climbing the mountain
with a pail of water on her head.
Here we live on injustice and fresh water.
Drawing a Blank
The young man who sweeps
the hotel courtyard every morning
brings me a coffee and a message from my sister.
She didn’t want to wake me
but my mother is not doing well.
She has locked herself in her room
and won’t open the door for anyone.
Everyone looks pretty happy to me. My sister kisses me as she dances. What’s going on? Nothing. What about my mother? That was this morning, now she’s fine. It happens sometimes, you know. In Montreal I would fall into an abyss without warning and not surface for hours. The enemy, in Montreal, is on the outside, when it’s minus thirty for five days in a row. Here the enemy is within, and the only nature we have to tame is our own.
I hear my mother singing. A song popular in her youth. Radio Caraïbes often plays it on its oldies show, Chansons d’autrefois. My sister whispers that she’s often like this after one of her descents into hell.
Marie, her name so simple
it’s like
sharing my mother
with all my friends.
When I think about it I don’t have any stories
about my mother from when she was young.
She’s not the type to talk about herself.
Aunt Raymonde’s stories are all
about her own person.
In vain I try to glimpse my mother
behind her.
My mother does not swim
in the great sea of History.
But all individual stories
are like rivers that run through her.
In the folds of her body she keeps
the crystals of pain of everyone
I have met in the street since I came here.
Pain.
Silence.
Absence.
None of that has anything to do
with folklore.
But they never
talk about those things
in the media.
Ghetto Uprising in the Bedroom
In my nephew’s little room.
Books on a narrow shelf
next to a Tupac Shakur poster.
I spot one of my novels
and a collection of poems by his father.
My eyes seek out every detail
to help me travel back through the stream of time
and recover the young man
I was before my sudden departure.
We are sitting on the unmade bed
watching a documentary about violent gangs
battling each other in the lower reaches of the city.
Gunshots ring out.
From time to time, my mother comes in
and gives us a suspicious look.
My nephew is at the age when death
is still something esthetic.
From close range a Danish television crew is following
the violent confrontations that have been raging
for months in this miserable district.
Graffiti on a wall shows an empty stomach
and a toothless mouth holding a gun
heavier than the weight of the average adult
in that part of town.
A young French woman
has entered this seething slum.
Close-ups on the two brothers as sensitive
as cobras in the sun.
Each heads his own gang.
The young woman travels back and forth
between the two brothers.
One loves her.
She loves the other.
A Greek tragedy in Cité Soleil.
Bily is obsessed by his younger brother
who took on the name Tupac Skakur.
Fascination with American culture
even in the poorest regions
of the fourth world.
I watch the two brothers
strolling through the Cité.
Undernourished killers.
Emaciated faces.
Cocaine to burn.
Weapons everywhere.
Death never far.
I wonder what my nephew
thinks about all this.
It’s his culture.
The new generation.
Mine was the ’70s.
We’re all cloistered in our decades.
These days the murderer strikes at noon
in this country.
Night is no longer the accomplice of the killer
who dreams of adding his star to the firmament.
To reach the heavens nowadays
they have to kill with their face uncovered
and trumpet their acts on the TV news.
The Tonton Macoutes of my era had
to hide behind dark glasses.
Serial killers.
Papa Doc was the only star.
Tupac, the young leader who looks so much like Hector,
has conquered the Foreign Woman.
Tonight their savage kiss
on a reed mat on the floor
will drive all the warriors crazy
under the Cité ramparts.
Now Tupac is making political speeches.
He moves through Cité Soleil in a car.
Thinking he’s a real leader.
A loud voice and an itchy trigger finger.
Suddenly he becomes lucid and
sees himself for what he is: a loser.
Facing the camera.
Sitting in the shadows.
Tupac: “If I stop, I’m a dead man.
If I go on, I’m a dead man.”
I feel my nephew shiver as if
he were facing the same choice.
This is a city where the killers
all want to die young.
Tupac falls at the height of his glory
in the dust of Cité Soleil.
Like his brother Bily.
Both killed by a frail young man
who suddenly stepped from the shadows.
The girl leaves with the TV crew.
On the cassette there’s blood, sex and tears.
Everything the viewer wants.
Roll the credits.
An Emerging Writer
My nephew wants to be a famous writer.
The influence of the rock-star culture.
His father is a poet who gets death threats.
His uncle, a novelist living in exile.
He has to choose between death and exile.
For his grandfather it was death in exile.
Before you begin
you have time to think about fame
because once you write the first sentence
you’re up against
this anonymous archer
whose real target is your ego.
Later on.
In a comfortable armchair.
By the fireside.
Fame will come.
Too late.
The hope then will be
for a day without suffering.
The worst stupidity, it seems,
is to compare one era
to the next.
One man’s time
to another’s.
Individual times
are parallel lines
that never touch.
In the little room, my nephew and I
look without seeing each other.
We try to understand
who the other is.
On the narrow shelf I notice
some Carter Brown novels that once belonged to me.
To write a novel, I tell my nephew
with a sly smile,
what you really need is a good pair of buttocks
because it’s a job
like the seamstress’s
where you spend a lot of time sitting down.
You also need a cook’s talents.
Take a large kettle of boiling water,
add some vegetables
and a raw piece of meat.
You’ll put in the salt and spices later
before lowering the heat.
All the flavors will blend into one.
The reader can sit down to the feast.
It’s like a woman’s job,