to clarify

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Susana

I wrote a story last week for TIME on the second earthquake anniversary in Haiti. Specifically, about Titanyen, a new settlement on what was ostensibly claimed “public use” land just north of the capital, Port-au-Prince.  To be even more specific, it is the Titanyen that is north of Grace de Dieu, which is north of Mon St. Christophe, which is north of Jerusalem, north of Canaan, north of Onaville, north of Corail-Cesselesse, which is north of La Plaine, north of Bon Repos, north of Crois-des-Bouquets. (But that’s not the real Crois-des-Bouquets, some locals will say.) And this Titanyen is south of the tiny village Titanyen, which is where I stopped one day to have a tall Coca-Cola by the side of the road and has, I can tell you, been around for a minute.

(People began to move to not-the-village Titanyen in November from Tabarre, Delmas, Cite Soleil, Cabaret, Santo and other places after they heard via SMS and radio that free land was available. Free land! For a first family home or an escape from a camp, who wouldn’t want to come?)

This Titanyen is a mass grave site. It is not where the earthquake memorial took place this year or last (that would be Mon St. Christophe), but rather it is where the dead are (and continue to be) buried en masse. There is still an open pit; when new bodies are dropped in, dirt from the towering mounds that surround the pit is pushed in to cover them. A few metal crosses remain from memorials past, some fallen forgotten in the rocky earth, among the last solemn physical reminders of what this place is.

Kijan rele zòn sa a? ”What is the name of this place?”

The answers were different each time I asked. The most popular, Titanyen, was the one that stuck. “No, I think this is Sous Pyant,” a few people said, recalling the name of the sulphur springs across the road and down the way. No one south of here seemed to want to claim the name Titanyen anymore; they had all taken on new names, baptized into their new lives. Someone had already tried to baptize this place, too.

“This is Bethlehem.” One man tried to convince me, showing off a hand-painted sign propped up on a hillside, but the name hasn’t gained much traction yet. Bethlehem. Birth place of Jesus, his saviour, and in keeping with the Biblical names taken on by his neighbours to the south. Bethlehem. Until the name sticks, adopted by a critical mass, the name Titanyen remains. Given the still-open grave, it seems fitting.

*

We are spoiled in the North/West by our expectation of hard and simple truths, boundaries, statistics, names, spellings. How big was the protest? How many dead? Who won the election? The most recent theme taken up by the international media has been this gem: Where did the money go?

Covering demonstrations is nearly always an exercise in managing manufactured appearances. So much is done for show, for influence and marketing power, but how do you report that the few hundred people that showed up with neat, pre-made protest signs in English at the anti-UN demo were actually bussed in and paid to attend by local politicians, narco traffickers and pro-army lobbyists? (Sometimes a three-for-one deal.) Is a protester still a protester if all he wants is some lunch?

My friend and colleague Maura O’Connor has a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review on the prickly dispute over the earthquake death toll that is worth a read. It astounds me, naïvely, still, how striving for accuracy in numbers can make you so many enemies. I’ve countered claims of overblown head counts by activists and journalists–claims of several thousand demonstrators at a protest when I see with my own eyes no more than several hundred–that has caused some friction, as well as one (so far) low-blow Twitter tussle. The idea that, by wanting to report a lower number, this somehow hurts “the cause.” But doesn’t reporting a flagrantly exaggerated number hurt credibility? And in the case of death or sickness counts–cholera, quake, or otherwise–cooking the numbers for political or financial reasons can have far graver consequences than a simple ego bruise. Choosing which numbers to report, and whether or not to include backstory details, isn’t always easy to navigate.

We measure the strength of movements and public opinion by how many bodies are in the street, with no distinction between the organic and the engineered. We also measure success in reconstruction, it seems, by similarly arbitrary numbers.

WHERE DID THE MONEY GO? Last week’s headlines, ledes and nut graphs screamed this question. An American reporter brought it up on a USAID teleconference, her delivery particularly indignant: where did all that money go? $10 billion pledged, $4.5 billion pledged, only half delivered, dispersed, spent, $155 per Haitian, $173 per Haitian, $200 000 for a country director salary, and people are still in tents, where did it all go?

Underlying much of this talk are a few major assumptions. The first, and most revealing, is that spending fixes things. The money that was pledged — Was it not enough? Was it too much? If all those billions of dollars had been spent, rather than just some of them, would Haiti be in top shape by now? There is no nuanced breakdown of how money is spent in a program, of how much is actually needed to deliver specific services or supplies. I’ve seen NGOs struggle with enormous AmCross grants, overwhelmed over how to spend tens- or hundreds-of-millions of dollars in a set period. Other programs, meanwhile, have languished for lack of financial support–not to speak of the chronically cash-starved state.

