Sa ou fe, se li ou we: A Haitian Travel Blog

By: Lea Graham

The Haitian proverb, Sa ou fe, se li ou we means “What you do is what you see.” In preparing for a trip to Haiti with my colleague in Environmental Science and a few of our students from Marist College, I’ve been thinking about travel and its meaning. Travel is a kind of “doing.” People keep asking us: What will you do in Haiti? At this point, we only have some vague ideas: teach some classes, investigate fisheries, work at the H.E.L.O. Orphanage in Les Cayes http://helohaiti.org/ , and scout possibilities for future trips with our students and faculty. But honestly, we’re still not sure.

Usually when I travel, I have a solid idea about what I’ll be doing: teaching a course, hiking a pilgrimage, visiting friends, taking notes for poems or articles I plan to write, or, once in a while, simply lying on a beach. The photographs, my journals, the collection of rocks and shells or ticket stubs from museums all compose evidence of what I was doing there. As a poet, I’m in the image business. I want objects—or language—to call up the “ there.” Last summer, I hiked 175 km of the Spanish pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. While walking, I thought about a writer who had recently written a blurb for my first book. He was a Canadian poet and novelist, who I had met a few times at conferences in Winnipeg. I admired his mind’s expanse and his work’s playfulness. The voice in his poems and fiction, so often joking and self-deprecating, created a camaraderie in my imagination that wasn’t actual. I also loved how his words expanded my sense of the Canadian prairies. I knew Bob had traveled to Spain and had an affinity for the country, and so I picked red and purple wild flowers outside of places like Santillana del Mar and Luarca, pressed them into my journal to send to him as a thank you when I returned home. A few days after arriving back in the States, I received a call about Bob’s death in a car accident. The flowers that I had picked are still pressed in my journal. The doing of that trip is there for me to see—recalling Bob and the loss of what might have been more years of correspondence and deepening friendship.

What will we do in Haiti? What will we see? What is the complicated relationship between action and evidence? My colleague and I keep talking about “gaining perspective” through this trip, what seems to me like our need to re-see our notions of the world, and possibly what we do in it. How does travel help us into another vision of the world? How might we—who have traveled and lived in developing countries—do something in Haiti that will be visible to ourselves and others in both tangible and intangible ways? As my mother would always say whenever we would ask her questions she couldn’t or wouldn’t answer: We’ll see. We’ll see.

LG