Create Dangerously (6 page)

“If you see a good film correctly,” Jean said, “the grammar of that film is a political act. Every time you see Fellini’s
La Strada
, even if there is no question of fascism, of political persecution, you feel something against the black part of life.”

Another favorite of his was the Alain Resnais documentary
Night and Fog
, which describes the horrors of concentration camps. “To us, Auschwitz was Fort Dimanche,” he said, referring to the Duvalier-era dungeonlike prison where thousands of Haitians were tortured and killed.

In 1964, the year Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin were executed, the Ciné Club was shut down by the Haitian military after a screening of
Night and Fog
at the Alliance Française. Jean then briefly turned to filmmaking, codirecting and narrating a short tongue-in-cheek documentary,
Mais je suis belle
(But I Am Beautiful), about a Haitian beauty pageant. This was, it is said, one of the first films made by Haitians in Haiti.

The task of finding the prints for the Haitian films being discussed in our Ramapo History of Haitian Cinema class proved herculean, as many of the filmmakers, including Jean, had lost track of their own prints during nomadic lives in exile. In our videotaped sessions, however, each time we’d mention a film title to Jean, he would proceed to describe at length not only the plot of the film but also extensive details of the method of its distribution and the political framework surrounding it. The film
Anita
, for example, made by Jean’s contemporary Rassoul Labuchin, told the story of a servant girl who is abused by the city relative to whom she’d been given by her peasant parents.

According to Labuchin, during the Ciné Club days, Jean had held conferences for aspiring filmmakers, encouraging them to view the seventh art as being essential to the majority of Haitians, particularly those who could not read. The most recent studies suggest that only about 56 percent of Haitians are literate. The actual figure is probably lower than that if one defines literate as, for example, being able to read an entire book. Perhaps this is why the visual arts have flourished in Haiti. Painters do not necessarily need to know how to read or write. This is what Jean had hoped filmmakers would do with film—make it, like radio and painting, a medium that would be not only open and available but also welcoming to those who were shut off
from other means of information communication and entertainment. “Jean asked us to develop screenplays,” Labuchin would later say, “that meant something to the Haitian people.”

During our Haitian cinema class, Jean told us how he and Labuchin had traveled together with Labuchin’s film,
Anita
, screening it throughout the Haitian countryside to discourage peasants from giving their children away to better-off families in the city. The film, which begins as a harshly realistic treatise on the
restavèk
child labor system in Haiti, ends as a musical fantasy in which the child servant is rescued by a pale Haitian woman who becomes the girl’s fairy godmother.

In the same vein, Jean had also broadcast on his radio station the Creole soundtrack of a film based on the classic Haitian novel
Gouverneurs de la rosée
(Masters of the Dew), written by the Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain and later translated into English by the poet Langston Hughes and scholar Mercer Cook. In Manuel—Roumain’s Sophoclean hero—and his peasant family and friends, Jean saw prototypes of poor Haitians, who were either condemned to a desperate life or driven to migrate, only to return to Haiti to face the impossibility of reintegration or even death. Jean was extremely proud of having aired the Creole teleplay of the novel on his radio station because whenever he visited the countryside, the peasants would tell him how they had recognized themselves and their lives in the words of Roumain’s book.

Masters of the Dew
begins with Délira Délivrance, Manuel’s old peasant mother, plunging her hands into the dust and declaring, “We’re all going to die. Animals, plants, every living soul!” Délira’s despair turns into hope when her son returns from the sugarcane fields of Cuba, greeting every living thing he encounters on his
way to his parents’ house by singing, “Growing things, growing things! To you I say, ‘Honor!’ You must answer ‘Respect,’ so that I may enter. You are my house, you’re my country.”

Délira’s despair and Manuel’s hope make for a delicate balance, of which I am reminded each time I return to Haiti: the exile’s joy and the resident’s anguish—it can also be the other way around, the resident’s joy and the exile’s anguish—clashing.

