The World is Moving Around Me

by Dany Laferriere

  …My view is different. Wandering is fitting for those who have lost their way. Kiss the feet my son of the woman Maria whose womb, for an instant, returned you to mine…

  I felt the small differences between us. My mother doesn’t speak; she murmurs, like a song inside her. The voice of Amos Oz’s mother seems surer. She orders him: Kiss the feet my son of the woman Maria. My mother doesn’t know the imperative. Amos Oz’s mother is a woman of passion; mine is one of gentleness.

  Washing Up

  Saint-Éloi goes with me. We fill a bucket of water from the pool. The bathroom is under the restaurant. No one outside of the hotel employees has ventured that far. We found two large towels near the pool. We don’t go too far inside for fear of getting trapped in that narrow room if an aftershock were to strike. We rub ourselves vigorously to remove the stain of misfortune. We dry ourselves as we converse, like a couple of athletes after a tough game. We put on clean clothes and step outside. On the tennis court, I open my suitcase and take out my razor and aftershave. People watch us, surprised at first, then they get moving too, as if awakening from a nightmare. Michel Le Bris announces that he’s going to wash his hair, and for the first time, he is willing to separate himself from his computer. He returns a few minutes later, a new man. The women bring out their lipstick. I exhibit my two mangos like war trophies. Which makes sense: when I went up to my room, I felt I was penetrating enemy territory. Someone hands me a jackknife. I offer everyone a thin slice of mango. It took an earthquake to get me to share a mango.

  The Decision

  That ceremony had just ended when I saw people coming up from the other side of the fence. They were officials from the Canadian Embassy searching the hotels and offering a flight out to Canadian citizens who wanted to leave. The departure to the airport was scheduled for one p.m. from the Embassy. The decision had to be made immediately. Saint-Éloi couldn’t go because he doesn’t have Canadian citizenship. I wouldn’t leave without him. I asked the officials to wait a minute. He and I went under a tree to talk it over. Stay or go—it’s always the same dilemma. After a while, I went back to the Embassy staff and said I was going with them. I’ve learned to make up my mind fast. The same way I had to decide quickly during the first seconds of the earthquake. You have ten seconds to figure out whether you’ll stay where you are or go elsewhere. That makes a difference, but I still wasn’t completely sure I’d made the right decision. I hesitated between my heart that told me to stay with these people, and my mind that told me I would be more useful for them back there. In the end, I figured that this was probably the last time someone would offer to repatriate me.

  A Semantic Battle

  When I heard the question that a Canadian TV journalist asked me as I was walking across the tarmac at the Port-au-Prince airport, I understood that a new qualifier had been invented for Haiti. For years, the country had been recognized as the first black republic in the world, and the second to win its independence in the Americas after the United States. Independence wasn’t handed to us over martinis, after a few hypocritical smiles and pompous speeches on a lawn littered with confetti. It was won after an armed struggle against the greatest European army at the time led by Napoleon Bonaparte. My childhood was filled with stories of slaves whose only weapon was their longing for freedom and a senseless kind of bravery. On summer evenings, my grandmother would tell me of the exploits of our heroes who had to take everything from the enemy, weapons and the art of war, for starters. Even the French language was part of “the spoils of war.” Then suddenly, toward the end of the 1980s, people started talking about Haiti only in terms of poverty and corruption. A country is never corrupt—but its ruling class can be. The three-quarters of the population that, despite endemic poverty, manage to keep their dignity should not be subjected to that insult. When outsiders talk about Haiti, those three-quarters feel concerned, and when the country is insulted, they—not the rich—feel the sting. The poorest country, no doubt, since the figures say so. But does that wipe away our history? People accuse us of dwelling on it. But no more than any other country. When a French TV network wants to fill its coffers, it airs yet another series about Napoleon. Think of the number of films and books about the history of France or England or even the Vietnam War, whereas there hasn’t been a single film about the greatest colonial war of all time, the one that allowed slaves to become citizens through sheer willpower. And now here comes a new label that is going to bury us completely: Haiti is a cursed country. Some Haitians, at the end of their rope, are even starting to believe it. You have to be really desperate to accept the contempt that others have for you. The only place to fight that label is where it germinated: in Western opinion. My sole argument: what did this country do to deserve its curse? I know a country that started two world wars in one century and proposed a final solution, and no one says it’s cursed. I know a country insensitive to human suffering, that continues to starve the planet from its powerful financial centers, and no one says it’s cursed. On the contrary: it claims to be a nation blessed by the gods—by God, more like it. So why would Haiti be cursed? I suppose some people use that label in good faith, finding no other words to name this stream of misfortune. But it’s not the right word, especially when you see the energy and dignity displayed by the nation as it faces one of the most difficult tests of our time. But each passing day makes the fight harder. All some commentator has to do is say the word “curse” on the airwaves and it spreads like a cancer. Before they can move on to voodoo, wild men, cannibalism, and a nation of blood-drinkers, they’ll see that I have enough energy to fight them.

