Create Dangerously
Page 15
“Good-bye, Maxo,” I simply say. “Good-bye, Nozial.”
Emerging from under the church and into the sunlight, I remember thinking, each time I saw someone rescued from the rubble on television, that it looked a lot like a vaginal birth, the rescue teams nudging, like midwives, a head, then a shoulder, then some arms, and then some legs, out of the expanded earth.
Maxo and Nozial, I thought, were never reborn.
At Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport, I must show my American passport to get inside to meet the plane for the return trip. The first U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer at the airport entrance asks me to take off my glasses as he looks at my picture on the passport. He holds the passport up to the sunlight for some time to verify that it is not fake. I am embarrassed and slightly humiliated, but these, I suppose, are lesser humiliations compared to what my loved ones and so many others are going through. The second and third Customs and Border Protection officers are Haitian Americans who speak to me in Creole. They wish me a good return trip “home.”
On the plane, I listen quietly as the flight attendant thanks the doctors and nurses who are returning to the United States from stints as volunteers in Haiti.
“I bet you’re looking forward to hot showers and warm beds and U.S. ice,” she says.
The doctors and others clap and whistle in agreement.
“Well,” she says, “I can offer you one of those things. The U.S. ice”
Wrapping up, she adds, “God bless America”
Feeling overly protective of an already battered Haiti, I hear myself cry out, “God bless Haiti, too,” drawing a few stares from my fellow passengers.
The man in the seat behind me taps me on the shoulder and says, “Really. God bless both America and Haiti”
As we take off, I look down at the harbor, where a U.S military helicopter is flying between Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport and the USNS Comfort medical ship anchored just outside Port-au-Prince harbor. Further out to sea are U.S. Coast Guard ships, whose primary purpose is to make sure that Haitians are intercepted if they try to get on boats and head to the United States.
I have a copy of Les Nègres that I had meant to leave on Maxo’s grave under the church, but in my haste and fear I had forgotten and brought it back with me.
I turn my eyes from the Coast Guard ships, and now on the plane I open the book and begin reading, turning immediately to the page that, soon after I’d learned of Maxo’s death, had directly spoken to me: “Your song was very beautiful, and your sadness does me honor. I’m going to start life in a new world. If ever I return, I’ll tell you what it’s like there. Great black country, I bid thee farewell.”
Great black country, I too bid thee farewell, I think.
At least for now.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am extremely grateful to the magnificent Toni Morrison for her kindness in having me present the second annual Toni Morrison lecture (March 2008), which led to this book. Thanks also to Eddie Glaude, Joelle Loessy, Valerie Smith, Chang Rae Lee, and Fred Appel for their assistance. And to Cornel West, the standard bearer. At last I have an opportunity to thank Marcel Duret for his promotion of Haitian culture in Japan and the enjoyable and informative trips there. Thanks also to Patricia Benoit, Fedo Boyer, Jim Hanks, Nicole Aragi, Kathie Klarreich, Project MediShare, Kimberly Green, and the Green Family Foundation. My thanks also to Daniel Morel for his time and his work. My deepest gratitude to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Thanks lastly, to Pascalle Monnin for the art used on the book cover.
Some of the chapters in this book appeared previously in the following publications:
Chapter 2 is taken partially from “A Taste of Coffee” in Calabash (May 2001). Other material is from an afterword to Breath, Eyes, Memory, by Edwidge Danticat (Random House Inc., 1999).
Chapter 3 is taken partially from The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, edited by Edwidge Danticat (Soho Press, 2003). Other material is from the article “Bonjour Jean” in The Nation (February 19, 2001).
Chapter 4 is taken partially from the foreword to Memoir of an Amnesiac by J. Jan Dominique (Caribbean Studies Press, 2008). Other material is from the introduction to Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Triptych, by Marie Vieux-Chauvet (Random House Inc., 2009).
Chapter 6 is taken partially from the essay “Out of the Shadows” in The Progressive (June 2006).
