BookThoughts: My Favorite Tropical Island
BookThoughts: By
Nancy Casey
from the February 2006 Newsletter
In the opening sentence of Christian Bauman’s novel Voodoo Lounge, an army warship glides past the north end of the island of Lagonav at dawn. I know that spot. It’s called Twou Lanfe—the Hell Hole. It’s a scorched sprawl of wet sand laced with tracks from overladen trucks whose drivers seek out routes where they won’t suddenly find themselves buried to the axle. The warship doesn’t stop there. It continues a few more miles and docks in Port-au-Prince. The year is 1994, and the ship is part of an invading force aimed to reinstall Jean Bertrand Aristide three years after his government was toppled by a military coup.
For the past several years, I have been making regular visits to a peasant community in the mountains of Lagonav, a two hour long bone-jarring ride up from the sinkholes of Twou Lanfe.
As a depiction of the Haiti that I know, Bauman’s book falls someplace between unresearched and bad. The kreyol language is inaccurate, the Haitians are scary, and the vodou ceremony is utterly bogus. Yet Bauman was an American soldier in that invasion, so what his novel shows you about that military engagement is probably quite accurate. You can see how the stage was set for Aristide’s second and final overthrow and the bloody unrest that continues there even now.
There’s much to applaud in this novel: an empathetic portrayal of a woman in combat, barracks romance, realities and honest misconceptions about AIDS, and a safe sex scene without condoms. It’s a page turner.
The book that has most resonated with my experiences in Haiti is Rachel Simon’s memoir, Riding the Bus with My Sister. This could be surprising, seeing as how it is set in urban Minnesota.
Simon is a 20-something over-achieving writer whose sister Beth, a year younger, is mentally retarded. Beth lives on her own with help from available social services. She’s somewhat overweight and wears yellow sweat pants and purple T-shirts. She talks just a little bit too loud, often to strangers who wish she’d be quiet. She used to have a part-time job bagging groceries, but gave it up to pursue her true passion—riding city busses all day long, chatting with drivers and passengers.
At the urging of other members of the family, Simon visits Beth in an attempt to get her to give up the bus riding and go back to bagging groceries. Beth challenges her to ride the bus with her for a year. And she does.
What Beth and other people like her have in common with Haitians is this: you can read all about them, their plight and their issues, but no amount of information will give you a truly empathetic understanding of their lives. You don’t even know what questions to ask. All you can do is spend time, withhold conclusions, and observe the bewildering behaviors without judgement.
Simon is astonished by what she learns about her sister. Beth is courageous and resourceful, even when daunted, afraid or hurt. Beth has her own priorities and her own ideas about what she wants. Despite what Simon has known all her life about her sister, she doesn’t understand the least thing about what it is like to be Beth until she enters her world. Over and over, Simon finds her tidy notions about what it means to be human unraveling. Then I would find myself saying yes!yes! for the way this resonates with how it feels to be me as my worldview is restructured among the peasants of Lagonav.
So what would one read to get a better inkling of Haitian peasant life? The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley. Yes, Greenland.
Europeans colonized the southern reaches of Greenland at the end of the first millennium. A back-cover blurb refers to them as a “failed people,” yet there they are in all the richness of their lives, eking out an existence in a landscape that is uninhabitable by our standards. Once you fall into the Germanic cadences of Smiley’s restrained, almost deadpan narration, your imagination drops into the rhythms and concerns of these peasant lives. Days tick away in heartbeats and time is measured with light. In a community where people arrive by being born and leave when they die, the social geography splits, heals and mutates over generations. By the time the small children in the opening chapter have grown old, you begin to get a sense that you have some answers to a few questions that you never asked.
Nancy Casey has been a member of the Co-op community for 23 years. These days, even if she walks into the store through the door marked “exit” she is dismayed and bewildered by how much she feels she has walked onto the final pages of Animal Farm.
|
© Copyright on articles, recipes and images
are jointly held by the Moscow Food Co-op
and the respective contributors, except were otherwise noted. |
For additions or corrections to this page, please contact the Webmaster.
