reread the stories we had already selected, fearing that such a cataclysmic event, which has so reshaped Haiti ’s physical and psychological landscape, would somehow render them all irrelevant. I was very glad to discover, upon reading them again, that this was not at all true. If anything, each story is now, on top of everything else, a kind of preservation corner, a snapshot of places that in some cases have been irreparably altered. (The fictional places, however, remain unchanged.)
The stories that frame the collection, and one story in the middle, do deal with the earthquake. (A portion of the profits will be donated to the Lambi Fund of Haiti, a grassroots organization working to strengthen civil society in Haiti.) The book opens with Patrick Sylvain’s “Odette,” which explores a community’s surprising reaction to an elder in the aftermath of the earthquake. In the middle we find Ibi Aanu Zoboi’s “The Harem,” which details an unusual arrangement for a man and his lovers. The book closes with Rodney SaintEloi’s hallucinatory “The Blue Hill,” which ends at 4:53 p.m. on January 12, 2010. The interesting thing is that many of the other bone-chilling, mind-blowing, and masterful stories in between could still take place in the Haiti of today. Noir indeed.
PART I.
ODETTE BY PATRICK SYLVAIN
The hum quickly gave in to the sound of a hundred tumbling oil drums. Then a morbid absence of sound. Odette lay there watching the shards and splattered chunks of grapefruit marmalade dotting the white linoleum floor of her house. A few seconds seemed like an eternity. There was no other way to say it. Could time even be measured anymore, in this new silent and fractured world?
When the crash came, her five-year-old granddaughter Rose watched her with an extraordinary intensity. It was as if at that very moment the child had inherited the gift that the women in her family had been known to have for generations. The gift of double sight. The child’s amber eyes narrowed and she let out a loud melodic scream that lasted the entire thirty-five seconds of the shaking. But then, like the rest of the world, she too fell silent.
Her daughter, the child’s mother, had the gift as well. But she had turned her back on it, joining a Protestant church that made her believe she was haunted by ghosts. Then, over time, Odette’s gift had faded. After her husband died and her daughter left, she no longer felt the desire to tell total strangers to be careful because she knew there was nothing they could do. There was fate and there was destiny. And there was nothing you could do to stop your star from diving from the heavens, if that’s what it wanted to do.
As the roar reverted to another prolonged hum, she heard a constant ringing deep in her ears and felt her eyes fill with dust. When she finally heard her granddaughter’s voice, it was very far and faint. As the child crawled toward her, she noticed that the girl’s bony little body was moving slowly. Odette’s mind and eyes faltered between light and dark. For a moment, she couldn’t figure out why the child was crawling toward her; nor could she grasp why she started feeling sparks in her spine and lower legs.
By the time the child’s soft, warm hands touched her face, and she noticed the girl’s tear-filled eyes, a valve seemed to be cutting off power to Odette’s brain. The silence and darkness were deepening, becoming shapeless. Then something seemed to stir inside her. Was she in water? Drowning? That’s what it felt like. She was drowning while listening to the sound of intermittent clicking. She tried to spit each grain of dust out of her mouth as though it were water, but she could not.
Her body was playing a strange orchestra. She hadn’t played classical music in the house since her daughter left to marry someone from that church-extra protection, they had convinced her daughter, against the ghosts. Leaving the child behind was part of that too. Her daughter had dreaded when that day would come for her own daughter, when the earth would seem to shake and she would pass out and wake up with her gifts. Except they had not been gifts to Odette’s only child. The entire world’s pains had become her own. She could not read or write or even listen to the classical music she loved without intruding voices.
“We were going to the beach,” Odette heard herself say. Before the earth began to shake, she and the child were standing in the kitchen eating bread covered with grapefruit marmalade and talking about taking a trip to the beach. They both loved going to the beach, especially since the child’s mother had left. Odette’s daughter used to love going to the beach too. There at the beach, between swims, they danced to the blasting konpa music of the other beachgoers’ boom boxes. The music, like everything else, was in their bodies. But now Odette couldn’t dance to it. Instead, waves of silence filled her. Her heart was pounding faster than normal. She wanted to scream but she couldn’t. She closed her eyes and felt the child’s hand on her face. The child’s voice still sounded far away. At moments she thought they were both still standing in the kitchen eating their sweet bread, sobbing. She closed her eyes again and clenched her teeth. Her body felt like it was being pricked by thousands of needles.
Her granddaughter’s voice became clear for a second. Then Odette saw what was pinning them both to the floor. A large cement beam the size of two kitchen chairs was on her lap and on the girl’s head. Her granddaughter was completely drenched with blood. It was like when they played “monster” and the child covered her entire body with a sheet. Odette wanted to tell the little girl that she loved her. She wanted to laugh and tease her about not being a convincing enough monster, but something stabbed her in her coccyx area and flushed her head once again with darkness. She envisioned herself walking on the beach with both her daughter and granddaughter while eating ripe mangoes. In her ancestral village in the southeast, they raced each other by a stream of red and violet flowers.
“We can’t get to the child,” she heard a voice say. It finally registered that the voices belonged to some men who were helping to pull her out from underneath the concrete.
“The child is in pieces,” she heard another say.
“Continue to be brave,” another said. “We’re going to get you out.”
While those voices were instructing her, the pain spread from the center of her back and rapidly shot up through her entire body. She was still unable to scream.
She would later remember being raised by many hands, then placed on the ground with a small cushion behind her head. When she reopened her eyes, multiple heads were standing in a dark circle over her. A car came: a black shiny 1970 Peugeot pulled by two muscular Andalusian horses. Horses? Where could horses go in a broken city? They would ride over the cobalt-blue ocean of her daughter and granddaughter’s favorite beaches and their perfectly spaced coconut and palm trees.
In the tent clinic, she smelled the rubbing alcohol as they poured it on the gashes on her leg, but she felt nothing. Around her, she heard people groaning and screaming, “M ap mouri!” I’m dying! It was as if they were all swimming in a pool of fire.
When she woke up from another bout of sleep, she was in a massive white tent surrounded by doctors speaking to each other in Spanish. She remembered the bright smile of one young girl-like her Rose, she couldn’t have been more than five years old-as she lifted her stumped left arm.
“Alone. Dementia,” she heard someone say. “But otherwise okay.”
Dust was still blanketing the kitchen where she lay. A brown angel whose white wings flapped high up in the breeze touched the back of her hand and said in a very assuring voice, “You’re lucky to be alive.”
After her daughter was born twenty-five years ago, driving home from the hospital, holding the baby in her arms in the back of her husband’s shiny black Peugeot, they had passed a bidonville in the middle of the city and she had thought of Hiroshima. The city she was being driven through now was like Hiroshima, the epic destruction reminding her of the World War II films her husband loved to watch. The National Palace ’s collapsed domes were like crushed camel humps; the National Police Headquarters compressed onto its blue and white walls. Thousands of desperate bodies were now sleeping on the streets, on bare concrete like stray dogs. Not sure where they were
