One of the things I have done, as my time has been winding down here, is to teach a creative writing course with Frank Baez and Erica Martinez. Frank is a Dominican writer who just won the National Poetry Prize (while we were teaching the course) and Erika is a Dominican-American writer who is also here on a Fulbright scholarship. We worked with the course participants to include their environment in their writing by having them go to a spot in the city and take notes to integrate into their writing. Then we did workshops on writing poetry, essays and fiction. The writers decided how to develop their material and we did work with revision and editing. The result is this literary map of Santo Domingo. To view the map, click on the link listed under blogspots on the left hand side of this blog. This is all in Spanish, but I think even if you do not read that language, you can get an idea of how the project worked. Enjoy.
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&source=embed&msa=0&msid=116423553606465302610.00046b9ba62a1c46cfd5d&ll=18.479014,-69.890784&spn=0.114944,0.248566&z=12
I haven’t written in a while, partly because I was completing the poetry challenge for the month of April, but partly because things have become more normal for me here. When a friend from New Hampshire visited in February, I saw the difference. “Wow!” she exclaimed, “Did you see that? Three people on a motorcycle!” or “He just ran a red light” or “There’s someone begging on that corner” or “Someone came up to me asking for money”
We see up to five people on motorcycles, including babies riding on their mother’s hips, and helmets are extremely rare. The same is true for crazy people in the streets—except for the one who slapped me across the face (that was memorable), beggars, shoeshine boys, chiriperos, even rats. I am complaining about the lack of water, but it doesn’t surprise me or catch my attention so much any more. I am no longer experiencing the assault on the senses that one experiences when one moves to a new place. There are things I simply no longer notice in the same conscious way.
This is as it needs to be and as it should be. One cannot go through life all the time like a wide-eyed tourist. For one thing, it’s exhausting. It means a constant processing of sensory input at a high level. Nothing enters automatically. Everything has to be processed, and when you add a non-native language to that, it can be overwhelming.
Last night I started co-teaching a creative writing class in Spanish. I don’t quite know how I ended up doing this. The original idea was that I would take the class as a student and simultaneously mentor the teachers, but somehow I ended up co-teaching. I was definitely out of my comfort zone. My friends find this hard to understand because I have been teaching classes in Spanish for a while, but creative writing is a whole other level. They are producing literature, and I have to go very slowly reading literature in Spanish. I find that my timing is off with the exercises because I write more slowly than I normally would in English. Teaching writing when one is at a severe linguistic disadvantage is not something for the faint hearted.
In one sense, however, I have an advantage. We are sending our students out to various parts of the city to make observations, collecting sensory data. Later, we will use these observations to create pieces of writing, which we will use, in turn, to make a literary map of the city of Santo Domingo. The advantage I have is that I am not so far from having “ojos del extranjero” or “stranger’s eyes”. It is easier for me to make the familiar strange because it wasn’t very long ago that it wasn’t familiar at all, and I still carry around in my head that other Meg who came here twenty years ago not speaking the language, or even the earlier Meg who grew up in a small town in New Hampshire where she didn’t see a nonwhite person until she was ten years old—and that person was a summer tourist.
While I don’t recommend such a provincial upbringing, the experience of having lived in a world that is so utterly “other” can be a plus for a writer. I only need to shift my perceptions and call up that person to whom everything here was strange, and look at the world again with stranger’s eyes.
There are things I love about this country, but the level of bureaucracy is not one of them. At first glance, this would seem to be a country with no rules. No one seems to take anything terribly seriously. People habitually arrive late; customer service is subpar, and traffic laws? When I first came here, I thought there were none. Later I learned that no one follows them even though they do exist.
For this reason, I find it puzzling that while no one seems to take anything very seriously, when it comes to paper work, people become completely rigid and inflexible. Not that everything really has to be done by the letter, but it has to appear to be done by the letter. As long as it has an official seal and stamp, everyone is happy. On most occasions, in fact, documents that were completely faked were accepted much more easily than legitimate documents. We got here a week before school started and spent that week chasing paper. I had gathered most of the required documents prior to leaving New Hampshire, but they all had to be officially translated (never mind that this is an English speaking school), certified and legalized (even though they were original documents). Then we had to get appointments with doctors to have an eye exam, a physical, and a dental exam. Never mind that we had gone through quite rigorous medical screening before we left New Hampshire as part of the procedure for Fulbright. None of this is easy to get here, especially if one does not have a car. Finally I gave up and got my ex-brother in law to get some of the documents for me. Faked ophthalmologist certificates were delivered with some creative spellings of my children’s names. These were accepted without question.
