Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Here was my introduction to Haitian politics. I had no idea what kind of place Haiti was until I saw that crowd. The intensity of the day reminded me of something I had seen years before, when I attended the funeral of a revered guru in Tamil Nadu. Mourners that day were convinced that by throwing themselves under the chariot conducting the swami to his funeral pyre, they too would escape the cycle of suffering; the police held the crowd back with whips. Both the demonstration on the Place Dumas and the funeral in India produced the same sound, like the vastly amplified buzzing of a hive. On both days I saw something human beings ordinarily keep hidden. Both encounters left me frightened and exhilarated, as such encounters inevitably do.

Soon the shabby, malnourished crowd was chanting for the judge. They were waving little photos of him that Toussaint had distributed, or green boughs, making a small forest; women banged on pots and pans, the drumming assembling spontaneously into complicated, hectic rhythms. They chanted, “What we want, is to vote.” Women were dancing, singing, clapping.

I don’t know how long we waited before the judge and Terry drove up in the judge’s black SUV. This was the moment the crowd had been waiting for. Now the drumming came to a crescendo, and the wailing intensified. I noticed that I was grinding my teeth as I watched the judge get down from his car, the crowd surging around him. “Come on,” I said to myself. Johel was in a dark suit, Terry in his uniform. At first the judge looked pleased by the crowd, waving and smiling, but then he seemed frightened as people pressed so tightly against him that he couldn’t move. Terry put his arm up, and the judge took a step, and another. Still, it took him almost ten minutes until he could work his way across the street.

When the judge and Terry were finally inside HQ, the dark room was filled with light as the flash of one cell phone camera exploded and then another.

Terry came and stood beside me. His beefy face was flushed. He was almost shaking with adrenaline. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“God damn,” he said. “You ever see something like that?”

“Kay’s looking for you,” I said.

He blinked, as if startled by the name. He looked around the room, through the doors of the HQ, where the crowd was seething in a mass. It wasn’t like a person, that crowd, or like a thousand people. It was just its own kind of thing.

“That man is a rock,” Terry said. “What you got to understand is, that man has some big-ass balls. We’ve been preparing for this for weeks.”

“Why’d they do it?”

“The way Johel’s guy heard it, the Sénateur paid the head of the CEH.”

“What are you going to do?”

“We’re headed to Port-au-Prince this afternoon. You know he’s not alone in this.”

“And what about — Nadia and Kay?” It seemed almost wrong to say their names in the same sentence.

“They’re coming too,” he said.

“Both of them?”

But I don’t think Terry heard me over the roar of the crowd. Johel had stepped out onto the upstairs balcony.

* * *

“We’ll get there,” the judge finally said. “We’ll get there.”

I submit that there is a natural sympathy between certain languages and certain forms of speech. Sibilant, formal French is certainly, in my experience, the language of seduction and diplomacy, the language of lies; bouncy Italian, with its diminutives, is ideal for conversation with children. Attic Greek does triple duty as the language of epic, tragedy, and philosophy. I would go into battle with any commander who spoke Latin, so brutal and so punchy; and I can’t really imagine why anyone would ever wish to write a novel in anything but English, with its massive vocabulary and remarkable ability to leapfrog effortlessly between the lyric and the vulgar, the raw and the fucking sublime.

But if I had to harangue a crowd, I’d do it in Creole.

There was to Creole a compression of sense and thought, a pithiness, a violence that rendered even tongue-tied Haitian orators compelling — and in the hands of someone who could really talk, it was superb.

The judge spoke with a microphone, but between the noise of the crowd and the noise of the generator powering the loudspeakers, I heard only words and phrases of his speech. He spoke for no more than twenty minutes, and of that, perhaps ten minutes were devoted to the judge waving at the crowd and waiting for it to calm down sufficiently that he might be heard. Then I heard him say that he was looking at a crowd of slaves. Master Hunger holds one whip and Master Corruption holds another. Master Empty Cooking Pot locks the chains on in the morning and Master Can’t Afford the Doctor counts heads at night.

And Master Maxim Bayard is chasing down runaways.

That’s why Master Maxim doesn’t want a road. Because he wants his slaves down home where he can keep an eye on them. Because Master Bayard knows what there is at the end of the road.

Someone in the crowd shouts “Port-au-Prince,” and the judge shakes his head. The city at the end of the road — it’s a beautiful city, the most beautiful city there is. It’s a city where justice isn’t bought and sold. It’s a city where children aren’t hungry. It’s a city where the water is clean.

At the other end of the long road was a city called Freedom.

* * *

Kay and Terry fought while the judge spoke. He just wanted her to be reasonable and get in the car, and she said, “Reasonable? You’re talking to me about reasonable?” He said, “Kay, it’s not the way you think,” and she said, “Don’t tell me what to think.” He said, “Kay, we’re getting in the car, and we are going to Port-au-Prince.” I don’t know what she said to him. The last thing I heard him say was that he loved her. Then there was a loud noise from the crowd, and when I looked back, Terry was standing alone. Kay had slipped out the back door of campaign HQ, maybe expecting Terry to follow her. But Terry had let her go.

The judge finished his speech on the Place Dumas by asking the crowd to march with him to Port-au-Prince. The crowd had calmed down. The drums began to beat out a stately, almost funereal rhythm. Johel descended the stairs, and the crowd parted to let him pass. He crossed the Place Dumas. Terry walked beside him, a few steps to his right. The procession filled the Grand Rue, absorbing greater numbers as it went along until it filled the whole Grand Rue from Basse-Ville to the ice factory, a half mile or so long. They walked through the quartier populaire of Sainte-Hélène, with its dense, winding passages of cinder-block houses and the smell of shit coming from the black beach that served as the neighborhood’s latrine. At the rear of the procession were white Mission SUVS manned by UNPOLs, watching them.

I walked with the crowd just as far as the iron suspension bridge over the Grand’Anse, a gift of the government of France back in the 1950s. The judge’s SUV was waiting for him at the far side of the bridge, the last paved road until Les Cayes, six hours to the south. I saw that Nadia was already in the car. The judge wanted to give another speech, but Terry whispered something in his ear. So Johel just waved at the crowd. Then he, Nadia, and Terry were gone in a cloud of white dust. Little children ran after them until they were out of sight.

The next day, Johel Célestin became a legend. He awoke as a minor Haitian politician, little known even in the Grand’Anse. By nightfall his name was known from Ouanaminthe to the Île-à-Vache, from Marmelade to Jacmel. If his name is still remembered today, it is because of what happened that August day in Port-au-Prince.

I was not there, but I followed events on the radio. I was at the library the next morning when I heard the judge’s voice exhorting a crowd, and I knew that he was hitting all the right notes when Monsieur Duval, the librarian, put aside his book to listen. Then, when I stopped at the Marché Soleil to buy tinned anchovies, I heard the roar of a large crowd singing the Haitian national anthem. By now the streets of Jérémie had come to a halt as little clusters of voters gathered around each transistor radio.