In It
2011, Haiti
Landing in Port-au-Prince and deplaning, that familiar thrill of being home comes over me and I’m smiling all over inside my body. I can smell the island heat. Walking out of the airport and into the baking-hot Port-au-Prince sun, what I see advancing toward me is a knot of men, young and old, each one jostling the other while hurling insults, all of them hoping to relieve me of my suitcases. They don’t want to steal them, just to carry them for me. Soon they stand before me, arms waving, hands on my bags, waiting for me to decide who I shall pick among them. Flustered, and trying hard to hold on to my luggage, I shout that I don’t need anyone’s help and for them to move away. They insist, one still shoving the other, I do need their help, they’ll even find me a taxi! One of them manages to grab one of the suitcases and rolls it alongside me. I don’t want a taxi! I’ve rented a car, someone is picking me up, he’ll help me! Alright then, just give me a couple of dollars since I already schlepped it for you, he says. I didn’t ask you to do that! But I already did! He’s pissed off now. Most of them have moved away, but the remaining two or three join in, yelling that I should pay him two dollars! Blessedly, I spot the guy from the rental agency, and I gesture to him. Within moments, he’s scattered the would-be porters away with threats. My savior takes my bags, opens the car door and I climb in. No A/C, of course. I’m drenched in sweat and harried. Welcome to Haiti.
I’m a Haitian native living in the U.S. since the age of eight and I make my living as a gallerist specializing in Haitian art in Hollywood, California. I’m there on a buying trip, and I remind myself that this is a country where people earn an average of $2 a day. You should have given him the two bucks. But they all would have wanted two dollars. $2 turns into a lot of dollars very quickly in Haiti. I could spend my entire art budget on all the beggars asking for two bucks.
They’re working and I’m here to work.
I get to my cousin Jean-Jean’s house, where I’ll be staying, and his wife Regine, my childhood friend, quickly serves me a couple of pieces of toast spread with a fragrant guava jam, while he makes me a sucrado — Rum Barbancourt, sugar, and lemon on ice) — so I can relax after my airport ordeal. But I don’t dally long and quickly get to charting my week there — the artist studios I’ll visit, the independent art reps, and galleries. One week zips by in a head-spinning flash there because of astonishing traffic and gridlock, which makes riding around in Port-au-Prince one of the most frustrating, diesel fuel-scented time-sucks in the world.
My husband Pascal is already in town, working on a documentary film about the arts in Haiti, and on a group of Vodou artists, specifically. Many of the people I want to see live in a slum in the Grand Rue area, where he’s been shooting; the place where Atis Rezistans, as the group is known (the Resistance Artists), anchors a community of artmaker studios creating a stunning amount of art for local and international markets. After the 2010 earthquake that killed a quarter-million people and injured and displaced many more, there they are creating large-scale sculptures (some of them museum-bound) from the debris that fills the streets; sewing beads, sequins, and buttons onto fabric panels, updated variations of the glittery banners used in Vodou ceremonies (and sold as art to collectors). There they are carving rubber tires to create smiling and frowning lwas (Vodou spirits) as wall hangings; turning bottle caps and wood into serpent gods hissing power, knowledge, and wisdom into the atmosphere. It’s as if there were clients in the wings. I am a client, but only one of very few. Still, they wake up every day as if a horde of tourists were about to descend upon them and create artwork as if their life depended on it. Because it does.
After an intense half-day of negotiating and buying from many more artists than I originally planned (this is always the case), I wind my way through the narrow, sewage-strewn alleyways of this buzzing microcosm, trying to figure out where I might find a place to relieve my bladder. I figure Pascal must know after years of returning here to finish his film. As I seek him out, I spy an artisan woodworker inhaling shavings as he goes with his battery-powered saw, and a welder wearing only sunglasses to protect his eyes. I walk by women washing clothes out of buckets, singing as they go, and other women braiding girls’ hair, yacking away the stories of this humid, exposed life, which lacks so much, and so mirrors their fellow human travelers living on the streets of Los Angeles a world away.
I spot my husband and ask him if he’s noticed a “restroom” of some sort in the vicinity. He walks over to a woman he knows and asks her what she would recommend. She waves me over and invites me into her tin metal shack with a filmy cloth doubling as a door. It can’t be more than 5’ x 5’ large. It’s dark in the middle of the day, no electricity here. She points to a tall, white plastic paint bucket and I get it that I’ve found my toilet. I pull down my pants and underwear and squat, trying hard to pee as she goes about her business — ironing sheets for some rich person who needs their top and fitted bedsheets pressed — and as a guy outside just across the way quietly peers at me whenever the pretty, flowery cloth blows open from a passing breeze. Nothing new to see here. And no jobs, either. Hanging out is a profession. I think about how someone walking in on you when you’re on the toilet belongs to that “terribly embarrassing” category, and how here, in this place, privacy moved out a long time ago, and no one seems to care.
Over the next few days, I also visit educated, well-to-do artists who studied in the States or in Canada and Europe. They live in flower-scented, fashionably decorated modern homes with well-appointed bathrooms sketched out by local professionals with good taste, like my interior designer friend, Regine. Not a latrine or paint bucket in sight. Phenomenal artwork imbued with the knowledge afforded by a mix of world travels and the homegrown culture is also created in these environments. A different kind of beauty, intellectual, not raw. Haiti is a study in contrast. I want this contrast in my gallery.
Between the artists working hard to eke out a living, those who live well but plug away just as urgently for success, and me, the art dealer who trudges through the exhibit installations, art openings, art fairs, and all the hustle it takes to sell the work, let me say right here and now that being in the arts is not for the faint of heart.
Los Angeles, 2021
Eleven years later, another earthquake and a president’s assassination grind away at Haitians’ pliancy, much as a never-ending pandemic works the gears of our patience and our tenuous mortality.
I think back on the whirlwind blur of gutter smells, gorgeous art, and island food bought in drive-by restaurants, as well as meals prepared by staff at my family’s home in Port-au-Prince, and I reflect on how everyone works at their craft. Some people work to buy houses, go to restaurants, make a lot of money, and seek status. Others work to barely put food on the table and call it a day. Hard-working people from all social spheres, doing what they must to earn a daily wage — some of it for survival, some out of duty, and others for a sense of self. We’re all in it. Yet for all the importance given to work, and politicians’ emphasis on jobs, jobs, jobs, finding meaning or purpose will not be found in that realm. Work, whatever that looks like, is what we do. Finding a way to be amidst all that struggle remains the most ethereal and satisfying breath of air we’ll ever take.
All clips from the award-winning documentary film by Pascal Giacomini, Out of Chaos, An Artist’s Journey in Haiti.
