Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [33]
Later, she faced off with some paramilitary leaders on Haitian radio in New York and, with the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed a thirty-two-million-dollar lawsuit against FRAPH, the paramilitary organization to which the attachés who’d attacked her belonged. More than a decade later, the case against FRAPH was decided in her favor, but it is unlikely that she will ever recover a dime.
As her visibility grew, she was featured in several U.S. newspapers and magazines and got a small speaking part in the Jonathan Demme–directed film version of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In the film, Alèrte plays Nan, a woman “who used different words.” Jonathan Demme had Alèrte say Nan’s lines (“She threw them all away but you”) to the lead character, Sethe, in Haitian Creole.
When one first saw Alèrte Bélance, what was most visible about her were her “marks,” her scars. But eventually it was also easy to recognize her spirited defiance.
“Do you realize how strong you are?” Patricia had asked her.
“Yes, I realize that I am strong,” she replied. “I am very strong. Some people get a small cut and it gets infected and they die. Look what was done to me and still I survived. Yes, I am very strong.”
In Courage and Pain, the undistributed documentary we ended up making, Alèrte and her family are surrounded by nearly a dozen other survivors who, like Alèrte, were nearly executed. They all tell different versions of the same story, of being beaten, macheted, shot, and tortured, and of nearly dying in a country they loved but where they could no longer live.
A few months later, a resolute Alèrte retold her story to Beverly Bell, an American researcher, democracy and women’s advocate, who would later compile the excerpts I have quoted throughout this chapter in an oral history titled Walking on Fire.
“Three months after I came back from the dead at Titanyen, I was on my two feet,” Alèrte told Beverly Bell. “I traveled around the United States trying to beat up on the misery of Haiti and the Haitian people. I spoke about women whom the cruel death and terror gangs were raping, little children they were raping, babies in the cradle. I went on television and the radio; I talked to U.S. congressmen, journalists, human rights activists. I spoke at demonstrations, press conferences, churches, congressional hearings . . . to say, “Here. Here is what I suffered.”
She not only suffered, however, but against all odds she also survived and thrived. And her testimony was a great gift to many others who were still trying to stay alive, and to the more than eight thousand others who died under the junta’s rule.
Alèrte Bélance: They killed mother after mother of children. They killed doctor after doctor, student after student. Mothers of children lost their children. . . . The devil has raped the confidence of the people. . . . People of conscience, hear me who is trying to wake you up. Hear my story, what I have experienced . . .
CHAPTER 6
The Other Side of the Water
In the summer of 1997, I flew to Port-au-Prince from New York a few days after my cousin Marius had flown in the cargo section of a similar American Airlines jet from Miami. Once I’d slept past the first half hour after takeoff, I’d strapped on the free headphones and chosen from the in-flight radio selection a pop station playing a song by the rock group Midnight Oil.
How can we dance when our earth is turning?
How can we sleep while . . .
Across the aisle from me, a man in a wrinkled brown suit shuffled a few papers in and out of a large manila envelope onto the tray table in front of him. He wiped his brow with a monogrammed blue handkerchief and then rang the flight attendant call button. When a plump blond woman hurried over, he asked her for a glass of water. When she brought it to him, he asked her when we were going to land.
I recognized the man, who had been escorted by immigration officers past the security checkpoint, right through the