Franketienne - Ready to Burst

— For me, hell is right here on earth. I’ve lived and suffered enough to know that. No one will ever make me think otherwise. I can’t imagine a demon more intelligent, more ingenious than man in the perfecting of punishment and misery. And in the end, life is contained dramatically within the parentheses of an enigmatic choice. A miserable set of alternatives: furious wisdom or peaceful madness. Otherwise, of course, surely we’d be dead before we even started living.

Endlessly, the passengers speak whenever they aren’t sleeping. Two nights and two whole days of navigation. Long hours woven with stories of misery and wandering, drawn-out sighs and a spattering of complaints. Voices thick with weariness and sadness against the calm silence of the sea. Hundreds of broken-down bodies on the old, wheezing ship. At dawn on the third day, the reflected rays of the sun illuminated the Caribbean. Large birds gleaming black and pink flew diagonally and heavily over the boat. In a few hours … Haiti. Enormous sharks followed in the vessel’s frothy wake; their narrow, silvery fins cut through the blue waters of the Wind Canal. Everything seemed marvelous. The majesty of the ocean. The flapping flight of the birds that alight periodically on the yard. The leaping sharks. Nature’s splendor. Unchanging. Eternal. Indifferent. As if it had never had anything to do with the suffering of men.

Standing up toward the rear of the deck with twenty or so other wretches, the unfortunate souls being sent back with him, Raynand seems to be lost in appreciation of this simple beauty, in a confusing amalgam of sensations and thoughts. To see my mother again. The streets of Port-au-Prince. The smells of humanity. The erotic heat. To return to this little place differently, in less pitiful circumstances … How happy I’d be! But to land back in my country as a good-for-nothing. Without money. Completely derailed. A wreck. Wearing this threadbare suit. Flapping in the wind. How will I be welcomed by my country … by my neighborhood … by my home?

Raynand’s gaze floats above it all, faraway. Suddenly, he’s torn from his daydreams by a sound that makes him start. A real racket. A veritable panic. In the front of the ship, anguished voices, begging:

— My friends, please, come back here! You’re going to kill yourselves! Don’t do this! Come back!..

Raynand barely has a chance to catch something about the escape and possible rescue of some drowning men before he realizes that there’s a group suicide happening. Four passengers had dived brazenly into the tide full of voracious sharks. Immediately, on the captain’s order, the old piece of scrap iron slows down. The sea, a roiling abyss, becomes an electric drum set, beating out a frenetic jazz rhythm. Violent intake of air. Locomotive with buzzing mucous membranes pitilessly kneading their prey. Hand brakes engaged. Swirling funnel in which the sharks, in a great red disorder, share pieces of arms, legs, and jagged flesh amongst themselves. Entrails and chests torn to bits. Not one scream is heard. All is submerged in a grating tumult of fins and froth. A horrible shredding of jaws, teeth, fangs, and tails. A porridge of effervescent colors and bloody turbulence. A sudden brewing of living, active ingredients in full eruption. An unbearable lyricism of purplish-blue stained with scarlet stripes. A massacre of slashed meat and exploded viscera.

Eyes peeled and fingers tensed on some rigging, Raynand holds his breath. Vertigo. He turns away and can just make out the distant shape of the island of Haiti, indolent and desperately denuded on the horizon. That very day, they’ll all disembark on the wharf in Port-au-Prince. A long line of horrifying skeletons. Faces from beyond the grave. If it weren’t for the frequency of the spectacle of repatriated boat people, one would take them for strange zombies escaped from some marine cemetery. From the inner port of the city they file out, two by two. Heads lowered. Attached to one another. As if made up like plague victims to act, against a realistic backdrop, in some scene from a dramatic opera. Quotidian theater of island violence. Tragedy of a people torn between secular suffering and the uncertainty of a dream without moorings.

Of course, our classical university schooling and our independent studies had opened the door to the world of beings and things outside ourselves, although we often arrived at dead ends. We’d learned a lot from that. To the point where we began to have doubts. To become conscious of our own ignorance. To renounce. To break. Slow meandering of a river whose mouth seems to vomit up the sea. Fermentation of the brain that yearns to create because the body is suffering and the heart is raging. In flying over the vast forests of History, we thought we glimpsed through a window — or at least guessed at — humankind’s long itinerary. Thus fascinated by an impossible dream of a moon and a rainbow wound together in the deceptive, velvety darkness, feverishly drinking up the light planted behind a nameless day, caressing the breasts and the navel of a sexless woman, parodying the language of sewn-up mouths, seeking the raised lids of a face without eyes, dancing on the contorted legs of a broken puppet … why ever would we stop milking the midnight cow? We draw the new milk of anonymous days. We don’t worry about the vastness of the dome that opens onto absurdity and nothingness. It has been put there on purpose to discourage us, this incessant back-and-forth between sickness and relapse. Let us borrow the nocturnal eye of the phosphorous lamp. The fiancée is there, sewing her bridal gown in the next room .

Nothing but sleepless nights and insomnia have dilated our pupils — from the last drop of rainfall to the first picked fruit! Heavy stride, magical caverns on the wings of ballistic engines. Miserable and perilous acceleration of History by an angel of light. A scout who heads up the caravan. Avant-garde that calls for revolution. A dramatic sneeze that decongests the blocked nostrils of time. For I take all revolutions to be the sneezes of History .

At school, I’d come across this word — History — wide as life itself, stormy as the sea. I was told so much about it that I got lost in a maze, having added so many crazy ingredients that I’d ended up with an indigestible and complex sort of bouillabaisse. Repulsive cat soup. Movement of a mobile whose path traces a closed curve. Journey of a celestial body in its orbit. Rotation around an axis. Abrupt and violent change of direction. While I knew full well that life was in fact open — irregularly — onto the branches of a rising spiral. To the point of vertigo. And that, ultimately, old bodies, worn-out hearts, and weary legs all end up part of a new universe, engorged with energy .

More and more teachers and books passed before my eyes, talking to me of revolutions! The miracle of Christianity. Demographic surges. Economic booms. New ventures in psychoanalysis. Surrealist quests. Marvels of modern science. Barriers broken down. Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, Karl Marx, Victor Hugo, Rimbaud, Einstein, James Joyce, Apollinaire, Lenin (whom I loved from the very first encounter) were presented to me either as madmen, visionaries, or as embittered and bloodthirsty characters. And during the twentieth century all political movements sought, or so it seemed at least, the revolt of the masses. Whereas on the sidelines of all demagogic orchestration the truth still seems inaccessible and ambiguous .

However, in a little corner of my life, at the very core of my being, the image of something I experienced long ago has always remained fresh. A seemingly banal event. But one that I carry in me like a drop of light. This image is first to appear, emerging from its hiding place, as soon as I hear anyone speak of revolution. It’s in January 1946. I’m nine years old. Standing under the little gallery of my house one Monday morning, I see an enormous agitated crowd of mainly young people coming up Docteur Aubry Street. Frightened, I clutch the porch rail. At the bend of Tiremasse Street, one of the protesters kneels suddenly, his face aflame, his arms flung open. And cries out over and over: Down with Lescot! Down with misery! Excited, my mother begins to scream the same words. I ask her what they mean. She tells me that this is the revolution .