Create Dangerously

by Edwidge Danticat

  In the same vein, Jean had also broadcast on his radio station the Creole soundtrack of a film based on the classic Haitian novel Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew), written by the Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain and later translated into English by the poet Langston Hughes and scholar Mercer Cook. In Manuel—Roumain’s Sophoclean hero—and his peasant family and friends, Jean saw prototypes of poor Haitians, who were either condemned to a desperate life or driven to migrate, only to return to Haiti to face the impossibility of reintegration or even death. Jean was extremely proud of having aired the Creole teleplay of the novel on his radio station because whenever he visited the countryside, the peasants would tell him how they had recognized themselves and their lives in the words of Roumain’s book.

  Masters of the Dew begins with Délira Délivrance, Manuel’s old peasant mother, plunging her hands into the dust and declaring, “We’re all going to die. Animals, plants, every living soul!” Délira’s despair turns into hope when her son returns from the sugarcane fields of Cuba, greeting every living thing he encounters on his way to his parents’ house by singing, “Growing things, growing things! To you I say, ‘Honor!’ You must answer ‘Respect,’ so that I may enter. You are my house, you’re my country.”

  Délira’s despair and Manuel’s hope make for a delicate balance, of which I am reminded each time I return to Haiti: the exile’s joy and the resident’s anguish—it can also be the other way around, the resident’s joy and the exile’s anguish—clashing.

  While in exile in New York in the early 1990s, at the insistence of some friends, Jean would occasionally participate in a television or radio program dealing with the injustices of the military regime in Haiti, which by then had killed almost eight thousand people, including a well-known businessman named Antoine Izméry and the then justice minister, Guy Malary. Since Jean had known both Izméry and Malary, after their deaths he agreed to appear as a guest panelist on The Charlie Rose Show and was seated in the audience at a taping of the Phil Donahue Show when the subject was Haiti. During the Donahue taping, Jean squirmed in his seat while Phil Donahue held up the stubbed elbow of Alèrte Bélance, a woman who had been attacked with machetes by members of the junta’s paramilitary branch, who cut off her tongue and arm. After the taping, Jean seemed almost on the verge of tears as he said, “My country needs hope.”

  Our Haitian cinema project came to an end at the close of the semester. After that, Jonathan, Jean, and I would occasionally meet in Jonathan’s office in Nyack, New York, for further discussions.

  One day, while driving to Nyack with Jonathan’s assistant producer, Neda, Jean told us about a word he’d rediscovered in a Pedro Almodóvar film he had seen the night before: guapa! While puffing on his ever-present pipe, Jean took great pains to explain to us that someone who was guapa was extremely beautiful and courageous—courageously beautiful, he added. Demanding further clarification, Neda and I would take turns shouting out the names of women that the three of us knew, starting with Michèle, Jean’s wife.

  “Michèle is very . . .”

  “Guapa!” he yelled back with great enthusiasm. This was one of the many times that Jean’s vibrant love of life, and his total devotion to his wife, Michèle, shone forth.

  On that guapa day, Neda had to stay in Nyack, so she gave me the car and told me to drive Jean back to Manhattan. I refrained from telling her that even though I’d had my license for three years, I had never driven any car but the one owned by the driving school where I’d learned. When I confessed this to Jean, he wisely offered to drive. We drove for hours through New York’s Rockland County and the Palisades, and then over the George Washington Bridge, finally realizing we were completely lost, with Jean trying to smoke a pipe and follow my uncertain directions at the same time.

  When we finally got to Manhattan late in the afternoon and Jean turned the car over to me, he seemed worried as I pulled away from the curb, and watched until I turned the corner, blending into Manhattan traffic.

  The democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was restored to power soon after that day. The next time I would see Jean would be at his and Michèle’s house in Haiti.

  “Jean, you’re looking guapa,” I told him.

  He laughed.

