According to Labuchin, during the Cine Club days, Jean had held conferences for aspiring filmmakers, encouraging them to view the seventh art as being essential to the majority of Haitians, particularly those who could not read. The most recent studies suggest that only about 56 percent of Haitians are literate. The actual figure is probably lower than that if one defines literate as, for example, being able to read an entire book. Perhaps this is why the visual arts have flourished in Haiti. Painters do not necessarily need to know how to read or write. This is what Jean had hoped filmmakers would do with film-make it, like radio and painting, a medium that would be not only open and available but also welcoming to those who were shut off from other means of information communication and entertainment. "Jean asked us to develop screenplays," Labuchin would later say, "that meant something to the Haitian people."
During our Haitian cinema cla.s.s, Jean told us how he and Labuchin had traveled together with Labuchin"s film, Anita, screening it throughout the Haitian countryside to discourage peasants from giving their children away to better-off families in the city. The film, which begins as a harshly realistic treatise on the restavek child labor system in Haiti, ends as a musical fantasy in which the child servant is rescued by a pale Haitian woman who becomes the girl"s fairy G.o.dmother.
In the same vein, Jean had also broadcast on his radio station the Creole soundtrack of a film based on the cla.s.sic Haitian novel Gouverneurs de la rosee (Masters of the Dew), written by the Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain and later translated into English by the poet Langston Hughes and scholar Mercer Cook. In Manuel-Roumain"s Sophoclean hero-and his peasant family and friends, Jean saw prototypes of poor Haitians, who were either condemned to a desperate life or driven to migrate, only to return to Haiti to face the impossibility of reintegration or even death. Jean was extremely proud of having aired the Creole teleplay of the novel on his radio station because whenever he visited the countryside, the peasants would tell him how they had recognized themselves and their lives in the words of Roumain"s book.
Masters of the Dew begins with Delira Delivrance, Manuel"s old peasant mother, plunging her hands into the dust and declaring, "We"re all going to die. Animals, plants, every living soul!" Delira"s despair turns into hope when her son returns from the sugarcane fields of Cuba, greeting every living thing he encounters on his way to his parents" house by singing, "Growing things, growing things! To you I say, "Honor!" You must answer "Respect," so that I may enter. You are my house, you"re my country."
Delira"s despair and Manuel"s hope make for a delicate balance, of which I am reminded each time I return to Haiti: the exile"s joy and the resident"s anguish-it can also be the other way around, the resident"s joy and the exile"s anguish-clashing.
While in exile in New York in the early 1990s, at the insistence of some friends, Jean would occasionally partic.i.p.ate in a television or radio program dealing with the injustices of the military regime in Haiti, which by then had killed almost eight thousand people, including a well-known businessman named Antoine Izmery and the then justice minister, Guy Malary. Since Jean had known both Izmery and Malary, after their deaths he agreed to appear as a guest panelist on The Charlie Rose Show and was seated in the audience at a taping of the Phil Donahue Show when the subject was Haiti. During the Donahue taping, Jean squirmed in his seat while Phil Donahue held up the stubbed elbow of Alerte Belance, a woman who had been attacked with machetes by members of the junta"s paramilitary branch, who cut off her tongue and arm. After the taping, Jean seemed almost on the verge of tears as he said, "My country needs hope."
Our Haitian cinema project came to an end at the close of the semester. After that, Jonathan, Jean, and I would occasionally meet in Jonathan"s office in Nyack, New York, for further discussions.
One day, while driving to Nyack with Jonathan"s a.s.sistant producer, Neda, Jean told us about a word he"d rediscovered in a Pedro Almodovar film he had seen the night before: guapa! While puffing on his ever-present pipe, Jean took great pains to explain to us that someone who was guapa was extremely beautiful and courageous-courageously beautiful, he added. Demanding further clarification, Neda and I would take turns shouting out the names of women that the three of us knew, starting with Michele, Jean"s wife.
"Michele is very . . ."
"Guapa!" he yelled back with great enthusiasm. This was one of the many times that Jean"s vibrant love of life, and his total devotion to his wife, Michele, shone forth.
On that guapa day, Neda had to stay in Nyack, so she gave me the car and told me to drive Jean back to Manhattan. I refrained from telling her that even though I"d had my license for three years, I had never driven any car but the one owned by the driving school where I"d learned. When I confessed this to Jean, he wisely offered to drive. We drove for hours through New York"s Rockland County and the Palisades, and then over the George Washington Bridge, finally realizing we were completely lost, with Jean trying to smoke a pipe and follow my uncertain directions at the same time.
