Choosing Haiti: Prologue to Bearing the Bruise
Posted by Ethan Casey on January 6, 2012 · 2 Comments
“In Bearing the Bruise, Ethan Casey offers up a heartfelt account of his travels in Haiti. As an eyewitness, Casey gives readers an informed perspective on many of the political and social complexities that vex those who seek to make common cause with Haiti, our oldest neighbor, as it seeks to emerge from decades of strife and one of the most devastating natural disasters in recent history.”
- Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health and author of Haiti After the Earthquake
The following excerpt, “Choosing Haiti,” is the prologue to Bearing the Bruise:
“Wee-eek up!” I heard from below my window. “Wee-ee-eek up!”
“Ki moun ou cheche?” I called. Who are you looking for?
“Ou menm! Paul Farmer wants to see you.”
It was only nine in the evening, but it had been a long day of hard travel. I forced myself to sit up and dress.
It seemed I came to Haiti anymore only when something bad had happened. This time, the occasion was the second abrupt and forcible ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been such a divisive central figure in Haiti’s drama since the late 1980s. On February 29, 2004, Aristide had boarded a U.S. plane at the airport in Port-au-Prince and somehow ended up in the Central African Republic. Farmer, the co-founder of Partners in Health, subject of Tracy Kidder’s bestselling book Mountains Beyond Mountains, and author of The Uses of Haiti, was not alone in calling it a coup. Others were pretending not to hear the hard questions Farmer and many Haitians were asking about the incident’s circumstances. Most Americans failed even to notice that it had happened. One American who had noticed was Dick Cheney, whose comment was characteristic: “We’re glad to see him go.”
Earlier that year, when the cable news channels had been carrying disturbing accounts of “rebels” mobilizing against Aristide in provincial Haiti, I was in Pakistan. The semester I had signed up to spend teaching at a university in Lahore ended in early February, and I returned to my home in a London suburb. Matters were coming to a head there as well after my long absence but, when I had a choice to make, I chose Haiti. I always chose Haiti. I quickly wrote and submitted the book I was writing on Pakistan, explained myself as best I could, then fled the suburbs again. I couldn’t not go to Haiti at such a time, or so I told myself; and if I had wanted to stay in the suburbs, I would have stayed in the suburbs in the first place.
So, at what turned out to be decisive cost to my personal situation, I chose Haiti yet again.
I was still groggy as the burly Haitian and I walked out of the compound and across the road. “You’re a writer?” he asked in Creole as we picked our way up a dirt path toward a small house hidden away on a wooded hilltop. His name was Ti Jean.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m not as well known as Tracy Kidder …”
“Se zanmi mwen,” said Ti Jean. He’s my friend. I felt one-upped.
A tall man wearing little John Lennon spectacles stood at the entrance to the yard in front of the house. “I’m Paul Farmer,” he said, offering his hand.
It felt like meeting Kurtz at the end of the long journey upriver, but the air of mystery dissolved quickly. In the light Farmer was a bland-looking white guy in early middle age, younger than I had imagined. He wore a light-blue Haitian shirt with stitched palm trees and stylized peasant figures on it. In his small front room he had set out glasses and bottles of rum and Prestige beer on a low table.
They were wary at first, and I blundered by describing the events surrounding Aristide’s departure as “complex.”
“Haitian professionals don’t really buy that peasants and slum dwellers ought to vote,” asserted Farmer. “People who can express themselves in international languages are not on the side of a popular vote. They’re just not, sociologically. The poor happen to be ninety percent of the population here. Reporters, even of goodwill, don’t talk to the poor. That was the purpose of The Uses of Haiti: to say, ‘Look, these people are human.’”
Ti Jean claimed attention and deferred to no one, and he felt insults keenly. If you could communicate with him in Creole, you quickly recognized a shrewd and alert intelligence. “In the U.S.,” he said, “I’ve never seen a Haitian go into a store or a restaurant with visible firearms. But in Haiti, Americans go into stores openly armed all the time. When I see you writing, it doesn’t make me hate you. When I see Paul with a stethoscope, it doesn’t make me feel bad. But when I see an American soldier in Haiti, it makes me want to kill myself.”
