How One Girl Finds Connection to Her Caribbean Roots in New York and Past

My first journey to Haiti was magical. It was October 2007, and I used to be falling in love with a Haitian man, Max, who was raised between Brooklyn and the nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince. Family and friends whispered, “Be cautious,” however throughout our six-day keep, my anxieties had been erased. 

I used to be mesmerized by the eclectic, bougainvillea-laced eating places in Pétion-Ville, a cosmopolitan suburb of Port-au-Prince; the colonial attraction of downtown Jacmel; Bassin Bleu’s 4 swimming swimming pools within the lush mountains alongside the island’s southeastern coast. 

I used to be so taken by Haiti’s attraction that we went again seven months later. This time, we headed north to Cap-Haitien, the place monuments to Haiti’s proud historical past because the world’s first Black republic nonetheless stand: the fortress Citadelle Laferrière, Sans-Souci Palace, and the statue honoring the Battle of Vertières, the ultimate struggle with Napoleon that gained Haiti its independence from France in 1803.

When Max and I found we had been pregnant, we’d typically speak of taking our child to Haiti, in hopes that she’d come to cherish her personal recollections of the nation. Our daughter, Jillian, was born in January 2010. Inside days, Haiti suffered probably the most devastating earthquakes in its historical past. Practically 220,000 folks misplaced their lives and greater than one million had been displaced. Our dedication to deepen our new daughter’s roots grew even stronger. 

In October 2012, I took her on her first journey to Haiti. She was not but two, so I carried her in my lap. Her father had arrange a building firm within the nation and had been working there for weeks earlier than we arrived. Max drove us to Wahoo Bay Seaside Membership, 70-minutes northwest of town. We spent a blissful few days at this family-run boutique lodge on a cliff with views of the ocean and Gonave Island. 

When Jillian was eight years outdated, we took her again to Haiti, and this time stayed for per week in a great-aunt’s residence close to Kenscoff, a mountainous suburb, the place our daughter picked bananas within the entrance yard. From there we drove to Les Arcadins, on the western coast of the nation. We spent three straight days going forwards and backwards between the ocean and pool, stopping solely to eat meals of stewed fish, diri djon djon (black rice), riz nationwide (rice and kidney beans), lambi (conch stew), and griot (fried pork). At dinner, Jillian drank contemporary limeade whereas her dad and I sipped Haitian Barbancourt rum and listened to the music of a native kompa band. 

Each journeys needed to be deliberate surreptitiously. Max’s household left Haiti in 1967, in the course of the 14-year dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and had not been again for many years. They held on to each unfavourable information story they heard of their tight-knit Brooklyn neighborhood. As a Black American with no ties to a particular nation inside the African diaspora, I didn’t perceive the resistance. I lastly requested Max why his mom and aunts had been so disdainful. He mentioned, “They miss the Haiti they knew rising up.” 

After the assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse in 2021, Max and I started to share his household’s hesitancy. Max noticed the political local weather shift up shut by his work in Haiti, and admitted that the nation’s rising gang violence made it too precarious for us to go to. Within the years since, issues have grow to be much more violent, with a state of emergency imposed in March.

And so, for the previous six years, Max has been steadfastly serving to our daughter to nourish her Haitian roots at residence in Brooklyn. Up first: he’s insisted that she should study to correctly eat a mango. Someday I got here residence with a Complete Meals container filled with sliced mangoes. Our baby and I had been consuming them straight out of the field when her father exclaimed, “This isn’t the way you eat a mango!” Okay mesye (sir or gentleman in Haitian Creole), how do you eat a mango? “She’s purported to tear into the flesh on the high and suck out the juice. Then peel again the pores and skin and eat the fruit across the seed.” Wow — or mézanmi, because the Haitians say.

However essentially the most genuine means we maintain our ties to Haiti robust is thru cooking, from mayi moulen (Haitian-style cornmeal) and sos pwa nwa (black bean sauce) to Saturday dinners with household, the place the aunts serve hearty servings of bouillon with goat. (Soup joumou is saved for Christmas morning and January 1, Haiti’s Independence Day.) As we cook dinner, we play Spotify’s Haitian Warmth playlist or our personal choice of the Haitian Troubadours, Boukman Eksperyans, Alan Cavé, and Konpa Kreyol. 

And once we’re on the lookout for a fête, there are a number of eating places that give us Haitian vibes inside a five-mile radius of our residence: Rebèl Restaurant & Bar, on the Decrease East Aspect; Immaculee Bakery, on Nostrand Avenue in East Flatbush; and up the road from there, DjonDjon BK. 

As a substitute of returning to Haiti, we’ve been making annual visits to Barbados, which is sort of a second residence to Max. The minute we step on “Bim,” because the island is thought, we deal with spending our time extra like Bajans than vacationers. We join our daughter for tennis and surf classes and spend evenings “liming” with buddies as they roast breadfruit of their entrance yard. On Fridays, we head to Oistins Fish Marketplace for the weekly fête of soca, meals, and drink. We had a front-row seat to Crop Over and watched those that performed mas make their final lap on the Carnival route. We ate at rum shacks, ordering fish, macaroni pie, and Banks beer (and a fruit mocktail for our lady).

We knew our efforts had been taking maintain final August, when my daughter and I had lunch on the Limegrove Life-style Centre in Holetown, on Barbados’s western coast. To get there, we took one of many brilliant orange buses that stopped throughout the road from our lodge. Dancehall was blasting from the audio system. I used to be busy watching the instructions on my cellphone, however Jillian had already rung the bell to alert the bus driver that we needed the subsequent cease. She walked confidently to the entrance of the bus — guiding me on our island journey. Once I relayed the second to her father that night, he smiled with pleasure. “She’s changing into a Caribbean lady.” 

A model of this story first appeared within the December/January 2024 situation of Journey + Leisure underneath the headline “Dwelling Away From Dwelling.”