Getting Sam into the university was a similar nightmare. I don’t know how many times in the process it was seriously suggested to me that I needed to fly to New York to the Dominican Consulate to get papers legalized. Never trust that anyone will see the absurdity in anything when it comes to bureaucracy. After having medical records sent from New Hampshire that were rejected on some technicality or other, I found myself in the absurd position of translating a form to a Dominican doctor in a government office without Sam present. Part of this involved me reading questions off like heart rate? and filling in the numbers he gave me for a person he had never seen. On another occasion, we went to the emergency room to pay someone off to get a medical certificate. The first thing they asked me was whether I wanted the certificate to say he was healthy or unhealthy. All of this is accepted without question.
I had a feeling that renewing Sam’s Dominican passport was not going to be easy, but I set off for the passport office anyway. First someone determined that he was a naturalized citizen, which he was not, but that got us off down a fatally wrong path. I had his old passport, his birth certificate and an official translation, and the required photos. Not nearly enough. First we were sent to the Junta Central Electoral to have the document “transcribed”. Then supposedly we were going to be able to get it legalized. I thought this sounded like a bad idea, but Sam wanted to persevere, so off we went. When we got to the JCE, we were handed another whole set of requirements. The first of which involved another visit to New York to get the document legalized, but then it would need to be legalized again once we got back to Santo Domingo. The translation would also have to be legalized, even though it was done by an official translator, and then we needed his Dominican father’s cedula and passport, neither of which he has used for 18 years, so surely they are expired as well. Sam and I just looked at each other right there in the office and laughed, nodding to the officious woman as if to say, “Sure, we’ll do all that. No problem.” The thing is we weren’t getting a new passport; we were renewing an expired one. Clearly no one considered that we had to go through all of this to get the passport the first time around.
So we let it go. Sam has a US passport and that will just have to be good enough. But there is a dark and terrible side to all of this. Many people just don’t bother even though they don’t have any other choice. My friend’s new grandchild, who some of you may have seen in my facebook pictures, doesn’t legally exist. Neither does her mother. Her mother’s birth, even though she is Dominican and born to Dominican parents, was never registered. Because she doesn’t have a birth certificate, she was never allowed to go to school. She does not know how to read and write. Because she has no papers, she cannot register her child. The child’s father is trying to figure out how he can register his daughter when she was born to a mother who doesn’t legally exist. This situation is common for Haitian immigrants who are defined by the Dominican government as “in transit” even though they might have lived here for decades. When they try to register, they are either told to go back to Haiti (even if they have never been there) or are given the same kind of crazy run around of shifting requirements that we were. This situation is untenable. It’s like entering into a nightmare black hole of endless requirements. Lives get sucked into that hole and lost.
On my third new Haitian morning, I sat on the porch of the mission house and clinic where I was staying listening to the cacophony of rooster calls and other animal noises. Niki, the student in the Ohio State group, mistook a cow lowing for a cell phone ring, which is some kind of statement about how far our lives are from this Haitian countryside. Haitian mornings are noisy—the ubiquitous roosters of course, but also stray dogs and hooting birds, and voices raised in song. The line forms for the clinic hours before it opens, and often people sing.
Some things are constant, the mango trees here, like the ones outside my apartment building are starting to bow with their heavy fruit. Soon it will be ripe and we will cover ourselves in sticky mango juice on both sides of the border when we try to eat them. But so much is different. It is as if there were ocean between us and this were a separate island, but of course we are not.
I stayed in the outskirts of the city in Petionville my first night in a mission house there, with Cheryl, the director of the project, and Niki in a dorm style room. Cheryl is also a writing project director, and the person I came to see. We didn’t know each other all that well before the trip. We had only met once, at the writing project annual review in Berkley about a month before.