While in exile in New York in the early 1990s, at the insistence of some friends, Jean would occasionally participate in a television or radio program dealing with the injustices of the military regime in Haiti, which by then had killed almost eight thousand people, including a well-known businessman named Antoine Izméry and the then justice minister, Guy Malary. Since Jean had known both Izméry and Malary, after their deaths he agreed to appear as a guest panelist on
The Charlie Rose Show
and was seated in the audience at a taping of the
Phil Donahue Show
when the subject was Haiti. During the Donahue taping, Jean squirmed in his seat while Phil Donahue held up the stubbed elbow of Alèrte Bélance, a woman who had been attacked with machetes by members of the junta’s paramilitary branch, who cut off her tongue and arm. After the taping, Jean seemed almost on the verge of tears as he said, “My country needs hope.”

Our Haitian cinema project came to an end at the close of the semester. After that, Jonathan, Jean, and I would occasionally meet in Jonathan’s office in Nyack, New York, for further discussions.

One day, while driving to Nyack with Jonathan’s assistant producer, Neda, Jean told us about a word he’d rediscovered in
a Pedro Almodóvar film he had seen the night before:
guapa
! While puffing on his ever-present pipe, Jean took great pains to explain to us that someone who was
guapa
was extremely beautiful and courageous—courageously beautiful, he added. Demanding further clarification, Neda and I would take turns shouting out the names of women that the three of us knew, starting with Michèle, Jean’s wife.

“Michèle is very . . .”

“
Guapa
!” he yelled back with great enthusiasm. This was one of the many times that Jean’s vibrant love of life, and his total devotion to his wife, Michèle, shone forth.

On that
guapa
day, Neda had to stay in Nyack, so she gave me the car and told me to drive Jean back to Manhattan. I refrained from telling her that even though I’d had my license for three years, I had never driven any car but the one owned by the driving school where I’d learned. When I confessed this to Jean, he wisely offered to drive. We drove for hours through New York’s Rockland County and the Palisades, and then over the George Washington Bridge, finally realizing we were completely lost, with Jean trying to smoke a pipe and follow my uncertain directions at the same time.

When we finally got to Manhattan late in the afternoon and Jean turned the car over to me, he seemed worried as I pulled away from the curb, and watched until I turned the corner, blending into Manhattan traffic.

The democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was restored to power soon after that day. The next time I would see Jean would be at his and Michèle’s house in Haiti.

“Jean, you’re looking
guapa
,” I told him.

He laughed.

It was wonderful to see Jean move about within his own walls, surrounded by his own books, pictures and paintings, knowing that he had been dreaming about coming back home almost every minute he was in exile.

Later at dinner, Jean spoke mournfully about those who’d died during and after the coup d’état: Antoine Izméry, Guy Malary, and later a well-loved priest, Father Jean-Marie Vincent. Adding Jean’s name now to those of these very public martyrs still seems unimaginable, given how passionately he expressed his hope that such assassinations would stop taking place.

“It has to stop,” I remember him saying. “It has to stop.”

The plane that took me from Miami to Haiti the day before Jean’s funeral seemed like a microcosm of Haiti. Crammed on a 727 for an hour and thirty minutes were young, well-to-do college students returning from Miami-area campuses for the weekend, vendors traveling with suitcases filled with merchandise from abroad, three male deportees being expatriated from the United States, a cluster of older women in black, perhaps also returning for a funeral, and, up front, the former president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, returning from a speaking engagement at the University of Miami Law School. That we were all on this plane, listening to flight announcements in French, English, and Creole, seemed somewhat unreal. I couldn’t help but recall one of the many conversations that Jean and I had while lost in the Palisades in New York that afternoon.

I had told him that I envied the certainty with which he could and often did say the words, “My country.” “My country is suffering,” he would say. “It’s being held captive by criminals. My country is slowly dying, melting away.”

“My country, Jean,” I said, “is one of uncertainty. When I say ‘my country’ to some Haitians, they think I mean the United States. When I say ‘my country’ to some Americans, they think of Haiti.”