  A Night of Distress

  I landed in Montreal in the middle of the night. My wife couldn’t come and get me at the airport. Some people I met drove me home. She seemed as exhausted as I was. The last few days must have been terrible for her. For one night and one morning, I had completely dropped off her radar. That had never happened before. She didn’t know any more than the journalists who kept calling to find out how I was. She had no idea where I was, if I was at the hotel or elsewhere. Or dead. At 4:53 in the afternoon, a person can be anywhere. I had tried several times during the night to reach her. The telephone rang but no one answered. She told me she felt it was me, but she didn’t hear anything. An emptiness. As if the call were coming from another world. I was frightened when I heard that, since she’s never been superstitious. Her only obsession is protecting her private life. I hardly ever talk about her in public for more than a few minutes. And she found herself having to manage two major crises at the same time: my disappearance and the media. Most journalists were thoughtful, she told me, even if there was a little misunderstanding at one point. She couldn’t understand that the fact of not knowing where I might be was news in itself. One journalist asked my wife’s permission to record her words. She kept saying that she had nothing to say because she didn’t know where I was. In the end, the poor journalist understood that my wife didn’t know that absurd system according to which nothing can be news. Then night came. But not sleep. Next to her, the telephone was silent. She couldn’t concentrate on her crossword puzzles. She’s probably thinking that I’m talking about her too much, and not enough about the people who lost their families. But I’m really talking about the anxiety that runs through the veins of anyone waiting for a phone call. I remember the last lines of the poem “Nuit d’hôpital” by Roussan Camille as he is waiting for dawn in a hospital bed in Port-au-Prince: “Our Lady of Fevers, mistress of anguish, have pity on the thoughts that run to madness in the night.”

  The Small Screen

  Inside Haiti, we didn’t have enough perspective to see the big picture. We could only take care of those next to us and had no idea what was happening in other parts of the city. The radio wasn’t working full-time yet. We had to find water, help an injured person get to the hospital, look after a child whose parents had disappeared. Everyone was trying to find out if their family members were still all alive. We didn’t dare ask if
people had survived. It’s always a shock to learn of a friend’s death. In Haiti, we experienced all that first-hand, but in only one place at a time (the place we happened to be). From outside the country, we had a panoramic view of the city. The small screen never blinks. A protean eye made of hundreds of cameras that show everything. Everything is naked. Flattened out. Death without discretion, since the camera, at first, made no distinction between class and gender. Since I returned a few hours ago, I’ve been lying prostrate on the bed, watching an endless parade of horrifying images, unable to absorb the fact that I’ve just emerged from that landscape of devastation. The worst thing is not this succession of misfortunes, but the absence of all nuance in the camera’s cold eye. Sleep came and caressed the back of my neck, warning me it was time to let go.

