Foreword

One of the narrators in Lyonel Trouillot's novella, Rue des pas-perdus (Street of Lost Footsteps), the aging madam of a popular brothel, laments to her attentive interlocutor, "You see, monsieur, twenty-seven thousand square kilometers of hatred and desolation—a touch more if you count all the outlying islands—it's no use, monsieur, hatred grows faster than trees." Perhaps something of the embattled story of Haiti is captured in this grim—yet empathetic—remark. If so, it is arguably something that captures no more than the limit-instance of a hard truth familiar to all our Caribbean. For in these islands-of-history, there is much laughter, to be sure, much love and even abandon; but there is also much anger, much misery, much frustration . . . and, yes, hatreds that grow faster than trees.

The final end of the long Duvalier regime, which came with the déchoukaj (uprooting) and departure of Jean-Claude in February 1986, ushered in a period of unstable hope. The exiles began returning in ones and twos; forms of life—aesthetic, literary, civic, political—repressed since the late 1950s began tentatively to resurface, to breathe the possibility of a new Haiti. But two decades on it may be forgiven if some wonder whether Haitians haven't exchanged black dog for monkey (as Jamaicans say): the settled finalities and predictable brutalities of the dictatorship for the personal and political insecurities and predatory appetites of the new grands mangeurs (big eaters) of the so-called democratic transition. The rise and fall—and again, rise and fall—of Jean-Bertrand Aristide may well have dampened the optimism and enthusiasm many seemed to feel in December 1990 for the prospect—at last—of real social change. Lavalas was to have been the flood that swept the uncivil past away. But of course the revolution did not materialize; not nearly.

What happened to Titid, some people ask. What made his second coming, secured as it was by the "immaculate invasion" of US troops, so unlike the first? Were there compromises he was obliged to make? Were there new forces by which he was constrained or inveigled? Were there interests—such as those that financed and organized the September 1991 coup—that were (and are) simply so unwilling to see social and economic justice in Haiti that they were (and are) prepared to go to any lengths to maintain the old status quo? There is a story here—which, admittedly, may not be CARICOM's story—that is waiting to be told in all its unhappy detail. For it is only fair to add that there are some in Haiti who will tell you with passionate conviction that they were always skeptical of Aristide's political style, that they always saw in the demeanor of his populism a distressing tendency toward personalism, intolerance, and fanaticism, and therefore an echo, however faint, of the old Griot himself.

Not the same, no, surely, but still: just how many dictators, how many prophets, how many foreign occupations, how many founding fathers, how many exiles, how many Jean Dominiques, how many tontons macoutes, how many chimères, how many victims of the notorious "torture of Père Lebrun" will it take to unmake the seeming zero-sum game of Haitian politics in which the only solution to rivalry seems to be extermination? The answer is of course uncertain, profoundly—perhaps sometimes desperately—so. But it must be clear that no romantic narrative of a revolutionary future underwritten by the idea of a debt owed to a past of great suffering will offer much consolation. Not now. The celebrated statues of the heroes of the liberation and independence scattered around the Champs de Mars (none of them unfamiliar with the politics of total power) are inert; they, anyway, hold no ready plots for a new story of emancipation.

Is it surprising, then, that Lyonel Trouillot's madam is a genuine cynic? I mean that she is the kind of cynic...