Authors: Nick Lake
It hurts now, even, and you would think I have other things to worry about, what with being trapped with no water and no food, and no way out.
Maybe, maybe, if I tell you my story, then you’ll understand me better and the things I’ve done. Maybe you’ll, I don’t know, maybe you’ll . . . forgive me. Maybe she will.
My sister, she was my twin. She was one half of me. You have to understand: a twin in Haiti, that’s a serious maji; it’s something powerful. We were Marassa, man. You know Marassa? They’re lwa, gods, the gods of twins – super-strong, super-hardcore, even though they look like three little kids. They’re some of the oldest gods from Africa. Even now in vodou, the Marassa come right after Papa Legba in the ceremony. Marassa can heal you, can bring you good luck, can make people fall in love with you. Marassa can see your future, double your money, double your life. People from where I come from, they believe human twins can do the same and can talk to each other in silence, too, cos they share the same soul.
So you see? Me and my sister, we were magic. We were meant to be born. We were special. We shared the same soul. People gave us presents, man – total strangers, you know. People would stop us in the street, want us to give them our blessing.
We shared the same soul, so when she was gone I became half a person. I would like you to remember this, so that you don’t judge me later. Remember: even now, as I lie in this ruined hospital, I am only one half of a life, one half of a soul. I know this. That is why I have done the things I have done.
But you don’t know them yet, of course – the things I’ve done, the reasons why I am half a person, the reason why I was in this hospital when everything fell down. You don’t know the hurt I’ve caused.
So I’m going to tell you everything.
First, I must explain the blood.
Some of it is mine. My bandage got all torn up when I was crawling around, looking for my half of the necklace, and I cut myself on some broken glass, I think. I already got shot, you know that, and there’s blood coming from there, too. The way the hospital fell down, it hasn’t been so convenient for my healing.
I can’t explain all of the blood, though. I think some of it comes from the dead bodies. This was a public ward before the ceiling and the walls fell down. There was a curtain around my bed that the nurses could pull if I wanted to use the toilet, but that was it for privacy. Those bodies are the other people who were in here. When the walls fell down, they fell down on them. I can tell cos there’s a hand near me, and I reached out and touched it, and followed it to the wrist and then the arm, feeling to see if it was a man or a woman. I don’t know why. And I couldn’t tell, anyway, cos after the arm there was no shoulder, just rubble.
Me, I was lucky. I was on the far end of the ward and the walls didn’t come down here.
Though maybe I’m not so lucky, cos I’m still trapped.
Maybe I’ll just die more slowly.
After I’ve thought about dying for a long time, I stop, and I eat the blood from the floor.
I figure it’s food and WATER, WATER, WATER, WATER, WATER, WATER, WATER at the same time. I mop it up with my fingers and lick them. It’s disgusting but, like I said, some of it’s mine, and it makes the hunger in my stomach cool down a bit, and my mouth gets a bit smaller, like maybe the size of a city. Only now that I’ve eaten the blood I’m not thinking so much about my mouth; I’m thinking more about how hungry I am.
In Site Solèy when you’re hungry, you say you got battery acid in your stomach, that’s how bad it burns. In Site Solèy you can buy a cake made from mud and water, baked in the sun with fat. Right now, I think, in Site Solèy they know nothing about hunger. If you gave me a mud cake, I would kiss you.
But then I get to thinking. If I’m hungry, that means I can’t be dead. Does a ghost eat blood? I don’t think so. A zombi, maybe.
I hope I’m not a zombi. I hope I’m not . . .
No.
I dig my fingernails into my palm. I don’t believe in zombis and the darkness can’t make me. Zombis scare me. And cos I’m scared, I say some words from a song to myself. They’re from
MVP Kompa
by Wyclef Jean, which was the song that was playing in Biggie’s car when I first met him.
