Antilles: the weblog of the CRB

"They had simply gone elsewhere"

Marie Micheline went to live with my uncle Joseph and aunt Denise for the same reason that my brother and I did: our parents had disappeared. They had not abandoned us. Nor had they been imprisoned or killed by the henchmen of the dictatorship that had come to power in Haiti in 1957, when Marie Micheline was five years old and my parents had not yet met. They had simply, as my uncle explained first to her and then to us, gone elsewhere.

-- From "Marie Micheline" by Edwidge Danticat, an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, published in the 11 June issue of the New Yorker.