When we finally got to Manhattan late in the afternoon and Jean turned the car over to me, he seemed worried as I pulled away from the curb, and watched until I turned the corner, blending into Manhattan traffic.
The democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was restored to power soon after that day. The next time I would see Jean would be at his and Michele"s house in Haiti.
"Jean, you"re looking guapa," I told him.
He laughed.
It was wonderful to see Jean move about within his own walls, surrounded by his own books, pictures and paintings, knowing that he had been dreaming about coming back home almost every minute he was in exile.
Later at dinner, Jean spoke mournfully about those who"d died during and after the coup d"etat: Antoine Izmery, Guy Malary, and later a well-loved priest, Father Jean-Marie Vincent. Adding Jean"s name now to those of these very public martyrs still seems unimaginable, given how pa.s.sionately he expressed his hope that such a.s.sa.s.sinations would stop taking place.
"It has to stop," I remember him saying. "It has to stop."
The plane that took me from Miami to Haiti the day before Jean"s funeral seemed like a microcosm of Haiti. Crammed on a 727 for an hour and thirty minutes were young, well-to-do college students returning from Miami-area campuses for the weekend, vendors traveling with suitcases filled with merchandise from abroad, three male deportees being expatriated from the United States, a cl.u.s.ter of older women in black, perhaps also returning for a funeral, and, up front, the former president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, returning from a speaking engagement at the University of Miami Law School. That we were all on this plane, listening to flight announcements in French, English, and Creole, seemed somewhat unreal. I couldn"t help but recall one of the many conversations that Jean and I had while lost in the Palisades in New York that afternoon.
I had told him that I envied the certainty with which he could and often did say the words, "My country." "My country is suffering," he would say. "It"s being held captive by criminals. My country is slowly dying, melting away."
"My country, Jean," I said, "is one of uncertainty. When I say "my country" to some Haitians, they think I mean the United States. When I say "my country" to some Americans, they think of Haiti."
My country, I felt, both as an immigrant and as an artist, was something that was then being called the tenth department. Haiti then had nine geographic departments and the tenth was the floating homeland, the ideological one, which joined all Haitians living outside of Haiti, in the dyaspora.
I meant, in the essay that I began to write the morning that Jean died, to struggle to explain the multilayered meaning of the Creole word dyaspora. I meant to borrow a phrase from a speech given by the writer Gerard Alphonse-Ferere at the Haitian Emba.s.sy in Washington, DC, on August 27, 1999, in which he describes diaspora/dyaspora as a "term employed to refer to any dispersal of people to foreign soils." But in the Haitian context it is used "to identify the hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in many countries of the world." I meant in that essay to list my own personal experiences as an immigrant and a writer, of being called dyaspora when expressing an opposing political point of view in discussions with friends and family members living in Haiti, who knew that they could easily silence me by saying, "What do you know? You"re living outside. You"re a dyaspora." I meant to recall some lighter experiences of being startled in the Haitian capital or in the provinces when a stranger who wanted to catch my attention would call out, "Dyaspora!" as though it were a t.i.tle like Miss, Ms., Mademoiselle, or Madame. I meant to recall conversations or debates in restaurants, at parties, or at public gatherings where members of the dyaspora would be cla.s.sified-justifiably or not-as arrogant, insensitive, overbearing, and pretentious people who were eager to reap the benefits of good jobs and political positions in times of stability in a country that they"d fled and stayed away from during difficult times. Shamefacedly, I"d bow my head and accept these judgments when they were expressed, feeling guilty about my own physical distance from a country I had left at the age of twelve during a dictatorship that had forced thousands to choose between exile or death.
In this essay, however, I can"t help but think of Jean"s reaction to my, in retrospect, inconsequential dyaspora dilemma, in a conversation we had when I visited his radio station to discuss a Creole program that Jonathan had created from one of my Haiti-based short stories, a radio play about a man who steals a hot air balloon to fly away from Haiti. Translating-retranslating-that story from the original English in which I had written it had been a surreal experience. It was as if the voice in which I write, the voice in which people speak Creole that comes out English on paper, had been released and finally I was writing for people like my Tante Ilyana, people who did not read, not because they did not have enough time or because they had too many other gadgets and distractions, but because they had never learned how.
Now I am suddenly back in the old essay, back to bowing my head in shame at being called a parasitic dyaspora, a foreign being but still not a blan, and I want to bring the old essay into this one with these words from Jean: "The Dyaspora are people with their feet planted in both worlds," he said. "There"s no need to be ashamed of that. There are more than a million of you. You all are not alone."
