The World is Moving Around Me

by Dany Laferriere

  Time on TV

  Two kinds of time, if I can put it that way, face off in a fight to the death. One intends to eliminate the other: the time that belongs to nature and the time that belongs to television. In reality, the life of a people is counted in centuries, sometimes in millennia. When a society takes a new turn, sometimes we don’t feel that breath of fresh air for another thirty years. The maceration occurs very slowly. Collective time is like that cow chewing its cud by the side of the road. Each car that whizzes past brings a new generation of new human beings with their particular sensibility, their own emotions and battles to fight. Our cow has seen so many cars rushing by that it doesn’t even lift its head to look when a new one comes along. It will chew over the earthquake, and that will take the time it takes. The way it has only just finished chewing over the Duvalier era. That time is nearly immobile, and one man’s death is no more than a blip on its screen. On the other hand, time on television is always accelerated. On TV, you can watch a rose bloom in ten seconds. In times of great turmoil, like now, people are glued to the small screen. Long enough for this artificial time to end up infiltrating their systems. When we watch television for too long, we start to think we can act upon events unfolding before our eyes. Everything in our lives seems too slow. We demand instant changes. Every time we come back from the bathroom, we want to see something new. We want progress. Why doesn’t that truck go faster? We criticize people who are taking action, though we haven’t moved from our armchair for the last two days. After a while, we figure it’s time to move onto something else. If we can’t change reality, we hope it will at least turn into fiction. That’s what happens when we spend too much time watching television.

  A Visit to the Doctor

  A little cat at my mother’s feet with eyes so soft, almost frightened, you’d think it was a mouse. We found it in the yard after the earthquake. My mother adopted it immediately, and ever since they’ve been whispering secrets to each other. And understanding everything, according to my sister. My mother has left the gallery, and the little cat watches her go, completely at a loss, as if its world has just collapsed. We’re waiting for my mother in the car. My sister is taking her to the doctor’s, something she detests above all things. She looks exactly like the little cat. She comes out of the house, then returns to look for something, but won’t tell us what it was. She’s really just stalling. My sister wants to be the first in line at the clinic, since she has only the morning off. If the appointment doesn’t take too long, we’ll have time to get to the lab and do the tests before eleven o’clock. Then she’ll drop us back at the house and rush off to work. She’s already starting to sweat. She’s done everything at top speed this morning: making breakfast at the house and planning the day’s meal with the cook. She has so many things to sort out (the bills, for starters) as she looks after my mother, who has developed all sorts of capricious manners; her son, who never has what he needs for school; her husband, who catches a new disease every morning; her daughter overseas, who’s depressed—no wonder she doesn’t have time to think about post-earthquake stress disorder, which is the theme this week on the radio. Ever since some psychiatrists got on TV and declared that Haiti is an excellent laboratory for studying post-earthquake stress disorder, that spice is being added to every sauce. Everything is seen from that angle. You get to work late. That’s due to post-earthquake stress disorder, even if you’ve never been on time in your life. Finally, my mother gets into the car and we drive off. My nephew left with his father. My sister figures they have a fifty-fifty chance of getting a flat tire on the way, which makes my mother burst out laughing. My sister tells me the doctor is good, but a little expensive. We get there, wait a short time, then we’re ushered into his office. A large, restful room. The doctor is a thin man, concerned with his own appearance, but he seems competent; in any case he has a dry manner with the discreet warmth of efficient people. My mother is always intimidated when there’s a doctor around. My sister is attentive and care-worn. The doctor, half-serious and half-jovial, looks a little worried at the sight of my mother’s swollen foot, especially the wound on her right leg. He scribbles a few instructions on a pad and sends us off to get tests. The results will be expedited to a specialist. In the car, I say that the doctor is lucky that his clinic escaped undamaged. My sister tells me he’s been kidnapped at least twice. He’s a brave man. That’s the minimum you can expect when you live here, my sister says, staring straight ahead. We went to have the tests done at a private laboratory, so we won’t have to wait so long. I expected to see people with a certain income level there, but they come from everywhere. They weren’t talking about the earthquake—only the difficulty of keeping their heads above water. Finally, they called my mother’s name. Her anxiety was visible even in the nape of her neck. I’d forgotten how frail she is. She lists to one side, and her little black purse keeps slipping off her shoulder. Her face is radiant when she returns; she didn’t have to have a shot. We drove straight home, and my sister went off to work.

