My Mother’s Haiti

On September 9, 1989, my mother boarded her return flight to JFK with my father in tow. Another completed trip to her motherland, Ayiti, was embedded in her body. There was nothing particularly special about the trip, per se, as it was not precipitated by a wedding, funeral, specific family visit, or any of the other myriad reasons those known as immigrants in the United States revisit their true origins of home. In my mother’s words, she went to “enjoy her country” and a month later was returning to her second home. The second home that required her to mother her three children in a very specific way based on the white gaze. The second home that provided the option to work twelve-hour shifts, four days a week, toward earning the most income anyone in her bloodline had ever earned, to her knowledge. The second home that seduced her into assimilation toward tasting the tantalizing American pie.

Four hours after takeoff, my freshly traumatized mother touched down hyperventilating with tears pouring down her face and declared that she would never step foot on a plane again. Turbulence, lightning, looming death, screams, thunder, overhead baggage everywhere, loss of control in the sky. Pure terror! She passed in February 2023 having kept her word. Her trip in 1989 was, in fact, the last time her feet touched the island of Hispaniola.

Ayiti is on my mind as the news circulates stories of strife, poverty, and chaos consuming not only the island but my fellow brethren inhabiting and migrating from the country. What would be the tone of my mother’s comments at the blocked canal of the Massacre River? In what new or familiar ways would she express anxiety at the mention of yet another hurricane or earthquake decimating Haiti? My mother was a proud Haitian woman, and remarkably critical of her fellow countrymen while understanding the ins and outs of imperialism and the deep-rooted impact of colonialism on modern-day “freed” countries. Nevertheless, my mother, Monique Toussaint, was a fan of victim-blaming, disavowing her own feelings of inferiority superimposed on her as an immigrant with an accent in the city that never sleeps. She would listen to Haitian news on the radio station 90.5 AM and criticize all those in power for allowing the “downfall” of her country, then spend hours cooking a traditional Haitian meal for my siblings and me. Blan diri, sos pwa ak pwol. Artists such as Levoy Exil, Hector Hyppolite, and Myrlande Constant hung on the walls in our home, and literature written in French, Creole, and English overflowed from her massive bookshelves, filled with the likes of Edwidge Danticat, Willy Apollon, and famous Voodoo folklorists. Skah Shah, Tabou Combo, and Alan Cavé sang to us on Saturdays as my siblings and I cleaned our home from top to bottom. Ayiti engaged our senses from the moment we woke up to the second we fell asleep in the home my mother and father adored as first-time home buyers. I could not comprehend as a child, nor as an adolescent, why her words did not match her actions. Did she love her country? Undoubtedly. Then why the constant critiques and harshness? Why is it I never heard her utter a sentence of gratitude, warmth, or positivity toward the first land she called home unless recalling a small cluster of memories from her childhood? Perhaps my memory is foggy and I am only a recorder for what was shared with me.

As children, my siblings and I were not allowed to travel to Haiti, out of fear that we would be kidnapped. For that reason, my grandmother lived in my mind as an omnipotent super-being in that she visited Haiti each and every year and managed to avert the mystical thugs who I feared would take her away with the request of a large ransom in return. She returned safely and magnificently rejuvenated each and every year, always offering to take me with her in the future. We both knew that was never going to happen, but I found solace in the gifts and stories she returned with. My grandmother was a tight-lipped religious woman, but on those returns in August, her storytelling came alive and matched her omnipresent generosity with sweets I did not have access to in the States. Caramels, mints, and, oh, the peanut butter, all with a specific “Haitian” taste. It was reminiscent of Christmas in the summer! Those stories inspired me to finally break through my mother’s fear barrier. Hence I declared a month before my twenty-eighth birthday that I would be visiting Haiti with my father / her ex-husband. At this point my grandmother was deceased, and my mother relented and gave me a list of things to bring back for her. Lwil maskriti, fresh djon-djon, and water from Saut-d’Eau. The experience was transformative and similar to that of one who takes part in Aliyah or Hajj; I felt as though I had been called to the Promised Land and immediately felt an increase in my already-cemented Haitian roots after two weeks of exploring the various terrains of my ancestors.

I now reflect on those political talks with my mother, which were encompassed with judgment masking deep care, and am in touch with her river-deep, mountain-high longing to smell the air in Port-au-Prince, to touch the bark of the mango trees in Hinche, to taste the warm cornmeal direct from a fire built by hand in Maissade. She missed her motherland, but it was too threatening to her sense of self as a permanent US citizen with a terrorizing fear of flying to allow the yearning, nostalgia, and deep care to fully emerge. My mother’s defensive positioning was working full force to protect her from that which she knew as an embodiment of permanent separation. The loss of her motherland mirrored the ways in which she handled the loss of her actual mother, Agnes Toussaint. The consistency was astounding. I reflected on this with her during her last days of life as we joked about ways I tried to lift her out of her melancholy.

“Mom, what about Klonopin? What if I get you a prescription so you can fly?” Those comments didn’t elicit a verbal response ever. In place of words, she would suck her teeth and cut her eyes at me, ending the conversation before it began. In her last month of life, we were able to joke about those attempts toward me moving her into a different way of being. What I realized as she lost the ability to speak and withdrew into herself, at the mercy of colon cancer, was the magnitude of experiencing. I was given the gift of truly experiencing her not only as my mother but as a person with real trauma and loss as memories embedded in her body. She recognized my efforts to help her as love despite the lack of externalized movement on her end. The parallel process of experiencing the loss of my mother while my mother experienced the loss of her mother and her motherland. The earth remembers, as does the body.

Ayiti translates to ‘“the land of high mountains.”’ Haiti is the English pronunciation of a land once traveled on by Taino Indians before any boats docked with enslaved West Africans. Present day, I find solace in a deep knowing, on a soul level, that my parents loved their country of origin and gave their all towards instilling values and understanding towards of my ethnocultural history. My Creole is choppy and barely comprehensible, the Haitian meals I cook are usually under-seasoned, and I haven’t been back to Haiti in over ten years. And yet the presence of my mother’s face in photographs or the scent of one of her many favorite perfumes instantly pulls on centuries-old memories tucked away in my bones. I am grateful for the experience, Ayiti Chérie.