Poetry’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

Christopher Columbus named his first landfall Hispaniola, in honor of his Spanish employers, declaring its blue natural harbors and lush hills a paradise on Earth. The island was called “Ayiti,” or “high land,” by native Ciboney Indians, soon to be eradicated by European germs and steel.

Today, Hispaniola hosts two separate worlds. The fertile eastern plain belongs to the relatively viable Dominican Republic, a country whose export earnings are augmented by a booming tourist industry. The mountainous western third remains Haiti--Ayiti still in the people’s language--though it would surely be unrecognizable to a time-traveling explorer from 1492. Parched, denuded of forests, the scant remaining water polluted with bacteria and parasites, Haiti is home to 8 million mostly illiterate souls “living” on an average of $300 a year. This is not paradise. Surely it must be hell:

Poverty makes all things faded,

crooked, cracked, emaciated,

wasted away, dingy, stupid, ground-down,

pocked ....

On Saturdays, the whole town on the coast

gets off by throwing their bodies into the sea

like people in heat.

Around here, life burns!

These lines are by Georges Castera, born in 1936 in Port-au-Prince, one of the grand poets of Haiti. Castera, along with such masters as Felix Morisseau-Leroy and Paul Laraque, helped spearhead the movement to create a world-class literature in the Haitian Kreyol language--indeed, to standardize in writing what had been strictly an oral language. Despite the repressive snobbery of Haiti’s French-speaking upper crust, Kreyol is a language of remarkable sound-beauty and supple expressiveness, a long-evolved mingling of primarily French vocabulary, spiced with Indian and English influences and governed by West African grammatical structures.

Here’s a taste, from the pen of Pierre-Richard Narcisse: “renn chantrel kote-ou? / si van vini l’a karese-w / si jou vini l’a kouwonnen-w” In translation: “singing queen, where are you? / if the wind comes, it will caress you / if the daylight, it will crown you.” Thanks to a groundbreaking new anthology brought out by Curbstone Press, English readers can discover and savor an array of these modern Haitian poets in both Kreyol and English. “Open Gate: An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry” takes its title from these lines by Paul Laraque: “This is the open gate of poetry / for us to enter / together / the promised land of liberty.”

There’s said to be little market for poetry here; probably even less for poetry from a country whose existence is essentially denied by our government, for whose refugees we reserve a policy of incarceration or deportation, and from which the U.S. has for years withheld hundreds of millions of dollars of promised aid in the frustrated hope of toppling an overwhelmingly popular president.

The considerable collaborative effort leading to this publication included dedicated editors Laraque and Jack Hirschman and reached beyond them to other translators, financial supporters and the poets themselves. With “Open Gate” in hand, one is tempted to say that news of the death of responsible American publishing may be premature.

Often the greatest poetry has been born of passion in those who have nothing to lose. For all the insult and suffering, these verses dazzle with love of life. The volume gathers the voices of 40 poets, along with brief biographical notes. Three groupings--the Pioneers, the Society of Fireflies and the New Generation--take readers from the 1950s (the darkest days of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s rule) through a period characterized by cycles of hope and cynical repression, to the present day and mood of bitter desperation, coupled with the poets’ renewed demands for action and for self-reliance.

“Zombies Arise” was first published in 1980 by the mysterious and probably pseudonymous Alexander Akao in the diaspora journal Idees: “Since I was a kid they’ve been choking me / They grab me, they stuff me into a barrel / Too small for me ... They’re burying us all alive / They’re stuffing us in the earth / Like slaves locked up in a canefield / When it’s not a horsewhip, papa / Making us walk a straight line / It’s a tonton macoute gun ... / But this morning I wake up / With salt on my tongue ... / I say it’s time they let up / Choking me, smothering us / I say it’s time all zombies / Arise!

Images and even emotions taken from the voodou tradition enrich much Haitian poetry. A spirit of creative juxtaposition is at work, as in these lines from Morisseau-Leroy: “There’s a loa of revolution boiling in my blood ... / A lambi of revolution is sounding / If you’ve the courage take my hand / My horse is saddled / Let’s go.” (A loa is a voodou spirit; the lambi is a conch horn.)

The poems in “Open Gate” have been chosen by politically conscious editors. One would welcome a second volume that is inclusive of a broader sensibility. But before reopening the hoary debate on whether political agenda “cheapens” art, we should reflect on the astonishing phenomenon of a rich stream of visual and written art pouring from any place as ground-down as Haiti, the poorest country by far in our hemisphere. There are delights on these pages: devices of syncopation and repetition from the oral tradition, startling imagery.

Some of the poets whose work is represented here live in the diaspora, but most are in Haiti, putting words on paper--precious stuff in a country where the state hospital recently had no paper left on which to write diagnoses or prescriptions. Bertolt Brecht famously declared, “First comes food / then comes morality.” If poetry, in its reach for truth and essence, is a form of morality, then these poets have stood old Brecht on his head.

Or, as Max Manigat rejoices:

I never knew you were a magician

But you do wonders that leave me speechless

In your hand a pen becomes a ritual rattle

Making all creole words convulse ....

Magician, maestro, quartermaster

Shake the ason, roll the drum, dish out the food

All creole words are falling into the dance

To damnwell strut our stuff in the face of misery