Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [51]
It may be that Basquiat knew this all too well. When Marc Miller asked him about the Haitian primitives who should have been nailed to his walls, perhaps all Basquiat could think of was the primitive in the mirror, the anonymous inventor, who was plucked from obscurity and turned into a god only to be continually called crude, naive, savage, and later even “a Madison Avenue Primitive,” as he was labeled in a November 9, 1992, review by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. Gone, except in these perhaps misunderstood shapes and forms, maybe the Madison Avenue primitive is now side by side with the Trou de Cochon primitive, if not in some collector’s storage space, then in their common ancestral Ginen, or possibly, in a few cheap prints nailed to some young artist’s wall.
CHAPTER 11
Acheiropoietos
On November 12, 1964, after Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin were executed and their bodies carried away, some say to the national palace to be personally inspected by François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, a lanky thirteen-year-old boy who had been standing in the back of the crowd to avoid the thunderous sounds of the executioner’s guns, stepped forward as the spectators and soldiers scattered. He walked toward the bullet-ridden poles, bent down in the blood-soaked dirt, and picked up the eyeglasses that Louis Drouin had been wearing.
The young man, Daniel Morel, only momentarily held the eyeglasses in his hands before they were snatched away by another boy, but in the moment he had them, he’d noticed tiny chunks of Drouin’s brain splattered on the cracked lenses. Perhaps if he had kept them, he might have cleaned the lenses and raised them to his face, to try to see the world the way it might have been reflected in a dead man’s eyes. Often in Haiti, the eyes of murder victims are gouged out by their murderers because it is believed that even after death, the last image a person sees remains imprinted on his or her cornea, as clearly as a photograph.
Before witnessing the execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, Daniel Morel was not particularly interested in dead men’s eyes. He had been like any other boy, going for long walks all over Port-au-Prince and playing soccer with his friends. He sometimes worked in his father’s bakery and tried to climb aboard Haiti’s commercial train, which brought sugarcane stalks from the southern fields of Léogâne to the sugar-making plant in Port-au-Prince. But the execution changed everything.
The next day, he walked by a photographer’s studio near his father’s bakery in downtown Port-au-Prince, and on the open paneled doors were enlarged photographs of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin’s corpses, purposely put on display as deterrents for the country’s potential dissenters. These pictures were exhibited there and elsewhere for weeks and young Daniel Morel would walk past them, and even though he had been at the execution, he saw them each day as if for the first time, and was unable to look away.
“That’s when I decided to be a photojournalist,” Daniel recalled more than forty-five years later, while sitting at the dining room table in my home in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood.
We had met nearly a decade earlier while I was in Haiti with some Haitian American journalist friends. It was All Saints’ Day and we had all gone with him to Port-au-Prince’s national cemetery to watch groups of people sing, dance, and pray inside the cemetery, to honor their dead.
No one is absolutely certain now where Numa and Drouin are buried, so I know that they were not among the dead being singled out for prayers at the national cemetery that day. From the images I had seen of the execution, I had tried