Part 8 (2/2)

I descend a cracked cement staircase, seeing through the fallen bas.e.m.e.nt walls the foundations of the two houses on either side of me. It occurs to me that I am in a cavernous hole around which the earthquake crumpled everything else. Through the gaps in the wall I can see parts of the bottom of the rubble.

The danger of my being there suddenly hits home. So quickly, more quickly than I would have liked, I kiss my hand and then bend down and touch the cemented mound where Maxo had been buried.

Esther, the maternal cousin who had overseen his burial, had carved in the cement his name, his date of birth, and the day that he died, the day that so many died.

”We buried him there and I marked it,” she had told me on the phone, ”so that whenever any of you come back from lt b dlo, you can see and touch his grave.”

I reach down and touch the grave again. I feel that I should perhaps say more prayers, intone more words, but frankly I am afraid. A ma.s.sive church is resting on a shattered foundation around me. Should there be another aftershock, I could be crushed.

”Good-bye, Maxo,” I simply say. ”Good-bye, Nozial.”

Emerging from under the church and into the sunlight, I remember thinking, each time I saw someone rescued from the rubble on television, that it looked a lot like a v.a.g.i.n.al birth, the rescue teams nudging, like midwives, a head, then a shoulder, then some arms, and then some legs, out of the expanded earth.

Maxo and Nozial, I thought, were never reborn.

At Toussaint L'Ouverture Airport, I must show my American pa.s.sport to get inside to meet the plane for the return trip. The first U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer at the airport entrance asks me to take off my gla.s.ses as he looks at my picture on the pa.s.sport. He holds the pa.s.sport up to the sunlight for some time to verify that it is not fake. I am embarra.s.sed and slightly humiliated, but these, I suppose, are lesser humiliations compared to what my loved ones and so many others are going through. The second and third Customs and Border Protection officers are Haitian Americans who speak to me in Creole. They wish me a good return trip ”home.”

On the plane, I listen quietly as the flight attendant thanks the doctors and nurses who are returning to the United States from stints as volunteers in Haiti.

”I bet you're looking forward to hot showers and warm beds and U.S. ice,” she says.

The doctors and others clap and whistle in agreement.

”Well,” she says, ”I can offer you one of those things. The U.S. ice”

Wrapping up, she adds, ”G.o.d bless America”

Feeling overly protective of an already battered Haiti, I hear myself cry out, ”G.o.d bless Haiti, too,” drawing a few stares from my fellow pa.s.sengers.

The man in the seat behind me taps me on the shoulder and says, ”Really. G.o.d bless both America and Haiti”

As we take off, I look down at the harbor, where a U.S military helicopter is flying between Toussaint L'Ouverture Airport and the USNS Comfort medical s.h.i.+p anch.o.r.ed just outside Port-au-Prince harbor. Further out to sea are U.S. Coast Guard s.h.i.+ps, whose primary purpose is to make sure that Haitians are intercepted if they try to get on boats and head to the United States.

I have a copy of Les Negres that I had meant to leave on Maxo's grave under the church, but in my haste and fear I had forgotten and brought it back with me.

I turn my eyes from the Coast Guard s.h.i.+ps, and now on the plane I open the book and begin reading, turning immediately to the page that, soon after I'd learned of Maxo's death, had directly spoken to me: ”Your song was very beautiful, and your sadness does me honor. I'm going to start life in a new world. If ever I return, I'll tell you what it's like there. Great black country, I bid thee farewell.”

Great black country, I too bid thee farewell, I think.

At least for now.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

I am extremely grateful to the magnificent Toni Morrison for her kindness in having me present the second annual Toni Morrison lecture (March 2008), which led to this book. Thanks also to Eddie Glaude, Joelle Loessy, Valerie Smith, Chang Rae Lee, and Fred Appel for their a.s.sistance. And to Cornel West, the standard bearer. At last I have an opportunity to thank Marcel Duret for his promotion of Haitian culture in j.a.pan and the enjoyable and informative trips there. Thanks also to Patricia Benoit, Fedo Boyer, Jim Hanks, Nicole Aragi, Kathie Klarreich, Project MediShare, Kimberly Green, and the Green Family Foundation. My thanks also to Daniel Morel for his time and his work. My deepest grat.i.tude to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Thanks lastly, to Pascalle Monnin for the art used on the book cover.

