Trip of the Tongue (31 page)

Mr. Mapou held out hope, however, that soon the language would not need so much help. He told me that two of his daughters, both doctors in New York City, call him regularly to ask for help with Haitian Creole. “How do I say this?” they ask. And every time he laughs and says they should have listened when he was trying to teach them as children. Then he made an interesting observation. As the Haitian community in the United States becomes ever larger and more influential, many Haitians who abandoned the language in the past now have reason to return to it. Mr. Mapou called this phenomenon “slow-cooking the language.”

Many months later, a friend of mine asked me if creole languages had ever been able to successfully combat the perception that they are corrupt or less sophisticated versions of the superstratum. The first language that came to mind was Haitian Creole, a language that is supported by a lengthy literary tradition and a language that has managed to acquire a measure of political consequence. In 1987, due in no small part to efforts of men and women like Jan Mapou, Haitian Creole was made an official language of Haiti, the first time a creole language in the Caribbean was granted such status.

However, this has not changed the fact that French continues to be the language of Haiti's political, economic, and social elite. This serves as a reminder that majority rule is not the sole determinant of linguistic prestige. Only 7 percent of the country's population is bilingual in French, and yet throughout the island nation there is still the idea that Haitian Creole is a coarse, simple tongue. As New York University's Bambi B. Schieffelin and Rachelle Charlier Doucet write, “Many educated middle-class Haitians, members of the petite-bourgeoisie, as well as Haitian elites, view [Haitian Creole] as a simplified form of French at best. Many claim it is not a real language at all, but a mixture of languages without a grammar.” Numerical force is, ultimately, no match for political and economic power. These, more so than demographics, are the determinants of perception and prestige.

This observation may be of theoretical use, but as I continued to explore Miami I found it to be of limited practical value. Though I was convinced that the same rules that applied in Haiti should also apply in the United States—and, indeed, the history of Gullah seemed to support that contention—I found Miami's linguistic and political environment to be almost impossibly complicated. There were so many opposing forces that I found myself hopelessly confused about what “power” would even look like here. I was reminded of my brief stint in graduate school, when I struggled to find ways to operationalize the variables I was most interested in, and my professors informed me archly that history is just “a mediocre data source.” People so rarely operate according to the neat little equations I would like them to.

Miami itself is a recalcitrant beast of a city, a place more suited to those looking for questions than those looking for answers. It reminded me, unrelentingly, of all the things I didn't know. From the moment I got there I was overwhelmed with facts and issues that I'd somehow managed to be blind to. Some of this was trivial, mind you—such as the fact that Miami Beach is actually an island on the other side of Biscayne Bay. But most of it wasn't.

Particularly significant were the things I learned about U.S. immigration policy.

Given Miami's geographical location, it is in addition to being a major center of trade also a frequent port of entry and final destination for immigrants from Central and South America and the Caribbean. It would be easy to characterize Miami's immigrant population in broad terms, as largely “Latinos” or “Hispanics” or “Spanish-speakers,” but there are considerable differences between the city's immigrant communities, something I discovered firsthand when I visited Little Havana.

Of all the city's immigrant groups—and given that half of Miami-Dade County's 2.5 million residents are foreign-born, there are more than a few—arguably the most influential is the Cuban community. Cuban immigration to the United States began in the nineteenth century, when cigar makers went to work in factories in Key West. Later immigration was driven not only by economic opportunity but also by political instability, with nearly one tenth of the Cuban population immigrating to the United States during the decades of struggle for independence from Spain. By the end of the nineteenth century there were approximately 100,000 Cubans living in the United States. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, rates of Cuban immigration skyrocketed, and Miami soon became the primary center of the U.S. Cuban community.

Though the Cuban population has dispersed throughout the county over the years—there are particularly large Cuban and Cuban American populations in and around Hialeah—the spiritual heart of the community is still Calle Ocho in Little Havana.

There was something about Little Havana I couldn't quite figure out. I knew it was a heavily touristed area, but though there was some measure of commercial rapacity to be found, it didn't feel nearly as performative as Times Square or Hollywood Boulevard. Or maybe it was and I didn't know enough to recognize it. Even more disorienting, Little Havana didn't feel like any of the other “ethnic” neighborhoods I'd been to.

While I was there, I met a man who was the fifth-generation scion of a cigar-rolling company and a gallery owner. He had traveled to the United States by boat and been picked up by the Coast Guard after three days at sea, with no food and no water but an entire intact art collection. I also spent some time talking to an artist named Molina. (I will never forget him, because when I met him I burst out with “You have the same name as my favorite baseball player!”) It was Molina who pinpointed what was bothering me about Little Havana. Molina was born in Cuba, but he lived in Manhattan before moving to Miami. When I asked him which he liked better, he just shook his head. “New York is a great city—I lived there for twenty years. But Miami … Miami is like being in Cuba.”

That was it. It wasn't that Little Havana hadn't sacrificed authenticity for commercial appeal. Authenticity wasn't the issue at all. What I was seeing was a community that had fended off assimilation. But in my experience that isn't something that can be achieved by sheer force of will. Rather, it requires some combination of economic resources, political clout, and cultural vitality—which is to say it requires a kind of power. Little Havana, I realized, has it; Little Haiti does not.

One way in which this is glaringly apparent is in the disparate U.S. government policies toward Cuban and Haitian refugees.

As presumed political refugees from an antagonistic, Communist state, Cuban refugees have long been granted preferential treatment by the United States. Repatriation in any form was a relatively rare occurrence until 1996, when the U.S. government adopted its “wet foot, dry foot” policy. Under this policy, if the Coast Guard intercepts a Cuban refugee in the water, he is sent back to Cuba or to a third country. If the refugee makes it to land, however, he will be given the opportunity to stay and—thanks to the Cuban Adjustment Act—to apply for permanent residency after a year. It is, relatively speaking, an incredibly lenient policy. It also, from what I understand, is not without its popular appeal. While I was in Miami I heard more than once of beach-goers cheering on Cuban refugees as they tried to make it to land before being caught by the Coast Guard.