We moved out to the countryside to this rural clinic the next day in order to visit the schools. The first school we visited is heavily patronized by the mission and thus better supplied than most. They have arranged for children to receive a meal there so they won’t be hungry and can learn better. There were as many as 30 children in the preschool rooms, but only 9 children in the highest class, the sixth grade. Most of the 6th graders were overage because they can’t always attend school and sometimes miss years and get behind. After sixth grade, there is nothing further in terms of education in this area. Children were reviewing for exams while we were there. I was happy to be able to follow the lessons in Kreyol.
Jean Marc, one of the translators, told me that there were more boys than girls in the school because families felt it was more important for boys to be educated so they would have a better chance of supporting a family. He also told me that children walk miles to be able to attend the school, even the little preschoolers. Most of the teachers have little more than a sixth grade education themselves.
Later, we talked more with Jean Marc, Cheryl and I. He talked about what he had seen of the project and where the problems were—there were many. He talked about his own role, and how he identified with the people in the schools because he was a Haitian, and what they did to or for them, they did to him as well. In the course of it all, he said, “God made me a Haitian—I don’t even know why—He knows why.”
And who does know why for any of it? Why was I born in a small town in New Hampshire, and what am I doing here on the mission porch talking about development with Cheryl and Jean Marc? It is comforting to believe in some sort of divine plan, and I do feel a sense of rightness about it: that this is exactly where I should be and that this is the work that was given me to do. But I am leery of that as well. People have marched off to all sorts of foolish and destructive adventures (like the crusades—and there are plenty of more contemporary examples) believing God is on their side and it’s all part of some divine plan. That may be too simple an answer.
Speaking of manifest destiny, it’s all too easy for educated, well-nourished Americans to swoop down here in planes and travel to these rural schools and find them wanting. Cheryl shared some of her inquietudes about the project itself and compared it to the treatment of black people in the states a hundred years ago. Colonialism takes different forms now, but it lives on. As I mentioned in my last post: “El que tiene dinero…”
In order to catch the bus back to Santo Domingo in the morning, I rode back to the mission house in the city for my last night. Roberta, one of the missionaries who run the clinic, wove in and out of traffic and the masses of people moving in the streets. It’s like a huge sea of humanity moving through the crowded, dirty streets, yet everyone’s clothing is so clean and well pressed. Niki started talking about how the slave ship that brought her ancestors to this hemisphere had landed in Virginia and her people had moved to West Virginia and then into Ohio. She marveled that if that ship had docked in Port au Prince instead, she could be one of those people moving in that street. She was glad that chance took them to Virginia. The point being: “Tout moun se moun”—Every person is a person, and Jean Marc might wish he’d been dealt a better hand as well.
But Jean Marc also talked about the Tap taps. Tap taps are flatbed trucks with roofs constructed over them and bench seats inside. The streets are thick with them—tap taps and UN Peacekeepers, but that is another story. They operate in a manner similar to the públicos in Santo Domingo. You hail them, get in, pay a small fee and when you want to get out you tap the sides and the driver stops to let you out—hence “tap tap.” They are practical and serviceable, but they are also gloriously beautiful. Every one is painted and decorated in bright colors with different sayings. They are covered in design and sometimes have little signs hand painted on their roofs as well. I heard that there is a tap tap in Port au Prince which sports a portrait of Barack Obama. Jean Marc noted that tap taps are found nowhere else in the world, and that Haitians created them because they love bright colors. There is a metaphor somewhere in that as well.
The first question everyone asked me when they learned I planned to go to Haiti was, “Who are you going with?” When I told them I was going alone, a look of horror crossed their faces, followed by admonitions to be careful and lists of things I should not do, which included just about everything. Their fears were not even slightly allayed by the fact that I was meeting someone over there and joining a university trip.
I had been studying Kreyol a bit in preparation for my trip, which one of my friends told me was “not even a language.” Another expatriate told me she saw no reason for visiting such a dirty, third world country. I am not saying that I didn’t have some trepidation about crossing the border into a place with serious travel warnings posted and UN Peacekeepers patrolling in white jeeps, but something else seemed to be operating here beyond these rational fears.
There is the physical presence of Haiti, which occupies the western third of our island, but there is also another Haiti which is more powerful in our imagination. Haiti represents everything dark and strange, our night terrors. Dominican parents have been known to tell their children that if they aren’t careful, Haitians will carry them off in the night. They joke about not being able to see them in the dark. It is this latter darker Haiti of our imaginations which is evoked when I told people I was going to Haiti.
