One night I dreamed that the bodiless toothpaste women all sat around me and wept. When I woke up, I was sure they’d cried so much that their tears, and not mine, had soaked my pillow. These cut-out images would come fully alive while my body was being violated. And even though these faces were as mute as I was—at times this boy would put his hand over my mouth and I would think I was finally going to die—at least they would witness my death. Later on, as an adult, I would feel a shock of recognition reading about headless paper dolls in Toni Morrison’s novel Sula. “When I was a little girl the heads of my paper dolls came off, and it was a long time before I discovered that my own head would not fall off if I bent my neck.”
While my parents were still alive, I was afraid to write about these nights. I was afraid that it might upset them. My parents had left Haiti in the middle of a thirty-year dictatorship during which most people were being terrorized. Women and girls being raped was not all that unusual. A girl could be walking down the street—she could be on her way to school alone—and if one of the dictator’s henchmen decided he liked her, he could take her. My aunt and uncle managed to protect me from street threats. Yet they were not aware that a different terror existed inside their home.
Joël’s stay in the house lasted around six weeks. He was eventually kicked out by his aunt for some other reason that I wasn’t aware of.
Tante Rezia was the only person I ever told about Joël. I told her a few years before she died. I was visiting her in Haiti and she told me that she’d just seen Joël on the street. He looked like a zombie, she said, like the living dead. He was hungry and she gave him some money for food.
“Remember Joël?” she asked.
I started sobbing, and maybe because I didn’t want someone I loved so much to start feeling sorry for him, I told her.
When I heard that Tante Rezia had died, I kept thinking of bodiless women and headless paper dolls and how they represented another kind of death, the death of innocence for little girls, some of whom do not manage to survive.
Dying Together
I was in a supermarket in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with my two daughters on the afternoon of January 12, 2010, when my cell phone started ringing.
“There’s been an earthquake in Haiti,” a family member told me. “They’re saying it’s 7.0 and catastrophic.”
During the drive home, I looked out the window but could barely see the brightly colored homes and storefronts of Little Haiti. Dusk comes quickly on January nights, even in Miami, and this night was no different. Still, it felt as if dark clouds had swallowed the day a lot faster than usual.
My heart was racing as I started running through, in my mind, a list of the family members and friends in Haiti I would need to get in touch with. Most of them lived in Léogâne, the epicenter of the earthquake; Carrefour; and the capital, Port-au-Prince. I tried to think of the most efficient way to find out about the greatest number of people. It would be best, I told myself, to call several people who would have news of everyone else—the family leaders, if you will. My cousin Maxo was one of those people.
At sixty-two, Maxo had been married several times and had eleven children ranging in age from forty-two years to fifteen months old. He was a lively and overindulgent soul who’d taken over the family homestead after his father, my minister uncle, had died, in 2004. Maxo, his wife, and five of his youngest children were living in Bel Air, the hillside neighborhood where I grew up, near one of Port-au-Prince’s most famous cathedrals. When I dialed Maxo’s number at a red light on the way home, I heard a strange sound on the other end of the line, something like air flowing through a metal tube.
When I got home, my husband was in front of the television watching the news on CNN. The television screen showed a map of Haiti with a bull’s-eye on Carrefour, where my husband’s two uncles were living. There were no images yet of the actual devastation, just interviews with earthquake experts and the occasional survivor via Skype. The eyewitnesses were describing a catastrophic scene. The presidential palace and several other government buildings had collapsed. Entire neighborhoods had slid down hills. Churches, schools, and hospitals had crumbled, killing and burying countless people. Aftershocks were continuing, prompting a tsunami warning.
“It was as if the earth itself had become liquid,” one survivor said, “like the ocean.”
My husband and I kept dialing the phone numbers of friends and relatives in Haiti and getting no response. Instead, I got a call from the producers of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360°. They asked if I would come on the show.
I wasn’t sure what I would say. What I was feeling was nearly indescribable. The country where I was born and had spent the first twelve years of my life, where many of my family members still lived, had been devastated. For all I knew, there were very few people left still alive. I was extremely worried about my loved ones. I was also feeling a deep sense of dread, a paralyzing fear that everything was gone, that the whole country had been destroyed.
As I sat in the satellite studio in Miami Beach, waiting to go on the show, I still hadn’t heard from anyone I knew in Haiti. I felt like sobbing when Anderson Copper turned to me on the monitor and said, “Edwidge, I know you have been trying to get in touch with your family as well. Have you had any luck?”
“This is probably one of the darkest nights in our history,” I managed to tell Anderson and his viewers that night.
When I returned home, the dark night continued. With daylight came the first images of the devastation. Piles of rubble were everywhere, many with both corpses and moving limbs peeking out. I cried watching a video of one trapped little boy whose arm could be seen reaching for his mother from a pancaked house. I didn’t know then that my cousin Maxo and his ten-year-old son, Nozial, had already died, and that three of Maxo’s other children—including the fifteen-month-old—would be trapped in the rubble for two days before being rescued by their neighbors.
