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2000s: The complex underbelly of the immigrant American dream
2000s: The complex underbelly of the immigrant American dream
When Lucien flees Haiti with his wife, Marie-Ange, and their three children to New York City’s South Ozone Park, he does so hoping for reinvention, wealth, and comfort. He buys a rundown house in a community that is quickly changing from an Italian enclave of mobsters to a haven for Haitian immigrants, and begins life anew. Lucien and Marie-Ange call their home La Kay–“my mother’s house”–and it becomes a place where their fellow immigrants can find peace, a good meal, and legal help. But as a severely emotionally damaged man emigrating from a country whose evils he knows to one whose evils he doesn’t, Lucien soon falls into his worst habits and impulses, with La Kay as the backdrop for his lasciviousness. What he can’t even begin to fathom is that the house is watching, passing judgment, and deciding to put an end to all the sins it has been made to hold. But only after it has set itself aflame will frightened whispers reveal Lucien’s ultimate evil.
Haiti
The country and city of Port au Prince appears briefly to show the journey the family take on their way top their new life in New York. The history of immigration from these parts is interesting.
South Ozone Park Queens
This is the one Italian neighbourhood where the family move into and they are a mixed immigrant community of mainly Caribbean people.
They call their house Kay Manman Mwen which is ‘my mother’s house’ or KAM for short.
The house being an entity of evil is scary – the house is a kind of Big Brother entity and it comments on all that goes on underneath its roof and in its basement. You will never look at houses in the same way again.
Destination/location: New York, Haiti Author/guide: Francesca Montplaisir Departure Time: 2000s
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