Cheap fireworks rise into the sky. As we look out at them, I see my father’s eyes. They reflect the emerald eruptions in the night, along with the awe that Jean-Bertrand Aristide is now the President of Haiti.
He found a passion for academia from a young age. His mother spent late nights working at a local library, he would find pearls amid the strings of books. He read Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Marx. He attended college in Port Au Prince, befriending a pantheon of professors. The fall of democracy was something he had always been attracted to. Rome’s demise as its empire bulged. The Weimar Republic and Hitler’s Third Reich. Civil war and the rise of Mussolini. After college he continued his education at MIT, receiving his PhD in history. He was then hired by a college in Port Au Prince, teaching political theory. Becoming a lauded faculty member, he was voted department chair. He then met my Mother, a journalist at the time, at a dinner for a circle of academics. A year later, they were married.
I was born on a warm June day, in Port au Prince, 1980. My childhood was white dolls, hair wound back into tight blond knots. It was children’s books, glimpses of young children growing up in the distant island of Brooklyn with the same colored skin as me. I loved writing poetry about nature, spending hours outside with my father in the summer months. I wrote about the peaks above the capital that impaled the half eyelid of the moon on particular nights. I wrote about the clusters of mango trees just outside the college library, their arms seeming to swim up into the sky. I wrote about goats in the pastures, feeding on the lush greenery in the spring. I wrote about bright parrots and flamingos, dawning their colors like resplendent treasure.
Aristide is inaugurated president when I am eleven. Growing up in the Salesian church, he captured the minds of millions through his sermons. They are broadcasted throughout the country, antagonizing the incumbent president Jean-Claude Duvalier. My father listened to them intently, leaned close to the radio so he could catch the frequency.
Six months later, there is a coup upon him. My mother works for a Haitian newspaper, and several of her colleagues have been kidnapped by gangs amid the chaos. Police forces instruct us to go to a hospital; there is a deep basement with security. We stay underground for four days. Mildew ribbons throughout the walls, thriving in the damp, stagnant air.