[Peace-discuss] Haiti and art

[C. G. Estabrook]

[In our discussion of Haiti last week I mentioned Graham
Greene's novel from the 1960s, The Comedians.  Yesterday's
Guardian (UK) carried this retrospective review.  What the
review leaves out (and Greene doesn't) is perhaps the most
crucial point for us, the role of the US.  --CGE] 

  Drinking, dancing and death
  Duncan Campbell on Graham Greene's Haiti
  Saturday December 17, 2005
  Guardian

In his foreword to The Comedians, Graham Greene mocks those
who imagine that the narrator of his novels, whether a
murderer, a jealous lover or an obsessive gambler, is always
Greene himself. But while Mr Brown, the central character of
the book, may indeed not be Mr Greene, he added that "poor
Haiti itself and the character of Doctor Duvalier's rule are
not invented, the latter not even blackened for dramatic
effect. Impossible to deepen that night."

First published nearly 40 years ago, Greene's novel about a
world-weary hotelier in the darkest days of the Duvalier
dictatorship was inevitably banned in the country. It would be
comforting to read it now as a historical record of a
different era but sadly the night in Haiti has deepened
further and if Greene were to return he would find no shortage
of the corruption and violence that acted as a backdrop to The
Comedians

The Oloffson in Port-au-Prince was the model for Mr Brown's -
and Mr Greene's - hotel so it is only appropriate that it
should remain at the centre of one part of Haitian cultural
life today. Richard Morse, who runs it, is a Haitian-American
singer with a diamond ear-stud and a degree from Princeton,
who could easily have found himself in a Greene novel.

"This place is Graham Greene's legacy," he said. "We never met
but he wrote to me once not long before he died. It was a
sweet letter because he has a sweet style. He said that 'I
have too much to do and not enough time'." Had Greene had a
little more time he might have relished Morse's description of
the habituées of the Oloffson on Thursday nights at the height
of the troubles in the 90s: "Haitian and foreign military,
beautiful Creole Haitian women, spies, CIA agents, foreign
press, photographers, people from the left, the right,
writers, musicians, film-makers, everyone mingling, dancing,
drinking . . . One night a week, the fighting stopped."

Greene would be tickled to know that the Oloffson has now been
"red-zoned" by the UN, which means it is in a part of
Port-au-Prince deemed too unstable for UN personnel. And
equally gratified that the audience, leaning against the bar
with a bottle of Prestige beer and flanked by two mighty
carvings of Jean Jacques Dessalines, who proclaimed Haiti an
independent republic in 1804, had its fair complement of
characters whose personal baggage would not fit into an
overnight bag. He would also probably be relieved that Morse
had, after discussions with friends and regulars, decided
against laying tiles in the shape of a body at the bottom of
the hotel pool, where, in The Comedians, poor Dr Philipot
chose to take his life.

Les Comédiens is prominently displayed in La Pleiade,
Port-au-Prince's best-known bookshop, although it is a
non-fiction book about the Duvaliers, The Price of Blood by
Bernard Diederich, that is its current bestseller. Solange
Lafontant, who runs the shop her father started in 1962,
remembers the time under Duvalier when many books were banned
and had to be sold beneath the counter. Her father was held in
jail for selling "subversive" literature, an offence that
carried the death penalty. Customs officers were instructed
not to admit any communist literature and, unable to read,
conscientiously confiscated books with red covers. After the
fall of the Duvaliers, The Comedians sold well and there is
still a great demand for literature, both fiction and
non-fiction, about that period.

"Traditionally, our best-selling writers live in the diaspora
but since the start of the Book Mania annual fair here [about
a decade ago] young local writers have suddenly become
popular," said Lafontant. Some writers, such as the prolific
Gary Victor and Lyonel Trouillot, still live in Haiti despite
all the problems faced by outspoken artists, while others,
like Dany Laferrière, who went into exile in Canada, still
live abroad. On the shelves are books by Jacques Stephen
Alexis, author of General Sun, my brother, who was killed by
Duvalier, and the novels of Edwidge Danticat, who was born in
Haiti and spent the first 12 years of her life there. Her
first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, has Duvalier's baleful
Tontons Macoutes hovering in the background, "dressed in
bright denim uniforms and dark sunglasses".

In Libète, an excellent Haiti anthology compiled by Charles
Arthur and Michael Dash, the authors noted that after the
Duvaliers' departure, "a new theme enters Haitian writing -
redefining the writer's relationship with a land he no longer
fully understands". They add that Haiti remains a "grim and
desperate country. Even more so, perhaps, because of the
absence of a literary and intellectual culture which has
remained outside the country. Literary traditions remain alive
in the diaspora but within modern Haiti, the burning issues
are no longer literary".

Some of the landmarks in The Comedians have gone or shifted.
The Columbus statue near the waterfront where Mr Brown would
rendezvous with Martha, his mistress and the ambassador's
wife, was torn down after the fall of Duvalier and now stands
forlornly in storage nearby. Aubelin Jolicoeur, the gossipy
journalist on whom Greene based the character Petit Pierre,
died in February this year aged 80, still claiming that he
gave Greene the title by telling him that "we Haitians are all
comedians". The music that Greene evoked in the book was Edith
Piaf's "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" and Juliette Gréco. Now the
soundtrack would be Ram or perhaps the Haitian musician,
Beethova Obas, returning to his homeland from his part of the
diaspora in Belgium, or even the country's most famous
musician, Wyclef Jean, another exile. The Tonton Macoutes
thankfully withered with the departure of the last Duvalier.
Their equivalent today would be the chimères, the gangs that
roam in Cité Soleil.

"For writers it is always said that the first 20 years of life
contain the whole of experience - the rest is observation,"
wrote Greene in The Comedians. In which case, aspiring writers
in a Haiti in the midst of an election with 34 presidential
candidates and a wave of kidnappings and firefights, at a time
when the only visitors to the island seem to be UN personnel
and Baptist missionaries, will have no shortage of material
with which to work. Impossible to deepen their night.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005