Things are not as easy for Haitian refugees. Since the Mariel boatlift of 1980 the U.S. Coast Guard has patrolled the waters between Cuba, Haiti, and South Florida in an attempt to discourage so-called boat people from making the journey to Miami. Though it is Coast Guard policy to interview refugees and determine whether they might face real danger in their home country, Haitians are overwhelmingly dismissed as “economic refugees.” Between 1981 and 1991, out of 25,000 intercepted Haitian refugees, only twenty-eight were granted political asylum.

These divergent practices are certainly influenced by the government's persistent and reflexive anti-Communism, but there is a strong sense—both in the Haitian community and outside it—that these policies and their outcomes are born of racism and discrimination. I certainly heard anecdotal evidence to support this, stories of the disproportionately low success of Haitian asylum requests and of sting operations designed to catch Haitian illegals. On several occasions I was even told about individual Haitians who were in the process of being deported. One was a friend of Mr. Mapou's who had been in Miami for ten years. His family in Haiti had all left or passed away; he was being sent back to nothing. Another was a mother whose children had been born in the United States; she was being sent back without them.

Indeed, when you look at the two neighborhoods, one relatively affluent and one deeply impoverished, one relatively light-skinned and one relatively dark, it is hard not to imagine there are other calculations at work. The more time I spent in Little Havana and Little Haiti, the more I began to think that the only minority languages or cultures that could survive the assimilative might of American society were those of communities with their own inherent political and economic resources. The Cuban population, I thought, had managed not to blend in because they were able to opt out.

The Haitian Creole I remember best from my time in Miami is a proverb I learned while I was in Little Haiti. It comes from Georges Sylvain's book
Cric? Crac!
, a volume of fables based on the work of Jean de La Fontaine and arguably the first major literary work to be written in Haitian Creole. The third fable in the collection tells the well-known story of the ant and the grasshopper, in which the grasshopper, faint with hunger after whiling away the summer instead of storing food for winter, is forced to beg for sustenance from the hardworking ant.

In the United States the fable is probably most familiar to those of us who were raised on Walt Disney Silly Symphonies. In this version, the grasshopper is an affable performer who would rather sing and dance (“The world owes me a living!”) while a parade of ants harvest food under the supervision of their imperious queen. That winter, when the grasshopper stumbles into the ants' warm and cozy colony, the queen is at first less than hospitable. “With ants, just those who work may stay,” she informs the ailing grasshopper. “So take your fiddle … and play!”

Sylvain's version is no less pointed:

Vouésin millò passé fanmill'!

Cé con ça moun' longtemps té dit;

Main, temps passé pas temps joki:

A lhè qui lé,—pas palé ça!—

Toutt coucouill' cléré pou gé yo.

Moin pas méprisé sièq' ça-là:

Main, dit-moin quil-ess' ou pito?
^bc

Voisin vaut mieux que parent!

Ainsi disaient les gens d'autrefois;

Mais le temps jadis n'est pas celui d'aujourd'hui.

A present,—ne m'en parlez pas—

C'est pour ses yeux que toute luciole luit.

Je ne méprise pas ce siècle-ci,

Mais dites-moi lequel vous préférez!

Neighbors better than family!

That's what everyone used to say.

But time past is not today.

These days—don't speak of them!—

Fireflies glow for their own eyes.

I don't despise this century:

But, tell me, which do you prefer!

The line that spawned the proverb I remember is the antepenultimate:
Toutt coucouill' cléré pou gé yo
—or, in modern spelling,
Tout koukouy klere pou je yo
. It means “Fireflies glow for their own eyes.”

The fable is immensely clever in that it can be interpreted or reimagined in any number of ways depending on whose side you take. I've often thought that zombies are a perfect allegorical monster in that they can stand in for just about anything you'd like them to; similarly, the story of the grasshopper and the ant could be used to criticize the rich, the poor, the powerful, or the subjugated. The Disney cartoon alone is the stuff master's theses are made of.

As such, there would seem to be any number of possible readings of
tout koukouy klere pou je yo
. Is it a celebration of self-sufficiency or a condemnation of uncharitableness? An ode to the workingman or an artist's lament? Even the simplest and most common interpretation, which is something like “every man for himself,” has a wealth of potential implications—an ambiguity that Sylvain himself seems to acknowledge with his closing line.

I remember this proverb in particular because these are the
koukouy
of Mr. Mapou's
sosyete
. They do not merely illuminate the darkness; they glow for their own eyes. For me, this is an eloquent articulation of the purpose of and challenges faced by language activists. In Haiti and in Miami, Haitian Creole cannot expect either active support from outside the community or passive support in the form of political, economic, or social incentives, a reality that appears to be readily accepted if not necessarily celebrated by the Haitian community. Even those who are dedicated to the celebration of Haitian Creole do not try to underplay the fact that English proficiency is essential if Haitians in Miami wish to better their circumstances. It's telling, too, that Haitians in Miami are learning Spanish in addition to English—and that Spanish-speakers in Miami are
not
learning Haitian Creole.

A person's language is necessarily a reflection of his or her political environment, of the social and economic forces that influence survival and success. The languages of prestige are the languages of power. The preservation and promotion of heritage languages, then, is something of a radical act, a pinpoint of opposition amid the glare of the status quo.
Tout koukouy klere pou je yo
is no mere acknowledgment of self-interest; it is a celebration of self-determination.

That's how I read it, anyway.

But then, maybe I too am just seeing what I want to see.