“This must be a lot like what you got in the Islamic world,” remarked Farmer. “These are the people I work with, and this is how they talk to me. But Haiti is America’s oldest neighbor. You can only have one oldest neighbor, and for the U.S. this country is it. It’s not Iraq or any other country.”
Farmer later told me how Ti Jean had gone from being a manual laborer to being his right-hand man.
“Everybody has to have a hobby, right?” he said. “Well, mine is planting trees, more than anything else. Trees. But once a place is reforested, then you have to plant other things. So I started with trees, and I’m still into trees, but I also plant other things: perennials, small plants, house plants, whatever, but outside. Water plants, bog plants. And when I would go back to Boston to be on service at the hospital there, I’d be gone for a month solid. And so I’d ask my neighbors, ‘Would you mind watering my plants?’ And they’d always say, ‘Oh please, Doctor Paul, we’d be so happy to water your plants for you. You’re such a fantastic guy, great doctor, we’d be thrilled.’ And I’d come back, and everything would be dead.
“I tried various neighbors. And you get kind of sheepish thinking, well, you know, it’s not like there’s a lot of water around, it’s not like things to eat are coming out of these plants and trees. They’re ornamentals. And so I never really could feel too put out. I always felt kind of sheepish. And Ti Jean was at the time, as he would say, lifting sacks. He would wash the cars, the vehicles, the ambulances, and on Fridays go to a local market and carry back these huge bags of things. And I would just see him in the courtyard. His brother was a patient of mine; he was one of eighteen kids. I knew lots of people in his family. Whenever they were sick, you know. He’s obviously a pretty sharp character, and I asked him would he mind watering my plants. And I came back from being in Boston for a month, and everything was lush and verdant.” He emphasized the adjectives with relish. “I had been expecting the worst. And I said, ‘Wow, Ti Jean, man, thank you so much for doing this. I owe you big-time. I’d like to do something for you.’
“And he said, ‘I’d like a computer.’
“And I was completely floored by that, and I said, ‘What do you want a computer for?’
“And he said, ‘Oh, did someone ask you that when you asked for your first computer?’ And I said, ‘Ouch.’ And it just so happened I had just been given a new computer, so I had two. And I did give him a computer. And now his chief complaint these days is likely to be, ‘I told you I’m sick of Windows 98. I want Windows XP 2000.’”
“The masses have no one sticking up for them anymore,” Ti Jean insisted. “Even now, with Aristide in exile and all the repression, he would be elected again for seventeen years. You can call this a government. We call it a tchoul, a lackey. It’s not elected. They’re jobbeurs, Bush’s hired hands. Haiti is a small country. But it’s the first independent black country. That’s why Aristide was overthrown. Aristide is a black man who wants to stay black. Rich Americans and rich Haitians conspire to make sure Haiti will always be a tchoul state. On February 29, 2004, they restored slavery to Haiti. All Haitian people elected a president. As soon as all Haitians elected him, they blocked international aid. And then when they kidnap him, they restore aid. It’s like The Lord of the Rings.”
I asked Ti Jean whether he believed Aristide had been kidnapped.
“They kidnapped him from his house and took him in handcuffs to the Palace,” he said. “Paul Farmer doesn’t know this. I know this. I have a good source.”
Ti Jean walked me back across the road and left me with a lot to think about.
“Merci, Ti Jean,” I said at the door to the guesthouse.
“Ou merite-l,” he said. You’re welcome.
The literal meaning of the Creole clause Ou merite-l is You deserve it. But was it true? And I couldn’t know whether Ti Jean had meant it literally. I guessed maybe not.
Farmer told me later that, after that first meeting, he had said, “Ethan’s progressive,” and Ti Jean had replied, “It seems that way, but wait until we read his book.”
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[...] I paused this column over the holidays in order to finish writing and otherwise finalizing my book Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti, which is now at the printer and will be published March 1. You can read an excerpt and/or [...]