Wyclef Jean was from Haiti, but now he’s a high roller in the US – big rapper, producer, businessman. Biggie was always listening to his music. Wyclef was a hero to him – a kid from Haiti who had made it in the music world. I guess Biggie thought that might happen to his ownself one day, which shows you how stupid Biggie could be.
Anyway, there’s this bit in the song where Wyclef Jean says that his friend Lil’ Joe has come back as a zombi. It’s midnight and Lil’ Joe is supposed to be dead, but he’s not. He’s back and he’s a zombi, and he has all his zombi friends with him. Wyclef sings this chorus where he tells everyone to catch the zombis, to grab them. And it’s good in the song cos you can catch zombis, you can hurt them and they can’t hurt you.
I like that idea, with the dead hand next to me.
So in the darkness I shout out to any zombis that I’m gonna catch them. I shout it till my throat hurts even more with dryness and thirst. And yeah, it makes me feel a bit better.
Yeah.
I don’t believe in zombis. I don’t believe in all that vodou shit. That’s kind of a lie, though, cos I saw a houngan turn into Papa Legba right before my eyes. So, yeah, maybe I do believe in vodou. But that doesn’t mean I have to believe in zombis, does it?
No.
Anyway, I think, what did vodou ever do to help me?
Vodou, it’s the old religion of Haiti. The slaves brought it over from Africa. In vodou, you got lwa, who are like gods, but sometimes they can be ancestors, too. Haitians, they believe that the lwa can come down and possess their bodies during ceremonies, talk through them. We call it
mounting
– the lwa mounts you and uses your body. See? It’s not like in the Kretyen religion. We talk to our gods; our gods talk through us. Manman talked to our gods, I should say. Me, I didn’t have a lot to do with them, apart from when me and my sister used to pretend in the ceremonies Manman organized. They didn’t seem very interested in me, either.
Manman, though, she loved all of it, and she believed in it all, even if she knew me and my sister were frauds, were bullshit. She had a houngan she went to. That’s a kind of priest who knows all the songs to bring down the lwa, and the foods they like to eat, and the veves – the symbols to paint on the ground to draw them to you. Like, if you want to be possessed by Baron Samedi, the lwa of death, you got to give him whiskey and cigars, stuff like that.
Right now, I’d be happy if Baron Samedi came for me and took me away from this place to the land under the sea where the dead go. At least then I wouldn’t be thirsty and hungry anymore.
But Baron Samedi is not coming.
Manman used to go to the houngan, but none of that stopped us losing the farm and ending up in Site Solèy. None of that stopped my papa being chopped up with machetes, my sister Marguerite being stolen.
Biggie said his houngan took a bone from Dread Wilmè after Dread was shot by the UN soldiers. He said the houngan ground that bone up and sprinkled it on Biggie, and that meant bullets couldn’t touch him, cos Dread died for Haiti, like Toussaint. So Biggie was proof against bullets, immortal, cos he had Dread’s bone powder on him. That’s what he thought, anyway. I even saw the bone dust in a jar when Biggie took me to see the houngan. Sure, I saw Biggie live through shit that no person should be able to. But I also saw Biggie take a full clip from a machine gun and those bullets tore him to dog food in the end, bone powder or no bone powder.
I don’t see what I got to thank vodou for. Anyway, Dread Wilmè didn’t die for Haiti. He died cos they shot him. I don’t think he wanted to die at all.
I don’t want to die, either.
I was born in blood and darkness. That’s how Manman told it, when I joined Route 9, when I started to roll with Biggie.
— He was born in blood and darkness, and that’s how he’ll die, the houngan told her.
Maybe she was right. Maybe I will die in blood and darkness. Maybe she would be happy if she saw me here.
Probably not.
The year I was born, it was when Manman had just moved to Port-au-Prince. They told her there’d be jobs there, electricity, running water. Well, she got the electricity from a line someone hooked onto the public cable, but the only running water was the sewer in the middle of the road and there were no jobs, not for anyone. Me, I was brought into the world as a symbol; I was marked from the beginning. There were some, even before the world fell down, who believed I was meant to do something special. It started right from the time I was born.
