Requiem for Port-au-Prince

Port-au-Prince before the earthquake, as described by Haitian writers and visitors to the island nation. 

JANUARY 14, 2010

Lilas Desquiron, from Reflections of Loko Miwa, trans. Robin Orr Bodkin, 1990

Oh! Port-au-Prince is a monster all right -- you'll never get to know the whole story. She'll offer you her sumptuous gardens and extravagant villas. But for those of us tossed back into her seediest neighborhoods by misery, she has both the gentleness and the rage of a whore. A female city, Port-au-Prince sometimes cradles you with an extraordinary tenderness and sometimes spits in your face without your knowing why.

Tonight, as is often the case these days, the streets are deserted. Besides the streetwalkers, only some impenitent revelers dare to be out and about. The macadam resonates with the sound of heavy boots as the armed makout patrol the city. Some of them seem so feeble you have to wonder how they're able to carry around those heavy machine guns. But of all of Duvalier's henchmen they're certainly the most dangerous, however, because they've betrayed us by spreading misery beyond measure and their shame has driven them insane.

Shaul Schwarz/Getty Images

 SUBJECTS:
 

BOREDWELL

8:17 AM ET

January 17, 2010

Island possessed

This is the title of a book on Haiti written by dancer and Guggenheim fellow in anthropology, Dr. Katherine Dunham, published in 1969. It is part cultural treatise but largely, and more importantly, an intimate eye witness account of a person who gradually-gingerly, timidly, daunted at first-chose to participate in every facet of the island's life. Professor Dunham accomplished a rare feat in detailing, aside from their indigenous beliefs and customs, the inner spirit of the people. In reading the book, the reader is given the opportunity to meet the Haitians on their home turf and, if s/he chooses, to understand their incredible endurance, which in spite of centuries of cruel odds, has not diminished. The Haitian people are tough and they are survivors.

 

BOREDWELL

8:19 AM ET

January 17, 2010

Island possessed

This is the title of a book on Haiti written by dancer and Guggenheim fellow in anthropology, Dr. Katherine Dunham, published in 1969. It is part cultural treatise but largely, and more importantly, an intimate eye witness account of a person who gradually-gingerly, timidly, daunted at first-chose to participate in every facet of the island's life. Professor Dunham accomplished a rare feat in detailing, aside from their indigenous beliefs and customs, the inner spirit of the people. In reading the book, the reader is given the opportunity to meet the Haitians on their home turf and, if s/he chooses, to understand their incredible endurance, which in spite of centuries of cruel odds, has not diminished. The Haitian people are tough and they are survivors.