We're Alone, page 10
I thought 400 Mawozo had named themselves after the wozo, adding the Kreyòl word ma (meaning “the rest” or “what’s left”) as a prefix to suggest that they were not just wozo but the roots of the wozo, the source of the plant’s ceaseless regeneration. But after 400 Mawozo kidnapped the seventeen missionaries and became known around the world, I was reminded by my artist friend of the actual meaning of the idiomatic word. A mawozo is a man who lacks panache, who doesn’t know how to speak to or woo women, a kind of Cyrano de Bergerac. The gang’s name, 400 Mawozo, is self-mocking, a “fawouch,” my friend said. The American press translated 400 Mawozo as 400 good-for-nothings, 400 simpletons or 400 inexperienced men (the Washington Post), and, my personal favorite, 400 idiots (Reuters).
Reuters has reported that 400 Mawozo started out as small-time thieves. They had initially named themselves Texas, perhaps due to the Lone Star State’s outlaw image. They stole livestock and motorcycles, and commandeered public transportation buses and containers heading to and from the Dominican border. One of the origin stories I heard on a Montreal-based Haitian YouTubers’ commentary feed is that Wilson Joseph started his first neighborhood gang as a teenager. Apparently, he did so after seeing a spaghetti vendor slap his destitute mother for not paying an accumulated debt for the cooked spaghetti breakfast she’d bought on credit every morning to feed him. This might be, in part, why Joseph, like many of the other gang leaders who grew up in the geto, the poor areas they occupy, claim that they are also helping the poor. (N ap fè sosyal.)
As the seventeen missionaries entered their third week in captivity, a criminal complaint filed by the FBI was unsealed, revealing that three Florida residents had been smuggling weapons to 400 Mawozo. The Floridians—Eliande Tunis, Jocelyn Dor, and Walder St. Louis—received the gang’s wish list via WhatsApp messages, bought the weapons from licensed arms dealers and pawnshops all over Florida, then shipped them, via a cargo company, in the large blue barrels that are as present as furniture in some working-class Haitian American homes. While Dor and St. Louis did most of the weapons and ammunition shopping, the shipping and communication were done by Tunis, a naturalized US citizen in her early forties, who described herself as the “queen” of 400 Mawozo. According to the FBI complaint, Tunis would wrap the guns in garbage bags and used clothes, adding some Gatorade in the blue barrel for good measure. In her What’sApp correspondence and voice notes with Joseph and another 400 Mawozo leader, Joly “Yonyon” Germine, who was coleading the gang inside a Haitian jail but has since been extradited to the United States, Tunis wrote, “You know we are 400 Mawozo.… We are snakes. We slither to get where we are going. They would be shocked to see Mawozo invade Miami.”
In early 2024, Germine, Tunis, Dor, and St. Louis pleaded guilty to smuggling and money laundering charges.
It’s rare to get detailed public accounts of what it’s like to be kidnapped and held for ransom by a group like 400 Mawozo. Father Michel Briand, one of the French priests kidnapped in April 2021 and held for nineteen days, told New York Times reporters Maria Abi-Habib and Constant Méheut that he and his group were driving through Croix-des-Bouquets when they were stopped by armed men who forced their way into their car, shoved their driver aside, and drove them all to a rural area. During their first few days in captivity, they slept outside, the priest said, under a tree, on pieces of cardboard. They were then moved to several abandoned homes and finally to one that was like a windowless prison cell. They were fed once a day until the final days, when they were given no food. Father Briand’s account was echoed by the Reverend Jean-Nicaisse Milien, who told Associated Press correspondent Dánica Coto in November 2021 that the group was kept blindfolded and “we did our necessities on the ground.”
During their last week with the kidnappers, Milien and the others were no longer fed the one daily meal of rice, bread, and Coca-Cola and were given very little water. While they were en route to yet another location, the gang members told them: “Here, we don’t have any food, any hospital, any house. We don’t have anything, but we have a cemetery.” Wilson Joseph offered his version to Guerrier Henri, the host of Radio Mega’s Boukante lapawòl (Trading Speech), which, like Louko Désir’s Matin débat, is also a kind of news-and-commentary-as-entertainment show.