  It was wonderful to see Jean move about within his own walls, surrounded by his own books, pictures and paintings, knowing that he had been dreaming about coming back home almost every minute he was in exile.

  Later at dinner, Jean spoke mournfully about those who’d died during and after the coup d’état: Antoine Izméry, Guy Malary, and later a well-loved priest, Father Jean-Marie Vincent. Adding Jean’s name now to those of these very public martyrs still seems unimaginable, given how passionately he expressed his hope that such assassinations would stop taking place.

  “It has to stop,” I remember him saying. “It has to stop.”

  The plane that took me from Miami to Haiti the day before Jean’s funeral seemed like a microcosm of Haiti. Crammed on a 727 for an hour and thirty minutes were young, well-to-do college students returning from Miami-area campuses for the weekend, vendors traveling with suitcases filled with merchandise from abroad, three male deportees being expatriated from the United States, a cluster of older women in black, perhaps also returning for a funeral, and, up front, the former president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, returning from a speaking engagement at the University of Miami Law School. That we were all on this plane, listening to flight announcements in French, English, and Creole, seemed somewhat unreal. I couldn’t help but recall one of the many conversations that Jean and I had while lost in the Palisades in New York that afternoon.

  I had told him that I envied the certainty with which he could and often did say the words, “My country.” “My country is suffering,” he would say. “It’s being held captive by criminals. My country is slowly dying, melting away.”

  “My country, Jean,” I said, “is one of uncertainty. When I say ‘my country’ to some Haitians, they think I mean the United States. When I say ‘my country’ to some Americans, they think of Haiti.”

  My country, I felt, both as an immigrant and as an artist, was something that was then being called the tenth department. Haiti then had nine geographic departments and the tenth was the floating homeland, the ideological one, which joined all Haitians living outside of Haiti, in the dyaspora.

  I meant, in the essay that I began to write the morning that Jean died, to struggle to explain the multilayered meaning of the Creole word dyaspora. I meant to borrow a phrase from a speech given by the writer Gérard Alphonse-Férère at the Haitian Embassy in Washington, DC, on August 27, 1999, in which he describes diaspora/dyaspora as a “term employed to refer to any dispersal of people to foreign soils.” But in the Haitian context it is used “to identify the hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in many countries of the world.” I meant in that essay to list my own personal experiences as an immigrant and a writer, of being called dyaspora when expressing an opposing political point of view in discussions with friends and family members living in Haiti, who knew that they could easily silence me by saying, “What do you know? You’re living outside. You’re a dyaspora.” I meant to recall some lighter experiences of being startled in the Haitian capital or in the provinces when a stranger who wanted to catch my attention would call out, “Dyaspora!” as though it were a title like Miss, Ms., Mademoiselle, or Madame. I meant to recall conversations or debates in restaurants, at parties, or at public gatherings where members of the dyaspora would be classified—justifiably or not—as arrogant, insensitive, overbearing, and pretentious people who were eager to reap the benefits of good jobs and political positions in times of stability in a country that they’d fled and stayed away from during difficult times. Shamefacedly, I’d bow my head and accept these judgments when they were expressed, feeling guilty about my own physical distance from a country I had left at the age of twelve during a dictatorship that had forced thousands to choose
between exile or death.

  In this essay, however, I can’t help but think of Jean’s reaction to my, in retrospect, inconsequential dyaspora dilemma, in a conversation we had when I visited his radio station to discuss a Creole program that Jonathan had created from one of my Haiti-based short stories, a radio play about a man who steals a hot air balloon to fly away from Haiti. Translating—retranslating—that story from the original English in which I had written it had been a surreal experience. It was as if the voice in which I write, the voice in which people speak Creole that comes out English on paper, had been released and finally I was writing for people like my Tante Ilyana, people who did not read, not because they did not have enough time or because they had too many other gadgets and distractions, but because they had never learned how.

