Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [18]
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