ROCKS IN THE WATER
ROCKS IN THE SUN
OUR LIVES: DIARY, MEMOIR, AND LETTERS
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SERIES TITLES
A Very Capable Life: The Autobiography of Zarah Petri
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Letters from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery
Helen Waldstein Wilkes
A Woman of Valour: The Biography of Marie-Louise Bouchard Labelle
Claire Trépanier
Man Proposes, God Disposes: Recollections of a French Pioneer
Pierre Maturié, translated by Vivien Bosley
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Rena Point Bolton and Richard Daly
The Teacher and the Superintendent: Native Schooling in the Alaskan Interior, 1904–1918
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Mission Life in Cree-Ojibwe Country: A Memoir of Mother and Son
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Rocks in the Water, Rocks in the Sun
Vilmond Joegodson Déralciné and Paul Jackson
ROCKS IN THE WATERS
A Memoir from the Heart of Haiti
Vilmond Joegodson Déralciné AND Paul Jackson
ROCKS IN THE SUN
COPYRIGHT © 2015 Vilmond Joegodson Déralciné and Paul Jackson
Published by AU Press, Athabasca University
1200, 10011 — 109 Street, Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8
doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781771990110.01
Book design by Natalie Olsen
Cover photo © arindambanerjee / Shutterstock.com
Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printers
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Déralciné, Vilmond Joegodson, 1983–, author
Rocks in the water, rocks in the sun : a memoir from the heart of Haiti /
Vilmond Joegodson Déralciné and Paul Jackson.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
Text in English with glossary of Haitian terms and Haitian sayings ; translated from the spoken Creole.
ISBN 978-1-77199-011-0 (pbk.). — ISBN 978-1-77199-012-7 (pdf). —
ISBN 978-1-77199-013-4 (epub)
1. Déralciné, Vilmond Joegodson, 1983–. 2. Déralciné, Vilmond Joegodson, 1983–
— Childhood and youth. 3. Fathers — Haiti — Port-au-Prince — Biography.
4. Haiti — History — 1986-. 5. Haiti — Social conditions. 6. Haiti — Economic
conditions. 7. Haiti — Religion. 8. Haiti Earthquake, Haiti, 2010. 9. Haiti —
Biography. I. Jackson, Paul, 1955–, author, translator II. Title.
F1928.23.D47A3 2015 972.9407’3092 C2015-900130-7
C2015-900131-5
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.
Assistance provided by the Government of Alberta, Alberta Multimedia Devel-opment Fund.
Please contact AU Press, Athabasca University at [email protected] for permissions and copyright information.
Woch nan dlo pa konn mizè woch nan solèy.
Rocks in the water don’t know the misery of rocks in the sun.
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgements
Rocks in the Water, Rocks in the Sun
A Memoir from the Heart of Haiti
Vilmond Joegodson Déralciné
Commentary
An Essay on Haitian Politics and History
Paul Jackson
Glossary of Haitian Terms
Pawol Granmoun / Haitian Sayings
Chants
PREFACE
In the course of Rocks, Joegodson will describe from his perspective how this book came into being. Beforehand, allow me to briefly introduce ourselves from my point of view. My intent here is to answer questions that might nag at you and distract you from his story.
Joegodson and I met in Port-au-Prince in January of 2006. The city was, literally and figuratively, on fire. The popular classes were in a death struggle with the powerful for control of the country. The battlefield, this time, was an election. The poor won what turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory. Joegodson will describe the circumstances of our meeting in that context. He also describes how we exchanged our maternal languages in a fair-trade deal: English for Creole.
Four years later, the earthquake left Joegodson homeless and jobless. Everywhere there was work to be done. The Haitians had all the skills needed to rebuild their country to their taste. But there was very little money in circulation. Especially in the city, Haitians needed money to survive. The formal economy was organized around sweatshops subcontracted to supply multinational clothing corporations with merchandise for sale in the consuming countries, like the United States and Canada. (Joegodson will describe the wages and conditions there.) Meanwhile, Joegodson was a talented furniture maker. He had friends in desperate conditions who were skilled tailors and artisans. We considered the possibility of establishing a kind of fair-trade enterprise to connect Canadian consumers with Haitian workers. While he organized them into a potential workforce, I researched in Montréal the logistics of establishing an import business. This project had been thrust upon me, however, rather than chosen. The idea of handcuffing Haitian workers to a capricious foreign market seemed short-sighted to me. The Haitians would still be dependent on the wage for their survival, except that it might come more directly from Canada. But they were desperate.
