On the plane, I listen quietly as the flight attendant thanks the doctors and nurses who are returning to the United States from stints as volunteers in Haiti.
“I bet you’re looking forward to hot showers and warm beds and U.S. ice,” she says.
The doctors and others clap and whistle in agreement.
“Well,” she says, “I can offer you one of those things. The U.S. ice”
Wrapping up, she adds, “God bless America”
Feeling overly protective of an already battered Haiti, I hear myself cry out, “God bless Haiti, too,” drawing a few stares from my fellow passengers.
The man in the seat behind me taps me on the shoulder and says, “Really. God bless both America and Haiti”
As we take off, I look down at the harbor, where a U.S military helicopter is flying between Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport and the USNS Comfort medical ship anchored just outside Port-au- Prince harbor. Further out to sea are U.S. Coast Guard ships, whose primary purpose is to make sure that Haitians are intercepted if they try to get on boats and head to the United States.
I have a copy of Les Negres that I had meant to leave on Maxo’s grave under the church, but in my haste and fear I had forgotten and brought it back with me.
I turn my eyes from the Coast Guard ships, and now on the plane I open the book and begin reading, turning immediately to the page that, soon after I’d learned of Maxo’s death, had directly spoken to me: “Your song was very beautiful, and your sadness does me honor. I’m going to start life in a new world. If ever I return, I’ll tell you what it’s like there. Great black country, I bid thee farewell.”
Great black country, I too bid thee farewell, I think.
At least for now.
I am extremely grateful to the magnificent Toni Morrison for her kindness in having me present the second annual Toni Morrison lecture (March 2008), which led to this book. Thanks also to Eddie Glaude, Joelle Loessy, Valerie Smith, Chang Rae Lee, and Fred Appel for their assistance. And to Cornel West, the standard bearer. At last I have an opportunity to thank Marcel Duret for his promotion of Haitian culture in Japan and the enjoyable and informative trips there. Thanks also to Patricia Benoit, Fedo Boyer, Jim Hanks, Nicole Aragi, Kathie Klarreich, Project MediShare, Kimberly Green, and the Green Family Foundation. My thanks also to Daniel Morel for his time and his work. My deepest gratitude to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Thanks lastly, to Pascalle Monnin for the art used on the book cover.
Some of the chapters in this book appeared previously in the following publications:
Chapter 2 is taken partially from “A Taste of Coffee” in Calabash (May 2001). Other material is from an afterword to Breath, Eyes, Memory, by Edwidge Danticat (Random House Inc., 1999).
Chapter 3 is taken partially from The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, edited by Edwidge Danticat (Soho Press, 2003). Other material is from the article “Bonjour Jean” in The Nation (February 19, 2001).
Chapter 4 is taken partially from the foreword to Memoir of an Amnesiac by J. Jan Dominique (Caribbean Studies Press, 2008). Other material is from the introduction to Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Triptych, by Marie Vieux-Chauvet (Random House Inc., 2009).
Chapter 6 is taken partially from the essay “Out of the Shadows” in The Progressive (June 2006).
Chapter 7 is taken partially from in the article “Thomas Jefferson: The Private War: Ignoring the Revolution Next Door” in Time (July 05, 2004). Other material is from the introduction to The Kingdom of This World, by Alejo Carpentier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).
Chapter 8 is taken partially from the essay “Another Country” in The Progressive (Fall 2005).
Chapter 9 is taken partially from the article “On Borrowed Wings” in The Telegraph India (October 2004).
Chapter 12 is taken partially from the article “A Little While” in the New Yorker (February 1, 2010). Other material is taken partially from the article “Aftershocks: Bloodied, shaken-and beloved” in the Miami Herald (January 17, 2010).
Chapter 1. Create Dangerously Daniel Morel and Jane Regan of Wozo Productions provided the footage of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin referred to in this chapter. Louis Drouin’s final statement was published in Prosper Avril, From Glory to Disgrace: The Haitian Army, 1804-1994 (Parkland, FL: Universal Publishers, 1999). “Create Dangerously” Albert Camus’ lecture, which was delivered at the University of Uppsala in December 1957, is reprinted in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: Vintage International, 1995.) The Le Matin quotation is from Bernard Diederich and Al Burt, Papa Doc: The Truth about Haiti Today (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969). All Ralph Waldo Emerson quotations are from Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems, edited and with a foreword by Robert D. Richardson (New York: Bantam Classics, 1990). The Roland Barthes quotation “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” is from the essay “The Death of the Author” in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978) Translations from Dany Laferriere’s Je suis un ecrivain japonais (Paris: Grasset, 2008) and from Jan J. Dominique’s Memoire errante (Montreal: Memoire d’encrier, 2007) were done by me. The “We have still not had a death” quotation from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is from the Perennial Classics edition (New York: Harper, 1998). The Toni Morrison quotation paraphrased in this chapter is “What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company,” from Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture in literature delivered in Sweden on December 7, 1993, and printed in The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993 (New York: Knopf, 1994). The quotations from Albert Camus’ Caligula are from the book Caligula and Three Other Plays by Albert Camus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). The quotations from Alice Walker are from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1983).
Chapter 3. I Am Not a Journalist The Michele Montas quotation “I was no longer willing to go to another funeral” is from an interview with Bob Garfield for On the Media, a segment titled “Haiti’s Media Crisis,” March 14, 2003. For a better understanding of Jean Dominique and Michele Montas, see the documentary The Agronomist, directed by Jonathan Demme. The quotations from Memoire errante (Montreal: Memoire d’encrier, 2007) in this chapter and the others were translated by me.
Chapter 4. Daughters of Memory The quotations from Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy are from the translation by Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokur (New York: Modern Library, 2009). The quotation
