February 9, 2010

Haiti, I weep for you. I hide my tears because I’m on a flight from Kelowna, British Columbia, to Toronto, and who knows, with all the heightened security I fear they may think something’s amiss. That I’m weeping as a prelude to joining my ancestors. So paranoid have we become. But I weep for you, Haiti, for your people, for the shit — the unmitigated shit — that life seems to throw your way. Again and again. And, to adapt the words of one of your warrior daughters, Maya Angelou, “still you rise,” to greet another green, tropic day that holds hope ransom, as you tear your people limb by painful limb from a hell that eschews fire and opts instead for the hardface, stoneface indifference of concrete that, Medusa like, seems to have frozen all of your magnificent history into slabs of cement. Now fragmented they litter your landscape as if some giant, angry at us mortals, had decided to stamp on your already precarious country. There was a time when our Caribbean houses kept faith with wood, whether one-room homes — some call them chattel houses — or larger, more graceful estate houses. Time was when the thatched Ajoupa bequeathed us by Taino, Arawak and Carib would have swayed to the groans of the earth as she eased her suffering, opening herself along her wounded fault lines to the ever blue skies, the constant love of the sun, to release all her pent up grief for us, birthing we don’t yet know what. Time was when hands steeped in skills of building homes brought from a homeland a slap, kick and a howl away, across a roiling ocean, would have gently patted mud over wattle, weaving branches to create cool interiors, shaping shelters from the earth that would not, could not, betray the safety in home to crush, obliterate, to fall down around your ears. Like the third little pig in the nursery rhyme, Haiti, you built your home of brick — it was supposed to protect you.

Poor you most certainly are in all things material, but your riches are immeasurable, woven through your history, your culture and your people.

Yours was the first and only successful slave revolt in the Western world and resulted in the second independent nation after the United States in the so-called New World. In taking the name the Taino had given the “Land of Mountains,” Ayiti, you returned the country to its First Nations roots. How many know that the USA embargoed you for sixty years because you fired a shot across the bow of history by liberating your people under the brilliant leadership of Touissant L’Overture? How many know that you became a pariah in the world for taking a moral stance in favour of justice and freedom and against racial exploitation and oppression? Then, you were at another epicentre, along one of the many fault lines of history, the reverberations of which seismic, political shift would be felt around the world. Indeed, are still being felt, I would argue. No one rushed to help you then, Haiti. Instead, what we had were France, Spain, Holland, Britain and the United States (albeit secretly) — shall we call them the coalition of the ready, willing and able, or simply the usual suspects? — preparing to invade you to re-impose the yoke of slavery. How many know that your liberation determined the eventual downfall of Napoleon? So decimated were Napoleon’s troops under his brother-in-law, General Leclerc, by fighting in Haiti and by yellow fever, they could not provide the necessary support for Napoleon’s subsequent campaigns in Europe — against Spain, Russia and Prussia to be exact. In November 1803, France, under Napoleon, capitulated. In January 1804, General Jean Jacques Dessalines

Despite the historical and contemporary demonisation of Vaudon, you have enshrined the religion of your ancestors in your constitution, making it an official religion alongside Christianity.

Only South Africa among a continent of African nations has dared to do this — most flee this reminder of who they are. No other Caribbean island nation has followed suit. Most of all, Haiti, you are rich in your people — their dignity, their love of homeland and willingness to struggle for freedom. What more fitting example of this is the recognition of the language of the people, Haitian Creol, as an official language? With the exception of the three formerly Dutch colonies, Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao, no other Caribbean island nation has officially recognised the language of the people, for the people and by the people — the vernacular, the demotic — Kamau Brathwaite’s nation language — as worthy of recognition. Ah, but most of all, Haiti, I weep for the “dream deferred” that Langston Hughes so eloquently wrote about. What has happened to the many deferred dreams of your people? Where have they gone? How many know that at the start of your fledgling nation in 1804, democratic principles were central to your constitution? First, you abolished slavery, then moved to enshrine one of the most frighteningly revolutionary and emancipatory ideals in your constitution — racial equality — even granting citizenship to Polish soldiers who had fought alongside Haitians against the French. In 1804 that would have been the equivalent of an earthquake measuring at least 8 on a Richter scale of oppression. You were at the heart of the awakening of modernity — albeit a deferred modernity. More than anything else, you presented, in the words of the Canadian poet, Jordan Scott, a profound “threat to cohesion.” The cohesion of imperial power founded on brute racism.

