Part 7 (1/2)
Desperate
Trapped
Please take my picture, jounalis
Screw Mr. Eastman
I'm not too ugly
Your camera will not break
I'm not too dirty
Not too black
After four consecutive storms ravaged Haiti, my friend the Miami Herald journalist Jacqueline Charles told me how, when she arrived with the photographer Patrick Farrell at a catastrophic scene where some dead children had been fished out of an overflowing river, a grieving father begged for some clean water to wash his mud-covered daughter and for a pretty dress to put on her before her photograph-which was later part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of photographs-was taken. Knowing that this would be the last image of his daughter, the father wanted her to look her absolute best.
The father, Jacqueline told me, desperately wanted his daughter's story to be told, knowing that though hers was a singular tale, her face a singular image, it could reveal a great deal about the larger disaster of the storms. In that way, the heartbroken father was following a long-honored tradition, in Haiti and elsewhere, of taking a keepsake photograph of the dead as a way of keeping them with us, and at the same time allowing his loved one's face to stand for many.
Another photographer, an Israeli named Daniel Kedar, had traveled all over Haiti and taken pictures of peasant farmers who'd never seen photographs of themselves. They sometimes denied their own image to him when he handed them the instantly printed photographs.
”No, I am not that skinny,” some would say. ”No, I am not that old.”
When everything does not rely on our image, do we imagine ourselves at all? Is there even a need for it when our face is ours alone? To suddenly become emblematic of a problem, the ”face” of a ravaged Haiti, is its own rude awakening, its own culture shock. Yet it allows a larger story to be told that in many ways can be helpful, because it fights complete erasure. It forces others to remember that we were-are-here.
”Pita nou led, nou la,” boldly claims the Haitian proverb. Better that we are ugly, but we are here.
”Photography has something to do with resurrection,” Roland Barthes wrote, ”might we not say of it what the Byzantines said of the image of Christ which impregnated St. Veronica's napkin: that it was not made by the hand of man, acheiropoietos?”
Might we not say the same of all impa.s.sioned creative endeavors?
”I never intended to become a photojournalist,” Daniel Morel tells me more than once. ”I became a photojournalist because at Numa and Drouin's execution, I felt afraid and I never wanted to feel afraid again. I take pictures so I am never afraid of anyone or anything. When I take pictures, I feel like something is s.h.i.+elding me, like the camera is protecting me.”
Did he, as a boy, want to protect Numa and Drouin? I ask.
He could not protect them, he said, but over the years he has felt as though he's managed to protect other Numas and other Drouins with his photographs. And during this final conversation, I am even more certain that to create dangerously is also to create fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us, then bravely moving forward even when it feels as though we are chasing or being chased by ghosts.
At the beginning of his 1955 short story ”Jonas ou l'artiste au travail” (Jonah, or the Artist at Work), Albert Camus cites as an epigraph the following verse from the book of Jonah.
Take me up and cast me forth into
the sea . . . for I know that for my
sake this great tempest is upon you.
Creating fearlessly, like living fearlessly, even when a great tempest is upon you. Creating fearlessly even when cast lt b dlo, across the seas. Creating fearlessly for people who see/watch/listen/read fearlessly. Writing fearlessly because, as my friend Junot Diaz has said, ”a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.” This is perhaps also what it means to be a writer. Writing as though nothing can or will ever stop you. Writing as though you full-heartedly, or foolhardily, believe in acheiropoietos.
There is something about doing your own grieving in a place filled with other people's grief. The last time I was at the Port-au-Prince national cemetery was for the February 2003 burial of my Aunt Denise. At that time, as at many others, I looked around yet again at a peeling section of the cement wall against which I believed the blood of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin had once been splattered. The story goes that the wall had been built a few decades before the execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, when a pleading female voice was heard coming from the leaves of a ma.s.sive soursop tree that stood in the middle of the cemetery. The voice coming from the soursop tree was that of Gran Brigit, the wife of Baron Samedi, the guardian spirit of the cemetery. Gran Brigit was known for her generosity in granting money to the poor. So as news of Gran Brigit's manifested presence spread, ma.s.sive crowds filled the cemetery, trampling the mausoleums and graves. The wall was built to keep Gran Brigit's followers out.
I looked around at this ma.s.sive hamlet of the dead and wondered where Gran Brigit's tree might have stood. I stared at the old two-story building near the cemetery entrance, the balcony of which was where I believed many had stood to watch the execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin. Neither the building nor the wall may be what or where I thought them to be. I tell this story now with the unreliability of that uncertainty.
On the wall that I believed had served as the background for these executions, I saw political graffiti. Aba-, Down with--. Not the name of a Haitian national figure, but someone I did not know. The words were written in the same type of black spray-painted cursive, the ubiquitous graffiti scrawl that one still finds all over Port-au-Prince, street commentary that suggests that Haiti's capital may be full of Jean-Michel Basquiats. There was, the last time I was in the cemetery, no plaque anywhere to acknowledge what had happened there to Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin on November 12, 1964.
”If we began to put plaques all over Port-au-Prince to commemorate deaths,” a friend had once told me when I'd pointed this out to him, ”we would have room for little else.”
In lieu of plaques, all we have of Numa and Drouin are individual memories like Daniel Morel's and a few minutes of black-and-white film in which they die over and over again and some photographs in which they remain dead.
The last time Daniel Morel was in the cemetery, there was a pile of corpses as high as the wall itself, all of them victims of the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010. Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin's death place proved too small a burial ground for the more than two hundred thousand people who had instantly died together in Port-au-Prince that afternoon.
Daniel Morel's would be among the first pictures of death and destruction to emerge from Haiti soon after the earthquake. He happened to be visiting Port-au-Prince from the United States and was walking the streets when the earthquake struck. There was no returning now to the more ”pleasant” images of a city and country that he'd been doc.u.menting since he was a boy. His-our-entire city was a cemetery.
CHAPTER 12.
Our Guernica My cousin Maxo has died. The house that I called home during my visits to Haiti collapsed on top of him.
Maxo was born on November 4, 1948, after three days of agonizing labor. ”I felt,” my Aunt Denise used to say, ”as though I spent all three days pus.h.i.+ng him out of my eyes.”
She had a long scar above her right eyebrow, where she had jabbed her nails through her skin during the most painful moments. She never gave birth again.
Maxo often complained about his parents not celebrating his birthday.
”Are you kidding me?” I'd say, taking his mother's side. ”Who would want to remember such an ordeal?”
Jokes aside, it pained him more than it should have, even though few children in Bel Air, the impoverished and now devastated neighborhood where we grew up, ever had a birthday party with balloons and cake.