Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [30]
Once the lights and cameras were set up, the director, my friend Patricia Benoit, tried to begin gently.
“Kijan wye?” How are you? Patricia, who was born in Haiti and moved to the United States with her parents when she was six, has a soft, hesitant, but cajoling voice in Creole. Fluent in English, Creole, and French, she is not only trilingual but also tritonal, having a distinctive timbre and pitch for each language she speaks. Patricia has often filmed in Haiti and has seen other victims of other horrors, so when she said to Alèrte, “Kijan wye?” it did not sound like small talk, especially in this nearly empty room so far from all of our homes.
Alèrte settled on the couch and with her semifunctioning hand began tugging at the dark knit cap on her head. She removed the cap and underneath were more scars and a military-style buzz cut. She quickly put the cap back on.
“We’ll do this any way you want,” Patricia said softly, “but you look nice with your cap off.”
With her cap off, even with the machete scars so visible, Alèrte’s injured cheekbones emerged. Her eyes had a glint of onyx and she had a coy smile that came from only one side of her mouth.
“I look like a boy,” she said, nervously rolling the cap in her hand.
She asked her husband to get two faux pearl earrings from a box in the bedroom. When he came back, he leaned down and, because she could not, put the earrings on her ears. Then he sat down next to her, as though to shield her from the camera.
What did you do for a living in Haiti?” Patricia asked Alèrte.
“I sold food in the market,” she said.
Her husband, she said, was a welder. He was also involved in some neighborhood committees that organized rallies for Jean-Bertrand Aristide when he was a presidential candidate.
Patricia guided her slowly toward the moment when the paramilitary men, called attachés, came to her house in Port-au-Prince.
They wanted to wipe out everyone who’d voted for Aristide, she said. Her husband, because of his election organizing, was targeted. They came knocking on her door. When her husband saw who they were, he escaped through a window in the back of their house. He thought that if they didn’t find him they would simply go away. He never thought they’d take her in his place.
They put her in the back of a pickup truck and drove her to a deserted stretch of land outside of town, Haiti’s so-called valley of death, a vast mass grave called Titanyen. There two men hacked her with machetes. When she realized that they were trying to kill her, she stopped fighting, lay down, and played dead. She lost the arm, she said, trying to shield her face and the rest of her body.
When the paramilitary men saw that she had stopped moving, one of them said, “Look, it seems like she’s dead.”
“They had more people to kill,” she said, “so they left me there.”
She waited until they were gone. Then she dragged herself back to the side of the road and waited until morning.
As she spoke, slowly but firmly, as if reliving every second of these horrors, I wrote a summary translation on a legal pad for one of our non-Creole-speaking producers. I felt tears run down my face. This was perhaps unprofessional, even disrespectful. The telling of that story was such a courageous act, I thought, that only one person in that room had the right to cry.
Alèrte Bélance: I woke up again the next morning and found myself stuck on top of a briar path where the zenglendo threw me. My whole body was full of prickers. I didn’t feel them, though, because my whole body was dead. I’m not positive where I was because I couldn’t see—my eyes were stuck together with blood—but I think I was up in the air, perched on the side of a hill, just over a hole. I felt myself shaking, my whole body was trembling. I unstuck my eyes and then I saw that I wasn’t too far from the road. But I couldn’t see up or down, I couldn’t move