This is an open letter to my ex-wife Emma Jean-Baptiste Adhemar
During a week of vacationing in Haiti, I met you on a spring day of 1990 in Cite du Peuple, Cap-Haitien. After a brief courtship, it was love at first sight. Automatically, I believed having met the woman of my life. A short time later, we got married. Six months into our wedding, I realized that what I thought was love was really a fatal attraction. You came out of your shell to show me your true color. You put me in a labyrinth that turned into my worst nightmare.
As a sorcerer, you manipulated me with witchcraft so you could have me and get from me what no other men would have given you: a committed love, a marriage after five months of dating and legal immigration to the United States. Words of you sleeping around with multiple partners are no secret in a city as small as Cap-Haitian where people know one another. People were reluctant to come forward with information about you for fear of their lives.
Once we went our separate ways, people were comfortable to share with me details once hidden and unknown to me about your dirty lifestyle. I became irate to know that the so-called Christian woman I had married was, in fact, a sorcerer, a personal voodoo priestess (Manbo), and a call girl with a specific clientele, someone who is a known Jezebel, but not a public “hooker” per se.
As I warned you of my imminent divorce, you responded with stern warnings of your own: “Hubert, the day you leave me, my dad, Jean-Baptiste Adhemar Kokobe, will kill you with witchcraft just like the four people he had killed.” You meant what you said, didn’t you? You named me all four victims: the wife of Jeanba’s first son, Daniel, the parents of the lady and Zo Nan Man Gras, a popular guy whom I knew and who lived right across from your family house. On February 9, 2007, a year after our separation, I almost became the fifth victim of your father, but, thank God, I survived.
You are cruel and a messed-up sl*t. I don’t blame you because you are too far gone to be normal. Shame on you! But it’s too bad for me. You put me through hell on earth, and you think it is fun because you’re evidently enjoying every bit of it. The reason is simple; you are an evil woman of Delilah type; I am Samson in the bible. A Jew and a Philistine, what did I expect? My marriage to you was that of a lioness and a sheep. As such, psychological torture, financial ruin, exploitation and fiasco became the concurring effects. By the way, cooking, after all, was the only thing for which I commended you.
Whether you admit it or not, I gave you the best of me, and I mean my life, my love, my money, my name and my all. But nothing seemed enough or good enough for you. My hope was to build a model family where we could raise our children and instill in them family values. But you’ve shattered my hope and dreams because you had a different agenda, which is material possessions and money.
You were literally not fit and not ready to settle down as a wife. I curse November 17 of every subsequent year to our wedding, the date I said I do. As you once stated, your marriage to me was one of convenience. I finally came to understand your ploy. Knowing that I am a U.S. citizen, you used me as a bridge to cross the Atlantic from Haiti to the United States, the promised land. You are a skillful scam artist and a master of deceit. Thanks to your scheme, you’ve become very successful at my expense.
A few months into our marriage, you suggested that we purchased a piece of land to build a family house. I agreed because I thought it was a good idea. I am in the United States and you in Haiti. I sent you my share of the money to purchase the lot. Unlike other wives, you fraudulent used your maiden name in the deed of the purchased lot. Now every penny I had saved that went into the construction of that beautiful mansion located in the upscale Barbiole Neighborhood is wasted because you claimed to have the sole ownership of it.
You also claimed the house in West Palm Beach, Florida as if it is normal for a couple to spend their hard-earned money on a joint acquisition to see it mysteriously robbed by a greedy ex-wife. The property laws in the United States and in Haiti say otherwise. Ambition and greed predominate your sphere of thoughts and obscure your common sense and your sense of reality. Idiot!
If you remember correctly, you turned our home into a battle zone, a ghetto-like den with a constant blitz of profanities to which I was unaccustomed. You burned me mercilessly in the same fashion as London was burning in the Second World War. Finally, It became evident to me that it was time for both of us to part ways. I had enough of you. But how could I live away from my children? During all those years, I was holding onto the marriage for their sake. Ultimately, I found out that such a decision was too suicidal to go on like this. In March 2006, I got out of the family house.
With a broken heart, I bade farewell to my three kids who were at that time 10, 9 and 4 years old. A couple of months later, I filed for divorce. My divorce was torturous, costly and painful. Evil! As I expected, the divorce was fraudulent as a vengeance from the judge who, oblivious of my plight and my will to be free from you, resented the fact that I divorced you in Haiti in 2008 while the court was dragging the divorce proceeding in West Palm Beach, FL. Now everything in your eagle claws is not yours alone; it’s time to let go of it, gold digger!
Abusive and greedy women are more so than men. You’ve embodied that type of person. A woman should be either a woman or you, not both at once. You acted like a vulture having a feeding frenzy on me, a voracious sensation of dissecting me piece by piece and of sucking my blood drop by drop. Fortunately, I am recovering, and I am thriving, to say the least. You are a unique type of species, the cruel kind who, with her bare hands, put a voodoo spell on me and who, while married, was still practicing her corrupt sexual lifestyle. Emma, “the end, this way, does not justify the means.”
As Steve Maraboli said, “It’s never pretty when you leave an abusive and controlling relationship. The warden always protests when the prison gets shut-down.”
Hubert Odias 