I STILL HAD no idea what country the painting came from. I could have found out easily enough, if I’d wanted to, by looking at a few art books in the Public Library, but I was never interested in the painting’s origins. The landscape existed so concretely to me that I never thought of attaching it to any particular place. Except for the place that existed inside me. But I took that place with me wherever I went. One day I was meeting an old friend at a bar not far from moma (the Museum of Modern Art in New York), and as I was a bit early (a mania with me) I decided to kill some time at the museum. There happened to be an exhibition of Haitian naïve art. And there, to my astonishment, were these enormous canvases (enormous in their quality more than in their dimensions) in the same style as my little landscape. It wasn’t so much that I had found a country; I had discovered a universe. An enchanted world. Brilliant colours. Animals, people (lots of people), mountains. Thatched huts on the flanks of blue mountains. Fish flying through the air. Cattle crossing swollen rivers. Cocks fighting. Marketplaces. Tall, slender women calmly walking down from the hills with heavy sacks on their heads. Children playing in dreamscapes. The sea. Everywhere, the sea. And no one looking at it. Natural life. Only after I had made a complete circuit of the exhibition did I begin to notice the names of the painters. The signatures danced in the corners of the canvases. Salnave Philippe-Auguste, the friend of the Douanier Rousseau (“I want to speak of Rousseau’s Dream. Just as one could say that everything is contained in the Apocalypse of Saint John, so, I am tempted to say, this huge painting includes all poetry, and with it all the mysterious gestations of our time. .”—André Breton, 1942). The quote was printed across the back wall of the room in which the massive jungle scapes of Salnave Philippe-Auguste were hung. In another room: the imaginary villages of Préfète Duffaut. The maniacally delicate precision of Rigaud Beno
t. Jasmin Joseph’s candor. Saint-Brice, who drew me in and frightened me at the same time. And the immense Hector Hyppolite (a Homer who used colour instead of words). Most of all, what sealed my loyalty to these magical works was the natural way they dealt with death. Life and death intermingled. They even made me wonder if death didn’t precede life. For me, who had always been afraid of the dark, this was the first time I had felt calm when confronted with symbols of death (especially in the paintings of André Pierre). I don’t know what happened (the security guard came and cast an uneasy glance into the room, even though I was the only visitor), but I no longer felt as though a block of cement were sitting on my chest, preventing me from breathing, as I had felt since my childhood. These are my people! These are my people! These are my people! I must go back to my people! I felt like an animal that had strayed from its herd, and years later was beginning to find traces of it. I absolutely had to get myself down there immediately. It was a matter of life and death.
I LEFT NEW YORK the next day, and have been in Haiti ever since. I lived in Port-au-Prince for a few months (I couldn’t stand the Bellevue Circle crowd for much longer, completely self-absorbed as they were; I wasn’t interested in re-creating in Port-au-Prince the artificial life I had just left behind in Manhattan), and then I met Solé, a farmer from Artibonite, and followed him here. I look after the house and our son Choual (which means “Horse”) — he’s the little blond-haired black boy playing football down there with his schoolmates— and sell the produce from our rice fields. Artibonite is in the part of the country that produces the most rice. Our rice is very aromatic. It’s the best in Haiti. If you’re ever in the region of Haiti that includes Hinche, Verrettes, Petite Rivière, Pont Sondé, Marchand-Dessalines, Saint-Marc or even Gonaïves, ask for the white farmer, and they’ll direct you to my house. My name is Laura Joseph. I’m now forty-seven years old, and I live with my husband and son in the painting of my childhood.
A Small House on the Side of the Blue Mountain
THREE DAYS AGO, Rebecca, her husband and their three children (twin girls who are ten years old and a boy who is eight) arrived in Port-au-Prince. They’re from London, where her husband runs an art gallery. Their friends call her Becky.
Becky is tall and blonde with a somewhat severe face. She has small breasts. Years ago she was a champion discus thrower.
Becky rides on the weekends on their large estate on the outskirts of London. Her family also owns vast lands in Australia and a huge house in the centre of the oldest part of London. Her father, a former officer in the Royal Navy, is also an accomplished athlete. Becky received a Spartan education. She wears jewelry only on rare occasions (a pearl necklace that her mother gave her as a wedding gift).
Everyone agrees that Becky is a good person. Stalwart, honest, old-fashioned. The typical British sporting type. She met her husband at a vernissage — she’d gone there with a woman friend — and they were married six months later. Rebecca Hunter has just turned forty, and this trip is, in some ways, a birthday present.
BECKY WANTED TO bring the children despite her mother’s insistence that she keep them with her in London.
“Becky, don’t you think John would like to have you to himself, without the children, just this once?”
“Don’t argue, Mother. I’m bringing the children. They’ll love the ocean. They’ll have the mountains and the sea.”
“Becky, perhaps I didn’t make myself clear enough: there are times when a woman simply has to be a woman.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Her mother looks her straight in the eye.
“Becky, you are forty years old, don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“Of course I do, Mother. It’s just that I have no interest in being alone with John.”
The older woman seems about to run her hands over a small African statue of a man with pronounced Negroid characteristics, but changes her mind at the last minute. Her hand remains open but still, a sign of her own nervousness.
“You don’t love your husband?”
“That’s not the point, Mother.”
“He neglects you.”
“Mother, when are you going to understand that such things don’t interest me in the least?”
The mother takes several quick steps about the room before turning again to her daughter.
“You prefer women?”
“What are you talking about, Mother!”
“I know what I’m talking about. You can be frank with me.”
“No, Mother! I am not even remotely interested in women.”
“Well, then, in whom are you interested?”
“I keep busy with the children, with the horses, with visiting my friends in the country. That’s what I like doing.”
“And your husband?”
“My husband is my husband.”
“I’m going to tell you this for the last time, Becky: we women are much more complicated than you seem to think. In any case, you’ll see for yourself. .”