This was 1995. That makes me 15 now. See? I can do math, just like I can read. My papa taught me both, before he was killed. After that, Dread Wilmè put me in school, gave us a home to live in, too, cos Manman was Lavalas to the bone. Sometimes, I think, if it wasn’t for Dread Wilmè, none of this shit would have happened. But then I say to myself, no. Dread Wilmè was not there when your papa died and they took your sister away. He tried to help.
Anyway, Manman was at a Lavalas rally. She had a great big belly and in that belly was us. She said she could hardly stand up she was so big. She was frightened by what might come out. But she went to the rally anyway cos she thought Lavalas would change everything in Haiti.
This was Aristide’s new party, the ones who were going to keep him in power. Manman loved Aristide – he was a communist and that meant he believed everyone should have ègal money, ègal houses and jobs. At that time, Aristide had been in power for about five years and no one in the Site had any jobs, but Manman said that was cos it was hard for Aristide. The Americans and the French had made such a mess of the country it was going to take him a long time to sort it out. Me, I think maybe Aristide was just a liar, but I didn’t say that to Manman – she would have been anpil upset to hear me say so, even later, when everything had gone to shit and it was obvious to everyone Aristide was not such a great guy.
Papa was somewhere else, working, I think. So Manman went to the rally alone, even though she was eight months pregnant and big-bellied like a swollen, starving donkey. That’s what she said, not me.
Aristide was standing on a chair at the back of this little meeting hall. He used to be a preacher, so he was accustomed to shouting at people. He was saying:
— Ever since it was discovered by Christopher Columbus, this nation has been enslaved. Columbus was a slave-driver. The French and then the Americans are his successors – and they more than equal him in cruelty and injustice. But we do not bear their yoke lightly! For five hundred years they have robbed us, but for five hundred years we have defied them!
He said:
— The Americans would like the people of Haiti to vote in a new government. They would like to get rid of me, as I have become inconvenient for them. They would like to control our companies and make us slaves again for their own profit.
People cheered. My manman cheered. She had worked in an American company and they had paid her piti-piti money, and then they fired her when she missed a day cos she was sick. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, how can I know this? How can my manman have remembered Aristide’s words? And I answer you – she didn’t. But Aristide wrote them down in a book, and I have that book still. Manman threw it away, and I picked it up out of the trash cos I thought it might have some power. Aristide signed it for my manman, you see. He put his name in it, and that’s serious vodou.
I used to look at his signature and think how sad it was that a man with such good ideas turned into such a monster. Biggie was like that, too, I think. And me. I had a big idea to get my sister back, but all I did in the end was get a lot of people killed, get a bullet in my arm.
But I’m telling you about the day I was born – I’m sorry, I keep getting distracted. It’s crazy – it’s not like there’s anything here to distract me.
So on his chair at the back of the church, Aristide said:
— Put Lavalas in power and we will throw the Americans into the sea. We will invoice France and America for all that they have stolen from us. They took our freedom, our labor, the fruits of our land. They must be held to account! Two hundred years ago, our coffee beans and sugar cane turned to gold in the coffers of merchants from Paris, while the French slave masters here in Haiti turned our people into animals, trammeled with chains, lashed by whips.
The people shouted:
— Yes! Yes! They made us animals.
Aristide laughed. He always knew how to make people shout and chant, though toward the end they were chanting for him to go away, to leave the country alone, to stop his chimères killing his enemies.
— And what happened when we had our independence?
— Tell us! Tell us!
— Once we had set aside their chains, once we had stayed their whips and stood up on our own two legs, beasts of burden no more, the French sent an invoice to
us
, demanding that we pay for our freedom in taxes and in trees. We were forced to cut down our forests to provide France with wood for building, and the rains that followed washed away our farming land. Everything that was left is being taken from us even now.