Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [59]
Maybe that was my purpose, then, as an immigrant and a writer—to be an echo chamber, gathering and then replaying voices from both the distant and the local devastation. Still words often failed me.
“no poetry in the ashes south of canal street,” the poet Suheir Hammad had written.
Would there be any poetry amidst the Haitian ruins?
It was too soon to even try to write, I told myself. You were not there. You did not live it. You have no right even to speak—for you, for them, for anyone. So I did what I always do when my own words fail me. I read.
I read hundreds of first-person narratives, testimonials, blogs. One of the most heartbreaking was written by Dolores Dominique Neptune, one of Jean Dominique’s daughters, Jan J. Dominique’s younger sister.
“Here is the tale of the death of Jean Olivier Neptune written by his mother Dolores Dominique Neptune,” the person who forwarded it to me noted.
“Where is my son? The house collapsed. He is in his room. On his bed,” Dolores Dominique Neptune wrote. “I call his name. I call on God and negotiate with Him. I call on the neighbors. What neighbors? All their houses have collapsed and no one will come.”
Later, after a massive effort by many neighbors and friends who literally emerged out of the rubble to help, she found her son.
“What an angel!” she wrote. “His left hand is resting on his stomach as he lies in his bed. My son is dead!”
A few days later, I read my friend the novelist Évelyne Trouillot, who wrote from Port-au-Prince, in a January 20, 2010, opinion piece for the New York Times, “The family has set up camp in my brother’s house. I live just next door, but it makes us feel better to be all in the same house. My brother, a novelist, is writing his articles; I am writing mine.”
I read her brother, the novelist Lyonel Trouillot, who was posting daily accounts of life after the quake on the Web site of the French publication Le Point.
“Last night,” he wrote on day five, “I heard the drums from a Vodou ceremony. I didn’t have enough energy to go and find out if they were praising or rebuking the gods. I started heading there anyway, but came across a group of people playing dominoes by moonlight. I listened to the jokes being told by the players, about both the living and the dead. . . . I know that like them, at the end of the day, both to forget the darkness and to not curse the dawn, I need to laugh.”
I too needed to laugh, so I began reading my friend Dany Laferrière again. Dany is one of the funniest people I know and his sense of humor often infuses his work. Dany was, along with Lyonel and Évelyne Trouillot, one of the writer organizers of a literary festival called Étonnants Voyageurs, which was to have started in Port-au-Prince on January 14, 2010. Some health concerns regarding my one-year-old daughter had forced me to turn down the invitation to participate in the festival. Given that I often travel to Haiti with my family and that we often try to add a few days at the beginning or the end of trips like these, it is possible that if we had agreed to attend Étonnants Voyageurs, we, along with forty other writers who live outside of Haiti, might have been either additional victims or survivors of the earthquake.
Dany Laferrière was an additional survivor of the earthquake. A few days later, he returned to Canada, where he lives, to tell of what he had seen: of the bravery and dignity of Haitians who initially received no outside help and dug their friends and families out of the rubble with their bare hands while sharing what little food and water they had.
Dany was criticized by some Canadian journalists for leaving Haiti after the earthquake. He should have stayed with his people, they said. And I have no doubt that if he were a doctor, he would have. But at that time, his role was to bear witness