This Is My Body
A reflection on violence and nourishment in America after experiencing a mass shooting hoax at a Florida mall.
OCTOBER 8, 2024
1.
Two days before Christmas 2017, I headed to a popular mall — Aventura Mall — not far from my home to get my then 12-year-old daughter Mira her first cell phone. The line to drive into the mall was endless. It was, I suspected, filled with people like me, who could no longer get anything online that would be delivered before Christmas. The line at the store was also long, but not as long as the winding lane of cars heading for the exit of the five-story parking lot after I purchased the phone.
I’d felt lucky to have found a spot on the top floor when I arrived, but at the pace the cars were moving, I worried that I might still be sitting in my car on Christmas morning. Then, just as I neared the second floor, dozens of people raced past my car. Among the many screams and voices I heard was a woman calling for someone named Jackson. In the surreal way that one’s mind works at a time like this, I remember thinking, for a second, that she was calling the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. Later I realized that had I been shot to death then and there, my final thought on this earth would have been of Michael Jackson.
The crowd rushing past my car and the other cars stuck in the parking lot made driving out impossible.
“What’s going on?” I shouted at the people sprinting past.
The same question echoed from the mouths of other drivers both in front of and behind me.
“There’s a shooter in the mall,” many of the fleeing said.
The pace of events quickened as people began to shout “Run!” even as they were already running. It was obvious then that I too would have to run. The cars were at a standstill. Many of the drivers ahead of me had already abandoned their vehicles. I quickly turned off my car, then put the keys and the phone in my purse. Then I heard a series of loud explosions. To my panicked ears, it sounded like bombs were going off nearby. Suddenly there were many more of us sprinting, running, dashing, more abandoned cars, and more parents screaming their children’s names. It was hard to tell, as I wove my way through a crowd of fleeing people and unmoving cars, whether I was escaping or heading toward these explosions.
I imagined the headlines and the breaking news banners. This one, I thought, would probably be called “The Christmas Massacre.”
My adrenaline took over and I ran down the ramp until I was on the ground floor and outside. At the exit were several heavily armed police officers headed in the direction I’d just come from. I was still hearing the explosions, which made me wonder whether the active shooter, or shooters, might not also be snipers who could be waiting to pick off those fleeing from the many stores surrounding us. I spotted a bush on the side of the parking structure and took cover there. The bush was part of a low hedge that was meant to soften the look of the concrete. I squeezed myself in between that hedge and the wall to catch my breath.
People were still running, still fleeing the mall. More police and emergency vehicles were coming in too. After a few minutes behind the hedge, I joined a group of shoppers heading toward a footbridge that led to the main road outside the mall. Everyone was out of breath, all of us, walking again — and not running — for the first time since fleeing the mall. Then the flood of cell phone calls began. Many were still frantic. Some had left behind loved ones, who as far as they knew were caught up in a bloodbath or a massacre.
My husband and two daughters were at a holiday theme park called Santa’s Enchanted Forest. I texted him to let him know I was safe. I then entered the words Aventura Mall in the Advanced Search box on Twitter, now X, and the first tweet I saw was written by Jacqueline Charles, a Miami Herald reporter, who happened to be in the mall and was hiding inside a storeroom closet with dozens of other people. I called my niece who lived nearby. When she and her husband arrived, I got in their car, collapsed in the back seat, and burst into tears. I was already counting the numbers in my head. Judging from the size of the mall and the booming explosions I’d heard, I believed that dozens of people had already died. I imagined the headlines and the breaking news banners. This one, I thought, would probably be called “The Christmas Massacre.”
Though there had been and would be other shootings resulting from arguments at the mall, this one turned out to be a hoax. Some young people had perpetrated the hoax with an app that made the sounds of gunshots and bomb detonations, which were then amplified by speakers. In similar hoaxes throughout Florida malls the following week, firecrackers were used to cause panic so that criminals could rob stores.
When I first learned about the potential massacre being a hoax, I felt lucky, but also angry. Then I began making jokes. My greatest shame, I told my niece, would have been dying clutching that dammed phone. As soon as I was reunited with my family, my mother-in-law reminded me how when I learned that my husband and daughters were going to spend the afternoon at Santa’s Enchanted Forest, I had worried that, much like the mall, a place filled with hundreds of distracted children and adults might be, in modern terrorism or mass shooter speak, a soft target. Still, both my husband and I had kept to our plans. After all, these things always seemed to happen in other places, and to other people.
