City of Love
To coincide with the release of the publication PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince, which celebrates the titular 2018 Pioneer Works exhibition, Pioneer Works Broadcast is publishing below an essay on Port-au-Prince and its artists by poet, playwright, performance artist, and translator Ariana Reines.
Port-au-Prince is a place I never had any business going to, or any real right to go. I went back and back again and again because something happened to my heart there, and I’ve resisted writing publicly about it, because what happened to me was love, and it turns out there is something about love that is so private, so scandalous, so shocking, and so unsayable, also so precious and so sacred you should never ever submit it to someone else’s judgment—that it feels like a risk, like a very real risk to put any of it down on paper.
But I think I should admit that this love of Port-au-Prince has to do with the horror of human suffering, and the exhausting nightmare of history, and the livingness of what whites call history, which is not history at all in the realms of the colonized and the exploited, the air, and every body, every minute, every second, the air.
The chauvinism of the idea of history. The whiteness of the idea of the past.
And also a sense of living, and beauty, and a feeling of liberty I never knew anywhere else.
I went to Haiti because my grandparents’ families had been slaughtered in the Polish Holocaust and my mother was crazy and I never knew where to put my pain over all that, what to do with it, or how to make of myself the place where that pain stopped. To make of myself the ending of the worst of that story. I went there because my mother was homeless and I didn’t know how to heal her, and the loss of home in a place of beauty—of beauty not receiving its due—was a feeling that rhymed with her. I went because I was hungry for God, because I hated everything, because everything was wrong with the world, and everything was wrong with me.
Like I told you, I had no business going. But I went anyway, and by the grace of God I would never and will still never, ever be the same.
Haiti is the Mecca, said the houngan who would become a father to me the night we met, in March 2010. Not a Mecca. THE Mecca. Suppose, if only for the sake of argument, we try to take my father at his word.
Some would argue that Haiti—convulsed twelve years ago by an earthquake that might have been Anacoana herself trying to shrug off five hundred years of iniquity, infected with cholera by United Nations forces, looted and tortured by its dictators and throttled by American imperialism, its agrarian communities destroyed by NAFTA, its ironies extreme and its legends extremer, rich in rumor and even richer in improbable fact—has been tread on by foreigners with anything but the reverential attitude of pilgrims. This is where Columbus first set his damning foot. This, where the so-called New World began, where America as we know it began.
I was a pilgrim. Not the Mayflower kind. More of a mendicant. I went with supplies and aid to offer, but spiritually I was the one with the empty begging bowl. I didn’t fully understand this at first, or I didn’t understand what, beyond the earthquake, had called me, or what had called me through the earthquake. I had scammed my way into a UN outreach team comprised of interfaith ministers and trauma experts. A humanitarian catastrophe had called me. I worked in delivering aid. I worked in medical logistics. I played with children who had lost their homes.
I was still pretty closeted as an artist, and I was also in hiding when it came to the spiritual emergency, the spiritual starvation, that drove me there. But after my first two trips I turned, as many overwhelmed lovers do, to furious research—on the one hand devouring Haitian authors and historical analyses of the place, from The Black Jacobins on down, and on the other hand, I looked for people who had never had any real business there, people like me, who had been changed, convulsed, as I had been. And I found them. Jerzy Grotowski, and two regiments of Polish soldiers before him (more on them later). Zora Neale Hurston. Jurgen Leth. Kathy Acker. Andre Breton. Graham Greene. Katharine Dunham, and then Maya Deren. Orson Welles.
Haiti took me by surprise: it shook me into relation with it. I have come to understand the earthquake as an aftershock of the revolution’s “shot heard round the world” which was not, in fact, heard round the world—which the world has done everything it could not to hear. The 2010 earthquake was an echo of Haiti’s revolution, which overturned every apparent law of reality and insisted upon—demanded—and made true for all a humanity and sovereignty that has yet to be fully ratified by reality itself, an idea of sovereignty and magic toward which we all—all artists—move, and for which we all yearn.
I’m not here to write about the earthquake, but I do mean to tell you something about what called me, I guess. I was called because I was yearning for a different reality, an art that was fused with devotion and not merely an instrument of markets, a culture that had paid for and won its independence, and its identity, against the very worst that planet earth had to offer. I am certainly as guilty of romanticism as I am of believing in my own pain—without both, I never would have gone there, let alone kept going back.
But the problem with telling you how I sincerely feel about this place, or trying to convey what I, in my ignorance, was able to experience of its everyday reality, is that I will seem to be exaggerating, I will seem to be mystifying, I will seem to be poetizing. I am only trying to tell you my experience.
How artists manage to do what we do under increasingly insalubrious circumstances is a matter of urgent study and vital comradeship. The artists in the exhibition PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince—and the subsequent, eponymous book—did not hail from the wealthy parts of the city, whose inhabitants move and were educated among the cream of Paris, Montreal, Miami, and New York. The artists in this exhibition were largely trained via apprenticeship, working directly with their mentors in styles characteristic of the materials and qualities of their locale and ethos. It makes more sense to describe their themes and materials and methods in terms of the workshop and master styles of the Renaissance than it does to speak of ideas with which the international art market traffics, or the theories and practices that are taught in its schools.
