The Boston Review has just published a beautiful piece in which Colin (Joan) Dayan meditates on her mother’s life and its relation to her native Haiti. Here is an excerpt of the piece, which can be accessed through the link below:
Now I can find my mother. Her life ended in an apartment in an Orthodox neighborhood of Brooklyn. She stood out on the terrace, looked at the black hats, at the girls in long skirts filing out of their yeshiva, all the yellow school buses in a row at the curb. “Where am I?” she asked me. “What a neighborhood.” She sighed. When she stopped talking, she still sang—sometimes once or twice a day—“Baby, it’s cold outside.” Far away from her home in Atlanta, where once she watched for dogwood and honeysuckle outside her window, she saw the buses, the girls, the men, the concrete, and the cars in the main thoroughfare called Ocean Parkway. In her dying days, she lived only six blocks from where she had moved with her parents 70 years before, when they left Port-au-Prince, Haiti, right before her fourteenth birthday.
They left Haiti in 1936, two years after the American occupation ended. When my mother arrived on Ocean Parkway, she wondered about the sea, why it was hidden, why no one ran into the waves, and what to do when the snows came down so white. My mother, as the eldest daughter, was introduced to the most eligible man in town. No matter that he was seventeen years older, that she did not love him. He took her to the circus. He tried to teach her to ride horses and eat mussels. I don’t know what she thought about the circus, but she could not ride and, until her dying day, hated anything that looked slippery and lived in shells.
You can find the complete piece at http://bostonreview.net/BR34.4/dayan.php
Colin Dayan is the author of the landmark study on Haiti, Haiti, History and the Gods.
