“Demonstrators in Haiti Are Fighting for an Uncertain Future” (Excerpt)

Early in his term as President of Haiti, in a cartoon that was either meant to caution or mock him, Jovenel Moïse is shown dressed as a Haitian superhero. Eyes closed, he’s standing in the barely lit home of a Haitian family, where he announces that in twenty-three months they will have electricity twenty-four hours a day—even as the father reads a book by candle light and the mother presses clothes with a charcoal-fuelled iron. The couple more or less ignores him while only their baby cheers him on.

In the accompanying article by the journalist Roberson Alphonse, published in Haiti’s Le Nouvelliste newspaper, on August 10, 2017, Moïse is quoted as saying, “When I say the entire country will have electricity twenty-four hours a day in twenty-three months, I will do it.” He added that a President “shouldn’t have to promise that. It’s an obligation, a necessity. A country must have electricity, water, and roads.”

It’s been thirty-two months since Moïse was sworn into office after a contested, fraud-plagued, two-round election cycle in which only eighteen per cent of eligible voters participated. In a country of more than ten million people, about six hundred thousand voted for him. Even before taking his Presidential oath, Moïse was accused by Haiti’s Central Financial Intelligence Unit (UCREF) of having laundered millions of dollars. A few months into his term, he fired the director of UCREF—a move that probably led to Moïse being cleared of the laundering charges, which he has denied.

Unknown to most Haitians until he was handpicked by his predecessor, Michel Martelly—who also came to power through elections mired in fraud—Moïse was presented as a successful rural businessman from outside Haiti’s political class, a banana exporter nicknamed Nèg Bannann, or Banana Man. Less advertised was that he was also an auto-parts dealer and a supposed road-construction magnate. According to two reports published earlier this year by Haiti’s Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes, in 2014, before he’d officially become a Presidential candidate, Moïse received more than a million dollars from Martelly’s government, funds that were allocated for road construction and repair in the northern region of the country. The government auditors report that Moïse was paid twice for the same contract, once as the head of Agritrans and again as the leader of another firm, called Betexs. The two firms were listed as having the same staff and projects, as well as the same government patent and tax-identifcation number. The road for which the money was doubly paid shows no sign of having been constructed or repaired. Moïse also got more than a hundred thousand dollars for another one of his companies, Comphener S.A., to install solar panels on street lamps.

I Was Carried to Ohio in a Swarm

of cataclysms & crises. of catacombs & cats with slick combed-back strands

of what were once thickly coiled afros. in a swarm of floods & flooded wrists

& flocks of old & new homies festooned in some fly shit passed down

from a fading ancestor. hunters & hustlers who hang the trophies

of their hunger or wear them, depending on the season. in a swarm

of loose-lipped prophets & pine trees shaking a fist at people passing by

catching their glance. some might slip the tint off the whip in winter & i’m carried

home by the residue of darkness. from the drive by shooting, a swarm

of dust kicks up & my dog couldn’t dodge the smallest explosion.

i have never wanted someone so dead

that i would roll a window down & let the good air out.

tell them folk to pay me what they owe me in the slang they couldn’t slip

their slow tongues around. the type of sweat that isn’t romantic

unless my people say so & when my people say so

it’s gonna be in a language you can’t hear & wouldn’t understand

if you could. i cannot explain the humidity anymore beyond what i have already said:

i open my mouth and in it, we swim an endless passage.

it isn’t biblical if you still fear drowning, or if you’re not handy with tools.

the story i’ve been told is that, as a boy, i found the dying bird in the brambles

of the backyard & brought it to the kitchen table, trying to pour small drops

of water into its gasping beak. you don’t get to hear the part about who lives

& who dies. where do you think all the feathers in the poems come from.

[ Excerpt ]

I will not shoot myself

In the head, and I will not shoot myself

In the back, and I will not hang myself

With a trashbag, and if I do,

I promise you, I will not do it

In a police car while handcuffed

Or in the jail cell of a town

I only know the name of

Because I have to drive through it

To get home.  Yes, I may be at risk,

But I promise you, I trust the maggots

Who live beneath the floorboards

Of my house to do what they must

To any carcass more than I trust

An officer of the law of the land

To shut my eyes like a man

Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet

So clean my mother could have used it

To tuck me in.  When I kill me, I will

Do it the same way most Americans do,

I promise you:  cigarette smoke

Or a piece of meat on which I choke

Or so broke I freeze

In one of these winters we keep

Calling worst.  I promise if you hear

Of me dead anywhere near

A cop, then that cop killed me.  He took

Me from us and left my body, which is,

No matter what we’ve been taught,

Greater than the settlement a city can pay

A mother to stop crying, and more

Beautiful than the new bullet

Fished from the folds of my brain.

[ Excerpt ]

If we see harm approaching someone⁠—

if you see me starting to talk about

something I know nothing about,

like the death of someone who’s a stranger to me,

step between me and language. This morning,

I am seeing it more clearly, that song

can be harmful, in its ignorance

which does not know itself as ignorance.

