We're Alone, page 2
“The sea is salt,” Zora Neale Hurston wrote.
“The sea is history,” wrote the Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott.
In his hybrid poetry and prose collection Un arc-en-ciel pour l’Occident Chrétien, translated by the scholar Colin Dayan as A Rainbow for the Christian West, the Haitian poet and novelist René Depestre writes that one day water will carry us to the other side of humanity. “Je dis bonjour à cette eau qui nous vient des confins de la douleur! Disons tous bonjour à cette eau qui nous vient des profondeurs de la mer!” (My translation—I greet this water that comes to us from the depths of pain! Let us all greet this water that comes to us from the depths of the sea!)
The story whose beginning I chose to explain to the teenagers at the library in Fond-des-Blancs is from my 1995 short story collection Krik? Krak! and is called “Children of the Sea.” It’s about a group of Haitian refugees trying to reach the United States by boat after a US-supported 1991 military coup d’état against Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
I began the story the way I did, I told them—with the lines “They say behind the mountains are more mountains. Now I know it’s true.”—because it evokes a Haitian proverb I love—dèyè mòn gen mòn. I also told them that writing that story, and all my stories, reaffirms my belief that being human means having to keep beginning again.
4
After we left Fond-des-Blancs, my husband and I and our two daughters went to spend two weeks with my mother-in-law in Gros Marin, a small rural village further south. Our US-born niece, who was in Haiti for the first time, joined us there. Suddenly a whole new generation of our family, from the millennials to the preteens, wanted to visit Haiti. They were telling us that they didn’t want to visit “Resort Haiti”—which we were not that familiar with anyway—but wanted to see what they were calling “the Real Haiti,” or as real as we, their diaspora relatives, could show them.
My eighty-six-year-old mother-in-law, who, when she was in the countryside, chose to live, for the most part, the same way her grandparents had, could always be counted on to provide a rustic experience. One of the three bungalows on her property—the one my husband, daughters, and I usually slept in—had a thatch roof. Behind our bedroom was a much smaller room where we showered using plastic buckets filled with water we pumped ourselves from her well. For a more luxurious bath, we could walk down to the river, which our niece did in the most elaborate white ruffled two-piece bathing suit that anyone in my mother-in-law’s village (and probably on most American beaches) had ever seen. At night we peed in chamber pots if we were too scared to walk out to the latrine in the dark. The foods we ate were mostly from my mother-in-law’s garden or had been traded for other foods from her neighbors’ gardens. When we were served chicken, it was likely that we had met the bird earlier in the day, which led to my husband, who’d spent his childhood summers in the same area, being the only one in our group eating those meals in their entirety. Our niece took all of this in the way young people process experiences, with her smartphone. She texted, Snapchatted, Instagrammed, and Facebooked everything to her hundreds of social media followers.
We did our best to stay one step ahead of the heat. There was the river, which was crowded with local bathers every afternoon. We also drove out to the beach but could not go in the water. Most of the beaches on the southern coast were covered in red tide, toxic algae that made them look as though millions of dead brown leaves were either bobbing on the waves or had washed ashore. The combination of the algae and the human-produced waste—plastic and foam containers being the most prevalent—made swimming impossible.
After our niece returned to Miami, we devoted ourselves entirely to watching World Cup games in the backyard of a neighbor who happened to have a television and was charging people the equivalent of a quarter to watch each game. The World Cup was an obsession in our area, as it was in the rest of Haiti, where the Brazilian team is a perennial favorite. There were Brazilian flags everywhere—on cars, motorcycles, and homes—not because Brazil had led MINUSTAH, a multibillion-dollar, decade-long United Nations peacekeeping debacle in Haiti from 2004 to 2017, or because thousands of Haitians had migrated to Brazil after the January 12, 2010, earthquake, but because most Haitians, like many other soccer fans around the world, claim Brazil’s team as their own. They hoped the Brazilian team would win its sixth World Cup in the last sixty years.
