Dany Laferriere - The Return

We discussed ad nauseam the absurdity

of this life while avoiding

references to the political situation

that were too obvious

because the poor quarters were crawling

with spies paid by the police.

Sharks in dark glasses

trawling the whorehouses patronized

by political science and chemistry

students who are always the first

to take to the streets.

I’ve been eating fat for three decades in Montreal

while everyone has gone on

eating lean in Port-au-Prince.

My metabolism has changed.

And I can’t say I know what goes on

these days in the mind of a teenager

who doesn’t remember

having eaten his fill

one single day.

My hotel is situated

in the center of a market.

At three o’clock in the morning

the vendors arrive.

The trucks full of vegetables are unloaded

and the racket runs nonstop

sometimes till eleven at night.

The power’s out.

Impossible to read.

I can’t sleep either.

Through the window, I watch the stars

that carry me back to childhood

when I would stay up late with my grandmother

on our gallery in Petit-Goâve.

I look at my poor body lying

on this hotel bed knowing

that my mind is wandering

down the passages of time.

I end up falling asleep.

Sleep so light

I can pick up the slightest sound.

Like those tourists

coming back from a night out.

There are so few tourists in this country

we should pay them to stay.

The high-pitched cry of a cat getting its throat cut.

At night alcoholics have a fondness

for that meat when it’s grilled

with no concern for the panicked voice

calling everywhere for Mitzi.

Headache.

I can’t sleep.

I go out on the veranda

and sit.

Something is moving up there.

A little girl

climbing the mountain

with a pail of water on her head.

Here we live on injustice and fresh water.

The young man who sweeps

the hotel courtyard every morning

brings me a coffee and a message from my sister.

She didn’t want to wake me

but my mother is not doing well.

She has locked herself in her room

and won’t open the door for anyone.

Everyone looks pretty happy to me. My sister kisses me as she dances. What’s going on? Nothing. What about my mother? That was this morning, now she’s fine. It happens sometimes, you know. In Montreal I would fall into an abyss without warning and not surface for hours. The enemy, in Montreal, is on the outside, when it’s minus thirty for five days in a row. Here the enemy is within, and the only nature we have to tame is our own.

I hear my mother singing. A song popular in her youth. Radio Caraïbes often plays it on its oldies show, Chansons d’autrefois. My sister whispers that she’s often like this after one of her descents into hell.

Marie, her name so simple

it’s like

sharing my mother

with all my friends.

When I think about it I don’t have any stories

about my mother from when she was young.

She’s not the type to talk about herself.

Aunt Raymonde’s stories are all

about her own person.

In vain I try to glimpse my mother

behind her.

My mother does not swim

in the great sea of History.

But all individual stories

are like rivers that run through her.

In the folds of her body she keeps

the crystals of pain of everyone

I have met in the street since I came here.

Pain.

Silence.

Absence.

None of that has anything to do

with folklore.

But they never

talk about those things

in the media.

In my nephew’s little room.

Books on a narrow shelf

next to a Tupac Shakur poster.

I spot one of my novels

and a collection of poems by his father.

My eyes seek out every detail

to help me travel back through the stream of time

and recover the young man

I was before my sudden departure.

We are sitting on the unmade bed

watching a documentary about violent gangs

battling each other in the lower reaches of the city.

Gunshots ring out.

From time to time, my mother comes in

and gives us a suspicious look.

My nephew is at the age when death

is still something esthetic.

From close range a Danish television crew is following

the violent confrontations that have been raging

for months in this miserable district.

Graffiti on a wall shows an empty stomach

and a toothless mouth holding a gun

heavier than the weight of the average adult

in that part of town.

A young French woman

has entered this seething slum.

Close-ups on the two brothers as sensitive

as cobras in the sun.

Each heads his own gang.

The young woman travels back and forth

between the two brothers.

One loves her.

She loves the other.

A Greek tragedy in Cité Soleil.

Bily is obsessed by his younger brother

who took on the name Tupac Skakur.

Fascination with American culture

even in the poorest regions

of the fourth world.

I watch the two brothers

strolling through the Cité.

Undernourished killers.

Emaciated faces.

Cocaine to burn.

Weapons everywhere.

Death never far.

I wonder what my nephew

thinks about all this.

It’s his culture.

The new generation.

Mine was the ’70s.

We’re all cloistered in our decades.

These days the murderer strikes at noon

in this country.

Night is no longer the accomplice of the killer

who dreams of adding his star to the firmament.

To reach the heavens nowadays

they have to kill with their face uncovered

and trumpet their acts on the TV news.

The Tonton Macoutes of my era had

to hide behind dark glasses.

Serial killers.

Papa Doc was the only star.

Tupac, the young leader who looks so much like Hector,

has conquered the Foreign Woman.

Tonight their savage kiss

on a reed mat on the floor

will drive all the warriors crazy

under the Cité ramparts.

Now Tupac is making political speeches.

He moves through Cité Soleil in a car.

Thinking he’s a real leader.

A loud voice and an itchy trigger finger.

Suddenly he becomes lucid and

sees himself for what he is: a loser.

Facing the camera.

Sitting in the shadows.

Tupac: “If I stop, I’m a dead man.

If I go on, I’m a dead man.”

I feel my nephew shiver as if

he were facing the same choice.

This is a city where the killers

all want to die young.

Tupac falls at the height of his glory

in the dust of Cité Soleil.

Like his brother Bily.

Both killed by a frail young man

who suddenly stepped from the shadows.

The girl leaves with the TV crew.

On the cassette there’s blood, sex and tears.

Everything the viewer wants.

Roll the credits.

My nephew wants to be a famous writer.

The influence of the rock-star culture.

His father is a poet who gets death threats.

His uncle, a novelist living in exile.

He has to choose between death and exile.

For his grandfather it was death in exile.

Before you begin

you have time to think about fame

because once you write the first sentence

you’re up against

this anonymous archer

whose real target is your ego.