Humor Healed

I recently read a book about a young girl in Haiti who had been enslaved by some distant relatives and made into a restavek, or child slave. This child, Tilou, was only five years old. The title of the book was "I Will Fly Again The Restavek" by Lili Dauphin. Lili mixed humor in the telling of the tale, which was largely autobiographical. Poor Tilou was beat over and over again, an unbelievable amount of physical punishment for a little child to withstand. For example, as a punishment, she had to sit on a food grater (one used for coconuts) for five hours, which caused the skin on her knees to cut open. The maid, about whom she humorously described in the book as a voodoo quack, administered this punishment. Unfortunately, this type of treatment to restaveks in Haiti has been the norm for too long.As a restavek, she was not allowed to go to sleep until her duties were finished and that sometimes entailed serving drinks to her alleged "masters" until the early hours of the mor
ning. She would be required to rise at around 4:00 am or risk another severe beating. Many of these beatings were life threatening. She relates that it was not unusual to see restavek children with bruises all over their bodies and apparently this was an accepted fact of life in Haiti. There was no penalty if any of these children were killed or injured by the people they were required to serve, except that they would lose a slave. If threat of prosecution even existed, these so-called "masters" would blame the death on another restavek.Apparently, even prior to becoming a restavek, some of the beatings she experienced were noteworthy, ranking up there in beating hell; for example a year prior to her becoming a restavek, she received a severe beating for wetting a bed during a visit to the same place where she was later enslaved. Beating children was not an uncommon event in Haiti. If the free children were experiencing child abuse regularly, the enslaved children were exper
iencing an out and out hell. In all of her books about Tilou, "Crying Mountain", "I Will Fly Again", "My First Sin", "Golden Soul", Lili has been highly critical of this commonplace abuse of children in Haiti. Outside of the plight of the restaveks, there was something almost universal about some of the child abuse, as you can see when she described the battering a cousin got from a nun for not getting high enough grades."After a moment of silence, one nun started to sing alone. She had the sweetest voice, but only when she was in church. In school, this beautiful nun would open her legs wide and put the kids' heads between them so she could have easy access to their butts. She once beat my cousin Robert so hard the poor kid couldn't sit on a chair for the longest time. All because he got a C on his paper instead of a B or an A" (Dauphin, 2007. "I Will Fly Again". p133.)Of course this was not as cruel as the horrors the restavek children suffered through. Perhaps Lili derive
d some comfort from her observation that not all of the child abuse in Haiti was so extreme and that some of this abuse was similar to child abuse worldwide or historically, such as corporal punishment from nuns or schoolteachers.Lili used humor expertly in telling this tale. Due to the dreadfulness of many of the experiences she related, that were based on her own true-to-life experiences, it might otherwise have been more difficult reading. The humor empowered her and also the reader and weakened the villains in the story, attacking them with her satire and comedy. Although, another ingredient she threaded into this tale was faith, the humor hit home. It healed.Dauphin, Lili (2007). "I Will Fly Again The Restavek". Los Angeles: Miraquest

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