In Canada, I worked with Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada to learn how goods are imported from the “least developed countries.” I discovered that products from peripheral countries are exempt from tariffs. The government claims that this regulation is intended to help the poorest countries develop their industrial base. It was easy to see, however, that the policy was a gift to the wealthiest multinational corporations that exploit the most vulnerable workers in the world. Not only do they have negligible production costs but the government allows those products to enter Canada as if there were no border. It is as if the production was located in Canada; however, they do not have to pay any of the social wages that Canadian workers had forced on the capitalist class over centuries of struggle. The environmental and social costs of production are displaced to the Global South, when possible. Nevertheless, and regardless of the real effect of the tariff exemption for products manufactured by Haitian workers, would it be possible for us to actually benefit from it?
We came up against obstacles in
both Canada and Haiti. In Montréal, I researched the viability of retailing furniture, clothing, and art. For practical advice, I went to see an entrepreneur who imported similar merchandise from Africa. Several years earlier, I had purchased from him an attractive plant stand made by Moroccan artisans. He had installed in the boutique a video that showed the actual production process; I remember having watched how the Moroccans produced the stand. Now, years later, I found the shop had expanded. It was still full of attractive furniture from around the world, but no longer did the proprietor promote the fair-trade aspect of the enterprise. The store manager told me that few customers were interested in the production process. In fact, promoting merchandise in terms of fair trade could actually handicap items otherwise in demand. Price was the critical factor in moving merchandise. Ultimately, we would be in competition with the multinationals.
Meanwhile, there were bigger obstacles in Haiti, where it is extremely difficult to register a company. Moreover, the Haitian customs office is rife with corruption and controlled by powerful interests that operate in the shadows. Joegodson had already been forced to pay bribes to customs agents for things I had sent to him in Haiti. More ominously, the customs office was in the hands of the same people who controlled the assembly industry. In his first term as president, René Préval had unsuccessfully attempted to make Haitian customs accountable. Any successful effort to raise the Haitian workers to a decent standard of living would undermine the formal economy controlled by the people on whom we would be completely dependent to export products. Joegodson’s friends were not concerned with these complications; they just wanted decent wages. Beyond that, Joegodson and I would be on our own.
At the same time, Joegodson and I were already working together on a blog that we set up so that he could describe post-earthquake conditions in Port-au-Prince. A few times, people who followed his writings sent him money. In his text, he talks about how he put those gifts to use. It was clear that these readers were not wealthy and were making financial sacrifices out of compassion for his ordeal. They encouraged Joegodson. He liked organizing his thoughts to produce posts for our website. And so, we devised the project that has culminated in this book. It was the one thing that we could produce that, as Joegodson put it, “allowed us to exploit each other equally.” I was enthusiastic about the idea. The voice of the most vulnerable link in the global division of labour is silenced in the consuming world. Members of the growing global pauper class — slum dwellers with no prospective source of income — are systemically shut out of discussions about the future of the world. When they appear, it is through the voices of academics, journalists, authors, activists, and filmmakers. In Haiti, the literacy rate is approximately 50 percent. Even for the poor who are literate, like Joegodson, books and journals and Internet access are extremely rare. There are many reasons that the poor don’t enter into our consciousness. Sometimes, it is because we would rather not hear them. But even where that is not the case, no infrastructure exists to support their intervention in the world of ideas, let alone policy. How would Joegodson have written his narrative alone in the circumstances that he describes? Even the pens and paper would have represented a big investment. Where would he have sent it for publication? The cost would have been prohibitive even if he had found a potential publisher. How would it have been received? In the culture of celebrity, who would care about the lives of some nameless slum dwellers? Beyond all of that, we are speaking of a world that, until we began to post items on our blog, was simply not within Joegodson’s field of vision. Our world is constructed of many solitudes.
And so, Joegodson sneaks us into his social circles in Cité Soleil, Delmas, and Saut d’Eau, and we have a chance to see how life is experienced there. He is not speaking for Haitians any more than I am speaking for Canadians in this preface. We are both critical of our compatriots and reject the proposition that anyone could speak for everyone. Joegodson describes how Haitians act within the context of the choices before them. The value of appropriating the voice of the victims of global capitalism is that you can portray them in a way that serves your agenda. I find Joegodson’s story happily devoid of the sentimentality and romanticism with which opponents of global capitalism discuss the world’s most exploited classes. It is equally free of the demagoguery used by proponents of the empire to justify suppression of the subordinate classes that try to improve their position or free themselves of capitalism altogether. Those creations are instruments of a political agenda. Joegodson speaks about life in Haiti from within Haiti. Those familiar with the writings of Gary Victor, Danny Laferrière, and Edwidge Danticat may recognize his Haiti. He has not written fiction, however, but a memoir through which he has tried to describe his actual experiences, as well as those recounted by his friends and family, as faithfully as possible.