  Now I am suddenly back in the old essay, back to bowing my head in shame at being called a parasitic dyaspora, a foreign being but still not a blan, and I want to bring the old essay into this one with these words from Jean: “The Dyaspora are people with their feet planted in both worlds,” he said. “There’s no need to be ashamed of that. There are more than a million of you. You all are not alone.”

  Having been exiled many times himself to that very dyaspora that I was asking him to help me define, Jean could commiserate with all of us exiles, émigrés, refugees, migrants, nomads, immigrants, naturalized citizens, half-generation, first-generation, American, Haitian, Haitian American, men, women, and children who were living in the United States and elsewhere. Migration in general was something he understood well, whether from the countryside—what many in Haiti called the peyi andeyò, the outside country—to the Haitian capital, or from Haitian borders to other shores.

  Jean’s funeral was held at the Sylvio Cator soccer stadium in downtown Port-au-Prince, where thousands streamed by his coffin and the coffin of Jean Claude Louissaint, a watchman at the radio station who was gunned down in the radio station’s parking lot along with Jean. T-shirts with Jean’s face had been distributed and everyone, including his wife, daughters, and sisters, wore them at the stadium that day. Banners demanding justice for the murders lined many Port-au-Prince streets and graffiti expressing similar sentiments covered the walls of government buildings. At the stadium ceremony, Jean received a posthumous service medal from the Haitian government. But his real funeral was held a week later in the Artibonite Valley, where as a young man he had worked as an agronomist. There his ashes were scattered in Haiti’s largest river, at the heart of the country’s breadbasket. The ashes were scattered by his wife, Michèle, along with several peasant organization leaders he had befriended over the years.

  In her memoir, Mémoire errante, Jan J. Dominique, the novelist and radio personality who is Jean Dominique’s daughter and phonetic namesake, writes of the Artibonite Valley ceremony that during Jean’s wake she witnessed the creation of a myth when someone told Jean’s wife, Michèle, “You know, Madame Jean, he often came to see us. He would follow us across the river all the way to the coffee plantations high in the mountains. He would sleep with us, share in our way of life. He was just here, a month ago.”

  “Michèle looked over at me,” noted Jan J. “I am bewildered. My father has never lived, in recent years, in this region. He had not left Port-au-Prince last month. When he went to the Artibonite it was to work as a journalist and activist. He neither planted nor harvested in the fields. We do not correct this man. We had not yet even scattered my father’s ashes in the river when he had already become a legend.”

  I remember watching footage of the scattering of Jean’s ashes, which were passed in a corn-husk-covered calabash from his wife’s trembling hands to that of several local farmers before they were emptied into the slow-moving water. I remember thinking how ample they were, these bountiful ashes, for such a skinny man.

  The footage of the scattering of the ashes is now part of a documentary that Jonathan Demme was directing about Jean’s life. The documentary would be titled The Agronomist because, during one of the many interviews that Jonathan conducted with Jean—when Jonathan had envisioned a film that would end with Jean’s triumphant return from exile—Jean, who is often referred to as Haiti’s most famous journalist, told Jonathan, “You will be surprised, but I am not a journalist. I am an agronomist.”

  Jean had been dead for eight months, and the Haitian government’s investigation into his death had been going nowhere, when I met his widow, Michèle Montas, in a Manhattan restaurant in December 2000 to interview her for an article I was writing about the case for The Nation magazine. Michèle was indeed guapa, a tall, striking, usually cheerful woman, but the day we met to talk about Jean’s death in detail for the first time, she was looking just as sad as she had at his funeral months earlier. At lunch, she barely sipped her water. When the waiter came to check on her glass, he stopped to ask about a button pinned to her jacket. On the button was a picture of Jean. Above Jean’s piercing eyes, raised eyebrows, and high forehead were the words Jean Dominique vivan (Jean Dominique Lives).

  “Who is Jean Dominique?” the waiter asked Michèle.

  “My husband,” she said.

