Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [140]
Arrogant malcontents! …
I don’t want to write. At least, not as I have before. I feel as if I am coming out of my apathy and becoming self-aware. Cornered, hounded like an animal, I take stock of my powers in silence and in fear, and plunge to the very bottom of my being. To find what there? Ah! Lord have mercy! Spare me from clutching at nothing yet again. Look at my buddies. Poets like me. Their empty gizzards stuffed with crooked rhymes, just like me. Poetry! The endemic illness of young malcontents, desperately embracing beauty, hog-tied to the tempting rhymes of a loaned-out language, tossed about between Creole and French like those rowboats over there on the sea I can hear but not see crashing from my shack. My senses grow sharp in this silence intermittently punctuated by cries or the whistling of bullets. I no longer need to look in order to see: the sea is raging. Raging against the devils, against our resignation, against our cowardice, against us. I listen to it holler, scold, protest, refute. Furious, her waves lift abandoned sailboats and make them clatter like teeth. Silver and pink fish jump high in the air and cast stunned looks at the shore; gaunt dogs pace along the beach, nosy, searching through trash and bodies. Closer by, multihued birds shake off the rain, gliding indifferently, wings fixed between heaven and earth. Between squalor and splendor. They whistle and sing cheerful sunny songs, the strident songs of island birds; and their unbridled effervescence, wafting on the warm noon breeze, that Haitian noon usually suffused with the smell of dishes spiced with garlic and hot pepper, accentuates our torment, poor prisoners that we are. We are indeed prisoners. Brave is he who ventures out. Even the beggars have deserted the streets. They have probably dug themselves in somewhere in the mountains. Let’s hope hunger doesn’t turn them into snitches and drive them to make a pact with the devils, those who just yesterday were praying at the gates of the church, arms outstretched in a cross. The church too has closed its doors and, since morning, the bells have been quiet. Is Father Angelo afraid? Is Cécile afraid? Let me put my thoughts in order, let me draw a battle plan, and I will fly to your rescue … Where have I read this? …
My shack is in a back alley that opens on the Grand-rue. A nameless back alley in the slums where near-beggars of my kind live here and there. It is near the Grand-rue and is even more despised for it. A disgraceful appendix of that main street with its heap of self-styled aristocrats, baptized by high society, as they say. Shopkeepers, businessmen, exploiters, thieves in the guise of respectable citizens, bursting with every sort of prejudice, living like pashas in this provincial small town, which, due to the terrible roads that link it to Port-au-Prince, seems forever separated from the rest of the world.
This Haitian province sung over and over in my French rhymes, province that I love because my mother and I grew up here, suffered and slaved here, I will free you from the devils’ claws!
The past is forever vomiting up regrets. Life is like a heavy cart slowly, implacably grooving a path straight ahead of itself. I turned my head to look back and was seized by discouragement. Why didn’t I keep begging for work? Why didn’t I have the courage to declare my love to Cécile? I ran away from responsibilities out of fear of the future and now I may no longer have a future. I am alone, shut up like a rat in his hole, I am gnawing at my solitude with every last tooth. Look at my buddies. André, Jacques, Simon! Malnourished poets like me. Hunted by the devils like me.
I heard gunshots and then furious running. And this time I jumped to the barricade to unblock the door. I opened it wide and the fugitive saw it and flew into my house like the wind: it was André. We put back the barricade before embracing.
“What were you