Mitsuka Attys’s Interview

as told to Michel Fallah

            Mitsuka Attys’s family wanted a better life in America. Not knowing much about the country except for New York City’s existence, Mitsuka’s grandmother, the first in her family to immigrate to the United States, attained her green card and started a new life in New York. Moving back and forth from birth until the age of about seven, Mitsuka has learned the importance of maintaining her Haitian roots in her current narrative. As a growing teen in New York’s Flatbush community, she is able to embrace both her own experiences as well as her family’s stories and, in the process, live in the middle ground between her new identity and her old heritage.

Mitsuka Attys, Age 20

Haitian with a Japanese Name

My father, he gave me the name and apparently my mom told me that it was a name that was found in a book. It’s a Japanese name so often people ask me like, where did that name come from? You’re Haitian but you have a Japanese name! 

Emigration from Haiti to “New York”

Its kind of a funny story too because there’s this circulating joke around the Haitian diaspora that always says that people in Haiti the only three cities they know of that exist in the Unites States are New York, Miami, and Boston… instead of saying that they’re going to the United States, they say they’re going to New York.

Nothing Sweeter than Haiti

We have a mango tree and we could take a bunch of mangoes and put them in a bucket, and people come and take it and go home with it. I love the mangoes, the cherries because you could grow cherries in the backyard. We also have passion fruit which you don’t really find here. There’s also this other fruit called abiko which is apricot which over here you don’t find it as much either but I love the food, the fruits, the juices that they make out of the fruits. I love the sweets that they have over there. There’s this thing in Haiti that they call a frisco which is like a snow cone and they have the shaved ice with a bunch of syrups and usually the grownups, the older people in the country, they get theirs with nuts in them, like peanuts… my favorite flavor was coconut and I loved it ‘cause the syrup tastes so natural.

Spiritually Connected

I am Seventh-Day Adventist so we’re a Christian denomination where we serve the Sabbath just like the Jewish people would. From Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, that’s our Sabbath… I spend my whole Saturday at church and during that time we don’t work, we don’t study, we don’t go to school, we basically keep it very religious and try not to get involved in secular events or secular things during our Sabbath time.

The 2010 Haiti Earthquake

The earthquake happened on January 12, 2010 and I was in eighth grade at the time. I remember on that exact day I was staying home from school because I was having a really bad stomachache… my grandmother had come over during her break from work to, you know, come make me soup… as soon as she left I was watching CNN news and then there was like this big blast of information that they had saying that a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti. And I’m here like losing my mind because I had never really heard about, you know, I read about earthquakes in textbooks and all that stuff, but I never really thought that it would be happening in real life and, you know, not to mention close to home… so then I called my grandmother right away and I was just like ‘Did you hear?! You know they said a 7.0 magnitude earthquake just hit Haiti!’

Misconstrued Messages

I remember during that time it was so hard to get in contact with anyone … but somehow they got in contact with some of our family in Canada who had contact with people in Haiti, and I remember it was so hard to get the truth and the messages translated out… I got a message where somebody told me that my mom died… so I’m here like crying and balling and all that stuff because you’re telling me that my mom died, but turns out it was false information… Then, after that, they told me that her leg got broken but that’s not what happened.

The Injuries and Casualties

Our house in Haiti at that time was two levels so there were two floors. What happened to the house was the first floor went down to the ground and the second floor took the place of the first floor… there was a staircase in the back of the house that connects the first floor and the second floor… everyone tried to run out at that time so the rubble fell on my mother and she was under there for 12 hours. Right now she lost a finger and a half so this finger, the index finger, is gone on the left hand and half of this finger. And she also broke her arm so about a month later she had to come into New York after we kept pleading her to come into the states to try to get it fixed. My sister, she had her neck split open, down here, during the earthquake and also her jaw got broken because she was stuck under the rubble also but they were able to get her out, but my mom it took way longer. My dad was at work at the time so he wasn’t affected. My uncle, who was living in the house with my family, he died in the earthquake. He died on the spot… Not a nanny, but we had this servant, like a maid, working with us and she died on the spot, too.

What Makes Us a Haitian Family

The big things for Haitian parents are legliz which is church, lekòl you know school and lakay, home, so these are like three big components for Haitian families.

Coming from a “Statistically Poor Country”

I feel like often times people in America, they had a bad view of Haitians. They always thought that you were from a statistically poor country so it’s like for them, how well can you do in life because you’re from a poor country?

Celebrating Haitian Independence Day with Soup

During New Years, we have this thing called soup joumou which is squash soup or pumpkin soup…we basically usually eat it for the rest of the week. And basically the soup is supposed to symbolize how we got our freedom because in Haiti at some point the slaves were not allowed to eat pumpkin soup. It was a commodity that was thought to be for the high class people, only which were the white people and the mulattoes at that time so when the Haitians slaves got their freedom from their capturers or whatever, to celebrate, they drunk pumpkin soup.

Céline Dion Fans United

One of my favorite artists is Céline Dion, and I think it’s because of the Haitian house that I grew up in because Haitians, they like love Céline Dion. Every Haitian, you tell them about Céline Dion, they know who she is. So I grew up listening to a lot of her songs and wanting to sing like her, and that’s how I really got into it and I never stopped.

French Creole is My Language

I also sing in a singing group that I have, well, that me and a couple of my friends have from different Seventh-Day Adventists Haitian churches. We’ve come together and made a singing group where we go around, we sing at concerts, we administer during Sabbath worship… we have mostly French songs because we are all from Haitian churches, and the Haitian churches that we attend, they speak Creole and French… This is why my family like they always snicker at people who don’t teach their children Creole or French because they want you to be in touch with your culture.

Haiti IS Significant

Last year, I found the Haitian American Student Association on campus, HASA for short, and I entered. I went to some of their events. We had the taste of Haiti where my mom cooked some dishes to expose the campus to Haitian cooking, and they also had a Miss Haiti pageant which kinda forced me to learn more about my culture … we were competing with one another to see who could win the crown and I was representing Jacmel… I learned a lot about the role that Haiti played on a global scale in terms of like assuring the Louisiana Purchase for the U.S. and all these different things that I had no idea that Haiti was involved in. In my head, it’s almost like the American society got to my head making me think that my country was small and that it wasn’t really significant but being in that pageant taught me that Haiti really did play a large role for a whole bunch of other countries. We were the largest exporter of sugar at some point. It helped so many countries out and it’s not something I was exposed to to realize that Haiti was that important to the world.

My Dream

I hope to become a practicing physician one day. And if I’m not there, I hope to be in the health field somehow… One of my biggest dreams that I want is to be able to go back in Haiti and help the underserving community.