In recent years — particularly with the young activists who emerged after the February 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida — we have had many detailed accounts of what it’s like to actually survive one of those massacres. The grace of the young Parkland survivors, their eloquence, their efforts to include less privileged youth — among them young people of color whose communities are chronically and disproportionately affected by gun violence — have been especially eye opening. As one of Mira’s teachers said when we went to our local March for Our Lives rally, the day before Mira’s thirteenth birthday, my daughters’ generation has lived in great proximity to graphic, vivid trauma due to gun violence. They also have enough tools, including social media, to share real-time accounts of the shootings and the aftermath with the rest of us. Our children not only read about dying violently, or see it online, or act it out, as some do, in sadistic video games. They are also being trained to expect dying while planning how to avoid it. One of the signs I found most heartbreaking at our local March for Our Lives rally was carried by an African American girl who looked like she was around ten, which was then my younger daughter Leila’s age.
The sign simply read, “LET US GROW UP!”
In the days that followed, I thought of my experience at Aventura Mall as a kind of drill, not unlike the ones carried out at my daughters’ school and at many other schools around the country. Soon after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings, each of my daughters came home describing her own experience of the active shooter drill at school. Leila was told to hide under her desk, which, even she acknowledged, is wooden and small and would not protect her from an assault rifle. Mira was told that if she was in the hallway with the active shooter nearby, she should find an unlocked classroom and run inside. Since her class had been advised to lock the door, I told her to run instead to the nearest bathroom or supply closet and take cover there. I hoped I hadn’t given her potentially deadly advice.
2.
I spent a lot of time thinking about suddenly dying after that day at Aventura Mall, but even before that, since my mother died of ovarian cancer in October 2014. Part of my job as a writer is to wrestle with mortality, both my own and that of others. I do this, in part, by writing about fictional people I give life to, throw untold atrocities at, then either redeem or destroy. In my own life, one way I wrestle with mortality is by keeping a pocket-size notebook with a list of instructions and counsel for my daughters, ranging from what they might call cringe (“Do not ever underestimate how awesome you are”) to the spiritual (“Keep some element of faith in your life. You saw how your grandmother’s faith brought her such solace and comfort as she was dying”). This, too, I took from my mother. The day she died, on the nightstand by her bed I found an advice-filled cassette created for my three brothers and me. On the tape, she told us not to be too sad, since she’d lived a long and fulfilling life, as well as what I should wear to her funeral: a long-sleeved black dress, a hat, no open-toe shoes. That cassette, I now realize, is one of the ways she resisted dying.
As a terminal cancer patient, my mother understood how not to die, even when you must die. Her tranquil yet firm voice on that cassette proves it. She knew we would be listening to her long after she was gone. She still wanted to parent us from the grave.
At the end of my mother’s life, when we were constantly telling each other stories, I told her how I’d once heard that a kind of amber-colored rice we loved is said to have come to our part of the world from the African continent because an enslaved woman had hidden some grains of it in her hair. I’d also heard that rice had been brought to the Caribbean by European enslavers to supplement the meager diet of the enslaved. However, we preferred the story of the woman with the rice in her hair.
“You mean her scalp was a garden?” my mother asked incredulously, even as her own scalp became more exposed as a side effect of chemotherapy.
The woman with the rice in her hair, I realize, was already imagining a future in which she would exist only as an ancestor. Perhaps she already knew that one day she would become a lejann, and a food and body story.
3.
The father of a friend used to tell her, as she enjoyed what he considered a bit too much food, that she was digging her grave with her teeth. I often think of this supposed oral grave digging when I am with incarcerated people. In the prisons and immigration detention centers that I have visited, food and body stories come up regularly. Many Haitian immigration detainees see the terrible food they are fed at the most inconvenient hours — sometimes at four in the morning for breakfast and four in the afternoon for dinner — as manje dekouraje, food meant to punish them, and encourage them to beg to be deported, and later tell others not to come.
My mother liked to tell my brothers and me that sak vid pa kanpe (empty sacks don’t stand) and se sa k nan vant ou ki pa w (only what’s in your belly is yours).
