Myriam J. Chancy
“Perhaps home is not a place but an irrevocable condition.” – James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
Port-au-Prince, 1999
Blackouts are common here. In the evenings, when everything has gone dark, they roll through, almost without notice, for those who have the luxury of electric hook-ups. They are usually followed by a serene quiet before those in service, or the owner of the house, become agitated, in search of the generator, which roars to life some minutes later and then the lights flicker tentatively back on.
On the occasion of my grandfather’s 90th birthday, a group of us gathers at my uncle’s house on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. The house is full. It’s hard to tell how many of us are there—anywhere between 20 and 40 people, it seems, of all ages—from inside and outside the country.
We gather like this every few years, improbably, for weddings, funerals, rites of life passages of various kinds. Children grow taller, aunts and uncles wider, grandparents thinner. As time passes, I wonder if we were ever anything more than beads strung on a string, each generation added to the other, connected by blood but sometimes little else. It can be difficult to pick up again where we left off, even though we do, or try to: we are no longer who we thought we were to one another.
Haiti, even, is no longer the home we remember, even for those who remain.
***
I read James Baldwin as a teenager. I was perhaps fourteen when I discovered his books by means I can no longer recover. I think reading Walker’s In Search of My Mother’s Gardens led to reading all the Black writers she named in those essays—Hughes, Cullen, Larsen—and maybe looking through library stacks for those names inevitably led to Baldwin, who had been a student of Cullen’s.
Baldwin satisfied in me a thirst for a reflection of myself I didn’t know, then, that I was looking for, a Haitian teenager growing up outside of her country of birth, in the vast prairies of Canada, a space which harbored so many outsiders, other peoples flung out from their native lands, seeking a future—Ukrainians, Russians, Mennonites, Filipinos, Thais—on the land of dispossessed First Nations people hemmed into Treaty 1 by force rather than by choice. A motley constellation of communities persisted side by side, sometimes uneasily, with multiple languages overlapping, weaving, even as each group struggled to learn French, or English, to ensure survival, longevity.
What I didn’t realize, then, was that Baldwin was raising questions that would haunt me, that I would find myself pursuing for decades: what defines a home? What defines the self? To what degree does a city, a neighborhood, come to define one’s possibilities, and by the same token, to what degree does one’s family come to define us, establishing what Baldwin often called one’s “mooring posts”?
Baldwin returned time and again to the entwined themes of home, fatherhood, place, and identity. He was clear about one thing: that “fathering” was not necessarily biological, and that blood was not the only way to define kin.
***
We gather here, in my uncle’s house, to celebrate our namesake, a name that goes back to the Bordeaux region of France, and harkens, as well, back to the Revolution.
A distant (French) cousin once wrote to me to tell me that he was certain that I was the descendent of one of his forefathers. Not believing him at the time, I didn’t answer, thinking that whatever connection remained was more likely the result of bloodshed, a history I didn’t want to revisit. Nonetheless, so the story goes: the Chancys were nephews of Toussaint L’Ouverture. His older sister, Genevieve Affiba, an enslaved African woman, had become the wife (partner? consort?) of a French landowner with whom she had many children, who all bore the landowner’s name: Chancy. When the Revolution came, he threw in his lot with the Africans, the defectors, his brother-in-law, or, at least, his children did, his sons.
The history books bear the story out: the Chancy name appears in the tomes of the Revolution. One, it is said, was executed for falling in love with Dessalines’ daughter.
Dessalines was not a fan of mulattos or of plantation owners. Koupe tet, boulay kay, was his dictum: Cut off their heads; burn down their houses. The Chancys nonetheless survived, then thrived.
***
“Perhaps home is not a place but an irrevocable condition,” says David, the protagonist of Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, as he struggles to come to terms both with his expatriate condition as he roams France far from his father pressuring him to marry in the US, and his gay desire, his love for the novel’s eponymous Giovanni.
