Wandering Memory

By Jan J. Dominique

The daughter of Haitian journalist and pro-democracy activist Jean Léopold Dominique, who was assassinated in 2000, Jan J. Dominique offers a memoir that provides a uniquely personal perspective on the tumultuous end of the twentieth century in Haiti. Wandering Memory is her elegy for a father and an ode to a beloved, suffering homeland. The book charts the biographical, emotional, and literary journey of a woman moving from one place to another, attempting to return to her craft and put together the pieces of her life in the aftermath of family tragedy. Dominique writes eloquently about love, loss, and traumas both horrifically specific and tragically universal. For readers familiar with Jean Dominique and his life’s work at Radio Haïti, the book offers an intimate perspective on a tale of mythic proportions. For the reading public at large, it offers an approachable and resonant introduction to contemporary Haitian literature, history, and identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Mar 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780813945873

Book preview

Wandering Memory

CARAF Books

Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French

RENÉE LARRIER AND MILDRED MORTIMER, Editors

Wandering Memory

Jan J. Dominique

Translated by Emma Donovan Page

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

Originally published in French as Mémoire errante

© 2008 Jan J. Dominique and les Éditions du remue-ménage/Mémoire d’encrier

University of Virginia Press

Translation and glossary © 2021 Emma Donovan Page

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2021

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dominique, Jan J., author. | Page, Emma Donovan, translator.

Title: Wandering memory / Jan J. Dominique ; translated by Emma Donovan Page.

Other titles: Mémoire errante. English

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2021. | Series: CARAF books : Caribbean and African literature translated from French | Originally published in French as Mémoire errante—Title page verso.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020039070 (print) | LCCN 2020039071 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813945859 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813945866 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813945873 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Dominique, Jan J.—Fiction. | GSAFD: Autobiographical fiction.

Classification: LCC PQ3949.2.D58 M4613 2021 (print) | LCC PQ3949.2.D58 (ebook) | DDC 843/.92—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039070

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039071

Cover art: Hibiscus rose, lithograph from Edward Step’s Favourite Flowers of Garden and Greenhouse (London: 1897) (photo: mashuk/iStock); Mapa de la Isla de Santo Domingo y Haiti, Casimiro N. de Moya (London: Rand McNally, 1906) (Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division)

Contents

Translator’s Note

1. City Names

2. Notes on the Ephemeral

3. Crossing the Border

Glossary

Translator’s Note

The author makes regular use of words and phrases in Haitian Creole, her mother tongue and the language shared by all Haitians in Haiti. These words are italicized in the original text, a choice I have preserved in this translation. A glossary of terms and phrases can be found at the back of this book. I would like to thank Dr. Laura Wagner for her assistance with the glossary.

In the original French text, the author uses French orthography for many Haitian Creole words. I have chosen to use the current official Haitian Creole orthography instead. Adopted in 1979, it has been taught in Haitian schools since 1987. Prior to that time a mix of other French-based orthographies was used, often inconsistently due to the fact that French rather than Haitian Creole was the medium of instruction in all schools.

Wandering Memory

1

City Names

Tomorrow, I leave. The words turn in my head. I can’t sleep and I’ve grabbed a piece of paper to write. No, not to write! I don’t write, I haven’t written for three years. I can’t. I don’t even try. So I’ve pulled this sheet from a pad of yellow paper to note the things I can’t forget. For three years, I haven’t written. I just note certain pieces of useful information, communicate with friends overseas, draft shows for the radio. When I take a piece of paper, it’s not to write that I leave tomorrow. Just the flight number, the arrival time in Miami, the information for the car, the important US telephone numbers. Practical details, which I should have put in my planner. For this trip, the agency got us tickets at a reduced rate. A special price for three weeks. Three weeks goes fast. I might have time to relax, to unplug. That’s the expression we use these days, as though we were plugged in to a source of energy against our will. A source that, paradoxically, drains us. My partner has to drive us to the airport. He isn’t leaving with us. This intensifies the illusion of a brief journey. This trip is a break, a respite, before other decisions. Which decisions? I’m bringing some light clothes with me. It’s hot in Miami, hotter than in Port-au-Prince.

