I used to be an optimist. When things were bleak, I used to look for the proverbial silver lining. Not today.
When I see what is happening to Haitian people in the Dominican Republic today, I don’t feel particularly hopeful. That another part of the world would rather self-destruct than heal is not surprising. Xenophobia is universal.
I wonder what would happen if the United States ruled to purge itself of every person of Dominican origin born after 1929. How would the rest of the world react?
Thousands of Dominicans with Haitian blood have lost their right to exist in the DR. They are forbidden to attend schools. They are denied birth certificates. They are stateless. No word yet on what will happen to the buried bodies of Haitian-Dominicans who died between 1929 and now. Perhaps they will be exhumed and deported.
The Haitian government’s plate is more crowded than usual. Yes, it is. It hasn’t been easy, but progress is evident. There are more paved roads on which the barefoot and thirsty majority may sleepwalk. It’s refreshing to see coats of colorful paint on the sprawling shanties. The Caribbean sun dances a new dance on those spellbinding chrome and glass edifices. Flying air-conditioned automobiles carrying VIPs strike fewer pedestrians than before. Farmers marvel at the ultra-modern grocery stores from which they cannot afford to buy vegetable they once grew. There has been so much progress since the earthquake, I should be ashamed of myself for not being more optimistic. When situations like ethnic cleansing in the Dominican Republic arise, I should seek the silver lining.
After all, we get new silver linings in Haiti all the time. Why, just the other day we had a mile-long silver lining sewn to drapery for a brand new, albeit temporary theater. The awestruck audience cackled like children at the circus. Imported entertainers contributed to the advancement of the Haitian people by spewing profanity and grabbing their glow-in-the-dark, frowning-clown-face-covered crotches. The ring leader led the audience in a chant that mocks a mother’s private parts. Haiti’s private parts.
While Haitian-Dominicans sleep in fear of violence, foreign-born entertainers arrive in Haiti to use the Haitian flag like a rag to wipe sweat off their backs. I can’t say I blame them. They are invited guests. VIPs. Maybe I’m just jealous. I’d always wanted to meet the president of my country. I’d always wanted to sing for my country. Perhaps one day I’ll get to hold the flag and sing a new song for Ayiti. Who knows? I used to be optimistic. Not today.
I look forward to a day when all of us can write different stories about Haiti. I may not see that day in my lifetime, I know. Perhaps my daughter will see a thriving Haiti–a Haiti that is respected; a Haiti that serves and benefits her people–not just those who use poverty as a tool to accomplish their covert agenda. Perhaps one day the enduring class line will loosen its knot a little. It is burdensome to know that 200,000 stateless Dominicans of Haitian origin will be tossed across the frontier. Many of them do not even speak the language. Many of them have never been to Haiti. I worry about how the country will receive the newcomers. Maybe Haiti will open her arms and create resources to aid her long-lost children. We’ll see.
Tragedians, by Katia D. Ulysse
(Tragedians was first published on Michele Fievre’s Whimsical Project).
Poverty is like an engagement ring: expensive but obligatory. Necessary. The world would be bleak without it. Poverty gives birth to thriving institutions that are immune to failure. Poverty is a lottery with the largest payout in history. Poverty is exotic.
Poverty, like clean water, is indispensable. The engineers of this flourishing institution will kill to maintain its integrity. Tragedy brings shame and hopelessness to those under its crushing hooves. To others, it brings pleasure and conceit. Tragedy is an insatiable lover that rouses lust like dust in a storm, choking the air, clogging nostrils, and blinding eyes. Tragedy is irresistible.
Poverty dances on some tongues like bubbles in fine champagne. Poverty builds empires. Poverty drips like precious oils from silver spoons. Poverty is a magic wand. Sex, power, and fame are the crop poverty yields in abundance; however, when those ingredients come together, they form a potent and highly addictive drug. One hit and you’re hooked. You become a poverty-junky.
Poverty junkies need like-minded people. Junkies congregate in hemispheres of infinite supply. Good actors they are! Everyday they feign battles against hunger, homelessness, violence, disease. They ad lib and improvise with the internally displaced. They show death at its rawest. Children with distended bellies and flies around the mouth make excellent props. Tragedians win golden awards for their recurring roles in the never ending play.
Tragedians itch and salivate when they smell the kind of rain that causes houses to slide like molasses from above. The audience loves them.
