WHAT BROKE MY HEART WAS NOT THE DAY THAT I LEFT HOME AT TWELVE YEARS OLD, which to me now is nothing but a distant memory. The public would say that a dog that was dead was a dead dog, and that was my name, my reputation, for the fact that I was gone for a day or two and never returned. But, people in other places, would say that it was merely survival. Even though, living was like falling on bricks over and over. What broke my heart was not the time when the boy in Caïman Lane, not too far from us, was cross at me for something manmi had made me do. We were only separated by a wooden door that was marked with many years of water damage. He has named us husband and wife only in the papa and maman game. Nothing could have separated us, really. Not even his papi, or manmi who had dismantled me like an engine that needed to be mended. What broke my heart was not the years of bullying by the masters in Catholic Elementary school.
It was not the fact that I wish I was never born the way I did, and the times when I let myself saturated in countless prayers to be changed. To be whole. To be a real person, rather than a soul that was wedged in a marionette's body. That was what manmi had told me. If I was as solid as walls, and did not swerve from the norms, you know, the behaviors of men that was placed by the public, papi would have never left us. Perhaps, …show more content…
Grown-ups and children alike never felt free from threats against their freedom to live the lives that they chose. It would have made no difference, though, whether people in Haïti were born in the present, or in the past, the push for survival in the midst of poverty and hunger was the only way of life. As manmi’s friend would have said, if a person’s name was not part of the Gouvènman Ayisyen an, they were doomed. They were to stay where they lived to
It was not the fact that I wish I was never born the way I did, and the times when I let myself saturated in countless prayers to be changed. To be whole. To be a real person, rather than a soul that was wedged in a marionette's body. That was what manmi had told me. If I was as solid as walls, and did not swerve from the norms, you know, the behaviors of men that was placed by the public, papi would have never left us. Perhaps, …show more content…
Grown-ups and children alike never felt free from threats against their freedom to live the lives that they chose. It would have made no difference, though, whether people in Haïti were born in the present, or in the past, the push for survival in the midst of poverty and hunger was the only way of life. As manmi’s friend would have said, if a person’s name was not part of the Gouvènman Ayisyen an, they were doomed. They were to stay where they lived to