  A Glass of Water

  I woke up bathed in sweat. I felt the room moving. The books on the bedside table had fallen to the floor, carrying the telephone with them. I must have been having a nightmare and knocked over the glass of water with my hand. I always keep a glass of water next to me because I often get up in the middle of the night to read. Mostly poetry. The little mess I’d made affected me because I know people don’t have enough water in Haiti. And what they have, they have to boil. It’s not easy to start a fire when you can’t find matches. I think of all those smokers trapped in a city without cigarettes. What’s worse, the Barbancourt company that makes the local rum sustained major damage. I stare at the wet floor and can’t stop picturing the faces of thirsty people. Normally I’m against transposing torment from one place to another. It’s better to keep your energy to help people solve their problems. Just because there’s a water shortage in Port-au-Prince doesn’t mean there should be one in Montreal. I lift myself and slide the pillow behind my head. I turn on the TV without the sound. The images flicker by in silence. A continuous stream. Women with arms raised skyward. Long lines of people walking with no destination. A girl telling a story I don’t need to hear to understand. I drift off again and leave the TV on. Turning it off would be like slamming the door on all those people who demand our attention. In any case, the telephone next to my head never sleeps.

  Year Zero

  I turned on the TV this morning and found myself listening to a political analyst who claims that Haiti could get back on its feet again if the country agreed to forget everything that occurred before the earthquake. He spoke of life before the event, which was hardly paradise. The scene was shocking, since the analyst and the journalist interviewing him were comfortably seated while behind them, in full screen, pictures of desolation streamed past. Just look at those scenes of horror (screaming faces that make no sound) and you’re bound to agree with everything being said. This technique of intimidation is so widespread we don’t see anything abnormal about it. What’s happening is this: we’re presented with a problem while being prevented from truly thinking about it. The answer is behind the question. To wrap up everything in a single expression supposedly rich with hope, the expert calls it “Year Zero.” Zorro to the rescue. It’s the first time I’ve heard the concept of Year Zero applied to Haiti. I can’t swallow the idea despite the intolerable images that assault my eye. After all this time, people should know you can’t erase the memory of a nation so easily. In Haiti’s case, history begins with the prodigious leap from Africa to America. People driven by a desperate desire to live together, despite the many reasons that would dissuade them from doing just that, are what creates cities, not the other way around. The earthquake didn’t destroy Port-au-Prince; no one can build a new city without thinking of the old. The human landscape counts. Its memory will link the old and the new. Nothing is ever begun from scratch. It’s impossible, in any case. All we do is continue. There are things you can never eliminate from a trajectory, like human sweat. What should be done with the two centuries, and all they contain, that preceded Year Zero? Throw it all in the garbage? A culture that pays attention only to the living risks its own death.

  My Mother on the Phone

  I finally reached my mother on the phone. Her voice was clear, but always with that trace of concern. She was happy to hear from me. The evening before I left, thinking I was going to come back, she made me something to eat, and that missed meal saddened me. Like every time, the conversation got around to her health, which worries me. To reassure me, she told me her appetite has returned. I picture her picking at a few grains of rice, like a bird. My doubts reached her over the phone. She can read my states of mind, even from a distance. She handed the phone to my sister, who confirmed she was eating more lately. What is she eating? Mostly the sweets you send her, she says with a side order of blame. My sister and I have opposing opinions on the subject. She’d like my mother to eat filling food: rice, beans in sauce, chicken. Which my mother refuses, because she only wants to eat sweet things. Otherwise, all she’ll tolerate, when it comes to filling, is spaghetti and peanut butter. She’s practically allergic to rice and red beans; she’s eaten them every day for the last eighty years. It does me good to talk about the small details of daily life with my sister: those little things mean life has returned. After a silence (her silences always fill me with dread), she gave the phone to my nephew who provided me with a complete description of everything that’s happened since the earthquake. He travels throughout the city; he’s my source of information. He told me about Filo’s misadventure, which he considers comical. Apparently, there was a passageway behind the wide black curtain I saw in the studio. Filo wormed his way into it and was able to crawl free of the building before it collapsed. His gods didn’t let him down (he always wears a picture of the goddess Erzulie). My mother came back on the phone but we got cut off just as she started telling me about Aunt Renée. My mother seemed in excellent shape. She didn’t make me repeat anything. Some people get their energy back when everything else is falling apart.