“One hit and you’re hooked. You become a poverty-junky.”
Tragedians come from faraway places to act in this play. They fly in planes that look like gigantic vultures from afar. The minute tragedians complete the “Reason for Visiting Form,” something inside crawls out of a ditch, does handstands, back flips, figure eights, and all kinds of fancy tricks. No matter how grim and abysmal their prospects back home, by the time the plane lands on the blistering tarmac, they believe themselves so exceptional that they start to levitate.
One minute on the stage, and they are infused with the sort of boldness that makes one man swear he can carry a thousand on his head. They strut like peacocks. Starving audience members applaud them. After all, they sacrificed plenty to come perform here. Here.
Tragedians and their traveling theatre companies wear the same masks and costumes. They memorize the same scripts. The lead actors could be sets of twins; their understudies have the same twinkle in their eyes when it’s their turn in the spotlight. All of them are junkies in need of a fix. They scour the countryside, looking for dope. No other stage in the hemisphere satisfies their craving faster.
Everyday more actors arrive to star in the never-ending drama. They bring suitcases full of mosquito spray, tanning lotion, bathing-suits, secrets, joblessness, broken homes, broken loves, brokenness. They bring their broken selves; their ignored, back-home selves. The audience cheers and cries for encores. How splendid they look in their roles of savior, rescuer, knight in shining neon t-shirts!
“They bring their broken selves; their ignored, back-home selves. The audience cheers and cries for encores.”
Feed the hungry. Cure the people of their memories. Cure them of their drum rhythms. Fix them, for they are broken. Cure them of their beliefs. Rid them of that darkness in their hearts. Rescue them from their arid land and build hotels. Show them what is possible. Don’t bother explaining why they won’t be welcome in those hotels built on their own ancestral lands; they’ll see those buildings and understand that they don’t belong. The entire country is like a open air market; open for business twenty-four hours a day. It’s an all you can eat buffet.
Children treat Tragedians like canonized rock stars. Beggars beseech them as if they were patron saints. Please, please, throw your change down on us. Let your coins fall on our heads like hail in a storm.
Tragedians study their lines. They rehearse daily, even in their sleep. When a scene requires the sort of verbal acrobatics only a native can do, they hire one or two. Otherwise they don’t share the spotlight, lest they’re upstaged by some stagehand who wants to rewrite the script.
Tragedians fear stagehands. Although they don’t show it, they fear the audience even more. Poverty junkies live in constant fear of the supply running out. So, morning, noon, and night, they keep the audience spellbound. Enthralled. Enchanted. Entranced.
Tragedians improvise and ad lib without deviating from the proven plot. The show must never stop. The curtain must never fall on this greatest show on the cracked earth.
***
Katia D. Ulysse was born in Haiti, and moved to the United States as a teen. Her writings have been published in numerous literary journals, including the Caribbean Writer, Meridians,Calabash,Peregrine, and Smartish Pace, among others. Her work has also appeared inThe Butterfly’s Way and Haiti Noir. Her first children’s book, Fabiola Can Count, was published in 2013. Ulysse lives in Maryland with her husband and daughter. When she’s not reading, writing fiction, gardening, or teaching, she blogs on VoicesfromHaiti.com. Drifting is her first book of fiction.
So you’ve learned to trill your “r” in the Spanish word for parsley. They don’t care. ¿dónde está tu país?
You were born in the Dominican Republic; everyone in your family–dating back to 1929–has a lot of Dominican in them. You call yourself Dominican. You feel Dominican. You speak like a native-born Dominican. They don’t care. ¿dónde está su casa? Naciste dónde? ¿When? Ten years ago? They tell you that’s just not good enough.
Dominican. The word is written in blood, your blood. The word filters through your veins, delivering borrowed memories to your heart. Si usted nació aquí antes de 1929, you’re so good to go, you can stay. If you were born in the Dominican Republic, say way back in 1928–that would make you 85 years old. At 85, no one expects you to have any babies. If you’re 85 and up, you’re safe. You can breathe now.
