Culture

Growing Up Haitian-American: A Curse, a Cultural Cornucopia, or Both?

By América Magazine / February 17, 2020

by Allison Mercer and Tyler Fisher

A review of Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite’s Dear Haiti, Love Alaine

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This debut novel offers a seemingly light-hearted romp through a Haitian-American teenager’s exploration of her cultural heritage. As an innovative riff on epistolary fiction, it conveys characterization and plot via a montage of postcards, high school homework assignments, post-it notes, and text messages.

But the book’s playful, multimedia messages and its quirky, winsome protagonist are, in a more profound way, devices for addressing weighty matters of our time: family breakdown, the stratification of social classes, and the complexities of cultural belonging for first- and second-generation immigrants.

Like the book’s co-authors, who grew up in Miami as daughters of Haitian immigrants, the eponymous protagonist embodies the tangled give-and-take of engaging with her Haitian heritage. How inevitable or enduring does one’s cultural heritage and associated stereotypes become when growing up in the United States today? For Alaine Beauparlant, the answer to this question depends on how much of her own family’s past, haunted by rumors of a Vodou curse (madichon), she is willing to uncover and embrace.

The novel’s first depictions of Alaine, glimpsed through a prism of diary entries and fragmentary school assignments, are sketches of a fun-loving teenage diva. Her circumstances take a sobering turn, however, when her mother becomes ill and unemployed, her own class presentation proves disastrous, and she must interrupt her studies for a punitive sojourn in Haiti. The unravelling of her rather happy private school existence suddenly makes the whispered family curse seem more real, more credible. Haiti and the shadowy contours of her family’s past had always felt distant or disconnected for Alaine, but this first visit to her parents’ homeland reveals how Haiti has shaped her identity far more than she had realized.

On the island, Alaine confronts jarring contrasts between poverty and her own family’s lavish lifestyle among the glitterati and tourists. Behind the stereotypes of Haitian indigence, entrenched political corruption, and blithe non-profit interventions, she sees a more complex reality, seemingly steered by vast patterns of extreme disparities and inevitability. In the course of her own charitable work as an intern, Alaine wonders about the limits of her contributions and the capacity for real change in Haiti.

The novel rightly allows many questions about systemic fatalism and social progress to remain unresolved. In the midst of this tightly controlled fiction, in which the authors’ design is masked by the textual pastiche, Alaine takes on the role of detective, setting out to solve a Vodou curse that seems to plague her family line, generation after generation, a token of the broader misfortunes of Haitian society. She is an agnostic investigator, unsure of how much credence to grant the very curse she is trying to break.

The notion of an ancestral curse is a useful motif for this novel. It fuels the central intrigue and readers want to follow the plot to uncover the same answers Alaine is seeking. It points to a real crime that her grandfather had inflicted on a household servant, which grants Alaine an opportunity to make restitution. And, with all of its explanatory force alongside its inherent ambiguities, the curse ultimately allows the main character to wrestle with questions of pre-determined destiny and personal choices.

The heroine, in this telling, chooses to remain undecided regarding the curse’s veracity but chooses actively to reconcile with estranged family members and with people her family had wronged. Alaine attains a sense of moral obligation that holds more sway over her decisions than what a murky curse from the past might oblige.

Lack of resolution is a recurring feature of this novel. The Moulite sisters’ fresh approach to epistolary fiction allows for active, collaborative readings in this regard. Diary entries, cell-phone texts, and partial television transcripts, among other brief texts, necessarily present one-sided conversations or half-truths. Loose ends regarding the fate of minor characters or the finales of particular subplots are, perhaps, inevitable.

The curse may or may not be resolved, and Alaine’s commitment to believing in it is even more noncommittal, but the ambiguities are productive. The title itself, Dear Haiti, Love Alaine, encapsulates the way in which readers, alongside the protagonist, must read between the lines to perceive a richer, more nuanced sense of an immigrant family’s connections to their ethnic heritage. Between an open salutation and a closing endearment, a first-generation American immigrant’s story is an open letter of complex negotiations that will resonate with today’s young adult readership.

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