I’m happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.
Please remind them that none of us have all the time we think we have in this troubled but still beautiful world.
Maybe the way death folds into the most private of spaces encourages us to underestimate the shattering weight of such a devastating loss. Perhaps uninterrupted routines and the daily flow of life force us to forget that losing a loved one to death is confounding, excruciating, sometimes even unbearable. That is, until it is our turn to grieve, and no matter how many people surround us, we end up, at one point or another, feeling totally alone.
How do you even choose what to mend when so much has already been destroyed? How could she think, she asked herself, that she could revive or save anything?
This is why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her.
There was probably so much blood being shed in different parts of the country that morning, the blood of militiamen at the hands of former victims, the blood of former victims at the hands of militiamen battling for their lives. Maybe the water could be a cleansing offering to the gods on behalf of all the dead, no matter what their political leaning had been.
They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother. You, child, were born a woman.
To my grandmother, chagrin was a genuine physical disease. Like a hurt leg or a broken arm. To treat chagrin, you drank tea from leaves that only my grandmother and other old wise women could recognize.
She cannot stay out of duty. The things one does, one should do out of love.
That night, I slept hugging my secret.
There are loves that outlive lovers.
They say the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. I have never been given very much. What was there to take away?
May your love remain an eternal flame.
And they shared, as she put it, an impractical love.
I sometimes feel as though we are all daughters of the same mythical mother. Some of us are super direct, funny. Others are pensive, inquisitive, maudlin, bitter, sarcastic, or a combination of all those things. Yet we have all been orphaned, except by our words, which we eventually turn to in order to make sense of the impossible, the unknowable.
Our faith is a mishmash of many things. We believe in family, in music and art, but we mostly believe in each other” -Giselle.
God grant us the courage to change those things we can, the serenity to accept the things we can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Your son is my friend,“... “He is my very terrible and imperfect and dear friend.
On that day so long ago, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at that moment looked as though it were in flames.
We are all bodies, but the dying body starts decaying right before our eyes. And those narratives that tell us what it’s like to live, and die, inside those bodies are helpful to all of us, because no matter how old we are, our bodies never stop being mysterious to us.
Sometimes you take detours to get where you need to go.