¿Hablas kreyòl ayisyen? Good, because now you have been elected maestra de vocabulario for children who don’t know the other place and don’t speak the other language. They’d never set foot on the other soil. They have to learn the other ways quickly. Here’s the vocabulary you have to teach : Dominican. Illegal. Immigrant. Citizenship. Revoked. Stateless. Homeless. Crisis. Paradise. Lost. Big concepts for children to learn, but you have to start teaching your lesson. You have to use every strategy you know. Teach them to make connections: Text to self; text to world; text to text: Haitian. Not. Illegal. Teach the children why the word Antihatianismo has been in their common core for a long, long time. Teach them before putting them to bed at night. When morning comes, maybe they’ll think it was all just a dream. A dream from far away. Far like paradise. A dream that must be forgotten. Fast.
Mañana, los niños dominicanos salir de la cama, y descubre que el idioma español era sólo un sueño.
I wonder what would happen if the United States of America ruled to revoke the citizenship of all individuals born to foreigners dating back to 1929. There would be an exodus of biblical proportions.
Three days from now, it will be October 2nd. Perhaps that would be a good day to revoke the citizenship of all “Americans” whose parents came to the country illegally.
I wonder if it’s by coincidence that the citizenship of second generation Dominicans (with Haitian heritage) is now stripped. In just a few days, it will be the anniversary of one of the bloodiest Saturdays in History: October 2nd. El Corte, the cutting, the massacre of Haitians mandated by El Jeffe, Rafael Troujillo, was carried out expertly. Tens of thousands of Haitians lost their lives. The year was 1937. Today’s cutting comes by the strike of a pen, not a sword . . .Nou dwe sonje sa. C’est assez.
I have read many books by Dominican authors, and have yet to find one story where the word Haitian was not used to describe every evil thing, person, place, and idea. I might have to put those books down for a little while. C’est assez.
There’s a major crisis in a paradise where the sun never shone on us anyhow. The same sun shines across the border, too. It beats hard on backs like in the Batey. What will you do now?
Will the Haitian government send back the Dominicans living in Haiti–even if they trill their “r”s like nobody’s business?
Dominicans with Haitian blood–reaching back to 1929–are no longer Dominicans. Their citizenship has been revoked by a court ruling. The decision CANNOT be appealed.
Although October 2, 1937 was a Saturday and schools were closed, the Dominican Republic administered a deadly language assessment to unsuspecting Haitians on their side of the island. This test, “El Corte,” mandated by a fully Hitlerized Rafael Troujillo, was epic but short. Passing required the proper enunciation of a single word: parsley–in Spanish. Those who failed were promptly slaughtered. Many authors have written about the Parsley Massacre, among them Edwidge Danticat, René Philoctète, and Rita Dove.
Try taking Troujillo’s language test now. Say “Perejil.” Did you remember to trill the “r” the way a native Spanish speaker would: Perrrrrrrejil. If you did, you might have lived to see another day. Maybe. If your skin is “light,” you would have been fine.
By the way, if you’re reading this post at the Dominican Beauty Salon that does your hair so well, don’t get upset and run into the street with shampoo dripping down–blinding you. You can get hurt. Be still and know Troujillo’s regime took the lives of countless Dominicans, too. In the Time of the Butterflies, a deeply moving book by Dominican author Julia Alvarez, draws readers into the lives of three sisters who stood up against the regime.
VoicesfromHaiti honors the 20,000+ Haitians whose blood spilled on Dominican soil and turned the Massacre River red and thick 75 years ago.
I used to be an optimist. When things were bleak, I used to look for the proverbial silver lining. Not today.
The Haitian government’s plate is more crowded than usual. Yes, it is. It hasn’t been easy, but progress is evident. There are more paved roads on which the barefoot and thirsty majority may sleepwalk. It’s refreshing to see coats of colorful paint on the sprawling shanties. The Caribbean sun dances a new dance on those spellbinding chrome and glass edifices. Flying air-conditioned automobiles carrying VIPs strike fewer pedestrians than before. Farmers marvel at the ultra-modern grocery stores from which they cannot afford to buy vegetable they once grew. There has been so much progress since the earthquake, I should be ashamed of myself for not being more optimistic. When situations like ethnic cleansing in the Dominican Republic arise, I should seek the silver lining.
emporary theater. The awestruck audience cackled like children at the circus. Imported entertainers contributed to the advancement of the Haitian people by spewing profanity and grabbing their glow-in-the-dark, frowning-clown-face-covered crotches. The ring leader led the audience in a chant that mocks a mother’s private parts. Haiti’s private parts.
