Rocks in the Water, Rocks in the Sun: A Memoir from the Heart of Haiti

by Vilmond Joegodson Déralciné

  I travelled to Saut d’Eau on the morning of the funeral and returned to Port-au-Prince in the evening.

  I couldn’t bear to see my grandmother disrespected in death. The funeral was stingy. There were two groups. One group of forty people was present as the body was buried. The other group, including my father’s eldest sister, was a distance away looking on. I knew that my grandmother had been aware that her children were fighting over the property as she lay dying. People were now at her funeral but were focused not on Suzanne but on the land.

  There was no ceremony. I insisted that everyone sing the traditional hymns for interment. A couple of people were crying. They started hollering that it was the other group that had caused the situation. It was a mess.

  I had not planned to speak, but I couldn’t stand the atmosphere around me. I asked people to stop hollering recriminations. I told them that these were battle cries whereas they should be tears of respect for Suzanne who had done so much for us all during her life. I chastised all of my relatives for their avarice and their inhumanity toward their mother and grandmother. I told them that I would take no side in the coming war over the land.

  They had divided themselves and they were all the poorer for it. I told them so. They had taken a beautiful place and turned it into hell. No one denied it. No one said anything. Everyone looked at the ground until I had finished. Then they put my grandmother in the ground. No one spoke. At best, my words will remain suspended in the air of Saut d’Eau.

  Then I returned to Delmas 33 to be with Naara and Annie and to wonder whatever would become of us.

  I have found it hard to live with the tragedy of Suzanne’s final passage. After all her life, a simple gesture of paying someone seventeen gourdes for a plot of land overshadowed raising children and grandchildren, keeping us all alive and healthy through sometimes desperate situations. I will always be haunted by the likelihood that she heard her children fighting over her little plot of land at her deathbed.

  My aunt was separated from her mother’s burial. She stood with her group in a valley in Saut d’Eau. Her future, she thinks, depends upon that plot of land. She thinks that she can build a future that ignores the past. She can’t.

  chapter forty-seven

  IF CANADIANS WOULDN’T LET ME enter their country, I refused to work in their sweatshops. But the double rejection soon turned into a positive experience for me. I had to lay a better foundation for my life in Haiti.

  We had the chance to rethink the status of my little property in Canaan. It was suffering. I had given my phone number, along with a few gourdes, to a woman who lived in the area and asked her to keep an eye on my land and call me if there was something I should know. She did call to say that the squatters on each side kept moving their property lines, squeezing me from each direction.

  If I had gone to Canada as planned to work on this book, maybe my heart would have remained behind in Haiti, worried about what was happening to Annie, Naara, and my land. When the Canadian government refused me entry, they allowed me to focus on my worries here in Haiti.

  After the news from the embassy, Paul advised me to use the rest of the money in my account to make my presence clear in Canaan. If time went by and there were no signs of construction, someone else might claim the land. And, depending on the decision of the local committee, they might succeed. Marking my presence on the land was important.

  I had already started to prepare for my home in Canaan. In the summer of 2010, we received an anonymous gift of $500 Canadian from someone who followed our writings. The person said I was to use it to develop the plot in Canaan that I had written about. I immediately called my cousin Lorès, who lived in Bon Repos. He was a metalworker and skilled in construction. He advised me to go to Site Solèy to buy my reinforcement bars. He said that he bought materials there and the locals sold their stuff cheaper than the construction stores. He told me that it was better that I prepare a solid foundation even if I didn’t have enough money to finish. I should build something durable, the opposite of the flimsy wooden shacks that the NGOs were throwing up. The NGOs gave these structures to Haitians and imagined that they were satisfied with them. Lorès didn’t have to convince me that I should work toward a stable, solid home.

  Lorès set aside a day to accompany me to Site Solèy to get the reinforcements. I bought twenty-five half-inch iron bars. Then we rented a taptap to take them to his property in Bon Repos. Lorès prepared the posts for the construction. Then one of Annie’s sisters advised us to not go further with the construction. There were still doubts about the future of Canaan. Would the government allow construction there? Would a bourgeois family succeed in claiming the land as its own? It wasn’t clear. Better that we survey the situation and wait until the signs were clearer. She worried that my money and effort would be wasted if the state prohibited construction. We decided that she was right. We left the steel bars on Lorès’ property to go to Canaan when the time was right.

  Instead of tracing the foundation of the building on the property, I decided to buy a truckload of sand. That would cost 4,000 gourdes ($100 US) and would be a clear sign that someone serious had claimed the property. At the same time, it wasn’t too great an expense. It was a good balance.

  I used the rest of the money from the donation to finish the furniture for my marriage.

  My friend Louise had sent Annie and me a wedding gift of one hundred English pounds ($162 US). I received it in November of 2010. I decided to use it to buy a truckload of stones. My pile of sand would have a friend. I went to Canaan and found trucks lined up, waiting for someone like me who wanted a load of rocks. One of the drivers agreed to allow me to travel with him to the quarry where the rocks were mined.

  When the driver arrived at the quarry, I found a community of male peasants who had created a world of their own. They were materially poor, far below the standard of Port-au-Prince. They were cheerful and happy in their work. I spent the afternoon talking and joking with them.

