Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (21 page)

LOOKING FOR COLUMBUS

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

I was looking for Columbus, but I knew that he would not be there. Down by the shore, Port-au-Prince exposed its wounds to the sun; and Harry Truman Boulevard, once the most beautiful street in Haiti, was now a patchwork of potholes.

The boulevard was built for the bicentennial celebration of Port-au-Prince, which Truman helped finance right between his launching of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the start of the Korean War. Now it looked like a war zone with no memory of the celebrations of which it had been the center. Only a few of the statues erected for the occasion remained. Its fountains had dried up under two Duvaliers. Its palm trees had shrunk as Haiti had itself. I turned in front of the French Institute, a living monument to the impact of French culture on the Haitian elites, and drove toward the U.S. Embassy, a center of power of a different order. Above a mountain of sandbags, a helmeted black G.I. watched nonchalantly as a crowd of half-naked boys bathed in a puddle left by yesterday's rain. He had probably come with the occupying forces that helped restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in 1994. The story I was looking for went back nine years earlier.

I drove by.

I stopped the car at a safe distance from the embassy and started a slow walk on the boulevard. On the buildings around the post office, conflicting graffiti asked the U.S. forces both to stay and to go home. I spotted a statue lying behind a fence across the street. A peddling artist stood next to it, selling paintings and crafts. I greeted the man and asked him if he knew where the statue of Christopher Columbus was.

I had vague memories of the statue. I only remembered its existence from my adolescent wanderings. The few images I could summon came from Graham Greene's
The Comedians.
It was under the watchful eye of Columbus that the heroes of that story, later played by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, consummated their illicit love. But the bust on the grass was no Columbus. The painter confirmed my doubts. "No," he said, "this is a statue of Charlemagne Peralte."

Peralte was the leader of a nationalist army that fought the first occupation of Haiti by the United States in the 1920s. From the pictures the Marines took of him after they had crucified him on a door, I knew he was a thin dark man. The bust on the grass was visibly that of a white male, rather stocky. "You're sure this is Peralte?" I asked again. "Sure this is Peralte," replied the painter. I moved closer and read the inscription. The sculpture was a bust of Harry Truman.

"Where is the Columbus one?" I asked.

"I don't know. I am not from Port-au-Prince," replied the man. "Maybe it is the one that used to be near the water."

I walked to the place he indicated. No statue was there. The pedestal still existed, but the sculpture was missing. Someone had inscribed in the cement: "Charlemagne Peralte Plaza." Truman had become Peralte and Peralte had replaced Columbus.

I stood there for another half hour, asking each passerby if he or she knew what had happened to the Columbus statue. I knew the story: I was in Port-au-Prince when Columbus disappeared. I just wanted confirmation, a test of how public memory works and how history takes shape in a country with the lowest literacy rate on this side of the Atlantic.

I was almost ready to give up when a young man replayed for me the events I had first heard about in 1986. In that year, at the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier's dictatorship, the most miserable people of Haiti's capital had taken to the streets. They had loosed their anger upon every monument that they associated with the dictatorship. A number of statues had been broken into pieces; others were simply removed from their bases. This was how Truman came to find himself on the grass.

Columbus had a different fate, for reasons still unknown to me. Perhaps the illiterate demonstrators associated his name with colonialism. The mistake, if mistake there was, is understandable: the word
kolon
in Haitian means both Columbus and a colonist. Perhaps they associated him with the ocean from which he came. At any rate, when the angry crowd from the neighboring shanty towns rolled down Harry Truman Boulevard, they seized the statue of Columbus, removed it from its pedestal, and dumped it into the sea.

DO SOMETHING FOR YOUR SOUL, GO TO HAITI

Babette Wainwright

Boarding the van in Port-au-Prince, for the poor southern Haitian village of Jeannette, I intentionally sat separate from the missionaries. This was a humanitarian work mission, not a vacation tour, and I wasn't there to socialize. Instead, I sat next to my friend, Kathy, who had volunteered to provide free dental care to the people in Jeannette for ten days; I was serving as her translator.

Riding in the seat directly behind the driver—a bright young man with many interests and a deep curiosity about life—we spent the time chatting with him in
Kreyol.
He suggested that we buy the local candy we craved from four vendors at four different stands. "That way, we can help each one make a little money today, instead of giving all the business to just one person." We talked about ways to uplift the country, ways for people to help each other, imagining something like the volunteer systems in the United States.