  No Place

  I tried in vain to watch TV while avoiding images of Port-au-Prince—let alone the smaller cities that we’re just finding out about. I get the impression that everyone is using the same bank of images. Within two hours, I saw the same closed expression on a little girl standing in a crowd a dozen times. The face of the boy who just crawled out of a hole is so luminous, he looks like he swallowed a light bulb. His glowing smile makes him an instant star. An American reporter is filing his story with a baby in his arms. The images are so strong they hide everything else. How do they go about choosing? Do these images just naturally get our attention, or is it the repetition that makes them so familiar? I suspect they’re busy building our memories. Often they’re the last ones we see before drifting off to sleep. Is the choice of images random or do the news directors know from experience what will move their audience? All that work in the flow of the moment. I try to see something new. Like that woman moving through the crowd. The way she’s walking, with no sense of anxiety, gives no idea of her destination. She’s just there. The truth is that people are in no hurry any more because most of them have lost their houses. They have no decent place to live, so they live in the moment.

  Ten Seconds

  She came and sat next to me on the yellow sofa. Slender and refined, she was extremely careful how she broached the subject. She wanted to know if there was a moment when I lost my head, knowing I might die. That isn’t a question to be taken lightly. I took my time answering. I think what helped, I told her, is that we were together as a group. There were three of us. We supported each other. I don’t know how I would have acted if the earthquake had caught me alone in my room. If the question had been, “Were you afraid?” I would have said Yes, but not at the beginning. The first violent tremor took me completely by surprise. No time to think. I was afraid when the second tremor shook us; it was almost as strong as the first. It came just as I was getting my thoughts back. Just when I figured I’d made it through, the second shock was like a blow to the back of the head. I understood this thing was serious. This was no play: the actors weren’t going to get back up fo
r the applause. There was no audience. No one would escape unharmed. For ten seconds, I waited for death. Wondering what form it would take. Would the earth gape open and swallow us up? Would the trees fall on us? Fire consume us? At that moment, I knew I couldn’t stay distant from it. In any case, I wasn’t up to it. If an earthquake could shake an entire city, one individual was not going to resist it. That’s when we cling to our most archaic beliefs. We think of the gods of the earth. I waited and waited. Nothing. I got to my feet, humbly. I felt the worst was behind me. But for ten seconds, those horrible ten seconds, I lost what I had so carefully accumulated all my life. The veneer of civilization that I’d been inculcated with went up in smoke—a cloud of dust like the ruins of the city. All that took ten seconds. Is that the true weight of civilization? During those ten seconds, I was a tree, a rock, a cloud, or the earthquake itself. One thing was for sure: I wasn’t the product of a culture any more. I had the definite impression of being part of the cosmos. The most precious seconds of my life. I don’t really know if there was a gap of ten seconds, but I’m sure the emotions were real. We all shared the same event, but we didn’t experience it the same way.

  Sharing

  You turn on the TV and feel their presence. They’re the first volunteers who found a seat in a plane. They don’t give their opinions; they act. I watch them file out of the plane and head immediately in the right direction. They know where to go. The situation is tailor-made for them. Most of them come from the United States: Adventists, Baptists. The Creole that their leaders learned in American universities makes it possible for them to fan out rapidly throughout the country. Traditionally, the Catholic church took the side of the political, cultural, and economic elite, and the Protestants used that fact to infiltrate the overall population. The Protestants vigorously pursued the war against voodoo that the Catholics began in the 1940s with their famous anti-superstition campaign. Over the last decades, the Catholic church has understood that to survive, it would have to win the heart of the poorer classes. Nowadays, you can’t tell the Catholics apart from the Protestants, since the two wolves have the same attitude toward the flock. Then you have to factor in the humanitarian organizations that act like left-wing clergy. They claim to be more practical and direct, but they’re just as emotionally manipulative. In the end, there’s no difference. Those who practice voodoo, who were always considered archaic, have been trying to modernize. They use the Internet and cell phones and want to claim their share of the market by tinkling the bell of nationalism. The people have all the opium they need. If the day ever comes when there’s enough to eat, will they still want to smoke so much?