I have crossed the line, as the line was crossed

with me. I need to apologize

to the letters of the alphabet,

to the elements of the periodic

table, to O, and C, and H,

oxygen, carbon, hydrogen,

which make up most of a human body—

body which breaks down, in fire,

to the elements it was composed of, and all that is

left is ashes, sacred ashes

of strangers, carbon and nitrogen,

and the rest departs as carbon dioxide and is

breathed in, by those nearby,

the living who knew us and the living who did not

know us. I apologize

to nitrogen, to calcium with the

pretty box-shape of its crystal structure,

I apologize to phosphorus,

and potassium, that raw bright metal

we contain, and to sodium and sulphur, and to

the trace amounts which are in us somewhere like the

stars in the night⁠—copper, zinc,

cobalt, iron, arsenic, lead,

I am singing, I am singing against myself, as if

rushing toward someone my song might be approaching,

to shield them from it.

[ Excerpt ]

When I returned to my home town of New Orleans for a second try at making a full-time life there, it was winter, 2011, six years post-Water. I find it impossible now, in the retelling, to know exactly how I decided to move back. I had been living in New York City, running a global nonprofit with more than three hundred employees; a relationship that I had thought might become a marriage had imploded. Undoubtedly, my return had something to do with the intensity of that work and the dissolution of those personal dreams, the combination of which made me long to return to the place where my mother lived.Though I suspect there is an ancient reason for this, moving back to New Orleans and successfully living there had been a goal of mine ever since leaving.

“Paying attention to being alive” was how the poet Jack Gilbert described what I wanted to do for a year in New Orleans. Whereas before, I reasoned, I had lived my familial life by rote, beneath the carapace of clan, now I would be present, physically at least, more than I had since my first departure from the city, in 1997, fourteen years before, when I was not yet eighteen, riding to college in my brother Eddie’s pickup truck, sitting between two other brothers, Carl and Michael. But that was not all. I wanted to work full time at being what I had never wholly allowed myself to be: a writer. I would observe my family and my city, spend time in the city’s archives and with my mother’s old papers, collecting my family’s stories as a journalist might.

I leased an apartment on the busiest, most photographed, most written about, most used corner in all of New Orleans, where all of the city’s ideas about itself converge and sometimes clash. And where, from my narrow balcony three stories above it all, I could watch it happen. That balcony overhangs St. Peter Street, but the entrance to the apartment was around the corner, behind a massive metal green door, on Royal Street, which, in 1941—the year my mother was born—the city directory described as a street that “once seen, can never be forgotten, for there is no other street quite like it in America, replete, as it is, with picturesque characters, real and imaginary, and ancient buildings with an aura of romance still clinging to them.” In 1941, and in the many years following, black people—picturesque or not—were not welcomed on this street, or in any of its famed antique and curio shops, unless they were passing through on their way to work.

This is not the area of the city. I grew up in New Orleans East, which had been vast cypress swamps until the nineteen-sixties, and which had been abandoned by developers after the oil bust in the nineteen-eighties. If the French Quarter is mythologized as New World sophistication, then New Orleans East is the encroaching wilderness. The East is less dressed up; it’s where the city’s dysfunctions are laid bare.

[ Excerpt ]

I remember this place where burdens wash away in the dark and mothers’ dresses float like blossoms, a boy drowns—his head turned toward home—body facing the farmer’s house, where the girl who loves him sleeps. She is the farmer’s daughter. They say she is the one who hit his head, the one who hoisted the rock, the one who watched his blood ooze out. This is the way you wash your clothes in the creek. This is the way you catch catfish in deep water. The mothers stand in water to their knees, their dresses wafting out like sheets on a line. On the creek bank, a child runs circles catching the wind and the mothers’ dresses float like blossoms. The mothers sing prayers for the boy’s mother who looks out her kitchen window and cries. The circle of mothers in the water whisper a prayer for the girl who tells all who will listen that she loved the boy who died. Her mother stands in the backyard, her hand on the chopping hoe with tears streaming down her face. The fathers brood in the fields, walking slow as lepers, hearts and houses filled with grief.

I almost drowned once, my grandmother’s dress blossomed around her like a sail. She was my johnboat in the creek. My mother stood on the shore frozen with fear, my father’s name mute on her tongue, his kiss spoiled fruit in her young sweet mouth. That dead boy’s ghost haunts this place, dark water flowing like a deacon’s robe. On nights spoiled with teenage trouble, I went to the creek and waited for the boy, hoping he would listen. Do you dream of the farmer’s daughter? I asked. Are you sorry for what you’ve done? He didn’t answer. They say he raped the girl but I wasn’t afraid of him. By then I had been raped, too, and was becoming a dangerous woman. I waited for him and held court with the moon. I’m here, I said. Let’s get this done! In this place where burdens washed away I stood, my dress flowering, floating. I was drowning too—my face turned toward home—my black body facing my father’s house, where my mother cried for me. They say the boy was handsome, but I never saw him in the flesh. At night the creek did scare me, its rush like a boy’s whispered threat in a girl’s ear. But here the mothers are always standing with water to their knees, their dresses billowing out like sheets on a line, praying because there was always something roaring in those trees, teeth gnashing, fathers killing boys for the sake of their daughters, eyes always watching, eyes always glistening in the dark.