Edwidge Danticat

I began my effort at improving my flight experiences by reading purposefully during my flights. My airplane reading would often be centered on themes. On some flights I would read only newspapers and magazines, catching up on one particular event. On other flights I would read a short novel, and finishing the entire book during the flight would give me a great thrill, as if I'd just flown a cross-Atlantic mission with Amelia Earhart.

I want to figure out how people can go on with their lives when mine has changed so much. I want to relearn how to breathe without carrying this big, empty cave inside me.

There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear a mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: 'Ou libéré?' Are you free, my daughter?"My grandmother quickly pressed her fingers over my lips.Now," she said, "you will know how to answer.

Perhaps there had been joy for them in finding that sugar could be made from blood.

They are the people of creation. Their maker_gives them the sky to carry because they are so strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head.

To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.

When you write, it__ like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women of your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.

No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.

...women, brave as stars at dawn

You may be surprised what we use our dreams to do, how we drape them over our sight and carry them like amulets to protect us from evil spells.

I once heard an elder say that the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children's inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversations, all are passed along to the next heir.

The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we take to meet on the other side.

Old age is not meant to be survived alone," Man Rapadou said, her voice trailing with her own hidden thoughts. "Death should come gently, slowly, like a man's hand approaching your body. There can be joy in impatience if there is time to find the joy.

The immigrant artist shares with all other artists the desire to interpret and possibly remake his or her own world. So though we may not be creating as dangerously as our forebears__hough we are not risking torture, beatings, execution, though exile does not threaten us into perpetual silence_ still, while we are at work bodies are littering the streets somewhere. People are buried under rubble somewhere. Mass graves are being dug somewhere. Survivors are living in makeshift tent cities and refugee camps somewhere, shielding their heads from the rain, closing their eyes, covering their ears, to shut out the sounds of military __id_ helicopters. And still, many are reading, and writing, quietly, quietly.

People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.

Those who die young, they are cheated,_ she said. __ot cheated out of life, because life is a penance, but the young, they__e cheated because they don__ know it__ coming. They don__ have time to move closer, to return home. When you know you__e going to die, you try to be near the bones of your own people. You don__ even think you have bones when you__e young, even when you break them, you don__ believe you have them. But when you__e old, they start reminding you they__e there. They start turning to dust on you, even as you__e walking here and there, going from place to place. And this is when you crave to be near the bones of your own people. My children never felt this. They had to look death in the face, even before they knew what it was. Just like you did, no?

These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.