We’re going to Miami, Michèle and I, to attend a film festival where they will be showing the final version of the documentary about Jean for the first time: The Agronomist. Suddenly, images from the film flash before me. I close my eyes to chase them away. We were sent the tapes of each version. I wanted to watch them all despite the pain, despite my feeling that the film would remain unfinished because the story must remain unfinished. But Jonathan Demme brought his project to a close. The story of Jean, journalist and agronomist, is also finished. The story of his dreams, his victories, his defeats. This film is an homage to a man of passion and courage. It’s also a filmmaker’s declaration of love for a country and a people who touched his heart. We’re going to attend the first public screening of the film. Here we are, headed to the Miami International Film Festival. On the yellow sheet of paper I end up writing: "I leave tomorrow." I look at the words as if they might leap off the page at me. And I begin to cry. Not because I leave tomorrow. Because I’ve written those three words.

I stay still for some time. Then I copy the words over and over on the yellow page. They seem out of place to me, almost obscene. I scratch them out furiously and write others: city names, Miami, four days, Long Island, two or three weeks, New York, for an indefinite period, maybe Paris, Orléans, and finally, I hope, Montreal. My vision blurs. It’s been nearly twenty years since I last saw Montreal and I don’t understand why I still think about it with this overwhelming sadness, so powerful it even drowns out my anxiety about this departure.

My life has been punctuated by many departures. I recall the words of a character in my novel La Célestine. In her garden at dawn Célestine thought about all the heartbreaks, all the rifts in her life: A little girl snatched from her mother, a slave thrown out by her master, forced into an endless flight toward freedom. The search for freedom takes the form of incessant departures. All these departures, first hers, then ours over the years, and now mine today. Are we condemned to these endless displacements?

I’m in my house. I’m gazing at my garden in the half-light of a February afternoon and tomorrow I leave for a brief journey. This could be the beginning of a fluffy novel, a rosy tale where the heroine, a journalist exhausted by years of working in a war-torn country, discovers happiness in the arms of wealthy Chinese businessman. No, not Chinese, Cuban because I’m going to Miami. A good man with a warm voice who murmurs sweet nothings in her ear on a Miami beach. I leave tomorrow, and I haven’t played with words for three years.

Port-au-Prince

Ordinary Madness

It was evening. In February, Port-au-Prince is very warm at six o’clock. We were all at the radio station, seated around the long table in the newsroom, discussing the same subjects: security, threats, the impossibility of doing our job under such conditions. Armed men had come knocking at Frédéric’s house in the middle of the night. Luckily he was out. He had to take refuge with friends. Guy had received an envelope addressed to him which held a picture of a coffin and a 9 mm bullet casing. Guy lived with his mother—he begged her to go stay with a cousin in the country for a few weeks.

I listened to the stories of our daily reality. My coworkers hadn’t said anything until that day. Each one had their own story. Each one hid their anxiety. Each one had been forced to find a temporary solution. But now we had to think about the team. We shared our experiences, working together, struggling to make the right decision. And yet I felt like I was playing a role. It was a strange feeling, one I recognized after so long—the feeling of watching myself live. Like facing my reflection, a little girl in a white dress. The reflection of a serious face, in the mirror of the blue room in Madeleine’s house. For the past few years I hadn’t been able to find the distance necessary to calmly observe people who were laughing or crying. All of a sudden there I would be, gazing at my reflection. I listened to the advice, the suggestions; I knew it was all over anyway. We didn’t have a choice. I had to look like I was weighing the pros and cons when the decision had already been made, in my mind and in the minds of those around me.

An assassination attempt on December 25. What human being is capable of killing on Christmas Day? I know, I’m stupid. If someone is capable of killing, what difference does it make if it’s Christmas or Saint-Glingling? In my native Creole, we call people who are capable of murder san manman: motherless, heartless, without a conscience. So that day must be a good one for hit men, their victims thinking themselves protected by the Christmas truce. Why try to get inside the head of a san manman? After the attack on Michèle on December 25, after the murder of her bodyguard and the increasingly specific threats against many of our colleagues, we decided to close the radio. We had to protect what could still be protected. The security measures, which exhausted us, hadn’t stopped this latest assassin. It was time to leave.

Why is our life punctuated by all these departures? My father’s. His first exile in 1980. Our clandestine meetings in the colonial town of San Juan. My first trip to show him my son and the constant fear of being rejected upon my return, of not being able to reenter my country. I stayed in Haiti after the crackdown against the democratic movement. First of all, because I didn’t have a choice. My health, my financial issues. Jean later confessed: They warned me to keep quiet in New York because I had family in the country. His family was a kind of hostage of the regime, a way to gag my loudmouthed father. When I got an exit visa I didn’t picture for a second staying in New York or moving elsewhere. It just didn’t occur to me. The second exile, in 1991, was harder for us. Jean and Michèle were once again shut up in a Manhattan apartment, but it wasn’t a personal tragedy anymore. The news was full of the deaths: three thousand, five thousand. The political assassinations, the repression of populist movements, rapes of women young and old. Sometimes even children. It was the first time that rape had been used on a massive scale in Haiti, as a tool of political repression. Terror again cloaked our country in an opaque veil. The brief visits Jean was able to make to Port-au-Prince left me sick with fear, and yet his assassins didn’t strike during the terrible season of that 1991 coup d’état.