Ti Pelin developed his style after the great innovations of, and working in the same neighborhood as, the tragic genius Roclor. Myrlande Constant learned sequin embroidery from her mother—and a shuttered dress factory meant that she could employ a dozen people to work on her vast compositions, which brilliantly and feministically (is that a word?) tell and re-tell the archetypal stories of the Lwa and their people. The members of Atis Rezistans all work in terrain its founders innovated—the neighborhood’s traditional furniture making and car repair shops alchemized into André Eugène’s phantasmagorical welding of garbage to sensitively carved faces in torment; Celeur’s eloquently auto-fellating Janus-headed revolutionary spirits, with their Napoleonic war hats and swirling black cloaks cut from old tires; and Evel Romain’s hilariously giant-dicked junk car Gedes, which grins the grins of human skulls, in open defiance not only of the iniquities of the day but of the grave itself.
Most of us live in cities that are generally incompetently governed, full of immigrants, being sold off to foreign and predatory corporations and real estate developers, and the extremities of Port-au-Prince lay bare not only the bitterest of geopolitical irony but also mechanisms through whose wheelwork every artist in every city of the world gets ground—the teeth of your own survival sinking into you, and the insane devotion it takes to make art in circumstances where it takes so much just to get through the day. I don’t mean to suggest that what happens on Flatbush Avenue is comparable to the intensities of the rue John Brown on a Monday morning, only that any artist who has struggled in a city, has an eye for beauty and a heart open to mystery, can grok the magic of Port-au-Prince, and learn to ride it, at least a little. This city is in constant motion, it has distinct neighborhoods with very different qualities and characteristics, and yes, to walk down the street here isn’t totally unlike an average day on the most active thoroughfares of Brooklyn, Queens, or Miami—but when I first set foot there, it gave me a feeling unlike anything else.
Port-au-Prince is a physical city inhabited by people who have almost always had exceptionally bad government, operatically cruel elites, variously incompetent, unscrupulous, and downright debauched and evil foreign speculators—of the financial, military, purportedly charitable, and Evangelical varieties.
And it is a city that is also, simultaneously, running on a different frequency from all of this. Call it telluric, or chaotic, call it a thing of the spirits. All of the things of the world are swirling there, but the place is teeming with spirit, and spirit moves with and also around and also against the laws of nature, at least the laws of nature as Newton described them. I need you to understand what I am saying about spirit as realism, not romanticism.
The place isn’t spiritual because of the hells that have been visited upon it. Its mystical intensity must never excuse or justify the political, technological, and military subjugation of the place. If you have been there you know this for yourself. If you are from there you know it. All places on the Earth are also “spiritual” and, but, I have never been to a place that feels like Haiti.
When I first saw it, Port-au-Prince was all cubist from the earthquake, and vibrating with an intensity unlike anything else I’ve ever felt before or since. Many people told me then what has now become commonplace—that Port-au-Prince before the earthquake was not very different from Port-au-Prince after the earthquake. The first thing to enter me was the salt smell of burning wood charcoal, a scent I have come to identify with Haiti as a whole, and to love and respond to like Maslow’s drooling dog.
Burning wood charcoal puts a saltiness in the air that mixes with the salt released by sweating human bodies and what rises from the ocean. I can’t prove it, but I feel this salinity is conducting energy somehow differently from the way I grew up accustomed to it moving, and that the churning tectonics below us are part of this place’s “very large charge.” That’s a line from Sylvia Plath, and she means it both electronically and financially, as I do.
Roosters crow all day long in Port-au-Prince, according to the dictum—because in the city they never know what time it is. Everything is for sale, but nobody, no matter how desperate, will accept tattered or dirty banknotes, or soiled coin.
In some strange mystical sense Haiti’s revolution has yet to fully arrive, and has yet to end the cruel Hegelian workings of history. In addition to a military and political event, a slave uprising that turned into the third democratic revolution on the planet and the real beginning of the anticolonial impulse in the modern era, Haiti’s revolution was also quite literally a story of magic, a story of deep time, and also the stuff of science fiction. One cannot speak of art, or daily life in a certain Caribbean city, or politics, or energy, without acknowledging that on some level the revolution that ended in 1804 has not yet ended, or is still being begun.
I think it was a revolution on Earth AND in Heaven. Have historians yet been trained to study such things? You can only understand that Haiti’s artists are qualified to tell the story of that place, its extraordinary novelists and musicians, its painters and its sculptors, its magicians by and for whom PÒTOPRENS, the exhibition and book, was made.
Haiti is a strong experience. It is for those with strong appetites. Its sweetnesses are shockingly sweet and its fruits are gigantic and expensive. And its pits are deep and strange; hell on earth. I love it. It changed me forever; I left a piece of my soul there. I didn’t dare write about it for years and years. Because—how do you describe love? And everything love does to you. It would take the rest of my life. ♦
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