We're Alone, page 12
As she neared the end of the essay class, I told Mira I wanted to write about my mother’s wooden machete. (I hadn’t yet figured out how to write about the Jehovah’s Witnesses book and the pictures.) The machete also seemed like a much more apparent symbol. Instead I started writing about the time when Mira was six years old and we took my mother to the airport so she could return to her home in Brooklyn after a monthlong visit with us in Miami. Taking my mother to the airport and watching her leave always reminded me of my first concrete childhood memory, of being peeled off my mother’s body on the day she left Haiti for the United States when I was four years old.
That day, at the airport in Miami, as Mira and I watched my mother merge into the crowd heading toward her gate, Mira screamed, “Manman!” at the top of her voice. My daughters usually called my mother Grann. Manman is what my brothers and I called my mother, so hearing Mira call my mother Manman startled both me and my mother.
My mother turned around and stared at us. She seemed relieved that there was nothing physically wrong with either Mira or me. As other travelers dashed around her, my mother took a few steps in our direction, then stopped. She looked like she wanted to walk back to us, but knew she could not. Returning to us would just require another goodbye. Her life, at that time, was in New York, as were her house, her friends, and her church. Her flight was already boarding. She slowly raised the hand that had been resting on her carry-on bag and waved once more, then she turned around and continued walking to her gate.
I asked Mira if she remembered that day. She remembered us taking my mother to the airport a bunch of times, she said, but did not remember ever calling after her. But she did recall another moment at the same place.
Once, while my husband and daughters and I were waiting to board a flight to New York with my mother, my mother went to look for a restroom and accidently walked past security, leaving the boarding area without her boarding pass or her cell phone. When our plane began boarding, Mira and I went looking for her and found her pleading, in her hesitant English, with an impatient TSA officer to let her back in, or at least to accompany her to the gate, and to us.
“She looked so lost and so scared,” Mira remembered. “Like she thought she’d never see us again.”
That day, I had also feared that we might never see my mother again, that she might end up on the wrong flight to some distant country, or as an eternal ghost in the airport, passing everyone by, or that, strangely, she might turn into a little girl who is left behind, by me. That moment also made me realize why travel, particularly air travel, is sometimes nerve-racking for me, why I stay up the night before putting my life in order, cleaning my house from top to bottom, and reminding my loved ones where important documents are kept. I do not want to leave anyone behind, but I know the choice will not always be mine, just as it was not entirely my mother’s.
The words my mother would later use to recount to her friends the experience of being lost in the airport trickle back into my mind on the last day of the essay class.
M te pèdi. Yo jwenn mwen.
Vwayaj la te kontinye.
I was lost. They found me.
The journey continued.
I too have been lost, but eventually, words, stories, find me. Once again, I have entered this body of water. I am no longer alone on the shore. Vwayaj la ap kontinye. Our journey continues.
APPENDIX
Plage
Roland Chassagne
Nuit. Bercement mélancolique
Des palmes.
Tu chantes. Ta voix fragile
S’évanouit loin,—
Sur les plages du silence.
Nuit. Le vent est d’une lourdeur
fraîche. Derrière moi,
J’ai refoulé toutes mes rancoeurs
Et tu sais que ma vie est une allée
Solitaire que, seule, tu longes.
Nuit. Nuit divine et triste. Là-haut
la lune nomade voyage dans les brumes.
Et plus ne reviendra la nuit triste,
Je le sens..
Laisse-moi prendre tes mains
Et te dire des choses simples
Et inoubliables . .
Parce que nous étions seuls,
Près du rivage, sous ce dais
de palmes, et qu’on s’aimait,
Le bonheur était intense et
Inexprimable.
Shore
Night
The sad cradling
Of palms.
You sing. Your frail voice
Faints afar—
Where the sands of silence are.
Night
Heavy, heavy the wind
But sweet! I have buried
My hatreds deep.
My life is a lone pathway
Which only you can keep.
Night
Night—divine and sad.
A nomad moon wanders away …
Never more will be a night so sad.
Never, never, can be .……
Your hands—give them to me,
Let me speak, and simply
Words you can not forget.
Night
We’re alone—
And the sea .…
And the cradling palms are thick.
Translated into English by Edna Worthley Underwood
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Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to United States Artists and Sarah Arison for the 2020 United States Artists fellowship. I am also immensely grateful to Jan and Marica Vilcek and the Vilcek Foundation for the 2020 Vilcek Prize in Literature. Thank you Cherie Miot Abbanat and Ferry Cadet from Haiti Projects, and Erica N. Cardwell for the “Writing the Self” class in Barnard College’s summer program. My deepest thanks to Rachel Arons and Brianna Milord, who have edited and fact-checked my pieces for the New Yorker online, as well as Veerly Huleatt and Caitrin Keiper at Plough. Mèsi anpil Regine Chassagne and Stanley Chassagne for our conversations about Roland Chassagne and much more. Thank you Ninaj Raoul, Guerline Joseph, Alix Cantave, and also to Jean-Jacques Solage and Tour Haiti.
Some of these pieces have been adapted from material previously published in World Literature Today, Traffic East Magazine, the New Yorker, Stranger’s Guide, the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Plough, the New York Review of Books, O, the Oprah Magazine, and Aperture. Thank you to Widline Cadet, whose work has deeply moved me and whose photograph Seremoni Disparisyon #1 (Ritual [Dis]appearance #1), 2019, appears on the cover of this book.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT is the author of numerous books, most recently the story collection Everything Inside, winner of the Bocas Fiction Prize, the Story Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Prize, and The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in Criticism. Her novels include Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, and The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner. Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, was the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Among other awards, she has received a MacArthur Fellowship, the Neustadt Prize, and the Vilcek Prize. She teaches at Columbia University.
