Does even plague have politics? Everything has politics. Political means could be used to prevent almost all deaths from childhood diarrhea. Diarrhea is spread by contaminated water. Public sanitation is, like personal security, national defense, and rule of law, one of the few valid reasons for politics to exist. Lowly, semicomic diarrhea kills 2,866,000 people a year worldwide, 2,474,000 of them children under the age of five. But celebrities aren’t wearing brown ribbons on their tuxedo lapels at the Academy Awards or marching down the Mall in Washington carrying signs reading DIARRHEA—IT CAN BE CONTAINED.
I went to the Washington headquarters of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), this hemisphere’s branch of WHO. I talked to Christopher J. Drasbek, PAHO’s “Regional Technical Officer, Expanded Program for the Control of Diarrheal Diseases.” Mr. Drasbek is one of those people who—with clumsy title, on modest salary, in an office shared by two other colleagues—accomplishes the actual good in the world.
Mr. Drasbek took time from the mounds of paperwork that accrue in any kind of good done in a bureaucracy (and also time, it occurred to me later, from his lunch hour) to tell me just how easily politics could rid the globe of 2,500,000 deaths.
“What would it cost,” I asked, “to clean up the world’s drinking-water supplies?”
“We don’t even have to do that,” said Mr. Drasbek. “All we need are Oral Rehydration Salts.” He pulled some foil packets out of a desk drawer. “These cost eight to ten cents apiece.” He explained that diarrhea kills by dehydration. The salts in the foil packet restore the body’s electrolyte balance, the degree of salinity in the body’s cells. Thus, the cells are able to retain fluid.
You mix one packet of the rehydration salts into a liter of clean water and get the patient to drink as much of the liquid as possible. This Oral Rehydration Therapy, or ORT, is given for as long as the diarrhea lasts. ORT alone, with no other treatment, is enough to prevent death from diarrhea, even from cholera. “Usually, to rehydrate a child, it takes two packets,” said Mr. Drasbek. In other words, between sixteen and twenty cents. So, for five hundred thousand dollars, 2,474,000 lives could be saved each year. This is about half the cost of a thirty-second Super Bowl advertising spot—an apt comparison, since Gatorade is more or less a commercial version of Oral Rehydration Therapy.
A packet of Oral Rehydration Salts contains glucose (corn sugar) to help the small intestine absorb the salts, sodium bicarbonate otherwise known as baking soda, a small amount of potassium chloride, and ordinary table salt. A homemade oral rehydration solution can be prepared by mixing eight level teaspoons of sugar or honey and half a teaspoon of salt in a liter of clean water. ORT is one of the unheeded medical miracles of the twentieth century. A dozen years ago there were over 5,000,000 annual childhood deaths from diarrhea.
But that still leaves enough dead kids every year to populate Kansas. What government is so politically screwed-up that it can’t get a little boiled sugar water and a pinch of salt to sick babies? Well, there’s Haiti. According to PAHO the average Haitian child has seven episodes of diarrhea a year and only a one-in-six chance of receiving Oral Rehydration Therapy.
I flew to Port-au-Prince on December 22, 1993. You’d expect the Christmas decorations in Haiti to be little Santas with pins in them. It’s been a long time since Saint Nick brought the Haitians much. And, in a deforested country undergoing an international oil embargo, even sticks and coal would look good in the stockings—if Haitians had socks. However, Haiti’s yuletide is greeted with the usual red and green gewgaws and tinsel festoons. Christmas trees are fashioned from the branches of Norfolk pines. JOYEUX NOËL is spelled out in Mylar letters. The radio plays reggae, calypso, and merengue covers of all the noted carols. And I didn’t see a doll with needle marks anywhere in the country.
Making figurines of one’s enemies and torturing these playthings has nothing to do with Haiti or voodoo. It is a piece of European superstition brought to the New World by those mysterious savages the French. Haiti has no need for such elaborate fancy goods of evil. Sturdy, utilitarian forms of wrong are readily available—the city water system, for instance.
For most Haitians the only source of water is a public well or tap. Downtown Port-au-Prince is served by one slimy concrete outdoor sink, a sort of horse trough with faucets. Here water is available only between eight p.m. and five in the morning. The women and girls carry it home in five-gallon plastic buckets. That’s forty-some pounds of water balanced on the heads of people who don’t weigh much more than that themselves. And they’re carrying it through unlit streets.
These streets are heaped with trash as high as the women’s bucket tops. A long mound of putrefying dreck will stretch for a block to an intersection, then turn the corner and continue for half a block more—a giant disposable traffic island. Not that it gets disposed of. According to the Pan American Health Organization, as of June 1993, Port-au-Prince had twelve garbage trucks in running condition. This to collect an estimated sixteen thousand tons of solid waste produced daily in the capital. Every now and then the locals try to burn the refuse, but the result is a parody of the North American landfill debate—biodegradability versus incineration. In Haiti’s climate everything is biodegradable. And the ooze of tropical rot defeats the fires. The trash piles stay just as large, with guttering flames adding a new stench to the miasma.
I saw two of the twelve garbage trucks. One was parked downtown, and garbage men were behind it with shovels. The first garbage man would scoop a load of filth and dump it at the feet of the next garbage man who would pass it to another. There was no garbage in the truck. The Metropolitan Solid Waste Collection Service occupied a modernistic gray and white building with expanses of tinted glass. A long row of truck garages was attached. Here another, very clean, garbage truck was parked on a wide, smooth asphalt driveway. The Collection Service’s building was spotless, the grounds were tidy, and, at two-fifteen on a Tuesday afternoon, nobody was there.
I’d been in Haiti for about six hours when I gave up the idea of investigating infant diarrhea or Third World sanitation or medical care in underdeveloped nations. Haiti was too far gone in entropy. Investigating public health, when the public obviously didn’t have any, left me nothing but that public to investigate. If the politics of disease are to be understood, particularly in the dreadful countries where this understanding is most needed, then the politics of total collapse have to be understood first. You can boil the water, but how do you boil history, social structure, economics, and religion?
And, as it is with disease, so it is with hunger, crowding, pollution, hatred, poverty, and so on. All these problems are knotted and tangled together. Haiti is as good a name as any for the snarl.
I took the long list that I’d made of health experts and government officials and NGO directors I’d meant to interview and put it in the glove compartment of my rented Jeep. My driver and translator, Dumarsais, asked, “Who do you want to go talk to?”
“Let’s just drive around,” I said.
The mystery of Port-au-Prince’s trash heaps is that there are so many really immense holes in Port-au-Prince’s streets. Putting one into another would create a certain leveling, at least, if not sanitation.
The streets and roads of Haiti are so bad that they almost seem to have been made so on purpose. The mere dragging and scraping of axles and undercarriages should lower some of the great humps, and chunks of disintegrating vehicles should fill a few of the ruts. “Haitian roads are a free massage,” said Dumarsais.
Maybe there are deconstructionist road crews who go out at night and wreck the macadam, gangs in the pay of the Port-au-Prince spare parts and car repair industry. But I don’t think so. Several long and exceptionally dirty blocks of the capital are given over to shade tree mechanics (minus the shade and the trees). It’s difficult to tell their wares from plain scrap metal and harder to decide whether the autos they’re hammering on are being put back together or beaten apart. We needed a new gas cap for the Jeep. Numerous experts came forward offering fittings ranging in size from a hubcap to a thimble, and one proffered the top of a juice bottle.
Or perhaps Haiti has guerrilla organizations so impoverished that they cannot lay hands on guns, bombs, or even knives and are reduced to terrorizing the establishment with shovels. The pavement in front of the very house of Lieutenant General Raoul Cédras, head of Haiti’s military junta, had been torn up, leaving a dusty and rock-strewn gap in his suburban street. (The house was an unprepossessing stucco villa in the hills above Port-au-Prince, identifiable only by a large number of soldiers standing, decidedly not at attention, outside its gate.)
During the time I was in Haiti, Haitians were blaming such things as lousy water and roads on the international embargo. The embargo had been instituted the year before in an attempt to return elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. But, looking around Port-au-Prince, it’s evident that lousiness is nothing new. The oldest buildings are wooden frame structures out of a New Orleans French Quarter attacked by termites instead of decorators. These houses are so rotted and gaping they seem to be wayward theatrical sets, held up by concealed props and guy wires. The newer buildings are random jumbles of concrete covered in battered signs: AVE MARIA DRY CLEANERS, SKYLAB ICE CREAM, SACRED HEART ART & SNACK, SUPER MARRIAGE NUMBERS BANK. The storefronts were brightly colored once, maybe, but now are wholly grimy, like Kandinskys painted in the dirt.