One sweltering early July day, we drove to the home of a family friend in Port Salut, a beautiful coastal town about thirty miles from my mother-in-law’s house, to watch Brazil face Belgium in the quarterfinals. So many of our friend’s neighbors had come to watch the game that he pitched a makeshift tent in front of his house to accommodate us all. When the match ended, and Brazil lost, scoring only one goal to Belgium’s two, the young woman sitting next to me began sobbing. I thought she was a superfan who was overcome with grief at the loss, but as she rocked herself, she said, “What am I going to do with all the machandiz?”
She’d been hoping that the Brazilian team would make it to the finals, she said, and had gotten a high-interest loan to buy Brazil-related merchandise—jerseys, flags, and bracelets—to sell. Now the items had plunged in value, and she was deep in debt. Her anguish was a heartrending reminder that the fate of some of the most disadvantaged people in the world is linked to factors far beyond their control.
Port Salut felt like a graveyard when we left it that evening, not just because of the disappointment over the World Cup. During Brazil’s final match, the Haitian government, led by President Jovenel Moïse and Prime Minister Jack Guy Lafontant, had announced that to ensure the country would qualify for low-interest loans from the International Monetary Fund, they were raising the price of gasoline and diesel. As a result, the cost of kerosene, which was used to light most homes in the Haitian countryside, increased by 51 percent. We only heard the news on the drive back to my mother-in-law’s when we began receiving messages from family members and friends advising us to get off the road. We encountered nearly a dozen roadblocks on the way, most of them made from piles of rocks and flaming tires guarded by anxious young men, some of them waving handguns. After fleeing one where a man was shooting in the air, we retreated to a dry riverbed where we encountered a young mototaxi driver, who, while explaining why he and his friends would not let us through, detailed how the sudden gas hike would chip away at the life they were struggling to build for themselves and their families.
“We want a future, but they keep snatching it away,” he said.
When we finally made it back to my mother-in-law’s house, we waited a few days until the demonstrations quieted down before leaving for Port-au-Prince to catch our scheduled flight to Miami. We left late one afternoon, and as we departed the countryside, it began to rain. The roads were mostly deserted, in part because of the rain but also because of the recent protests. We came across remnants of several roadblocks along the way: half-melted tires, blackened river rocks, fallen palm trees, around which our friend and Tour Haiti driver, Solage, carefully skirted his pickup truck.
We were relieved as we approached Port-au-Prince since we thought we were leaving behind, in the countryside, the greater possibility of overflowing rivers and mudslides strong enough to overtake Solage’s jeep in the rain. As we approached the city’s outskirts, I saw what seemed like a shimmery river extending for miles and miles. Solage was uncertain about how to proceed. It was hard to tell how deep the water was or where the car might sink or get stuck. Solage moved carefully, staying close to the front porches of houses and patches of sidewalk that were still visible.
As the car made its way through the tightly packed surface of this street river, the water parted, and on either side of us were hundreds of plastic water and soda bottles mixed with foam boxes, which in the limited light seemed to glow. During heavy rains in Port-au-Prince, a large number of people—with no sanitation system to speak of and no regular pickup—throw their trash in the surge of water suddenly gushing in front of their homes. We did this in the house I lived in as a child, not thinking where this trash would end up. Our trash probably resurfaced in a place like this, in a stream of rubbish seeking a path to the ocean.
Our trash was mainly fruit and vegetable husks and peels. We reused everything else. The Carnation milk cans became lamps (tèt gridap), and occasional glass jars or plastic bottles were used to store castor, cooking oil, or kerosene. Now so much of the trash is plastic or Styrofoam that it floats by the tons on top of flowing or agitated waters, reminding me of images I have seen of vortexes and plastispheres in both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, most famously the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that stretches between California and Hawaii.
A few weeks after we found ourselves in this river of debris, Hurricane Florence struck North Carolina, and debris from Haiti and the Dominican Republic, including shampoo, vinegar, and ketchup bottles, and relaxer containers with Spanish and Creole labeling, washed up on much-frequented North Carolina beaches.