On the way out of Santo Domingo, our bus followed a small guagua with the following message written on its back window: “El que tiene dinero piensa que él que no lo tiene no vale nada.” (Those who have money think that those who don’t are worth nothing.) It seemed an eerily appropriate message that only grew in meaning over the course of the trip.
I was actually more terrified by the political border than by Haiti itself. I didn’t like leaving my children on one side of it and crossing to the other. The border is a dusty, desolate outpost with a huge wall and gate on the Dominican side. The bus company takes all of our passports when we board the bus. They pay the taxes that we have paid in advance (in dollars, oddly) to the appropriate officials. They handed back the Haitian passports first and then the Dominican and the few of us who were neither waited while our passports were checked in a special room. Once we had been checked through the Dominican side, we were let out of the gate into a no man’s border land where a market thrives. People trade goods in little market stalls and money changers approach us asking if we want to trade pesos for gourds.
Once we entered the Haitian immigration station, no one spoke Spanish anymore and my Kreyol was not good enough to allow me to understand much, but I was checked through. I had crossed the border at Jimani and rode along the shore of a salt water lake called Etang Saumatre. The dirt road bordered a cliff and frequently the lake water washed over it.
At first the differences aren’t so apparent. The land seems drier, and the houses less finished in their construction. At first you don’t notice the lack of infrastructure, or the abandoned nature of the place. That comes later.
When I visited a class this morning, the teacher asked the students to write about the game. No one asked which game she was referring to. Here in the Dominican Republic, there was only one game last night—the world baseball classic. This event, held every four years, pits teams of different nationalities against each other. The Dominican team entered favored to win, but lost their first game to the Netherlands. After crushing Panama, they were facing the team from the Netherlands again, and if they were to lose this game, they would be eliminated from the competition.
When I got back to my house at about 8:00 last night, Marc was watching the game. When I asked him how it was going, he said, “Our pitching is impeccable, but our batting is horrible.” The score was tied at 0-0 going into the bottom of the 8th inning. As the game moved into extra innings, Sam and I joined him in front of the television. We groaned in disappointment when the Dominican team stayed scoreless in the 10th and whooped with joy when the Dominican team finally scored in the 11th. We switched off the television in disgust when the Netherlands answered with a run in the bottom of the inning. Like many, many others, we were in a dark mood over breakfast.
What struck me about this was not so much the loss itself as what it revealed about our loyalties. There was no question in our minds as we watched the game that this was our team—you could hear it in our pronouns: our team, our pitching… I think if the Dominicans had been facing the US team, we would still have been rooting for them.
It’s odd how team loyalties can reflect stronger, more fundamental aspects of identity. People sometimes live in a new place for decades still following their old hometown team. Does this reflect some failure to shift other, deeper identities?
When we first arrived here, the Beijing Olympics was on television every day. I remember how annoyed we were that the television coverage focused only on the Dominican team. We could barely tell how the United States was doing.
Watching the end of the baseball season here, where one major league game a night is televised, we were frustrated because we wanted to see the Red Sox games, but coverage focused on the games that featured Dominican players. If Pedro Martinez was pitching, we could forget about any chance of seeing the Red Sox.
But this time around, no one complained about watching only the Dominican team in the baseball classic. No one even wondered how the United States team was doing. It’s not that we weren’t interested or didn’t care, but it wasn’t that pressing. Our loyalties had undergone some kind of subtle shift.
When we first came here, my children would comment on Dominican behavior in wide, general terms. (My favorite was Max’s quote after riding in a public car: “Dominicans have no concept of personal space.”) I hear these comments less and less. We still feel our difference, and I, at least, will never be taken for Dominican, but we do feel more a part of this place—and that is reflected in how we too feel depressed and chagrined this morning that the Dominican baseball team—the Dominican team—from the country of baseball where major league scouts set up special recruiting camps—was eliminated by the Netherlands (!) in the World Baseball Classic.