Kathy and I were going to Jeannette along with the Haiti Mission of the Episcopal Church of Milwaukee, which has been financing a school, church, and mission house in Jeannette for over eleven years. The Mission coordinator had approached me a year before for
Kreyol
lessons, and had shown me the project's promotional literature, which proclaimed, "Do something for your soul, go to Haiti."

The brochure described yearly "hands on" visits during which visitors could meet and interact with the people of Jeannette and attempt to make a difference in their lives. I decided to go along, paying eleven hundred dollars for a trip back to my homeland. (Although the actual traveling costs were under five hundred dollars, I was told that this trip would be a fund-raiser for the project so I gladly agreed to pay more.)

Our trip from Haiti's capital to Jeannette took four hours. For four hours, the "poorest country in the Western Hemisphere" gave the missionaries, Kathy, and myself its best display of dust, rags, huts, and seaside trash dumps. Kathy wept as we passed a few cadavers of young men in gutters. According to our driver, they were thieves whose bodies no one dared claim, so they were left by the roadside to rot. The members of the Mission seemed unmoved.

At last, we reached the entrance to the small village of Jeannette. Suddenly the missionaries began blowing up balloons and throwing them to a parade of screaming children. The driver shook his head disapprovingly as the children ran dangerously into the road. The missionaries laughed. The scene reminded me of my childhood, watching Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier throw pennies out of his limousine window as he rode through the slums of Port-au-Prince. Had I paid so dearly to come to Haiti to contribute to the further dehumanization of my own people?

During our stay in Jeannette, we were lodged in the priest's living quarters, a luxurious mission house equipped with all the amenities: water, modern bathrooms, and comfortable furniture. A garage was under construction. I learned that it had cost eight thousand dollars to build. The priest was a tall, imposing Haitian man in his seventies. He had a long gray beard that made me think of Rasputin. Always lurking behind the missionaries, he seemed to have disdain for them, even while they were in awe of him and his "projects."

The priest's projects for the people of Jeannette included a small dark church, and two school buildings with tiny dark rooms and blank walls. The teachers' dormitories resembled jail cells. Ironically, prior missionaries had once spent an entire trip stenciling the dank concrete walls of the dormitories "a la Norwegian." A clinic, which the brochures had advertised as well-stocked, had no bathroom facilities, no running water, and no electricity. I was told that even the light bulb that lit the clinic during our visit would be removed by the priest as soon as the missionaries left. I watched as a clinic helper hauled heavy buckets of water to an unsanitary bathroom where medical implements were being scrubbed, while hundreds of patients waited all day to be seen.

Most people in Jeannette must go for days without a proper meal, walk for miles to fetch water, use the bushes as their bathroom, live with infected skin wounds if they can't pay the two gourdes or twelve U.S. cents required to see the nurse in this clinic. Teachers report that the local children are so hungry that many are unable to stay alert in class. The teachers themselves often go without food. A teacher's aide who shares a shack with eight members of his family told me that he could not afford to replace his torn shoes. In the meantime, he watched quietly as the eight-thousand-dollar garage was built to accommodate the Haiti Project's van. People do not need to build elaborate garages for their cars in Jeannette, especially when their homes are fenced in. Leaving the car in the yard or under a simple carport would offer it plenty of protection. With the eight thousand dollars for this garage, the project could have built over a dozen solid homes, or an open-air cafeteria to provide a balanced midday meal for all the students and school personnel, five days a week, for a year.

In addition to obvious wastefulness, the missionaries also showed a lack of sensitivity toward the people of Jeannette. In one instance, the Haiti Project leaders kept the cook waiting long past her working hours and then, while indulging in one of their nightly cocktail parties, declared that, "All she had wanted was to go and party."

A young Haitian woman who had spent an entire morning helping us in the clinic was invited by the nurse to join us for lunch. This gesture displeased the church members, who rushed to take the food away, sending the young woman running from the table in shame. I talked with a man who had designed a number of greeting cards and embroidered several items of clothing hoping that the mission would use them for fund-raising. Project members ignored him, patronizing instead an art shop in Port-au-Prince that was a well-known sweat shop.

If in fact the goal was to develop self-reliance in Jeannette, not only would the missionaries have supported local entrepreneurs, but during the yearly "hands-on" trips the missionaries also would have brought with them appropriate items such as farming tools, fabrics, blankets, lamps, and up-to-date medical supplies, rather than the hard candy, plastic cups, balloons, and sample vials of expired medicines. These items did nothing to help poor people escape their oppression and misery. Furthermore, they contributed to the significant amount of dumping I saw around the clinic and the school yard.

