The World is Moving Around Me (9 page)

My Nomadic Friend

My friend Dominique Batraville lives in Port-au-Prince, but I don't have his address. In any case, he's never home. I always meet him at an art show, a book launch, or a press conference at the Ministry of Culture. He's a cultural journalist, exactly what I did when I lived here. He's part of the group of young poets that my brother-in-law Christophe Charles published a few decades ago in his magazine, which featured only poets eighteen years old or younger. His first collection of poems in Creole,
Boulpic
, was a great success. Like many in his generation, he went through hell without a complaint. When I ask after his health, he'll slap his chest with his open palm: his way of reassuring me. His way of defying his illness, too. You never know what shape he'll be in when you see him. He has his ups and downs. When things are going really bad, he'll disappear from sight for a month or more. Alarmed, his friends go looking for him, though they know he'll reappear on his own one day. And suddenly he's there. You can hear his characteristic laugh from a distance. One of the few men I know who has no enemies. You should never say something like that, but I say it in his case. He crosses borders effortlessly in a country where social classes are no laughing matter. He's a jack-of-all-trades: radio host, newspaper journalist, poet, actor, and volunteer impresario. Often you see him with a talented young artist he's promoting. He travels the city. You picture him ever more fragile, especially since his mother's death. When he catches my concerned look, he gives me a wink of reassurance. While Frankétienne watches Port-au-Prince from the balcony of his house where he stands bare-chested, Batraville moves through the city on foot. He knows every part of it. With his way of covering the territory, he reminds me of Gasner Raymond, my friend who was murdered by the dictatorship thirty-five years ago. Gasner was positively caustic. Although Batraville's laugh might seem sarcastic at times, you can tell right away that he's a generous, gentle man. You can feel it by the way he opens his arms wide when he goes to greet you—he does it with his whole body. I breathed easier when I learned he had survived the earthquake. In his precarious state, the man sums up this untamable city.

A Photo

In this broken place, a lot of people who have come to help brought their cameras with them. At first they try to capture the suffering on film. The pictures are sent to their friends via the Internet. Then, after a while, they begin to enjoy it. Every photo creates a certain amount of interest back home. And every amateur photographer dreams of being in the right place at the right time to get a great picture. They imitate the professionals by shooting away at everything and anything. I met one of those amateurs happily shooting blindly into the crowd. He told me he was taking a photo class at a Miami university with an old-school teacher who accepts paper photos only, which cost him a fortune. Be spontaneous, no framing, give me untouched reality. The teacher tears up the pictures so quickly you wonder if he took the time to look at them. He told me all about his class as he went on shooting. I watched him and realized his method is not much different from his teacher's. And wondered who was taking the photo: he or the camera? Why didn't he take the time to look at the person he was photographing? What is this need to shoot people blindly? As if any picture will do. The look he gave me made me realize we weren't living in the same century. It takes me at least an hour to photograph a scene, but with his machine, he can take fifty a minute. I look like an old artisan with my black notebook in which I note down every detail that will help me sketch out a face. We followed the crowds and ended up on the square in front of the ruined cathedral. We went on talking about our different art forms and our respective methods. He seemed more receptive than before, making mental calculations to see how much he could save with this technique of a single photo. Still, there's something seductive about a photographer shooting multiple pictures of the same subject. I don't know what a writer at work looks like. We came across a woman standing with her arms thrown open in front of a great black cross—all that remains of the cathedral. I sat down on a low wall to write. How to describe a scene like that? He took just one picture.

New Landmarks

The government can name streets if it wants to, but people have their own way of establishing landmarks. A church, an empty house, a park, a public building, a stadium, a cemetery—anything can be a landmark. People invent their own personal map of the city. They come from the countryside with precise information that will help them locate a family member or friend. Luckily, no one building looks like another, and no urban plan was ever considered. Everyone had his say when it came to building his house so it wouldn't look like a rabbit hutch. Every house can be found thanks to its originality and especially its loud colors. But when everything has been destroyed, and since people have always refused to orient themselves according to street names, it's a little hard to get your bearings, especially at first. That situation created a new reality and people had to adapt fast. “You know where the Caribbean Market used to be? Well, you go past it, and then two buildings that collapsed …” To the landscape of this crumbled city, people have added elements of the old one still present in their memory. For the population whose minds are always in ferment, things accumulate instead of disappearing. We'll have to wait for a generation who never knew the old city, and who'll be willing to accept a new map.

