Create Dangerously

As she talked, her daughters played nearby. They had heard all this before, it seemed, and they could ignore it now, or they were simply protecting themselves by giggling together on the floor and disturbing the shoot. Their childish giggles reminded Alerte to say that after all this, after she went from being a plump, voluptuous, long- haired woman to a skinny, buzz-cut amputee, her daughters also did not recognize her. Because of her new appearance, they did not know who she was. The younger of the two would pull a picture from the side of the bed, a framed picture of Alerte looking fleshy and healthy and smiling. The child would carry the picture to her and say, “You are not my mother. This is my mother.”

It took the children a while to get used to her new body and the new, deeper voice she had as a result of her tongue having been cut in half and sewn back together again. The tongue had been hanging by a thread of flesh, but the doctors sewed it back on and, miraculously, it healed.

“It healed,” she said, “so I can tell my story, so people can know what happened to me.”

Her strength and resolve seemed to grow with each word, even as she said she got depressed sometimes because she couldn’t do much for herself or her family. She ached all the time from the wounds we could see and others we could not see. At night she ached even more because of the seren, the twilight air, which affected her bones. Her husband had to bathe her and comb the children’s hair. Something a man ought not to have to do, she added.

Her son was sitting quietly in a corner observing the shoot while her daughters played and ate candy in their Sunday dresses. Watching the girls, it occurred to me that when they are grown, they may look exactly the way their mother used to look.

“I think we are done,” Patricia said at the end of the interview.

Alerte’s body slid down on the couch. She seemed relieved. Her eyes traveled around the room, and then she asked Patricia, “Kote w soti?” Where are you from?

Patricia told of her origins in shorthand. Born in Haiti. Mother French. Father Haitian. Raised in Queens.

“Do you like New Jersey?” Patricia asked.

She did not go out much, Alerte said. People stared. She had just been invited to appear on the Phil Donahue Show, though, and had agreed to go and, with a translator, tell her story.

“If it helps Haiti,” she said.

Suddenly, her son edged closer. Patricia asked him if he wanted to say something.

The boy said yes.

On camera?

The boy nodded.

Patricia asked Alerte and her husband if it was all right to let the boy speak on camera.

They both nodded.

We started filming again, and the shy little boy told of seeing his mother in the hospital for the first time.

“She looked like chopped meat,” he said, echoing his father’s words.

Tears ran down the little boy’s face as he spoke. His body was tense but it seemed as if he was finally releasing a knot in his stomach. He could not stop crying.

We all began to cry along with him, even those who did not speak Creole and could not understand a word he said.

As we drove back though the Lincoln Tunnel, leaving Alerte and her family behind, we all wondered if there was more we could have said. Was there something else we could have done? I kept asking myself what Alerte’s life with her husband was now like, what their relationship was like beyond his being helpful to her. A question I could not ask was whether or not they were still attracted to each other, still in love.

A few months later I got my answer.

She became pregnant.

Alerte Belance: I remember lying in the hospital bed and trying to imagine how I was going to live in the situation I’m in now. I don’t have two arms. My left arms sticks to my body but serves no purpose for me… Killing Alerte Belance was supposed to mean that Alerte Belance couldn’t speak for a better life. Contrary to their stopping me, I’m progressing because I’m still bearing children. They tried to take my life away, but not only couldn’t they do that, I’m producing more life.

The following week was the taping of the Phil Donahue Show. The producers of the Donahue Show asked our producers to find Haitian audience members, and Patricia and I, along with Jean Dominique and a few other friends, were in the audience.

The point of the show was to encourage the Clinton administration to do something about the junta that was killing or maiming people like Alerte. The lure was the celebrity supporters of Haiti, including Harry Belafonte, Susan Sarandon, and Danny Glover, as well as the TransAfrica Forum founder Randall Robinson, who went on a hunger strike to press the Clinton administration to act. Alerte did not get to speak very much on the show because she had to use a translator, which slowed down the process of telling her story. Instead, Phil Donahue held her arm up in the air; her story was told more visually than in her own voice.

After the show aired, however, Alerte became the face of the junta’s atrocities in Haiti. I ran into her again at several events and rallies where she loudly demanded the return of the democratically elected government. At one rally, she even shared the stage with President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had requested to meet her.

Later, she faced off with some paramilitary leaders on Haitian radio in New York and, with the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed a thirty-two-million-dollar lawsuit against FRAPH, the paramilitary organization to which the attaches who’d attacked her belonged. More than a decade later, the case against FRAPH was decided in her favor, but it is unlikely that she will ever recover a dime.

As her visibility grew, she was featured in several U.S. newspapers and magazines and got a small speaking part in the Jonathan Demme-directed film version of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In the film, Alerte plays Nan, a woman “who used different words.” Jonathan Demme had Alerte say Nan’s lines (“She threw them all away but you”) to the lead character, Sethe, in Haitian Creole.

When one first saw Alerte Belance, what was most visible about her were her “marks,” her scars. But eventually it was also easy to recognize her spirited defiance.

“Do you realize how strong you are?” Patricia had asked her.

“Yes, I realize that I am strong,” she replied. “I am very strong. Some people get a small cut and it gets infected and they die. Look what was done to me and still I survived. Yes, I am very strong.”

In Courage and Pain, the undistributed documentary we ended up making, Alerte and her family are surrounded by nearly a dozen other survivors who, like Alerte, were nearly executed. They all tell different versions of the same story, of being beaten, macheted, shot, and tortured, and of nearly dying in a country they loved but where they could no longer live.

A few months later, a resolute Alerte retold her story to Beverly Bell, an American researcher, democracy and women’s advocate, who would later compile the excerpts I have quoted throughout this chapter in an oral history titled Walking on Fire.

“Three months after I came back from the dead at Titanyen, I was on my two feet,” Alerte told Beverly Bell. “I traveled around the United States trying to beat up on the misery of Haiti and the Haitian people. I spoke about women whom the cruel death and terror gangs were raping, little children they were raping, babies in the cradle. I went on television and the radio; I talked to U.S. congressmen, journalists, human rights activists. I spoke at demonstrations, press conferences, churches, congressional hearings… to say, “Here. Here is what I suffered.”

She not only suffered, however, but against all odds she also survived and thrived. And her testimony was a great gift to many others who were still trying to stay alive, and to the more than eight thousand others who died under the junta’s rule.

Alerte Belance: They killed mother after mother of children. They killed doctor after doctor, student after student. Mothers of children lost their children… The devil has raped the confidence of the people… People of conscience, hear me who is trying to wake you up. Hear my story, what I have experienced…

CHAPTER 6