Please pardon this interruption of your valuable time. The inviting smile, that you so graciously wear, encouraged me to contact you. I hardly know you, though I have followed you for the past six years. You, however, know me very well. You know my likes and dislikes. You know my past and present. You know my deepest unspoken thoughts. You also know my family: my mother, my brothers and sisters, my cousins, my uncles, and even the church couple from Léogane, or Jacmel, or Cap-Haitien.

It came to my attention that you’ve been telling the world about our lives.
For that, I want to thank you.

We first met in 1998, through Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club series. In your first novel, “Breath, Eyes, and Memory,” I recognized the story of my sisters and my cousins. In 1995, you published the stories that my mother and my uncles told me, in your collection of stories, “Krik? Krak!” though I don’t remember you when I was growing up in Port-au-Prince. As I started to research my history and ancestry, you released “The Farming of Bones,” in 1999. A couple of years later, you assembled and presented to the world my life stories in “the butterfly’s way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States.”

In your latest novel, “The Dew Breaker,” you managed to bring a sense of sympathy to one of Haiti’s most perplexing figures, the macoute. At a time, when I search for understanding of my people’s actions, you bring sense to what seems a senseless situation. As you intertwined the patches of stories into a quilt of a novel, you touched on feelings that I thought were not part of me. I now understand the stories my “kitchen poet” mother used to tell me on Saturday mornings. I now understand the quiet couple at my church that I only get to see on Sundays. They are noticeably absent at any other Haitian event. Your perception of our people and our culture, especially in this culturally absorbing world called America, keeps us from melting into the pot.

I want to thank you, not because the Washington Post calls you an “emerging American literary force,” not for the fact that you are a celebrity judge at the Cannes Film Festival, but because you are the last bridge standing over the ever growing ocean separating the dyaspora and our Ayiti cheri. My refugee face is well known; it can be found periodically on the six o’clock news, or on too many charity fundraising brochures, but my voice is rarely heard. I thank you for articulating our story, our way, in our words. I thank you for the unapologetic way that you love me and the culture I try to represent. I thank you for holding up the mirror so I can really love who I am, where I live, and where I was born.

Edwidge, I thank you very much!
Mèsi anpil, anpil!

Dyaspora, U.S.A.
© gmathurin