Hispañola

As a child, I lived  in Bani, Dominican Republic on an expansive and tranquil ranch just 4 hours from the border of Haiti. I traveled back and forth to this island all through high school and college. As a young adult I went twice a year to see my grandmother and family in Santo Domingo until Mama Lina died in 2006. I knew the struggles the Haitian people endured but I was always concerned for my people who cared for us and for my grandmother, the Dominican people of the campo “who struggle like the haitians” I would always say.

I turned a blind eye to Haiti in church, in the news because once you’ve live in the middle of abject poverty you become immune to it. Or that is what I would say when friends would travel to the DR and talk about the children begging for food at every traffic light in the capital.

Also the Dominicans and the Haitians have a long history of discord. You have surely seen the post earthquake news about Haiti turning away Dominican troop support… But when I met tommy who was born in Puerto Rico but whose family is from the french caribbean island of Dominica I started studying.  About the creole language which his family speaks and which originated in Haiti. About West African tribes that came through Hispañola (now Haiti and DR) during the slave trade and then were funneled out to the other islands and then sold back and forth, their ancestry cut away with every trade. I had heard there are ways to repair the cuts and trace ancestry. I wanted to see if I could undo the tangle of Tommy’s ancestry for our babies that don’t even exist yet so that I can tell them the story of their heritage on a more personal note.

I know mine. I am descended from Europeans on both sides who had lots of spare time to talk about and write down where they came from.  Even though Tommy was not born in Haiti and his people do not come from Haiti, Tommy’s ancestors live in the spirit of every living and dead human soul in Haiti.

His ancestors and ALL ancestors of every Afro Caribbean in all the islands of the Caribbean had ancestors who passes through the island of Hispañola. If we live in America, North, Central or South, it is because Hispañola was the ideal treasure that Europe lusted after. It is the foundation of the New World and it needs our attention and continued support. It is both sides of my heart and soul even if I shunned one side for much of my life. As an international community, we can come together and help the foundation of the New World heal and solidify. It took an Earthquake and hundreds or thousands of deaths to see the beauty that was right next door all along. I will do my part to help make up for all this lost time.

A Homemade Thanksgiving

After spending the past 2 Thanksgivings at the beach, mr. sir, lil mama, Clarey and I are spending Thanksgiving at home this year. For mr. sir and I, it is our first thanksgiving and anniversary at home since we got married in Grayton Beach, FL the day after Thanksgiving 2007 and spent our first anniversary on the beach of Oak Island, NC.  So this being our first homemade married Thanksgiving, we are continuing the wonderful Butler/Fernandez traditions AND adding a little Le Blanc family spice to the occasion!

As of 8:30 am the turkey is properly seasoned with our own Le Blanc secret rub and juiced up with a Chilean white wine and butter infusion ,which mr. sir will baste over it as he slow roasts it for the next six hours. It already smells ridiculous and with the oven only on 250°, I could pretty much curl up in there with said turkey and nap until he’s ready!

In keeping with new Thanksgiving traditions, we divvied up the dishes rather than have lil mama do it all. She has done one hell of a job all these years preparing it by herself but that’s one part of the new and old coming together that we tweaked.

So here’s the Butler-Fernandez-LeBlanc menu breakdown!

Lil mama~ Giblet gravy, Homemade Mashed Potatoes, California Veggie Casserole, Sister Shubert Rolls, and breakfeat while we watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

Tommy ~ Turkey

Sonia ~ Dressing, Roasted Root Vegetables with carmelized pecans, 2 Apple Butter Pumpkin Pies, Butterscotch Haystacks

Clarey ~ provide moral support, drink wine and beer, pick up her friend who’s coming for dinner! Possibly clear table and do some dishes but probably not since lil mama likes to personally hand wash every piece of fine china and crystal herself! Clarey gets an out here because she is still in college for approx. two more week and then she may be contributing next year! She could totally make the California Veggies because she makes them for her Christmas party every year. I’m just being hard on her

It’s 9am and I’m headed down to lil mama’s to curl up and watch the parade with clarey! Mr. sir will continue to man the turkey and play a creepy lego batman video game that seems more appropriate for 1st graders and less so for doctoral candidates! mr. sir, mwhaaaaa! Since I made desserts last night and my pecans are carmelized and stored for later, all I have to do is the root veggies which can be chopped and dealt with post parade!!!

Dinner at 3pm will include the four of us plus, Saurav, mr. sir’s classmate in his doctorate program and Clarey’s friend, Arian, who did not go home for Thanksgiving! Lil mama has set her beautiful traditional table which looks just like it has for years and we will gather around it to eat new and traditional delights as we create yet another lovely family memory to add the many we already have and the many years’ worth still to come!

Politics of Cheating

Yesterday, South Carolina governor, Mark Sanford, announced, after being out of touch for a week, that he had been with his Argentinian mistress in Buenos Aires. Once the news broke, media began to speculate about his career in politics. This morning, The Today Show interviewed the former governor of New Jersey, Jim McGreevey, about this latest gubernatorial scandal.

You will recall that Mr. McGreevey is quite the expert since his own scandal broke out in 2005 involving an extramarital affair with another man followed by an immediate resignation once he came out as “a gay american” (his words).  After listening to him use the interview as an opportunity to publicly redeem himself by telling about all the wonderful things he is doing for the community and his strong spirituality . He never addressed the real reason they asked him to come on, which was in part whether Sanford should himself resign, as McCreevey did in 2005. It got me thinking about the politics of cheating.

