Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [23]
“A lot of what I have been trying to do is keep Jean alive,” she said. “It’s an important thing for me right now. Fifty percent of my energy goes toward that.”
Who does she think killed Jean, I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “After all, I am a journalist. I cannot deal in rumors. I am looking for facts, for proof. The most important step to resolution is knowing the truth. All I know is, the fact that we don’t know who paid for this crime puts us all in danger.”
Michèle was somewhat encouraged when a police officer was arrested after he was found in possession of a car that had been identified as having been at the crime scene.
“I feel that something is moving,” she said. “We are approaching something. We are getting closer to more apparent leads.”
The leads never materialized, however. One suspect, a senator, refused to cooperate with the investigation, claiming parliamentary immunity. The investigating judges fled the country, fearing for their lives. On Christmas Day 2002, a potential assassin walked into Michèle’s yard in a suburb of Port-au-Prince and began shooting, killing Maxime Seide, one of her young bodyguards. The assassin had come to kill her, but had been scared away by Maxime Seide’s heroic intervention.
I was in Haiti then with my husband, spending Christmas with my mother-in-law in a small southern town. We were listening to the radio that my mother-in-law always had on in the house when we heard a news bulletin falsely stating that Michèle had been killed. We managed to clear things up by calling some mutual friends who assured us that Michèle was very much alive. I could not fully believe it, however, until I saw her again.
When my husband and I saw her at her house shortly after the assassination attempt, she was calm but sorrowful. She had escaped death again, yet someone had died in her place. She was at times angry and defiant, but already one could tell that it was all beginning to weigh on her, the responsibility for herself, for her elderly mother—who had been with her during the assassination attempt—and the journalists and others who worked at the radio station and were getting more and more threats as yet another inconclusive report on Jean’s assassination was made public.
In March 2003, as the threats continued, Michèle Montas closed the radio station to which she and her husband had given several decades of their lives, and moved back to New York. This was her first solo exile since she and Jean had been together.
“We have lost three lives in three years,” Michèle told an American journalist shortly after pulling Radio Haiti Inter off the air. “I was no longer willing to go to another funeral.”
CHAPTER 4
Daughters of Memory
I first read Jan J. Dominique, the Haitian novelist and daughter of Jean Dominique, when I could still read an entire book in French without once consulting a dictionary. Five years before, at age twelve, I had left Haiti (where I had been living with my uncle and aunt) and had moved to Brooklyn, New York, to be reunited with my parents. Being new to a place where schoolmates felt free to call me a dirty Haitian or Frenchie or boat person, I hungered for words from home. Reading in New York would not be like reading back in Haiti, where rote memorization was the primary method of learning for children my age and where I had memorized, then recited, and then quickly forgotten at least a million unsavored words. If anything, I had resented those forgotten words, their length and complication, their impenetrability, their occasional irrelevance to my tropical reality. We had been made to memorize, for example, lessons about seasons, which listed them as le printemps, l’été, l’automne, et l’hiver—spring, summer, fall, and winter—without acknowledging the dry or rainy seasons, or even the hurricane seasons, around us. At least we were not obliged to recite the French colonial creed, “Our ancestors the Gauls” with our African lips while staring ahead from our black faces with our dark eyes. But there were