A New Word
I’m standing on the sidewalk, waiting for my nephew to come back. Young women slip out of their tents in the camp next door. They’re dressed for Saturday night. My nephew is late, and my mother is worried. I listen to the radio that she forgot on the gallery by her chair. Actually, I’m not really listening. You can’t count the number of radio stations in Port-au-Prince. I recognize them by their decibel level. A lot of announcers think they have to scream to get the public’s attention. Their voices add to the heat. Other announcers present a more distinguished profile to charm the upper-class audiences who hate those loud, demanding voices. Really, I’m not as bothered as I let on by the cacophony of everyone shouting out his argument without even pretending to listen to anyone else. Politics is the only subject, the daily bread of those who prefer opinion to information. Despite the noise, it’s a kind of barometer. Someone has just burst into flames of wrathful anger — then I realize it’s only theater. From the inflamed discussions, I’ve picked out these words (shouted every time) that keep coming back: cracks, ruins, reconstruction, camps, tents, provisions. Will they dislodge the words from the previous generation: Aristide, les chimères, corruption, de facto government, eradication, and embargo? Or the terms from the generation before: Duvalier, dictatorship, prison, exile, tonton-macoute. Every decade has its vocabulary. The frequency of certain words in the media informs us about the state of things. For many years, the two favorite ones were “dictatorship” and “corruption.” Now, for the first time, we’re hearing “reconstruction.” That’s a new one. Even if most people can’t really believe it.
A Slight Indisposition
My mother and my sister were on the gallery. My nephew was working on his political economy homework. I was on the bed in his room. My brother-in-law was eating dinner alone with his newspaper. Suddenly, we heard a dish shatter. My nephew jumped up and discovered my brother-in-law stretched out on the table, his jaws locked. We didn’t know what to do. My sister walked calmly into the room. Her cool demeanor always scares me because I know, deep down, that she’s panicking. She threw cold water on my brother-in-law’s face. I worked to loosen the grip of his jaw as my nephew tried to slip an aspirin into his mouth. It was no use. A little sugar water was more effective. He’d felt ill suddenly, and thinking his blood pressure was too high, he took a drug to lower it. But the opposite happened. A quick drop in blood pressure threw him into a kind of coma. My mother’s face was a picture of concentration as she paced the corridor, calling upon the Virgin’s help. Once the crisis passed, my nephew started making jokes, but we knew he was afraid. We all went off to bed without any more discussion. My nephew plugged in the machine that keeps away mosquitoes. We listened to the dry buzz of grilling mosquitoes until my sister asked him to turn the thing off so we could sleep.
Frankétienne’s Strategy
I went by Frankétienne’s place yesterday. He wasn’t there. I looked around the garden. Everything seemed to be in good order, including the disorder. This morning I saw the stone-masons at work. The foreman invited me to look around; Frankétienne wanted me to, though he couldn’t be here today because he had a meeting out of town. Once a month, he meets with old friends for long discussions on a variety of subjects. In other words, he wouldn’t be back until evening. I noticed solid-looking steel poles planted here and there, better to resist the next earthquake. Frankétienne had painted them in the Basquiat style. I detected echoes of the two Haitian painters closest to him, Tiga and Saint-Brice. That’s Frankétienne in a nutshelclass="underline" he sees the world as an artist does. I wouldn’t mention it to the foreman, but if you ask me, adding steel poles is not going to make the house more resistant to earthquakes. The opposite is true. But Frankétienne is a maximalist. Faced with an earthquake, the best strategy is to bend so you don’t break, but he reinforced his backbone with concrete. The next time will be a duel. But what matters most is that he’s trying to turn this disaster into a work of art.
