The earliest sound I can
remember is the sound of the wind stirring through my grandmother’s house in
St. Marc, Ayïti. It would wend its way slowly through the mango tree just
outside her bedroom window, rising up and over the tin roof—making a strangely comforting rustle as it went—before landing gently on
my nose bearing the smell of sea salt and endless fields of sugar cane.
In Haiti,
the wind takes on almost human form: Often, it comes ashore as a soothing,
cooling breeze just off the Caribbean Sea. But
sometimes, it morphs into a loa and bears down on the island with the
wrath of the gods—forcing humans,
animals and spirits alike to take cover. When I was a child, I believed I
controlled the wind. It came and went at my call, just like any well-trained
pet. It loved and soothed me when I needed it, and it served as intermediary to
the unseen elements that were a natural part of my life. I heard and felt it
everywhere I went.
On the morning of the day I left Haiti, the wind was nearly silent.
I stood on the tarmac feeling the heat rise up to push me away. The
journey before us promised so much more than any six year old could imagine: We
were moving to New York!
“You’re going to be a good
girl for your mother and father, you understand?” My grandmother said. “You'll
show them I raised you well while they were gone.”
I nodded politely, but my
attention was not on her words. I was awestruck by the giant white beast that
stood before me. Its engines roared to life as they sucked in air and
spat out the wind with a wheezing, metal-infused groan that both frightened and
thrilled me. I imagined myself being pulled by the wind slowly, inexorably, into
its wildly spinning blades.
“S’il vous plait!” a flight attendant shouted as
she attempted to marshal passengers up the ramp into the dark, gaping mouth of
the waiting airplane. “It is time for people with tickets to come take their
seats. Everyone else must go.”
No one listened. It seemed all of St. Marc had come to the airport to see us
off, and each person would have his turn. Our friends and family chatted and
laughed and recounted when-you-were-young stories that always ended badly for
me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could
see my brother running around and around the crowd with his friends, while my
sisters looked on in boredom.
We were ready for the journey to begin.
My grandmother
straightened the ribbons in my hair one last time and tugged needlessly at my
pleated skirt before letting me go. I practically skipped across the tarmac
buoyed by the weight of the wind at my back. I looked back at my
grandmother just once and saw her tears. In a culture heavily dependent on its
young to care for its old, she was being left all alone. First her daughter and
son-in-law were lured away just four years earlier. Then her son. Now, her
grandchildren had heard the call of the wind and followed.
It is a cycle that has repeated perhaps millions of times in
the last few hundred years. Since early sailors learned to harness the wind to
power their journey across the sea, the world has never been the same. In the European Age of Sail beginning in the 16th
Century, sailing ships used the vast trade winds of the Atlantic Ocean to transport
hundreds of thousands of goods and people across every corner of the known
Universe, giving rise to an expansive if exploitative global trading system.
And it all began with Christopher Columbus.
Why am I choosing to write about Columbus? Edwidge Danticat, the noted Haitian-American novelist, once said "Write what haunts you. What keeps you up at night. What you are unable
to get out of your mind" Columbus haunts me. I trace my own life journey back to the one Columbus took in 1492. The fact that I am Haitian raised as an immigrant in New York, an international trade and development lawyer and scholar, the fact that I speak English, French and Haitian Creole—all of these small facts about me flow from that fateful journey. How can I
not write about Columbus? I want to understand Columbus not as a mythic hero or a reviled figure but as a man. And I want to explore his legacy not just in my own life but in the life of all of us who live and love in The Americas. And so I write.
These are mostly fictional stories drawn from the historical record. I imagine into being the lives of Columbus' descendants in the New World.
I wonder how he has affected your own life journey?
