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 have 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 received Haiti its independence from France in 1803.

When Max and I found we have been pregnant, we’d usually discuss of taking our child to Haiti, in hopes that she’d come to cherish her personal reminiscences 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 1,000,000 have 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 previous, we took her again to Haiti, and this time stayed for every week in a great-aunt’s dwelling 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 backwards and forwards 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 recent 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, throughout the 14-year dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and had not been again for many years. They held on to each damaging information story they heard of their tight-knit Brooklyn neighborhood. As a Black American with no ties to a selected nation inside the African diaspora, I didn’t perceive the resistance. I lastly requested Max why his mom and aunts have been so disdainful. He stated, “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 via 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 dwelling in Brooklyn. Up first: he’s insisted that she should be taught to correctly eat a mango. At some point I got here dwelling with a Complete Meals container filled with sliced mangoes. Our baby and I have 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 presupposed to tear into the flesh on the prime 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 probably the most genuine manner we preserve our ties to Haiti sturdy 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 number of the Haitian Troubadours, Boukman Eksperyans, Alan Cavé, and Konpa Kreyol. 

And after 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 dwelling: Rebèl Restaurant & Bar, on the Decrease East Facet; 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 dwelling 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 pals 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 woman).

We knew our efforts have 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 shiny 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 telephone, however Jillian had already rung the bell to alert the bus driver that we wished the following 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 satisfaction. “She’s turning into a Caribbean woman.” 

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