Having been exiled many times himself to that very dyaspora that I was asking him to help me define, Jean could commiserate with all of us exiles, emigres, refugees, migrants, nomads, immigrants, naturalized citizens, half-generation, first-generation, American, Haitian, Haitian American, men, women, and children who were living in the United States and elsewhere. Migration in general was something he understood well, whether from the countryside-what many in Haiti called the peyi andey, the outside country-to the Haitian capital, or from Haitian borders to other sh.o.r.es.
Jean"s funeral was held at the Sylvio Cator soccer stadium in downtown Port-au-Prince, where thousands streamed by his coffin and the coffin of Jean Claude Louissaint, a watchman at the radio station who was gunned down in the radio station"s parking lot along with Jean. T-shirts with Jean"s face had been distributed and everyone, including his wife, daughters, and sisters, wore them at the stadium that day. Banners demanding justice for the murders lined many Port-au-Prince streets and graffiti expressing similar sentiments covered the walls of government buildings. At the stadium ceremony, Jean received a posthumous service medal from the Haitian government. But his real funeral was held a week later in the Artibonite Valley, where as a young man he had worked as an agronomist. There his ashes were scattered in Haiti"s largest river, at the heart of the country"s breadbasket. The ashes were scattered by his wife, Michele, along with several peasant organization leaders he had befriended over the years.
In her memoir, Memoire errante, Jan J. Dominique, the novelist and radio personality who is Jean Dominique"s daughter and phonetic namesake, writes of the Artibonite Valley ceremony that during Jean"s wake she witnessed the creation of a myth when someone told Jean"s wife, Michele, "You know, Madame Jean, he often came to see us. He would follow us across the river all the way to the coffee plantations high in the mountains. He would sleep with us, share in our way of life. He was just here, a month ago."
"Michele looked over at me," noted Jan J. "I am bewildered. My father has never lived, in recent years, in this region. He had not left Port-au-Prince last month. When he went to the Artibonite it was to work as a journalist and activist. He neither planted nor harvested in the fields. We do not correct this man. We had not yet even scattered my father"s ashes in the river when he had already become a legend."
I remember watching footage of the scattering of Jean"s ashes, which were pa.s.sed in a corn-husk-covered calabash from his wife"s trembling hands to that of several local farmers before they were emptied into the slow-moving water. I remember thinking how ample they were, these bountiful ashes, for such a skinny man.
The footage of the scattering of the ashes is now part of a doc.u.mentary that Jonathan Demme was directing about Jean"s life. The doc.u.mentary would be t.i.tled The Agronomist because, during one of the many interviews that Jonathan conducted with Jean-when Jonathan had envisioned a film that would end with Jean"s triumphant return from exile-Jean, who is often referred to as Haiti"s most famous journalist, told Jonathan, "You will be surprised, but I am not a journalist. I am an agronomist."
Jean had been dead for eight months, and the Haitian government"s investigation into his death had been going nowhere, when I met his widow, Michele Montas, in a Manhattan restaurant in December 2000 to interview her for an article I was writing about the case for The Nation magazine. Michele was indeed guapa, a tall, striking, usually cheerful woman, but the day we met to talk about Jean"s death in detail for the first time, she was looking just as sad as she had at his funeral months earlier. At lunch, she barely sipped her water. When the waiter came to check on her gla.s.s, he stopped to ask about a b.u.t.ton pinned to her jacket. On the b.u.t.ton was a picture of Jean. Above Jean"s piercing eyes, raised eyebrows, and high forehead were the words Jean Dominique vivan (Jean Dominique Lives).
"Who is Jean Dominique?" the waiter asked Michele.
"My husband," she said.
For more than two decades, excluding stretches of time when they were twice forced into exile, the two had worked together, coanchoring a morning news program, the highlights of which were Dominique"s commentaries on Haitian social and political life. Friends and foes listened to them, to "smell the air and test the waters," as Jean liked to say, "get closer to the beton," gauge the mood of the streets. Had it been any other morning, Jean and Michele would have been together when he and Jean Claude Louissaint were a.s.sa.s.sinated in the radio station"s parking lot.
"We usually drove to work together," Michele explained, carefully drawing out her words, as though to pace herself so she would not cry. "That morning, Jean left ten minutes before me to look at some international news for the program. As I got in the car, leaving home, I heard some usual announcements on the radio and then silence. I called the station and the person who answered told me, "Just come!" When I pulled into the parking lot, the police were there. I saw Jean Claude Louissaint, and then I saw Jean"s body on the ground. I called to him, but he didn"t answer. I rushed upstairs to call the doctor, thinking something could be done. I didn"t believe he was dead until the doctor confirmed it."