  They had peasant names. Haitian peasants distinguish their offspring with names that refer to the conditions of their birth. I began by chatting up a man in his forties named Lamizè (Misery). His story was similar to the others. He had four children. They lived with his wife in Croix-de-Bouquets so that they could attend school. A couple of times a month, they came to visit their dad in his quarry and he would pass along the money he had earned so that they could pay their teachers and buy food. Otherwise, the quarrymen lived apart from their families. They lived and worked hard from sunrise to sunset in their quarries.

  Each peasant mined his own quarry. I bought a truckload of stones from Tinonm (Little Man) who had a shipment ready to go. All four of the peasants who worked in that area came to help Tinonm and me load the truck. They joked and laughed together and then went back to their separate quarries. I was exhausted just watching Tinonm pound the wall of rock into blocks of stone. They told me that when sunset comes, they were physically exhausted and slept well. They lived in ajoupas (a hut built of branches covered with palm leaves that allows breezes to circulate inside the structure, typically built to last for several years).

  When I asked Tinonm how long he had worked in the quarry, he replied that he had been there since a truckload cost 100 gourdes ($7 US). Now, it fetched 3,000 gourdes ($75 US). The peasants did not use the same references as I: they did not calculate in years or hours, but followed events that had meaning for them. I tried several other approaches until I figured out that Tinonm had been working there since 1995. Others had been there longer. Tinonm used to make charcoal for the Port-au-Prince market before that, but since there were no more trees to be transformed into charcoal, he decided to get into the quarry business.

  There was no water in the neighbourhood. They looked forward to the passage of a truck, like the one that brought me to them, so that someone could hitch a ride back to Canaan and fill up the jugs with water. Otherwise they had to walk and it was a long way. I looked at the dirty water containers and
asked about their precautions since Haiti was dealing with the cholera crisis.

  “Aren’t you afraid of cholera?” I asked.

  “What’s that?” they all asked.

  They were all in good condition, of course, although their skin was burnt by the sun. They worked constantly, always making sure that someone had a shipment of rocks ready in case a truck came by. There was no telling when the next truck might appear.

  They knew little about what was happening in Port-au-Prince. While only kilometres away, it was not easily accessible. They made their own community, dependent on the urban economy, but otherwise isolated from the city.

  My spirit lightened during the afternoon. They were unpretentious and evidently content with their lives and comradeship. Once they made enough cash to support their families, their own material needs were minimal and almost completely independent of money.

  Their simplicity was inspiring. Port-au-Prince — greedy, anxious, egotistical, unhappy — seemed far, far away. The constant struggle to earn enough of the little money in circulation to assure our survival seemed artificial in the face of this community of men who happily allowed money to slip through their fingers.

  We returned to Canaan and piled the rocks next to the sand. They could serve as a solid foundation.

  A few months later, a number of people were building homes to last, not ajoupas or tents. This increased activity fed upon itself. Before long, it was clear that the state had no choice but to recognize the new community of Canaan and those who were building even farther up the mountains. When policemen started building and the state recognized the committees, it was clear that we were safe to continue. People were setting up businesses. Once a new development takes off, the question is who will profit from it. The powerful would come to get their piece of the Canaan action.

  The money that remained in my bank account would allow me to complete the foundation. That would solidify my claim to the land. First, my land was on a slope. That meant that I would need two other truckloads of rocks and twenty-five bags of cement to lay a solid foundation. Fortunately, a few of the new settlers had already dug water reservoirs. Water had been scarce only a few months earlier. Now, I would have access to what I needed to mix the cement.

  In Canaan, I found a couple of masons who were experts at tracing and digging the foundation. They traced two rooms, each four metres square. So, my house would be four by eight metres. I chose the crest of the hill, overlooking the valley below, and cooled by the perpetual breeze.

  My future neighbour who watched over my land in my absence lent me a few drums to fill with water. I hired her young son as the water boy. Each bucket of water cost five gourdes (12 cents US). His job was to carry buckets of water from the nearest basin and fill up the drums. I was there just to oversee the work. I helped the masons with whatever they needed, carrying rocks and mixing mortar.

  As we worked, masons passed by continuously asking for work. There was no lack of work to be done. There was no lack of skilled people to do it. There was only a pitiful lack of money to meet everyone’s needs. I was privileged to be in the situation of laying a foundation. It had taken me a year to get this far. The other plots had nothing but sticks.

  After two and a half days, the foundation was laid. The sand that I had bought a year earlier was the best quality. It helped the work go smoothly and it meant that the foundation was solid. Others, cutting corners, were using coarser sand. The mortar that resulted from using the coarser sand and cement was less reliable, less secure. I wanted to be sure that my little home would withstand the next earthquake, whenever it came.

  It took time, but I could see my home literally rising out of Haitian soil. I was very happy.

  chapter forty-eight

  AFTER THE CANADIAN EMBASSY REFUSED ENTRY, I was discouraged about this project. I suggested to Paul that the only way we could continue was by telephone. Seeing how unwelcome a poor little Haitian like me was in the Canadian embassy in Haiti, I wondered what it would be like if I had been accepted. Was Canada not just a big version of the embassy? Would I not be humiliated everywhere? My curiosity and excitement was replaced with apprehension and acrimony. I feared that I understood Canada through its embassy.

