Light rain despite the sun.
The little cemetery, hidden behind the marketplace,
is an oasis of peace.
Women in mourning though not widows
move among the dead
telling of their pain
without fear of being interrupted.
It's the only spot
where killers never come.
To live on a deforested island
knowing they'll never
see what is happening
on the other side of the water.
For most people
the hereafter is the only country
they have any hope of visiting.
A dog moves up the street.
Nose skyward.
Tail up.
It runs to the head
of the funeral procession.
I remember the pallbearers of my childhood
who danced with the casket on their shoulders.
Women threatening to throw themselves
into the hole to join their husband.
Frightened dogs running among the graves
while the wind shook the palm trees
like a schoolgirl playing with her braids.
Death seemed so funny to me back then.
Later when I was a teenager
not a day would go by without
the bell tolling for someone.
Each time it made my mother's blood run cold.
Death that people compared to a journey
set my own mind wandering.
Death could come at any time.
A bullet in the back of the neck.
A red flash in the night.
It appeared so quickly we
never had time to see it coming.
Its speed made us doubt its existence.
Life in the Neighborhood (Before and After)
A quiet neighborhood.
Very discreet.
A vendor sets up her stall
near a wall.
Then a second one comes.
Then a third.
A week later
a new market has sprung up.
And life has changed in the neighborhood.
A man running with sweat
with a white plastic water pail.
He hides behind the low wall
and vigorously washes his face,
neck, torso and armpits.
Then returns to the market.
How can anyone think of other people when they haven't eaten for two days and their son is at the General Hospital which doesn't even have enough bandages? But that's exactly what that woman did when she brought me a cool glass of water. Where does she find such selflessness?
That's me in the yellowing photograph,
that thin young man from Port-au-Prince
in the terrible 1970s.
If you're not thin when you're twenty in Haiti,
it's because you're on the side of power.
Not just because of malnutrition.
More like the constant fear
that eats away at you from inside.
I remember the sun beating down on the backs of people's heads. Dusty street, no trees. We all had the same emaciated look (wild eyes and dry lips). That's how you could recognize our generation. We used to meet up in the afternoon in a little restaurant near Saint-Alexandre Square, with a view of the lumpy buttocks of anarchist poet Carl Brouard. This son of the solid bourgeoisie had chosen to wallow in the black mud, in the middle of the coal market, to share the poverty of the working-class people. There weren't just parlor poets tethered to corrupt power back then.
We discussed ad nauseam the absurdity
of this life while avoiding
references to the political situation
that were too obvious
because the poor quarters were crawling
with spies paid by the police.
Sharks in dark glasses
trawling the whorehouses patronized
by political science and chemistry
students who are always the first
to take to the streets.
I've been eating fat for three decades in Montreal
while everyone has gone on
eating lean in Port-au-Prince.
My metabolism has changed.
And I can't say I know what goes on
these days in the mind of a teenager
who doesn't remember
having eaten his fill
one single day.
My hotel is situated
in the center of a market.
At three o'clock in the morning
the vendors arrive.
The trucks full of vegetables are unloaded
and the racket runs nonstop
sometimes till eleven at night.
The power's out.
Impossible to read.
I can't sleep either.
Through the window, I watch the stars
that carry me back to childhood
when I would stay up late with my grandmother
on our gallery in Petit-Goâve.
I look at my poor body lying
on this hotel bed knowing
that my mind is wandering
down the passages of time.
I end up falling asleep.
Sleep so light
I can pick up the slightest sound.
Like those tourists
coming back from a night out.
There are so few tourists in this country
we should pay them to stay.
The high-pitched cry of a cat getting its throat cut.
At night alcoholics have a fondness
for that meat when it's grilled
with no concern for the panicked voice
calling everywhere for Mitzi.
Headache.
I can't sleep.
I go out on the veranda
and sit.
Something is moving up there.
A little girl
climbing the mountain
with a pail of water on her head.
Here we live on injustice and fresh water.
Drawing a Blank
The young man who sweeps
the hotel courtyard every morning
brings me a coffee and a message from my sister.
She didn't want to wake me
but my mother is not doing well.
She has locked herself in her room
and won't open the door for anyone.
Everyone looks pretty happy to me. My sister kisses me as she dances. What's going on? Nothing. What about my mother? That was this morning, now she's fine. It happens sometimes, you know. In Montreal I would fall into an abyss without warning and not surface for hours. The enemy, in Montreal, is on the outside, when it's minus thirty for five days in a row. Here the enemy is within, and the only nature we have to tame is our own.
I hear my mother singing. A song popular in her youth. Radio Caraïbes often plays it on its oldies show, Chansons d'autrefois. My sister whispers that she's often like this after one of her descents into hell.
Marie, her name so simple
it's like
sharing my mother
with all my friends.
When I think about it I don't have any stories
about my mother from when she was young.
She's not the type to talk about herself.
Aunt Raymonde's stories are all
about her own person.
In vain I try to glimpse my mother
behind her.
My mother does not swim
in the great sea of History.
But all individual stories
are like rivers that run through her.