The food would neither “stay up nor down,” one woman told me in early 2002 when I met her in the south Florida hotel that had been turned into a holding facility for women and children who’d come to Miami by boat from Haiti. These women either vomited this food or it gave them diarrhea. Six of them lived in one hotel room. Some were forced to sleep on the floor. Not only did these women have no control over what they were putting in their bodies, but it was making them sick, and the sickness was further dehumanizing them.
During my teenage years, in the early 1980s, my parents used to take me to visit Haitian refugees and asylum seekers at a detention center near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The men there believed that hormones in the detention center food were making them grow breasts, a condition known as gynecomastia. In October 1987, thirty Haitian men who had been detained at Miami’s Krome detention center filed a civil suit against the U.S. government claiming that they’d developed gynecomastia while they were at Krome. The lawsuit revealed that the gynecomastia might have been caused by the detention center’s use of insecticides, particularly a type meant for animals, and Kwell, a harsh antiscabies and lice cream, which was given to Haitian detainees to use daily as a body lotion. Other research, however, found clear links between diet and gynecomastia, and the men remained convinced that the detention center food had something to do with it. Despite all this, a jury found the U.S. government, their jailer, not liable.
One of the ways my immigrant parents tried to immerse my brothers and me in American culture was to let us choose pizza, fried chicken, or hot dogs on Friday nights after eating rice and beans, plantains, and other Haitian dishes every other night of the week. My mother liked to tell my brothers and me that sak vid pa kanpe (empty sacks don’t stand) and se sa k nan vant ou ki pa w (only what’s in your belly is yours). She often told us these things right before we went to someone else’s house for lunch or dinner. The ultimate lesson in those maxims and proverbs was to never show up somewhere too hungry. You never knew when your hosts would be ready to feed you, and you must not seem too famished, too desperate, too empty when they do. And if by any chance your arrival at someone’s house happens to coincide with a meal to which you were not previously invited, you must refuse the food you are offered, even if you are starving. Otherwise it will seem as though you purposely showed up for that meal and that would make you seem calculatingly greedy, visye.
Meals eaten in desperation or under distress of course end up being memorable. The choice of pre-execution meals generates so much interest that they are often mentioned, along with the final words spoken by the executed, in postmortem press conferences. The most legendary final meal is the Last Supper. We have no account of what else was consumed at the Last Supper besides unleavened bread and wine, which Jesus offered to his disciples — including the ones who would renounce and betray him, by saying, “Take, eat; this is my body.” Then, “Drink, this is my blood.”
I think of all this, too, when I hear about people who have nothing in their stomach of their choosing, people who have no choice but to swallow food they despise, and people who are fed against their will while they are jailed. Algerian-born Lakhdar Boumediene was living in Bosnia in October 2001 when he was accused of participating in a terrorist plot. He was cleared by Bosnian authorities after a thorough investigation, yet was turned over to U.S. authorities, who renditioned him to Guantánamo, where he was a prisoner from 2002 to 2009. In a 2017 opinion piece in the New Republic, he wrote about a monthlong hunger strike, which he started in December 2006:
I stopped eating not because I wanted to die, but because I could not keep living without doing something to protest the injustice of my treatment. They could lock me up for no reason and with no chance to argue my innocence. They could torture me, deprive me of sleep, put me in an isolation cell, control every single aspect of my life. But they couldn’t make me swallow their food.
In July 2013, the rapper and activist Yasiin Bey agreed to be force-fed in a manner similar to the way prisoners on hunger strike were being force-fed at Guantánamo Bay. Bey was strapped to a feeding chair that looked like an electric chair. His hands and feet and head were placed in restraints. A nasal gastric tube was forced through his nose, down the back of his throat, and into his stomach, a process the U.S. military called enteral feeding. As Bey wriggled and twisted — to whatever extent he could — tears ran down his face. He coughed. He grunted. He pleaded with his “jailers,” who were pressing the weight of their bodies on his chest and stomach, to stop.
“Please, please, don’t,” he begged.
After a minute or so, he was squirming so much that the tube fell out. The jailers put him in a choke hold to further restrain him and only stopped when he said, “This is me. Please stop. I can’t do this anymore.” Then he broke down and cried.
