Create Dangerously

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 passed, 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 assassin walked into Michele’s yard in a suburb of Port-au-Prince and began shooting, killing Maxime Seide, one of her young bodyguards. The assassin 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 assured 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 assassination 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 assassination 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 assassination 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 classes, 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 space 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 space 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 Saturday 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 title 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 bastard 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