In the folds of her body she keeps
the crystals of pain of everyone
I have met in the street since I came here.
Pain.
Silence.
Absence.
None of that has anything to do
with folklore.
But they never
talk about those things
in the media.
Ghetto Uprising in the Bedroom
In my nephew's little room.
Books on a narrow shelf
next to a Tupac Shakur poster.
I spot one of my novels
and a collection of poems by his father.
My eyes seek out every detail
to help me travel back through the stream of time
and recover the young man
I was before my sudden departure.
We are sitting on the unmade bed
watching a documentary about violent gangs
battling each other in the lower reaches of the city.
Gunshots ring out.
From time to time, my mother comes in
and gives us a suspicious look.
My nephew is at the age when death
is still something esthetic.
From close range a Danish television crew is following
the violent confrontations that have been raging
for months in this miserable district.
Graffiti on a wall shows an empty stomach
and a toothless mouth holding a gun
heavier than the weight of the average adult
in that part of town.
A young French woman
has entered this seething slum.
Close-ups on the two brothers as sensitive
as cobras in the sun.
Each heads his own gang.
The young woman travels back and forth
between the two brothers.
One loves her.
She loves the other.
A Greek tragedy in Cité Soleil.
Bily is obsessed by his younger brother
who took on the name Tupac Skakur.
Fascination with American culture
even in the poorest regions
of the fourth world.
I watch the two brothers
strolling through the Cité.
Undernourished killers.
Emaciated faces.
Cocaine to burn.
Weapons everywhere.
Death never far.
I wonder what my nephew
thinks about all this.
It's his culture.
The new generation.
Mine was the '70s.
We're all cloistered in our decades.
These days the murderer strikes at noon
in this country.
Night is no longer the accomplice of the killer
who dreams of adding his star to the firmament.
To reach the heavens nowadays
they have to kill with their face uncovered
and trumpet their acts on the
TV
news.
The Tonton Macoutes of my era had
to hide behind dark glasses.
Serial killers.
Papa Doc was the only star.
Tupac, the young leader who looks so much like Hector,
has conquered the Foreign Woman.
Tonight their savage kiss
on a reed mat on the floor
will drive all the warriors crazy
under the Cité ramparts.
Now Tupac is making political speeches.
He moves through Cité Soleil in a car.
Thinking he's a real leader.
A loud voice and an itchy trigger finger.
Suddenly he becomes lucid and
sees himself for what he is: a loser.
Facing the camera.
Sitting in the shadows.
Tupac: “If I stop, I'm a dead man.
If I go on, I'm a dead man.”
I feel my nephew shiver as if
he were facing the same choice.
This is a city where the killers
all want to die young.
Tupac falls at the height of his glory
in the dust of Cité Soleil.
Like his brother Bily.
Both killed by a frail young man
who suddenly stepped from the shadows.
The girl leaves with the
TV
crew.
On the cassette there's blood, sex and tears.
Everything the viewer wants.
Roll the credits.
An Emerging Writer
My nephew wants to be a famous writer.
The influence of the rock-star culture.
His father is a poet who gets death threats.
His uncle, a novelist living in exile.
He has to choose between death and exile.
For his grandfather it was death in exile.
Before you begin
you have time to think about fame
because once you write the first sentence
you're up against
this anonymous archer
whose real target is your ego.
Later on.
In a comfortable armchair.
By the fireside.
Fame will come.
Too late.
The hope then will be
for a day without suffering.
The worst stupidity, it seems,
is to compare one era
to the next.
One man's time
to another's.
Individual times
are parallel lines
that never touch.
In the little room, my nephew and I
look without seeing each other.
We try to understand
who the other is.
On the narrow shelf I notice
some Carter Brown novels that once belonged to me.
To write a novel, I tell my nephew
with a sly smile,
what you really need is a good pair of buttocks
because it's a job
like the seamstress's
where you spend a lot of time sitting down.
You also need a cook's talents.
Take a large kettle of boiling water,
add some vegetables
and a raw piece of meat.
You'll put in the salt and spices later
before lowering the heat.
All the flavors will blend into one.
The reader can sit down to the feast.
It's like a woman's job,
my nephew points out, worried.
It's true you have to be able to change
into a woman, a plant or a stone.
All three realms are necessary.
Watching the vein in his temple beat that way, I know he's thinking fast. But you haven't explained the most important thing to me. What would that be? It's not just the story, it's how you tell it. Then what? You have to tell me how to do it. You don't want to write something personal? Of course. No one can tell you how to be original. There must be tricks that can help. It's always better if you discover them yourself. But I'll waste time. That's the point: time doesn't exist in this job. I feel like I'm all alone. And lost. What good is having an uncle who's a writer if he tells you he can't help you out? At least you know that much. A lot of young writers think they can't write because they aren't part of a network. Maybe I don't know how to write. You can't say that if you haven't spent at least a dozen years trying to find out. What do you mean? A dozen years to find out I can't write? Well, believe me, that's a conservative figure. So what good is the experience then? I can't tell you any more than that, Dany.