What can such financial frenzy mean
on an island abandoned by the birds?
He rushes from his house to his car,
from his car to his office,
from his office to the restaurant
and from the restaurant to his seaside house
where he’ll meet his mistress of the month.
He may know nothing of the poor man
but the poor man is watching his every move.
The rich man is a creature of habit.
What good is being rich in a country
constantly at the mercy of a bread riot?
The chances of losing a fortune
overnight are high.
A can of gas and the whole neighborhood goes up.
The game changes so fast.
One starving guy with a match
calls the shots.
Why stay in this mudhole mixed with shit trampled by crowds hemmed in by malarial anopheles when you could lead a dream life somewhere else? Here the rich man must collect the poor man’s money. And he can’t delegate an operation like that, considering the country’s current moral state. People have no scruples about keeping money for themselves that they figure is stolen. The debate raging these days in the poor districts where Christian morality has gotten its hooks in can be summarized by this mighty question: is it theft to steal from a thief? The State says yes. The Church does too. But what if just once the question wasn’t put to them? The pressure is strong on the ill-paid office clerk who has to deliver to the boss, down to the last penny, all the money gathered in the poorest districts of the hemisphere. All those houses with neither roof nor door rented to large needy families by usurers representing the rich who live in the luxury villas set high up the mountain. We’re really living in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.
When I went North, I had to rid myself
of the heavy reality of the South
that oozed from every pore.
I spent thirty-three years adapting
to that winter country where everything is so different
from what I’d known before.
Returning South after all these years
I am like someone
who has to relearn what he already knows
but had to forget along the way.
I admit that it’s easier
to learn than to relearn.
But harder still
is to unlearn.
The Blind Archer
Noise was the path the Caribbean used
to enter me.
I had forgotten the racket.
The bellowing crowd.
The overabundance of energy.
A city of beggars and rich men
awake before dawn.
You can find the same energy
in a naïve painting
where the vanishing point
is not at the back of the canvas
but in the solar plexus
of the viewer.
When you look at a market scene
by any street painter
you don’t feel you’re entering
the marketplace but that
instead the market
is entering you, overwhelming you
with smells and tastes.
Which is why you step back
faced with these strong primary colors.
People die faster here than elsewhere,
but life is more intense.
Each person carries the same amount
of energy to burn
except the flame is brighter
when the time it has to burn
is briefer.
Behind me, the blue mountains
that surround the city.
This dawn sky with its rosy hue.
A man is still sleeping
under a truck packed with melons.
In the international media
Haiti always appears deforested.
Yet I see trees everywhere.
As a child I hated trees
so much I dreamed of covering the planet in asphalt.
People always wanted to know why
a child wouldn’t like trees.
It was that feeling they were looking down on me.
Two hearses cross paths
on this dusty street
at the foot of the mountain.
Each one is carrying its customer
to his resting place.
The last taxi costs the most.
Death, that blind archer.
As busy at midnight as at noon.
Too many people in this city
for him, even once,
to miss his target.
All I need is to start the rumor
that I’ve returned to live there
without saying which there it is
and in Montreal people will believe
I’m in Port-au-Prince
and in Port-au-Prince they’ll be sure
I’m still in Montreal.
Death would mean not being
in either of those cities.
To Die in a Naïve Painting
I like to climb up the mountain, early in the morning, to get a closer look at the luxury villas set so far apart one from the other. Not a soul around. Not a sound, except the wind in the leaves. In a city this populous, the space you have to live in defines who you are. In my random walks, I discover that these vast properties are inhabited only by servants. The owners reside in New York, Berlin, Paris, Milan or even Tokyo. Like in the days of slavery when the real masters of Hispaniola lived in Bordeaux, Nantes, La Rochelle or Paris.
They built these houses hoping their children studying abroad would return to take the family business in hand. Since those children refuse to return to a country cast into darkness, the parents have moved closer to them and settled in some metropolis with a museum, a restaurant, a bookstore or a theater on every corner. The money harvested from the mud of Port-au-Prince is spent at Bocuse or La Scala. In the end the villas are rented out for a fortune to the directors of non-profit international aid organizations whose stated goal is to lift the country out of poverty and overpopulation.
These envoys from humanitarian organizations show up in Port-au-Prince with the best intentions. Lay missionaries who look you straight in the eye as they recite their program of Christian charity. In the media they are prolix about the changes they intend to create to ease the terrible conditions of the poor. They make a quick tour of the slums and the ministries to take the pulse of the situation. They learn the rules of the game so quickly (allow themselves to be served by a host of servants and slip part of the budget allocated to the project into their pockets) you have to wonder whether it’s in their blood — an atavism of colonial times. When confronted with their original project, they escape by saying that Haiti is incapable of change. Yet in the international press, they go on denouncing corruption in the country. The journalists passing through know they have to stop in for a drink poolside to gather the solid information they need from honest and objective people; the Haitians, everyone knows, can’t be trusted. The journalists never ask themselves why these people are living in villas when they say they’ve come to help the wretched of the earth throw off the shackles of poverty.
Haiti has undergone thirty-two coups
in its history
because people have tried to change
things at least thirty-two times.
The world is more interested by the military men
who engineer the coups
than by the citizens who overthrow
those men in uniform.
Silent, invisible resistance.
There is a balance in this country
based on the fact
that unknown people
in the shadows
are doing everything they can
to put off the arrival of night.
When there’s a power failure,
people light their houses
with the energy of sexually charged bodies.