My country, I felt, both as an immigrant and as an artist, was something that was then being called the tenth department. Haiti then had nine geographic departments and the tenth was the floating homeland, the ideological one, which joined all Haitians living outside of Haiti, in the
dyaspora
.

I meant, in the essay that I began to write the morning that Jean died, to struggle to explain the multilayered meaning of the Creole word
dyaspora
. I meant to borrow a phrase from a speech given by the writer Gérard Alphonse-Férère at the Haitian Embassy in Washington, DC, on August 27, 1999, in which he describes diaspora/
dyaspora
as a “term employed to refer to any dispersal of people to foreign soils.” But in the Haitian context it is used “to identify the hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in many countries of the world.” I meant in that essay to list my own personal experiences as an immigrant and a writer, of being called
dyaspora
when expressing an opposing political point of view in discussions with friends and family members living in Haiti, who knew that they could easily silence me by saying, “What do you know? You’re living outside. You’re a
dyaspora
.” I meant to recall some lighter experiences of being startled in the Haitian capital or in the provinces
when a stranger who wanted to catch my attention would call out, “
Dyaspora
!” as though it were a title like
Miss, Ms., Mademoiselle
, or
Madame
. I meant to recall conversations or debates in restaurants, at parties, or at public gatherings where members of the
dyaspora
would be classified—justifiably or not—as arrogant, insensitive, overbearing, and pretentious people who were eager to reap the benefits of good jobs and political positions in times of stability in a country that they’d fled and stayed away from during difficult times. Shamefacedly, I’d bow my head and accept these judgments when they were expressed, feeling guilty about my own physical distance from a country I had left at the age of twelve during a dictatorship that had forced thousands to choose between exile or death.

In this essay, however, I can’t help but think of Jean’s reaction to my, in retrospect, inconsequential
dyaspora
dilemma, in a conversation we had when I visited his radio station to discuss a Creole program that Jonathan had created from one of my Haiti-based short stories, a radio play about a man who steals a hot air balloon to fly away from Haiti. Translating—retranslating—that story from the original English in which I had written it had been a surreal experience. It was as if the voice in which I write, the voice in which people speak Creole that comes out English on paper, had been released and finally I was writing for people like my Tante Ilyana, people who did not read, not because they did not have enough time or because they had too many other gadgets and distractions, but because they had never learned how.

Now I am suddenly back in the old essay, back to bowing my head in shame at being called a parasitic
dyaspora
, a foreign
being but still not a
blan
, and I want to bring the old essay into this one with these words from Jean: “The
Dyaspora
are people with their feet planted in both worlds,” he said. “There’s no need to be ashamed of that. There are more than a million of you. You all are not alone.”

Having been exiled many times himself to that very
dyaspora
that I was asking him to help me define, Jean could commiserate with all of us exiles, émigrés, refugees, migrants, nomads, immigrants, naturalized citizens, half-generation, first-generation, American, Haitian, Haitian American, men, women, and children who were living in the United States and elsewhere. Migration in general was something he understood well, whether from the countryside—what many in Haiti called the
peyi andeyò
, the outside country—to the Haitian capital, or from Haitian borders to other shores.

Jean’s funeral was held at the Sylvio Cator soccer stadium in downtown Port-au-Prince, where thousands streamed by his coffin and the coffin of Jean Claude Louissaint, a watchman at the radio station who was gunned down in the radio station’s parking lot along with Jean. T-shirts with Jean’s face had been distributed and everyone, including his wife, daughters, and sisters, wore them at the stadium that day. Banners demanding justice for the murders lined many Port-au-Prince streets and graffiti expressing similar sentiments covered the walls of government buildings. At the stadium ceremony, Jean received a posthumous service medal from the Haitian government. But his real funeral was held a week later in the Artibonite Valley, where as a young man he had worked as an agronomist. There his ashes were scattered in Haiti’s largest river, at the
heart of the country’s breadbasket. The ashes were scattered by his wife, Michèle, along with several peasant organization leaders he had befriended over the years.