In the moments after David has read and put away a letter from his father, from whom he has asked for financial support, David looks out “at the side, sunlit foreign avenue,” and sees a sailor with whom he identifies, “wishing I were he.” “He seemed,” Baldwin writes, “—somehow—younger than I had ever been, and blonder and more beautiful, and he wore his masculinity as unequivocally as he wore his skin. He made me think of home—perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition” (121).
David then goes on to say that his identification with the sailor is so total that he seems in him not only himself, in which “pain and women baffled,” but his father, and he wonders if his father ever once felt the struggle now facing him, to own his desire, to own up to it.
David flees America just as he flees his sexuality. It is Giovanni, in the end, who tells David the uncomfortable truth that “you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore.” And, in the same conversation he says, “Isn’t it true? You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back” (154-155).
David’s struggle is not only about his sexuality, nor is it about choosing where to live and how. As Baldwin would say to his editor, Giovanni’s Room is about choosing to love and what one risks in doing so. Because, to truly love, one has to be honest about everything that one is and can be, the good as well as the ugly. David refuses to choose the love that has already chosen him and, as a result, destroys not only his own capacity to be fully himself but those who love him—Giovanni, Hella (his on-and-off girlfriend), his father.
By withholding his love, David ensures that all those who love and trust him are doomed. To go on loving someone who doesn’t love themselves is, in the end, to doom oneself to a loveless prison.
Giovanni comes to die in a literal prison, and David condemns himself to another, that is, to a life without mooring posts, another kind of homelessness.
***
My grandfather was the single, country son of a single, countrywoman. She, in part, raised my father (the single son of his mother), and two of his siblings born after him, of another mother, between my grandfather’s marriages. My grandfather was a serial monogamist. He married only twice, with a menaj in between. His first wife, my father’s mother, died in childbirth with a second child who did not survive. The only grandmother I knew, his second wife, gave birth to the last of his children, all eight of them. I know nothing of my grandfather’s father; I presume he died when my grandfather was a young man, a child, even.
My grandfather first worked in construction. He eventually became a foreman, what is known in Haiti as “a boss.” He worked on the World Expo buildings in the 1940s, which were eventually transformed into the capital’s parliament buildings, most of which stood until the 2010 earthquake. He invested his money in land then he searched for less backbreaking ways of making a living.
He toyed with becoming a musician, but his talents were limited. His sons took up the guitar and other instruments. Some of them became recording artists. Some became international stars so ubiquitous that I still come across the name of their band in literature by Haitians writing from the 1970s to the present. As the Black middle class became more prosperous, he invested in entertainment schemes, renting chairs, spaces. He invested in the nascent Black Power movement of the fifties, then retrenched as François Duvalier revealed himself a repressive dictator.
As the number of the dead climbed, my grandfather made a sanguine decision and shifted from entertainment to a more practical venture: he became an undertaker. When corpses lay unclaimed in the streets, he buried them at no cost if the family had no money. Or this is what I am told. I hope this is true. Business thrived.
At ninety, my grandfather walks from his home to the mortuary. He says the walk and the work keep him going.
When I was a child, the mortuary was at the back of the same house he and my grandmother lived in. While she made hearty family meals in the main kitchen, I would peer through a hole in the wooden barricade separating the house from the mortuary and watch workers cleanse the dead. Death surrounded us, it seemed natural. Death was there within a few paces: it was a part of life.
As the dictatorship came to an end in the late 1980s and a nascent democracy was interrupted by a military coup in the early 1990s, more bodies fell.
My grandfather built a new house for himself and my grandmother. The mortuary became a stand-alone business. He expanded, built a new, modern graveyard in which the dead could be buried stacked, below ground, to avoid grave robbers, a lucrative hustle during the Duvalier years. He built a family compound and dreamed of all his children returning, living together with their families within walking distance of one another—this never came into fruition.
I wonder if my grandfather’s daily walks toward the dead are a form of ritual, a dance with the spirits, a lighting of the way, or perhaps expiation for having figured out a way to remain in place without succumbing to the violence, yet making a small fortune from it while all else descends into chaos around him as he walks, unperturbed.