I weep for you, Haiti, and for I ‘n’ I, because when I bear virtual witness to your despair and your suffering, when I see the mountains of rubble and concrete, the broken roads, the tangle of electrical wires, and hear the voices droning on and on about the lack of infrastructure, I think of my own internal infrastructure — spiritual, psychic, intellectual and political — and realize that your history has played no small part in its structure and design. I recognize you writ large through CLR James’ The Black Jacobins that I first read as a young Caribbean woman trying to find her place in a world and a history that had hardly begun to be told. Your history, your struggle, your survival, epitomised through the successful Haitian revolution, as told by James, became a part of my own struggle to understand my place and the place of my people in this world — on all those tiny pieces of coral or volcanic rock scattered in the ever blue Caribbean Sea. Through The Black Jacobins we, each and every one of us who read that work, grew in stature internally as Caribbean people, children of the volcano all, to quote the brilliant Martniquan poet and founder of negritude, Aimé Césaire

I gaze at a map of Port au Prince in a newspaper identifying high profile sites of destruction: it is as if someone decided you had to start again, and wiped the slate clean: the Ministry of Justice — gone; the Presidential Palace — gone; administrative offices — gone; the penetentiary — gone; the hospitals — gone; churches — gone; the cathedral — gone. Hundreds of thousands of people — gone. All gone — just like that. In the clichéd wink of an eye — God’s perhaps? Or the devil’s snap of fingers. Leaving nothing but bright mornings filled with mourning, despair, grief and pictures of little Black girls with locks made blonde by concrete dust, who look out at the world through glasses, bearing the weight of history and a building on their little legs. Oh God, oh God, why hast thou forsaken us? This is the language — the language of the Bible — that bursts forth, as if the apocalyptic nature of the disaster itself demands a language of Biblical proportions. Because flesh hurts, and love and grief know no bounds when your loves are entombed before your very eyes, sometimes leaving no one to mourn, no one to cry out, Why? Why? Why? And, worse than that, no one to answer why.

October 27th, 2009  — in the Year of Our Word (to quote Looking for Livingstone)

Haven’t  been in Africa 24 hours yet.  Am sitting in an internet cafe writing a blog for the first time ever.    At my age there are not many first- times-ever left, or perhaps shouldn’t be.    But I’m also thinking that you’re only old once, which to my mind is far more relevant and meaningful than you’re only young once.    After all, in the latter case you have your whole damn life in front of you.    In my case it feels like my whole damn life is behind me, or under me, or sometimes above me pressing down with all its might.  And then again sometimes there is no ‘or’ — I’m completely encapsulated by my life.   Which doesn’t feel like such a good thing.

Perhaps that’s what I’m doing here.  In Ghana.   Trying to escape my life… perhaps trying to chase a life that escaped and still escapes me.  Anyway hunter or hunted, pursuer or pursued, here I am in Afronet.    That’s the  ever- so- cool name of the internet cafe.    So many resonances there that connect with African cultures that, at their foundation, work on principles of connectivity and breaking (dance); synapse jumping and colliding;  bouncing off this, riffing on that, picking up stuff here and leaving it there.     Like jazz, I mean.  Or Negro music as Ellington wanted to call it.

It’s warm outside and cool in here with 2o or so people, mainly men – young men, working industriously at computers.   Whoever runs Afronet  has it locked down in a positive way  — there are always one or two people walking around to give assistance.  You — I — notice these things in Africa because so much doesn’t seem to work, and I fret like an anxious parent.    When are we going to get it right? (If the media were to be belived, the only thing we seem to get right is killing and raping each other.)  When are we going to get out from under that life that is “downpressing” us so relentlessly?

So why am I in Africa — what am I doing here at this particular point in time?  Three years ago, while in the throes of working on my last book of poetry,Zong!, I  visited Africa — Ghana, believing I needed to ask permission (of whom?) to bring to light the voices of the submerged that are at the heart of that work.   I always knew that once the work was done I would have to return.    John Keats advanced the theory of  negative capability –”being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”    And negative capability best sums up — often with lots of irritability and anger, though — my thoughts, such as they are, and feelings about a journey which is not metaphorical but very real: should I, for instance, take malaria pills or use herbs or homeopathic remedies and prophylactics instead?   Which immediately brings up the apparently irrevocable link between disease and Africa, which I will explore in another posting.   To return to negative capability, however,    I “knew” I had to shave my head after I was done with the work — took me some time but I did do it.    I also “knew” I had to wear white after I was done.    So I did that as well.   Interestingly enough, this morning in conversation with a friend here about the death of my mother at the age of 90,  he tells  me that white would be worn for her because one of the practices here in Ghana is to wear white when there is a victory of sort.  If a woman, for instance, has had a difficult labour and survives, she would wear white.  Or, as in the case of my mother, her living a long life is considered a victory, so we, her survivors would wear white.    I say hmmm to myself and listen some more.

I’ve learnt that having a bald head and  not having to worry about twisting and/or combing one’s hair frees up a lot of time and that one’s head get cold very quickly.  I’ve also learnt that  you can wear  an article of  white clothing  a lot longer that you think you can and it still “looks” white.  But I sense that there is more at work here than these trivial pieces of information  — perhaps, it has to do with the roots of poetry being in the sacred and in ritual, and, perhaps, some resistance to that on my part.     So, I will continue in negative capability around this trip “without reaching after fact or reason” and continue to post as the spirit moves me.