Create Dangerously

While lingering on her voice, it was also hard not to stare at her right forearm, the pointy black stub filled with keloid scars. Leading to the tip were more machete scars, as though the person-the people-who had chopped off her arm had tried extremely hard to do it. You could not look at that arm and not wonder where the rest of it was.

My brother Kelly also has a missing forearm. Unlike Alerte, he was born that way. I am not exactly sure what happened with Kelly, but when my youngest daughter, Leila, was born with a few small indentations in her left earlobe, her pediatrician told me that sometimes in the womb, elongated tissue called amniotic bands wrap themselves so tightly around fetal tissue that they can amputate a fetus’s arm or leg. My Vodou-and Santeria- practicing friends, however, tell me that when a person is born missing any piece of flesh-be it a limb or otherwise- it means that the person has lost a twin in the womb and that lost twin has put a visible mark on the living twin.

At last, I’d thought, I had two possible answers to the mystery that was my beautiful brother. Kelly’s missing forearm had dissolved inside my mother, becoming a part of the tissue, and spirit, that had helped create him. Alerte’s missing forearm had dissolved in a mass grave, becoming a part of the country that had helped create her.

Alerte Belance: They sliced me into pieces with machete strokes. They cut out my tongue and my mouth: my gums, plates, teeth, and jaw on my right side. They cut my face open, my temple and cheek totally open. They cut my eye open. They cut my ear open. They cut my body, my whole shoulder and neck and back slashed with machete blows. They cut off my right arm. They slashed my left arm totally and cut off the ends of all the fingers of my left hand. Also, they slashed my whole head up with machete blows.

Once the lights and cameras were set up, the director, my friend Patricia Benoit, tried to begin gently.

“Kijan wye?” How are you? Patricia, who was born in Haiti and moved to the United States with her parents when she was six, has a soft, hesitant, but cajoling voice in Creole. Fluent in English, Creole, and French, she is not only trilingual but also tritonal, having a distinctive timbre and pitch for each language she speaks. Patricia has often filmed in Haiti and has seen other victims of other horrors, so when she said to Alerte, “Kijan wye?” it did not sound like small talk, especially in this nearly empty room so far from all of our homes.

Alerte settled on the couch and with her semifunctioning hand began tugging at the dark knit cap on her head. She removed the cap and underneath were more scars and a military-style buzz cut. She quickly put the cap back on.

“We’ll do this any way you want,” Patricia said softly, “but you look nice with your cap off.”

With her cap off, even with the machete scars so visible, Alerte’s injured cheekbones emerged. Her eyes had a glint of onyx and she had a coy smile that came from only one side of her mouth.

“I look like a boy,” she said, nervously rolling the cap in her hand.

She asked her husband to get two faux pearl earrings from a box in the bedroom. When he came back, he leaned down and, because she could not, put the earrings on her ears. Then he sat down next to her, as though to shield her from the camera.

What did you do for a living in Haiti?” Patricia asked Alerte.

“I sold food in the market,” she said.

Her husband, she said, was a welder. He was also involved in some neighborhood committees that organized rallies for Jean-Bertrand Aristide when he was a presidential candidate.

Patricia guided her slowly toward the moment when the paramilitary men, called attaches, came to her house in Port-au-Prince.

They wanted to wipe out everyone who’d voted for Aristide, she said. Her husband, because of his election organizing, was targeted. They came knocking on her door. When her husband saw who they were, he escaped through a window in the back of their house. He thought that if they didn’t find him they would simply go away. He never thought they’d take her in his place.

They put her in the back of a pickup truck and drove her to a deserted stretch of land outside of town, Haiti’s so-called valley of death, a vast mass grave called Titanyen. There two men hacked her with machetes. When she realized that they were trying to kill her, she stopped fighting, lay down, and played dead. She lost the arm, she said, trying to shield her face and the rest of her body.

When the paramilitary men saw that she had stopped moving, one of them said, “Look, it seems like she’s dead.”

“They had more people to kill,” she said, “so they left me there.”

She waited until they were gone. Then she dragged herself back to the side of the road and waited until morning.

As she spoke, slowly but firmly, as if reliving every second of these horrors, I wrote a summary translation on a legal pad for one of our non-Creole-speaking producers. I felt tears run down my face. This was perhaps unprofessional, even disrespectful. The telling of that story was such a courageous act, I thought, that only one person in that room had the right to cry.

Alerte Belance: I woke up again the next morning and found myself stuck on top of a briar path where the zenglendo threw me. My whole body was full of prickers. I didn’t feel them, though, because my whole body was dead. I’m not positive where I was because I couldn’t see-my eyes were stuck together with blood-but I think I was up in the air, perched on the side of a hill, just over a hole. I felt myself shaking, my whole body was trembling. I unstuck my eyes and then I saw that I wasn’t too far from the road. But I couldn’t see up or down, I couldn’t move to the left or right. Anywhere I turned, I would fall into the hole.

Patricia then moved on to her incredible survival.

“How did you get found?” she asked.

In the morning, on the precipice by the side of the road, she saw many cars speeding by. She stopped to raise her bloody arms to catch their attention. Some drivers, stopped and gawked and then got back into their cars and kept going. By then she was covered with the pikan, the thorns that are common in the area. One potential good Samaritan even said, “She’s not dead,” but kept going. Finally an army pickup truck came by and-proving that not all soldiers are the same-one of the two soldiers in the truck said, “We can’t leave that woman here.” They picked her up and put her in the back of the truck.

Tearful, Alerte stopped talking and her husband picked up the narrative from there. During the entire interview, he referred to her in Creole as dam la, the lady, a rather formal but not impersonal designation.

After escaping to his aunt’s house in another part of town, Alerte’s husband returned home the next morning. The children told him that their mother had been taken away by the men who’d come the night before. That same morning, a soldier came to the house and asked who he was. He hesitantly told the soldier his name. The soldier said, “You should come quick to the hospital. Your wife is sick. She may even die before you get there.”

When he got to the hospital, he did not recognize her. “That’s not my wife,” he told the doctors.

Alerte had the presence of mind to nod her head to indicate to him that she was indeed Alerte.

“She had long hair before,” he said, pointing to her buzz haircut. “But when I saw her, she was like the chopped meat they sell at the market.”

Later a human rights group would publish a brochure filled with pictures of Alerte taken in the hospital after her attack. I had never seen anything like it: picture after picture of hollowed pockets of severed and swollen tissue all over her face, arms, and legs.

The doctors had to hide her when several attaches came looking for her in the hospital. There were many instances of attaches coming back to kill torture survivors in hospitals. A young man who had been left for dead in Titanyen was later taken to the hospital, and then was murdered in the hospital by paramilitary men as his grandfather watched helplessly. That precedent forced the doctors to hide her.

She was lucky to have had the doctors she had, she chimed in. Doctors like that are hard to come by for poor women in overcrowded hospitals in Haiti. The doctors hid her and, when the killers came by, they would say that she had died.

Slowly, she said, reaching up to touch the scars on the side of her face, she began to heal. But she did not want to give the impression that it was quick and easy, as in a movie. She remembered the infections over her entire body, when most of her wounds were filled with puss. She had to be on oxygen a lot of the time because her nasal cavities were too inflamed to take in enough air.