I wonder if it is his proximity to death itself that stills him, makes him unafraid of anything else.
***
Remarking on the deplorable state of Harlem in the 40s, Baldwin noted that Americans were fooling themselves if they thought that racial equality depended solely on changes in the South.
As he wrote in “East River, Downtown: Postscript to a Letter from Harlem”:
They are two sides of the same coin and the South will not change—cannot change—until the North changes. The country will not change until it reexamines itself and discovers what it means by freedom….It is a terrible, and inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself. Walk through the streets of Harlem and see what we, this nation, have become. (66)
I wonder, of course, how many people have walked the streets of Port-au-Prince as they might have those of Harlem. What most Americans know of Haiti is what they see on their television and smart phone screens and what they see shocks and turns them away, a deplorable state of affairs in which they do not—cannot—see themselves.
Yet, were it not for the Haitian Revolution, the US as we know it today would not exist. If France had not lost their war against enslaved Africans in 1803, the Louisiana Purchase which encompasses ⅓ of the US territory, would never have taken place, constituting the US in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. Consequently, Haiti became the first Republic in which all citizens were deemed free, regardless of their race and, initially, of their gender (since women took part in the Revolution and were officers in the rebelling army).
The Haitian Revolution so threatened the foundational precepts of the US that they sought to obliterate the fledgling nation—as did France—by first denying its existence then by blocking its capacity to trade. Haiti had to agree to pay France an indemnity in order to “allow” Haiti’s access to trade, which began the nation’s impoverishment, while the US navigated its waters and eventually invaded when it could no longer control it from afar. Beginning in 1915, a nearly thirty-year US occupation distorted “freedom” in Haiti’s civil society, instating segregationist views and violently putting down all efforts at armed insurrection and making martyrs of their leaders.
If we think of Haiti as the “South” to the United States’ “North” then we can hinge Baldwin’s thinking about South/North relations to hemispheric terms. There is no hope for progress in the Global South if the Global North does not change. In other words, we need only to look at the streets of Port-au-Prince to understand, in part, what the US has become.
***
My grandfather’s children—my aunts and uncles—behave as if my grandfather is not altogether present when we gather at his house. But, when I sit next to him, he occasionally whispers rye observations; he doesn’t miss a beat; he just doesn’t let others know that he is listening and, even less, what he is thinking.
My grandfather, in family assemblies, is the picture of calm, of wisdom earned. He answers questions quietly when asked. He is a man of few words. He speaks only in Kreyól. He understands French but never responds in this language. He feigns ignorance but knows where his holdings are, down to the very last penny. He is not anyone’s fool.
His children seem to have forgotten his pilgrimage from the countryside to the city. Once he had land, remarried, a thriving home and business, he moved his aging mother into the city. She lived in the exact same shack she did out in the country because she refused to leave it behind. Like a turtle, she brought her carapace with her. He erected the shack shamelessly in the front yard of his house and she lived there until her dying day, without running water or any of the conveniences he could have built for her. She didn’t want any of it. His children have forgotten who he was before he became the undertaker, forgotten that he broke ground, built things with his hands, broke things, possibly people. None of them have ever picked up a hammer; none of them ever worked the land.
When they gather, they like to swap stories of his brutality when he was a young father. Thin as a reed, it is difficult to imagine the muscular man they once knew, throwing his weight around.
I find a picture of him in his forties. He was once stocky, muscular, like my father at the same age. Looking at the black and white photograph, I see my father and his half-brothers in my grandfather’s face: they all have the same lilt of head and lopsided smile, eyebrows that peak in the middle. I wonder if the look is learned or inherited.
I have a distinct memory of my parents discussing behind closed doors whether to continue the practice of the raclée—spanking. After the discussion, neither raised a hand to us going forward. I was three years old, and the legacy of physical harm was broken. Was my father a different kind of man than his father or simply one with more choices, a different life before him with different—or fewer—pressures? Or was it my mother’s influence? She, raised solely by women?
