Hoàng-Ân
Edwidge Danticat's "Breath, Eyes, Memory," An Exerpt
...the night is passing...so soft and tender...embracing me like a velvet blanket...
...my heart is troubled and my mind is burdened...
...in the darkness of my soul that gives colors to the shadows inside and outside of my body:
...i miss my Mother so much...
...so i come here to fall upon the words that bleed the scarlet tears from my heart...
...let us enter Danticat's initiation into the land of yearning for the warmth of a mother's womb...
...here to us ladies of the soul-catchers, my dear, dearest Mother...
(from Hoang-An's poem "Now I Wear A Yellow Rose on Mother Day")
I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of statues that their daughters pray to. My mother was as brave as stars at dawn. She too was from this place. My mother was like that woman who could never bleed and then could never stop bleeding, the one who gave in to her pain, to live as a butterfly. Yes, my mother was like me.
From the thick of the cane fields, I tried my best to tell her, but the words would not roll off my tongue. My grandmother walked over and put her hand on my shoulder.
"Listen. Listen before it passes. Parol gin pie wel. The words can give wings to your feet. There is so much to say,
but time has failed you," she said. "There is a place where women are buried in clothes the color of flames, where
we drop coffee on the ground for those who went ahead, passed on; where the daughter is never fully a woman
until her mother has passed on before her. There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will
hear your mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: "Ou libere?" Are you free,
my daughter?
My grandmother quickly pressed her fingers over my lips:
" Now," she said, "you will know how to answer."