Even though the then outgoing president, Rene Preval, was a close friend of Jean and Michele, eight months later the murder remained unsolved. In the final state of the nation address of his first term, President Preval admitted that the biggest weakness of his five-year presidency had been justice. Citing Jean"s case, he warned his parliamentarians, "If we leave this corpse at the crossroads of impunity, we should watch out so that the same people who killed Jean do not kill us as well."
That fall, an important lead in the case had vanished when a suspect, Jean Wilner Lalanne, was shot as he was being arrested. The thirty-two-year-old Lalanne later died, reportedly of respiratory complications and cardiac arrest, during surgery meant to remove three bullets from his b.u.t.tocks. Lalanne"s body then disappeared from the morgue and has never been found.
A month after Dominique"s death, on May 3, 2000, Michele reopened Radio Haiti Inter, starting her first solo broadcast with her habitual greeting to her husband, "Bonjour, Jean." I was there in the studio the morning the station reopened, with Jonathan Demme and many other friends of Jean and Michele. President Preval was there as well. Aside from filming and milling around, there was very little else we could do. Our presence was the worst kind of comfort. We were all there, crowding hallways, giving hugs, taking notes, being generally underfoot, because Jean was not. In a poignant and poetic editorial the morning the radio reopened, Michele announced to her listeners that "Jean Leopold Dominique, independent journalist, is not dead. He is with us in our studios." She went on to detail what the b.u.t.ton could not, that those who tried so violently to silence Jean could never really succeed. Like Prometheus, she said, he"d learned how to steal fire from the G.o.ds.
Her broadcast was followed by three days of old Dominique programs, ranging from a lengthy interview with a woman whose child, like sixty other Haitian children, had died after taking toxic Chinese cough medication distributed by a Haitian pharmaceutical company, to a peasant leader contesting a fertilizer price hike, to conversations with Haitian playwrights and filmmakers.
During the months that followed Jean"s a.s.sa.s.sination, Michele often had the impossible task of reporting on the air about the investigation into his death. Though Haitian law bound her to secrecy as a party in the investigation, she was not prevented from commenting on aspects of the inquest that were in the public record.
"Every time I feel that the investigation is slowing down," she told me at lunch, "I realize I must say something. I have to ask the judge"s permission to do it, but if there is something I feel that people must know, I have to report it. What I am trying to do is get it to the point of no return, where things must be resolved. Rather than reporting the story, we became part of the story. There are times when you cannot stay out of the story even if you want to."
During the eight months following Jean"s death, Michele partic.i.p.ated in rallies and demonstrations, picketing along with other journalists, victims" rights groups, and peasant organizations, demanding that Jean"s killers be found and prosecuted.
"This corpse will not lie cold," she said. "The issue of Jean"s death has taken a large place in the country. People are asking for justice for Jean but also for protection. People feel that if my husband can be killed, then others can be, too. We need to end this climate of impunity and find justice now."
Perhaps more than anyone else in Haiti in those days, Michele knew how difficult that task might be. She worried, as time pa.s.sed, that her husband"s name would be added to the long list of nearly forgotten martyrs, some of whose faces loomed from posters lining the hallway of their radio station.
"A lot of what I have been trying to do is keep Jean alive," she said. "It"s an important thing for me right now. Fifty percent of my energy goes toward that."
Who does she think killed Jean, I ask.
"I don"t know," she says. "After all, I am a journalist. I cannot deal in rumors. I am looking for facts, for proof. The most important step to resolution is knowing the truth. All I know is, the fact that we don"t know who paid for this crime puts us all in danger."
Michele was somewhat encouraged when a police officer was arrested after he was found in possession of a car that had been identified as having been at the crime scene.
"I feel that something is moving," she said. "We are approaching something. We are getting closer to more apparent leads."
The leads never materialized, however. One suspect, a senator, refused to cooperate with the investigation, claiming parliamentary immunity. The investigating judges fled the country, fearing for their lives. On Christmas Day 2002, a potential a.s.sa.s.sin walked into Michele"s yard in a suburb of Port-au-Prince and began shooting, killing Maxime Seide, one of her young bodyguards. The a.s.sa.s.sin had come to kill her, but had been scared away by Maxime Seide"s heroic intervention.
I was in Haiti then with my husband, spending Christmas with my mother-in-law in a small southern town. We were listening to the radio that my mother-in-law always had on in the house when we heard a news bulletin falsely stating that Michele had been killed. We managed to clear things up by calling some mutual friends who a.s.sured us that Michele was very much alive. I could not fully believe it, however, until I saw her again.