I borrowed a couple of travel guides from some friends yesterday. This is not a genre of writing I am overly familiar with. A friend of mine is coming down here and I was deputized to make travel arrangements. I have never actually used a travel guide, but the web presence here isn’t great and I was getting frustrated. They were informative, if out of date in terms of price, but something about them troubled me. First it was the pictures: “Colorful commerce in Santo Domingo’s Zona Colonial” or “Women run a small sundries shop on Santo Domingo’s Calle Durarte.” This last particularly disturbed me, with the two women posing beside the cart from which they sell gum, cigarettes, and packages of crackers. One of them is smiling for the camera and the other looks quite grim, almost as if she were aware of how the camera might portray her.
With this disquiet forming within me, I happened to have lunch with a woman who had written several of these travel guides. She brought them with her to show me. She described doing the research for the book, traveling all over the island by guagua and motoconcho. But then she told me something odd. She said that she had come to regret writing the travel guides because she had come to believe that it was better to keep tourists away from the culture, behind the walls of secluded resort communities and she was sorry she had written books that would make it easier for them to come out. She described how Hawaii protects its islands by barring tourists from many of them and walling them off in tourist compounds. “I used to think that was horrible,” she told me, “But now I think they had the right idea.”
I pressed her for examples of what she meant. She told me about “Safari buses” (we could start with the name, I remarked) that take tourists out and how they throw candy from the windows of the buses at the children who eagerly pick it up. It’s easy to see how this is offensive on many levels—ugly, people here would say. Or the remark an American student of one of my friends made about how she wasn’t going to have children because the women in countries like this would have them for her and she could adopt them. It’s easy to see how repulsive these things are. But what about the tourists who try to be sensitive? What about the ones who want to learn? Who engage in conversation with the people? Who travel in public transportation?
Here’s another quote from the guidebook: “Motoconchos are available all hours to get you out to remote locations for less than 20 cents US. These guys work really hard because they need to make payments on their bikes or have them repossessed.” So their hard life is your good fortune I guess. Maybe you can even feel virtuous as you pass them the equivalent of 20 cents.
I have always felt the way my friend said she used to feel—that it was better for everyone if the tourists actually saw some of the country they were visiting, if they came to know something of the culture. But now I am wondering if she is right. Is there any way that the gaze of the tourist can be anything more than demeaning? Is it inevitable that the fact of the privilege that gives one the right to gaze and makes the other the object of that look dooms any chance of the relationship rising above exoticizing the culture?
The question for me crystallizes in the image of those women on the Calle Duarte. Which one knows better—the one who smiles for the camera, or the one who looks suspicious of the photographer’s intentions? The tourist can look, but will the object of that gaze ever be seen?
Yesterday, I attended a dinner hosted by the Public Affairs Division of the United States Embassy for all of the Fulbright scholars and students currently in the country. We were supposed to bring our “Dominican partners” to the luncheon. I was dreading the occasion, without really knowing why. On the one hand I think I felt responsible to demonstrate that I was accomplishing something here, but on the other hand, I feel more as if I am again caught in a liminal space. The first time I lived here, I felt a bit as if I were posing as an insider. I lived as a Dominican and was married to a Dominican. I presented myself to the Peace Corps Volunteers I worked with as some kind of insider, and as the only non-Dominican member of the Spanish department, I occupied an interesting space. This time around, in contrast, I feel as if I am posing as an outsider. Both the other Fulbright scholar and I attended the Juan Luis Guerra concert last Saturday, but while she attended because she wants to have “every cultural experience she can,” I attended because I have been a fan of the music for 20 years. So I behave in somewhat similar ways, but with me it’s an act. When people ask me how long I have been here, it’s hard to answer—do I talk about the time I was here before? Have I been here 6 months—or four years with a 20 year gap? I never seem to fit neatly into any simple category.
Honestly, perhaps I like the liminality and the complexity because I seem to seek it out in many aspects of my life. Contrast that with the people from the embassy. I learned at the luncheon that what makes them so insufferable to me is part of the design of the position. Embassy personnel only stay at a “posting” for a maximum of three years. They are moved around so that they will not adopt the perspective of the countries they live in. Allowing them a longer stay in a country would “destroy their objectivity.” I question so many of the assumptions here. First, I don’t think that the outsider perspective is by definition more objective because it is not a neutral position. This is like taking whiteness as neutral and objective and blackness as “ethnic”, “racial” or in a real perversion of the language, “diverse.” To suppose that longer stays in the country would cause embassy personnel to lose their objectivity presupposes that they had any to lose in the first place.