The waterfront is an idle mess. Most of the docks are too rickety to hold a middle-size reporter. The harbor is a slough of wet rubbish. The ocean itself is stained the color of tea-bag seepage. Everything is worn-out. The tap-taps, the little buses made from pickup trucks, are exuberantly so—covered with chipped decorations, dented ornaments, and scratched-up paintings and slogans. The open-air markets are woefully so—filled with more crud and dust than goods. The people are in between—always hail-fellow-well-met and as carefully dressed and laundered as circumstances allow but tired, frayed, and thin.
Little cheerless cement houses of the lesser bourgeoisie are scattered haphazardly up the hillsides. They all have high walls with broken glass embedded in the tops or, sometimes, upended conch shells. The streets, empty lots, and open spaces of even the better neighborhoods are spread with trash.
The downtown parks are weed-grown and deeply littered, the railings knocked over, the statues of the heroes oxidized to the indistinctness of lead soldiers and dripping with pigeon muck. The only clean thing in the city center was the empty presidential palace, a mediocre beaux arts design in the middle of ample, well-tended grounds. A single chrome kitchen chair sat unaccountably on the lawn.
Dumarsais and I went to buy fuel at the gasoline black market, which was hardly clandestine. Sales were conducted by the side of Boulevard Harry Truman down the street from the Haitian Chamber of Commerce. Gas from open 55-gallon oil barrels was sloshed into cans, buckets, and plastic washbasins. All purchases guaranteed filtered through a dirty cloth. It was the only place in the country where I didn’t see people smoking. One of the customers was a police officer in a squad car, and he seemed to be paying full price. In Haiti even corruption is inefficacious.
I spoke to an outbound American missionary couple at the Port-au-Prince airport, nice people from my native corner of Ohio. The wife talked about Haitian boat people. “I’d float out of here on a matchstick if that’s the only chance I thought I had.” She and her husband were cheerfully headed to Uganda.
As for plague, the whole of Haiti is a disease vector—of physical, mental, and moral illnesses.
On the night after Christmas in an alley of Cité Soleil, Port-au-Prince’s largest slum, one Issa Paul was murdered, presumably by supporters of Haiti’s exiled president. The next night the same alley was set afire, presumably by supporters of the junta that exiled Aristide. Paul was a member of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, or FRAPH, pronounced like the French word for hitting somebody. FRAPH does the bidding of the Haitian military. Cité Soleil is a center of enthusiasm for Aristide. A good-size chunk of Cité Soleil burned down.
Cité Soleil has become a squalor chestnut in the U.S. media. It is more crowded, needy, and pathetic than other places most American journalists have been, not counting singles bars in the 1970s. Whenever something awful is happening in Haiti (and something awful always is), we are given a description of this vast shantytown built on the mud flats of Port-au-Prince Bay where 150,000 people, give or take a zillion, live in a kind of poverty the news always describes as “abject.” Considering America’s treatment of Haitian boat people, the cliché is too appropriate: abject, from abjectus, Latin for “thrown out.” The reporters tell us how the residents of Cité Soleil swim in mire when it rains and choke in dust when it doesn’t and go hungry in either case. Then we are treated to a reflection on the irony of the place-name “Sun City.”
“Cité Soleil” is not ironic. After the ouster of dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the name of the slum was changed to honor Radio Soleil, the Catholic station instrumental in Baby Doc’s fall. Baby Doc’s father, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, built Cité Soleil in the 1960s and named it after his own wife: Cité Simone. That was ironic.
Cité Soleil is not the worst slum in the world. A lot of people around the globe live this way. Cité Soleil is about as bad as parts of Dhaka or Rio, better than all of Mogadishu, and, although South Central Los Angeles is more attractive looking, I have walked through Cité Soleil at three in the morning and been bothered by nothing worse than my conscience. But, in another way, all Third World slums are more terrible than the CNN videotapes can make them out to be. You can’t smell television.
Cité Soleil is low, muddled, close-set, overpeopled, and made from such an oddment stew of cast-off materials that, at first, the eye registers nothing but confusion. The smells are what’s clear: sweat, shit, piss, puke, rotting offal, burning rubbish, spoiled cooking oil, rancid fry-fire smoke, kerosene vapors, cheap cigarette fumes, the bad breath of diseased teeth, and the body odor of lesions and sores all underlain with something more subtle, something with a scent reminiscent of Watergate.
Even for a government project, Cité Soleil is a horror. There are no water pipes to speak of, no sewers at all, only a few electrical wires, and the oil embargo has given the military an excuse for not running electricity through them. There isn’t so much as a latrine or an outhouse in Cité Soleil. When I went there a few days before the fire, the first thing I smelled was an open area in the midst of the hovels, about half an acre heaped in ordure and slime and dotted with squatting kids. “This is where people go to crap,” said Dumarsais. “The children go in the daytime, the grown people at night.” Goats and pigs were nibbling in the excrement as they nibble in all such piles of waste in Haiti, and it certainly moves one in a vegetarian direction when goat or pig is on the menu.
Cité Soleil was laid out with a few main roads running perpendicular to the bay. The roads are on causeways of rubble and fill. Between and below them, housing was constructed in the mud. The building material was cement block and the design inspiration was horse sheds of the less spacious kind. The old historic homes of Cité Soleil are long rows of three-walled cubicles perhaps ten feet square with no windows, doors, or chimneys, unless you count the missing fourth wall as one of each. Around these hovels, worse hovels grew up, tiny shacks made of anything that will stand or lay flat—packing-crate staves, lengths of pipe, plywood scraps, cardboard, the tin from gallon cans. The siding of one residence is the wallpaper of the next. The space between the dwellings, when there’s any at all, is so narrow that walking must be done in a tango slide.
It is as though thousands and thousands of kids have all built forts on the same vacant lot—the raggediest kids ever on the worst vacant lot you can picture. And they’ve gotten their parents to come play, too. By which I mean, Cité Soleil, though remarkably bad, is also remarkably cheerful, noisy, and welcoming.
Haitians are not, of course, simple, happy folk who don’t notice misery the way we would. But pulling a long face and railing at fate (or Americans—and the two can be hard to distinguish in these parts) isn’t the fashion in Haiti.
However, at 7:30 on the morning after the fire, Cité Soleil was no longer cheerful, though still noisy. An area about the size of three football fields had burned, leaving perhaps a thousand people hovel-less and an indeterminate number dead. The only thing left of the nothing these people had owned was the corrugated metal of the hut roofs. Young men were collecting the tin sheets and piling them together with a racket like a high school theater group’s attempt to make thunder sound effects offstage. Two hysterical women and one crippled old lady sat in the smoldering ash. A little girl held a burned baby doll (with absolutely no pins in it). Dumarsais found me someone who could speak English.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he, probably wisely, said.
People were picking through the debris. Some had found charred pop bottles. They might be able to get the deposits back. One woman had the very sensible idea of gathering armloads of the ruins and selling them as charcoal.
Cité Soleil is grossly flammable. The more so because the drivers of Port-au-Prince’s tap-taps live there. Since the embargo, the tap-tap drivers have been squirreling supplies of gasoline in their homes. The whole slum should have burned to the ground. But, in Haiti, nothing works right.
A Port-au-Prince radio station gave a Christmas concert. The music was admirable. The staging was clever. But the cash bar didn’t even have a horizontal surface. Refreshments were served circle tag–style from the middle of a crowd of thirsty audience members by a woman with a cigar box full of change, a man with a bottle, another man with several plastic cups, and a third man with a table knife and a block of ice. Whenever the woman was cornered, the man with the bottle had been tackled elsewhere. When the bottle was seized, the cups had escaped. By the time a cup had been nabbed I found myself on the extreme outskirts of the crowd and had to reenter the scrum to get back to the woman with the cigar box. I finally achieved a nearly complete drink only to be caught out by the man with the ice, a hockey puck–size chunk of which splashed all my liquor on the ground.
