WE ARE UGLY, BUT WE ARE STILL HERE By Edwidge Danticat The Caribbean Writer, Volume 10 (1996) Posted by Wilgeens Rosenberg
One of the first people murdered on our land was a queen.
Her name was Anacaona and she was an Arawak Indian.
She was a poet, dancer, and even a painter.
She ruled over the western part of an island so lush and green that the Arawaks called it Ayiti land of high.
When the Spaniards came from across the sea to look for gold, Anacaona was one of their first victims.
She was raped and killed and her village pillaged in a tradition of ongoing cruelty and atrocity.
Anacaona's land is now the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, a place of continuous political unrest.
When they were enslaved, our foremothers believed that when they died their spirits would return to Africa, most specifically to a peaceful land we call Guinin, where gods and goddesses live.
The women who came before me were women who spoke half of one language and half another.
They spoke the French and Spanish of their captors mixed in with their own African language.
These women seemed to be speaking in tongue when they prayed to their old gods, the ancient African spirits.
Even though they were afraid that their old deities would no longer understand them, they invented a new language our Creole patois with which to describe their new surroundings, a language from which colorful phrases blossomed to fit the desperate circumstances.
When these women greeted each other, they found themselves speaking in codes.
How are we today, Sister? -I am ugly, but I am here.
My grandmother believed that if a life is lost, then another one springs up replanted somewhere else, the next life even stronger than the last.
She believed that no one really dies as long as someone remembers, someone who will acknowledge that this person had in spite of everything been here.
We are part of an endless circle, the daughters of Anacaona.
We have stumbled, but have not fallen.
We are ill-favored, but we still endure.
Every once in a while, we must scream this as far as the wind can carry our voices: We are ugly, but we are here! And here to stay.
**Definitely read the complete article at htfhaiti.org Edwidge Danticat, from Haiti: She speaks ten languages, published Krik? Krak (1995) and Breath, Eyes, Memory (1995) and "The Farming of Bones" She came to the United States when she was twelve years old. However, her heart and soul remain tied to the country she remembers well, and has often revisited to renew her spirit.
In "We're Ugly, but We're Here", Edwidge gives us an intimate look at her people's experience through her own eyes.
She won a Pushcart Prize for a story in the Caribbean Writer in 1994 and also was a recipient of the Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for fiction.
