earthquake in haiti

Podcast • March 19, 2010

Whose Words These Are (25): Fabienne Casseus’ Broken Haiti

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Fabienne Casseus (16 min, 7 mb mp3) Fabienne Casseus is a 17-year-old poet of young Haiti, broken Haiti, corpse-like Haiti, where she witnesses that a strong heart is ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Fabienne Casseus (16 min, 7 mb mp3)

Fabienne Casseus is a 17-year-old poet of young Haiti, broken Haiti, corpse-like Haiti, where she witnesses that a strong heart is still beating. Fabienne is a senior at a pilot public high school in Boston, “Another Course to College.” She came to the States with her mother at age 9, and has been writing — mostly poetry — ever since.

Fabienne’s Haiti is “who you are,” an island that people leave but never get away from, she says, a state of mind strong and rich in language, culture, and history.

What I’ve chosen to do when it comes to the earthquake and writing about it is: I look at Haiti as a woman, basically, that’s been broken. Reading throughout the history, I consider Haiti as a raped country. I consider her as somebody that’s been stolen from so many times that eventually her land is just tired. The earthquake is just her exploding from being manipulated and used for too long, and being pacified for too long.

I’ve started writing many different pieces where I speak of Haiti as a person: she’s a woman and she’s going through turmoil and she’s going through heartbreak. I don’t see it as something that’s ugly. I see pain as something that’s actually very beautiful, and I see the earthquake as a way for her to just cleanse herself and to remind people of who she is, to speak about the fact that she’s there, and she’s not just an isolated island in the world. She has something to say.

The attention is negative, but I feel that this is a way for her to speak and remind people that Haiti is strong, and Haiti is here, and Haiti’s been going through a lot and this is not the beginning or the end of it.

This is the fifth conversation in a series with Haiti-minded artists since the catastrophic earthquake in January. Link to the others here.

Podcast • March 17, 2010

Whose Words These Are (23): Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell’s Haiti

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell (24 min mp3) “Looking in” by Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell is an oil almost six feet wide, in the collection of Partners in Health. Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell is a ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell (24 min mp3)

“Looking in” by Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell is an oil almost six feet wide, in the collection of Partners in Health.

Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell is a Haitian-American artist in prose, paint and poetry. She speaks to us a poem about the January earthquake, in which the sky, it seemed, let go of the Christ statue that had looked over her childhood; God let go of his son’s hand as the roofs of Port-Au-Prince collapsed on her city.

Marilene Phipps Kettlewell is a visual artist, too, celebrated for her brilliant impressions of Haiti’s street life, its voodoo temples, its spirit life.

And then, in a spooky coincidence, on the very day of the earthquake, January 12, she got the news that her book of Haiti stories, titled “Company of Heaven,” had won the University of Iowa award for short fiction.

She is telling us about a large landscape of memory and imagination — no small part of what the earthquake smashed. Her poem “Man Nini” is a glimpse of the Haiti of her childhood:

    Man Nini was queen of the coal kitchen,

    standing within six square feet of soot,

    in front of four pits glowing with embers,

    churning the bubbling bean sauce, beaming

    the yellow kernels of her smile at the chickens

    flapping in the loose ashes below, strung

    together by the feet with sisal,

    their furious claws resembling the old

    people’s toe nails. She sighed as she sat

    on a low straw chair, the heat-lacquered

    columns of her black legs folded in a squat,

    her soiled apron caught between her knees

    forming a valley just below the wrinkled

    mound of the belly, to sort out

    peas, the good, the diseased, though all

    grew round together in the same pod.

    When she took off the flowered scarf she wore,

    Man Nini’s hair resembled rice paddies,

    with traced avenues on her scalp that

    glistened like the moist red earth

    of Kenskoff Mountain in soft fog. The remnants

    of frizzy white down were gathered

    into inch-long, upright, puffed-up braids

    which, in the darkness of the windowless

    kitchen, seemed the luminous gathering

    of her ancestors’ will-o’-the-wisps, filled

    with murmurs about the secrets of her strength,

    joy, and the sweetness of the food she cooked.

This is the third in a group of conversations with poets, word-artists, about a catastrophe beyond words: the earthquake in Haiti this January. Thanks to the Grolier Poetry Book Store in Harvard Square, Cambridge for studio space. Tomorrow, performance poet Eli Marienthal.

Podcast • March 16, 2010

Whose Words These Are (22): Peace-Poet Fred Marchant

Fred Marchant approaches the unspeakable horror and loss of life in the Haiti earthquake with a gingerly air of obligation. It’s the poet’s job, he says, to find words and speak them. His instructions came ...

Fred Marchant approaches the unspeakable horror and loss of life in the Haiti earthquake with a gingerly air of obligation. It’s the poet’s job, he says, to find words and speak them. His instructions came from his teacher of old, Saul Bellow. Bellow said he took them from Keats’ line that art and artists dwell in “the vale of soul-making,” not in the commonplace “vale of tears.”

I find the line in a famous Keats letter from April 21, 1810 — 200 years ago, almost to the day. “Call the world if you Please ‘The vale of Soul-making,’ Keats wrote. “Then you will find out the use of the world… I will put it in the most homely form possible–I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read–I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?”

In Fred Marchant’s cheerful radicalism, the impulse then is to take up meaning-making and life-building as a pastoral, virtually sacramental opportunity:

If you believe in language, and you believe in language’s capacity for carrying human experience, both inner and outer dimensions of it, then you have to lean into it and try… Poetry is an art, it’s the art of using this language in ways one hasn’t quite dreamed of yet, that somehow express things that one hasn’t quite yet named even. The degree to which any poet, any writer, can muster the resources of language that would allow or enable you to stand with someone suffering in these kinds of catastrophes. Then, I think, that is the sum total of human good.

I mentioned earlier that Saul Bellow had been a teacher of mine. One of the great things that Saul taught me — he told me to read Keats’ great letter about this world being a vale of soul-making. And Saul said think about what that word means, soul-making. Think about how it implies that the soul could be diminished or could be greater, depending. It was offering a theory of art. The work of art is in fact increasing the dimension of soul in the moment you’re alive. And frankly, there are moments in life when it disappears.

His Haiti poem is “A Place at the Table”:

It means you can face your accusers.

It means there is no place to hide.

It means you will not drift off to sleep,

or carve your name on your arm.

Or give anyone here the finger.

It means you do not have to wave your hand as if you were drowning.

It means there is nothing here that will drown you.

It means you really do not have to have the answer.

Since there are only a few of you left, sitting across from you,

it means you can study their faces as you would the clouds outside.

You will not totally forget them.

It means you are now, roughly, for a while, just about equal.

In the center before you there is nothing unless someone gives it.

It means that when you are gone, everyone feels it.

It means that when you leave, you feel as if you haven’t.

That you still have a place at the table.

Later in your life this moment will return to you as a mote

of dust that floats in on the spars of sunlight.

It will search every room until it finds you.

from The Looking House. Graywolf Press, 2009

Fred Marchant has the distinction of being the first Marine Corps Officer honorably discharged for conscientious objection, during the war in Vietnam. Fred directs the creative writing program at Suffolk University in Boston and has published three books of poetry.

This reading continues our series with poets, “Whose Words These Are.” Tomorrow: Mariléne Phipps-Kettlewell.