Getting on my plane to Haiti in New York, the sound of “We will begin pre-boarding …” was drowned by the trampling of Haitians, all of them aware of the probable fate of checked luggage in the Port-au-Prince airport and therefore toting their complete movable possessions and some major appliances as hand baggage. More than an hour later a stewardess was still standing at the aircraft’s forward bulkhead, with her hairpins come loose and her face the shade of raspberry yogurt, holding the intercom phone in a World Wrestling Federation grip and shouting repeatedly, “The-captain-cannot-take-off-until-all-carry-on-items-have-been …”
The grandiose Louis-Napoleon-style building of Haiti’s Department of Agriculture is half burned down. Haitians—who, like most people having a hard time, are fond of the fantastic—say the army burned it to destroy records of illegal atomic-waste dumping done by foreign governments in Haiti. But a foreigner has more humdrum suspicions concerning, perhaps, fire hydrants which only work after eight p.m.
At a New Year’s Eve party in the Oloffson Hotel, midnight slipped by without the band noticing or anyone exclaiming, “Happy New Year!”
The military junta’s effort to win the hearts and minds of Haiti’s citizens consisted of suddenly, on January 1, changing the name of Cité Soleil back to Cité Simone. Replacing the street names was more than the army could handle. But the Cité Soleil tap-taps were supposed to put Cité Simone signs on their roofs. I saw one tap-tap with a brick-shaped hole in its windshield and a “Cité Simone” placard so hastily done the paint was still wet. I asked the driver what had happened, and he said, as the man at the fire had, that he didn’t know. But another tap-tap driver claimed one of the army’s plainclothes goons, or “attachés,” had said—referring to President Aristide or the Cité Soleil fire or maybe to everything in general—“What you like is gone, so the name is changed.”
“Nothing sounds stupid here,” said a left-wing French priest in a Chicago Bulls T-shirt who had just finished telling me a very stupid story about how multinational corporations choose the president of the United States and the Pentagon employs twenty million people.
The only orderly thing I saw on the Port-au-Prince streets was a neat and level line of bullet holes down the side of an automobile, and these had been also to no avail. The car was in running order and waiting in line to get gas.
In the wealthy suburb of Pétion-Ville, anti-American graffito appeared, aptly mispunctuated: FUCK US.
Even rudeness doesn’t work in Haiti. I went to the Iron Market, a city block–size shed of steel beams and sheet metal, a tinker’s and tinsmith’s Carnegie Hall. It was from here that Haiti’s tourists used to bring home mahogany carvings of surpassing insipidity and garish canvases showing improbable congregations of addled-looking jungle animals. The tourists were gone but plenty of people were still on hand to pester them. An insistent young man named Jesse laid hold of me. He claimed great powers as an interpreter, purchasing agent, porter, and general factotum, and he could probably cook and take Pitman shorthand. I told him to buzz off. “Be nice to me,” said Jesse, with perfect frankness. “Someone else will just come along and bother you.” Dozens were waiting to do so.
Jesse led me through a Minotaur’s palace of handicrafts. The awful tourist stuff was there but with no one but the tourists to blame for it winding up in American dens and rec rooms. A hundred kinds of wonderful things were also for sale—coarse Mardi Gras masks, fine embroidery, cheerful little painted wooden boxes, large solemn polished wooden trays, beautiful tortoiseshell bracelets that U.S. Customs will confiscate, and silhouettes of strange voodoo spirits cut from the flattened sides of oil drums which will show up clearly on your baggage X-rays and scare the hell out of airport security personnel. Haiti’s abstract soapstone sculptures could give a refresher course to Henry Moore, if he weren’t dead. Among the dross of mahogany figurines were individual pieces as well whittled as netsuke. The excellence of the palm-frond weaving made Baby Doc’s old nickname “Baskethead” seem almost a compliment. Handsome goatskin rugs were spread across the Iron Market’s floor (although these were best appreciated with the ocular rather than olfactory sense). Furniture was available, too, clunky enough to be called fashionable country pine in Elle Decor, but better made and cheaper. For eight chairs and a dining room table long enough to bowl duckpins on, the kickoff bargaining price was $750.
I tipped Jesse, and Dumarsais took me to a gallery owned by Issa El Saiëh, whose family, in an example of frying pan/fire emigration, had come to Haiti from Palestine. A thousand paintings were for sale in what had once been a living room, dining room, and sun porch. Issa had portraits with the wide-eyed, startled, straight-ahead impact captured usually only on driver’s licenses. He had historical scenes executed with masterful-but-crude technique as though the French academic school had used house-painting brushes. There were Edenic landscapes of a Haiti so unlike the real thing that it hurt worse to see them than to look at Cité Soleil. The pictures of voodoo spirits or saints, the loas, made surrealism so much Hallmark sympathy-card art. And the animal paintings appeared to be illustrations for fables Aesop thought it best not to tell.
Issa told me about the various painters, how one hung in New York’s Metropolitan Museum, another was collected by a Rockefeller, a third had just sold out an exhibit in Switzerland. One painter seemed to have been strongly influenced by Henri Rousseau. “You know, I have to laugh when people say things like ‘strongly influenced by Henri Rousseau,’” said Issa. “This is Haiti. That guy’s never seen a Henri Rousseau or had a chance to. You know what influenced him? Tarzan. Go to his studio and you’ll see stacks and stacks of Tarzan comics.”
There was another painter I particularly liked, an impressionist who used such large blocks of pigment that the effect was almost of cubism, who had Gauguin’s colors and a deft use of heavy black line like Rouault. “Oh, that’s the janitor,” said Issa. “Give him five bucks.”
I couldn’t see Issa’s gallery or the Iron Market, and then think Haitians were lazy or in any way slow thinking. Even the tap-tap buses bespoke acuity and gumption in their tags and slogans.
I WANT TO BE
I WANT TO BE FREE
BACK TO REALITY
WELCOME TO AIR
AMI DE TRAVAIL
THAT’S WONDERFUL
CRY FREEDOM
OZONE
EXODE 14:14 (referring to the Bible verse “The Lord will fight for you, and you need only to be still.”)
All over the city I saw signs: COLLEGE DESCARTES, COLLEGE PYTHAGORAS, COLLEGE ALBERT EINSTEIN, COLLEGE ISAAC NEWTON, TWO-WAY ENGLISH SCHOOL, and COLLEGE MIXTE ALPHA—VERITABLE CENTRE DE FORMATION INTELLECTUELLE—ORDRE DISCIPLINE SUCCES.
Haiti is not screwed-up because Haitians are screwed-up. Haitians are courteous. “Accident do for everything,” said the waiter when I let loose an oafish gesture and knocked the sugar bowl halfway across my hotel’s dining room.
Haitians are funny. When journalists rushed to Haiti in the fall of 1993 to cover reaction to the Governors Island Accord that was supposed to put Aristide back in power, the staff of the Port-au-Prince Holiday Inn took a look at the reporters and posted a sign in the lobby: OUR EVENING DRESS CODE HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED IN HONOR OF OUR FRIENDS IN THE MEDIA.
And Haitians are law abiding, when there is law to abide. Along the unmarvelous sidewalks of the Rue des Miracles, dozens of moneychangers stood with large wads of U.S. dollars in hand. “I’d like to see someone try that in New York City,” said Dumarsais, who once lived in Brooklyn.
“Is there much crime in Haiti?” I asked.
“Why would we have crime in Haiti?” said Dumarsais. “We have the police and the army to do that for us.”
The headquarters of that army is a modest two-storied, balconied affair sitting cater-cornered from the Presidential Palace. It looks colonial, which makes sense since the Haitian army is a sort of colonial occupying force, though with nothing to occupy but its own country. The parade ground consists of a parking lot, and security is provided by a few very slack sentries, or maybe these are just soldiers standing around the front door.
A public waiting room, which seemed to have a lot of wives or girlfriends in it, is separated from the offices of the high command by a glass half-wall partition less elaborate than that which protects an American liquorstore clerk. I was ushered inside by, of all things, a Canadian, Lynn Garrison, honorary consul of the Republic of Haiti.
Garrison is convinced that the military is misunderstood and that Aristide is a commie nut. Both of which may be true. Whether that means the military is any better than we think or Aristide any worse than what usually governs Haiti, I can’t say. Personally, I’ve always thought the Haitians made a mistake not going communist. Look how well escapees from Cuba are treated by the U.S. The Haitians also made a mistake being black. Look how well escapees from British journalism are treated by the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Anyway, it’s too late now for Haiti to become part of the Red Menace.