“I don’t have a hospital or an orphanage in my house, and I don’t owe anyone food anymore,” Joseph told Henri when he was asked, nine days after they were abducted, whether he was still feeding his clergy captives.
These priests and nuns were not the only members of the cloth who’d been kidnapped that year. In April 2021, while their evening service was live-streamed on Facebook, gunmen burst into the Seventh-day Adventist Gospel Kreyòl Ministry Church in Carrefour. They kidnapped the pastor, the church pianist, and two others. In late September, a sixty-year-old deacon, Sylner Lafaille, was killed by an armed group. His wife, Marie Marthe Laurent Lafaille, was abducted as they entered the First Baptist Church of Port-au-Prince. On October 3, seventy-nine-year-old Jean Pierre Ferrer Michel, a US citizen and pastor of the Jesus Center church, was kidnapped by armed men dressed in police uniforms before a Sunday-morning service. He was held for nearly a month.
Wilson Joseph had told Henri on Boukante lapawòl that he saw the French priests and nuns as representative of France’s sins against Haiti: enslavement, colonization, and “the Ransom” of $150 million that Haiti was forced to pay France for this independence.
“They are the reason Haiti is the way it is today,” he added.
The year before, Christian Aid Ministries had settled with Haitian sexual victims for $420,000. These victims had sued the organization after Jeriah Mast, one of their employees, confessed to having molested thirty boys, over fifteen years, while he was working with the organization in Haiti. Two managers had been aware of the abuse for years but did nothing. Mast was serving a nine-year term for molesting minors in Ohio when the missionaries were kidnapped.
The spike in kidnappings of priests, nuns, and pastors reconfigured how segments of the Protestant church worshipped in Haiti. Protestants had been largely apolitical, except during the presidency of Jovenel Moïse. In the summer of 2020, pastors and their flocks collected thousands of signatures in petitions and took to the streets when Moïse’s government proposed changing Haiti’s penal code to legalize abortion, lower the legal age for consensual sex to fifteen, and make it illegal for clergy to refuse to perform same-sex weddings. After the clergy kidnappings, however, some pastors began to think of new ways to protect themselves and their congregations. The most notable case is that of Jesus Christ Full Gospel Church pastor Job Antoine in Port-au-Prince. Citing Luke 22:36—“Jesus said to them … if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one”—Antoine encouraged his congregants to purchase machetes, which they waved in the air during his sermons.
“Those of us in the Protestant church in this country were taught not to avenge ourselves,” Antoine preached. “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. Thou shall not kill. If anyone slaps you on one cheek, turn the other cheek. That’s what we have been taught, right? … Contrary to what we have been taught and what we learned in Bible school, we can’t stand by and let a man gut us and spill our shit. We’ll spill his shit first. Amen?”
The following Sunday, Jesus Christ Full Gospel Church senior pastor Jean Paul Davius, himself formerly kidnapped, quoted the Latin adage Si vis pacem, para bellum. “Those who want peace must prepare for war,” he explained.
He added that his conscience was keeping him from recommending that the congregants get guns too. His conscience and perhaps the fact that lacking a business like kidnapping to fund a military-style arsenal, most congregation members could never match the gangs’ firepower, which surpassed even that of the Haitian National Police. In areas ruled by young men armed for war, the Sermon on the Mount was being interpreted differently. “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth” no longer applied.
“The way we’re living in this country right now, the only earth the meek will inherit is the cemetery,” my artist friend concurred.
On July 14, 2022, Haitian customs officials confiscated seventeen semiautomatic weapons, twelve shotguns, and four pistols from containers arriving from Miami and addressed to Haiti’s Episcopal Church, exposing a weapons smuggling ring that led to three church officials being charged for arms trafficking and money laundering. A few months later, Haitians in different areas organized self-defense groups in a zero-tolerance swift-justice movement called Bwa Kale, or peeled wood. Like mawozo, the term bwa kale has several figurative meanings, including an erection, or, as Jon Lee Anderson wrote in the New Yorker in July 2023, “a Shaft up the Ass.”
The best-known incident of Bwa Kale happened in Port-au-Prince in April 2023 when police intercepted a minibus carrying fourteen pistol-toting gang members. A crowd gathered at the scene and pressured the police to turn the men over, after which the crowd stoned them to death and then burned their bodies, just as the gangs had, for years, killed their neighbors and incinerated their corpses. Later, the gangs would return in full force in an operation they called zam pale (weapons speak), expanding their territory through even more brutal massacres, including one in which they mowed down dozens of church members as they marched toward gang-occupied neighborhoods carrying sticks and machetes.
