Recollections of Haiti

The scene has a haunting effect upon me to this day, its recollection stirred by the recent images of devastation in Haiti.  I was one of only two diners in a somewhat elegant, albeit a-bit-worse-for-wear dining room, the only other patron in worn jeans and a tattered sweatshirt, whose college affiliation long ago faded from my memory.  A young man entered the room and sat down at a grand piano, the instrument, like the restaurant, oddly opulent considering the larger environment beyond the walls of where I was dining.  He sat at the piano stool, took a breath, then proceeded into some of the most beautiful renderings of Chopin pieces I had ever heard, so much so I was having difficulty picking at the remains of my dinner, my eyes pinned on the pianist, while the other patron seemed completely oblivious to the lovely sounds that accompanied whatever it was he was eating. 

It was a deeply depressing moment.  The young man so out of synch with the setting, completely unaware of how his music was affecting me.  I was strangely relieved when I had finished, signed my check and could leave.  But while I tried to lose myself in some reading, back in my room at the hotel that housed the dining area, I could hear the music filtering through the walls.  Finally, I decided upon a late nightcap and returned to the bar adjoining the restaurant.  By this time, the young man was playing to an empty room. 

Although I had come to write about his country for a guidebook section, this young Haitian was representative of a Haiti I had not expected to find: a country of glaringly repressed creativity buried beneath decades, even a couple of centuries of repressive politics and grinding poverty, but that burst through fissures of music, art and literature in those ways that art always has of fighting its way to the surface.  There was truth to what I had been warned: you couldn't wait to leave, but the experiences you would have there you would have difficulty expressing because they would demand something deeper within. 

It was the waning days of the Duvalier era, the dictatorship of father (Papa Doc) and then son (Baby Doc), who had ruled with that unspeakable level of repression common in parts of the Caribbean and South America, and most of Central America, during the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s.  The contrast here between the few haves and the multitudes of have-nots was greater than anything I had witnessed in years of travel prior to, and ever since.  I would tell people after my return, "whatever your definition of poverty, forget it unless you've been to Haiti."  I'd seen people living in cardboard boxes or beneath the skimpy canopy of near-denuded trees, washing their children in the muddy, grimy runoff water in ditches along the sides of broken roads, cooking dinners of slivers of meat from god-knows what animal over a few coals in a brazier.  By contrast, they said Madame Duvalier, Baby Doc's wife, had a half-dozen fur coats for her trips to Paris, and possessed other accoutrements that seemed unnecessary to list for a woman who had a half-dozen fur coats in a poverty-stricken country where it was too hot to wear any of them - unless of course you escaped to frequent trips abroad. 

One day, while I was strolling through the Iron Market, a central meeting place of shops selling every thing from tchatchkes to produce - days-old versions of the latter rotting rancidly in piles behind stalls - Madame Duvalier had decided to go shopping.  I hadn't noticed at first, but became aware that something was amiss, when people started scurrying for cover.  They dove into alleys and doorways, sometimes knocking over crates or the small cooking fires with their precious morsels of food flying hither and yon.  Madame's entourage approached, first a man jogging while holding an automatic rifle above his head, then a V-formation of motorcycles, ridden by men armed to the teeth. Next came Madame's white BMW, followed by more motorcycles with armed bodyguards.  They stopped for no one.  If you were in the way, they would run into you and/or knock you down.  They weren't heading for the pathetic stalls of the Iron Market and, thankfully, were soon little more than their settling dust and the slow reemergence of those who had taken refuge in the dark crevices of the neighborhood.