Perhaps because the images of the helplessly trapped were so hard to take, a lot of the television news coverage quickly shifted to foreign-led professional rescues. The rescues provided a dramatic arc for viewers, a resolution that wasn’t death. Among the stories that might have been too devastating to watch are some that my family members told me of hundreds of people who individually or in small groups kept vigil near a pile of rubble and spoke to their trapped loved ones as they slipped away, dying so close yet beyond their reach.
One of the books I took with me when I returned to Haiti twenty-three days after the earthquake was Haruki Murakami’s 2002 short-story collection, After the Quake. The six stories in the collection take place after the Kobe earthquake, which killed more than six thousand people on January 17, 1995. I’d read After the Quake when it came out, when I was writing The Dew Breaker, a collection of linked stories about a torturer and the aftermath of his crimes, including their impact on his victims’ lives. Even before the Haiti earthquake, I’d found After the Quake’s traumatized characters both instructive and comforting. None of us know how we might react when faced with a disaster that directly affects our lives and our communities. Would we keep our cool? Would we lose it? Would we go nuts?
Murakami’s characters display a whole range of reactions, from numbness to flights of magical realism that some might consider madness or simply grief. The earthquake, though, is not the central focus of these stories; the aftershocks are. Not just the physical or geographical aftershocks, but the psychological ones as well.
In “UFO in Kushiro,” the wife of Komura, an electronics salesman, suddenly leaves him after the earthquake. To keep his mind off the current state of things, Komura agrees to carry a mysterious package on a plane for a colleague. While traveling he observes:
The morning paper was full of earthquake reports. He read it from beginning to end on the plane. The number of dead was rising. Many areas were still without water or electricity, and countless people had lost their homes. Each article reported some new tragedy, but to Komura the
details seemed oddly lacking in depth.
Poems, essays, memoirs, stories, and novels can help fill depth gaps in a way that numbers and statistics can’t. One person’s well-described life and death can sometimes move us more than the mere mention of thousands of deaths can.
“Nothing is less sensational than pestilence,” Albert Camus writes in his 1947 novel, The Plague. “Great misfortunes,” he notes, “are monotonous.” So how do we write about them without sounding overindulgent, self-righteous, self-piteous, melodramatic, sentimental, or a combination of some or all of the above? Humor, as Christopher Hitchens shows us, might be one way. Another might be the iceberg. Yet another way might be to spill one’s heart all over the page. After all, death is one of life’s most spectacular events, one that surpasses all existing words and deeds.
When writing about death, I remind myself of the mundaneness, even the routineness of it. People die all the time, though they are not all people I know or love. I also acknowledge that a death that moves me terribly and crushes me might not have the same effect on someone else. Empathy is not guaranteed, and hyperbole does not necessarily ensure it. I also try to stick to what the writer Brenda Ueland, in If You Want to Write, calls “microscopic truthfulness.” “The more you wish to describe a Universal the more minutely and truthfully you must describe a Particular,” she writes.
The more specifically a death and its aftermath are described, the more moving they are to me. The more I get to know the dying person on the page, the more likely I am to grieve for that person.
What is lacking in the newspaper accounts that Murakami’s character Komura reads are “Particulars,” like this conversation between Junko and Miyake, two friends and potential lovers, in another story called “Landscape with Flatiron.”
“I’ve never once thought how I was going to die,” she [Junko] said. “I can’t think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to live.”
Miyake gave a nod. “I know what you mean,” he said. “But there’s such a thing as a way of living that’s guided by the way a person’s going to die.”
Later, Junko realizes that she couldn’t live with Miyake, but she wouldn’t mind dying with him. Eventually all of Murakami’s characters—like my Haitian relatives right after the earthquake—begin living with the heightened awareness that they could die at any time, and out of that realization comes a kind of clarity of focus and an attentiveness, albeit temporary, to every single hour and every single day.
During most of the post-earthquake nights I spent in Haiti, I would sleep on the roof of the house of one of my husband’s uncles in Carrefour. The two-story cement home had survived the earthquake intact. Still, I was too afraid to sleep inside the house, which I kept imagining crumbling on top of us in an even more powerful earthquake. So I lay in a sleeping bag on the roof and looked up at a sky full of stars while listening to the voices of neighbors who were also sleeping on their roofs or on the street, because they were too terrified to sleep inside what was left of their homes.
“Strange and mysterious things, though, aren’t they—earthquakes?” Nimit, a tour guide, declares in a story called “Thailand.” “We take it for granted that the earth beneath our feet is solid and stationary. We even talk about people being ‘down to earth’ or having their feet firmly planted on the ground. But suddenly one day we see that it isn’t true. The earth, the boulders, that are supposed to be so solid, all of a sudden turn as mushy as liquid.”
The liquefied earth makes us all liquid, evaporative. Others dying en masse, through man-made or natural disasters—earthquakes, plagues, epidemics, tsunamis, terrorist attacks, or mass killings—remind us that we might all be here one day and be gone the next.
“Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value,” Satsuki, a doctor in “Thailand,” reflects.