When my husband and I saw her at her house shortly after the a.s.sa.s.sination attempt, she was calm but sorrowful. She had escaped death again, yet someone had died in her place. She was at times angry and defiant, but already one could tell that it was all beginning to weigh on her, the responsibility for herself, for her elderly mother-who had been with her during the a.s.sa.s.sination attempt-and the journalists and others who worked at the radio station and were getting more and more threats as yet another inconclusive report on Jean"s a.s.sa.s.sination was made public.
In March 2003, as the threats continued, Michele Montas closed the radio station to which she and her husband had given several decades of their lives, and moved back to New York. This was her first solo exile since she and Jean had been together.
"We have lost three lives in three years," Michele told an American journalist shortly after pulling Radio Haiti Inter off the air. "I was no longer willing to go to another funeral."
CHAPTER 4.
Daughters of Memory I first read Jan J. Dominique, the Haitian novelist and daughter of Jean Dominique, when I could still read an entire book in French without once consulting a dictionary. Five years before, at age twelve, I had left Haiti (where I had been living with my uncle and aunt) and had moved to Brooklyn, New York, to be reunited with my parents. Being new to a place where schoolmates felt free to call me a dirty Haitian or Frenchie or boat person, I hungered for words from home. Reading in New York would not be like reading back in Haiti, where rote memorization was the primary method of learning for children my age and where I had memorized, then recited, and then quickly forgotten at least a million unsavored words. If anything, I had resented those forgotten words, their length and complication, their impenetrability, their occasional irrelevance to my tropical reality. We had been made to memorize, for example, lessons about seasons, which listed them as le printemps, l"ete, l"automne, et l"hiver-spring, summer, fall, and winter-without acknowledging the dry or rainy seasons, or even the hurricane seasons, around us. At least we were not obliged to recite the French colonial creed, "Our ancestors the Gauls" with our African lips while staring ahead from our black faces with our dark eyes. But there were still some necessary erasures, one of them being the fact that, because of the dictatorship and its brutal censorship, I knew no child who had read even a short novel by a Haitian-born writer. What we got in school were excerpts from certain French novels, among them Camille and The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas pere et fils, who had a Haitian grandmother and great-grandmother in Marie-Cesette Dumas.
Many older students also read the meticulous details of emile Zola"s downtrodden cla.s.ses, which strongly echoed some of the realties of my own impoverished neighborhood. These and the fables of La Fontaine, the pensees of Blaise Pascal, and the crude jokes of Francois Rabelais filled whatever s.p.a.ce and time might have been devoted to homegrown contemporary talent. I can hear now as I write this cries of protest from other Haitians my age (and younger and older, too) shouting from the s.p.a.ce above my shoulders, the bleachers above every writer"s shoulders where readers cheer or hiss and boo in advance. They are hissing now, that chorus or a portion of it, decrying this as both a contradiction and a lie. "I read Haitian writers when I was twelve," they say, but I must stop and turn to them now and say, I am speaking only for myself.
One of my young literature teachers in primary school, Miss Roy, loved French literature so much that she was always quoting from it. "Comme a dit l"auteur," or "As the writer said," she would begin, before citing Voltaire, Racine, Baudelaire-writers to whose words we must be exposed, she thought, in order to be fully "civilized."
I would later become a French literature major in college, I think because I secretly worshipped her. I remember her cocoa brown skin, her manicured nails, and her forced Parisian accent, her slight hint of vetiver perfume, her perfectly creased clothes, her face that never sweated, even on the hottest days, when in the heat"s haze it would appear almost as though her spiky high heel shoes were not even touching the ground. If my angelic literature teacher knew the existence of homegrown literature, she never betrayed the fact.
So I first read Jan J. Dominique when I could still read an entire book in French without consulting a dictionary. At seventeen, after having lived in the United States for five years, I went on what had become a regular weekly quest for reading material at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library one Sat.u.r.day afternoon and was shocked to come across two new narrow shelves of books labeled Livres Haitiens, or Haitian books, most of them still crisp and new as though they had each been carefully packaged and lovingly hand-delivered to those shelves. The thirty-year Duvalier dictatorship had just ended in Haiti, and perhaps some of the more vocal Haitian patrons of the Brooklyn library had demanded more books about themselves to help them interpret their ever-changing country from afar.
I checked out the only two novels remaining among the poetry collections and political essays: Jan J. Dominique"s Memoire d"une amnesique (Memoir of an Amnesiac), and the French edition of Jacques Roumain"s Gouverneurs de la rosee, (Masters of the Dew). Because the Roumain book was shorter, I devoured it first, and perhaps it is thanks to that eager first reading that I have tried to maintain a silent conversation with Jacques Roumain that publicly manifested itself in the t.i.tle of my 2004 book The Dew Breaker, a book that I intended to be neither a novel nor a story collection, but something in between. The longing to converse with Roumain is not mine alone. In a tribute on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, Jan J. Dominique wrote, "Over the years, Jacques Roumain has often been present in my life. For various reasons ranging from literature to politics, to Vodou, to linguistics choices, to personal considerations and professional activities. Roumain has sometimes infiltrated my daily life as a journalist, teacher, citizen, and most of all, I have felt his absence in my awareness of being a literary orphan."
