At the insistence of some of his friends in New York, Jean would occasionally participate in a television or radio program dealing with the injustices of the military regime in Haiti which by then had killed almost five thousand people, including among them the businessman Antoine Izmery and the Haitian justice minister, Guy Malary, people Jean had known. After Malary's death, Jean appeared as a guest on a panel on The Charlie Rose Show and was seated in the audience at a taping of The Donahue Show where the subject was Haiti. During the taping, Jean squirmed in his seat, while Phil Donahue held up the stubbed elbow of Arlete Belance, who had been attacked with a machete by paramilitary forces. After the taping, he seemed almost on the verge of tears as he said, "Edwidge, my country needs hope."
Our Haitian cinema project came to an end at the end of the school semester. However, Jonathan, Jean, and I would occasionally meet in Jonathan's office in Nyack for further discussions. One day, while driving to Nyack with Jonathan's assistant Neda, Jean told us about a word he had rediscovered in a Spanish film he had seen the night before, Guapa!
While puffing on his ever-present pipe, Jean took great pains to explain to us that someone who was guapa was extremely beautiful and courageous. Demanding further clarification, Neda and I would take turns shouting out the names of women the three of us knew, starting with Jean's wife.
"Michele is very-"
"Guapa!" he yelled back with great enthusiasm. This was one of many times that Jean's vibrant love for life easily came across.
On that guapa day, Neda had to stay in Nyack, so she gave me the car and told me to drive Jean back to Manhattan. I refrained from telling her that even though I'd had my license for three years, I had never driven any car but the one owned by the driving school where I had learned. When I confessed this to Jean, he wisely offered to drive. We drove for hours through New York's Rockland County and the Palisades, and then in New Jersey and over the George Washington Bridge, finding ourselves completely lost because Jean was trying to tell some hysterical story, smoke a pipe, and follow my uncertain directions all at the same time.
When we finally got to Manhattan late in the afternoon, Jean turned the car over to me. He seemed worried as I pulled away from the sidewalk and watched until I turned the corner, blending into Manhattan traffic.
The democratically elected government was returned to power soon afterward. The next time I would see Jean would be at his and Michele's house in Haiti.
"Jean, you're looking guapa," I told him.
He laughed.
It was wonderful to see Jean move about his own walls, surrounded by his own books and pictures and paintings, knowing that he had been dreaming about coming back home almost every minute that he was in exile.
Later at dinner, Jean spoke mournfully about those who had died during and after the coup d'etat: Antoine Izmery, Guy Malary, and later a well-loved priest, Father Jean-Marie Vincent. Adding Jean's name now to those of these very public martyrs still seems unimaginable, given how passionately he expressed his hope that these assassinations would no longer take place.
"It has to stop," I remember him saying. "It has to stop."
The plane that took me from Miami to Haiti the day before Jean's funeral seemed like a microcosm of Haiti. Crammed on a 727 for an hour and thirty-six minutes were young rich college students returning from Miami-area college campuses for the weekend, vendors- madan and mesye saras traveling with suitcases filled with merchandise from abroad, three male deportees being expatriated from the United States, a cluster of older women in black, perhaps also returning for a funeral, and up front the former president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, returning from a speaking engagement at the University of Miami. That we were all on this plane listening to flight announcements in French, English, and Kreyol, seemed to me somewhat unreal, as would most of the events that would unfold up to and after Jean's funeral at the Sylvio Cator stadium in downtown Port-au-Prince.
On the plane, I couldn't help but recall one of the many conversations that Jean and I had had while lost in the Palisades in New York that afternoon.
I had told him that I envied the certainty with which he could and often did say the words, "My country."
"My country is sufFering," he would say. "It is being held captive by criminals. My country is slowly dying, melting away."
"My country, Jean," I said, "is one of uncertainty. When I say 'my country' to some Haitians, they think of the United States. When I say 'my country' to some Americans, they think of Haiti."
My country, I felt, was something that was then being called the tenth department. Haiti has nine geographic departments and the tenth was the floating homeland, the ideological one, which joined all Haitians living in the dyaspora.
I meant in another type of introduction to struggle to explain the multilayered meaning of the word dyaspora. I meant to borrow a phrase from a speech given by Gerard Alphonse Ferere, Ph.D., at the Haitian Embassy in Washington, D.C., on August 27, 1999, in which he describes diaspora/dyaspora as a term "employed to refer to any dispersal of people to foreign soils." But in our context used "to identify the hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in many countries of the world." I meant in another type of introduction to list my own personal experiences of being called "Dyaspora" when expressing an opposing political point of view in discussions with friends and family members living in Haiti, who knew that they could easily silence me by saying, "What do you know? You're a Dyaspora." I meant to recall some lighter experiences ofbeing startled in the Haitian capital or in the provinces when a stranger who wanted to catch my attention would call out, "Dyasporal" as though it were a title like Miss, Ms., Mademoiselle, or Madame. I meant to recall conversations or debates in restaurants, parties, or at public gatherings where members of the dyaspora would be classified-justified or not-as arrogant, insensitive, overbearing, and pretentious people who were eager to reap the benefits of good jobs and political positions in times of stability in a country that they had fled during difficult times. Shamefacedly, I would bow my head and accept these judgments when they were expressed, feeling guilty for my own physical distance from a country I had left at the age of twelve years during a dictatorship that had forced thousands to choose between exile or death. However, in this introduction, I can't help but think of Jean's reaction to my dyaspora dilemma in a conversation we had when I visited his radio station while in Haiti one summer.
"The Dyaspora are people with their feet planted in both worlds," he had said. "There is no reason to be ashamed of being Dyaspora. There are more than a million of you. You are not alone." Having been exiled many times himself to that very dyaspora that I was asking him to help me define, Jean could commiserate with all those exiles, emigres, refugees, migrants, naturalized citizens, half-generation, first-generation, American, Haitian, Haitian-American men, women, and children who were living here in the United States and elsewhere. Migration in general was something he understood extremely well, whether it be from the provinces, the peyi andeyo, the outside country, to the Haitian capital or from Haitian borders to other shores. Like many of us, what he wanted to see ultimately was a Haiti that could unite all her sons and daughters, be they inside or outside.