This is why I try to carve these stories into you dreams, so that you will not be deceived by birds and wolves who will want to make you and take you into the night... so that not only will you always remember the sound of my voice but yours as well. I tell you the story not even certain that you will know how to discern my voice, if you will stay silent or sing it back to me. But I have no choice but to tell you this story. It is all that I know. It is all that I have.
- Edwidge Danticat
I have been gone from Haiti now for one month and thirteen days. Upon my takeoff, which I viewed from a window seat in a strange emotionally exhausted, overcaffeinated, essentially confused state, the country waited for a final election result that would bring, at least temporarily, some satisfaction to the people.
But as I left, the matter remained unresolved. And so as I looked out for the last time in who knows how long at the broken streets teeming with people framed by the tree-stripped mountains, I thought back on a particular scene that will forever replay in my head.
We have been stranded in Kenscoff for 4 days. Normally, this wouldn't be such a bad thing, but today is a different matter. With the election trouble, the electricity has been even more sporadic for the last 3 days, so our showers are freezing with the mountain air and our only entertainment is an old checkerboard that neither of us wants to touch and irregular radio broadcasts (which I struggle to follow completely with my limited language comprehension). No one goes outside except for short walks to a friend's house. None of the boutiques, depots, or food stops in town have remained open. But even worse than the low level of activity at home has been the attitude that the trouble has created in the community. It's proved especially bad for my roomate, Jean Buteau. Unable to go to the bank, he has run out of money, and he is fed up with everything to do with his country. At night, we sit together, having just managed to find some food at a little house behind the road where they sell pâté. At the end of a difficult conversation, he repeats a similar refrain, the line he goes to when our electricity suddenly goes out or there are reports of trouble in town. "Ayiti," he says in his young but tired-sounding voice, his dark features shining in the candlelight, "se yon rév. It is a dream."
...
"It just seems so crazy.
"I was in Petionville on Friday, walking around with Job (he's a Haitian friend), and these kids come up to us, who I know because they want to be in our program. They greet me all amicably, then Job, both very shortly, and then we parted ways.
" 'One of those guys, he whispered something in my ear about you, which I want to tell you because we're good friends,' Job said to me. ' When you had your back turned talking to the other guy, he leaned in and told me that you are very powerful and can do many things to help people. Then he gave me a look and walked off.'
"I mean who are these people kidding? I'm 22 working for no money in a start-up NGO with capacity for 20 people. A lot of power? It's not even my program."
She, who has never been in Haiti, laughs slowly, and calmly reminds me that, "Given the situation, Chris, you do have a lot of power."
...
Riding through the countryside, I feel as if I could be viewing the early 20th century. Stone-faced farmers slice at their hillside plots while their wives cook rice over a coal fire and their children run naked through the yard.
A farmer shows me his palm-roofed house, a sturdy structure, but one that lets in rain during the wet season, making everyone and everything damp and miserable. Yet I cannot help myself from being fascinated that he has lived this way, in this time, for his whole life.
Ferel interrupts my thoughts, "In the United States, you wouldn't let your dog live in one of those things."
...
I am choking on the thick, disgusting smoke which blows up into my face, bringing tears to my eyes, but I refuse to take the cigar away from my face for more than a few seconds. A far more rancid set of smells awaits beyond the smoke.
I am in the city morgue, 10 minutes away from the country's center of government. The deceased men, women, and children are kept in no organized fashion, just strewn about a not-cold-enough freezer, left to decompose.
As I take in the smoke, rum, and singing while busying myself by putting little cloths on the deceased that we are taking to bury, the dizzying sights and sounds pass in a fray. In the midst of it all, I see a small hole in the old tin roof, a light peeking through and I think:
These battered remnants of life are the children of God.
...
I am in Jenny's farm house, listening to rhythmic drumming, a voodoo beat, I am informed. We are celebrating and mourning under the banner of endings and beginnings. And the band breaks into song, playing Yele.
Si ou gen zorey, tande
Si ou gen bouche, pale
If you have ears, listen
If you have mouth, speak
I smile, loving the music. OK, Clef. I will.
...
It is my second week in South Africa, and I have been thinking a lot about dreams. And I've been dreaming a lot about Ayiti. I am struggling to understand the disconnected vignettes that are my experiences in Ayiti; to link what seems like another lifetime to my reality in this new place. I look down at the floor of the District 6 museum and see a Langston Hughes poem:
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
And I remember the stories of my Haitian students, friends, and collegues, who fight seemingly insurmountable circumstances. Who at their worst feel like nothing and no one, but still get up and fight for their lives every day. And I dream of their success, their happiness, their freedom. And I will never forget.
M'ap vini
I'm coming
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