The theme for my blog has lately been “blog or die tryin” and mostly I’ve been not blogging, and not trying. It isn’t that the French bakery in Oakland with it’s tartes tintins wasn’t deserving. Or that the lovely couple, longing to live in Europe who we met at Capri on Abbot Kinney last night were not inspiring. And it isn’t that I miss Europe any less. My bones still ache for a summer in France. Weeks. Not days. Weeks, I tell Ethan. I know, he says, I know. Jihane, my Lebanese sister in Toulouse writes, where are you? How is your work? Your marriage? And I only have a few lines in my increasingly broken French via Facebook to share in return. Not because I don’t long for an evening spent by her table with her daughter and husband Wissam, who could have been an uncle, who found me the wretched and beautiful apartment on Rue du Taur. I miss them all, and I should speak of it here. But my life exists in working hours, mortgage payments and after work swims at “the gym.” When is there room left to long for poems and wax nostalgic about those 4.5 years in Europe? I do not mean, “when is there time?” I mean, when is there room.
And then, there is Haiti. Like Iran’s green almost-revolution this summer, it has crawled under my skin, filling me with both sadness and hope. And reminding me of our “chance” that beautiful French word that in an ironic twist, in our language means, “luck.” The earthquake in Haiti, the rubble and destruction left behind, the images coming through the computer screen in our quiet, clean little condo, remind me of how fragile life is; how uncertain our time here; and, how disparate our worlds are, depending on what plot of land–or what zip code–we happen to be born on. Obama wrote this today about the situation in Haiti:
“In the aftermath of disaster, we are reminded that life can be unimaginably cruel. That pain and loss is so often meted out without any justice or mercy. That “time and chance” happen to us all. But it is also in these moments, when we are brought face to face with our own fragility, that we rediscover our common humanity. We look into the eyes of another and see ourselves.”
Equally moving were the words of Madison Smartt Bell in the New York Times article, “Haiti in Ink and Tears.” Bell writes,
“Haiti offers, keeps on offering, a shimmering panorama of visual art and a wealth of seductive and hypnotic music, much of it rooted in the rhythms of ceremonial drumming. For the past 50 years a remarkably vivid and sophisticated Haitian literature has been flowing out of Creole, an ever-evolving language as fecund as the English of Shakespeare’s time. The Haitian world is not all suffering; it is full of treasure. Here are a few of the many voices, native and not, inspired by Haiti.”
That amidst our antiseptic lives in first world urban centers, we forget how to create art, write books, make music is no surprise. That there is room for it even in our suffering, is humbling. I don’t know if it speaks to the power of poems, or the power of the human spirit. But it tells me that to survive, to really survive, we must create, we must express, we must write these tears. I hope that articles like Bell’s will continue to come forth and remind us of the other narratives that exist in Haiti. Beyond the rubble and poverty and tragedy, beyond cliche pronouncements of Haitian “strength” and “resilience.” Narratives that do not have answers or solutions, but exist as the purest form of human expression.
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