"Between the Pool and the Gardenias" was unlike the other stories we were taught in tenth grade. Marie, half-mad from the grief of multiple miscarriages, had run away to Port-au-Prince to escape a resentful and faithless husband and an unsympathetic village. She finds the body of an abandoned infant in the street and adopts it; she tells "Rose" the stories of her life as she tries to wash away the growing stink of rot with stolen perfume.
This short story was written by Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American writer born in Port-au-Prince who had emigrated to Brooklyn at twelve. I fell in love with her mythic language. Like the poetry of Pablo Neruda, her words read like pure earth to me, elemental in their ache of loss and desire. I felt the prose down to my bones. I ended up writing my International Baccalaureate Extended Essay on the use of myths and superstitions in the short stories. I wrote about black butterflies and sleep talking and deye mon gen mon and mermaids singing in Latin at a Catholic Mass in an underwater heaven, watched over by the sea lwa Agwé.
Marie's story is from the collection Krik? Krak! The title refers to a call and response style of Haitian storytelling. "Krik?" "Krak!" "I have many stories I could tell you."
There were many nights when I saw some old women leaning over my bed.
"That there is Marie," my mother would say. "She is now the last one of us left."
Mama had to introduce me to them, because they had all died before I was born. There was my great grandmother Eveline who was killed by Dominican soldiers at the Massacre River. My grandmother Défile who died with a bald head in a prison, because God had given her wings. My godmother Lili who killed herself in old age because her husband had jumped out of a flying balloon and her grown son left her to go to Miami.
In rereading "Between the Pool and the Gardenias" within this collection, this simple section takes on greater intensity. These women, these passing references, are characters in the collection's other short stories. These short stories all intertwine, a technique more explicitly done in her other collection, The Dew-Breaker. Sometimes, the connections are a little more subtle, but my interpretation is simple: There is more to the story.
There is more behind it all. There is a greater context. By excising this story out, our English teachers decontextualized the story in this instance, but one of the greatest things I took away from IB English was learning about the writer. It is so easily missed but I feel like it is too often that a creative work is divorced from its creator. Place a work of literature in the context of not just the entire body of work, but in the context of the writer, of the writer's experiences, of the writer's time and place. How the writer's identities, gender, sexuality, skin color, how it all comes to intersect with each other and with greater contexts, histories, cultures, systems. It is utterly enriching to see the veins of history pulsing through what was a simple story.
In fact, it is too often that we divorce stories in all their forms from their contexts and histories. We see it often in the discussion of the nations of people of color. How often have we heard people advocate simply dismissing the Middle East or Africa (reduced from vast regions of different cultures and nations to singular geopolitical identities) as doomed? Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie in the TEDTalks "The danger of a single story" explains, "Start the story of with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story" (10:40, but watch the whole thing).
We see the single story again in discussions about Haiti as it becomes worthy of humanitarian aid again due to the 12 January earthquake (and its subsequent fifty-two aftershocks). It is a failed nation. It is a nation of corrupt governments. It is a nation of unbelievable poverty, and it is a nation of tragedy. And we do love connecting it to HIV. We see this story used in pleas for help for this pitiful nation ("No possibility of feelings more complex than pity.") and in callous dismissals and calls to simply abandon Haiti.
But: Why does this matter? Yes, it is incorrect to believe these single stories, and we are taught—to some extent—that it is not "politically correct" to repeat these stereotypes. Why don't we focus on real problems? Real racism? Or how Haitians need help now, regardless of history or politics?
Because our actions are informed by the stories we have been told and have told ourselves. This is the very essence of socialization and cultural learning. When we have thoroughly mired ourselves in these mythic narratives, we know no better than to live and form judgements and make decisions and act by these narratives. Por eso, educations are so fundamental for any government, whether it is wholesale prohibition of literacy for black slaves, the revisionist calenders of the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, the deletion of the Taino people from our American history books when we celebrate Christopher Columbus Day?
How did Ronald Reagan transform American attitudes towards public assistance programs? By making shit up. He told absolute lies about welfare queens. And so, we have this narrative where there are these (black) persons who are really able to work are sucking on the government teat and draining taxpayer money, and this narrative is more powerful than facts. Despite the studies demonstrating otherwise, we can still hear people giving anecdata about the outrageous welfare abuse. By this narrative, we told ourselves we had to "reform" the welfare system into the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act under Clinton. (Look at that name, could you throw in anymore Reagan buzzwords?) We told ourselves that it makes sense to submit welfare recipients to drug tests, that, somehow, we have the right to the lives of these people receiving one particular kind of public assistance—as opposed to, say, public assistance to students (scholarships) or to the wealthy (work expense tax breaks and business stimuli). It is clear how narratives inform policy.
Consider the stories about the dangerous riots everywhere in Haiti immediately following the disasters. Because of these conditions, this chaos, this violence, we had to delay aid and move in military personnel. As ABC News have reported, we block up airports with soldiers, obstructing planes with medical equipment and supplies. We make these vital decisions of balancing security and aid based on this story of violence. And this story is untrue. This is not just sensationalist news and hype; this is a narrative used to justify moving soldiers instead of medicine.
And look at how abduction is transformed into adoption in the narrative. Americans trafficking children under the delusion of being saviors. There is much hullabaloo about this particular case, but leading up to it, the common narrative was we as foreigners need to save those Haitian babies. From the earthquake, from poverty, from suffering, from those riots that don't exist, from death, from lack of families, from their families, from being Haitian. We have Catholic leaders in Miami who want airlifts for children who "appear to be orphaned [emphasis mine]". And this narrative is backed up by prologues long as novels, where we feel that we not only have a moral imperative but a right to another nation's children. Is it any surprise these missionaries believed they were doing God's work? Is anyone really shocked at these missionaries' audacity?
Krik? Krak! was one of the books I had brought along to Glasgow with me. I recently reread it before slowly working on this blog entry (and then losing half of it to a stupid copy-paste error), and, as always, it made me cry. Not just for the characters' pains and tragedies, but in exultation of their hopes. I shared in their common humanity, their blazing dignity, their impossible faith, their love as endless as the sea. Their arguments with mothers about choice of partners. Deye mon gen mon: Behind the mountains are more mountains.
I don't know what I was trying to gain from reading Danticat again. I just knew I wanted to do so much, but it is even illegal for me to volunteer in this country. I knew I was frustrated with the lack of respect for this nation, born of the third successful republic revolution. Ever. This nation whose freedom afforded the United States the Louisiana Purchase because the Haitian Revolution taught Napoleon that the Americans were just too much trouble, only for the U.S. to completely ignore it (because they don't their own slaves getting any ideas) and deem it doomed (because they had to tell themselves it will collapse).
I was sick of people talking about the corrupt governments of Haiti without mentioning the American participation in and manipulation of the government. I was sickened by how Bill Clinton was given any capacity to "help" Haiti, and I was outraged that he foresaw the commodification of yet another Caribbean nation for foreign consumption and foreign profit as a "fix" to the Haitian economy.
This is a poor substitute for tangible help, but that is all I can give for now: A request that you listen. Adichie defines power as "the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person." We have held onto that ability for far too long. And it is not that we must empower Haitians to tell their own stories. We cannot prop ourselves as the heroic enablers of the Haitians, because that is still our story. But rather, we must simply learn to listen better. Because people, they have always been telling their own stories.
