schools and churches to oversee all over Haiti. The return, though, was brutal. During our telephone calls, he talked about the high price of food in Port-au-Prince. “If it’s hard for me, imagine for the others,” he’d say.
His time in detention in the United States had sensitized him to prison conditions and to prisoners’ lack of rights in Haiti. He often called asking for money to buy food, which he then took to the national penitentiary. (The penitentiary was one of the few government buildings that remained standing after the January 2010 earthquake, though all the prisoners managed to escape.)
Maxo’s generosity, along with the Haitian sense of kindness and community, is perhaps why, immediately after four stories collapsed on him on January 12th, family, friends, and even strangers began to dig for him and his wife and their children. They freed his wife and all but one of his children, ten-year-old Nozial, from the rubble two days later. Even when there was little hope, they continued to dig for Maxo and for those who had died along with him: some children who were being tutored after school, the tutors, a few parents who had stopped by to discuss their children’s schoolwork. We will never know for sure how many.
The day that Maxo’s remains were found, the call from Bel Air came with some degree of excitement. At least he would not rest permanently in the rubble. At least he would not go into a mass grave. Somehow, though, I sense that he would not have minded. Everyone is being robbed of rituals, he might have said. Why not me?
By the time Maxo’s body was uncovered, cell phones were finally working again, bringing a flurry of desperate voices. One cousin had an open gash in her head that was still bleeding. Another had a broken back and had been carried to three field hospitals trying to get it X-rayed. Another was sleeping outside her house and was terribly thirsty. An in-law had no blood-pressure medicine. Most had not eaten for days. There were friends and family members whose entire towns had been destroyed, and dozens from whom we have had no word at all.
Everyone sounded eerily calm on the phone. No one was screaming. No one was crying. No one said, “Why me?” or “We’re cursed.” Even as the aftershocks kept coming, they’d say, “The ground is shaking again,” as though this had become a normal occurrence. They inquired about family members outside Haiti: an elderly relative, a baby, my one-year-old daughter.
I cried and apologized. “I’m sorry I can’t be there with you,” I said.
My nearly six-foot-tall twenty-three-year-old cousin-the beauty queen we nicknamed NC (Naomi Campbell)-who says that she is hungry and has been sleeping in bushes with dead bodies nearby, stops me.
“Don’t cry,” she says. “That’s life.”
“No, it’s not life,” I say. “Or it shouldn’t be.”
“It is,” she insists. “That’s what it is. And life, like death, lasts only
I was thinking about Maxo, Nozial, NC, Tante Zi, and many others when the media called to ask for my reaction to the earthquake and its aftermath. I was numb, like everybody else, I wanted to say, tallying my losses, remembering each moment of every day, someone I had not heard from, someone I had not been able to reach. But once we got past the personal angle, shedding my reluctance to speak for the collective, this is what I felt I had to say. I said: Haitians like to tell each other that Haiti is
I said that our love for Haiti had not changed, that in fact it had become even deeper. But Haiti, or what is left of it, had changed. It had changed physically, earthquake fault lines catastrophically rearranging its landscape. The mountains that had been stripped of their trees, mined for charcoal and construction materials, and then crowded with unsteady homes had crumbled, leaving both the poor and the rich homeless.
This is a natural disaster, I explained, but one that had been in the making for a long time, partly owing to the complete centralization of goods and services and to the import-favoring agricultural policies that have driven so many Haitians off their ancestral lands into a capital city built for two hundred thousand that was forced to house nearly three million. If a tropical storm could bury an entire city under water as Tropical Storm Jeanne did Gonaives in 2004, if mudslides could bring down entire neighborhoods with homes and schools and people in them, then what chance did Port-au-Prince and the surrounding area have against a 7.0 magnitude earthquake? With thousands hastily and superficially buried or lodged in miles and miles of rubble, I said, Haiti is no longer just slippery ground, but also sacred ground.
I tried to say some of this whenever I went on the radio or on television, whenever I wrote my articles of fifteen hundred words or less. They were therapeutic for me, these media outings, and helpful, I hoped, in adding one more voice to a chorus of bereavement and helping to explain what so many of us were feeling, which was a deep and paralyzing sense of loss.
Maybe that was my purpose, then, as an immigrant and a writer-to be an echo chamber, gathering and then replaying voices from both the distant and the local devastation. Still words often failed me.
“no poetry in the ashes south of canal street,” the poet Suheir Hammad had written.
Would there be any poetry amidst the Haitian ruins?
It was too soon to even try to write, I told myself. You were not there. You did not live it. You have no right even to speak-for you, for them, for anyone. So I did what I always do when my own words fail me. I read.
I read hundreds of first-person narratives, testimonials, blogs. One of the most heartbreaking was written by Dolores Dominique Neptune, one of Jean Dominique’s daughters, Jan J. Dominique’s younger sister.
“Here is the tale of the death of Jean Olivier Neptune written by his mother Dolores Dominique Neptune,” the person who forwarded it to me noted.
“Where is my son? The house collapsed. He is in his room. On his bed,” Dolores Dominique Neptune wrote. “I call his name. I call on God and negotiate with Him. I call on the neighbors. What neighbors? All their houses have collapsed and no one will come.”
Later, after a massive effort by many neighbors and friends who literally emerged out of the rubble to help, she found her son.
“What an angel!” she wrote. “His left hand is resting on his stomach as he lies in his bed. My son is dead!”
A few days later, I read my friend the novelist Evelyne Trouillot, who wrote from Port-au-Prince, in a January 20, 2010, opinion piece for the
I read her brother, the novelist Lyonel Trouillot, who was posting daily accounts of life after the quake on the Web site of the French publication
“Last night,” he wrote on day five, “I heard the drums from a Vodou ceremony. I didn’t have enough energy to go and find out if they were praising or rebuking the gods. I started heading there anyway, but came across a group of people playing dominoes by moonlight. I listened to the jokes being told by the players, about both the living and the dead… I know that like them, at the end of the day, both to forget the darkness and to not curse the dawn, I need to laugh.”
I too needed to laugh, so I began reading my friend Dany Laferriere again. Dany is one of the funniest people I know and his sense of humor often infuses his work. Dany was, along with Lyonel and Evelyne Trouillot, one of the writer organizers of a literary festival called Etonnants Voyageurs, which was to have started in Port-au-Prince on January 14, 2010. Some health concerns regarding my one-year-old daughter had forced me to turn down the invitation to participate in the festival. Given that I often travel to Haiti with my family and that we often try to add a few days at the beginning or the end of trips like these, it is possible that if we had agreed to attend Etonnants Voyageurs, we, along with forty other writers who live outside of Haiti, might have been either additional victims or survivors of the earthquake.
Dany Laferriere was an additional survivor of the earthquake. A few days later, he returned to Canada, where he lives, to tell of what he had seen: of the bravery and dignity of Haitians who initially received no outside help and dug their friends and families out of the rubble with their bare hands while sharing what little food and water they had.
Dany was criticized by some Canadian journalists for leaving Haiti after the earthquake. He should have stayed with his people, they said. And I have no doubt that if he were a doctor, he would have. But at that time, his role
