"Search for my daughter" -- Commentary from a Haitian-American Mother

By Vidho Lorville
Email: vidho@vidholorville.com


Sunday, January 17, 2010

I learn about the earthquake Tuesday night when a text message comes from a friend in New Orleans, with the kind of news you never want to hear. Haiti had been devastated. "Have you heard from your daughter and other family members?" my friend asks. "I pray they are okay. Let me know."

I stare at the screen for a few minutes until I am sure I understand what I am reading.

I cancel a meeting, purchase a few calling cards and head home to my apartment in the Bronx. I take two Advil and start calling my daughter in Port-au-Prince.

She is 19 now, and didn't grow up with me. I go to Haiti twice a year to spend time with her and have been struggling to move her to the United States.

Now, television news is filled with images of Port-au-Prince, the city where I lived for the first 31 years of my life, in ruins. And my daughter is somewhere within the chaos.

By 11:30 p.m. I still can't get in touch with anyone. The phone rings and rings and then the line goes dead.

I do have some news. I talked to my sister in Florida. Yes, she heard from our other sisters, who live in the capital. My half-brother is also okay. They were all together when the earthquake hit. But no word on my daughter.

By 1:00 a.m. I've been calling every 15 minutes without any answer.

In the middle of this dark moment, I hear, clearly, something my mother used to tell us when we were growing up: "Things may not get better, but they can always get worse." This actually calms me down.

My mother, who worked as a healer and seamstress while raising 10 children, prepared us for catastrophe. She made sure that her boys and girls knew how to cook and how to wash and repair their clothes by hand. We needed to be able to take care of ourselves in case "things got worse."


Some nights, she would put us in Haitian beds made of dried banana leaves called nát in the front yard of our home and we'd sleep outside. We needed to get used to sleeping like that, she said, just in case one day we had to.

My mother knew we had to be prepared for the worst. And at times, it has seemed that the worst has kept chasing me.

In the beginning of the last decade, I had to flee a political mess in Port-au-Prince, and I settled in New Orleans. I had met many artists from that city in the 1990s; they were in Port-au-Prince as part of a cultural exchange encouraged by then-Mayor Marc Morial of New Orleans, himself of Haitian descent. And New Orleans felt a bit like a sister city to Port-au-Prince, with its gingerbread houses and Creole roots. I had fled my home, but it didn't feel as though I had gone too far away.


I left that city a day before Hurricane Katrina hit and saw the water swallow my adopted home from a hotel room in Houston. Tuesday night, and all last week, felt the same: I was watching devastation from a comfort zone. Safe myself, but gripped with fear for my friends and family.

Is this my luck? To miss the very worst by always expecting it, the way my mother taught me?

I could not answer until I knew whether my daughter was safe.

Around 6:00 a.m. I finally get through on her mom's cellphone. My daughter is next to her mother, sleeping with her two half-siblings.

"Where are you?" I ask.

"We're outside in our front yard sleeping on náts," her mother tells me. Their house survived the quake, but they decided to stay away in case of aftershocks.

I hear screaming and wailing in the background -- the neighbors, she says, all scared to go inside. They are crying out because they are hurt or searching for family. "We are all praying," she says. And the phone cuts out.

But I know my daughter had made it through. After I hang up, my mother comes back again in my memory: I see her standing on the veranda, preparing us to sleep outside. Three decades later, my daughter found herself wrapped up inside a nát in her front yard in Port-Au-Prince.

It is most certainly pure legend, I know, but now I remember the Haitian folktale about the magical power of those beds. As the story goes, if a child is threatened by a sorceress's evildoing, you can roll her up in a banana-leaf bed and she will be safe.


I was very lucky. My daughter was protected. But my city wasn't. I know Port-au-Prince like my pocket -- I know every single wall in that city. Seeing the destruction is devastating beyond belief.

But I have seen one city begin to come back to life after catastrophe: In New Orleans, where I still travel to teach and work, people are learning to use what they have to remake their home. The key is to see things differently than you did before.

I have learned from gardening that when you want a plant to grow, at some point you'll have to cut the tops of the branches to allow them to expand and become stronger. But in Haiti there is never enough fuel for fire, so the trees are chopped down wholesale, never given a chance to flourish.

Haiti can do better -- for the trees that make up its forests, and for the people toiling to remake life from this disaster. We will rebuild. And we will grow stronger.

Vidho Lorville is a Haitian artist living in New York.