Weekly Geeks: Haiti

This week’s Weekly Geeks is about Haiti. We’re asked to feature a book, or an author, or do something creative, like write a poem (hah…we all know I’m only good for a parody when it comes to poems).

I had thought of talking about Edwidge Danticat, but I’ve only read (actually, listened to) one of her books, Brother, I’m Dying. And while it was stunning, I was looking for something different for my post.

And then yesterday, I found myself in Barnes and Noble (funny how that happened), and I came across Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote. The book includes some of Capote’s travel essays, including a piece on Haiti written in 1948. Who knew Capote had visited Haiti? Certainly not me. But given the Weekly Geeks topic, this book and I were obviously meant to meet.

Capote writes about Hyppolite, a primitive painter, the noises of Port-au-Prince (car horns and dogs), tourism, and a Voodou ceremony that he witnessed. Some excerpts:

From the terrace where in the mornings I sit reading or writing, I can see the mountains sliding blue and bluer down to the harbor bay. Below there is the whole of Port-au-Prince, a town whose colors are paled into peeling historical pastels by centuries of sun: sky-gray cathedral, hyacinth fountain, green-rust fence.

Tell me, why are there so many dogs? To whom do they belong, and for what purpse? Mangy, hurt-eyed, they pad along the streets in little herds like persecuted Christians, all innocuous enough by day, but come night how their vanity and their voices exaggerate!

The Estime government has passed a law which forbids promenading in the streets sans shoes: this is a hard, uneconomical ruling, and an uncomfortable one as well, especially for those peasants who must bring their produce to market afoot. But the government, now anxious to make the country more of a tourist attraction, feels that shoeless Haitians might depress his potential trade, that the poorness of the people should not be overt.

Now again the drums began, the voices of the girls spacing every slow, dramatic beat, and then the door to the altar opened; three boys came out, each carrying a plate filled with a different substance – ashes, cornmeal, black powder – and candles, like those for a birthday cake, burned in the center of these materials; balancing the plates on a rounded stone, the boys knelt facing the door. The drums grew softer, there began a nervous rhythmical rattling, this made by a gourd encasing snake vertebrae, and swiftly, like a spirit that has unexpectedly solidified, the boungan glided airy as a bird through the column of girls and around the room, his feet, the ankles tinkling with silver bracelets, seeming not at all to touch the floor, hand his loose silk scarlet robes rustling winglike. There was a caul of red velvet draped around his head, a pearl gleamed in his ear.

If you’re interested, you can read the entire essay here (thanks Google).