Chapter 7 is taken partially from in the article “Thomas Jefferson: The Private War: Ignoring the Revolution Next Door” in Time (July 05, 2004). Other material is from the introduction to The Kingdom of This World, by Alejo Carpentier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).
Chapter 8 is taken partially from the essay “Another Country” in The Progressive (Fall 2005).
Chapter 9 is taken partially from the article “On Borrowed Wings” in The Telegraph India (October 2004).
Chapter 12 is taken partially from the article “A Little While” in the New Yorker (February 1, 2010). Other material is taken partially from the article “Aftershocks: Bloodied, shaken—and beloved” in the Miami Herald (January 17, 2010).
NOTES
Chapter 1. Create Dangerously
Daniel Morel and Jane Regan of Wozo Productions provided the footage of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin referred to in this chapter. Louis Drouin’s final statement was published in Prosper Avril, From Glory to Disgrace: The Haitian Army, 1804-1994 (Parkland, FL: Universal Publishers, 1999). “Create Dangerously” Albert Camus’ lecture, which was delivered at the University of Uppsala in December 1957, is reprinted in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: Vintage International, 1995.) The Le Matin quotation is from Bernard Diederich and Al Burt, Papa Doc: The Truth about Haiti Today (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969). All Ralph Waldo Emerson quotations are from Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems, edited and with a foreword by Robert D. Richardson (New York: Bantam Classics, 1990). The Roland Barthes quotation “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” is from the essay “The Death of the Author” in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978) Translations from Dany Laferrière’s Je suis un écrivain japonais (Paris: Grasset, 2008) and from Jan J. Dominique’s Mémoire errante (Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2007) were done by me. The “We have still not had a death” quotation from Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is from the Perennial Classics edition (New York: Harper, 1998). The Toni Morrison quotation paraphrased in this chapter is “What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company,” from Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture in literature delivered in Sweden on December 7, 1993, and printed in The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993 (New York: Knopf, 1994). The quotations from Albert Camus’ Caligula are from the book Caligula and Three Other Plays by Albert Camus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). The quotations from Alice Walker are from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1983).
Chapter 3. I Am Not a Journalist
The Michèle Montas quotation “I was no longer willing to go to another funeral” is from an interview with Bob Garfield for On the Media, a segment titled “Haiti’s Media Crisis,” March 14, 2003. For a better understanding of Jean Dominique and Michèle Montas, see the documentary The Agronomist, directed by Jonathan Demme. The quotations from Mémoire errante (Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2007) in this chapter and the others were translated by me.
Chapter 4. Daughters of Memory
The quotations from Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy are from the translation by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur (New York: Modern Library, 2009). The quotation by Rose-Myriam Réjouis is also from that edition. Jan J. Dominique’s comments regarding Jacques Roumain are taken from her essay “Roumain et la dévoreuse de mots: L’adolescente et les livres,” published in Mon Roumain à Moi (Port-au-Prince: Presses Nationales d’Haiti, 2007). The quotation from the essay was translated by me. The W.E
.B. Dubois quotation starting “The United States is at war with Haiti” can be found in W.E.B. Dubois: A Reader, edited by David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).
Chapter 5. I Speak Out
Except where indicated, the Alèrte Bélance quotations are from Beverly Bell, Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). The quotations from and references to Toni Morrison’s Beloved are from the Vintage International edition (New York: Vintage, 1987).