The other assumption I question is the idea that when one enters into a new cultural perspective, one replaces the perspective one already had. The Dominican perspective I have adopted doesn’t erase my North American one. I am capable of holding both perspectives in my mind at the same time—a sort of duality of consciousness that I could only see as an advantage in dealing with other cultures. Why would you not want your people to be capable of understanding things from a different perspective? Only, I would guess, if you want to keep them unquestioning of your foreign policy initiatives. Granted, this duality of consciousness can be lonely—but a sort of “constructive marginality” (to quote Milton Bennett).
So who are the insiders and who are the outsiders, and where the hell do I fit in all this? I feel as if, in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the luncheon was not so much about inclusion as about drawing lines between “our” beneficence and “their” cooperation. Language helps to draw those lines. Why was the main conversation in English, and why was it assumed that everyone at the table was fluent in that language? Could it be that it is really about who gets to speak and who will have the linguistic advantage? As always, those with the most power set the tone and the rest goes subaltern, like the life beneath the surface of supposedly tranquil waters.
So somehow, as always, I end up feeling a bit like a fake and not knowing where I belong. I think it’s odd that most of the “cultural experiences” that spark this writing for me arise out of contact with people from my own country. Not all of course: the other Fulbright scholar and the two students and I had to go through a bit of decompression together after the dinner, laughing at what our faces had and hadn’t revealed. I wonder if the others ever feel caught in some space between inside and outside as well. Ah, borders– they have the capacity to divide, but have become the space where I live.
I have had a lot of occasion to think about language while I have been here. I came here before under very different circumstances. I didn’t have an established end point to my stay. I also didn’t speak Spanish, but except for the English classes I taught, I had no occasion to speak my native language and had no contact with anyone who spoke it. It was a long lonely time. Sometimes I felt as if I lived in a world of total silence, where my thoughts echoed in my head with no one to answer them. I eventually got work supervising teachers in a Spanish language training program, so I was speaking, living and breathing Spanish.
The world was different then as well. We didn’t have email or internet readily available and the telephone was too expensive to use except for emergencies. The mail service wasn’t reliable, so I ended up almost completely cut off from my former life. It was very hard, harder than I wanted to admit at the time.
This time has been different in many ways. While my Spanish is sufficient for almost any eventuality, I am here as the single mother of children who were raised speaking English. As we have been communicating in English for all of their lives, they are not about to switch over to Spanish at home, even though they are learning it and can get by in their lives. The world has also changed. I don’t feel cut off from anything about life in my country. I can listen to New Hampshire public radio on my computer in the morning and almost fool myself into thinking I never left (until I hear the weather). I can be in instant contact with friends at home and friends in other countries as well. All of this requires a great deal of language switching. At first I was lamenting the fact that this time around, I will not have the purity of language experience I had the first time, but I am coming to see that differently as well.
I have gotten to the point where I can turn on a linguistic dime. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. I often find myself racing along towards the end of a sentence mentally conjugating a verb I will need at the end into its subjunctive form. And then there is the tongue that betrays me, suddenly flattening a vowel, refusing to roll an r, or substituting one sound for another at a crucial moment. When I am speaking Spanish, especially in formal situations, I speak more slowly, more carefully than I do in English.
A reverse effect can occur as well, when I have to speak English to those who strain to understand it, or when the words come to me in Spanish and I have to fight them back, seek out their equivalents, or shut off a part of my brain.
I wonder if anyone can truly know me, all of me, if they can only know me in one language. I expressed this to Sam, and he said that my essential self existed in English and the Spanish self was an add-on. I had to think about what he said. It is certainly true that there is a depth to the mother tongue hard to approach in another, and when we reach certain heights of emotion we revert to it.
Yesterday, we were visiting friends who live on the fifth (and top) floor of a government housing project. Against my better judgment and my protests, we went up to the flat rooftop above the house. I won’t say it wasn’t stunning to sit up there and watch the sunset over the rooftops of the city, but at the same time it was terrifying to be up there with my three children knowing that if any of us went over the completely unprotected edge, it was certain death.