Some of the chapters in this book appeared previously in the following publications: Chapter 2 is taken partially from ”A Taste of Coffee” in Calabash (May 2001). Other material is from an afterword to Breath, Eyes, Memory, by Edwidge Danticat (Random House Inc., 1999).

Chapter 3 is taken partially from The b.u.t.terfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, edited by Edwidge Danticat (Soho Press, 2003). Other material is from the article ”Bonjour Jean” in The Nation (February 19, 2001).

Chapter 4 is taken partially from the foreword to Memoir of an Amnesiac by J. Jan Dominique (Caribbean Studies Press, 2008). Other material is from the introduction to Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Triptych, by Marie Vieux-Chauvet (Random House Inc., 2009).

Chapter 6 is taken partially from the essay ”Out of the Shadows” in The Progressive (June 2006).

Chapter 7 is taken partially from in the article ”Thomas Jefferson: The Private War: Ignoring the Revolution Next Door” in Time (July 05, 2004). Other material is from the introduction to The Kingdom of This World, by Alejo Carpentier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).

Chapter 8 is taken partially from the essay ”Another Country” in The Progressive (Fall 2005).

Chapter 9 is taken partially from the article ”On Borrowed Wings” in The Telegraph India (October 2004).

Chapter 12 is taken partially from the article ”A Little While” in the New Yorker (February 1, 2010). Other material is taken partially from the article ”Aftershocks: Bloodied, shaken-and beloved” in the Miami Herald (January 17, 2010).

NOTES.

Chapter 1. Create Dangerously.

Daniel Morel and Jane Regan of Wozo Productions provided the footage of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin referred to in this chapter. Louis Drouin's final statement was published in Prosper Avril, From Glory to Disgrace: The Haitian Army, 1804-1994 (Parkland, FL: Universal Publishers, 1999). ”Create Dangerously” Albert Camus' lecture, which was delivered at the University of Uppsala in December 1957, is reprinted in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: Vintage International, 1995.) The Le Matin quotation is from Bernard Diederich and Al Burt, Papa Doc: The Truth about Haiti Today (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969). All Ralph Waldo Emerson quotations are from Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems, edited and with a foreword by Robert D. Richardson (New York: Bantam Cla.s.sics, 1990). The Roland Barthes quotation ”a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” is from the essay ”The Death of the Author” in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and w.a.n.g, 1978) Translations from Dany Laferriere's Je suis un ecrivain j.a.ponais (Paris: Gra.s.set, 2008) and from Jan J. Dominique's Memoire errante (Montreal: Memoire d'encrier, 2007) were done by me. The ”We have still not had a death” quotation from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is from the Perennial Cla.s.sics edition (New York: Harper, 1998). The Toni Morrison quotation paraphrased in this chapter is ”What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company,” from Toni Morrison's n.o.bel lecture in literature delivered in Sweden on December 7, 1993, and printed in The n.o.bel Lecture in Literature, 1993 (New York: Knopf, 1994). The quotations from Albert Camus' Caligula are from the book Caligula and Three Other Plays by Albert Camus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). The quotations from Alice Walker are from In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1983).

Chapter 3. I Am Not a Journalist.

The Michele Montas quotation ”I was no longer willing to go to another funeral” is from an interview with Bob Garfield for On the Media, a segment t.i.tled ”Haiti's Media Crisis,” March 14, 2003. For a better understanding of Jean Dominique and Michele Montas, see the doc.u.mentary The Agronomist, directed by Jonathan Demme. The quotations from Memoire errante (Montreal: Memoire d'encrier, 2007) in this chapter and the others were translated by me.

Chapter 4. Daughters of Memory.

The quotations from Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy are from the translation by Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokur (New York: Modern Library, 2009). The quotation by Rose-Myriam Rejouis is also from that edition. Jan J. Dominique's comments regarding Jacques Roumain are taken from her essay ”Roumain et la devoreuse de mots: L'adolescente et les livres,” published in Mon Roumain a Moi (Port-au-Prince: Presses Nationales d'Haiti, 2007). The quotation from the essay was translated by me. The W.E.B. Dubois quotation starting ”The United States is at war with Haiti” can be found in W.E.B. Dubois: A Reader, edited by David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).

Chapter 5. I Speak Out.

Except where indicated, the Alerte Belance quotations are from Beverly Bell, Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). The quotations from and references to Toni Morrison's Beloved are from the Vintage International edition (New York: Vintage, 1987).

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