Sometimes when a person dies a mò sibit, suddenly with no previous sign of illness, the elders in my family will say that this person was “eaten.”
Had Bey been an actual prisoner, his jailers wouldn’t have stopped until they were done force-feeding him. Those on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay were fed like this twice a day, and for two hours each time, which led to Bey’s demonstration as protest. After being force-fed, those on hunger strike at Guantánamo would then have a mask placed over their mouths while their bodies processed the liquid nutritional supplement. Back in their “dry” cells, which meant there was no water in those cells, they were observed closely to see if they were vomiting. If they vomited the supplement, they were force-fed again. Many prisoners urinated and defecated on themselves in the chair. Prisoners who were fasting during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, were force-fed before dawn and after sunset.
4.
Sometimes when a person dies a mò sibit, suddenly with no previous sign of illness, the elders in my family will say that this person was “eaten.” Yo mange li. They killed them by “eating” them. The yo (they) who’s done the eating is often a person or a group of persons of ill will who have deployed some destructive force. We might never willingly offer ourselves to be “eaten” in this way (Here is my body.) unless we are noble to the point of being sacrificial or feel we have no choice.
In the early 1990s, before it became a military prison where terrorism suspects are detained indefinitely, the Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba was used for warehousing over forty thousand Haitian asylum seekers who’d been intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard on the high seas after the coup d’état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Haitians were detained behind barbed wire and in four-foot- square cages. Families were separated. Some detainees were taken to an underground cage and tortured by the marines. Women were raped by U.S. military officials, with at least one case leading to court-martial.
Because HIV-positive immigrants were banned from entering the United States at the time, HIV-positive asylum seekers were also held in Guantánamo. Over 200 HIV-positive Haitians, led by Yolande Jean, a mother of two and Haitian political activist, started a hunger strike on January 23, 1993, that lasted ninety days. Yolande Jean told some visiting American journalists at that time: “We started the hunger strike so that this body could get spoiled and then the soul can go to God. Let me kill myself so my brothers and sisters can live.”
In a letter addressed to her family, particularly to her sons, Hill and Jeff, Yolande Jean wrote:
To my family,
Don’t count on me anymore because I am lost in the struggle of life. Hill and Jeff, you don’t have a mother anymore. Realize that you do not have a bad mother, only that life took me away. Goodbye, my children. Goodbye, my family. We will meet in another world.
Yolande Jean was released from Guantánamo in May 1993 after her T cell count dangerously plunged below 200. She was reunited with her children in the United States. Half of the other HIV-positive hunger strikers died from the virus after being released.
“Sometimes surrendering to death is how you survive, but sometimes telling yourself that you will live, is how not to die,” Yolande told me a few months after her release.
We were on the set of a video shoot for the title song of the 1993 AIDS courtroom drama Philadelphia, which was directed by the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Jonathan Demme. A passionate advocate for Haiti and Haitian refugees, Jonathan had followed Yolande’s incarceration and hunger strike closely and recruited the actress Susan Sarandon to read Yolande’s farewell letter at a March 1993 New York City protest, where Jonathan, Susan Sarandon, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson were arrested. I had worked for Jonathan as an assistant in the early 1990s, and he invited me to the set to translate for Yolande, whose body was plump and healthy again.
In the Bruce Springsteen video, the music star walks the streets of a mural-covered, children-filled, impoverished Philadelphia. Along his route, he crosses paths with a pensive Yolande Jean, who’s watching a group of Black girls cheerfully jumping rope as Springsteen sings:
I was bruised and battered
I couldn’t tell what I felt
I was unrecognizable to myself
As I was sitting behind the hedge at Aventura Mall two days before Christmas 2017 I thought I heard this song playing somewhere in the distance. My mind raced backward and forward, thinking about all the people, including my children, who’d miss me most if I died. A few days later, I began writing a novel that opens in the mall. In the novel, people die, just as others have, or nearly died, at other times, in other malls, and just as I might have died that day. The novel’s narrator, a survivor, also recalls some stories from her past. This is my body, she thinks, my blood.
“This Is My Body” from We’re Alone. Copyright © 2024 by Edwidge Danticat. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org
✺ Published in “Issue 21: America” of The Dial