The siblings laugh as they tell the stories of pissing themselves out of fear as my grandfather meted out a raclée to one or the other. They laugh. He sits quietly, a dim smile animating the edges of his lips. If he remembers terrorizing his children, he doesn’t say.
What I wonder is this: how much of who we are—before we come to know ourselves as belonging to a creed, a nation, a race, a language, a faith, a family—is molded by how fathers choose to interact with us, the touch of fathers, their violence, their reticence, their words of lack thereof, their absence or presence, their silences?
What I wonder is this: is how a nation defines itself a translation of how fathers have raised their sons or what their sons remember of them?
***
It becomes clear when reading Baldwin that, in his imaginary, the nation is a fatherland, that his own despotic father is, in some way, a stand-in for the brutality of race relations, or a product of it, so replete that the father-son relationship comes to be a duel of sorts, replicating the state of the union.
In “Notes of a Native Son,” as he and his family drive his father to his resting place in a Harlem graveyard, Baldwin opines:
He had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness now was mine. (90)
Baldwin, by this time, at only nineteen, has understood that his father’s bitterness and atrophy of spirit is the result of a racism so corrosive that it prevented his father from fully coming into himself as a man and, as such, prevented him from loving those closest to him, especially his children. His father was only one generation removed from slavery.
Baldwin resolves, however, not to go the way of his father, not to lay down the sword against injustice, not to be felled by hatred or rancor. “Bitterness was folly,” writes Baldwin. “Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.”
In his first novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain, Baldwin seemingly attempts to exorcize the father/son relationship bequeathed to him by imagining a child preacher much like himself, named John, who attempts to come out from beneath his father’s repressive shadow. When John comes to realize that his father is not the paragon he makes himself out to be to his family and to his congregants, he attempts to free himself by becoming one of the chosen:
Then he would no longer be the son of his father, but the son of his Heavenly Father, the King. Then he need no longer fear his father, for he could take, as it were, their quarrel over his father’s head to Heaven—to the Father who loved him, who had come down in the flesh to die for him. Then he and his father would be equals, in the sight, and the sound, and the love of God. Then his father could not beat him any more, or despise him any more, or mock him any more—he John, the Lord’s anointed. He could speak to his father then as men spoke to one another—as sons spoke to their fathers, not in trembling but in sweet confidence, not in hatred but in love. His father could not cast him out, whom God had gathered in (145).
Yet, since when has religion saved anyone? Or helped to lay down weapons rather than take them up?
If John’s quest is hopeless, it is because he hopes that he can repair the violence done to him through an instrument his father respects more than the relationship with his son, which he has already violated.
Unlike John, Baldwin, the man, comes to forgive his father for his inability to achieve such transcendence, for being a man among other men, and as limited as others in their vision for a reparative future.
***
At one point in the evening, my grandfather’s oldest sons play a song and my grandfather rises to dance on the makeshift dance floor in front of the pool with an invisible mate: my grandmother had passed away a few years before.
Everyone claps as he dances with her ghost.
Then the lights go out. The music stops. The moon shines into the mirror of the pool, casting a beam of light across the still waters, across the faces of those assembled. Dogs bark. An ordinary night in Port-au-Prince.
I walk around the perimeter of the house. It is pitch dark, despite moonlight. I look up and see the stars piercing the firmament. This is the sky beneath which I was born almost thirty years prior.
In that time, a dictator has died, his son taken his place and uprooted in a popular uprising as large in scale as the Revolution itself. Elections then took place. A democratically-elected president took up the reins. A military coup occurred, was quelled and, still, things brew beneath the surface. One can feel the heat rising, like rain before a thunderstorm. For now, all is calm.
I close my eyes and breathe in the humid air that smells of waste being burned some streets away—boukan—and the stale scent of men’s and women’s cologne intermingling, sweat. In the distance, people laugh.
