These people who carry their pain
with such grace
have a sense of life
which it would be a shame to ignore.
I come back to my mother once again to explain Haiti from another angle, that of those who suffer without a word, but also without ever giving up. These voices that we cannot hear, too busy as we are with the noises of the city: machine gun fire, ambulance or fire sirens (if there are any), cries of pain, screams in front of the cameras of those reading manifestos, the rantings of armed thugs, and the various international or national meetings to save the country.
While those who keep this country alive, as always, whisper essential things. And my mother who told me: “Take care of your homework, that’s all we ask of you. » And these women are numerous, much more than the gangs who hold the country at the end of their heavy weapons, as they say. Here we find ourselves once again on the edge of the precipice, and all we need to do, it seems, is to think about forms of power.
Today we still ask ourselves this nagging question “how to get out of this new crisis?” “, and we wonder almost everywhere in the world if these people do not have something defective in their genes to thus attract misfortune, I remember with particular emotion the sense of beauty in this woman.
I met my mother’s seamstress in Miami, and she told me that Marie (my mother’s name) made it a point to have the back of her dress as delicately made as the right side. , even if it means paying double the price. And yet, she was a poor woman whose husband had lived in exile for decades, and who had to raise two children alone. Situations like this are common in this country.
I didn’t really understand this behavior from my mother. I will understand it years later when I become a writer. How can we say that the only path to freedom is through beauty? We need to agree on the meaning of the word beauty, which has nothing to do with luxury. But taking such good care of the back of the dress that you can’t see, isn’t that a form of luxury? I see my mother’s big eyes seeming to say, “If this is their idea of us, then I understand why we are left to flounder in such a swamp of violence.” » For her, life is not just about being able to stand up. We must be able to remain so with dignity.
I don’t know why, when it comes to Haiti, we always remain on the surface, even violent, intolerable, unacceptable, without ever focusing on the daily life of these women and their meaning, not only of a better life, but of beauty itself. Does the taste for beauty go only with those who can appreciate Mona Lisa ? And no to this woman who would like the back of her dress to be as neat as the front?
Not so long ago, commenting on the major book for understanding today’s Haiti The villages of God by Emmelie Prophète, I suggested leaving aside the theater of power and shuffleboard for a moment to focus our gaze on armed gangs, as the novelist suggested. The country had been living under the control of gangs for almost a decade. We didn’t pay much attention to it, and today the bomb explodes in our faces. Of course the gangs are not autonomous, and that it is a large and complex network whose ramifications go beyond the country. As people say: Who sells the guns? Worse than the corrupt are the corrupters. Here we are again stuck believing only in what we can see. Tire flames and machine gun fire should not hide the forest from these luminous women.
There is a word that I would like to include here, it is patching, which brings me closer to Miron’s famous rapaillé. I always saw my mother patching my socks, shirts and pants, in a word, she kept returning to the craft and constantly changing what can be changed by making something new out of something old. This is my art. The patched man.
In fact, I wanted to say, for all those who see no link between this art of living that I publish today and who find me casual and carefree in relation to a tragedy, I am a fashion designer who tries to make a garment that the back is as neat as the front to respond to this injunction from my mother about dignity. On a moral level, we must see in her this upright soul which does not have two faces, like the tartuffes. And by writing this book despite the machine gun fire, I respond, as an obedient son, to this order from my mother: “All that is asked of you is to do your duty”, and to do it well, I conceived.