Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre

Author:René Depestre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2017-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

2

Letter from Jacmel[1]

Situated in the southern part of the island, on the Caribbean coast, facing Venezuela, Jacmel is the village the farthest away from Port-au-Prince by sea. By land, less than fifty miles separate the two cities. Traveling from one city to the other is the ideal way to discover Haiti—the most beautiful, the most sensual, and the most authentic of all the Caribbean islands. But there is no real road to speak of connecting Port-au-Prince to this little provincial town, once considered the most modern of the island and famous for being, along with the more western town of Jérémie, the village of poets. It is also known for having welcomed, one after the other, two exiled libertadores: Francisco de Miranda and Simón Bolívar. It is even said that Miranda sketched the first Venezuelan flag while docked amongst the coral reefs of Jacmel’s windswept harbor. Beyond the fifteen miles recently paved by a French company, there is only a stony dirt and clay road, riddled with potholes, which serves either as path, trail, or water slide, depending on the topography at any given spot. In the dry season it is not too much of a problem, at most three or four hours on foot. But during the rainy season it can take fifteen to twenty hours to cross a hundred or so of the many creeks, often swollen to rapids—if the trip is even manageable at all.

Very few cars ever risk it: a few Jeeps, the odd Volkswagen, and “tap-taps”—one of those half-tank/half-truck vehicles that are Haiti’s makeshift form of public transportation—decked out in bright rainbow colors, and sporting equally colorful names: By the Grace of God, Mary the Beautiful, The Renewed Immaculate Conception, Trust in God . . . Men, women, and children pile up inside, on benches pressed together back-to-front and side-to-side. On the roof, toward the back, and attached to the floor are where you find the animals. Fighting cocks add their war cries to the dizzyingly cacophonous grunting of black pigs of all sizes, tied up, heads bouncing about in the void. “Tap-taps” get stuck many, many times during the trip. When this happens, everyone gets out, rests a bit, stretches, hums a little perhaps. Without any particular urgency, everyone eventually starts pushing and pulling until the vehicle is freed from the muck.

The landscape is intensely tropical. At spots, fierce and untamed, it seems to have been barely touched by man. A confusion of trees, plants, and flowers present the great richness of Haiti’s flora: silk-cotton trees, laurel trees, mango trees, sapodillas, tuberoses, orchids, amaranths, oleander bushes, and lilacs. The landscape changes from one hill to the next. Peasants cultivate coffee in their lakous—groupings of wood-frame huts held together with dried mud and lime and packed into tree-branch trellises, in which large extended families live without any basic comforts. Just outside the hut—a pig, a couple of chickens, sometimes a goat, and three stones for a grate to cover the fire. There are a few naked children, with their jet-black eyes, who have never even heard of school.

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