Create Dangerously (19 page)

When I enter the church during my visit, I am amazed how little damage it appears to have sustained. Given that so many buildings around it had crumbled, its endurance seems part of some greater design, like the twenty-foot crucifix standing in the ruins of the collapsed Sacré-Cœur Church in the Turgeau neighborhood of Port-au-Prince.

The church is open and a group of men are huddled in the aisle in deep conversation when I walk in. One of them offers to show me Maxo’s makeshift grave.

I descend a cracked cement staircase, seeing through the fallen basement walls the foundations of the two houses on either side of me. It occurs to me that I am in a cavernous hole around which the earthquake crumpled everything else. Through the gaps in the wall I can see parts of the bottom of the rubble.

The danger of my being there suddenly hits home. So quickly, more quickly than I would have liked, I kiss my hand and then bend down and touch the cemented mound where Maxo had been buried.

Esther, the maternal cousin who had overseen his burial, had carved in the cement his name, his date of birth, and the day that he died, the day that so many died.

“We buried him there and I marked it,” she had told me on the phone, “so that whenever any of you come back from
lòt bò dlo
, you can see and touch his grave.”

I reach down and touch the grave again. I feel that I should perhaps say more prayers, intone more words, but frankly I am afraid. A massive church is resting on a shattered foundation around me. Should there be another aftershock, I could be crushed.

“Good-bye, Maxo,” I simply say. “Good-bye, Nozial.”

Emerging from under the church and into the sunlight, I remember thinking, each time I saw someone rescued from the rubble on television, that it looked a lot like a vaginal birth, the rescue teams nudging, like midwives, a head, then a shoulder, then some arms, and then some legs, out of the expanded earth.

Maxo and Nozial, I thought, were never reborn.

At Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport, I must show my American passport to get inside to meet the plane for the return trip. The first U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer at the airport entrance asks me to take off my glasses as he looks at my picture on the passport. He holds the passport up to the sunlight for some time to verify that it is not fake. I am embarrassed and slightly humiliated, but these, I suppose, are lesser humiliations compared to what my loved ones and so many others are going through. The second and third Customs and Border Protection officers are Haitian Americans who speak to me in Creole. They wish me a good return trip “home.”

On the plane, I listen quietly as the flight attendant thanks the doctors and nurses who are returning to the United States from stints as volunteers in Haiti.

“I bet you’re looking forward to hot showers and warm beds and U.S. ice,” she says.

The doctors and others clap and whistle in agreement.

“Well,” she says, “I can offer you one of those things. The U.S. ice”

Wrapping up, she adds, “God bless America”

Feeling overly protective of an already battered Haiti, I hear myself cry out, “God bless Haiti, too,” drawing a few stares from my fellow passengers.

The man in the seat behind me taps me on the shoulder and says, “Really. God bless both America and Haiti”

As we take off, I look down at the harbor, where a U.S military helicopter is flying between Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport and the USNS
Comfort
medical ship anchored just outside Port-au-Prince harbor. Further out to sea are U.S. Coast Guard ships, whose primary purpose is to make sure that Haitians are intercepted if they try to get on boats and head to the United States.

I have a copy of
Les Nègres
that I had meant to leave on Maxo’s grave under the church, but in my haste and fear I had forgotten and brought it back with me.

I turn my eyes from the Coast Guard ships, and now on the plane I open the book and begin reading, turning immediately to the page that, soon after I’d learned of Maxo’s death, had directly spoken to me: “Your song was very beautiful, and your sadness does me honor. I’m going to start life in a new world. If ever I return, I’ll tell you what it’s like there. Great black country, I bid thee farewell.”

Great black country, I too bid thee farewell, I think.

At least for now.