Garrison led me upstairs to a sitting room with French windows opening to the second-floor balcony. On that balcony was a crèche. Mary, Joseph, and Jesus looked American. Garrison pointed at the parking lot. “Schoolchildren,” he said, “come here after dark to read their textbooks under the streetlamps.”
Garrison made his case against Aristide, calling the little priest a symptom of the absurd expectations Haitians have about changes in government. After the fall of the Duvaliers in 1986, he claimed, there were crowds in the streets shouting, “We’ve had democracy for seven days—where’s the food, where’s the jobs?” (Which didn’t sound so absurd to a reporter who’s covered U.S. presidential elections.) And Garrison accused Aristide of complicity in the horrible reprisals against Duvalier supporters. This may be fair. In 1993 the New York Review of Books, not noted for its right-wing politics, ran three articles of Homeric length about Aristide. The author, Mark Danner, was largely praiseful but also described Aristide’s constituents killing Duvalierists by “necklacing” them—shoving old car tires down over their shoulders to pin their arms to their sides and then setting them on fire.
Their remains were left lying in the sun to be further abused, or in some cases their charred corpses were paraded through the streets like war trophies.
Then Danner recounted an interview with Aristide.
“I stood and marveled at the justice of the people,” Father Aristide told me as he sat in his church that March … He smiled patiently at my surprise, and at the inevitable question: How could he, a priest, call such acts “justice”? … “One must know when to look at the acts of the people and judge them as a psychologist, not as a priest,” he replied, and then, a bit more heatedly, “Our consciences should be clear.”
Garrison made his case for the army, calling them the “only structural element that can do anything in the country,” though the single example he gave of a thing they had done was the approval of some tree planting by an international organization. Anyway, “only element that can do anything” is the excuse always given for uniformed bully boys in the Third World. Never mind that since independence Haiti hasn’t been in a real war with anyone except the Dominican Republic and hasn’t fought at all since 1855, if you don’t count battling the 1915–1934 American occupation, which was done by Haitian peasants, not the army. But then Garrison told me something that really was illuminating, something that explained the whole relationship between armed might and corruption in Haiti. Full colonels in the Haitian army are paid 5,000 gourdes a month, U.S. $417. Enlisted men make 83 bucks.
The public moralists at Americas Watch issued a report in February 1993 detailing rights violations by Haiti’s military. In a long list of harassments, injustices, beatings, and occasional murders, one item caught the eye as painfully typical. It seems that most of Haiti’s pigs had to be slaughtered in the early 1980s because of an outbreak of African swine fever. Various international aid agencies have been trying to rebuild the ham population ever since—teaching pork-chop husbandry, providing adopt-a-piglet services for rural cooperatives, and so forth. Said Americas Watch: “Soldiers … took advantage of their new power after the coup to steal pigs from peasant groups … In [the town of “X”], a soldier [named “Y”] was the worst offender … he came home from the capital a few days after the coup firing his gun into the air. He got some friends together and they stole a pig to feast upon. In the following days [Y] and his group stole more than 60 pigs in [X]. This encouraged other military supporters to steal pigs.”
I was in X myself and the area did seem pigless, also politicized. The head of an aid agency in Port-au-Prince had told me pig distribution was being broken up by the military, lest it somehow lead to rural insurrection. “Every time they see a pig,” said the agency head, “they think there is a group of peasant organizers near.” An aid worker in X confirmed this, saying, “Whenever anyone is working directly with peasants he or she is suspected by the authorities.” Not that those suspects weren’t pretty far gone in political paranoia themselves. Someone else in X told me the whole swine-fever episode had been a plot by American pig monopolies.
Haitians aren’t screwed-up, but everything political, intellectual, and material around them is. Even so, some Haitians have molded comfort and success from this poor clay. I was surprised to see a Jaguar sedan in Port-au-Prince, surprised because most of Haiti’s rich drive Range Rovers, the roads being what they are. Enough of these rich exist to people the fancy suburb of Pétion-Ville, five miles into the mountains from downtown. Reasonably fancy suburb, anyway. While some of the houses are very large, none could be said to be distinguished. And none could be said to be attached to a sewage system either.
The bars on the windows of the houses in Pétion-Ville are very attractive—elaborate scrollwork lattices. Similar filigrees, called vèvè, are used in voodoo ceremonies to represent the loas. The designs are drawn on the floor of the voodoo temple with flour, coffee, ashes, or even gunpowder to invoke a loa’s power. Some scholars of voodoo trace the vèvès back to the Dahomey, or to the Arawak tribes who occupied pre-Columbian Haiti. Others claim the vèvès derive from eighteenth-century French embroidery motifs, china patterns, and wrought iron.
Many of the residents of Pétion-Ville are mulattoes. Haiti has a history of race warfare, not between blacks and whites—because the whites all fled or were killed at independence—but between blacks and mulattoes. Under French rule many mulattoes were freedmen, often rich and educated. The mulattoes owned slaves themselves, and blacks haven’t forgotten it. Since Haiti became a free country mulattoes have dominated the nation’s economy and often pulled its political wires, and blacks haven’t forgotten this either. Meanwhile Haiti’s only sustained contact with whites was an invasion by U.S. Marines and an even more devastating—through the introduction of AIDS alone—invasion by tourists and charity givers. Yet Haiti is integrated in a way not seen in the United States except in soft-drink television commercials.
At the radio station Christmas party, every skin shade possible was represented from sable to much lighter than my purple Irish sunburn. And the music was multicultural enough to baffle David Byrne. Wispy little French cabaret songs were sung in a big American way by someone who looked like Nat King Cole. “White Christmas” and “Silent Night” were crooned in the Gaulic manner by Maurice Chevalier’s double. Then came RAM, a Haitian voodoo rock band led by an American, Richard Morse, who owns the Oloffson Hotel. RAM is so diverse, it has a song on the Philadelphia movie soundtrack.
The New Year’s Eve party at the Oloffson was more eclectic yet. Mulatto businessmen and industrialists came with their pale-skinned wives; so did members of the black elite, whose families rose to wealth through the government and armed forces. There were embassy personnel in the crowd, aid workers, journalists, wandering hipsters, artists, musicians, regular and irregular Haitians of all kinds, even an absurdly dressed group of French holidaymakers, the seeming victims of a very shady travel agency.
Since Graham Greene set his novel of Papa Doc terror, The Comedians, there in 1966, the Oloffson has been an emblem of everything that is strange, gothic, incomprehensible, and outré about Haiti, although nothing else in the country resembles it. The Oloffson is a meandering white folly of Victorian gimcrack covered in hundreds of layers of paint, all the paint missing from everything else in Port-au-Prince. It’s built into the side of a hill, so that the back of its ballroom is the face of a cliff. The names of various famous people who have stayed there are inscribed on the hotel room doors: IRVING STONE, LILLIAN HELLMAN, ANNE BANCROFT, and, too rightly, CHARLES ADDAMS.
RAM, of course, performed again. Richard Morse was dressed in khaki with a military officer’s cap and a big cigar. Except for his ponytail and normally shaped face, Morse looked a good deal like Haiti’s de facto dictator General Raoul Cédras. RAM played a song that has caused the band political trouble. One radio station was shut down for broadcasting it. “You’re just playing this same song over and over,” the soldiers told the station manager (a kind of armed playlist criticism with which Top 40 listeners can, in a way, sympathize). Translated from the Creole, the offending lyrics are: “I only have one son/And he’s been forced to leave the country.” At the back of the crowd a natty gentleman in a very good suit was standing on a chair, digging the tune. Dumarsais told me this was the richest man in Haiti.
Are Haiti’s wealthy the cause of its disease and anguish? Are they just bloodsuckers, sweat jobbers, and bums on the plush? Doubtless some are. And maybe some are only making a living. Are they in cahoots with the military? As if they have a choice. Armed partnership negotiation is at least as effective as armed music reviewing. Anyway, sharing the wealth is not going to solve Haiti’s problems. With a $370 annual per capita GNP, every Haitian would wind up with … $370.