Golf

For the last few months, the golf course has been occupied by a crowd of people who knew nothing about the game before the earthquake. The game is hard to comprehend in a city so overpopulated. It takes up too much space for too few people: no more than a dozen bored spouses and young mistresses who pretend to be amused as they wait for the game to end. A tiny white ball for such a vast surface—it seems like another provocation. And the players take their time in a country where the abbreviated life expectancy pushes people into constant agitation. Anyway, soccer is our passion. The land is good, but there's not a single fruit tree in sight. Most agronomists believe that our survival can be credited to the mango and avocado trees that serve as a rampart against famine. The owners of the golf course are getting worried; they sense that the crowd is not about to leave the grounds. It took an earthquake to get them here, and it will take an event of equal magnitude to chase them away.

The Chair

Between Aunt Renée's and my mother's bed, in the narrow room, stands a chair. It's an old chair that my grandmother brought from Petit-Goâve. It reminds me that my grandmother, before she died, shared this room with my Aunt Renée. My mother slept in the room where my sister is now. After my grandmother's death, my mother came and replaced her, next to Aunt Renée. She couldn't be left alone at night since her heart attack. The room is Spartan, with two single beds separated by an old chest of drawers. And the chair where I would sit when I wanted to spend time with them. Actually, I used the chair to converse with my mother. When I talked to Aunt Renée, I preferred to sit on the bed. I was the only one to whom she granted that privilege. After her illness began, she had trouble expressing herself, and you had to be close to her to understand. My mother knew her so well she could anticipate her every desire even before she spoke it. The other family members did their best to decipher the noises she made. But since I was rarely there, I had to concentrate on her face (her mouth and eyes) to understand her. She repeated every word several times, with a touching kind of patience, until I understood what she was trying to say. Often it was the same thing: news of my daughters, how my health was, the subject of the book I was writing. We clung to these conversations and refused all intermediaries (starting with my mother) who would have served as translators. After a conversation with Aunt Renée, I would sit on the chair, taking my place between the two women who occupied such an important place in my life, and in my writing as well. The chair, like the room itself, has aged, but my mother doesn't see it that way. She wants my sister to have it repaired. And when my mother really wants something, she'll talk about it day and night. My sister is in a tough spot. She can't really ask a tradesman to take care of an old chair when they are all busy with more urgent jobs. Meanwhile, my mother won't leave her alone. Without the chair, she's afraid she won't have any more visitors.

The Role of God

The few belongings people had are buried in rubble. The city is on its knees. Help isn't reaching certain parts of the population. For these people, what they hear on the radio—in other words, politics—doesn't concern them. They can count only on themselves. And God. They use God to convince themselves that they're not alone on this earth and that their lives are not just a beadwork of misery and pain. What matters most is their access to God at all times. They've understood that they can't ask too much of him. His spiritual resources may be infinite, but his material ones are limited. They lost their house, but they praise him for sparing their lives. I'm always surprised by what intellectuals say about the role of God among the poor. It has nothing to do with spirituality. It's like my mother's chair. It's better to have it in case a visitor shows up.

A City of Art

If it's true that we have so many painters that we don't know what to do with them, we should give them a special place in the rebuilt city. A house is not just a shelter. And a city has to have a soul to be livable. What defines Port-au-Prince on the international scene? The brightly colored
tap-taps
that carry people from one place to another? Why not consider painting certain neighborhoods? Or turning Port-au-Prince into a city of art where music could play a role too? Haiti should use this truce to change its image. We won't have a chance like this a second time, if I can put it that way. Let's show a more relaxed face. Although everyone knows the reasons behind the tension (poverty, dictatorship, insecurity, hurricanes), it puts off visitors. Despite our troubles, our culture is joyful; we need to show it off. First, by separating art from craft. Haitian painting is a major art form. Why don't cities like Paris (Paris has done it more often than the others), New York, Rome, Montreal, Berlin, Tokyo, Madrid, Dakar, Abidjan, Sao Paulo, and Buenos Aires organize major exhibitions of Haitian art in their national museums? That would create interesting partnerships, and all sides would benefit. Haiti would recover its place among the nations. Its contribution would be artistic—and that's saying a lot.

Brazil and Haiti

Brazil has three things in common with Haiti: coffee, the love of soccer, and voodoo. They practice a variety of voodoo called
candomblé
. As for soccer, we hopped onto the Brazilian train a long time ago. Add to that the passion for music (the body fever of Carnival) and the rituals that come from Africa. We worship the Brazilian national soccer team to the point that we cheer for Brazil even when it plays against Haiti. I remember when Pelé came through Port-au-Prince. The city was literally transfixed. I didn't go to the game, even if I did live close to the stadium. I was surprised to hear three loud cheers that shook the city. I went outside to find out what was going on. A guy was coming up the street, dancing with joy. I asked him how much Haiti was leading Brazil by. He looked at me like I was out of my mind and told me that Brazil had scored only three goals so far out of politeness for the host. In my memory, I can still hear him laughing all the way to the end of the street. At the beginning of the World Cup, every tent flew its Brazilian flag. The warm green and yellow colors made the city look happier somehow. The earthquake was no longer the first subject of conversation in this wounded place.