  Why had the Canadian embassy not accepted me? Everyone was seeing me as a furniture maker, a manual worker who is little respected in Haiti. That I was most happy and satisfied when I was crafting furniture was irrelevant to authorities. They scoffed at the idea that I could also be a writer. Maybe they were right. Maybe they knew me better than I knew myself. I shared those thoughts with Paul. I told him that we could just continue to write articles on our website and talk on the phone. Paul heard the resignation in my voice. He said that what I was feeling was just what the authorities had been hoping for. Both in Haiti and in Canada, the powerful are very happy when the poor, whether Haitian or Canadian or other, believe they are powerless. When we resign ourselves to the lowest rung of the global ladder, they profit. Their great fear is that the ladder might be disassembled. Those at the top would have a long way to fall. We had to decide how to respond to the humiliations and rejections that I had faced.

  Paul argued that these experiences that had got me into a funk were inevitable. If things had been easy — if people could move between these borders as easily as money and corporations — then we would have to rethink how we understood the world. We had to keep supporting each other in the face of the obstacles that people, and the system in which we all live, put in our way.

  Paul’s mother, who was eighty-two years old, was angry to find that her government had refused me entry into her country. She had been willing to welcome me not only into her country, but into her home. She told me to not let them bully me. That showed me that the government didn’t speak for all Canadians. But the rejection by the Canadian government helped us to understand how the rich and poor countries of the world were working together to manage things.

  After my embassy nightmare, Paul asked me to think about what I wanted to do. He said that he would call me after three days and we could talk about it. He said that if I was really still too dejected to continue, he would let our project die. I asked him if he was willing to continue by telephone. He said no, that it would not be possible to write unless we sat together and reflected in depth. Were we to continue with our challenge, we would simply have to find a way around the Canadian government.

  Three days later, he called as promised. I told him that I still wanted to continue our work. I agreed that we needed to have both courage and truth together. But how to write our book together? Paul said, “If Mohammed can’t go to the mountain, then the mountain must go to Mohammed.”

  And so he planned to arrive as soon as he had finished a contract in Canada. We needed to have two laptops that we could recharge whenever electricity flowed. That way, we could usually keep working until the batteries ran out. So he bought an extra laptop for me.

  Meanwhile, things around me continued to change all the time. My little sister Gloria was now eighteen years old. All her life, she had been dependent on Deland who had cared for her in the face of her constant seizures. We worried about whether we would be able to care for her without Deland — and how Gloria would respond to life without Deland. She couldn’t understand his final illness and death. Sometimes, she would ask the neighbours where her father was. When they told her that he had died, she asked when he would come back. On 24 October, Gloria came down with a fever and was dehydrated. My sisters in Simon took her to the hospital where they put her on intravenous fluids. But she had a seizure and pulled the tubes out. Soon after, she died. Since they suspected that she had died of cholera, they disposed of her body in a common grave.

  As I prepared for Paul’s arrival, therefore, I was a strange mixture of sadness and excitement.

  My room was already too small for three Haitians. Unless Paul had shrunk to nothing since 2006, he wouldn’t have been able to fit into it with us. I called Annie’s sister and bro
ther-in-law who were renting two rooms in Silo. I told them of our situation and that I would like to stay with them for two months to write our book. I told them that, during the time we spent with them, we could pay for the food for everyone. They didn’t hesitate. They agreed right away to the proposition. All was settled.

  We decided that we would try to be liquid and to fit into whatever situations came along. Paul happily agreed that he would follow my counsel while he was here.

  And so the day arrived, 31 October. My cousin Claude agreed to drive his taptap to meet Paul at the the airport. I wanted to make sure that I had someone I could trust. We arrived after Paul’s plane. That made sense. It’s easier to get to Toussaint Louverture Airport from Canada than from Delmas 33.

  To see what we did next, go back to chapter 1.

  COMMENTARY

  Joegodson often frames his critique of modern-day imperialism in terms of the national hero, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a central figure of the revolution and first ruler of an independent Haiti in 1804. As we will see, Joegodson is not alone among Haitians in calling upon the spirit of Dessalines, who is both an historical and a mythical figure. Scholars work to understand the historical Dessalines, both the person and his actions. However, the mythical Dessalines fulfils an important role in present-day Haiti. It is that Dessalines that Joegodson invokes.

  The mythical and historical Dessalines are not distinct phenomena that can be definitively separated. In the first place, there is more than one mythical Dessalines. The imperialist, slave-owning countries created their own mythical Dessalines who was as ignoble as the mythical Dessalines of Haiti’s struggling classes is noble. The hero of the successful Haitian Revolution was the villain of its opponents. American and French leaders defamed Dessalines as an illiterate savage. Contemporary documents prove otherwise. As there is no such thing as an unmediated fact, we should see that evidence comes to us through agents already embedded in systems of power. How we receive “facts” tells us about our own relationship with those systems.