Transition 111: New Narratives of Haiti

By IU Press Journals

The 111th issue of the magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, featuring fiction, poetry, art, and essays focused on the black world.

Published three times per year by Indiana University Press for the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate.

In issue 111, Transition focuses on “New Narratives of Haiti.” Guest editors Laurent Dubois and Kaiama L. Glover have invited contributors to think about the world in ways that place Haiti at its center. Thought pieces by Madison Smartt Bell, Jonathan Katz, Gina Athena Ulysse and others, as well as translations of Franketienne, Lyonel Trouillot, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, dispel trenchant cliches that have long plagued representations of Haiti in literature and scholarship. This issue also includes Jamaica Kincaid’s poignant memories of a brother lost to AIDS, and a scholar’s chance discovery of cultural (and genealogical?) links between Cuba and Sierra Leone. Exceptional poetry, fiction, and review essays also take us beyond Haiti to San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, and Renaissance Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9780253018649

Book preview

On the Sounds of Haiti

excerpt from La belle amour humaine (2011)

Lyonel Trouillot

Translated from French by Laurent Dubois

IN THIS EARLY passage from Lyonel Trouillot’s recent novel La belle amour humaine, a Haitian guide, who has just picked up a European visitor at the airport, offers this typology of the sounds of Port-au-Prince.

. . . HERE, WHERE life is afraid of silence. Here, if you wake up unprepared to go into battle, there is no life ahead. Bread is hunted like prey, and since there is not enough for everyone, noise has replaced hope. What you saw at the airport, twenty porters for a single suitcase, babbling in every language, that’s nothing. Wait until you see the city center. We’ll have to cross it, wade through the noise until we get to the Northern station. Despite their best efforts, foreigners often lose their sense of hearing as they confront things, animals, humans all equal in their right to make a din. Pots and pans. Mufflers. Shouters selling everything, from elixirs to antibiotics by way of skin-lightening cream and pills that make you fat. Bureaucrats from the mayor’s office chasing away market-women selling grains, fruits, and vegetables on the sidewalk. The speeches of volunteers from the Public Health department celebrating the virtues of mother’s milk and hand-washing. No one can listen all at once to so much noise in opposition, in contradiction, puncturing your eardrums to stuff your head with the illusion of movement. The lines in front of the Immigration Office and the Ministry of Social Affairs, the threats of security agents and the reactions of the crowd—go screw yourself, we’ve been waiting for weeks. Motorcycle-taxis threading their way between cars. Money-changers who sell you counterfeit money at the precise daily rate and wave their bills in the faces of passersby to attract clients. Traffic police chatting with their mistresses in the middle of the street. Pedestrians who run into each other and argue about whose fault it was. In the city center, noise is like poverty, you never get to the end of it. Whenever you think you’ve circumscribed poverty in the neighborhoods built for it, it overflows and stands up elsewhere. Noise, here, is the same way. There’s no way to make a list. The cistern trucks that whine and drip as they climb the hills. Big children. Little children. The still-children who make children. Errant bullets. Crazy prophets announcing the end of the world and reproaching you for not having accepted Jesus as your personal savior. The sirens of official motorcades. Sidewalk vendors’ radios, spitting out the cycle of bad news and winning lottery numbers. The crowd shouting after a thief. The thief who slips into the crowd and shouts louder than anyone else. Dog fights—on one side the small ones, on the other the big, just as it is among human beings, the small ones who run away crying about their defeat before charging back to be beaten once again by the big ones. The audience made up of porters, and the unemployed who are sick of seeing the same spectacle, even if it’s free, and pick up sticks to disperse the crowd. And like life, noise has its moods. If you pay attention, you’ll be able to distinguish between sounds of rage and those of waiting or fatigue. Here, noise is the only proof of the difficult duty of existing, and it never rests. When you’ve lost everything else, there’s nothing but time to lose. Listen to the sound of lost time. Soul-less shoes scraping the pavement. Droves. Demonstrations. Widows marching on the Champ de Mars demanding justice for their assassinated husbands, for whom living didn’t do them much good but whose tragic death has made sympathetic; victims of swindlers at the Treasury waiting in vain for their investments to be reimbursed; garbage collectors demanding a month of back pay walking in the garbage. Soccer-game commentators advertising imported rice and mantègue and bark even when nothing is happening on the field. Compas. The crazed decibels of public buses. The sizzle of wrought-iron welders’ soldering irons plugged into clandestine outlets. The agents from the electrical company unplugging the cables. Gatherings around epileptics fallen stiff in front of stores. Even death and nostalgia are part of the concert . . . Listen. All these sounds of life making fun of life. What it was and what it still is . . . The ‘yesterday it was’ of old men who cross the street with eyes lost in the paradise of memory and get yelled at by drivers. The fans of Vieux Tigre (le Violette) and the fans of Vieux Lion (le Racing) who talk only about old times because, today, despite their pompous names of jungle animals, Vieux Lion, my ass, Vieux Tigre, my eye, are nothing more than peaux de chagrin. The sad steps of shoes white with dust of poor parents following the sluggish hearse of the funeral procession. A naked woman, crying and telling passersby—pray for me, mister, understand me madam—the story of a mad love affair. Roving music bands who don’t wait for Mardi Gras to offer music. Students sent home from private schools because of lack of payment wandering the streets and making up new nicknames for the mad. The mad who turn around and pursue the students, throwing stones and insults. The . . .

Alright, I’ll stop. I could go on for a long time but you’ll probably get bored. . . . Capital for capital, when it comes to riches or monuments, at least to judge by the images I’ve seen, it’s true, we can’t compete. . . . We have the basilicas, the avenues, and the palaces we can. Hyperbole, in the heart of humans when they are talking about where they are from, is like a natural plant. The proof is that ours, when they’ve left for where you live and come back, they don’t tell us only of beauty. It seems they haven’t only seen marvels. And where is it written that words can name things according to their right measure! In the city you come from, I’m sure they exaggerate plenty. Everyone is excessive at times. In every country, there’s a gap between the day of national celebration and the rest of the year, between official speeches and the trembling speech of daily life, between postcards and the dog’s life common to mortals. Don’t come and tell me that where you live everything is beautiful. . . . Here, with our potholes and dilapidated buildings, we can’t claim the treasures of ancient cities or invite you to walk down the most beautiful avenue in the world. But, when it comes to noise, I’ll bet you my guide’s salary that we win the World Cup. Here, in this disfigured city, we’ve got so little room that there’s no place for silence and little love for mystery. Here, for lack of better we get drunk on the din. And, when the end comes, like a sick old dog tired of uselessly wandering about, we lie down and we die of an overdose of noise.