Since none of the missionaries on this particular trip had bothered to master the language of the people they served, I wondered if they could assess the people's needs and measure the effectiveness of their interventions. For example, What happened to the young people once they completed the last grade at their Mission school? They returned to their shacks to face hunger with the rest of the community.

I saw and heard discontented people who watched as the priest obtained a TV antenna, solar and wind generators, a garage, and a bamboo fence to keep them out of the mission house, while their children remained malnourished and thirsty in the mud huts. Weren't the people of Jeannette the reason so much money was donated to this project? Weren't their pathetic photographs used to touch the donors' hearts and pockets?

Now it is clear to me what the promotional bulletin meant when it said: "Do something for your soul, go to Haiti." For this mission, Haiti is a place to relax, have nightly cocktail parties, and feel important as you watch the natives beg for your leftovers and trash. Returning to my homeland with the Haiti Mission project did do something for my soul: It wounded it deeply.

A
POEM ABOUT WHY
I
CAN'T WAIT
GOING HOME AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN

Gina Ulysse

Every morning from the time I was three

I had to open my mouth to receive

two tablespoons full of emulsion scott

sometimes I would pinch my nose so I couldn't smell it

making it easier to swallow that pasty white liquid

that left my tongue tasting of salty tears and cod liver oil

Often we had to chase it with homemade V-8

watercress celery beets spinach carrots and all sorts of

other things that grow in the earth to give little weaklings strength

Despite the grimaces pouts tears

despite the nos the I don't want tos the cries the wails

the screams that often preceded this ritual

eventually I would drink it

not because it's good for me

but because I had to I didn't have a choice

I had to open my mouth

let it slime down my throat

and swallow

When I was about fifteen

One day my father called all three of us in the living room

and told us we had to let go of our dreams

and be serious about the future

Poor man not even a son to carry on his name

he had been cursed with three girls

and we wanted to be a singer a dancer and a writer

After calling us by our names he said

I want a doctor a lawyer and a dentist

I remember saying to him

I don't care if I never have any money

(though I would change my mind later)

I don't care if I never have any money

even if I live in a tent as long as I have my music

What are you asking me that I live this life my life for you

In all my sassiness I dared him.

And when would I live my life? when you die?

the horror on his face I have since forgotten

but I remember mother verbally mourning her wasted life

having given him the best years of her life

and realizing that I only get to do this "life thing" once

so I was going to do it on my terms

as long as I have a choice
I remember the first time I went back to Haiti

It had been 17 years

but I had to hide in a hotel so daddy wouldn't know I was there

Desperate to refill all the gaps in my past

I stole back memories at night to retrace my childhood

I begged my cousin to drive me around

to the house on rue darguin

but it was long gone

and had been replaced with an edifice that

breathed the same coldness as the Pentagon

then we went to the gingerbread house

that too had been demolished and reconstructed

though the mango tree was still there

le petit chaperon rouge had been closed for years

vines interlaced with the iron of the gate
I went back again two years later

and I remember a conversation with a man

who has lived in Haiti longer than I did

this white man who says he loves my country

the country that I saw in newspapers and on TV

for seventeen years

the country that for the longest time I only went to in translation

we were talking about class and color

I was asserting my gramscian ideals

about the importance of and the need to fight both wars—

the war of maneuver and the war of position

especially the war of position

so we can take back spaces

hence why I tie my head with a scarf when I go to those places

you think they care he replied

they don't care about your aunt jemima head

uhmm! even after over twenty years in this country

you still have no other references I said quietly

Oh these ethnic notions I thought enraged

after over twenty years in my country his social limits were intact

for me that was the end of the conversation

after all this was not a teach-in
How do you overturn four hundred years of history
in less than one century?
I've been thinking a lot about writing a poem

about the meaning of the word
diplomacy

about how this word is just another four letter word

about how this word is just another way to say

I am going to fuck you

not only are you not going to enjoy it

but when I am done with you

you're sure to say thank you

and like my sistahgurl says you might even pay me for it

in accrued debt interest
Can life exist without ideals

Can life exist without dreams

I am only 31 years old and I am getting so cynical

I am trying not to be

I've been reading Shakti Gawain

trying to do creative visualization

trying to imagine

trying to imagine a better world

so I can change my world

so I can change the world

But I have been having a lot of difficulty

I keep remembering my friend B with her three kids

who after a year still can't get a job

its not because she's not qualified

or that she's not trying

but because she's not from the right family

she doesn't have the right connections

and her skin is too damn dark

worse

she doesn't play by the rules of the game

she doesn't do safe cocktail conversations

she was on the sidewalks in the 80s

bringing down the second revolution

she was there on the streets

in front of the palace

in front of ministries

in front of police stations

waiting

waiting to lay claim to dead bodies

no one else would acknowledge for fear of losing their lives

you know in Haiti one often inherits social scars by association

you know in Haiti one often inherits fatal scars by association

scars

wars

social fatal

death by association

tell me how to imagine a better world in this place

tell me how to imagine a better world in this place

where even after operation restore democracy
that came bounded with IMF loans
International Mother Fucking loans
for the structurally adjusted

