The only fuel this country has
in industrial quantities
can also send
the demographic curve soaring.
When you arrive in this city set on the shores of a turquoise sea and surrounded by blue mountains, you wonder how long it will take before it all becomes a nightmare. In the meantime you live with the energy of someone waiting for the end of the world. So said a young German engineer who’s been working for the last ten years rebuilding the road network.
We were having a drink at the bar at the Hotel Montana. When did you first understand that this particular hell wasn’t for you? He gazed at me a while. My father came here for the New Year’s holiday, and he made me see it. My father is an old military man. His job is to look at things as they are and say what he thinks in no uncertain terms. What did he say to you? That we were all bastards in this well-protected luxury hotel, all the while thinking we were living a dangerous and difficult life. And so? And so ten years later I’m still here. But at least I’m not telling myself any more lies. We can even use cynicism to keep from dying of shame.
The headquarters of foreign journalists.
A hotel set on the heights so they can see
what’s boiling over down below
in the great stewpot of Port-au-Prince
without actually having to go there.
For the details just listen to the local radio station.
The bar is stocked well enough to resist a month-long siege.
I’ve been watching this cameraman at the end of the bar for a while. His arm resting lightly on his camera. I move down to his end because I like people whose job is to look. But I don’t see anything, he tells me. I see only what I’m filming. I look down a very narrow field. People are incredible here. They participate in everything, they’re so enthusiastic. I’ve been to a lot of countries with the job I do, but this is the first time I’ve seen anything like it. You can ask someone whose family has just been killed to reenact the scene, and they’ll play the whole thing for you with complete attention to detail. The murderer too: just ask him and he’ll play the murderer for you. It’s a real pleasure working here. Wherever I go people ask for money, but not here. Okay, friends of mine told me the market ladies want to be paid if you take their picture, but that’s only if they don’t like you. That’s because some photographers don’t know how to go about it. They want to go too fast. Here, you can’t hurry people. They have their dignity. They can feel it right away if you respect them, and if they feel you’re making fun of them then I can tell you your life is in danger. Otherwise, they’re cool. And the setting is magnificent, not too green so it doesn’t look like a postcard, it’s great, I really can’t complain. Excuse me, it’s your country and I’m talking this way, I’m not insensitive to what’s happening, I see the poverty and everything, but I’m speaking as a professional. All jobs are like that; if you could hear the surgeons when they operate on you, they opened me up three times, and it’s curious but hearing them talk about what they had for dinner the night before as they were slicing me up, that reassured me because I knew they were doing it to relax. I’m not insinuating that people are insensitive to their own misfortune, it’s just that they like to play, to act, they’re born comedians, and what does a comedian do when the camera goes on? He acts. The kids, especially the kids — they’re so natural. And in a setting like this. It’s like nothing is real here. I listen to the big shots talking, I cover the press conferences at the palace, receptions at the embassies, and I can tell you, if you don’t mind, that the only thing that will get this country out of the state it’s in is the movies. If the Americans forgot about Los Angeles and came and shot their blockbusters here and if the Haitian government was smart enough to demand a quota, yes, I said a quota of Haitian actors on every film, in less than twenty years you’d see this country get out of this mess, and the money would be clean money too because these people are fabulous actors. And the sets too, they’re so colorful, very, very alive. I never thought you could die in a landscape like this.
Hunger
I woke up
in the middle of the night.
My nerves jangling.
My pajamas completely soaked.
As if I had swum
through a sea of noise.
From that tiny house,
just three rooms
protected only by walls as thin
as fine paper,
I saw no fewer than thirty-six people
come out
in less than an hour.
Not a millimeter left unoccupied.
Not a second of silence, I imagine.
We search for life
among the poor
in absolute uproar.
The rich have bought up the silence.
Noise is concentrated
in a clearly defined perimeter.
Here trees are scarce.
The sun, implacable.
Hunger, constant.
In this space teeming with people.
First comes the obsession with the belly.
Empty or full?
Sex comes right after.
And after that, sleep.
When a man prefers
a plate of beans and rice
to the charming company of a woman
something has happened
to the hierarchy of taste.
The pattern has become common. The rich who flee the poor leave the city behind and go to live in ever more secluded parts of the countryside. It’s not long before the news spreads through the overpopulated zone. The siege begins. A little hut in a ravine. Another at the foot of the pink villa. Two years later a whole slum has sprung up, asphyxiating the new upper-class quarter. The goal of all wars is the occupation of territory.
The space of words can be occupied as well. For the last hour, this toothless old woman has been telling me a story of which I understand nothing. Yet I feel that it’s hers and it is worth, in her eyes, as much as anyone else’s.
A day here lasts a lifetime.
You’re born at dawn.
You grow up at noon.
You die at twilight.
Tomorrow you change bodies.
The horn has a variety of uses. Sometimes it replaces the cock’s crow. It alerts the absent-minded pedestrian. It announces a departure or an arrival. It expresses joy or anger. It carries on an endless monologue in traffic. To outlaw the horn in Port-au-Prince would be censorship.
I walked into an Internet café and discovered a friend I hadn’t seen for some time. My old comrade Gary Victor with his moon-like face always makes me think of sweet-tempered Jasmin Joseph, the man who painted nothing but rabbits. Every time, Gary Victor pulls out of his hat a novel full of devils, thieves, zombies, mocking spirits and carnival bands painted in the cheerful colors of a naïve painting. But so loaded down with obsessions that in the end it becomes as dark as a teenage nightmare. I talked with him for a while about what the subject of the great Haitian novel might be. First we reviewed the obsessions of other nations. For North Americans, we thought it was space (the West, the Moon landing, Route 66). For South Americans, it’s time (One Hundred Years of Solitude). For Europeans, it’s war (two world wars in a century alters the mind). For us, it’s hunger. The problem, Victor told me, is that it’s difficult to talk about it if you haven’t known it. And those who’ve seen it up close aren’t necessarily writers. We’re not talking about being hungry just because you haven’t eaten for a while. We’re talking about someone who has never eaten his fill in his entire life, or just enough to survive and be obsessed by it.
Still, it’s very surprising how hunger is absent, considering that artists are always looking for subjects. Very few novels, plays, operas or ballets have hunger as their central theme. Yet there are a billion starving people in the world today. Is the subject too harsh? We don’t mind exploiting war, epidemics and death in every possible shape. Is the subject too raw? Sex is stretched across every screen on the planet. So what’s going on? The problem is that hunger concerns only people who have no buying power. Starving people don’t read, don’t go to museums, don’t dance. They just wait to die.