Timoun Etranje: Constructing Identity in the Space Between Haiti and the United States

Abstract

My parents were born in a tiny village in the North district of Haiti called Anse-a-Foleur. While he was alive, my father insisted that he had known my mother since childhood. Separately, they traveled to the Bahamas where they reconnected. At the time, my mother was raising my three-year-old sister, Ruth, on her own, and she found some comfort in this man who knew about her home village. They got a home, and my brother Michel was born. But the Bahamas was no easy place for Haitian immigrants in the 1960s, or today for that matter. So my mother, frustrated and fearful of the threat of deportation, returned to Haiti with my eldest siblings. My father refused to return.