The Motorcycle Thief
Here’s what happens in a country without a functioning judicial system. This man, above, was stealing motorcycles, apparently, down near rue Capois in Port-au-Prince two days ago. He was allegedly working with a ring of thieves. But he was the one who got caught, and the people in the zone took justice into their own hands and lynched him. Of course such behavior is unacceptable. But there’s a reason for it.
People in Haiti know that malefactors will not be brought to justice. At best, a man like this, arrested, will spend years and years in penitentiary, uncharged, awaiting a trial that may never come.
Aristide in 2000
I was just cleaning out my Haiti memorabilia, notebooks, newspapers, and sheer masses of stuff and index cards with notes on them like: “Gold!” when I found the notebook I used the last time I saw Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in July, 2000, a few months before his re-election to the presidency of Haiti. While I waited outside his office for our interview, I met a man who was then chief warden of Haiti’s prisons. He gave me his number so I could call him to make an appointment to discuss the assassination of Jean Dominique, one of Haiti’s most outspoken journalists, some four months earlier. He was most delighted that I would be calling him, and, he said, very eager to give me all the facts.
When Art and Voodoo Mix in L.A.
I visited In Extremis: Death and Life in Haitian Art when this fascinating exhibit opened at the Fowler Museum a few months ago. (It closes on January 20th.) It’s truly a show worth seeing, so if you haven’t seen it yet, go now!!
But don’t expect to see Haiti as Haitians see it, here.
The exhibit features the rough, sexualized, scabrous, naughty and death-loving world of the Gede, diabolical little childish fiends who are offspring of the darkest of the Vodou spirits.
Blue jeans and chubby chairs
I was thinking today about my post of yesterday (see below: “Globalization and the Little Haitian Chair”), about the chubby little rough-hewn Haitian chair and its cheap, comfortable smooth plastic Chinese replacement. Even more, I was thinking about secondhand U.S. clothing that comes in to Haiti.
And I was thinking, in sharp contradistinction to what I wrote yesterday, that maybe Haitians, especially young people, prefer the secondhand clothes from the U.S. to the handmade stuff of the homeland.
Globalization & the Little Haitian Chair
Tomorrow, my second book about Haiti, Farewell, Fred Voodoo, is being published, and I wanted to think about the ways in which old Haiti — the Haiti I first knew years ago — is changing, and what that means.
The first thing I ever bought in Haiti was a little Haitian chair. These were ubiquitous there in the 1980s. I sent my chair home because I had to have one in the States: they were so adorable, especially when new. They had such charm. You could see that they were quickly made, but by experts. They were rough and stubby and endearing.
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