Inasmuch as our stories are the b.a.s.t.a.r.d children of everything that we have ever experienced and read, my desire to tell some of my stories in a collaged manner, to merge my own narratives with the oral and written narratives of others, begins with my reading of the two books I eagerly checked out from the Livres Haitiens section of the Brooklyn Public Library that day, books that could have been written only by literary orphans, to offer to other literary orphans.
Maxims about judging a book by its cover aside, when I picked up Jan J. Dominique"s Memoire d"une amnesique, I was of course drawn to its paradoxical t.i.tle. How can an amnesiac remember? Perhaps there is a particular type of memory allowed to amnesiacs, one that only other amnesiacs or near amnesiacs share. I had grown up steeped in Haitian orality, but I had never seen it written down in French before, especially in such an intricate and graceful way. Here was a deeply moving exploration of childhood, of a complex father/daughter relationship, further complicated by a brutal dictator who to his a.r.s.enal of physiological weapons adds folktales, turning old myths into living nightmares. Thus the legend of the Tonton Macoutes, bogeymen who come to take disobedient children away in a knapsack, comes to life in the form of denim-clad killers, henchmen and henchwomen who would a.s.sa.s.sinate their own mothers and fathers if so ordered by the dictator.
A foreign journalist once asked Francois Duvalier what he represented for Haitians and Duvalier replied that he was their father and the Virgin Mary was their mother. Duvalier also dressed as the guardian of cemetery, the Baron Samedi, and was believed to have stealthily stood in the crowd dressed like this, or in military camouflage, at the public execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin. Thus all Haitians were meant to be like the future young writer of Jan J."s novel, terrified children who could not be sure even whom to look in the eye or smile at or love. For love could easily turn into something ugly, something that could be expressed only through violence. A slap, like the one given to the daughter who must not speak against the evil she witnesses, to silence her and protect her from greater injuries. Coldness that hides a fear of attachment because who knows when we might have to leave, to go into hiding, into exile? Who knows when we might have to die? Who knows if we are going to be remembered once we are gone?
Grappling with memory is, I believe, one of many complicated Haitian obsessions. We have, it seems, a collective agreement to remember our triumphs and gloss over our failures. Thus, we speak of the Haitian revolution as though it happened just yesterday but we rarely speak of the slavery that prompted it. Our paintings show glorious Edenlike African jungles but never the Middle Pa.s.sage. In order to shield our shattered collective psyche from a long history of setbacks and disillusionment, our constant roller-coaster ride between saviors and dictators, homespun oppression and foreign tyranny, we cultivate communal and historical amnesia, continually repeating cycles that we never see coming until we are reliving similar horrors.
Never again will foreigners trample Haitian soil, the founders of the republic declared in 1804. Yet in 1915, the "boots," as they are referred to in Jan J."s novel, invade, launching an American occupation that would last nineteen years. As soon as they landed, U.S. marines shut down the press, took charge of Haiti"s banks and customhouses, and inst.i.tuted a system of compulsory labor for poor Haitians. By the end of the occupation, more than fifteen thousand Haitians had lost their lives.
"The United States is at war with Haiti," W. E. B. Dubois wrote after returning from a fact-finding mission to occupied Haiti. "Congress has never sanctioned the war. Josephus Daniels [President Woodrow Wilson"s secretary of the navy] has illegally and unjustly occupied a free foreign land and murdered its inhabitants by the thousands. He has deposed its officials and dispersed its legally elected representatives. He is carrying on a reign of terror, brow-beating, and cruelty, at the hands of southern white naval officers and Marines. For more than a year this red-handed deviltry has proceeded, and today the Island is in open rebellion."
Growing up in the shadow of that rebellion, the narrator"s father will never truly know a free and sovereign life, having had not just his country but also his imagination invaded as a small boy when his parents used the presence of U.S. marines to frighten him into drinking his milk.
There are many ways that our mind protects us from present and past horrors. One way is by allowing us to forget. Forgetting is a constant fear in any writer"s life. For the immigrant writer, far from home, memory becomes an even deeper abyss. It is as if we had been forced to step under the notorious forgetting trees, the sabliyes, that our slave ancestors were told would remove their past from their heads and dull their desire to return home. We know we must pa.s.s under the tree, but we hold our breath and cross our fingers and toes and hope that the forgetting will not penetrate too deeply into our brains.
