Tuesday, August 24, 1999

Miami

Since Red Pop Revenge, it seems like the trip is always summed up, explicated, in what occurs immediately after. So here’s what’s happened in the airport: convinced myself through two concourses that the woman in front of me was Catherine; woke from an uncomfortable doze to find a cockroach crawling up my thigh. I stomped it.
– Inch speaks in singsong repetitions, sometimes labouring the same point four times just to roll the words on her tongue. Jim uses expressions like “distress raised a power of isolation”—at once murky and mathematical.

– Damn gotta finish Things Fall Apart. The stories in that are actually captivating. Gotta learn that.

– Inch’s masochism, rolling the rock onto her own hand … “My mother found me walking slowly home, balancing the water jug wth my good hand. Laili and Regane were running after her. They all looked scared, and mama was sobbing: what a brave girl could crush her thumb and not cry a tear? You’re my angel, my Poucette. I didn’t feel brave.
“I never told them I’d done it to myself, on purpose.
“At school my teacher beat me like a boy, and beat me, and beat me because I could take it.
“And still Mama loved me: because she loved raisins she would sometimes put some in my akasan. Papa would sometimes get so mad at me that his face would sink right back into his head. But he never hurt me, either: the only ones in the house that he ever beat were the dogs, and once he took a stick and hit a turkey so hard that it got clean broken and we had to keep it in a box until it died. That night I could hear it flapping, trying to get out, but when I looked in the morning it had given up, barely breathing, with its legs sticking out upside down from under its body. It flapped once more + and I screamed + begged my mother to kill it right
away.
“Sometimes when Papa was happy we would tease him about beating the animals, and maybe he would laugh, but we were always nervous about these jokes because when it happened it never seemed funny. When the dogs were yowling under his cane we walked away, walked into the fields, walked until we couldn’t hear them anymore.”

Monday, August 23, 1999

Pétionville

Reading Henry Louis Gates, Jr. with my shirt off and picking at my peeling sunburns the day before I leave. Struck for the first time at the poetry of Benisoit showing me his birth certificate—he did this twice—once in the back room at the Centre where he sleeps, and it was yellowed and crumbling, and his whole identity was dissolving; once at the office, proudly, with a crisp photocopy. Ah, Lordy. I’ve been having good dreams now that I’m going home: three-wheeling with Anna and Ivaan, together with Jen. I am after all a weak silly little fuck.

I asked Robbie to write and draw something for me when I found him, and he grudgingly gave me my trophy. See above. He is in paradise. The truck driving up to his village from San José de Ocoa just climbed and climbed, through thick hanging jungles and the contours of mountain pastures, all of which reminded me of nothing so much as Mount Aso. The froth of vegetation is the same as Japan, and everywhere in it are butterflies or meandering cows. I was in the bed of the truck with 40 bags of cement and another Dominican Rafael and we could talk a bit. By the end of it we were tracing a ridge as high as the horizon, and every bush on the slopes had red teardrops, and every vine had trumpets the colour that our passports turn under the light.

Robbie didn’t even recognize me at first … he had no idea I was even on the island. Relieved when he broke into a grin an introduced me to his teammates as “one of my best friends from Canada.” So it really seems like it’s all forgiven.

Iris saved my ass on the trip back to P-au-P. The Haitian in charge of the bus kept doubling what he thought was necessary for customs, so I decided to face em myself and ended up making everyone wait like an extra 15 minutes. Apparently that Haitian got furious and started stirring up the other passengers against the white that didn’t trust him, and they probably would’ve left without me if Iris hadn’ta stood up to him.

Last few days in Pétionville breezing through pizzas and some last-minute translations. Men here hiss at taxis and women to get their attention. Spent the morning combing galleries for souvenirs that weren’t vodou. It’s all good. Glad to be headin home.

Irony of identity: slaves nearly always changed their names when they were freed. How about Inch’s name game?

Wednesday, August 18, 1999

San José de Ocoa

When things were going well for em, they seemed to be going ridiculously well—9 declarations in an hour of teaching in Ouanaminthe. (I’d never seen anything like it and I’m not even sure it’s a good thing.) Then when they went bad, they were horrid. All of their plans for joining the Dominicans on the other side were dashed by a sudden, unforeseen inability to land visas—among other things the generality of Dominicans are fantastically racist toward their neighbours—and the group foundered in a mess of bitter arguments. Some of the leaders wanted to defer to the wishes of the group as to whether they should cut their losses and head home early; others crumpled their voting slips. Nothing of Bahá’í consultation in any of it, and everyone except Myriame came out looking bad: when all the anger died down she quietly suggested a plan that everyone could agree on, though one of the leaders held out for a while out of arrogance, and they went back to Ouanaminthe one last time on Saturday morning to give a presentation before they went home. Three people came. They went. These were the circumstances under which Iris (Hawaiian) and I quit the group and started our wholly undeserved vacation in the Dominican Republic. In words of Phadoul: “You’re along with the group, but not a part of it.” And Goddamn it, isn’t a people guaranteed to fail when they’re nearly right in believing that the whole world’s against em?