Maybe Haiti is really not screwed-up at all. If we take the longest possible view of human existence—which allows us to ignore such unpleasant details as life and death—Haiti is normal. Haitians live the way the great majority of people have lived throughout history, like the cattle of stronger men. Haiti has an unwritten Bill of Rights (no matter, since only 35 percent of Haitians can read) to the effect of “Who can, may.” The government exists solely to benefit the governors. The enforcement of law consists of force only. The elite is divorced from its fellow countrymen and feels the same responsibility toward the other party that, after a divorce, most of us feel. In a society where commonweal does not exist, there are no duties, only exactations to be avoided, and no freedoms, only privileges to be grabbed. There can be no such thing as “public services” because nothing in the country is truly public. Everything is somebody’s fief. And every fief must be exploited if the exploiter cares to survive. Haiti is so dangerous and unstable that loyalties to clan and alliances for power have to take precedence over civic virtue. Anyway, how can civic virtue exist without civis? The votes of Haitians count for nothing. Their labors go for naught. And the entire business of their nation, from colonial times to the present, has been conducted in French, a language 90 percent of Haitians don’t understand. Haitians are no more citizens in their own country than Anglo-Saxons in Norman England, helots in Sparta, or Republicans in Chicago.
So how did Haiti get to be so normal? The French settled on the western end of Hispaniola in 1641 in an attempt to quell—or get in on—Caribbean pirate activity. The French soon discovered that Saint-Domingue, as they called their colony, was better suited to sugarcane growing than plank walking. By the late eighteenth century Saint-Domingue was exporting 177 million pounds of sugar a year. Its commerce with the mother country made up a third of all French foreign trade and provided the single greatest source of French government revenue. Saint-Domingue was counted the richest colonial possession in the world.
The trouble was that sugar plantations required large numbers of unhappy people. Growing sugarcane is miserable labor done in a wretched climate. Tending, carting, and pressing the cane, boiling down the molasses, and refining the sugar are all hard work. And harvesting the cane is a nightmare business of stooping through a tropical marsh swinging a machete and making snakes and rats mad.
To harvest enough sugarcane to make a few bottles of rum, the way the ribereños do in the Amazon, is one thing. But to harvest enough to make 177 million pounds of sugar, and for someone else’s profit, is another matter entirely. No one in his right mind wants to work on a sugar plantation. The SDS types who joined the Venceremos Brigades to help Castro with his cane harvests in the 1960s are living testimony. Thus slaves were imported to Haiti, and a lot of them. By the time of the French Revolution, Saint-Domingue was estimated to have a population of 32,000 white people; 24,000 freedmen, mostly mulattoes; and 480,000 slaves. This was as many slaves as there were in the entire thirteen colonies during our own Revolution, and in a country the size of Maryland.
For Saint-Domingue, the first steps on the road to liberty were not exactly a freedom march. In 1789, after the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the white planters grew frightened that the new National Assembly in France might grant the vote to mulattoes or even abolish slavery. They convened a Colonial Assembly in order to declare themselves to have no political rights whatsoever. They claimed to be under direct rule of the king. This set off a slave rebellion, which set off another rebellion by mulattoes, who claimed loyalty to the National Assembly. The mulattoes fought both the Colonial Assembly and the slaves.
In 1792 the government of France sent a civil commission to Saint-Domingue to straighten out this mess. One of the commission members was a Jacobin named Sonthonax who dismissed the Colonial Assembly, quarreled with the National Assembly loyalists, infuriated the governor general, got on the wrong side of the army garrison, and ended up siding with the rebel slaves.
Sonthonax, in a good move, considering who his allies were, announced the end of slavery. The blacks left the plantations. The whites left the country. And such chaos ensued that even some of the slave rebellion’s leaders, among them Toussaint L’Ouverture, deserted to the Spanish troops who had invaded from the other side of the island. Then the British invaded, too. And at this point—though I have been back and forth through Haitian histories a number of times—I lose count of how many people were fighting each other.
In 1794 Toussaint L’Ouverture redeserted to the French governor general’s side. Toussaint was a freed slave of minor education and unimposing looks, but he possessed that military genius which seems to come to men sometimes out of nowhere, as it did to Spartacus and Sam Nunn. Toussaint chased away the Spanish immediately, expelled the last of the British in 1798, and used political maneuver to rid himself of Sonthonax and the remaining powerful whites. He then defeated the mulattoes, killing some of their leaders and exiling the rest. By 1801 Toussaint was in complete control of Haiti.
And he didn’t know what to do.
Given Haiti’s economy and the lack of skills and sophistications among its inhabitants, the only recourse seemed to be to put people back to work on the plantations. This Toussaint did by means of forced labor, although now the workers were supposed to be entitled to a share of estate proceeds, and they were, of course, theoretically free.
Perhaps this policy would have created stability and prosperity sufficient to allow Haiti to evolve into a veritable Arkansas of the Antilles. But the world’s other resident military genius from out of nowhere, Napoleon, decided on reconquest in 1802.
The commander of the French invasion, General Leclerc, brought along his wife, Napoleon’s extremely annoying sister Pauline. Leclerc was thus eager to spend as much time as possible out campaigning. He overran Haiti in a few months and nabbed Toussaint. Then Napoleon made the mistake of reinstituting slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique. Haitians could take a hint. All hell broke loose.
By December 1803 the French had been driven from the country. Of the forty-three thousand troops Napoleon sent to Haiti, thirty-five thousand had died, most, including Leclerc, from—speaking of the political aspects of disease—yellow fever or malaria. Toussaint was also killed, in a tropics-to-temperate-zone exchange of ills, by pneumonia in a French prison cell. Independence was declared on New Year’s Day, 1804, by Toussaint’s lieutenant Jean-Jacques Dessalines. He stood on the beach at Gonaïves and tore the white stripe out of the French tricolor and had the remaining sections sewn together to create the Haitian flag. Then he massacred the French whites who had been stupid enough to remain in Haiti during all of the foregoing.
Dessalines, like Toussaint before him, could think of nothing to do with Haiti but return it to the plantation system. Haitians were not pleased with Dessalines’s decision. An enlisted man shot him.
In 1807 Haiti was divided between an illiterate ex-slave military commander, Henri Christophe—who crowned himself Emperor Henri I in the North—and a French-educated mulatto, Alexandre Pétion—who made himself the president of a republic in the South. Christophe continued the tradition of absolute rule and plantation service. Pétion had liberal ideas about franchise rights, land reform, and teaching agricultural methods by example. Here was an experiment to see which system of government would best benefit the Haitian people.
Neither.
Christophe invented a nobility for his fellow army officers—Comte de Limonade and Duc de la Marmelade among the titles. Everybody else got to live under the feudal peonage that Europe had just spent a thousand years getting rid of. Christophe grew nasty, paranoid, and self-indulgent, as those who possess an excess of power invariably seem to do. Haitians who could, fled to the more lenient regime of Pétion. Meanwhile Christophe spent the wealth from the plantations of his little empire on knee breeches, gilt furniture, and royal carriages from Europe; on the huge, carelessly named Sans Souci palace; and on a string of cyclopean fortifications. The largest still stands, the Citadel of Laferrière. It’s on the top of one of Haiti’s tallest mountains. The walls are 140 feet high and 30 feet thick. This stronghold once mounted 365 cannon and cost, the Haitians say, twenty thousand peasant lives in the building. It was meant to repel foreign enemies. They never came.
By 1820 the North was in rebellion. Then Christophe had a stroke that left him paralyzed from the waist down. The gleeful army mutinied. In Haiti, being a defeated political figure does not result in fat lecture fees and large publishing advances, at least it didn’t before Aristide. Christophe shot himself.
Things didn’t go much better for Pétion. He and his fellow mulattoes had what contemporary meddlers in poverty would call “high self-esteem” and “good workplace communication skills,” et cetera. But the mulattoes had favored slavery and therefore possessed no moral standing with the majority of their countrymen. That majority had been through half a generation of war mingled with repression almost as onerous as what they’d suffered during bondage. The mood of most Haitians under Pétion was akin to the mood of boys just out of school in June. Going back to cutting cane, even their own cane, must have seemed as bad an idea as mowing the lawn once seemed—really, still seems—to me. Also, Christophe, angered by the desertions of his populace and hopping with megalomania, kept threatening to invade the South. The wherewithal of the Pétion government had to be spent on defense. The republic went broke. Pétion worried himself to the point of illness. He wasted away in 1818 saying he was sick of life.
