Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti
The January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti compelled me to revisit and complete a book that I had been writing in drafts and versions since 1994. Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti, to be published in spring 2012, is the result. I first visited Haiti at age 16 in 1982 and have been there many times at intervals since then. To complete the book, I returned to Haiti twice in 2010 and plan to visit again in September 2011.
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- Ethan Casey, June 2011
From Ethan Casey’s speech at the TEDx Cornerstone Event, Princeton Public Library, Princeton, New Jersey, June 1, 2011:
As a friend of mine put it years ago, Haiti is a place for big questions. I’ve been trying to understand it for nearly thirty years, and its politics, history, and culture have many twists and turns that are still opaque to me. But one thing I know is that anything that’s true of Haiti is true of the world as a whole. And that’s a truth that’s not complicated at all, only hard to swallow. We deny it because it’s less painful – in the short run – to avert our eyes. As Tracy Kidder, the author of the celebrated bestseller about Dr. Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains, once said to me: “I’ve learned so much about the world from Haiti – some of which I almost wish I hadn’t learned.” To me Haiti feels like home, because I was sixteen years old the first time I went there. My early experience of Haiti informed my later responses to very different countries, particularly during the five years I lived in Asia in the 1990s. I saw chronically desperate Cambodia, and tortured Burma, and deforested Thailand, with the eyes of someone who had seen Haiti.
Ethan Casey in Haiti, March 1982.
From Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti:
I decided that being a writer means not having answers or an ideology but paying attention and taking notes, and I found that if you do that long enough, things start falling into place. Meanwhile, every human life spirals back on itself. Like a book read first in youth and reread at intervals, a formative early experience lies in wait, ever ready to yield up new aspects of meaning. At sixteen, I didn’t know what I was getting myself in for. Nearly three decades later a great deal had happened, but little had changed. Tout moun se moun: all people are people. Byin mal pa lanmo: almost dead is not dead. Pito m-led m-la: I may not be pretty, but at least I’m here. Everything I’ve done and written since 1982 has been in the service of keeping faith with Haiti. This is why I spent so much time in Haiti in 2004 and why, on January 12, 2010, I knew despite myself that I would have to lay other things aside and return again.