The money must be spent! Restricted funds, unrestricted funds, emergency response funds, development programme funds. There are submenus to be explored in this monetary breakdown, and sub-questions to pose. Stepping back further: What does the charity spending impulse reveal? What does the bang-for-your-donated-buck demand reveal? Pouring money into a fractured aid system and then being upset that bothersome problems like homelessness and poverty haven’t been solved after two years is a cocktail that gives me the worst kind of headache.

The self-directed resettlement and reconstruction happening in Titanyen struck me as extraordinary for a number of reasons, one of them being that it is not extraordinary at all. In the face of everything, in the face of mismanagement of funds and expectations, life must go on. People must eat. People must sleep. Some of the most striking personal stories I heard had little to do with the earthquake. The man who had his arms and head disfigured in a machete attack in Freres two decades ago. The woman who put her two children in an orphanage after her husband died, losing all contact with them after they were sold away in a German adoption years ago. At least, she thinks they’re in Germany. Information, she said, has been hard to come by.

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a-ris-to-ter

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Susana

Mines ahead, behind, to the left, to the right. Mines inside us. Mines in our sleepy, exhausted eyes, trembling and worried, trying to stay awake. Seeking out objects of death whose characteristic is that of never being seen—they wait their entire life and are born only for a second to die with you.

Move by day. Move by night. Eat cornmeal or eat nothing. Save the last can. Boil tea gathered from bushes. Cook in black pots in the earth plowed by tires. Eat the last can. Eat with your hands from flaking enamel plates. Fantasize about fresh water. Salivate salt. Shiver from the cold an hour after the moon rises. Suffocate from the heat an hour after the sun rises.Dream about a bed.Wake up with rats.Go to sleep with fear.

Disdain tears.

Avoid dogs.

Defecate in front of others. Bathe in the river, swim during the crocodiles’ siesta, keep away from snakes, dry your body with your hands, extract the shudders from your bones, cover your skin with filthy clothes. Vomit your own smell. Sleep in the open air, sleep on the alert, in transit, in abandoned houses, on mattresses of straw and lice, on blankets with holes and mange. Listen to the wind beneath the divan. Listen to the sound of leaves laughing as they scrape the cement on the ground.

DANGER MINES. Do not touch anything, tread on existing tracks, walk backward retracing your steps, the same steps, exactly, or —

On short breaks in the True North, I eat books. While in this imaginary world I slip in and out of others, good ones and bad ones, slogging through the dull and lapping up the delicious. I met the author of this one before I knew the words were his. Read them in our native Portuguese first, Baía dos Tigres, conversed in our adopted French, but reading an excellent English translation has brought it to life anew. It, as in death taste, death smell, mortality, but sinewy and vivid and locomotive. This is non-fiction.

“The problem is basically a political one… You say you’re on a journey, but there are various kinds of journeys, as you know. Is it to gather information?”

“No. It’s to meet people.”

“But you’re a journalist. People give information. A journalist investigates. You’re on an investigation.”

“No, I’m on a trip. That’s different. Working on my own. People tell stories. I’ve already said I’m not here for my newspaper. I’m not even interested in the peace process.”

“But later you’re going to write about this and make good money; it’s always like that with foreigners.”

I’m still so inspired and grateful, friend. I had to share.

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you’ll never believe what happened

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Susana

“We live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted — knowingly or unknowingly — in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.”

- Ben Okri

I’ve been thinking a lot these past two weeks or so about stories and storytellers, unreliable narrators, unreliable memories, and the purpose of conflict in a plot. An essay came out last week — maybe you saw? — about one person’s experience in Haiti that upset a number of people. I was one of them. Reading Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories has helped me understand my negative reaction. But we’ll get to King in a moment. First, that essay.

The crux of the piece is trauma and how one person dealt with it, but the context of Haiti (starting with graphs two and three, but really starting long before that) is what made many of us cry foul. I don’t need to reiterate why. The letter, which I did not write but supported enough to sign my name to, already covers these points.