Jean-Pierre Boyer was elected to replace Pétion and took over the whole country when Christophe died. He signed a foolish treaty with France agreeing, in return for international recognition, to pay Haiti’s ex-landowners huge reparations. When the bill for this came due, Haitians, yet again, were sent to the plantations by force. They rebelled. Boyer resigned and sailed for Jamaica in 1843.
Major Charles Hérard replaced Boyer. According to Black Democracy: The Story of Haiti by H. P. Davis, Hérard “entered the capital on March 21st amid an extraordinary demonstration of popular approval.” He promptly invaded the Dominican Republic, lost the war, blew his popularity, and in April 1844 “sailed for Jamaica.”
Three presidents followed in the next three years until General Faustin Soulouque was elected in 1847, supposedly because he was too idiotic to bother anybody. Soulouque crowned himself “Emperor Faustin I,” named 624 princes, dukes, and other nobles, and initiated a court etiquette so elaborate that after a joke the chamberlain would announce, “His majesty is laughing. Gentlemen, you are invited to laugh also.” Soulouque sailed for Jamaica in 1859.
Then came General Fabre Geffrard, who sailed for Jamaica in 1867. And Major Sylvain Salnave, who was tried and shot in 1869. And Jean-Nicolas Nissage Saget, who actually served out his constitutionally mandated term and left office peacefully. This so confused the nation that there was a coup d’état anyway. General Michel Domingue sailed for Jamaica in 1876.
The next president, Pierre Boisrond-Canal, sailed for parts unknown. (Jamaica being, apparently, full to the brim with ex-leaders of Haiti.) J. N. Leger, in Haiti, Her History and Her Detractors, says the people showed great sympathy for Boisrond-Canal and “cheered him as he left the wharf.”
So it went for Haiti through another eleven chief executives, only one of whom gave up power on purpose, until we arrive at the case of Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. “General” Sam was “elected” “president” in 1915, that date being the only thing in his career which doesn’t require quotation marks. Once Sam was installed, the usual rebellion got under way outside Port-au-Prince, and the usual political opponents were locked in the national prison. Revolutions in Haiti don’t normally involve much fighting. The standard procedure is for the leader of the rebellion, when he feels strong enough, to send a small force of men into the capital. The rebels attack various government buildings, and the government troops either fight back or don’t according to whether they think the revolution is likely to succeed. Sam, however, committed a rules-book violation and had all his political prisoners slaughtered. The public was wroth. Sam had to hide in the French legation. A mob gathered there. In the words of H. P. Davis:
The mob remained without the gates, but a small body of well-known citizens, after courteously explaining to the French minister that the people were no longer to be baulked of their revenge, entered the house and, finding Sam under a bed in a spare room on an upper floor, pulled him down the stairs, dragged him along a driveway, and threw him over an iron gate to the mob.
Sam was torn to pieces.
It was then that the United States bowed to the kinds of pressure that the United States is forever being pressured to bow to—in Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti right now—and intervened. The U.S. Marines were sent to straighten things out in short order. They stayed nineteen years. And everything in Haiti has been fine ever since.
Washington Irving called Haiti “one of the most beautiful islands in the world” (although he went on to say “and doomed to be one of the most unfortunate”). As recently as 1936 Alec Waugh said that the country was “of extraordinary natural beauty, which might almost have inspired Rousseau’s dreams of the ideal state of nature.” (Waugh was talking about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, rather than Henri, but “Tarzan” was still what he meant.) Haiti doesn’t look like that anymore. In the hills the deforestation is complete, as though the geography had been sanded. What green is left is down in the cracks and crevices of the landscape awaiting some cook-fire-building or charcoal-making equivalent of Zip-Strip. On the plains a few big trees are left, looking like amputee veterans of a botanical war. The Haitians cut off one limb at a time to keep their fuel supply growing as long as possible.
There are no zombies working the fields in Haiti. No one’s working the fields at all. It is impossible to tell a Haitian farm from a brush patch, although there is a shortage of cultivatable land in Haiti and all those brush patches are, in fact, farms. A few banana trees will appear in a chicken-infested thicket of weeds with, here and there, a patch of cassava, sorghum, sweet potatoes, chickpeas, or corn, and, in the mountains, maybe a half-wild coffee bush or two. Why aspire to agricultural surplus when soldiers will just steal your pigs? And most of the farmers don’t own their land or don’t have clear title to it. A title would, anyway, be under the power of those august local officials—mayors, army officers, and government-appointed chefs de section—who can read and write. And the document would be in French besides.
Dumarsais and I traveled to the Haitian countryside, driving north from Port-au-Prince on a road known as “the goat path.” This climbs the quite-dry Montagnes Trou d’Eau and the once green Montagnes Noires to Haiti’s central plateau. The initial ascent is steeper than college tuition and made via zigzags like a Washington polygraph. At no point is the road wide enough for two vehicles to pass safely, and at some points nothing at all can pass without mortal risk. There are two brief sections of guardrail, thought-provokingly dented. What has gone on at the curves that don’t have guardrails?
Beggars appeared along the roads of the central plateau, also soldiers. I saw many more soldiers in the middle of the country than I saw at the border. Going into the mountains we were stopped at three military checkpoints and questioned at each, the information on our passports and press cards laboriously copied by officers who held the pencil stubs as though they were large power tools.
The soldiers were nice enough. I was headed for the outhouse at the army garrison in Mirebalais when a private motioned for me to stop. He ran back into the barracks. I could see him through the unglazed, unscreened window as he opened a large vinyl suitcase. He returned with a precious commodity he’d brought from home, toilet paper.
It was hours after dark when we arrived in the town of “X.” I’ll call it Pignon, which is a real town elsewhere in Haiti, as are Bombardopolis, Ditty, Mme Joie, Marché Canard, and Moron. We’d been delayed when a truck ahead of us went into a rut so deep that it fell over on its side.
The army barracks in Pignon were completely unlit. A soldier came out of the moon shadows and motioned us into a large, dusty room empty except for three straight chairs and a table. Eventually another soldier arrived with a candle. He was followed by a wide man in a loud sport shirt. This was the lieutenant. He wore a huge gold watch of elaborate design. And what a great rogue of a pig thief he must have been, if the watch was real, which it wasn’t.
The lieutenant, with the aid of the candle, my flashlight, and a Bic, solemnly read every entry and exit stamp in my passport. I wish I knew what he thought. As the result of a busy reportorial weekend in the aftermath of the opening of the Berlin Wall, I have something like fifteen East German visas in there. “I’m in Haiti to cover the terrible health effects of the U.S. embargo,” I ventured.
“Thousands of children are dying,” said the lieutenant, his tone indicating even an East German spy could understand that.
I wouldn’t, I hoped, see any dying children. But I did want to see the Pignon town clinic that treated them. We went there to wash up by Eveready light. The clinic had all the normal plumbing fixtures, but running water came from only one tap sticking out of a wall in a rear supply room. I stood over a drain and sluiced myself with a bucket.
We slept in a small house that the clinic owned. A broken exercise bicycle stood in the corner of my mud-walled room. What CARE flub, Peace Corps mix-up, or kink in charitable intentions had put it here?
In the morning the porch of the clinic was full of patients, mostly women and children, all dressed in their best clothes because not much happens in Pignon. Getting sick is an occasion. Thirty-five to forty people a day are usually treated. The clinic is run by one of the international aid agencies. The agency works in cooperation with Haiti’s Ministry of Health. The Ministry of Health is one of this unhealthy nation’s largest employers. About one-fifth of the country’s civil servants, some eighty-nine hundred people, are on its payroll. And 62 percent are in administrative positions.
The Pignon clinic, however, couldn’t be called a patronage plum. It was a humble structure, superior to its surroundings only by virtue of a poured-concrete floor. The dispensary was untidy, with medical supplies stacked wherever space could be found. The examining rooms were not very clean. A refrigerator was used only to keep things from getting lost or rat eaten. There’d been no electricity since the international embargo began.
The clinic had a little laboratory, not much more complicated than my boyhood chemistry set. But twenty-five tests could be performed, including cancer biopsies and Pap smears. There was a gas oven to sterilize the equipment for simple operations such as cleaning and suturing tropical country life’s endemic machete wounds. There was a delivery room, its walls decorated with sexy posters promoting breast feeding. Only very difficult births took place here, maybe three a month. Midwives attended the rest. The clinic staff had made friends with the midwives, convincing them to wash their hands and so forth. The midwives had even been enlisted to sell safe water for infant formula to the mothers for a penny or two a jug.