Quiet permeates, a silence, a space reaching between the surface of the island’s dust and the sky above that bespeaks so many things unsaid: the despair of the mothers in the lakou wondering from where their children’s next meals will come, the broken young men prowling the streets in search of a power that eludes them in daylight, the memory of the conch cry that unleashed uprisings never seen before to pronounce a freedom captured, realized, then squandered.
Time spirals in that silence, between the space of the before, the now, and the unknown: it spirals and unravels.
***
With the rise of the dictatorship came the suppression of free expression. If one was not in line with the dictatorship, then one was expelled from its sphere, often brutally. After torture, came exile, if one survived. To exist in such a world, one must cultivate silence or find a different way of expression.
For some, Spiralism was the way.
Kaiama Glover explains: “From the structure of the double helix that defines every living being, to the swirl of stars, gas, and dust that compose the galaxy, the very foundations of the universe unfold in a spiral, implicitly putting even the most dramatically isolated into relation.” According to Glover, the Spiralists of Haiti were/are the writers Frankétienne, Fignolé and Philoctète, all of whom remained in Haiti during the years of the dictatorship producing their writings (and visual art in the case of Frankétienne), isolated from the rest of the Caribbean and the world.
From within this isolation, however, they produced a quintessentially Haitian art form that reflected Haitian mores, and which served to connect them to a larger, cosmic order.
The spiral “is present in the bands of the hurricane winds that regularly ravage the island, and it makes up the structure of the conch shell, an object that functions symbolically to recall the rallying cries of Haiti’s revolutionaries.” Furthermore, writes Glover, it “signifies within an even more specifically local context: it is the form that decorates the entire length of the poteau-mitan (the wooden post that stands at the center of every Haitian vodou temple [peristyle] around which all ceremonies revolve) and, as such, is an integral element of Haiti’s most fundamental belief system” (viii).
Spiralists trouble linear time, geopolitical time, spatial configurations and engage multiple and conflicting perspectives to arrive at works that defy the logics of power itself in order to not be divested of their home, the nation itself, in order not to have to live in exile, physically or psychically.
Could it be that all Haitians, on the island and in the diaspora, exist only fully and completely within the double helix of the spiral?
If we exist in the double helix of the spiral, we are never not home, never not in Haiti.
We—some of us—always say that were it not for the regime, none of us would have left.
Some of us have gone only to return. Some have never left, will never leave. With only the gods to bury us.
***
It’s clear from his essays that Baldwin defined Harlem as a home of sorts, perhaps a primary home or a compass point from which all other spaces in which he subsequently found himself might be measured. He returns time and again to Harlem, whether to speak of the neighborhood directly, or to look out from its vantage point onto other areas he comes to inhabit.
In “Fifth Avenue,” he wrote from a distance about a development scheme named “Riverton” in Harlem that soon descended into a slum state:
Harlem watched Riverton go up…in the most violent bitterness of spirit, and hated it long before the builders arrived. They began hating it long before the builders arrived….They were, and are, right in one respect: that nothing can be done as long as they are treated like colored people. The people in Harlem know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere else. No amount of “improvement” can sweeten this fact. Whatever money is now being earmarked to improve this, or any other ghetto, might as well be burnt. A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.
Baldwin wrote of the destruction of Riverton not to shame its inhabitants, as a postscript he added to the essay makes clear, but to point out what happens when a people are denied a hand in their own sovereignty, in the development of their own space and place in the world which, one could argue, is the lot of Harlem and surrounding areas in NY today. Port-au-Prince, by the same token, presently descending in the apparent chaos of gang warfare orchestrated from beyond its shores might be described in similar terms.
In the years after the 2010 earthquake, billions of dollars trickled into the country: three- and four-star hotels were built with some of this money, for the foreigners who would then flow in to perform their research and various projects, most of which, like the hotels, no longer operate. Billions of dollars that could have rebuilt a nation but less than 10% of it in government hands—too corrupt to be trusted, it was said—and so it goes.