Writer at Work

When I came in, my nephew was writing on an old computer that he had put together himself. I sat down to watch him. I spotted a notebook close by in which he scribbled down something from time to time. Exactly the way I do. Yet I'd never told him anything about the way I work. Maybe he read it somewhere. Or maybe we have the same method. Writers at work all look the same. Suddenly, he turned to me.

“Are you writing?”

“I don't know …”

“I saw you.”

“I wasn't writing.”

We looked at each other a moment.

“Why do you refuse to accept that you were writing? That's what writers do.”

“I'm not a writer,” he stated in no uncertain terms.

“Why not?”

“I haven't written a book.”

“A writer is just someone who writes.”

He looked at me like a punch-drunk boxer. Now the issue of craft enters. A long road awaits him. He'll have to walk it by himself.

A Sunday in Petit-Goâve

I wanted to escape the uproar of Port-au-Prince, and the best time to cross the city of constant turmoil is early on a Sunday morning. I wanted to take that route again, but in an atmosphere different from Aunt Renée's funeral. See everything with a different point of view. From our house at Delmas 31 to the fragile shacks along the sea in Martissant, with fresh eyes I discovered a Port-au-Prince deep in slumber. I can't remember the last time I gazed upon the monster at rest. Even the gaudy
tap-taps
, those swift trucks that carry thousands of workers from the poor neighborhoods to the industrial zones, were hard to come by. A few party-goers were making their way home, crossing paths with elderly ladies going to early morning mass. Young girls with buckets of water on their heads. The district is overpopulated and very poor. All week, in the slums that have grown up around Port-au-Prince, there was only one subject in the air, and that was the unacceptable elimination of Brazil from the World Cup. People must have been emotionally exhausted (there were four deaths after Brazil's defeat). Once I got on the highway, I recovered that sense of exhilaration I always felt when I left Port-au-Prince for Petit-Goâve after year-end exams. On the road, I saw countless bicycles and little red-and-yellow motorbikes that serve as taxis, carrying girls who stared at me impassively, their expressions an obsession from my younger years. To the left, little houses with shutters painted yellow and blue like in the paintings they sell in front of the hotels. To the right, I glimpsed the sea, turquoise this time of day, behind the cane fields. Long stretches where you don't see anyone alternated with little markets, crowded even this early in the day. The sharp sunlight caught up with us at the foot of the terrible Tapion Mountain. Since childhood I've had this premonition that a truck will slide off the edge of the cliff with me in it. I got out to pick a mango and ate it beneath its tree—an old dream of mine. Then came Petit-Goâve, just on the other side of the mountain. I didn't recognize the entrance to the town. The new road doesn't go through the heart of town, which has grown in size. I've lost my bearings. I sorted through my memory—so rich in details when it comes to Petit-Goâve—but I couldn't locate any of these houses. The car turned right, toward the sea. And Petit-Goâve leaped up before my eyes. The same long, white, dusty street still crosses the town. We went past the hospital still standing with its back to the sea and continued to the little square by the marketplace. The new square is more handsome than the one from my childhood, but it doesn't have the same effect on me. I wish it were more natural, less prettied up. I wanted to see the port. That's where the adults would gather for an evening stroll when the July heat became unbearable. For teenagers, it was the perfect place for an innocent touch and an exchange of burning looks. When I think that's all it took to send me to seventh heaven. We went by the church, still clean and white; the religious songs and the noonday bells still live within me. From the church (that exists only in memory) to the elementary school where priests from Brittany looked after my education. The sisters' school, with its swarm of girls, reminded me of my years of thralldom to Vava. And Killick the teacher's house—he was the best back on the Petit-Goâve soccer team. We then turned left toward the house that stands at 88 Lamarre. For two decades, I've been working to make that address universal: the address of a happy childhood. The big Jubilee Cross around the back helped me recognize it. I first noticed the house across the street where a black dog lived. Today, the house of my childhood belongs to a friend who used to live across the street, but it crouches intact in the thicket of my memory. When I visited it, I clearly heard the voices of my aunts and felt the soothing presence of my grandmother. In the shadows, my dog Marquis brushes against me. I walked through the little Sunday market to the old cemetery on the other side of the bridge. Surrounded by tall grass, at the very back, I found my grandmother's grave, next to which Aunt Renée is resting. I took a bouquet from another tomb and put it on hers.