Chapter 7. Bicentennial
The Thomas Jefferson quotations can be found at the Library of Congress’s American Memory Archives: The Thomas Jefferson Papers 1606-1827 at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers. I also use Notes on the State of Virginia, edited by William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). Toussaint L’Ouverture’s speech that begins “In overthrowing me . . . ” is widely circulated and paraphrased. I am using the version that is in Ralph Korngold, Citizen Toussaint (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979). For a recent biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture, see Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007). The edition of Alejo Carpentier’s Kingdom of This World referenced and quoted here was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2006. Alejo Carpentier’s comments about Haiti and magic realism were reprinted in Cristina Garcia, ed., Cubanisimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature (New York: Vintage, 2003)
Chapter 8. Another Country
The quotation from Their Eyes Were Watching God is from the Harper Collins Perennial edition (New York: Harper Collins, 1999.) The Masood Farivar quotation is from his essay “Man on the Path,” in 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11, edited by Ulrich Baer (New York: New York University Press, 2002). The Isabel Allende quotation is from My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey through Chile, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).
Chapter 9. Flying Home
The Wole Soyinka poem “New York, USA” is from Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1988.) “i have not written one word / no poetry in the ashes south of canal street” is from the poem “first writing since” by Suheir Hammad published in Trauma at Home: After 9/11, edited by Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.) The Ralph Ellison short story “Flying Home” is found in the book Flying Home, edited by John F. Callahan (New York: Vintage International, 1996). The quotation “On Wednesday the 18th of February, 1931, I will take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive me, I loved you all” is from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (New York: Vintage International, 1977.) The Ralph Waldo Emerson quotations here are from the essay “The Poet” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems, edited and with a foreword by Robert D. Richardson (New York: Bantam Classics, 1990). The Adrian Dannat quotation concerning Michael Richards is from Michael Richards’s obituary in the Independent on September 24, 2001. The Moukhtar Kocache quotation is from C. Carr, “Lost Horizons: An Artist Dead, a Downtown Arts Organization in Ruins,” Village Voice, September 18, 2001. The quote from Assotto Saint is from Spells of a Voodoo Doll: The Poems, Fiction, Essays and Plays of Assotto Saint (New York, Richard Kasak Books, 1996).
Chapter 10. Welcoming Ghosts
For much of Hector Hyppolite’s life story, I am grateful to Selden Rodman’s The Miracle of Haitian Art (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974) as well as Selden Rodman’s Where Art Is Joy, Haitian Art: The First Forty Years (New York: Ruggles de Latour, 1988). Basquiat’s biography, particularly his “Papa, I will be very famous one day,” is from Phoebe Hoban’s Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1998). Demosthenes Davvetas’s interview with Jean-Michel Basquiat was published in New Art International, no. 3 (October-November 1998), and was reprinted in the art catalog Basquiat (Milan: Edizioni Charta and Civico Museo Revoltella Trieste, 1999). The Miller/Basquiat interview (Jean-Michel Basquiat: An Interview, ART/new york, no. 30A, 1989) is from Inner Tube Video. The “Madison Avenue Primitive” reference is from Adam Gopnik, “Madison Avenue Primitive,” New Yorker, November 9, 1992.
Chapter 11. Acheiropoietos
The poem “Tourist” by Felix Morisseau-Leroy was translated from Haitian Creole by Jack Hirschman and is published widely on the Internet as well as in Haitiad and Oddities, edited by Jeffrey Knapp (Austin: University of Texas, 1991). The Junot Díaz quotation is from his essay “Becoming a Writer,” published in O: The Oprah Magazine, November 2009. Selden Rodman and Carole Cleaver tell a version of the story about Gran Brigit and the cemetery tree in their book Spirits of the Night: The Vaudun Gods of Haiti (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1992). The Susan Sontag quotations are from Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1973). The Roland Barthes quotations are from Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1973). Jane Regan and Daniel Morel’s book on the Septentrional has not yet been published. The quotations are from a manuscript in progress. Albert Camus’ short story “The Artist at Work” is reprinted in Albert Camus, The Plague, the Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2004).