On October 31, 2021, it was reported on Haitian media that Patrice Michel Dérénoncourt, a well-known attorney, criminologist, engineer, and academic who was kidnapped the same day as the missionaries, was killed by his kidnappers because his family couldn’t produce the $900,000 ransom they had requested. Nine years earlier, on August 27, 2012, Dérénoncourt had posted what looked like a passport picture on his Facebook page, and a friend of his had jokingly reacted, writing, “Ou vin jèn anpil wi lol! Ou sanble w fenk milyonè.” (You’re looking very youthful. LOL. You look like you just became a millionaire.) To which Dérénoncourt had good-humoredly replied, “Gen lè ou anvi fè yo kidnape m.” (Seems like you’re trying to get me kidnapped.) Kidnapping was common enough in Port-au-Prince to inspire jokes like this whenever having money or coming into money was discussed publicly, even among Haitians outside the country who were considering visiting.
Soon after his death was announced, I watched an old interview with Dérénoncourt on a Haiti-based book program, which was recorded at a Radio Television Caraïbes studio in Port-au-Prince. The program’s moniker, Des livres et vous (Books and You), is a pun on delivrez vous (deliver yourself), for which the show’s well-read and enthusiastic host, Dangelo Néard, who at the time was head of Haiti’s National Library, makes a passionate case in the opening montage by declaring: “If people write, it’s because the world is an act of language. Language is a tool of significance, deliverance.”
On the December 13, 2019, episode featuring Dérénoncourt, both men sat on chairs that looked like they’d been carved out of bookshelves. Néard was wearing a ginger-colored jacket over one of his signature colorful shirts, this one adorned with butterflies. Dérénoncourt was wearing a mauve plaid shirt, dark pants, a beige jacket, and a matching ivy cap. Dérénoncourt, a voracious reader, was asked by Néard how he’d developed his love of reading. Dérénoncourt said that his father was a university professor and his mother a school principal and French teacher. When Dérénoncourt was a teenager, his father made him read the Bible as punishment, demanding that he write summaries of, memorize, and recite passages that taught specific lessons related to his offense. Dérénoncourt spent time with many prominent Haitian intellectuals, including his father’s good friend, the writer and painter Frankétienne. He also spent hours discussing books and other subjects with his father’s university students when they stopped by his house.
“I grew up in an environment where books were adored, where books represented the ultimate quest for knowledge,” Dérénoncourt said, eyeglasses in hand. “I fell into books.… My magic potion is books.”
Dérénoncourt had inherited a family library containing hundreds of volumes, some over a century old. Néard asked him to introduce the audience to five he’d take with him to a desert island. Dérénoncourt immediately modified the assignment and said that he’d brought books he believed spoke in some way to the country’s current reality. He hoped that the books he’d chosen would lead to a better understanding of the present and “a partial improvement of the future.”
The first book he introduced was Makenzy Orcel’s Les immortelles (The Immortals), translated into English by Nathan Dize. The thirty-six-year-old Orcel’s first novel describes a collaboration between a writer and an unnamed sex worker who wants the writer to tell the story of her colleague Shakira, who died during the January 12, 2010, earthquake.
“Let’s begin. I’ll talk. You, the writer, you write. You transform,” the sex worker tells the writer. Dérénoncourt had chosen this book, he said, because understanding others, including our most maligned neighbors, “allows us to evolve, to be more human.” His second choice was Friedrich Nietzsche’s hybrid philosophy and experimental fiction work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Dérénoncourt was particularly fond of this often-quoted line: “In truth, man is a polluted river. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted river and not be defiled.”
His third choice was “Autre lamentation” (Another Lament), a poem from Le fou d’Elsa, by Louis Aragon, a French poet and cofounder of the surrealist movement.
