Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [29]
We were speeding through the Lincoln Tunnel toward New Jersey to visit a Haitian woman named Alèrte Bélance. Alèrte was the latest casualty of the 1991 military coup d’état in Haiti. We—the director, the producers of the documentary, and I—had heard about Alèrte through a refugee women’s organization in Brooklyn. We were told that she had been arrested by men belonging to a paramilitary group working for the junta that had led the coup and had become the de facto leadership of the country. Five of us immediately jumped into a small car and, with a trunk full of video equipment, headed for the public housing project in Newark where Alèrte, her husband, and their three children were living. Our documentary was about Haitian torture survivors and we hoped that she would tell us her story.
As we entered the sparsely furnished apartment on the top floor of the six-story building, we were greeted by two young girls dressed in ruffled pink dresses and matching bows in their hair. Alèrte’s son was sitting on a large orange sofa in the middle of the living room. He was a small boy and it was hard to tell whether he was older or younger than the girls, who both appeared to be around ten. The boy never smiled, which made me think that he was indeed older and understood a lot better than his sisters did what had happened.
Alèrte’s husband, a youthful-looking, goateed man, carried in a few chairs from the kitchen for us. Then Alèrte emerged from the bedroom. She was a small woman, her dark face sunken on one side where a machete had nearly chopped off her cheekbone. She was in her late twenties, but looked twice as old, the machete scars and suture marks like tiny railroad tracks leading toward her chin. She was wearing a green blouse, a flowered skirt, and a dark knit cap on her head, and as she limped toward the couch she greeted each of us with a nod.
Somewhere downstairs a baby was crying.
“These apartments are sometimes used for battered women,” she said in halting Creole.
Still, her voice was a lot clearer than we had expected, since during the attack her tongue had been cut in two.
While lingering on her voice, it was also hard not to stare at her right forearm, the pointy black stub filled with keloid scars. Leading to the tip were more machete scars, as though the person—the people—who had chopped off her arm had tried extremely hard to do it. You could not look at that arm and not wonder where the rest of it was.
My brother Kelly also has a missing forearm. Unlike Alèrte, he was born that way. I am not exactly sure what happened with Kelly, but when my youngest daughter, Leila, was born with a few small indentations in her left earlobe, her pediatrician told me that sometimes in the womb, elongated tissue called amniotic bands wrap themselves so tightly around fetal tissue that they can amputate a fetus’s arm or leg. My Vodou-and Santeria-practicing friends, however, tell me that when a person is born missing any piece of flesh—be it a limb or otherwise—it means that the person has lost a twin in the womb and that lost twin has put a visible mark on the living twin.
At last, I’d thought, I had two possible answers to the mystery that was my beautiful brother. Kelly’s missing forearm had dissolved inside my mother, becoming a part of the tissue, and spirit, that had helped create him. Alèrte’s missing forearm had dissolved in a mass grave, becoming a part of the country that had helped create her.
Alèrte Bélance: They sliced me into pieces with machete strokes. They cut out my tongue and my mouth: my gums, plates, teeth, and jaw on my right side. They cut my face open, my temple and cheek totally open. They cut my eye open. They cut my ear open. They cut my body, my whole shoulder and neck and back