So: overnight in Dajabón. Went out to visit some Bahá’ís in Corral Grande just outside just outside, turned out that the remote country is much like Haiti, except that they have washing machines and did some clothes for us. Wicked nice but of course we could barely get a word through.

Sunday 1:30 to La Vega, a singular Las Vegas which apparently was near “Ochoa,” where I remembered Robbie’d said he’d be. Steven Seagal movies on the bus distracting me from the plains and cock pits rolling by out the window. Trouble was, the people on the bus didn’t think Ochoa even existed, so we got off in the big city of Santiago to readdress the issue.

Ran into a Raphael by complete fluke in the bus station, a bank worker who refused to accept money for driving us to an online computer … turned out it was at his home, double-checked Robbie’s message, which turned out to be even more imprecise than I’d thought: his “village 50 miles out of San José in the Ochoa region,” considering that San José doesn’t exist itself, might translate best into “village 50 miles out of San José de Ocoa,” where we set our sights.

Raphael drove us back to the station to catch a Santo Domingo bus before heading off to see how his dad was recovering from his surgery. I don’t know why he was so nice to us—he’d heard of the Faith but thought it was something exclusive—maybe it was some kind of good luck charm for his father.

We called contacts in the capital at 9:00 at night, and a young guy named Alí Benzan came by to pick us up. He introduced us to the Canadian Bahá’ís first off, who turned out to be a bachelor pad of medical students (nice) and teenaged businessmen (craven), the latter trying to convince me that moving to an underdeveloped country was just a subconscious way of saying I was better than everybody else. I asked him if he had an inferiority complex and he didn’t know what that meant but he’ll be a millionaire by the age of 20 by printing CDs for Tower Records. They all punched Iris’s addy into their cell phones and Alí drove us off to a pención.

If Monday hadn’t been Restoration Day, when the whole country closes down to celebrate their declaration of independence from Spain, and if we’d been more confident that Robbie were in San José de Ocoa, we’d have met him there on Monday afternoon after just two days in the country. But we didn’t know and to get more information we’d have to wait till Tuesday morning. Which we did. Spent Monday visiting the Old City, a happy cross between the open squares and cafés of Montreal and the parapets of the Kremlin. Palms and creepers everywhere. We took Alí to dinner where he introduced me to mofongo, which is mashed plantains and pork rinds and garlic. It’s no-holds-barred awesome. Must remember to send Alí a copy of Dune from Canada.

Tuesday morning got to work: changed more money and found the Canadian embassy and got a number for Hope International and learned that Robbie was in a town called Yutia NE of SJdeO … at noon we caught a bus, but when we got there it was too late … Robbie’d been right in town since Friday, but that morning his team had returned to some inaccessible village in the hills. Had to wait for Wednesday. At midnight we were woken from our hotel bed by a serenade to a visitor who was leaving the next day … beautiful singing … “America, America … patata lluvia trópica.”

This morning we caught two of the motorcycle taxis they use over here and found the building where a bus is supposed to take us to Robbie. Iris is drinking coffee in the lobby. Woo-ha woo-ha.

My travelling companion is 18 years old, and she seems young. Every so often she claps her hands and gushes about how this is her first real “adventure” and then refuses any food that doesn’t resemble a Big Mac. I think she used to be overweight in high school and she still carries a bit of psychological residue … a bit insecure etc. Drinks water pathologically and had to stop the bus to Ocoa to keep from wetting herself. Nice enough, and I have to remember that this is my undertaking so it’s natural that I have to make the decisions.

Too bad that my drawings are limited to when I have the time. Santo Domingo could have occupied me for a solid week, it could be so lovely. Instead I get one page of a mediocre seafront.

[Picture of wind blowing on a barn, with the following legend: “Can’t write much with this blunt pencil, but in only six weeks my life has changed (and yours too). And Nathan’s here too. Robertico”]

Monday, August 16, 1999

Santo Domingo

In a country so poor as Haiti, it’s amazing how badly they treat their money, all passed around in rotting, wadded clumps.

Anyway: Saturday I left Ouanaminthe with its cinder blacks piled on dust, and since then I’ve been travelling through the Dominican Republic in search of Robbie. It was probably a bastard thing to do, leaving my Haitian friends to face the awful return trip on their own, especially after the nearly unqualified failure of our teaching trip.

Thursday, August 12, 1999

Dajabón, Dominican Republic

We crossed the border to find a hotel. I looove the Dominican Republic. I love lukewarm showers and rickety beds and I have an extremely wide tolerance for latina chicks on scooters. When I got here I felt so good I had the nerve to spend half an hour in the washroom sink doing laundry by hand.

