2
WORKS CITED
Aubourg, Diana. “Charting the Butterfly‟s Course: The next generation
of Haitian Diaspora in the United States.” Let Haiti Live. Eds.
Melinda Miles and Eugenia Charles. Coconut Creek, Florida:
Educa Vision, 2004. Print.
Bell, Beverly. Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and
Resistance. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Foreword by Edwidge Danticat. Print.
Bolles, Edmund Blair. Remembering and Forgetting: Inquiries into the Nature
of Memory. New York: Walker, 1988. Print.
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Danticat, Edwidge. Behind the Mountains. New York: Orchard Books,
2002. Print.
--- , ed. the butterfly’s way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United
States. New York: Soho Press, 2001. Print.
---. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print.
Dobie, Ann. “On the uses of memory.” Memory: Past and Future. Ed.
Lewis Pyenson. Lafayette: University of Louisiana, Center for
Louisiana Studies, 2000. Print.
Gula, Richard M. “Let the mind of Christ be in you: moral formation
and the imagination.” Theological Digest 51.4 (Winter 2004).
Print.
Harbawi, Semia. “Writing memory: Edwidge Danticat‟s Limbo
Inscriptions.” Journal of West Indian Literature 16. 1 (November
2007). Print.
Kotre, John. White Gloves: How we create ourselves through memory. New
York: The Free Press, 1995. Print.
Lee, Daniel E. Navigating Right and Wrong: Ethical Decision Making in a
Pluralistic Age. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Print.
Phipps, Marilene. “Pour water on my head.” the butterfly’s way: Voices from
the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States. Ed. Edwidge Danticat.
New York: Soho Press, 2001. Print.
Racine, Marie M.B., with Kathy Ogle. Like the Dew that Waters the Grass:
Words from Haitian Women. Washington D.C: EPICA, 1999.
Foreword by Edwidge Danticat. Print.
Rohlehr, Gordon. The Shape of that Hurt and other essays. Port-of-Spain,
Trinidad: Longman, 1992. Print.
Journal of West Indian Literature