Create Dangerously

“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 shielding 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 lot bo 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 massive 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, massive 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 massive 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 documenting 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 pushing 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.

Maxo once told me that when he was a teenager his favorite author was Jean Genet. He read and reread Les Negres. He liked all the wild language in the play, the way you could easily lose track of what was going on, not understand much of what people were doing and saying, and then suddenly feel as though each of the characters was directly addressing you. He felt it was a perfect play for Haiti, one that could easily have been written by a Haitian.

In light of Maxo’s death, these lines from the play now haunt me: “Your song was very beautiful, and your sadness does me honor. I’m going to start life in a new world. If I ever return, I’ll tell you what it’s like there. Great black country, I bid thee farewell.”

Two days after a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, on January 12, 2010, I was still telling my brothers that one night, as we were watching the television news, Maxo would pop up behind one of the news anchors and take over his job.

Maxo was a hustler. He could get whatever he wanted, whether money or kind words, simply by saying, “You know I love you. I love you. I love you.” It worked with many of our family members in New York, both when he occasionally showed up to visit and when he called from Haiti to ask them to fund his various projects. With a voice that blended shouting and laughter, he made each of his requests for money sound as though it were an investment that the giver would be making in him- or herself.

The last time I heard from Maxo was three days before the earthquake. He left a message on my voice mail. He was trying to raise money to rebuild the small school I had visited with his son Nick and my Uncle Joseph in the mountains of Leogane in the summer of 1999. The school had been destroyed by a mudslide a few weeks earlier. Thankfully, none of the children had been hurt. (It’s interesting that both Maxo and his father had the school in mind as one of the last things each wanted to do before he died.)

When Maxo’s father, my eighty-one-year-old Uncle Joseph, left Haiti in 2004, after a gang threatened his life, Maxo was with him. They traveled together to Miami, hoping to be granted political asylum. Instead, they were detained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and were separated while in custody. When Maxo was finally able to see his father, it was to translate for the detention center’s medical staff, who accused my uncle, as he vomited both from his mouth and from a tracheotomy hole in his neck, of faking his illness. The next day my uncle died and Maxo was released from detention. It was Maxo’s fifty-sixth birthday. Once the pain of his father’s death had eased, he joked, “My parents never wanted me to have a happy birthday.”

After his asylum petition was denied, Maxo returned to Haiti. He missed his five youngest children, some of whom were constantly calling to ask when he was coming home. There was also his father’s work to continue-small