“I can’t fathom the volume of trash that must be floating in the ocean from that one small island. It is a serious problem when a shoreline over 1,100 miles away is tainted,” a Charlotte resident told his local newspaper.
Our small island did not invent this trash. Ironically, a flatbed truck from the Dominican Republic was stuck in the trash river with us. The truck was carrying hundreds of bottles filled with fluorescent juices and sodas heading to market: for schoolchildren to put in lunch boxes, to be enjoyed at parties, or during days spent at beaches, some of which are covered with bottles like these. Even if all the plastic in the water that night was instantly removed and recycled, those bottles on the truck were waiting to replace it. Not to mention the foam food boxes, single-use bags, and discarded used clothes (pèpè) shipped in bales to Haiti daily.
It feels theatrical to admit, but while the car was wading through that river of foam and plastic, and God knows what else, with Solage and my husband and daughters watching, I felt like screaming, “The land might never be pristine again.” This land of mountains beyond mountains has already seen genocide after Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards arrived in 1492 and either killed outright or worked the Taíno and Arawak to death for their gold. This land where enslaved Africans were then brought to be brutalized by the Spanish, British, and French until the enslaved people and some free men and women, and some mutinous Polish soldiers whose descendants now live in Fond-des-Blancs, battled for independence and created the world’s first Black republic. This land was forced to spend the first century of its existence paying $150 million (now worth close to $30 billion) indemnity to France for this independence. Americans invaded and then occupied this land for nineteen years at the beginning of the twentieth century. This land endured the murderous thirty-year dictatorial Duvalier dynasty until 1986. This land elected its first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1990 only to have him overthrown in a coup d’état carried out by the Haitian military—some of whose members had been trained in the United States and were on the CIA’s payroll—and deposed again in 2004 after his reelection. This land was devastated by a massive earthquake that killed over two hundred thousand people in 2010. This land was struck by several destructive hurricanes soon after. This land where United Nations “peacekeepers” introduced a cholera epidemic that has killed over ten thousand people and has affected close to a million, increasing the use of water bottles as carriers for “safe” or filtered water. This land where, at the same time that we saw this river of scraps and discards, protesters were demanding the ouster of their president over fuel price hikes and corruption, most recently embezzled funds from Petrocaribe, an oil alliance between Venezuela and some Caribbean states, including Haiti.
In the Caribbean tourism market, the “hot” places quickly clean up their trash. However, those who can’t afford to clean up a river or rain drain full of plastic and foam in the middle of a city will have to live with their trash. Or they might burn the garbage themselves. And burning one’s own garbage, as many do in Haiti—from those living in the middle of the city to those residing in the most remote rural areas—now means using fire to break down plastic and foam polymers. This trash is not just migrating from land mass to oceans and back. It is also migrating into our blood, lungs, placentas, breast milk, and our brains.
Three decades earlier, in 1988, a garbage barge named the Khian Sea dropped four thousand tons of incinerated trash ash from Philadelphia on the shores of Gonaïves, a historic northern Haitian city and one of the country’s largest. The Khian Sea had been sailing worldwide for years, looking for a place to unload its cargo in the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Bermuda, Panama, Honduras, then Senegal, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Borneo, and the Philippines. The barge was turned away from these ports. Then a group of Haitian politicians accepted bribes in exchange for having a portion of the Khian Sea’s fourteen thousand–ton cargo, which was labeled as fertilizer, discarded on a beach in Haiti. (The rest was dumped in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.) The ash, in the care of a waste disposal company hired by the city of Philadelphia, was later found to contain lead, chromium, and dioxin, a toxic environmental pollutant and a known carcinogen.