One of the midwives came up and gave me a kiss. She was a very old woman with no teeth but real gold earrings and a face that was a nest of smile lines. Her fame seemed to rest on having had triplets.
The clinic even had a dental chair. Treatment was all by extraction as far as I could tell by observing the locals. A dentist, a volunteer from France, came by every so often to yank the really difficult teeth.
The Pignon clinic had no doctor and only moderate hopes of getting a nurse. Until then, the clinic was run by a nurse’s aide. The aide did not know how many people lived in the area his clinic served. Haiti does not yet suffer from information overload. But the Pan American Health Organization estimates that the population of the central plateau is over 473,000 and says there are just forty-four health centers, mostly the doctorless kind. The hospital nearest Pignon (and hospital is stretching the term) is several hours away over worse roads than we had come in on.
But Haitians don’t die of the fancy hospitalized maladies which afflict the sanitized and healthy. They don’t live long enough. Life expectancy is fifty-five years. And the mortality rate among children under five is 13.5 percent. These kids expire from the most prosaic causes—a cough, the runs. And here the nurse’s aide was able to perform the kind of wonders practitioners at Mayo can only pray for. He could clear lungs with decongestants and cure most respiratory infections with cheap antibiotics. And he had reduced diarrhea cases to fewer than three a week.
“How?” I asked.
“Safe water.”
“But how do you get safe water?”
“Chlorine.”
“Where can you get chlorine?”
“Five drops of Clorox in a gallon,” said the nurse’s aide. “That’s all.”
The nurse’s aide said foreign donations were down. Dumarsais blamed it on the embargo. He said people were mixed up about what they should or shouldn’t do for Haiti. But I think people are mixed up about Haiti, period. We like to give to hopeful or heroic causes. Note how few charitable campaigns are targeted at “Muddling Through.” The clinic used to provide medicine for free but now sometimes had to sell it. “What if people can’t pay?” I asked.
“We open a line of credit,” said the nurse’s aide.
“And what if people can’t pay off the credit line?”
The aide seemed puzzled by my question. “Those who can,” he said, “pay back. Others just can’t.” A nurse’s aide in Haiti has come up with an eight-word national health-care program. The plan the Clinton administration presented to Congress was fourteen hundred pages long.
The Pignon clinic has been operating since 1978. Before that the only medical treatment in the area was from—as the nurse’s aide put it—“a nottrained woman who gave injections.” The success of the little clinic, all the things it accomplished with facilities and skills that wouldn’t do to treat an American for a hangover, was wonderful. But this is a sad kind of wonder. It should be this easy to save the millions of other dying kids, kids so unfortunate they don’t even have the luck to live in Pignon.
Pignon had no stores or shops. The only thing that marked it as a town was a town square. An aberrant bit of government attention had been paid to this plot of land. The bare earth was overlain with a maze of cement curbs and walkways to make a formal garden without the garden. And cement benches had been placed around it as though Haiti lacked spots to sit and do nothing.
There was nothing with any charm in Pignon, except every one of its residents. They waved each time they saw us, inquired after our well-being and comfort, and insisted that I wear an absurd straw hat while I wandered around in the sun—lest, I suppose, my weird red skin pop like a weenie’s on a grill. Not that they had any weenies. Or grills either.
When we had a flat on our Jeep, two chairs were brought out so Dumarsais and I could sit in the road while half of the town’s men went to work repairing the tire with scraps of rubber and a vulcanizing oven improvised from an old piston head.
No one begged or stared. Only one kid could have been labeled pesky, and he was cute about it. The very pariah dogs were friendly. Or maybe they’d given up even the hope of having anything to bite.
Of course, the humans in Haiti have hope. They hope to leave. Back in Port-au-Prince, I asked Dumarsais to take me to the wharf in Cité Soleil where boat people embark. I stood on one of the dock’s few planks and looked at a wooden sloop that seemed to have been built with a hammer and a penknife. The vessel was maybe thirty feet long with a shallow draft and an awkwardly wide beam. The hull looked soggy with age. The sails appeared to have been sewn from grain sacks. There was no cabin or shelter of any kind. “Put a couple of hundred people on board,” I said, “and it’s going to be an unpleasant cruise to Florida.”
“Ha!” said Dumarsais. “It’s for fishing. The refugees don’t use those.” He turned me around and faced me toward the shore. A couple of twelve- or fifteen-foot lorries were sitting swaybacked on a mud bank. Their hulls had been eaten by rot. I could see daylight through their sides. “That,” said Dumarsais, “is what people go to Florida in.”
And for those who cannot get to Florida, there is heaven or, anyway, voodoo.
Someone at the bar at the Oloffson Hotel had said to me, “You’ll never understand Haiti if you don’t understand voodoo.”
“Can you explain it to me?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Dumarsais took me to a voodoo temple, or hounfò, a few blocks from the pier. This was a room about thirty feet by thirty feet, a grand space for Cité Soleil, and decorated in a manner that owed something to the sacramental and something to party time. The ceiling was covered with small paper flags, crêpe bunting, and inflated beach balls. The walls were painted putt-putt golf green and arrayed with vèvè symbols and with pictures of the loas the vèvès represent.
Loas, though descended from African pantheons, are identified with Catholic saints. Saint John the Baptist is Jan Batis Trasetonm, the Virgin Mary is Metrès Ezili, Saint George is Ogou Chango, and the Three Kings are Simbi Boua, Simbi Nandezo, and the rap-group-sounding Simbi 3 Kafou. The saintly loas were depicted here in a carnival-booth art style, and combined with the cagelike vèvès, they gave the hounfò the look of a canonized sideshow menagerie.
In the center of the room was a pillar of stepped-back, ziggurat design like a Sunday school illustration of the Tower of Babel. This was the potomitan, the ladder by which loas’ spirits descend into the hounfò. Most of a voodoo ceremony’s rituals and dances center upon it. It was decorated with ribbons and with drawings of eyes and other symbols. There’s a hint of the maypole in the potomitan, though May is not the season when nature awakes from a long sleep in Haiti. Nature may not ever do that in Haiti again.
The members of this hounfò were adherents of Bizango, one of a number of voodoo organizations in Haiti. They are called “secret societies,” but the secret is only that they have some private ceremonies and passwords, as do the Free and Accepted Masons, which, if you think about it, are no more strangely named.
The houngan, or priest, wore a shirt and tie and looked as if he might be a Mason, a thoughtful small businessman, the kind who does a lot of volunteer work. Indeed, his title in this Bizango chapter was the unexotic one of president. He asked me if I would like to see the altar. It was actually a room, no bigger than a kitchen pantry, lit only by a few small oil lamps. A confusion of sacrifices were in here, pieces of velvet and satin, items of clothing, vases, pottery cups, flags, artificial flowers, foodstuffs, bottles of rum, and, in the center of these, a cross swathed in dark-colored draperies. It was as though, in collecting these sacred objects, the worshippers had tried to touch upon every aspect of existence, including reality—a number of long and nasty-looking knives were thrust into the dirt floor in front of the cross.
I’m not of mystical inclination. Aside from the occasional prayer-in-time-of-medical-tests, I am rooted in the profane. Nevertheless, I was affected by the reliquary. Voodoo is a syncretic religion. All its myriad labors of inclusion and reconciliation were enshrined here. If it was just a closet in a slum, it was a closet with a story. People from dozens of Africans societies, with their hundreds of deities, had been abducted by aliens and taken to a place that might as well have been another planet. Here they were subjected to the worst indignities by people the color of grubs and slugs. These pasty tyrants claimed that the son of their own god said everybody was equal. This god and his kid and the kid’s mother were all filled with infinite mercy and love, but, if you didn’t convert, they baked you in an oven when you died.
Whatever the various African words for “bullshit” are, slaves in Haiti must have spoken them frequently. And yet those slaves studied Christianity, and they studied all their own multifarious creeds. From this metaphysical slumgullion they created something upon which they could agree, just as they created a language, Creole, in which they could agree they agreed. Thus a measure of comfort, hope, and social structure arose in conditions that would have driven less decent and intelligent people—me, for instance—into atheistic rage. What voodoo’s nameless apostles accomplished makes the labors of the early church fathers at the First Council of Nicaea seem a mere keeping of minutes at a PTA meeting.
