Dany Laferriere - The Return

a narrow unpaved road

then come to a farm with a green roof

in the middle of wide fields.

My friend’s wife, a tall redhead,

is waiting for us at the door.

I have the feeling, in front of this Irish flag

hoisted in the pasture among the cows,

that I’m in another country.

Some time after I left Haiti,

he went to Ireland

where he lived for twenty years.

He brought Ireland back with him

to this green hamlet set upon

the heights of Pétionville.

When I was in Ireland, he said to me, I lived as if I were in Haiti. Now that I’m in Haiti, I feel totally Irish. Will we ever know who we really are? That’s the kind of question that makes us feel intelligent even under a blazing sun. Such vanity is no match for a second rum punch.

Like a flight of wild birds

we left almost at the same time.

We scattered across the planet.

Now, thirty years later,

my generation has begun its return.

We talk underneath the mango tree, with so much passion, about the years abroad: a whole life. His wife listens with a tired smile as she sips her coffee. She has come to sit with us. Her only demand is that we speak Creole when she’s around. The language touches me here, she says, pointing to her round belly.

As she walks me to the car, while her husband goes to give orders to the staff, her voice is determined. I’m going to make sure my child’s mother tongue is Creole. If mother tongue means the mother’s language, then it’ll be English. No, it’s the language the mother chooses to teach her child: I want to raise him in Creole.

I decide to tell her a story. Back in Petit-Goâve, when I was eight years old, I met a woman who came from some unknown place. She was white and walked barefoot through the dust of Haiti. She was the woodworker’s wife. They had a son my age who was neither black nor white. I never understood how someone could live in a culture other than their own. Despite the thirty-three years I spent in Montreal the mystery remains. As if I were talking about someone else.

In that little room in Montreal,

I read, drank wine, made love

and wrote without fearing the worst every morning.

But what can I say about this woman

who came from a free country and chose

to live in a dictatorship?

She tells me this story.

One of her girlfriends who lived all her life in Togo

and who she asked for advice before leaving Belfast

explained to her that people are not necessarily

from the country where they were born.

Some seeds are carried elsewhere by the willful wind.

My friend comes back. He kisses his wife’s neck; she squirms and moans under the sun. Nothing is more sensual than a pregnant woman. We get into the Jeep and circle the Irish flag before coming back to her. She moves toward the door. They smile at each other with their eyes. She touches his forearm. He starts up the car again. She stands in the sun a while before going back into the house. If ever he gets it into his head to return to Ireland, she won’t go with him.

Already we’re at the stop, at Fermathe,

where they sell grilled pork

and fried sweet potatoes.

A truck full of people eating.

The anticipation in the air

before the long descent

into the deep South.

It takes as much time

to travel to another country

as it does to go from one city

to another in this country

over the broken roads

and along the edge of dizzying cliffs.

We run a gauntlet of screaming vendors

who jam their fruit baskets in our face.

Laughter rises above the racket.

A man’s impertinent remark.

The sudden gaiety of the women.

The driver slows down

and all the men lean toward

the singing river far below

where bare-breasted women

are washing the white sheets

of the rich ladies of Pétionville.

A colonial scent.

Where is that young girl going, seething with rage

through a field of yellow flowers

that lie flat as she passes by?

The ability of a girl that young

to produce such anger just might be

the palpable sign that this country still has

some guts.

A woman, under a mango tree,

offers us a coffee.

The river isn’t far.

The air is so gentle

it hardly brushes my skin.

The music of the wind in the leaves.

Life is weightless.

A little cat

looking for its mother

finds a dog

of the tolerant sort.

Now both are sleeping

among the flowers.

We get back on the road and find ourselves behind

a long row of cars

full of men wearing ties

running with sweat

and women in black.

The cortege stops

at a modest cemetery decorated

by the local peasants.

Where did they get the idea

to paint death in colors

so brilliant and with motifs so naïve

they make children laugh?

For the naïve painter

death is as ordinary as the sunrise.

A visit to the painter Tiga

who lives close by the cemetery

that so impressed Malraux.

Thin as a reed.

Head like an insect.

Bristling with intelligence.

He sits down, gets up, goes to the window and returns

with an idea so natural

it seems simple.

And what’s rare for a mind so inventive:

other people seem to matter to him.

The peasant painters have come together

under the banner Saint-Soleil.

Daily life in this village where people spend

most of their time dreaming and painting

revolves around the solitary star

that so intimidates Zaka, the peasant god.

My life has been adrift since that late-night call

announcing the death of a man

whose absence shaped me.

I let myself go knowing

that this wandering is not in vain.

When we don’t know the destination

all roads are right.

The Jeep stops

near the Pétionville market,

the very place

where we met this morning.

At length we embrace,

without saying goodbye,

feeling we won’t be seeing each other

again soon.

I feel as if I know that man sitting on a bench in Saint-Pierre Square, the little plaza by the hotel. He seems so absorbed in his reading. His hair has grayed, but he has that familiar way of stroking his cheek with his fingertips. He is the only person I ever saw read poetry in an algebra class. He was drinking in Alcools; a single verse of it soon had me inebriated. I went to his house and stayed until I had read all the poetry books in his father’s library. His family read nothing but poetry. Without ever wanting to write any, as his father said proudly. I touch him on the shoulder. He raises his head and without as much as a smile makes room for me next to him. He is still reading Apollinaire.

His father died in prison. They destroyed his library, sup-posedly because it concealed communist books. The man who hated communists because he suspected them of not liking poetry suffered a blow to the head and died of a cerebral hemorrhage a few days later at the military hospital. My friend wasn’t at the house when the regime’s henchmen visited. Alcools is the only book that wasn’t destroyed that day because he had it, as always, with him — he never weaned himself off Apollinaire. And he never wanted to leave the country despite the appeals of his uncle who lives in Madrid and reads nothing but García Lorca.

He is working as a proofreader for the book pages at Le Nouvelliste. Just enough to survive. He could have been a literary critic, but he’ll have nothing to do with other people and reads but a single poet (“humble as I am who am nothing worthwhile”). He still lives in the little room he had when I first met him. He closed off the other rooms the day a friend who works at the palace informed him of his father’s death. Ever since he’s been adding alcohol to poetry. He works at the paper in the morning and spends his afternoons reading on this bench, waiting for nightfall.