I can’t help but think of the trash that ended up on the beaches of North Carolina during Hurricane Florence, in the summer of 2018, as a kind of revenge. The Khian Sea ash spent twelve years on the beach in Gonaïves before the Haitian government, with help from the environmental organization Greenpeace, pressured the waste disposal company to take what was left of the ash to a landfill in Philadelphia, just a few miles from where it began its decade-plus journey.
There’s a Haitian proverb that says Lanmè pa kenbe kras. The sea does not hold dirt. This saying might have come down to us from the combined knowledge of our indigenous ancestors, who ate from the sea their whole lives, and our African ancestors, so many of whom were brutally transported across the ocean on slave ships. The sea welcomed the bodies of those who jumped off those ships and never made it across—cleansing them. (It does not hold dirt, thus we are not dirt.) Our ancestors might have also been speaking of a cleaner, more pristine sea.
Illustrating that some creatures will overcome impossible odds to survive, in early 2023, scientists from the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution found close to five hundred invertebrate species growing on the soupy plastic debris of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, over a thousand miles from the nearest land. The invertebrates detected in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch trash vortex—anemones, barnacles, hydroids, mussels, oysters, sponges, and worms—usually make their home along coastlines and were thought to be incapable of surviving in open seas. Pushed by wind and currents, they have migrated just as humans have been forced or chosen to do since the beginning of time. These coastal creatures have adapted to their new circumstances while coming into contact with open-sea creatures they might have never encountered before. The ocean is not their final destination. They might travel further still, the scientists believe, and become invasive species on newer (to them) shores.
“As humans, we are creating new types of ecosystems that have potentially never been seen before,” a biogeographer told the Atlantic magazine in 2023. In other words, we are creating potentially beautiful, or potentially tragic, new beginnings.
We are the children of these seas as well.
A Rainbow in the Sky
It’s hard to describe to people who have never experienced a major hurricane what it’s like to live through one. The pounding torrential rains. The roaring gale-force winds uprooting and tossing giant trees as though they were twigs. The relentlessness of it all heightens your doubts about your creaking house’s ability to remain standing. It is as if the air you are accustomed to breathing has suddenly gathered supernatural force and become angry and decided to try to kill you. Then there’s the sudden stillness of the eye, with its clear skies and its deceptively light, sometimes even warm, breezes, followed by the brutal force on the back end of the storm, reminding you that there’s still a catastrophic doughnut rotating in the sky.
The less stable your house, the more terror you feel. I remember my parents describing their fright as they trembled inside their respective homes—my mother’s a wooden tin-covered house, my father’s a concrete one—while Hurricane Flora, a Category 4 storm, roared through Haiti in October 1963. Ask any Haitian who is old enough to remember, and you might still be able to detect a remnant of alarm. Flora, which also struck Cuba and the Bahamas, was responsible for thousands of deaths in Haiti.
I only remember two hurricanes when I lived in Haiti as a child. Hurricane David made landfall in the northern part of the country, in late August 1979, as a Category 3 storm. David had a high death toll in the neighboring Dominican Republic, where it struck as a Category 5. No deaths were officially attributed to David in Haiti, though my family members were sure many went unnoted—deaths in remote rural regions of the country are rarely accurately reported. The following year, in August of 1980, Hurricane Allen brushed past Haiti’s southern coast. It did not make landfall but still took several hundred lives in floods and mudslides. At the time, I was living in Port-au-Prince, whose surrounding mountain ranges offer some buffer and act as a partial shield against hurricane-force winds, even if they don’t provide much protection against the pounding rain. Flooding would continue even after the rain had stopped, carrying dozens of people away.
The first hurricanes I experienced in the United States made landfall in Florida during the brutal 2005 season, which brought three Category 5 storms, most famously the catastrophic Katrina, in August. My daughter Mira was five months old when Katrina struck New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I held Mira tightly as my husband and I spent hours watching the bloated cadavers of men and women floating down the inundated streets of New Orleans on our television screen. In addition to sorrow and horror, we felt a kinship with the survivors, who, like us, had been born and raised in the paths of such storms and were now living in their crosshairs in Miami.