As I said, I did not get up there without protest. In order to get to the roof, one had to climb up a security gate on one of the apartments and shimmy under an overhang onto the flat roof surface. The problem was that this overhang was located at the edge of a five storey drop to a concrete patio below. And when I cried out my protests about not wanting to attempt it and wanting to just get down, I did it in my mother tongue, despite the fact that most of the people there did not understand me.
So yes, there is an emotional core that reverts to the language of our families and our homes, but I have lived enough of my life in Spanish and created enough friendships with people who have rarely or never heard me speak English, that I can’t negate that and accept Sam’s premise that they don’t really, or can’t really know the core of me because of the language.
People who have spent time living in another culture often gravitate to each other. It doesn’t matter so much the particular cultures as the experience of having moved between cultures. At this point, I am most comfortable with the people I know who can move back and forth between languages with me. I like the ones who switch languages mid sentence or mid thought, especially if perfection is not expected in either tongue. It’s a way of making manifest the fact that languages embody different ways of looking at the world. We can pose in one perspective or another as we embody it in words.
Spanglish is a living language too, a language of the borderlands between cultures whether these are physical borders or margins within the soul. I have come to think of borders, not as the lines that divide us, but as places to occupy, to live, as lively spaces where culture and language is created. And now that I am able to live this richness, I am loathe to give it up.
I don’t know how it happened that I stumbled into a conversation with one of my dearest friends here about the Haitian question yesterday. She told me that people from the United States “think Dominicans just don’t want to help the Haitians, but they don’t understand the past, the history, and how it influences the present.” Her opening remark was intriguing enough to lure me in, despite my misgivings about touching on this subject. I am certain that there are many things I don’t understand, and I have a healthy respect for the danger of looking at things ahistorically. I listened hard, trying to open my mind to hear her.
As far as the history, I know the historical facts, at least. I know how Haiti occupied the Dominican side of the island three times, and that the final 22-year occupation ending in 1844 is said to have left an indelible mark on Dominican culture. I know that the Independence Day we celebrate on the 27th of February is independence from Haiti and not from Spain. I presume this is the history that my friend wants me to remember. But does she also want me to remember that during their rule, the Haitians abolished slavery here, and that they were (at least at first) regarded as an improvement over the Spanish? Or that after independence, certain Afro-Dominicans took up arms fearing that when the Haitians left slavery would be reestablished? And would she have me consider the racist legacy of Trujillo, the massacre of 15,000 to 30,000 dark-skinned people (accounts differ) living along the border in 1937, or the way he would powder his skin to appear whiter, or the incentives for European immigration to keep the population lighter? Does she want me to remember the treatment of the Haitians in the bateyes? Or Balaguer’s openly racist rhetoric? Or even more recent history, such as the total destruction (to ashes) of ten houses occupied by Haitians in Puerto Plata less than a month ago in reprisal for the death of a Dominican driver, supposedly at the hands of three Haitians, who were in police custody at the time of the attacks?
This last she alludes to, deploring such acts of violence, but not mentioning the sentiment that led to them. She acknowledges the racism of the Trujillo era, and condemns it. She remembers some of it first hand. She was nineteen years old when Trujillo was assassinated. She was educated in schools with textbooks approved by the regime. So while she deplores the overt racism, she also tells me that the two countries that share this island are totally different, with distinct language, customs, histories and ways of life. The island, the land itself, is the only thing they share, she tells me, and they have never shared that well. Conflict, to her, as to many others who have looked at the relationship between these two nations, would seem inevitable.
One day when I was sitting near my 14-year old son Max as he did his homework, he looked up and said he had been thinking about how much alike the Dominican Republic and Haiti were. I drew in my breath involuntarily in fear for him. “Them’s fighting words,” I said. He laughed. “I know. I would get so beat up if I said that to any of my Dominican friends.” He looked up again from his homework, “But it’s true,” he said. “They were both colonies. They both imported slaves. They both have been invaded by the United States and they both have suffered under brutal dictators. They really have a lot of common interest. If only they could see that.” But instead, he notes, the students in his class show their disrespect for their Haitian French teacher through passing notes consisting of racist caricatures of him that Max identifies as reminiscent of the Jim Crow vaudeville representations of African Americans in the United States. And so it goes. What do these Dominican ninth graders understand about that history?
