It was said, in whispers carried through my wife's Haitian village, that the spirits were conspiring against her entering the world.

 

On the day of her birth, three times she emerged from her mother, and three times she retreated back in, as if pushed by unseen hands. A well-known local curse, placed by a vengeful neighbour, had forecast that both mother and child would die that day.

 

My wife's mother had fallen unconscious from the pain, and her family feared the worst. Only the intervention of her eldest sister, who slipped deep into a trance to do battle with the spirits, broke the curse that would have ended in death for both.

 

She circled the home three times on foot, and smashed a glass bottle on the ground to signify the release of the curse. At that exact moment, the child - my wife - slid into the world.

 

Within such a powerful mythology, where could I fit? For a Canadian boy raised in a secular and striving society, the richness of Haitian culture - the legends, the language, the rough influence of forces you can't see or control - can be overwhelming. But when I first met my wife, who mercilessly wore a scoop-neck top and talked about Flaubert and the Sorbonne and the mistresses of Louis XIV, there was no resistance. I was pulled into an unfamiliar culture.

 

I was no stranger to different environments, but love was something new to the equation. Now a culture wouldn't remain as a traveller's momentary experience, a series of photos or an entry in a journal. It would become something that weaves into you, embedded in your fibres.

 

Above all, I had to approach it with respect and reverence, almost like a suitor. After all, I wanted no part of curses.

 

That's why, not six months into our romance after meeting in New York,  we travelled to my wife's village in the mountains of southwest Haiti. My wife didn't say it at the time, of course, but the purpose of our visit was to see if I could handle the full force that is Haiti. She's a demanding country, one that requires endless patience and creativity, and absolute love. Frankly, she wasn't sure I had it in me.

 

And so began my two-week cultural boot camp. There were challenges, like nighttime drives over dirt roads of pure potholes accompanied by a gun-toting driver in case we encountered any trouble. There were meals of goat testicles and blood sausage that threw my insides into confusion. There were checkpoints, soldiers with rifles raised perplexed about what in the world a white financial journalist was doing traipsing through rural Haiti.

 

But in the countryside, beyond the lingering menaces of Port-au-Prince, I came closer to the nation's soul. There, life offers a different flavour. The capital's urgencies are replaced with calm and kindness, and the forests are lushly green instead of stripped bare. In short, life is preserved.

 

I'm told it's not all that different from when my wife was a child, back when she would steal bags of coffee beans from her grandfather's plantation and sell them back to him for three-quarters of a gourde.

 

 

Over time, I began to make sense of the countless rituals that make up a culture: the orange seeds you keep at the strike of the New Year to grant you luck in the coming year; the child's umbilical cord buried with a planted tree to allow protection from the spirits; the thread placed on a child's forehead to stop the hiccups.

 

If I was ever to truly know my wife, I had to invite the country into my core. When we married over Labour Day weekend in 2004 in New York State, I brought a little bit of Haiti into the heart of the festivities. I delivered my wedding speech in halting Creole after taking a year's worth of lessons. I slipped in references to food, music and the sayings of the country I wanted to honour. The shock of the Haitian guests, seeing a Vancouverite spinning Haitian proverbs, was total.

 

Now we have a two-year-old boy with a combination of blood in his veins. Some Western Canadian, some Haitian, all Brooklyn, where we live now. In bringing him into the world my wife had abandoned all English and retreated into pure Creole, pushing him out with a guttural force that brought her back to the core of who she was.

 

Looking back, I know why my wife cried softly on that flight back from Port-au-Prince. The demanding mistress that is Haiti had brought me in, sized me up and made her ruling. It was this: While I'll always remain something of an outsider, a white Canadian linked to an essentially unknowable land, I've brought my wife and her beloved country into my dreams and my blood and my bones. What other definition of love is there?

 

Chris Taylor lives in Booklyn, N.Y.