revolves around the solitary star
that so intimidates Zaka, the peasant god.
My life has been adrift since that late-night call
announcing the death of a man
whose absence shaped me.
I let myself go knowing
that this wandering is not in vain.
When we don’t know the destination
all roads are right.
The Jeep stops
near the Pétionville market,
the very place
where we met this morning.
At length we embrace,
without saying goodbye,
feeling we won’t be seeing each other
again soon.
Tropical Night
I feel as if I know that man sitting on a bench in Saint-Pierre Square, the little plaza by the hotel. He seems so absorbed in his reading. His hair has grayed, but he has that familiar way of stroking his cheek with his fingertips. He is the only person I ever saw read poetry in an algebra class. He was drinking in Alcools; a single verse of it soon had me inebriated. I went to his house and stayed until I had read all the poetry books in his father’s library. His family read nothing but poetry. Without ever wanting to write any, as his father said proudly. I touch him on the shoulder. He raises his head and without as much as a smile makes room for me next to him. He is still reading Apollinaire.
His father died in prison. They destroyed his library, sup-posedly because it concealed communist books. The man who hated communists because he suspected them of not liking poetry suffered a blow to the head and died of a cerebral hemorrhage a few days later at the military hospital. My friend wasn’t at the house when the regime’s henchmen visited. Alcools is the only book that wasn’t destroyed that day because he had it, as always, with him — he never weaned himself off Apollinaire. And he never wanted to leave the country despite the appeals of his uncle who lives in Madrid and reads nothing but García Lorca.
He is working as a proofreader for the book pages at Le Nouvelliste. Just enough to survive. He could have been a literary critic, but he’ll have nothing to do with other people and reads but a single poet (“humble as I am who am nothing worthwhile”). He still lives in the little room he had when I first met him. He closed off the other rooms the day a friend who works at the palace informed him of his father’s death. Ever since he’s been adding alcohol to poetry. He works at the paper in the morning and spends his afternoons reading on this bench, waiting for nightfall.
Night falls so suddenly in the tropics.
Night black as ink.
Surprised by the darkness all around me
I walk behind the man slowly
reciting Apollinaire.
The smell of ilang-ilang
uses the darkness
to spread over
this poor district.
We slip silently between
two rows of lamps.
The melodious voices
of the women whose silhouettes
are sketched upon the market walls.
Their sung stories were my childhood lullaby
on summer evenings.
The indolent gait
of a cow
on her evening stroll.
The night becomes
a Chagall painting.
Those nubile young girls from the poor parts of town
wearing flimsy sandals slip like geishas
over the asphalt still warm from the sun
on their way to the movie house near the market.
Soon their lovers will meet them.
Young tattooed bandits they kiss
all along their way.
Before I left, that sort of thing didn’t exist, working-class girls who kissed in public. The only films were the ones the government bothered to screen ahead of time. The authorities established a morals brigade that spread out through the parks looking for unmarried lovers. They were married on the spot. The inspectors demanded, when the captive was worth it, to try out the goods first. The government figured that the more virtuous the population, the less likely it would rebel.
Raucous voices.
Near the nightclub.
On an out-of-the-way street.
Three pickup trucks crammed full
of peasants in Sunday clothes
come to town for a wedding.
The fragile napes
of the young women
contrast with
their calloused hands.
Our hands always reveal
our class origins.
The laughter of these one-night beauties
in the perfumed night
lets the young tiger on the prowl
locate them easily.
Then choose one,
bring her back to his lair
and devour her at his leisure.
A half-naked woman
preparing for the evening
at the end of a long corridor.
Car headlights
sweep across her glowing breasts.
To protect them from the eyes of predators
she quickly covers them with her hands,
revealing her swelling sex.
His father would spend his evenings at home. He died, he believes, never having known the night. We climb slowly toward the square. I watch him now that there’s light to see. He brushes close to people, takes in smells, savors the moment as I have rarely seen someone do. Worried that his precious knowledge of the night will one day disappear along with him, I ask why he doesn’t record his nocturnal adventures in a collection of poems or a personal journal. With a weary wave of his hand he lets me know he has no desire to share such emotions.
A pack of dogs ready to fight for a bone that a passerby just threw them. They break into two groups. The bone between them. Suddenly each goes for the throat of the other with no care for the bone. I turn to make a comment about their behavior, which doesn’t seem much different from humans but he is gone. Faded into the night that has suddenly grown opaque. I go back to the hotel and hope for sleep.
A swarm of little yellow-and-black motorbikes
like bees in search of pollen
buzzing around Saint-Pierre Square.
So it really is the end of Papa Doc’s
sharks in dark glasses.
New barbarians are in town.
A Generation of Cripples
From the hotel balcony, I look onto the square,
the marketplace, the bookstore
and in the distance the dusty road that leads down
toward my mother’s house.
Besides the excursion with my friend to his farm
I have not left this secure perimeter.
What is frightening me? Not the Tonton Macoutes who have melted into the population since Baby Doc’s departure, afraid of being discovered by someone they once tortured. Not the young guys on motorbikes who descend like locusts on this neighborhood of hotels and art galleries frequented by the few foreigners who risk visiting the country. I don’t stray far from this golden circle; I don’t want to feel like a foreigner in my own city. I keep putting off that moment of confrontation.
When I was a teenager, Pétionville was the rich suburb we visited on Sunday afternoons. In Saint-Pierre Square we hoped to spot upper-class girls out for a stroll. Things have changed since then. The rich have sought refuge on the mountain. To find out what life is really like, I should go down to Port-au-Prince where a quarter of Haiti’s population is squirming like fish out of water. For four decades the landless peasants, jobless people and wretched of this nation have been converging on the city.
I think of my mother who
has never left her neighborhood.
I think of those six million Haitians
who live without the hope of leaving one day,
if only to catch a breath
of cool air on a winter’s day.