I am extremely grateful to the magnificent Toni Morrison for her kindness in having me present the second annual Toni Morrison lecture (March 2008), which led to this book. Thanks also to Eddie Glaude, Joelle Loessy, Valerie Smith, Chang Rae Lee, and Fred Appel for their assistance. And to Cornel West, the standard bearer. At last I have an opportunity to thank Marcel Duret for his promotion of Haitian culture in Japan and the enjoyable and informative trips there. Thanks also to Patricia Benoit, Fedo Boyer, Jim Hanks, Nicole Aragi, Kathie Klarreich, Project MediShare, Kimberly Green, and the Green Family Foundation. My thanks also to Daniel Morel for his time and his work. My deepest gratitude to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Thanks lastly, to Pascalle Monnin for the art used on the book cover.

Some of the chapters in this book appeared previously in the following publications:

Chapter 2
is taken partially from “A Taste of Coffee” in
Calabash
(May 2001). Other material is from an afterword to
Breath, Eyes, Memory
, by Edwidge Danticat (Random House Inc., 1999).

Chapter 3
is taken partially from
The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States
, edited by Edwidge Danticat (Soho Press, 2003). Other material is from the article “Bonjour Jean” in
The Nation
(February 19, 2001).

Chapter 4
is taken partially from the foreword to
Memoir of an Amnesiac
by J. Jan Dominique (Caribbean Studies Press, 2008). Other material is from the introduction to
Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Triptych
, by Marie Vieux-Chauvet (Random House Inc., 2009).

Chapter 6
is taken partially from the essay “Out of the Shadows” in
The Progressive
(June 2006).

Chapter 7
is taken partially from in the article “Thomas Jefferson: The Private War: Ignoring the Revolution Next Door” in
Time
(July 05, 2004). Other material is from the introduction to
The Kingdom of This World
, by Alejo Carpentier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).

Chapter 8
is taken partially from the essay “Another Country” in
The Progressive
(Fall 2005).

Chapter 9
is taken partially from the article “On Borrowed Wings” in
The Telegraph India
(October 2004).

Chapter 12
is taken partially from the article “A Little While” in the
New Yorker
(February 1, 2010). Other material is taken partially from the article “Aftershocks: Bloodied, shaken—and beloved” in the
Miami Herald
(January 17, 2010).

Daniel Morel and Jane Regan of Wozo Productions provided the footage of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin referred to in this chapter. Louis Drouin’s final statement was published in Prosper Avril,
From Glory to Disgrace: The Haitian Army, 1804-1994
(Parkland, FL: Universal Publishers, 1999). “Create Dangerously” Albert Camus’ lecture, which was delivered at the University of Uppsala in December 1957, is reprinted in
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death
(New York: Vintage International, 1995.) The
Le Matin
quotation is from Bernard Diederich and Al Burt,
Papa Doc: The Truth about Haiti Today
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969). All Ralph Waldo Emerson quotations are from
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems
, edited and with a foreword by Robert D. Richardson (New York: Bantam Classics, 1990). The Roland Barthes quotation “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” is from the essay “The Death of the Author” in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978) Translations from Dany Laferrière’s
Je suis un écrivain japonais
(Paris: Grasset, 2008) and from Jan J. Dominique’s
Mémoire errante
(Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2007) were done by me. The “We have still not had a death” quotation from Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is from the Perennial Classics edition (New York: Harper, 1998). The Toni Morrison quotation paraphrased in this chapter is “What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company,” from Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture in literature delivered in Sweden on December 7, 1993, and printed in
The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993
(New York: Knopf, 1994). The quotations from Albert Camus’
Caligula
are from the book
Caligula and Three Other Plays
by Albert Camus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). The quotations from Alice Walker are from
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose
(New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1983).

The Michèle Montas quotation “I was no longer willing to go to another funeral” is from an interview with Bob Garfield for
On the Media
, a segment titled “Haiti’s Media Crisis,” March 14, 2003. For a better understanding of Jean Dominique and Michèle Montas, see the documentary
The Agronomist
, directed by Jonathan Demme. The quotations from
Mémoire errante
(Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2007) in this chapter and the others were translated by me.