I’ve been somewhat troubled by the sometimes vicious, mostly vapid back-and-forth on the topic. The arguments praising the author for being “brave”; the haughty, sneering references to her as a “parachute” journalist;  the claws-out attacks on the 36 signatories (among them, a highly respected Haitian author and several Haitian and foreign journalists, activists and researchers who have spent years or decades living in and writing about the country) for daring to question a victim of an ailment they likely have suffered from themselves; disputes over the veracity of the ugly Haitian context of the essay or whether the context even matters. Each side accuses the other of missing the point.

Also, I’m told that PTSD is a hot topic? And that calling someone a “liberal” is an insult? I wouldn’t know.

The point is not the trauma acquisition or recovery process. That is something personal. Everyone has a different threshold for this sort of thing, framed by their own upbringing, exposure to violence and relationship with pain, injustice, death. I’ve seen my friends break to pieces, lash out in anger, withdraw into themselves, drown their memories in alcohol and drugs. Many of them, to escape trauma, will simply occupy their minds with newer, fresher traumas, bouncing from difficult assignment to difficult assignment, layering horror upon horror. But the new images and stories and experiences don’t cancel out the old ones, do they?

(My own panic attacks, chest-gripping anxiety and crying fits have subsided over the past several weeks, thanks in no small part to two passports, plane tickets, and a six hour time difference. Temporary exile, a luxury that is still accessible to me. I wasn’t interested in talking to a therapist because, culturally, that would have felt very weird. I do have a support network, both on and off the island, but the back-home network, unless they’ve been in similar situations, often aren’t much help.

“You are so brave for going there,” they would say. It made me cringe, because there is absolutely nothing brave about it. Some of the people who expressed the most shock or admiration were Haitian friends who were either born in the diaspora or left as small children and never returned. The way they painted their motherland was stark. “You’re going to get kidnapped,” they told me, breathless, eyes wild with a brand of Ayiti paranoia I came to know well. “It is total anarchy. Please be careful.” And again, “you are so brave.”

We have strange ideas about what bravery is.)

Over a week later, I’m looking beyond the online fight-picking and feeling more thoughtful. I realize that, in part, my reaction is fed by frustration with so much of the shoddy, thoughtless, lazy journalism I watched pour out of Haiti in the first eight or nine months I spent there. People I consider my colleagues, both parachute-jumpers and long-haulers, have made bad judgement calls in how they describe Haiti, how they contextualize their stories, and in how they selectively — if at all — do their background homework. Countless journalists have published and aired stories that paint a Haiti that is far more dangerous and chaotic than it actually is. There are lots of examples. You have probably seen many of them, absorbed them, taken them as fact. I won’t even get into political coverage, or we’ll be here all night. There’s bad, sensational reporting everywhere, but Haiti seems to be spectacularly good at attracting this sort of thing.

I’ve been wondering through all of this, perhaps naively: what is the purpose of making Haiti sound worse than it is? Who benefits from making it come across as a war zone, or yes, a hellhole? Quite a lot of people, I would imagine. All of these stories mean something. They build something. People believe them. Each bad story props up the other, until a new, perceived version of Haiti is papered over the real one. Darkness.

In talking about stories, Thomas King starts by telling the one from which all the others spring: the creation myth. First, the story of the woman who fell from the sky. Second, the biblical creation story. He writes:

“So here are our choices: a world in which creation is a solitary, individual act or a world in which creation is a shared activity; a world that begins in harmony and slides toward chaos or a world that begins in chaos and moves toward harmony; a world marked by competition or a world determined by co-operation. And there’s the problem.”

From this central story, the one that frames our world and everything in it, stems the desire for dichotomies and battles. “We trust easy oppositions,” He says.

“Perhaps this is why we delight in telling stories about heroes battling the odds and the elements, rather than about the magic of seasonal change. Why we relish stories that lionize individuals who start at the bottom and fight their way to the top, rather than stories that frame these forms of competition as varying degrees of insanity. Why we tell our children that life is hard, when we could just as easily tell them that it is sweet. Is it our nature? Do the stories we tell reflect the world as it truly is, or did we simply start off with the wrong story?”

The desire for these masculine, arrow-shaped storylines [PDF] in our own lives — we are the heroes or heroines, pitted against a cast of cardboard villains — is problematic, it is dangerous, and it is very boring.

Perhaps this is what’s bothered me most. I am disappointed with these arguments because I am bored with the flat stories they are woven around. Bored with heroes, bored with villains, bored with black and white judgements, bored of these meaningless, echoing stories we absorb without question and then act out, me versus you, every day. It is so much easier to see a place like Haiti painted in ugly, unforgiving broad strokes than it is to contemplate it in shades of grey, orange, blue, red. It’s so much easier to choose sides in wars of personality. So much easier to enjoy conflict than to question its purpose in a plot. So much easier than challenging these stories. So much easier than telling, or listening, to new ones.