But what happens when we cannot tell our own stories, when our memories have temporarily abandoned us? What is left is longing for something we are not even sure we ever had but are certain we will never experience again.
"I love memories on glossy paper" the struggling novelist narrator of Memoire d"une amnesique declares. Memories when not frozen in time are excruciating, yet Jan J."s stand-in writer has no choice but to write around these memories because, for one thing, the types of books she loves and would love to write are forbidden and illegal. Their mere presence in her house can result in the arrest and execution of her entire family.
How does one write under those conditions? this novel asks again and again. How can we not write in code, andaki, when so many of those who came before us lost their lives because they thought they had nothing to fear? How does Jan J. write after having seen her father gunned down a few feet from where they worked together at his radio station? The book that she finally began writing three years after his death is called Memoire errante, Wandering Memory.
In Memoire errante, Jan J., now as a memoirist, writes, "Since April 3, 2000, I no longer write. Before I was full of ideas. I have always loved working on many texts at once, planning parallel stories. A story set in the present filled with furor and noise while dreaming of a woman from the past without knowing if the two will eventually become linked. There has been no link. There has been no book."
A book that almost never was is Amour, colere, folie, the singlevolume trilogy I encountered on my next trip to my Livres Haitiens haven at the Brooklyn public library. The author was the stunning and brave-the guapa-Marie Vieux-Chauvet. Born in Port-au-Prince during the first year of the U.S. occupation, she would later recreate this period in Love, the first novella in her seminal trilogy, which was published for the first time in English in August 2009 as Love, Anger, Madness. Claire Clamont, the main character of Love, equates her own unfortunate predicament as a thirty-nine-year-old virgin with the predicaments of D. H. Lawrence"s Lady Chatterley and Flaubert"s Madame Bovary (both Vieux-Chauvet favorites) when she laments in her journal that "there is hunger of the body and that of the soul. And the hunger of the mind and the hunger of the senses. All sufferings are equal."
But is all suffering equal, Marie Vieux-Chauvet wonders, when the people who suffer are not considered equal? How do those who stuff hot potatoes into their child servants" mouths fare against those who murder a journalist or rape a neighbor? How can those who have been brutally enslaved turn around and enslave others? Is suffering truly equal when we live in a society that would never allow the people who are suffering to be considered equal?
"We have been practicing at cutting each other"s throats since Independence," Vieux-Chauvet writes of the country that we Haitians like to remind the world was the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere, home to the only slave revolt that succeeded in producing a nation. What we would rather not say, and what Vieux-Chauvet does, is that this same country has continued to fail to reach its full potential, in part because of foreign interference, but also because of internal strife and cruelty.
X, the pseudonymous town featured in Love, is terrorized by local henchmen who are given by an unseen dictator the power to decide at any time who lives and who dies. The town is also plagued by other terrors. Not only are the hills and mountains heartbreakingly eroded, but American ships routinely leave X"s ports filled with prized wood from trees the loss of which is causing that erosion. Children die of typhoid and malaria. Beggars drink dirty water from ditches and are routinely persecuted by the ruling colonel. Even though this section of the trilogy is mostly set in the 1930s, it is obvious that it is meant also to evoke the later period, 1967, during which this book was written in a six-month-long writing binge-when the elder Duvalier"s regime was becoming more and more severe and, in addition to carrying out public and private executions, was persecuting intellectuals and artists.
"Alone again," Marie Vieux-Chauvet writes, referring to Rose Normil of Anger, the second novella in the trilogy, "she had invented touchingly naive myths to console herself: a leaf whirling in the wind, a b.u.t.terfly whether black or multicolored, the hooting of an owl or the graceful song of a nightingale seemed pregnant with meaning."
This is me, I thought, reading this while attempting my first little stories filled with my self-created folklore-my fake-lore-my hybrid and metisse warm-weather daffodils, my crackling fires of dried tree branches and death-announcing black b.u.t.terflies, my visions of flame-feathered birds.
It is in Madness, the final novella of the trilogy, that Vieux-Chauvet perhaps comes closest to reproducing herself and her dilemma as a writer living and writing under a brutal authoritarian regime. Depicting four persecuted poets living in a shack, she echoes her own membership in Les Araignees du soir (Spiders of the Night), a small group of poets and novelists who met weekly at her house to discuss one another"s work. Like actual spiders, they hoped to weave a protective web around their own and keep out predatory pests. But many were either jailed or exiled by the dictatorship, and Marie Vieux-Chauvet herself had no choice but to flee Haiti in 1968, after this book, on the verge of being published in Paris, was pulled from publication for fear that her family members might be arrested or killed.