Here’s what I came up with. In our society, we act appalled by these type of scandals. But in reality, it’s not so much that a politician has an affair and gets caught but who the affair is with. I think that Mark Sanford’s career will have a slight set back but nothing too severe. I mean his affair was exotic and international and his mistress is allegedly gorgeous! He’s a bad ass now!

Let’s remember some great scandals from the recent past and see if they tell us whether Gov. Sanford is going to be able to hang in there with the likes of such notable presidential cheaters such as Kennedy, Eisenhower, Jefferson and of course Bill Clinton!

Former New Jersey governor, Jim McGreevey

No second chance for him! He had an affair with a guy who he had appointed as a homeland security adviser in his state. Oops! When questions started to be raised, McGreevey decided to come out of the closet AND resign. If only he would have had a successful “mistress” instead of a “mister” he may have stayed in office and eventually married her and lived happily ever after! You know like Charles and Camilla!

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa

So here’s a situation where a nice looking politician with a rising career (much like Gov. Sanford) gets to stay in office! Mayor Villaraigosa cheated on his wife a lot over the course of their marriage but he really did it up right the last time with political reporter, Mirthala Salinas. News got out that they were having an affair, his wife filed for divorce and then he acknowledged publicly that he was in fact in a relationship with Salinas.

No resignation for him! He is still Mayor and was an advisor to Hillary Clinton in her campaign and an advisor to President Obama as well. Salinas however was put on leave from Telemundo when the news broke. Awesome!

Note to beautiful professional women ~ When having an affair with hot, married politicians, chances are you will get in more trouble than they will. Even though you are single and they are a bunch of sons of bitches. Cheers!

Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer

Love this picture! Poor former Gov. Spitzer should have just found a decent girl to have a little fun with. That way, when he got caught he could have just apologized and gone on with the business of running New York. Alas, he chose to pay for play (using the state of New York’s money in some instances) and the rest is history! A scandal involving the “oldest trick in the book” will get you booted from politics pretty quickly! Quicker than you can pay Pretty Woman.

Moral of the story seems to me to be that if you choose the right woman to have an affair with, things won’t hurt to badly if discovered. But be damned if you have a homosexual affair or get caught with a prostitute! POLITICAL CAREER OVER!

So let’s see what happens as this latest politico/sexual scandal erupts, but I’d put my money on Governor Sanford not only redeeming himself but potentially getting himself back in the running for a republican presidential nod in 2012… Kinda following the footsteps of Rudy Giuliani….

A post from the past in a new light…

Here is my first and only blog that I did a while back and posted on a different blog site which I decided i didn’t like much. So I have moved to the wordpress world and will have more to come!

So I’m reading this ridiculous book and I’ve started having some crazy dreams because of it. It’s like it has seeped into my subconscious and is messing with my head. This is a little disturbing because it a historical fiction novel about the life of Marie Laveau. If you don’t know who she is then open up another window, google her, figure it out, and then come back to me. So you see why it technically is a problem that the book is fucking with me.

There is a specific saying that comes to mind in this instance for me. It only works if you believe. This could be universally true for any religion but it is especially true when it come to Voodoo.  So because I one hundred percent believe that some crazy shit can go down with Voodoo then it a little bit trips me out that subconsciously the book is messing with my brain.

Now I am not practicing Voodoo by any means but I grew up in the Dominican Republic, specifically Santo Domingo, and it is commonly believed that Voodoo was brought to the United States ( in this case, New Orleans) from slaves transported from Santo Domingo. And since Santo Domingo is, to use the words of Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winning Dominican author, “ground zero” for the unleashing of the most evil destruction of humanity in history. In other words, Columbus arrived there first and began the utterdecimation of the native Taino people which led to Spain’s decision to traffic Africans into slavery, for many centuries believed to be based on a fucked up Old Testament story about Noah’s son Ham ~ google that shit and see what I’m talking about ~

So no freakin wonder that African slaves who were literally snatched from their homes in the middle of the night or knocked over the head and dragged from their gardens never to see their families or home again, brought along with them the only thing they had; Their gods and their religion which happens to be, in my opinion, pretty hard core and not to be messed with as it was sometimes the only defense they had against the terrors that besought them.

Ok. let me back up. I’m of Spanish decent. I’m Catholic. I believe in God and all that the trinity stands for. But I understand why the African people and the native Indians had a pretty hard time converting to Christianity. Because the Christians who captured them and sold them into slavery and treated them as sub-human creatures weren’t setting the greatest Christ-like example.

So I get why Voodoo and Santeria have prevailed throughout the centuries and have evolved to take on many characteristics of the Catholicism that was so closely intermingled by the close relationship (positive and negative) that arose from African slaves and their Spanish masters and mistresses. I believe that all these religions play an important part of our country’s history and my personal history as a US born citizen of Spanish decent who grew up among descendants of Spanish masters and descendants of African slaves in the Dominican Republic.

So when I read a book, although fictitious, about a real woman who was believed to be the most powerful Voodoo mistress of all time and it makes me have dreams that I never would have conceived of having, then I’m not going to lie that it freaks me out a little. But her story is about her struggle with the goodness and evil of religions, Voodoo and Catholicism, and of finding a path to salvation in a world that chooses their version of good and evil based on what one believes and in many cases the color of their skin, not the goodness inside of a person. This is my biggest struggle in my path of faith and I totally identify with Marie Laveau in that sense. So maybe she’s getting in my head to open it up further to an understanding of humanity and the choices we must make given the cards we are dealt.