  New Art Forms

  What art form will be the first to come forward after the earthquake? Poetry, so impulsive, or painting, eager for new landscapes? Where will the first images of the earthquake be seen? On the city walls or the bodies of tap-taps? Will the short story, not as fast as poetry but quicker than the novel, come back into fashion? The novel demands a minimum of comfort that Port-au-Prince can’t offer; it’s an art form that flourishes in industrialized nations. Are writers already at work? Will we see a race to write the great earthquake novel or the major essay about reconstruction? And the winner—will it be Frankétienne or a young, unknown woman novelist? Dalembert or a German writer who’d never even heard of Haiti before the event? Don’t forget that the great novel of the Haitian dictatorship (The Comedians, 1966) was written by Graham Greene, an Englishman. The earthquake is a planetary event. It belongs to everyone. What would we think if this great tragic novel ended up being written by a talented, yet mannered, young upper-class writer? Would we take that book for what it is (a masterpiece) or see it as the ultimate slap from a jesting god? What style would it be written in? Ironic or tragic? Could it be comic, even if so many people died? Laughter to tears? Who will censor the works that don’t live up to the standard of what is tolerable? The church, the state, or society? Do artists who weren’t present at the time have the necessary legitimacy to turn the earthquake into a work of art? Is the new Haitian someone who went through the event? The race has begun. But we’ve lost something: our intimacy. Everyone is carefully scrutinized now. Just to speak your mind, you have to show you’re clean. Say how many deaths you had in your family. As if it were a war, not an earthquake. When it comes to the Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire’s poem is what remains.

  Social Bonds

  There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of teenagers orphaned by the earthquake. Some have lost all their family members. If we allow them to drift, it won’t take long before we have a serious crime problem in this country. People think twice about killing when they have relationships with others. When the opposite is true, they develop a terrifying insensitivity. They’d hesitate to rob a woman who happens to be the mother of a schoolmate. Or kill a former teammate for his money. These bonds develop during childhood. They make us an integral part of society, and we owe it something. If we don’t start working on the social network, the city will soon become fragmented and gangs will multiply.

  A Faithful Friend

  I met Marcus for the first time in 1972 at a talk at the Institut français. I had just finished secondary school and had registered in the ethnology department, which, in my hopeful opinion, was one of the rare spots in Port-au-Prince where you could catch a good nap while getting an education. It was the final refuge for people who had failed to enter a more prestigious department, like medicine, engineering, or agronomy. Law wasn’t worth much at the time, but it was more highly rated than ethnology. The latter is useful in Haiti, but only if you want to do research on voodo
o, traditional music, and sacred dances. You had to wear a full beard, a peasant shirt, and a few necklaces of dried maldioc beans. I whiled away the afternoons at the university, not far from the Palace movie theater, discussing Dr Price-Mars’ theories on the influence of African culture on Haitian identity, and the impact of French culture, which meant Parisian, on the local bourgeoisie. One evening, I met up with Marcus again at a show at the Collège Saint-Pierre museum, and he asked me to come and work with him at the Haïti-Inter radio station. I was a reporter for the midday news show that he was directing. Since we were neighbors, he on ruelle Roy and I on Lafleur-Duchêne, we used to have breakfast together. His wife Jocelyne wasted no time adopting me. We listened to Wagner, since Marcus had developed an addiction to his music during an internship in France. Every morning we’d go jogging in the Champ-de-Mars, discussing the political situation, or more often than not the complicated relation between power and the press. We had to watch what we said. There were signs that government spies had infiltrated the media, passing themselves off as independent journalists. Which was why we did our talking as we ran around the edge of the park. Marcus was a very meticulous journalist who hated rumors. He insisted on backing up every statement with facts, in a country where everyone was forever making up stories. The government, the opposition, the press, people in their daily lives, everyone was busy inventing a private universe that had no relation to reality. I wondered how he had developed his passion for fact. I saw him lose his head only once: the day his daughter was born. He came by the house because he wanted me to go to the hospital with him. The effort to maintain his self-control made him seem more wound up. I pretended I didn’t notice anything. He drove around the Presidential Palace three times in a row. Normally we avoided the place. It was infested with the regime’s henchmen, and a flat tire could have disastrous results. We reached the hospital untouched. His happiness was something to see when he learned he had a daughter. Yet he waited a month before he took the baby in his arms. His wife Jocelyne would give me desperate looks until one morning, just before getting into his car to drive to the radio station, he turned to her and took the baby. You should have seen her ecstatic look! Marcus was the first to tell me about the death of Gasner Raymond, the friend who shared a byline with me for Le Petit Samedi Soir, a weekly that covered politics and culture, and that was barely tolerated by the government. I left for Montreal after Gasner was murdered in June of 1976, and in November 1980, Marcus was thrown in prison with all the other independent journalists who called for elections in the country, since the Duvalier regime had been in power since 1957. Later, the group was sent into exile. We met again in New York. There was a return to Haiti in 1986 after Jean-Claude Duvalier left. We lost track of each other then, but came together again in Miami in 1990 when I moved there from Montreal to have a quieter place to write. I lived in Kendall, in the southwest, and he was next to Little Haiti. Every time I went to see my aunts there, I’d stop by and spend some time with Marcus and Jocelyne. He was still active and publishing a political weekly, Haïti-Demain, and hosting a radio show. We discussed all kinds of things, jumping from politics to literature, not to mention the gossip of everyday life. We also talked a lot about American culture, which fascinated both of us, even if we did live in the belly of the beast. I would bring escapist novels for Jocelyne who was still nostalgic about life in Port-au-Prince. She went back as soon as she got the chance. It was more difficult for Marcus; he had to stay in Miami for his newspaper and his radio show. His dream was to have a station in Haiti. With his friend Lucien Andrews, he did just that, years later. It became Mélodie FM. That’s where I met him today, at noon. He entrusted me to his young team of reporters as he finished the next issue of Haïti-Demain. I looked around the station and felt I’d traveled back in time to the mid-1970s. Then Batraville showed up, and we talked for a while (they served us coffee) in Marcus’s office, though he hadn’t finished the issue yet. Nothing could distract him from his work, even a friend he hadn’t seen in more than ten years. We got around to talking about what Marcus was able to save from the ruins of his house after the earthquake. He described everything in a neutral tone, without pathos. I know him well: he’d throw himself into a raging river to rescue a dog. He was at the station when it happened. As soon as he understood it was an earthquake, he went home. He knew Jocelyne was dead when he saw the empty space where his house had been. She had to be in there. At that time of day, she would have been knitting in front of the TV. And it was true: he found her underneath a beam. He rushed her to the hospital but it was too late. He carried her body to a friend’s house before going back to the station. Why go back? Mélodie FM, he told me, a small station, was the only one on the air that night, along with Signal FM. “I’m a journalist. I couldn’t miss a scoop like that,” he said in a steady voice. It was only the second time in the country’s history that a major earthquake had hit Port-au-Prince (we didn’t know yet that Léogâne, Petit-Goâve, and Jacmel were affected too). He stayed and helped inform people about how the situation was developing, and he didn’t leave the studio for days. I imagined Marcus that way. His wife’s body was safe, so he returned to work. One-hundred-percent professional. When I left, he gave me a little radio for my mother. She was so touched he remembered her that she talked about it all evening. She wanted to know why we didn’t see him any more. The stream of life had carried him away.