Haiti’s president was assassinated in 2021, after two years of demonstrations from the population demanding that he step down for failing to hold elections. The last presidential elections were held in 2015, almost ten years ago. Today, Haiti has been “assigned” an interim government and money will begin to flow into the country again. More projects will be “assigned,” and we can wait for a “Riverton”-like outcome. As Baldwin said: “A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.”
Whatever is next planned for Port-au-Prince, and maybe for the whole of Haiti, one thing is certain: it will look nothing like it once was and could still be as it is a culture marked for annihilation.
***
Two years after the gathering, my grandfather will die alone in the big house he built for himself and my grandmother. Marie, the housekeeper my grandmother had hired decades before, was the sole witness to his passing.
She was like a member of the family, to an extent. My grandmother had hired a local schoolteacher to teach her how to read, write and to do arithmetic. When I asked her why, my grandmother replied, “after we go (meaning her and my grandfather), she will have no one and she needs to be able to fend for herself.”
A woman alone in a world ruled by men, is what I thought, pensively. An unmarried woman or a widow, like my grandfather’s mother had been.
My grandfather died in his sleep, without his eleven children. They came, of course, later, once alerted, but his dream of being surrounded by his children and all their children in a compound he had built from the ground up, on land he had worked for since his early days as a builder, after coming to the city from the country, crumbled to dust in those final hours.
None were there to see his final breath. Only an adoptive daughter who had the keys to the house but perhaps not much else in the man’s world that Haiti remains.
***
I don’t know if my grandfather thought of himself in terms of history, with respect to the nation or global realities. He would have been born sometime in the dawn of the twentieth century, his mother in the late 1800s. For both, slavery would have been some hundred years or more in the rear-view mirror. Still, they saw Haiti’s fortunes dwindle, the coming of the US gunboats, were subject to Occupation and all that came with it: subjugation, rule by another, becoming “others” in their own land, racial disenfranchisement.
They were, like Baldwin would describe his own father, dark of skin and noble in features, which is to say that they were striking, African. They knew this to be a disadvantage in a nation organized by color hierarchies, a demotion in the face of a segregationist organization by which free people became second class citizens in their own country by decree of the occupying forces. Then, they were lured into the promise of upward mobility as an enticement to remain while others were plundered or hung, only to be plunged thereafter in the dark recesses of a contest between greater powers than their own, than that, even perhaps, of the lwa. Those greater powers held the future of their children’s lives in ransom, in exchange for forgetting the will of their forebears for whom the only battle worth fighting was, indeed, for a future they would never come to see. In that new world order, they would have been made to know their newly designated place.
Knowing one’s place in a disordered world foments various things: bitterness, hatred, anger, and a desire to recover sovereignty.
Or it fosters a misrecognition of oneself in the mirror of others. It fosters silence and measured words.
***
1999. There is a blackout in Port-au-Prince.
With my feet on Haitian soil, I close my eyes and attempt to take in all that the moment transmits but the whole of it remains ungraspable, with the family assembled beyond me, what’s left of it. The uncles and the aunts. The cousins. Those who speak Kreyól and those who don’t. Those who have lives lot bó and are just making do elsewhere but here can pretend to be princes.
There is the past behind us, in all its glory and depravity, the knowledge of those who clawed through the red earth to survive, who fought on the battlefield, buried the dead, buried their heads, climbed the mountains, picked the black mushrooms growing on the fallen trees in forest clearings, some memory from long-ago maroon time directing their hands, their thoughts, their judgment.
Just as the possibility of capture seems to come into focus, to be within palpable reach, like an essence I could bottle and take back abroad, the generator motor roils to life. The lights of the house flicker back on. The music returns. The voices of those assembled rise. A cock crows.
I see over the brick of the house’s fence that light has not returned a few streets over. I hear someone walking on the other side of the wall.
Ki sa gayen? Someone asks someone else. What’s going on?
I smell cigarette smoke as the answer is swallowed by the night. The party continues. No one will measure its cost.
My grandfather retires: he has an appointment with the dead in the morning.