Ayiti yo pa vle wè a…

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ayiti yo pa vle wè a

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Susana

It didn’t rain the day of Michel Joseph Martelly’s inauguration. It didn’t rain the day after either. I would have remembered, I think. Rains are something that stick in my memory now, each downpour bringing with it a different rhythm, a different kind of destruction. I still remember the rains one Friday afternoon in September, how dark grey clouds curled across the sky, layering and pooling to turn it black. Winds whipped plants, trash, tarps and things in frenzied circles, ripping through fragile tents and makeshift wood-and-blue-plastic shelters, rain shooting down in heavy pellets to drown it all. I remember other rains in October that turned parts of Tabarre into a great, brown river, rushing and disappearing into the cracks and holes where pavement had collapsed.

The rains in May are different. The clouds come in more timidly, usually around late afternoon. They start in the mountains, drizzling down over Thomassin and La Boule first, crawling across the skies over Pétionville, until they reach the Centreville of Port-au-Prince, close to where I live. It rains most evenings, sometimes in the late afternoons. Water cascades from the sky in ribbons, though not for long, and not as aggressively as September. Not yet. On the days it doesn’t rain, the stickiness coats your skin, making it wet another way. It’s a wetness you carry with you, heavy, hiding under your clothes and trickling along the back of your neck.

Last week I marked eight months in Haiti. I’ve been quiet here, but not still. When I arrived, the election campaigning had not even begun. The first posters had not yet been pasted or hung, the first radio jingles not yet stuck in my ears, the already snarling traffic not yet crushed to a standstill by the first campaign tours, parties or parades. The walls, mostly bare for that brief two-week window, would soon have their cracks and stresses covered in blue, red, green and pink headshots of the candidates. Some walls were already dotted with spray-paint scrawl, like a never-ending news ticker: down with MINUSTAH, down with Préval, jen kore jen and fas à fas and other Wyclef slogans, pleas to Obama for help. Nou bouke, we’re tired. These gave way to messages about cholera, the provisional electoral council, and slogans and insults for the presidential hopefuls, by then whittled down to a tangled three and then a final two. “Give me my mother” battled it out with “Tèt kale,” the bald-headed slogan winning the ultimate battle: marketability. In the republic of logos, the best packaging wins.

Today it rained twice. First, mid-afternoon, while over a beer with a maybe-future Minister in the new administration, he told me he had predicted Martelly’s rise 15 years ago. “I said to my daughter in 1996,” he went on, his assertive enunciation carrying the softest of rolling French arrrrrrs, that Sweet Mickey was the only one capable of taking on Aristide and winning. Mickey had an organic connection to the people, he explained, because of his music.

It’s raining again now, rolling past with a purpose, thunder exploding over the building across the road. There is months of this to come, and storms, and after that, the hurricanes again. But for now the sticky heat has broken. The cicadas will be quiet tonight, and all over Port-au-Prince people will prepare for sleep on sheets and mattresses and ground that is very very wet.

Posted in ayiti, voyages, yo yo yo yo yo | 1 Comment

nan boudam

Posted on November 15, 2010 by Susana

I’ve been in Haiti two months now and all my writing is going elsewhere. Some of it is secret. Fais-moi signe if you want in, car j’suis pas complètement à l’aise sharing it publicly pour l’instant.

It goes on: mud cholera heat elections campaign parades sweat sun hurricanes rains rubble dust smoke fires blackness traffic roadblocks protests cabrit rice barbancourt ti-punch tarps camps wind shacks 4x4s mountains sea monsters markets bodies shotguns sweetness sunsets sunrises roosters radio crackle comedians kompa smiles whispers coo-cooing chouchouuu.

Posted in ayiti, voyages, yo yo yo yo yo | 2 Comments

i am not wifey

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Susana

When I saw her last, one year ago this month, she mentioned she had been working on my wedding towel. Embroidering it by hand, painstakingly, while her eyes held up. But I don’t know, she shrugged, if you’re getting married any time soon.

“Well,” I asked her, “is the towel finished?”

No, she said. I’m still working on it.

“So am I,” was my reply. And she laughed.

I got word two days ago — she’s finished. Her eyes are failing, but the towel is done, embroidered, pressed, and ready for me to collect from her mountain-top-weathered hands.

Oh lordy.

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