Yet another departure, a few weeks ago. To protect Michèle from new assailants, to prevent them from depriving us of another life. We had to smile, pretending. A vacation. I couldn’t stand that awful compromise. Not a vacation, a trip for your health. She had to regain her health. She had to protect her health. I had lost my father, I couldn’t stand losing my friend, his partner. I wanted to be bitter. She didn’t realize, she didn’t care. She didn’t fret about the tragedies we were experiencing.

Today, here we are on our way to a city which manages to be flat and gray despite the strength of the sun and the magnificence of the flowers. I pretend to believe that this, this latest sojourn beyond the shores of our island, will be brief. After the film festival we’ll take advantage of the chance to see some family for a few weeks of respite. I don’t know how much we’ve chosen to delude ourselves. Do I know? I’ve only brought a little suitcase with some comfortable clothes and a dressier outfit for the gala. And in the front pocket, a pad of yellow paper.

At the Port-au-Prince airport, I still want to believe that the trip will be a brief one. Why did I refuse to bring any little thing that might signal a true departure, an extended stay abroad? No books, not even my notebooks, which have sat closed for three years. No photos, not a bauble or a trinket, not even my favorite painting—small enough that I could have slipped it into the bottom of the little suitcase. Nothing, no objects, however small they might be. I cross the departure lounge without letting myself worry about the tension that makes the air tremble around us. People avert their eyes or stare intently, seeking mine out. Quick gestures and whispers follow us.

On the plane, we sit in silence. Two tired women, shocked to find themselves here again. We were escorted right up until we boarded the plane. The first feeling at the moment of takeoff is one of incredible, dazzling new freedom. In Miami, there won’t be an armed bodyguard at my side. I’ll be able to walk down the street. It would be bizarre, incongruous to have bodyguards in the world toward which we’re headed. We aren’t movie stars or mafia mistresses. I joke so I don’t have to think. And I let out a crazed laugh when we land in the Miami airport and Jorge, looking uncomfortable, tells us that the authorities have decided we will be accompanied by a bodyguard. Very discreet of course. We can’t take any risks, you understand. We know that certain people want Michèle’s life . . .

We will have to wait until the end of the festival to regain our anonymity in this city where, happily, we are nobody.

Miami

Theater of the Absurd

I haven’t yet seen anything of Miami, beyond the enormous airport which I’ve passed through so often that it gives me the illusion of being in a familiar land. People tell me, Some signs are in Creole now! I smile, act pleasantly surprised, but deep down I think about the pathetic, ironic aspect of this signage. Most monolingual Creole speakers don’t know how to read. I digress. I’m in Miami and I’m dazzled by the freeway where a line of impressive cars stretches out before me, the buildings downtown, the streets where I don’t see a single pedestrian. No one walks in this city. Miami is a car paradise. At the hotel where we’re staying the room is in our hosts’ names. Our names don’t appear anywhere, for security, repeats Jorge. I feel like I’m going to hate this place but I have to smile. They’re so considerate. They want to give us the best.

I remember my first trip after Jean’s murder. It was to the Miami airport, not the city. I was invited to a seminar. Fort Lauderdale, I think. I wandered through the conference rooms of a hotel for four days, not really knowing what I was doing, happy to meet colleagues, unsettled by the fact that people surrounded me like I was gravely ill. An incurable disease, sick from my country’s pain, from all the heaviness around me. I returned to Port-au-Prince more anxious than before. Routine kept me from thinking. Those four days far from the land of the daily struggle had revealed, like the negative of a photograph, the strangeness of the months that followed Jean’s murder. I swore that I wouldn’t leave Haiti anymore. That I would remain immersed in my abnormality so it would continue to feel normal. And yet here we are in downtown Miami. I try to focus on the film festival. A risky exercise, I feel like I’m about to slip into a stupor.

All I remember about the gala is Michèle’s glowing smile, her misty eyes, and her hand in mine. I had the impression that she sensed the moments when I felt like I was drifting and took my hand to keep me from sinking into the depths. I would learn the details the next day. The festival organizers were astounded by the audience’s reception. 1,200 people. The number of viewers for The Agronomist set a record. In the festival’s twenty years of existence, they had never seen such a crowd. The