In 2007, I got a chance to see a great documentary film by my friend Jeremy Robins called The Other Side of the Water: The Journey of a Haitian Rara Band in Brooklyn. The movie tells the story of Djarara, a Flatbush, Brooklyn-based group that, over the last two decades, has revolutionized rara music in their adopted country, winning scores of American fans in the process.
At the time, I lived in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn—Alex’s neighborhood in A Song for Bijou, just a stone’s throw away from Flatbush. Watching the film, I was amazed that these great musicians were reinventing their culture less than a mile away from my house. How could something so exciting be happening almost literally in my backyard, without me knowing a thing about it? I didn’t forget about Djarara. These musicians, their struggles and triumphs, stayed with me long after the lights came up and I walked out of the theater. (And while I didn’t know it yet, the character of Jou Jou would be based on some of the young men I had “gotten to know” in the movie.)
Three years later, when the earthquake struck Haiti, millions around the world were spellbound by the tragedy. And as I followed the story along with everyone else, I couldn’t help but think of the tens of thousands of Haitians living right here in Brooklyn and the devastating impact the event must have had on their families back home.
I began to imagine the intersecting lives of Bijou, a strong and determined survivor of the quake, and Alex, a shy Brooklyn boy who can’t possibly understand what Bijou has been through, but wants to try. There was no real story yet. All I had was an idea about a relationship between two seventh graders that survives despite peer pressure, cultural prejudices, and a hundred and one misunderstandings. And also, I had a title, A Song for Bijou. I’m not sure why, but the character name and the title came almost immediately. I didn’t have a clue how this “song” would fit into the story, but I liked the sound of the title, and it stuck.
When it came to the actual story, it wasn’t too tough to write from Alex’s perspective. My own childhood was a bit like his—I grew up with a single mom until I was eleven, and I went to a school almost exactly like St. Christopher’s (although we weren’t lucky enough to have a sister school just a few blocks away!), so it wasn’t difficult to imagine the mixture of admiration, respect, and confusion that Bijou would cause in him. But to be able to write from Bijou’s point of view, I knew I’d need to spend some time with people who had lived a life similar to hers. Over the next few months, I spoke with Haitian and Haitian American women, eager to know about their experiences living and going to school in New York City.
Two of them, Toni Cela and Fabienne Doucet (who kindly allowed me to use her last name for Bijou), helped me to understand the experience of a newly arrived seventh-grade girl whose country and culture seem so often to be ignored, misunderstood, or feared. Both Toni and Fabienne are educators now, and they’ve dedicated much of their careers to understanding the lives of young people. I read their academic writing with great interest, but the personal stories they shared with me had an even greater impact on A Song for Bijou.
When I met with Toni, she told me about a funny instance of the word “Haitian” being misunderstood as “Asian,” which I thought would be an amusing way to show Alex’s ignorance of Bijou’s cultural background. Toni also explained that spending time with a boy would have been next to impossible for a girl like Bijou, because until adulthood, girls are rarely more than a few steps away from a family member, teacher, priest, or other authority figure. I wanted to portray this as realistically as possible, but it posed a problem: if Bijou wouldn’t be allowed to hang out with Alex, how would they ever get to know each other? And if my two main characters weren’t able to spend time together, did I really have a book at all? The only solution was for Bijou and Alex to both become very creative, even deceptive, in order to be together. They’re good, honest kids, but they want to get to know each other so badly that they’re willing to bend a few rules along the way. I’m not saying lying to your parents is a good thing, but a fib or two in the service of love is a time-honored tradition that probably started a few thousand years before Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet.
When I interviewed Fabienne, she told me she had learned English in Haiti largely by watching All My Children on satellite TV, and I found that detail too irresistible not to use for Bijou. More importantly, speaking with Fabienne influenced my decision that Bijou would be from a middle-class family—in Haiti, they would be called bourgeois—rather than a poorer one. While there are many different kinds of people from different economic backgrounds in Haiti, most Americans assume that all Haitians are desperately needy. This stereotype is one of many that Bijou confronts throughout the book; like so many newcomers to America, it is very hard for her to be truly seen by the kids she meets at her new school. Fabienne helped me to understand that.
Later, Gina Vellani, who coordinates the English as a Second Language instruction for thousands of Haitian students every year at Flatbush’s essential resource center, CAMBA, allowed me to visit classes held on Church Avenue, just blocks away from Bijou’s home in the book. While listening to Haitian ESL students introduce themselves and describe their lives in the English phrases they had learned only a few weeks earlier, I furiously scrawled notes on their diction and pronunciation. I also paid close attention to the way they dressed and used some of these details in describing Jou Jou and his bandmates.
Finally, I was aided greatly by a talented drummer in the Haitian tradition, Morgan Zwerlein, and a Brooklyn-based musicologist and musician, Lois Wilcken. Morgan helped me learn just enough hand-drumming technique to imagine what it would be like for Alex to study with Jou Jou. Lois helped me to understand the Haitian music scene in Brooklyn and told me all about the history of the Gran Bwa on the southern tip of Prospect Park, where anyone who wants to see some real-life rara should go on a Sunday afternoon between April and November. You will never forget what you see and hear there.