Editor’s Note: Freelance writer Levi Bridges of Sedgwick is documenting the lives of several immigrants in Maine. Their stories will appear periodically in the Bangor Daily News.
When Edie Charlot remembers Paris, the city where she spent her youth, a fond smile crosses her lips. Sitting in the Maine College of Art in downtown Portland recently, she recalled the French capital as a bustling city of cobblestone walkways and warm cafes.
“As a young girl, my family and I moved from France to a small town in Connecticut called Deep River,” she said. “In Connecticut, I experienced a quieting of the energy I felt in France. When I remembered Paris, this loud buzzing sound seemed to fill my head.”
Deep River, Conn., is a quiet New England town. It’s the type of place where, on a humid July night, townspeople leisurely converse in rocking chairs on front porches. The move was a drastic change for Charlot and her siblings, who went from living in a multicultural Parisian neighborhood to being the only black family in an all-white American town.
“Seven of us lived in a two-bedroom house on Main Street,” she said. “In France, we were middle class. But in America, we were … upper lower class … I think Charles Dickens said that,” she added.
Charlot, a 22-year-old student of printmaking and graphic design at the Maine College of Art, struggles when explaining her identity.
“People always assume I’m African-American,” she said. “And I confuse the African immigrants in Portland, too. They hear my last name, Charlot, and say, ‘OK, you’re not American, Somali or Sudanese. What are you then?’
“I tell them I’m part American, part French,” she said, “and Haitian.”
Charlot’s parents emigrated from Haiti to France as teenagers. Her mother originally wanted to move to America, but couldn’t get a visa.
In 1996, Charlot’s mother realized her dream. The entire family moved to Connecticut and became part of the nearly half-million Americans of Haitian descent.
Coming to Maine
Most of Charlot’s extended family still live in a region of Haiti called Fond des Blancs. Over mountainous terrain and bad roads, it takes four hours to make the 75-mile trip from Fond des Blancs to the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince.
Haiti’s poor infrastructure makes it difficult for family members abroad to keep in touch. Phones didn’t work well in Haiti even before the Jan. 12 earthquake. “Since the earthquake, we’ve only had limited contact with our family,” said Charlot. “It has been difficult to watch this disaster from Maine.”
To raise money for quake victims, the young artist began making buttons and silk-screen T-shirts to sell. Charlot also created the Web site dearworldhelphaiti.com, a directory of organizations working in Haiti that also will use a blog-style format to document the relief effort.
“I hope my Web site will make Americans remember Haiti in six months like 9-11 or Hurricane Katrina,” Charlot said. “That’s the only way the situation [in Haiti] will ever improve.”
Some of Haiti’s biggest problems before the earthquake were lack of adequate health care and deforestation. Most rural Haitians rely on charcoal as a fuel source. As a result, Haiti continually loses trees as they are used to make the fuel. Today, Haiti ranks as one of the world’s most deforested regions, making the Caribbean na-tion extremely vulnerable to natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes.
Because Charlot still has family in Haiti, these issues remain part of her everyday consciousness. “My uncle in Haiti died recently because there was no medical staff nearby to help him,” she said. “He left six kids behind that my grandmother takes care of on our small family farm. After the earthquake, she took in seven more orphans from Port-au-Prince. It’s difficult to feed them all because the farmland is too unstable to grow crops, so she’s burning the coffee trees my mother grew up with to sell as charcoal.” Absorbing culture
Although Charlot’s family background differs from that of many Americans, she easily integrates with her peers. In Portland, she shares an apartment with a roommate, a young man from Maine who also studies at MECA.
“My roommate teaches me about American culture,” she said. “We listen to the same music his parents did, like KISS and Jethro Tull. It’s interesting to see the cultural things, like music, he inherited from his American family that I didn’t as an immigrant.”
Today Charlot looks at Portland as the perfect middle ground between her stimulating childhood in Paris and quiet teenage years in Connecticut.
“I visited the school twice and fell in love with Portland. The city was completely accessible to me. I loved the arts district and all of the restaurants. It honestly just felt right. I had a chance to walk around quite a bit and found the noise and busy-ness really exciting,” she said.
Does she plan to stay in Maine?
“I am planning to stay in Maine and plan on calling Portland home base. I plan on traveling here and there for a little bit after I graduate,” she said.
“I have made lifelong friends and expanded my family. I call Portland, Maine, home.” To learn more about how you can help quake victims in Haiti, or Edie Charlot’s T-shirt fundraiser, visit www.dearworldhelphaiti.com
Levi Bridges grew up on a farm in Sedgwick. A graduate of Alfred University in New York, he has traveled extensively and studied abroad at universities in Mexico, Spain and Russia. He resides in Portland. If you, or someone you know, have an immigrant story in Maine you think should be told, e-mail Levi Bridges at losbridges@gmail.com