The red earth produces such beautiful onions.
The vendors hoist their baskets up to our level.
My friend lowers the window to buy
carrots and onions.
The smell of rich earth makes me dizzy.
The voices of the peasants
coming down the river.
Barefoot in the water.
Straw hats.
Each with a fighting cock under his arm.
And a bottle of alcohol
in his back pocket.
They are going single file
to the Sunday fights.
A dog looks for a sunny spot
then ends up lying down by the wall.
Its muzzle moist.
Its eyes half-closed.
The siesta comes early.
Everything grows here.
Even what no one has planted.
The earth is good.
The wind scatters the seeds.
Why do people gather
where it smells of gasoline and shit?
Where it’s always too hot?
Where it’s so dirty?
Even as they admire beauty
some prefer to live in ugliness,
often richer in contrasts.
I can’t breathe
when the air is too pure.
The landscape too verdant.
The living too easy.
The urban instinct is sharp within me.
From the other side of the cliff,
a horse slowly turns in my direction
and casts a long look at me.
Even the animals have started to recognize me.
Maybe that’s what a country is:
you think you know everyone
and everyone seems to know you.
The Jeep swings suddenly to the left.
For ten minutes or so, we follow
a narrow unpaved road
then come to a farm with a green roof
in the middle of wide fields.
My friend’s wife, a tall redhead,
is waiting for us at the door.
I have the feeling, in front of this Irish flag
hoisted in the pasture among the cows,
that I’m in another country.
Some time after I left Haiti,
he went to Ireland
where he lived for twenty years.
He brought Ireland back with him
to this green hamlet set upon
the heights of Pétionville.
When I was in Ireland, he said to me, I lived as if I were in Haiti. Now that I’m in Haiti, I feel totally Irish. Will we ever know who we really are? That’s the kind of question that makes us feel intelligent even under a blazing sun. Such vanity is no match for a second rum punch.
Like a flight of wild birds
we left almost at the same time.
We scattered across the planet.
Now, thirty years later,
my generation has begun its return.
We talk underneath the mango tree, with so much passion, about the years abroad: a whole life. His wife listens with a tired smile as she sips her coffee. She has come to sit with us. Her only demand is that we speak Creole when she’s around. The language touches me here, she says, pointing to her round belly.
As she walks me to the car, while her husband goes to give orders to the staff, her voice is determined. I’m going to make sure my child’s mother tongue is Creole. If mother tongue means the mother’s language, then it’ll be English. No, it’s the language the mother chooses to teach her child: I want to raise him in Creole.
I decide to tell her a story. Back in Petit-Goâve, when I was eight years old, I met a woman who came from some unknown place. She was white and walked barefoot through the dust of Haiti. She was the woodworker’s wife. They had a son my age who was neither black nor white. I never understood how someone could live in a culture other than their own. Despite the thirty-three years I spent in Montreal the mystery remains. As if I were talking about someone else.
In that little room in Montreal,
I read, drank wine, made love
and wrote without fearing the worst every morning.
But what can I say about this woman
who came from a free country and chose
to live in a dictatorship?
She tells me this story.
One of her girlfriends who lived all her life in Togo
and who she asked for advice before leaving Belfast
explained to her that people are not necessarily
from the country where they were born.
Some seeds are carried elsewhere by the willful wind.
My friend comes back. He kisses his wife’s neck; she squirms and moans under the sun. Nothing is more sensual than a pregnant woman. We get into the Jeep and circle the Irish flag before coming back to her. She moves toward the door. They smile at each other with their eyes. She touches his forearm. He starts up the car again. She stands in the sun a while before going back into the house. If ever he gets it into his head to return to Ireland, she won’t go with him.
A Little Cemetery Decorated Like a Naïve Painting near Soissons-la-Montagne
Already we’re at the stop, at Fermathe,
where they sell grilled pork
and fried sweet potatoes.
A truck full of people eating.
The anticipation in the air
before the long descent
into the deep South.
It takes as much time
to travel to another country
as it does to go from one city
to another in this country
over the broken roads
and along the edge of dizzying cliffs.
We run a gauntlet of screaming vendors
who jam their fruit baskets in our face.
Laughter rises above the racket.
A man’s impertinent remark.
The sudden gaiety of the women.
The driver slows down
and all the men lean toward
the singing river far below
where bare-breasted women
are washing the white sheets
of the rich ladies of Pétionville.
A colonial scent.
Where is that young girl going, seething with rage
through a field of yellow flowers
that lie flat as she passes by?
The ability of a girl that young
to produce such anger just might be
the palpable sign that this country still has
some guts.
A woman, under a mango tree,
offers us a coffee.
The river isn’t far.
The air is so gentle
it hardly brushes my skin.
The music of the wind in the leaves.
Life is weightless.
A little cat
looking for its mother
finds a dog
of the tolerant sort.
Now both are sleeping
among the flowers.
We get back on the road and find ourselves behind
a long row of cars
full of men wearing ties
running with sweat
and women in black.
The cortege stops
at a modest cemetery decorated
by the local peasants.
Where did they get the idea
to paint death in colors
so brilliant and with motifs so naïve
they make children laugh?
For the naïve painter
death is as ordinary as the sunrise.
A visit to the painter Tiga
who lives close by the cemetery
that so impressed Malraux.
Thin as a reed.
Head like an insect.
Bristling with intelligence.
He sits down, gets up, goes to the window and returns
with an idea so natural
it seems simple.
And what’s rare for a mind so inventive:
other people seem to matter to him.
The peasant painters have come together
under the banner Saint-Soleil.
Daily life in this village where people spend
most of their time dreaming and painting