The quotations from Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s
Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy
are from the translation by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur (New York: Modern Library, 2009). The quotation by Rose-Myriam Réjouis is also from that edition. Jan J. Dominique’s comments regarding Jacques Roumain are taken from her essay “Roumain et la dévoreuse de mots: L’adolescente et les livres,” published in
Mon Roumain à Moi
(Port-au-Prince: Presses Nationales d’Haiti, 2007). The quotation from the essay was translated by me. The W.E.B. Dubois quotation starting “The United States is at war with Haiti” can be found in
W.E.B. Dubois: A Reader
, edited by David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).

Except where indicated, the Alèrte Bélance quotations are from Beverly Bell,
Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). The quotations from and references to Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
are from the Vintage International edition (New York: Vintage, 1987).

The Thomas Jefferson quotations can be found at the Library of Congress’s American Memory Archives: The Thomas Jefferson Papers 1606-1827 at
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers
. I also use
Notes on the State of Virginia
, edited by William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). Toussaint L’Ouverture’s speech that begins
“In overthrowing me . . . ” is widely circulated and paraphrased. I am using the version that is in Ralph Korngold,
Citizen Toussaint
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979). For a recent biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture, see Madison Smartt Bell,
Toussaint Louverture: A Biography
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2007). The edition of Alejo Carpentier’s
Kingdom of This World
referenced and quoted here was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2006. Alejo Carpentier’s comments about Haiti and magic realism were reprinted in Cristina Garcia, ed.,
Cubanisimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature
(New York: Vintage, 2003)

The quotation from
Their Eyes Were Watching God
is from the Harper Collins Perennial edition (New York: Harper Collins, 1999.) The Masood Farivar quotation is from his essay “Man on the Path,” in
110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11
, edited by Ulrich Baer (New York: New York University Press, 2002). The Isabel Allende quotation is from
My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey through Chile
, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).

The Wole Soyinka poem “New York, USA” is from
Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems
(New York: Random House, 1988.) “i have not written one word / no poetry in the ashes south of canal street” is from the poem “first writing since” by Suheir Hammad published in
Trauma at Home: After 9/11
, edited by Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.) The Ralph Ellison short story “Flying Home” is found in the book
Flying Home
, edited by John F. Callahan (New York: Vintage International, 1996). The quotation “On Wednesday the 18th of February, 1931, I will take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive me, I loved you all” is from Toni Morrison’s
Song of Solomon
(New York: Vintage International, 1977.) The Ralph Waldo Emerson quotations here are from the essay “The Poet” in
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems
, edited and with a foreword by Robert D. Richardson (New York: Bantam Classics, 1990). The Adrian Dannat quotation concerning Michael Richards is from Michael Richards’s obituary in the
Independent
on September 24, 2001. The
Moukhtar Kocache quotation is from C. Carr, “Lost Horizons: An Artist Dead, a Downtown Arts Organization in Ruins,”
Village Voice
, September 18, 2001. The quote from Assotto Saint is from
Spells of a Voodoo Doll: The Poems, Fiction, Essays and Plays of Assotto Saint
(New York, Richard Kasak Books, 1996).

For much of Hector Hyppolite’s life story, I am grateful to Selden Rodman’s
The Miracle of Haitian Art
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974) as well as Selden Rodman’s
Where Art Is Joy, Haitian Art: The First Forty Years
(New York: Ruggles de Latour, 1988). Basquiat’s biography, particularly his “Papa, I will be very famous one day,” is from Phoebe Hoban’s
Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1998). Demosthenes Davvetas’s interview with Jean-Michel Basquiat was published in
New Art International
, no. 3 (October-November 1998), and was reprinted in the art catalog
Basquiat
(Milan: Edizioni Charta and Civico Museo Revoltella Trieste, 1999). The Miller/Basquiat interview (
Jean-Michel Basquiat: An Interview
, ART/new york, no. 30A, 1989) is from Inner Tube Video. The “Madison Avenue Primitive” reference is from Adam Gopnik, “Madison Avenue Primitive,”
New Yorker
, November 9, 1992.