According to Rose-Myriam Rejouis, one of the trilogy"s two official translators, when Marie Vieux-Chauvet received news that the book had been accepted for publication, she threw a party at which she read excerpts from her ma.n.u.script to her friends and family.
"It was then," writes Rejouis, "that family and friends expressed concerns about how the book might, no matter what absurd formula Duvalier used to determine who counted as an enemy of the state, put the life of every member of her family and her husband"s family at risk."
At first Marie Vieux-Chauvet resisted, insisting that the publication of the book might bring rebuke and shame to the regime, but then it became obvious that she would have to choose between the book and the people she loved.
"There is a curious split in my behavior," the poet narrator of Madness confesses. "I calmly go where there is screaming, where I am certain the devils are committing murder. I avoid danger while accusing myself of cowardice, loathing my own reactions. In the trunk there are a few poems, unpublished, as are all of my poems about devils and h.e.l.l. Enough of them there to get me pumped full of lead without anyone hesitating."
Exile became Marie Vieux-Chauvet"s only choice.
Later, while living in Queens, New York, Marie Vieux-Chauvet wrote Les Rapaces (The Vultures), a novel that portrays a writer wrestling with his work and his brutal surroundings after the death of Papa Doc Duvalier. Through the valiant effort of a devoted reader, the work of that book"s fictional writer manages to live on, something that Marie Vieux-Chauvet must have dreamed of for herself while writing about Haiti, in French, in the United States, not certain if either she or her books would ever find their way back to Haiti or would ever find an interested audience in the United States.
On June 19, 1973, at fifty-seven years old, Marie Vieux-Chauvet died of brain cancer after five years in exile. The Duvalier dictatorship had been pa.s.sed down from father to son, whom the U.S. government saw as more acceptable. Foreign investment flowed into Haiti, nurturing an atrocious sweatshop culture that added another layer of despair to the lives of a population that could not refuse to work, no matter how meager the pay. Other poor Haitians were sold by the Haitian government in secret deals to work in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic and were shipped off like slaves to the other side of the island.
As a child growing up in Haiti at the time, I heard, along with the darkest of tales of the brutal Tonton Macoutes or Vieux-Chauvet"s men in black, stories of children being kidnapped so their organs could be harvested and used to save rich sick children in America, an idea that frightened me so much that I sometimes could not sleep. What would Marie Vieux-Chauvet have made of such a tale? I wonder. Or of the period that followed the end of the Duvalier dictatorship, when the son flew off into his own exile and the people, like the beggars of her trilogy and the ma.s.ses of Les Rapaces, took to the streets in celebration and revenge? What would she have made of the first democratically elected president of Haiti, or the death of Jean Dominique? Of September 11th? Of Haiti"s catastrophic earthquake on January 12, 2010? And what would it have been like to have sat down with her over a cup of coffee in a dark corner of a Haitian restaurant in Port-au-Prince or Miami, as I have had the pleasure of doing with Jan J. Dominique? In Marie Vieux-Chauvet"s absence, I feel orphaned. But it was only after I read Jan J."s Memoire errante that I felt once again what it was like to lose a literary parent and a biological one at the same time.
Because she bore her father"s name but for a single vowel, there was always the possibility that someone would mistake the novelist daughter for the agronomist/journalist. So the novelist daughter at first used her nickname, J. J., on the cover of her books.
"One day they"ll introduce me as the father of Jan, the novelist," her father said. He loved her novels. He said that one of them reminded him of Proust, his favorite writer. "If I weren"t your father," he said, "I"d write a review, but people would think me biased."
Then there was the a.s.sa.s.sination and her being unable to write because everyone was saying to her, "You should write about your father," which she eventually did.
For her part, during the final months of her life, Marie Vieux-Chauvet was researching and mapping out an epic novel called Les Enfants d"Ogoun (The Children of Ogoun), Ogoun being the Haitian G.o.d of war. Unfortunately, Marie Vieux-Chauvet died before completing more than a few pages of this much hoped-for book.
"I would like to be sure," she writes in Love, "that Beethoven died appeased that he had written his concertos. Without this certainty, what would be the point of the painful anxiety of a Cezanne searching for a color that escapes him? Or of the anguish of a Dostoyevsky grasping at G.o.d in the thoughts swarming within the h.e.l.lish complexity of the soul!"
I too would like to be sure that Marie Vieux-Chauvet died appeased that she, like her living sister novelist/memoirist Jan J. Dominique, had written, pa.s.sionately, fearlessly, dangerously, the books that she did. The more I write myself, the more certain I am that she did.