What strikes me about what my friend tells me is that it is the power of the idea of cultural, racial and historical difference, the belief in it as an immutable fact, at least on this side of the island, that may be the most destructive force of all. This idea is so widely accepted as a given by many Dominicans that it blinds them to the similarities and the common interests that Max perceives.
She goes on to tell me that the state run hospitals are crowded with Haitian women giving birth. She implies that this is so their babies will be Dominican, although she notes that this runs counter to the laws here. She says there are so many Haitian women in the public clinics that the Dominicans are forced to seek out the cheaper private ones, where they need to give birth and leave right away if the birth is normal, the next day in case of a Cesarean. Because, she tells me, no Dominican would lie down on a bed where a Haitian had been.
I can detect no trace of irony in her voice. I wait, but she doesn’t clarify what she meant. I am left to wonder if she herself would refuse to lie down. The story itself echoes the xenophobic rhetoric I often hear in regard to Mexican and Hispanic immigration in the United States. “They” are taking over. They come here to breed.
It would be easy to dismiss what Max has seen in his classmates, and what my friend tells me, as racism, which of course it is. Yet you have to look at that in context too. Racism is, as Beverly Tatum notes, like smog in the air we breathe whether on the streets of Santo Domingo or the mountains of New Hampshire. Dominicans didn’t invent racism, even if their version of that particular “powerful illusion” is distinct.
The supposed “whiteness” of the Dominican people was used in the years following its independence to make a case to Americans that the country should be formally recognized. Trujillo’s campaign to be perceived by the United States and other Western/European powers as a “white country” makes sense when you consider that these countries are more likely to be sympathetic to those whom they perceive to be like themselves. Part of Dominican “whiteness” is an identification with American and European cultures which they (probably rightly) perceive will benefit them in substantial and real ways. So perhaps how Dominicans see themselves racially is influenced in no small way with how they are seen by powerful nations with whom they have shared a relationship of economic and political dependence. Yet despite that, Dominicans have resisted the polarization of black and white that leads most of the mainstream media in the United States to classify Obama unambiguously as the first “African American president” without acknowledging the interesting mix of racial and cultural backgrounds that has helped to form his ability to communicate so well with so many. Dominicans classify their skin color with many, many words—cinnamon, caramel, Indian… The only word they do not use is black. Black is reserved for Haitians.
Through two occupations in the twentieth century, Dominicans had to struggle against the binary racial definitions of the United States. My Dominican ex-husband used to speak of how he felt as if he had been rendered invisible when he came to study in the United States. He suddenly found himself to be perceived as black without regard for the complexities of his heritage. On a larger scale, Dominicans, especially those who have immigrated to the United States, have had to struggle with balancing their own more nuanced definitions of skin color and racial identity against “one-drop” assumptions. Even though Trujillo and later Balaguer were avowed racists, their racism was often framed as nationalism, leading Dominicans to identify black with Haitian, And while the Africanness of their heritage was denied, Dominicans of all shades tend to identify themselves as mixed.
Perhaps the best glimpse at the future can be seen in the young man I met at a poetry reading in a bar just before Christmas. He was a university student in New York, of Dominican heritage, but born and raised in Brooklyn. He intended to move to the island after he graduated. He explained to me that it was his best chance to do something with his life, that there he was just a ghetto kid, but here he had family connections, he could make a difference. At the same time, he told me, he was sometimes confused about being Dominican, because he wasn’t raised on the island and identified more with the hip hop culture of the city. When he found out I was a writer, he pulled out a book called Growing up Hip Hop which he highly recommended. He told me he identified himself as “ghetto”. But he acknowledged that he was, after all, Dominican in an essential way.
Perhaps all of this history is about story, the ones we tell ourselves and the ones we believe, and perhaps his confusion about being Dominican grows out of his identification with a culture that is consciously black in a way this one is not.
So while it’s necessary and important to think about problems like this in the abstract, to not ignore, as my friend suggests, the historical context, I keep noticing the Haitian presence woven into the fabric of our daily life, adding depth and substance and reminding us of all of the history we share. Perhaps we can tell stories that will help us to write a new history that will better benefit us all.