Crossing over puts Ouanaminthe in perspective, though. What had seemed like a respectable city, relative to others in its country, takes on a whole new light when compared to Dajabón just across the river. Ouanaminthe spreads like alluvial silt toward the source of the border crossing: walking toward it the fan of huts gives way to braided motocross paths, and all the jostling bikes fuse into a gauntlet beneath the pillars of two towering wapou trees, a frame of superhuman proportion for what you see when you walk through: a seething, milling pedestrian bridge leading to a checkpoint that looks a little bit like Angkor Wat. Beyond that is the Dominican Republic. At first the buildings look vaguely similar—same clay finish, same watercolour tints. But they house public libraries and music academies, and the streets are neat paved squares, and the men fixing their trucks on the roadside don’t look desperate to earn their day’s wages, but more like they’re puttering in the street in front of their homes. And then you realize: all of Ouanaminthe is a shanty-town for Dajabón, their entire existence centres on earning scant pesos and making Dajabón tick.

And where is the morality in saying I love the Dominican Republic, and still I do. And if the contrast is only striking because of proximity, how much worse will be my love for Canada when I return, but still I will?

[The wapou trees]

[Entrance to Dajabón: slack chain, bridge, iron gate, checkpoint]


[The waterfront at the base of Máximo Gómez St., Santo Domingo]

Haitian writers, according to the group:

Jacques-Stéphane Alexis
Jacques Roumain

Masillon Coicon
Frédéric Marcelin
Émile Roumain
Franc Étienne
Etzer Vilair

Anotoine Duprez
Bernard Pozey
Giles-Soline Millecent
Lilac Desquerond

Margarette Papillon
Frédérika Étienne
Audette Roy Fonbroun
Yanick Lahens
Mercedes Guignard
Magalie Cocteau-Denis
Danny Laferrière
Gary Victor
Cyto Cave
Lional Trouillo
Mireille Perodin-Jérome
Lionel Lerebours
André Victor
François Duvalier

Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Myrlande H. Manigat
Leslie M.
Prospère Avril
Michel Soukar
Oswald Durand


At about 2:00 yesterday afternoon we finally piled into the rented taptap and started driving north. St-Marc is a perfect pirate city, straight out of Monkey Island, because of all its colonial houses on the turquoise sea (the second storeys look evacuated and blasted because wood construction doesn’t hold up under 200 years of tropical sun) and the changing carnival music at every block. Oddly, every store seemed to sell tires, which was good, because we’d already blown a tire and had had to pull over beside a clutch of women selling melons by the ocean to change it.


As night was falling and we were jittering toward Gonaïves our battery failed, and I wouldn’t have known what to do without jumpers, but apparently you pull into a Shell station, wash off whatever dust you can, and get a bunch of street kids to help you push the truck back and forth, letting go of the clutch every so often. And then on to Gonaïves, birthplace of liberty, to find a pool of light outside a bar with seafood on rice and Shaggy on the speakers and enough room to dance a little.

Our second tire blew in the middle of pitch-black nowhere, and all of a sudden my daydreams about what I’d do if bandits attacked evaporated … newspapers call them the real rulers of the countryside, and they rob and rape and kill people like us on a regular basis. Phadoul stopped telling jokes and we started singing prayers … there were drums in the distance as we jacked up the truck. Changed the tire. As we were pulling onto the road again Risson slammed to a stop an we had to start singing again, this time to wait for him to figure out what to do about the headlight wiring that had just fried. They’d blank every so often for the rest of the trip.

The corrugated sides of semis passed by us in hills like the flanks of great huge whales, lit askance by our truck and disappearing. Their broken-down hulks might emerge into our beams, exposing the holes ravaged in their sides by looters. Or their whole fearsome bulk nose-dived down the steep side of a hairpin turn, the driver’s cab lost somewhere in the darkness and the underbrush down below.

We made it to Cap-Haïtien around midnight—we had been aiming for 4:00 p.m. We passed through the city gates and foiled across the slick of gasoline at the entrance to town. Ducking down alleyways and veering from sudden motorcycles reminded me of my first night in Haiti, driving in the dark from the airport, the whole city of Port-au-Prince working its horns to avoid gridlock and head-on collisions. (Inch seeing this on her return is perfect counterpoint to the American car chase with Dieter…) I was starting to have enough.

We finally got to a nearby town called Limonade at about 2:00 in the morning (we’d passed through a Marmelade on the way). A Bahá’í named Charles who’d been in the front of the taptap lives there. His left arm tapers down to a single finger. He offered us his floor for the night. I was fuming with lack of sleep and not having taken a decent shit in a week, and Risson was dancing around me and beating his chest and saying: “I’m solid. I’m Haitian.” I was just about ready to flip my lid.


We were woken up four hours later for the final leg, and I bit my lip and climbed back onto the hard wood bench in the taptap. Ouanaminthe is much bigger than I thought it would be: I was imagining a hill town, but after a morning of rolling semi-desert it turned out to be another prairie city with high city walls. We met the group of Dominican Bahá’ís we’ll be working with for the next week—although I’d been assured at one point that the Dominican Republic is really just as much a black republic as Haiti (they just don’t care to admit it), the Dominicans all turned out to be very much hispanic in their baseball caps as we sat together in the shade and idled awkwardly.

We’re getting to know each other a bit better now, though, and I’m getting a kick out of getting to say “gracias” so much. And I’ve just come from having a beautiful bowel movement and my heat rash is at its lowest ebb since July.