Wood
People have started talking about wood again. I remember that before the earthquake, the problem of clear-cutting was on the agenda. That’s all anyone talked about, especially in the international media. Haiti was on the brink of ecological disaster. No trees, so nothing to hold down the arable land when the hard rains fell. You could literally see the bones of the country. That’s because people cut down the trees to make charcoal. In recent years, every presidential candidate added tree-planting to their program. If there are any trees left standing, it’s because concrete has become the favorite building material. But since it failed the earthquake test, the latest talk is of going back to wood, since it’s more flexible and resisted the tremors better than cement. That’s true enough, but if we go back to wood, we’ll risk ecological catastrophe.
My Nomadic Friend
My friend Dominique Batraville lives in Port-au-Prince, but I don’t have his address. In any case, he’s never home. I always meet him at an art show, a book launch, or a press conference at the Ministry of Culture. He’s a cultural journalist, exactly what I did when I lived here. He’s part of the group of young poets that my brother-in-law Christophe Charles published a few decades ago in his magazine, which featured only poets eighteen years old or younger. His first collection of poems in Creole, Boulpic, was a great success. Like many in his generation, he went through hell without a complaint. When I ask after his health, he’ll slap his chest with his open palm: his way of reassuring me. His way of defying his illness, too. You never know what shape he’ll be in when you see him. He has his ups and downs. When things are going really bad, he’ll disappear from sight for a month or more. Alarmed, his friends go looking for him, though they know he’ll reappear on his own one day. And suddenly he’s there. You can hear his characteristic laugh from a distance. One of the few men I know who has no enemies. You should never say something like that, but I say it in his case. He crosses borders effortlessly in a country where social classes are no laughing matter. He’s a jack-of-all-trades: radio host, newspaper journalist, poet, actor, and volunteer impresario. Often you see him with a talented young artist he’s promoting. He travels the city. You picture him ever more fragile, especially since his mother’s death. When he catches my concerned look, he gives me a wink of reassurance. While Frankétienne watches Port-au-Prince from the balcony of his house where he stands bare-chested, Batraville moves through the city on foot. He knows every part of it. With his way of covering the territory, he reminds me of Gasner Raymond, my friend who was murdered by the dictatorship thirty-five years ago. Gasner was positively caustic. Although Batraville’s laugh might seem sarcastic at times, you can tell right away that he’s a generous, gentle man. You can feel it by the way he opens his arms wide when he goes to greet you — he does it with his whole body. I breathed easier when I learned he had survived the earthquake. In his precarious state, the man sums up this untamable city.
A Photo
In this broken place, a lot of people who have come to help brought their cameras with them. At first they try to capture the suffering on film. The pictures are sent to their friends via the Internet. Then, after a while, they begin to enjoy it. Every photo creates a certain amount of interest back home. And every amateur photographer dreams of being in the right place at the right time to get a great picture. They imitate the professionals by shooting away at everything and anything. I met one of those amateurs happily shooting blindly into the crowd. He told me he was taking a photo class at a Miami university with an old-school teacher who accepts paper photos only, which cost him a fortune. Be spontaneous, no framing, give me untouched reality. The teacher tears up the pictures so quickly you wonder if he took the time to look at them. He told me all about his class as he went on shooting. I watched him and realized his method is not much different from his teacher’s. And wondered who was taking the photo: he or the camera? Why didn’t he take the time to look at the person he was photographing? What is this need to shoot people blindly? As if any picture will do. The look he gave me made me realize we weren’t living in the same century. It takes me at least an hour to photograph a scene, but with his machine, he can take fifty a minute. I look like an old artisan with my black notebook in which I note down every detail that will help me sketch out a face. We followed the crowds and ended up on the square in front of the ruined cathedral. We went on talking about our different art forms and our respective methods. He seemed more receptive than before, making mental calculations to see how much he could save with this technique of a single photo. Still, there’s something seductive about a photographer shooting multiple pictures of the same subject. I don’t know what a writer at work looks like. We came across a woman standing with her arms thrown open in front of a great black cross — all that remains of the cathedral. I sat down on a low wall to write. How to describe a scene like that? He took just one picture.