where the rules of the game are

I am going to fuck you

and you are not going to enjoy it

tell me how do you imagine a better world in this place

tell me how to imagine a better world in this place

where the rules of the game is this diplomacy

where blackness still equals poverty

where even after over 400 years

still too black too strong not French enough

never really French enough

and the new generations don't want to be men
raging youths are now more committed

to seeing blood run

raging youths are now more committed

to seeing blood run

to seeing blood run on sidewalks

just to see blood run through the streets

next to expensive cars

outside of elite-owned stores

because they say they have had enough

the end result is still the same

the revolution is not over

the revolution is not over they cry as they die

they have had too much adversity

this is the generational gap

don't need to ask them when are they going to grow up

when are they going to grow out of this phase

it is not a phase this is about the game

it was at the university that they learned the rules

through liberation theology they learned they were comrades

it was at the university that they learned

the multiple meanings of the word
diplomacy

how you have to be pliable

acquiescent

don't make waves you don't get the perks

no gains if you misbehave like a good little
neg

that's what you are being trained to be

a docile body without integrity

like the ancestor who sold my ancestor to the west

depi nan ginen neg pat vie we neg

gede nibo gad sa vivan yo fe mwen
plante mayi m mayi m tounen rozo
rozo tounen banbou
banbou tounen ponya
ponya yo ponyade m gede

How do you overturn four hundred years oj history
in less than one century?

And I keep thinking back to my life here

And I keep thinking back to my life right here

in this white power center

ain't no misbehavin' here

in the ivory tower

abounded with liberals and marxist scholars

where liberalism is rhetorically defined

as a floating signifier associated with

the ever-growing pony tail

the peace sign

the old leather jacket from undergrad

the backwards baseball cap

nightly homage to the celestial herb to justify being a function

commitments

commitment to the metaphysics of diversity

commitments

to the environment to animal rights

the pet projects

and pet cultures

signifying signifiers

are recreating structures

these signifying signifiers are recreating structures

these signifying signifiers are recreating bourgeois structures
bourgeois bourgeoisie bougi bouginess

blackness bouginess blackness

contradictions

disjunctures

underplayed identities
downpressing privilege

down

down

down you got to keep it down

sometimes it just wants to rise up

but you gotta keep it down

Shut your mouth!!!!

stuff it in your mouth

just keep your mouth shut and get out

ram it down your throat

deep down your throat

swallow

it

down

you're being forced

to

deep throat

But I don't want to

I don't want to

swallow

it

down

you gotta keep it down

you gotta keep it down

why you have to be down to keep it real

downplaying privilege

little white rebels wanna be niggers

and niggers wanna be niggaz

bourgeois blues

opportunities denied

blackness bouginess

disjunctures?

contradictions?

In Haiti the bourgeoisie funded coups

in Jamaica uptown bougies tried to silence a revolution

but rastafari had a free black mind

so they self-fashioned an everyday resistance

the self-fashioning of an everyday SEXIST resistance

an everyday HOMOPHOBIC resistance

blackness bouginess blackness

in the Caribbean bouginess has funded revolutions

little white rebels wanna be niggers

and rebelling niggers wanna be niggaz

these signifying signifiers are just recreating bourgeois structures

Can life exist without ideals

Can life exists without dreams

Lately I have been thinking a lot about writing

a poem about class comfort

and color and privilege and guilt

about the social luxury of whiteness

about the social luxury of the white skin

a poem about the rules of the game

and I think back to the keeping it real conference

how we had the rhetoric to deconstruct performance

the performance of blackness and black identities

but we couldn't talk about black privilege

for fear of having to talk about black guilt

like the good doctor says we can't talk

about the fact that we like trashing on the weak

because we don't have the courage to confront the powerful

in this place

in this white power center

this bastion of liberalism

where ANTHROPOLOGY incubates racism

where anthropology INCUBATES racism

where anthropology incubates RACISM

this place of learning who the players are

what the rules of the game are

and how to play and win

I'm criminal

compulsive alertness

always having to be alert

criminal

always ready to answer questions