Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [17]
I couldn’t sort out fully, under this full assault of memories, the exact moment when I had met Jean Dominique. As a child in Haiti, I had heard his voice on the radio many times, sometimes blaring from ours or neighboring houses at the highest possible volume. As an adult in New York, I had seen him at so many different Haiti-related gatherings that I can’t even pinpoint our first in-person meeting. I do, however, remember the first time we had a lengthy conversation. It was at an art exhibit at Ramapo College in 1994. The exhibit was curated by our mutual friend, the filmmaker Jonathan Demme, and featured three emerging Haitian artists. The night of the exhibit, Jean was in exile yet again, after some U.S.-trained colonels leading the Haitian military had deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and had raided and destroyed Jean’s radio station. The night of the art exhibit, Jean and I talked at length about the strikingly colorful paintings on display and the extreme nostalgia that they evoked in him, the hunger to return to his home and his radio station in Haiti as soon as he could.
A few weeks later, Jonathan Demme asked Jean and me to work with him on a project about the history of Haitian cinema. Every week, the three of us would meet on the Ramapo College campus to discuss Haitian cinema while some communications students watched and videotaped us. I said very little at those sessions, feeling rather shy sitting between two obsessive cinephiles. My job was to find prints of the films that we could discuss. Jean’s was to help us all understand them by putting them in context as Jonathan questioned him about technique, content, and style.
During the dictatorship, in the early 1960s, a young Jean had created a cinema club, hosting weekly screenings at the Alliance Française in Port-au-Prince. There he showed films such as Federico Fellini’s La Strada, which is, among other things, about a girl’s near enslavement as a circus performer.
“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