GRAN: BROKEN, YET UNDEFEATED.

I was much older before my first opportunity to spend a significant amount of time with her. It was during that same time that I learned to speak my family’s language, Haitian Kreyol. I think it was those early memories, in my formative years as a 19 year old trying to “become Haitian,” that I learned what it felt like to be loved. I remember my first trip to Haiti at the age of eleven and the initial steps off the plane. The tarmac was pulsating from the dead heat of a normal February afternoon. I remember the images that were seared into my memory. Seeing the mountains stacked with houses like the staircase I had just descended. Everything about my first encounter with Haiti was foreign. Walking through the airport with what seemed like thousands of people screaming and speaking loudly to one another in a language I did not understand. And the many people who begged. I remember a man who was walking on his hands that were hanging by his sides because he had no lower body. That gentleman, that picture, that face, stuck in my head and never left. I remember the pungent odors of diesel exhaust, rotting trash, and an open sewerage combined. This was “my” Haiti.

My grandmother; I call her, “Gran.” She was generous, encouraging, and perseverant. She grew up in Haiti on the Island of Hispaniola. The “Pearl of the Caribbean,” as it was once known during the late 1700s, was the epicenter for propagation of significant ideas for black men and women living as slaves in the New World. Concepts like sovereignty, equality, dignity, and fraternity were rooted in the…