Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [58]
The day that Maxo’s remains were found, the call from Bel Air came with some degree of excitement. At least he would not rest permanently in the rubble. At least he would not go into a mass grave. Somehow, though, I sense that he would not have minded. Everyone is being robbed of rituals, he might have said. Why not me?
By the time Maxo’s body was uncovered, cell phones were finally working again, bringing a flurry of desperate voices. One cousin had an open gash in her head that was still bleeding. Another had a broken back and had been carried to three field hospitals trying to get it X-rayed. Another was sleeping outside her house and was terribly thirsty. An in-law had no blood-pressure medicine. Most had not eaten for days. There were friends and family members whose entire towns had been destroyed, and dozens from whom we have had no word at all.
Everyone sounded eerily calm on the phone. No one was screaming. No one was crying. No one said, “Why me?” or “We’re cursed.” Even as the aftershocks kept coming, they’d say, “The ground is shaking again,” as though this had become a normal occurrence. They inquired about family members outside Haiti: an elderly relative, a baby, my one-year-old daughter.
I cried and apologized. “I’m sorry I can’t be there with you,” I said.
My nearly six-foot-tall twenty-three-year-old cousin—the beauty queen we nicknamed NC (Naomi Campbell)—who says that she is hungry and has been sleeping in bushes with dead bodies nearby, stops me.
“Don’t cry,” she says. “That’s life.”
“No, it’s not life,” I say. “Or it shouldn’t be.”
“It is,” she insists. “That’s what it is. And life, like death, lasts only yon ti moman. Only a little while.
I was thinking about Maxo, Nozial, NC, Tante Zi, and many others when the media called to ask for my reaction to the earthquake and its aftermath. I was numb, like everybody else, I wanted to say, tallying my losses, remembering each moment of every day, someone I had not heard from, someone I had not been able to reach. But once we got past the personal angle, shedding my reluctance to speak for the collective, this is what I felt I had to say. I said: Haitians like to tell each other that Haiti is tè glise, slippery ground. Even under the best of circumstances, the country can be stable one moment and crumbling the next. Haiti has never been more slippery ground than after this earthquake, with bodies littering the streets, entire communities buried in rubble, homes pancaked to dust. Now Haitian hearts are also slippery ground, hopeful one moment and filled with despair the next. Has two hundred and six years of existence finally reached its abyss? we wonder. But now even the ground is no more.
I said that our love for Haiti had not changed, that in fact it had become even deeper. But Haiti, or what is left of it, had changed. It had changed physically, earthquake fault lines catastrophically rearranging its landscape. The mountains that had been stripped of their trees, mined for charcoal and construction materials, and then crowded with unsteady homes had crumbled, leaving both the poor and the rich homeless.
This is a natural disaster, I explained, but one that had been in the making for a long time, partly owing to the complete centralization of goods and services and to the import-favoring agricultural policies that have driven so many Haitians off their ancestral lands into a capital city built for two hundred thousand that was forced to house nearly three million. If a tropical storm could bury an entire city under water as Tropical Storm Jeanne did Gonaïves in 2004, if mudslides could bring down entire neighborhoods with homes and schools and people in them, then what chance did Port-au-Prince and the surrounding area have against a 7.0 magnitude earthquake? With thousands hastily and superficially buried or lodged in miles and miles of rubble, I said, Haiti is no longer just slippery ground, but also sacred ground.
I tried to say some of this whenever I went on the radio or on television, whenever I wrote my articles