Ô sable divisé dans les mains souveraines
Cruel à toi-même à toi-même confronté
Peuple qui n’es que sang qu’on verse en vérité
Qu’entrailles de chevaux sur l’arène qu’on traîne
Regarde celui-là ton pareil et qu’on tue
Ils t’ont donné la pierre et le couteau pour être
Le bourreau de toi-même à te choisir un maître
Et les coups de ton bras sur qui les portes-tu
My attempt at a partial translation:
O divided sand in sovereign hands
Cruel to yourself and against yourself pitted
A nation whose blood keeps being spilled
Like horse entrails across showground lands
Look at those like you whom they are killing
They gave you the stone and the knife to be
Your own executioner. On your master agree.
And with your blows, whom are you striking?
When he was asked why he chose that particular poem by Aragon, Dérénoncourt answered: “Haiti today. The pain, the violence, the tearing apart of brothers, the tearing apart of a nation.”
“Do you think Haiti today is ‘divided sand’?” Néard asked him.
“I don’t even have to say it,” he replied. “Everyone can see it. This division, this tearing apart, is palpable, visible. It now surpasses politics. We are at a point of rupture.”
His fourth selection was Ultravocal, the genre-bending first novel by the eighty-five-year-old Frankétienne, one of the founders of Spiralism, a literary movement Frankétienne started in the 1960s, during the Duvalier dictatorship, with the writers Jean-Claude Fignolé and René Philoctète. Spiralism, according to Paulin, the novelist character of Frankétienne’s 1968 novel Mûr à crever (translated by Kaiama L. Glover as Ready to Burst), “uses the Complete Genre, in which novelistic description, poetic breath, theatrical effect, narratives, stories, autobiographical sketches, and fiction all coexist harmoniously.”
Dérénoncourt’s fifth book merited an explanation from Néard, who said that in his four years of hosting the show, no one had ever chosen a book cowritten by Lorimer Denis, a Haitian ethnologist and cofounder of Haiti’s Black nationalist noirisme movement, and the former dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. The book was Extraits des oeuvres ethnographiques du François Duvalier et Lorimer Denis (Extracts from the Ethnographic Works of François Duvalier and Lorimer Denis). Duvalier was a medical doctor and a former public health minister who helped eradicate the bacterial infection yaws in rural Haiti before becoming president in 1957. Soon after Duvalier was sworn into office, he declared himself president for life, created a militia (the Tonton Macoutes) that committed untold atrocities in his name, and imprisoned, exiled, or executed his detractors and political opponents. François Duvalier remained in power until he died in 1971, when his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc,” replaced him, carrying on with the regime until he left for France after massive protests and international pressure in 1986. “Is this a provocation?” Néard asked Dérénoncourt. “Why are François Duvalier and Lorimer Denis on my show?”
Because part of Duvalier’s original message has remained relevant, Dérénoncourt explained while leafing through a copy of the very large book on his lap. He was not being revisionist or excusing the dictatorship, he said. He thought it was worth pointing out that Duvalier, in his academic work with Lorimer, reminded Haitians not to abandon the country’s rural class. To grow his urban base during his fourteen years as president for life, Duvalier aggravated rural misery by busing thousands of rural residents to the capital, forcing them to trade off their ancestral plots of land for life in Port-au-Prince shantytowns, competing for jobs in American factories, where they made baseballs or T-shirts for less than a dollar a day. Later his son, Jean-Claude, contracted out both the rural and urban poor to work as sugarcane workers in the Dominican Republic, where some of their descendants are still denied citizenship decades later.
“We must go to the roots of these problems because these problems are not simply material. They are also mental,” Dérénoncourt added regarding the Lorimer/Duvalier book.
On May 31, 2021, on another program on the same station, L’Invité du midi (Noon-Hour Guest), Dérénoncourt said that a genuine national dialogue in Haiti shouldn’t involve only politicians and political parties but should also take place between people from different social classes, particularly between the haves and the have-nots.
“How can we get along?” he said, throwing out some possible questions that might be raised. “It’s fine that you earn money, but what about the others? What will you give them? What’s the limit to the amount of profit I can make? That’s the national dialogue, which should happen even before the dialogue between the politicians. The politicians are just passing through, and sometimes they come up with good ideas. Sometimes they come up with wacky ideas when the reality is hunger. The reality is work. The reality is education. To raise the country’s educational level, the rich must come to some agreement with the poor. The rich must agree to earn less and pay taxes. The number of people who can become rich must grow. Contributing to the country’s social evolution is the rich’s best protection.”