I said something to this effect to the hounfò’s president. He opened a narrow door next to the altar room. “I don’t think any outsider has ever seen this,” said Dumarsais. There was a small space inside, little more than a cupboard. This was the sanctum sanctorum of the chapter. I confess that to me it looked like more of the same spiritual jumble sale. But an electric charge of reverence ran through Dumarsais. And the president himself seemed awed. I had to be satisfied with feeling honored.
Dumarsais said there was a meeting of the chapter that night, a ceremony only for the initiates, but the president said we could come. And so at nine o’clock we returned. The street was empty except for our Jeep. No one and nothing stirred aboard in Cité Soleil.
The hounfò was lit by a single lantern. About forty-five people were inside. They ranged in age from early twenties to the indeterminate venerability that comes so early to Haitians. The men wore identical gray smocks trimmed in crimson, the peasant smocks of eighteenth-century France but in dress-parade version. The women wore archaic peasant dresses in the same colors. Everyone had a red kerchief tied at the neck, and one was loaned to me.
People sat around the margins of the room, smoking cigarettes and talking. An old woman swept the packed-earth floor. Branches from some aromatic plant had been piled around the potomitan, like a combination room freshener and preparation for an auto-da-fé. I couldn’t tell exactly when the ceremony began. The president, now wearing the sequined shirt of a salsa bandleader, came in. And three men began to play on a graduated set of congas. But the president didn’t burst into song. He spoke in conversational tones. A young man moved through the crowd anointing the congregation with something like Aqua Velva, pouring so much of it on our hands and heads that the room smelled like one giant fourteen-year-old boy learning to shave. Someone else had a censer on a chain, incense fumes pouring out, and he used it very differently than in a Catholic Mass, swinging the vessel between the legs of the men and under the skirts of the women.
Candles were distributed and lit. The president, punctuating his remarks with a gourd rattle, made one general prayer to the Gran Mèt, the Big God. Voodoo is, at its heart, monotheistic. But God is conceived—quite reasonably, given Haitian experience—as remote. He is too la-de-da for daily affairs. Once obeisance had been made to the Gran Mèt, all further invocation was aimed at the more workaday loas. We prayed to the loas represented on the walls, the loas to which this particular chapter of Bizango was consecrated. Dumarsais prompted me as to when to kneel, turn, stand, or shut up. Some dancing started. First the men, then the women, then everyone but me circled the potomitan in a desultory fashion.
It was an hour and a half before the ceremony took on form. Several people seemed to have been appointed as ritual police. They nudged the others to do the correct thing at the correct time the way Dumarsais nudged me. Late in the evening, the enforcers would also wake those who dozed. A choir was nudged into song. And two angry-acting men entered the dance, one carrying a noose and the other swinging a hide whip.
Voodoo societies had been founded, Dumarsais told me later, for mutual protection in the anarchistic slave communities. The rope and the lash had nothing to do, as I would have thought, with the slave masters. Rather, the whip was a token of self-discipline and the noose stood for catching thieves. The slave masters did not need to be dealt with symbolically, they’d been dealt with in an actual manner in 1804.
The dances grew more practiced and complex—bows and side-slip steps, thigh slaps and arm-waving salutes, turns and bobs and genuflections. If country line dancing were done for some serious purpose to better music by people more coordinated than Houston suburbanites, it would look like this.
And, then again, no it wouldn’t. The women rushed into the altar room and came out waving knives. They picked up the branches from the base of the potomitan and put them on their heads like laurel wreathes. The drumming quickened. The singing rose in pitch. And a weaving, flailing, cantering dash around the center post began. The speed increased until centrifugal force should have sent the dancers slamming into the hounfò’s walls. The man with the whip, a huge person with a shaved head like an artillery shell, stood snapping the plait at the dancers’ feet and taking mouthfuls of cane liquor and spraying these over the celebrants. An awful keening chant arose. The frenzy in the darkened room seemed more primordial than Haiti’s African heritage. The kingdoms of West Africa date only from the fourth century AD. Maybe this is what the Greek mystery cults did on their lodge nights. Dionysus, that city-state yuppie, invented only wine, not rum, but just such Dionysian furors were described in 408 BC in The Bacchae by Euripides. I had no more than thought so when a woman dancer spun out of the crowd straight at me, sweeping her knife through the air and looking perfectly like one of the maenads about to tear her sacrificial victim to pieces. There was the fate of Guillaume Sam to be considered.
But the woman meant me no harm. She didn’t even see me. She was possessed, being “ridden by her loa,” as it is sometimes described. Then another woman was possessed. Then half a dozen women were describing dervish circles and groaning to heaven. One fell on the ground and made pig noises. Some shook and convulsed. Others lost control of arms and legs, and these limbs would then propel them about the room in spastic flips and tosses. They began to speak in tongues. But this was not so impressive. I have a born-again sister who does that. And my own French probably sounds like glossolalia.
Whoever was closest to a possessed woman would (myself excepted) brave the knife blade, run in and catch hold of the ecstatic, and clutch her until the loa jumped off or lost interest or whatever. I remember this sort of thing from LSD in the 1960s. And, as with LSD, it was hard to tell whether possession was terrifying or bliss. A bit of both, if memory serves.
For the next couple of hours, dancing waxed and waned and raptures came and went. Then, on some cue I did not see, the crowd faded back to the walls. A delegation of officers and officials went to the small door next to the altar room, the entrance to the holy of holies, and there performed a number of Masonic rituals. My father and all my uncles were Shriners. I know the drill. My instincts about the Bizango president had been right. Later, reading the Haitian voodoo scholar Gérard Alphonse Férère, I discovered that one more thing voodoo had drawn upon was the abandoned Freemasonry of the dead and exiled French slave owners.
When the salutes and incantations were finished, the door of the tabernacle was opened and a cross and three coffins brought out. I’d just looked in there that afternoon. There wasn’t space inside for these. The coffins were for an infant, a child, and an adult. The man with the shaved skull raised his rum bottle and took hold of a machete. A woman picked up the cross, and the two of them performed a dance of menace and confrontation—the eternal verities versus Saturday-night fun. The fun seemed to triumph. Another woman put the baby’s coffin on her head, and the dance was repeated. She too was vanquished, as was a third woman who danced with the larger, child-sized casket precariously balanced aloft. Finally, four male pallbearers took hold of the biggest coffin, drew daggers from their waistbands, and chased the machete-wielding rum-spitter around the potomitan. Death holds trumps. The cross and all the caskets were waltzed through a macabre cotillion, a Busby Berkeley eschatology.
In the end the coffins were stacked crisscross fashion with daggers and candles arrayed in front of them and a crucifix drawn on the earth in flaming rum. Each member of the congregation came forward to make elaborate gestures of respect, to knock several times on the lids of the coffins and place a cash offering on the polished wood. “The grave is just one more thing we have to go through,” said Dumarsais. And, considering what Haitians have been through already, I could see his point.
The last act of the ceremony was for the coffins to be run up and down the streets of Cité Soleil. Whether this was to exhibit Bizango’s victory over death or just to scare the neighborhood, I couldn’t tell. But Dumarsais said to me, “There is no real protection in Haiti without voodoo.”
When the coffins had been brought home—carried backward into the hounfò and backward through the sanctuary door—the members all embraced each other. Each of them hugged me and clasped my hand. Then, though it was two in the morning, it was time to talk. A voodoo society is also a social club and a mutual aid organization and even a community bank. Everyone had his say. They asked me to speak, too.
All I could manage was “Thank you.” But what I really wanted to tell the voodoo celebrants was “I wish all of you could come to the United States and live there. You’re an immense improvement on the other people who go to Florida. And, if Americans are worried that immigration will cause overpopulation, ecological problems, and such, then we could arrange a trade. You sail north. And we’ll get a bunch of crabby families in Winnebagos, drug smugglers, Disney executives, Palm Beach divorce lawyers, 2 Live Crew, time-share condo salesmen, Don Johnson, Miami Beach aerobics instructors, William Kennedy Smith, kvetching retirees, and teenage gang members and send them back to Haiti on the same boat.”