From a logistical standpoint: we wrote Rocks in the Water, Rocks in the Sun in Haiti in the fall of 2011 into January 2012. Joegodson formulated the story by choosing experiences from his life and the lives of his family and friends. They cooperated. We changed their names for obvious reasons. We spoke in Creole or French and I wrote in English; in that way, we could both express ourselves most freely. We both thought it best to publish in English. We went over every passage together. I tried to minimize my role as mediator as much as possible. However, the fact that we discussed our project constantly over the months of its creation means that I played some indeterminate part. If he had worked with someone else, the emphasis might have been on other aspects of Haitian life. In other words, this is one of a number of memoirs that Joegodson might have produced. There are many more books to be written by each of us.
Acknowledgements
A number of people and organizations have contributed to the realization of our book. Funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada made possible our initial encounter and intercultural exchange in Haiti in 2006. Although that postdoctoral scholarship had originally been granted in support of a very different plan of study, the committee accepted its conversion into a transnational project. After the earthquake of 2010, Cy Gonick and James Patterson posted our reflections on the situation in Haiti on the Canadian Dimension website. Soon after, we decided to create our own blog, www.heartofhaiti.wordpress.com, to introduce many of the issues that we would develop in this book. We were motivated to continue by readers who supported our analysis and approach as well as those who rejected us. Those articles that most pleased some readers invariably outraged others; all responses educated us. Once we decided to write this book, we needed material support. Joan Jackson helped from Canada in a number of ways and kept our project alive at crucial moments. In Haiti, Yves and Wilberta Gardel opened up their home to us. Antonia cooked, cleaned, and took care of Joenaara, which allowed us to write the manuscript. Back in Canada, Alvin Finkel saw the value in our work and encouraged us to submit it to Athabasca University Press where Pamela Holway made some important suggestions relating to its organization. After that, and most critically of all, Connor Houlihan oversaw its maturation to its final form; he kept it from going off track. Two anonymous reviewers made insightful observations that improved the manuscript. Ann Klefstad helped to make the text clearer. Megan Hall captured the spirit of our book in the graphics arena. Outside of AUP, Louise Velazquez was our most perceptive friend. She read the manuscript before anybody else and engaged us at every level, probing the boundless meaning concealed in daily life. On a different plane, Joegodson gives thanks to God, who granted him the ability to accomplish the book and who never lost confidence in him.
PAUL JACKSON AND VILMOND JOEGODSON DÉRALCINÉ
ROCKS IN THE WATER
ROCKS IN THE SUN
chapter one
MY DAD WAS BORN IN 1963 in a village called La Hatt Polikap in Ville Bonnet, a few kilometres from Saut d’Eau, which means “the waterfalls.” Water abounded there. The local peasants knew how to exploit all the different types of soil in the area. Some parts were dry, others
swampy, still others well drained. The mixture meant that the cultivators could grow all kinds of crops and raise livestock too. The local rivers were good for crops like rice, sugar cane, bananas, and some legumes.
The peasants stayed in the countryside. There was no need for them to go to the capital where they were ill at ease and mocked for their lack of refinement. Even if they wanted to visit Port-au-Prince, it was difficult because agricultural work took all their time. To migrate to the capital meant a complete change of life. Migrants depended on the support of their home communities. Family and friends would bring provisions to them while they tried to adapt to life in the city where they needed money. Peasants saw little money and lived well without it.
There were no fences in Saut d’Eau. There were little pickets placed at the corners so that peasants knew which plots they were responsible for cultivating. People respected each other’s land. Everyone knew which plots belonged to which family. More important than expanding claims in relation to their neighbours was maintaining order in the system that supported the community.
The section chief was responsible for keeping order. He didn’t carry a firearm. To demonstrate his authority, he had a baton and wore a special cap. He too would be a cultivator who walked around barefoot with his shirt unbuttoned, just like everybody else. Sometimes the section chiefs had whistles. It was the whistle and the baton that could instill fear in inhabitants, because behind those symbols was the Duvalier regime.
The peasants worked together all the time. To cultivate the soil, they organized what they called a konbit. As Haitians said, Men anpil chaj pa lou — many hands make the load lighter. A konbit was a group of cultivators who came together to work the land of one of the members. Working together, they would motivate each other. Also, there was more pleasure in working together than alone. The peasants loaned their time and effort to the cultivator whose land they worked. He or she would pay back the loan by working the land of each of the others in turn. A konbit was a full day’s work. The peasants assembled at sunrise to work until the sun had almost completed its arc across the sky. The family that benefited from the konbit was responsible for feeding the workers. The women of the family would take care of that. The other women worked in the konbit, but the work was divided according to gender. Men worked with the heavy tools like picks and hoes. Women followed, gathering and twining the cuttings or planting the seeds, depending on the season. A mera was the same as a konbit, but it was only a half-day’s work.
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