  The Notion of Usefulness

  Since January 12 (we say January 12 here the way they say September 11 in other places), the borders of Haiti have disappeared. Haiti is a place where you feel Haitian. It’s not enough to be in Haiti to be useful to the country. That’s what we discovered after the world-wide wave of generosity created by our situation. Things are not determined by place any more. You can be in Haiti and actually be a detriment to its development. François Duvalier hardly ever left the country, and he’s one of the architects of its misfortune. The same goes for kidnappers. And the ones known as the “big eaters”—men who pillage the coffers of the state and who shamefully accumulate a multitude of public-sector jobs. The new nationalism born of January 12 can’t erase the corruption committed by those who never left Haiti. For people who live outside the country, I can understand why they’d like to see it with their own eyes and touch its great body with their hands, but too much attention will end up suffocating the patient. Except, of course, if your profession makes you useful on the ground. We’ve all witnessed that comic scene in which one person is doing all the work while a crowd mills around him. You’re never far from a television camera in Port-au-Prince, now that the city has been turned into a giant set. In this new invasion of Haiti (everyone wants to be at the bedside of the celebrated patient), a lot of organizations and people are in it for their own personal visibility. Of course, a good number of organizations and individuals are completely sincere. How can we separate the wheat from the chaff? No need to waste time with that. As soon as the cameras pull out, the sorting will begin immediately. No sense pushing and shoving; if you want to help, you’ll find a way. I know someone who left Montreal and returned to Port-au-Prince right after the earthquake. Guided only by emotion. Today, he is among the ranks of people who depend on international aid to survive. The country needs energy, not tears.

  The Local Market

  I’m surprised when my sister brings home refrigerated vegetables from the supermarket when there are such good fresh ones at a better price from the local market. My sister is obsessed with germs—that’s the problem. The market is teeming with them, or so she imagines, while supermarket vegetables are kept far from the flies and dust behind their envelope of cellophane. But since the earthquake and the collapse of the Caribbean Market, everyone knows it’s risky to enter the supermarkets that weren’t built according to earthquake standards, whereas there’s no risk at all in an outdoor market. After the first week, everyone carefully avoided any covered structures. But in no time, those who had a certain level of buying power, since prices
went up instead of falling, started flocking back to the supermarkets. Every neighborhood is defined by its supermarket. If you don’t see one near you, it’s because you’re not in the right part of town. For us, it’s the Eagle Market. Since the Caribbean Market collapsed, the neighborhood stores have recovered some their customers. Even the little outdoor market, where the vegetables are laid out on a jute sack on the ground, shared in the influx of buyers. We go there in the evening, just before the vendors start putting away their produce, to get the best prices. Everyone bargains hard at that market, while in the supermarket, they are happy to pay the price on the package, no questions asked. The customers obey the strong and crush the weak and hope to balance their budget that way. It’s very important not to be seen by a co-worker from the office when you go to the outdoor market where the flies land gaily on the meat (don’t forget to boil it hard). The technique is simple: you stay in your car until you’ve spotted the product you want. When there aren’t many people around, usually just before nightfall, when the women start bundling up their vegetables, you spring from your car and pounce on that sack of yams you’ve had your eye on for the last hour. Often you’re not the only one who has spotted a good deal. Sometimes you find yourself face-to-face with the one person you were hoping not to meet. In that case, you’ll have to share that sack of yams. My sister told me that story. Ever since, she and the woman have been going to the market together.