Chapter 12. Our Guernica
The Jean Genet quotation, “Your song was very beautiful,” is from the English edition of Jean Genet’s Les Nègres—The Blacks (New York: Grove Press, 1960). The Dolores Dominique Neptune quotations are from an e-mail message dated January 30, 2010, sent by Claudine Michel, Professor, Department of Black Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. The Evelyne Trouillot quotation is from Evelyne Trouillot, “Aftershocks,” Op-ed, New York Times, January 20, 2010. The Lyonel Trouillot quotation is from Lyonel Trouillot, “Carnet de Bord à Haiti: Fais divers de nos mauvais jours, 5/9,” published on January 24, 2010, at www.lepoint.fr; the translation is mine.
INDEX
Adam (Biblical figure), 5-6
Afterwords: Novelists on Their Novels, 33
AIDS, 89, 91
airline flights, 115-21
Alexis, Jacques Stephen, 11-14
Allende, Isabel, 112-13
Allende, Salvador, 112
Alliance Française, 7, 43-44
Almodóvar, Pedro, 47
Alphonse-Férère, Gérard, 49
Alvin Ailey Dance Company, 129
Amado, Jorge, 15
andaki (code), 65
Les Araignées du soir (Spiders of the Night), 68
Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 43, 47, 48, 77, 83, 99-101, 104, 142, 164
art: dangerousness of, 8-11, 19-20, 148
Haitian, 8-14, 44, 127
and persuasion, 7-8.
See also writers
Artibonite Valley, 51-52
assassinations, 41, 46, 48, 53-58, 63, 65, 71
attachés, 77-80
bagay la (the thing) [Haitian earthquake], 168
Barthes, Roland, 15, 139, 141, 147-48
Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 127-35
To Repel Ghosts, 133-34
Toussaint L’Ouverture Versus Savonarola, 132-33
Untitled 1982, 132
Baudelaire, Charles, 60
Beauséjour, Haiti, 21-40
Belafonte, Harry, 83
Bel Air, Haiti, 7-8, 13, 170-72
Bélance, Alèrte, 46, 73-85
Bell, Beverly, Walking on Fire, 85
Beloved (film), 84
Benoit, Patricia, 76-77, 81-84
Bible, 12
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 99, 132
Bouckman (Boukman), 102
Breath, Eyes, Memory (Danticat), 31-35
Breton, André, 129
Brigit, Gran, 149
Bush, George W., 108
camps, 18, 43, 164-65, 169
Camus, Albert, 9-11, 18
Caligula, 6-8, 12, 16
“Create Dangerously,” 13
“Jonas ou l’artiste au travail” (Jonah, or the Artist at Work), 148
Carpentier, Alejo, The Kingdom of This World, 101-5
Carter, Jimmy, 141
catastrophes, 107-13, 146-47
Center for Constitutional Rights, 84
Central African Republic, 100
Le Centre d’Art, Port-au-Prince, 128, 129
Cervantes, Miguel de, 15
Césaire, Aimé, 9, 15
Cézanne, Paul, 71
Charles, Jacqueline, 146-47
Charles, Jhon, 163, 165-66, 168-70
The Charlie Rose Show (television show), 46
Christophe, Henri, 102-4, 164
Ciné Club, 43-44
cinema, 43-46
Clinton, Bill, 83
Le Club de Bonne Humeur, 7-8
coffee, 29, 35-37, 39-40
Colette, 11
USNS Comfort, 173
common humanity, 109-13
Cook, Mercer, 45
Corneille, Pierre, Le Cid, 6
Cortés, Hernán, 132
courage, of artists, 10, 148-49
Courage and Pain (documentary), 73-85
creation myths, 5-7
Cuba, 101-3
Dalembert, Louis Phillipe, 13
Daniels, Josephus, 64
Dannat, Adrian, 125
Danticat, Kelly, 75
Davvetas, Demosthenes, 132
Day, Edner, 13
death: and deportation, 88-93
in Egypt, 19-20
as family matter, 22-27, 31, 38-40, 88-96
in Haiti, 16-17, 137
last image before, 137
photography and, 139-40, 142-47
Vodou and, 134-35
writers and, 17-20
declarations of independence: American, 98
Haitian, 104
Delens (cousin’s roommate), 89-91, 94