Continental Drift

A curious trait in humans, one that gives aid and comfort to the dark angels of entropy and makes it all the more difficult to establish here on earth once and for all a Heroic Age, is the ease with which we take everything personally. At sea level, we cannot even see the Gulf Stream; yet if it benefits us, we think it’s only right it does so. And standing on the earth, we cannot feel it move beneath our feet, but if we could, we would wonder what we had done wrong this morning and say ten Hail Marys, just in case. All the more, then, when a hurricane, namely familiarly Jean or Hattie or Allen, spins slowly north from the coast of Guyana, gathers force and moisture from the warm waters off Trinidad and Tobago, crosses the Lesser Antilles, destroys everything in its path and chews its way toward us, here, in the Greater Antilles, let’s say, for this we can see, this we can feel: the skies in the southeast darken slowly as ten-mile-high towers of cumulonimbus clouds cross the horizon, the air pressure drops so rapidly our heads ache, seabirds fly inland and disappear behind dark green jungle-covered hills, and the onshore breeze replaces the offshore breeze as if rushing from the island to greet the approaching wall of gray clouds: and it’s because we can see the hurricane with our eyes and feel it with our bodies (though it’s caused by something no more concerned with us and our individual and paltry fates than is the rotation of the earth) that we nevertheless take it personally. We make it “our” hurricane, and when we talk with tourists from America, we speak of “our” weather, just as the New Englanders among them speak with wry pride of blizzards and Californians brag about sunshine.

If, however, we are a poor, middle-aged woman with five children living in a daub-and-wattle cabin in the hill country of Haiti a few kilometers west of Port-de-Paix on the north coast, we know the hurricane comes because the loas have not been properly fed. It’s not that we have been bad; it’s that the quality of our attention has waned. We’ve forgotten the dead, les Morts, and les Mystères, we’ve neglected to feed them, and it’s not we alone who have been neglectful, this poor, solitary woman, let’s say, a woman with a husband gone off to America in a boat, not we alone, but all les serviteurs, all of us who serve the loas. It’s true, for a long time now we have not fed the loas, so today the hurricane comes to remind us that it is we who live for the dead and not the dead who live for us.

In early August our side of the island was struck by a hurricane. We learned too late that it was coming — not that we would have done anything differently had we known about it sooner, for it was too late to stop it, the waters had already been stirred. We would deal with the loas later, we said, for that is how it has been done in the past. There have been other hurricanes, and after they have passed over us, even before we have patched up our houses and repaired our gardens, we have fed the loas. This year, however, when the hurricane came, it was different, for things got confused. And though we did not think we were a part of the confusion, we watched it and slowly got drawn into it and soon began to behave as if we, too, were confused. Here is how it happened:

Our settlement is called Allanche and it is located behind the first line of hills on the northwest coast a few kilometers off the road from Port-de-Paix to Saint Louis du Nord, which, because Allanche is too small to be a market town, is fortunate, for the women can carry their baskets of yams, mangoes and breadfruit, their apricot mameys and jamelacs, over the ridge on narrow pathways down to the coast road early on the morning of market day, and if they cannot hail a truck or car or wagon for a ride into Port-de-Paix, it is still not too late to walk the other way to the smaller market town of Saint Louis du Nord and arrive there in time to sell most of their goods.