Takatsuki, a newspaper reporter in “Honey Pie,” the book’s final story, no longer reacts to seeing dead bodies.
“I can see a corpse now and not feel a thing,” he said. Bodies severed by trains, charred in fires, discolored with age, the bloated cadavers of the drowned, shotgun victims with brains splattered, dismembered corpses with heads and arms sawed off. “Whatever distinguishes one lump of flesh from another when we’re alive, we’re all the same once we’re dead,” he said. “Just used-up shells.”
Though the (translated) language is stripped-down, Murakami’s characters are never used-up shells. Some of their most profound, though not always flattering, traits are “unearthed” in these stories. No halos are placed on the heads of those who’ve disappeared or died. Death has not cleansed or whitewashed them in the memories of their loved ones. “The best friend a person has,” Gabriel García Márquez writes in One Hundred Years of Solitude, “is one who has just died.” Murakami’s characters don’t suddenly become saints or anyone’s best friend because they’ve died. Still, Junpei, the fiction writer in “Honey Pie,” and possibly a stand-in for Murakami, decides after the earthquake that he mostly wants to write about “people who dream and wait for the night to end.”
Two years before After the Quake, Murakami published an oral history of the orchestrated sarin gas attack on the Japanese subway system on March 20, 1995, in which twelve people died and fifty were injured. This act of domestic terrorism was carried out by members of Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese doomsday cult. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche features Murakami’s interviews with dozens of survivors of and witnesses to the attack.
“What I did not want,” Murakami writes in the book’s preface, “was a collection of disembodied voices. Perhaps it’s an occupational hazard of the novelist’s profession, but I am less interested in the ‘big picture,’ as it were, than in the concrete, irreducible humanity of each individual.… I wanted … to recognize that each person on the subway that morning had a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions and dilemmas—and that all of these factors had a place in the drama.”
Even while faced with two disasters, Murakami finds his own microscopic truthfulness.
Nearly two years after the earthquake in Port-au-Prince, some of my cousins were removing rubble from the school where my cousin Maxo had been the principal. In the process, they found human bones. Because they are not scientists and because Haitian officials had no interest in bones, it was impossible for them to trace these bones back to the bodies to which they had belonged: active, lively people who once spoke and laughed and loved. So rather than carry these bones around like some of García Márquez’s characters do in early, cemetery-less Macondo, they decided to bury the bones next to my cousin Maxo’s remains in our family mausoleum.
Whose bones are these? they wondered. Do they belong to the bright student who was always first in her class, to a parent with whom a teacher had an appointment? Are they the teacher’s bones?
My family members and their friends were finding these bones in the rubble around the time of the ten-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and as I was talking to them, I couldn’t stop thinking of human beings who had tried to be un-boned and fly. I couldn’t get my mind off the men and women who’d been catapulted from or had jumped from the inferno of the World Trade Center buildings, then cut across a clear blue sky, down toward the ground. Some were alone. Some were in pairs. Some tried to make parachutes of curtains and clothes. One woman held on to her purse, perhaps thinking it might help identify her.
Dying en masse, especially on television, makes death—that most private of departures—public, national, global. No deaths were more public on September 11, 2001, than those of the so-called “jumpers,” a word that many have rightfully called a misnomer, because these were certainly not the deaths these people would have chosen for themselves.
We are often told not to compare tragedies, but how can we not when we experience them in the same body and with the same mind? Past horrors give us a language, or a basis upon which to create a new language, to define new disasters. Public terrors b
ecome personalized. Those of us who saw the jumpers that day, either live at the scene or on television screens, saw a sky raining lives. Those of us who were from countries that have been, in their own way, on the edge of destruction, could now be counselors to our previously sheltered friends, but only barely. For no matter how much we immerse ourselves in communal grief, we all still carry our own private losses within us.
Watching any public disaster and the collective mourning it inspires always reminds me that acts of remembrance, like pieces of art, can also surface out of daily rituals, even interrupted ones. A place setting left unused at a dinner table. An oversize shoe into which we slip a foot. A tearstained journal in which we scribble a few words about unclaimed bones.
There is an ongoing debate about whether the great September 11 novel will ever be written. A case can be made that it has already been written, even if retroactively, even if in fragments. Though the stories collected in After the Quake were published in magazines and journals before September 11, some of his characters’ senses of disorientation are similar to the testimonials of people who survived the terrorist attacks.
Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, published in 1927, is often cited as an ex post facto contender for a novel about September 11, or any other disaster. Set in eighteenth-century Peru, it examines the lives of five people who plunge to their deaths during a bridge collapse.
“Why did this happen to those five?” says Brother Juniper, a Franciscan missionary, and he decides to fully investigate the question. His quest is a lot like the persistent pursuit of all those who would write about the dead. Some more practical soul might have investigated the condition of the bridge; however, Brother Juniper decides to investigate the lives of those who plummeted from it. Why them? What kinds of lives did these people lead and what connections do they have to the larger community, and to each other, both in life and in death?
The Art of Death Page 4