  For more than two decades, excluding stretches of time when they were twice forced into exile, the two had worked together, coanchoring a morning news program, the highlights of which were Dominique’s commentaries on Haitian social and political life. Friends and foes listened to them, to “smell the air and test the waters,” as Jean liked to say, “get closer to the beton,” gauge the mood of the streets. Had it been any other morning, Jean and Michèle would have been together when he and Jean Claude Louissaint were assassinated in the radio station’s parking lot.

  “We usually drove to work together,” Michèle explained, carefully drawing out her words, as though to pace herself so she would not cry. “That morning, Jean left ten minutes before me to look at some international news for the program. As I got in the car, leaving home, I heard some usual announcements on the radio and then silence. I called the station and the person who answered told me, ‘Just come!’ When I pulled into the parking lot, the police were there. I saw Jean Claude Louissaint, and then I saw Jean’s body on the ground. I called to him, but he didn’t answer. I rushed upstairs to call the doctor, thinking something could be done. I didn’t believe he was dead until the doctor confirmed it.”

  Even though the then outgoing president, René Préval, was a close friend of Jean and Michèle, eight months later the murder remained unsolved. In the final state of the nation address of his first term, President Préval admitted that the biggest weakness of his five-year presidency had been justice. Citing Jean’s case, he warned his parliamentarians, “If we leave this corpse at the crossroads of impunity, we should watch out so that the same people who killed Jean do not kill us as well.”

  That fall, an important lead in the case had vanished when a suspect, Jean Wilner Lalanne, was shot as he was being arrested. The thirty-two-year-old Lalanne later died, reportedly of respiratory complications and cardiac arrest, during surgery meant to remove three bullets from his buttocks. Lalanne’s body then disappeared from the morgue and has never been found.

  A month after Dominique’s death, on May 3, 2000, Michèle reopened Radio Haiti Inter, starting her first solo broadcast with her habitual greeting to her husband, “Bonjour, Jean.” I was there in the studio the morning the station reopened, with Jonathan Demme and many other friends of Jean and Michèle. President Préval was there as well. Aside from filming and milling around, there was very little else we could do. Our presence was the worst kind of comfort. We were all there, crowding hallways, giving hugs, taking notes, being generally underfoot, because Jean was not. In a poignant and poetic editorial the morning the radio reopened, Michèle announced to her listeners that “Jean Léopold Dominique, independent journalist, is not dead. He is with us in our studios.” She went on to detail what the button could not, that those who tried so violently to silence Jean could never really succeed. Like Prometheus, she said, he’d
learned how to steal fire from the gods.

  Her broadcast was followed by three days of old Dominique programs, ranging from a lengthy interview with a woman whose child, like sixty other Haitian children, had died after taking toxic Chinese cough medication distributed by a Haitian pharmaceutical company, to a peasant leader contesting a fertilizer price hike, to conversations with Haitian playwrights and filmmakers.

  During the months that followed Jean’s assassination, Michèle often had the impossible task of reporting on the air about the investigation into his death. Though Haitian law bound her to secrecy as a party in the investigation, she was not prevented from commenting on aspects of the inquest that were in the public record.

  “Every time I feel that the investigation is slowing down,” she told me at lunch, “I realize I must say something. I have to ask the judge’s permission to do it, but if there is something I feel that people must know, I have to report it. What I am trying to do is get it to the point of no return, where things must be resolved. Rather than reporting the story, we became part of the story. There are times when you cannot stay out of the story even if you want to.”

  During the eight months following Jean’s death, Michèle participated in rallies and demonstrations, picketing along with other journalists, victims’ rights groups, and peasant organizations, demanding that Jean’s killers be found and prosecuted.

  “This corpse will not lie cold,” she said. “The issue of Jean’s death has taken a large place in the country. People are asking for justice for Jean but also for protection. People feel that if my husband can be killed, then others can be, too. We need to end this climate of impunity and find justice now.”