Haiti Noir

Edwidge Danticat, Patrick Sylvain, M. J. Fievre, Gary Victor, Kettly Mars, Evelyne Trouillot, Madison Smartt Bell, Ibi Aanu Zoboi, Josaphat-Robert Large, Marie Lily Cerat, Louis-Philippe Dalembert, Marvin Victor, Katia D. Ulysse, Nadine Pinede, Yanick Lahens, Marie Ketsia Theodore-Pharel, Mark Kurlansky, Rodney Saint-Eloi Haiti Noir

© 2011

Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

Haiti map by Aaron Petrovich

“Twenty Dollars” by Madison Smartt Bell ©2011 by Madison Smartt Bell; “The Finger” by Gary Victor was originally published in French as “Le doigt,” in Treize nouvelles vaudou (Mémoire d’encrier, Montreal).

INTRODUCTION

NOIR INDEED

I began working on this anthology about a year before January 12, 2010, when Haiti was struck by its worst natural disaster in over two hundred years. The world knows now that more than two hundred thousand people died and over a million lost their homes in Haiti ’s capital and the surrounding cities of Léogâne, Petit-Goâve, and Jacmel. As I am writing these words, survivors remain huddled by the thousands in displacement camps, most shielding themselves from intermittent rain with nothing but wooden posts and bedsheets.

Even before the earthquake, life was not easy in Haiti. There was always the risk of dying from hunger, an infectious disease, a natural disaster, or a crime. But there was also hope, laughter, and boundless creativity. Haitian creativity has always been one of the country’s most identifiable survival traits. Whether expressed in vibrant and colorful paintings, double entendre-filled spiritual or party music, or the poignant, humorous, erotic, lyrical (and yes, also dark) short stories and novels of its writers, Haiti’s more nuanced and complex face often comes across in its arts.

When I began seeking submissions for this book, many of the writers I contacted, both inside and outside of Haiti, would comment on the suitability of the title Haiti Noir.

“I know you inherited it from the series,” one of them said, “but it certainly is fitting.”

Noir of course means-among other things-black, and Haiti became the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere when it was established by former slaves in 1804. Noir (nwa in Creole), as the scholar Jana Evans Braziel points out in her book Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora, also refers to any Haitian citizen, regardless of race. The founders of the republic designated it that way so that even the Polish soldiers who deserted the French to fight alongside Haitians during their battle for independence were considered “noirs,” while all other foreigners, of whatever race, were considered “blancs” (blan in Creole).

The irony of these designations struck me recently as I was rereading what I consider the most historically “noir” stories that link Haiti and the United States. The stories I am thinking of are those self-designated “dark tales” written by United States Marines who were stationed in the country during the American occupation that began in 1915 and ended in 1934. Over those nineteen years, Haiti was fertile ground for cannibal-and zombie-filled soldier memoirs and fear-provoking Hollywood B movies. Claiming to recount firsthand tales of “woolly-headed cannibals,” books such as Captain John Houston Craige’s Black Bagdad and Cannibal Cousins, along with William Seabrook’s The Magic Island and Richard Loederer’s Voodoo Fire in Haiti, shrouded Haiti in a kind of mystery that aimed to stereotype and dehumanize its people. I am certainly not one to censor any writer, but sentences like this one from Voodoo Fire in Haiti, send chills down my back:

Laugh at the negroes! You understand them as little asthey understand you. The black race is far closer to theearth than the white, and for that reason they are happierthan all the white men put together. A negro believes withoutasking why; he submits to nature.

This is as understanding as it gets, folks.

What these narratives prove, however, is something that the Haitian scholar and intellectual Jean Price-Mars-a peer of those men-had been trying to convince his fellow Haitian writers for some time, that Haiti ’s own stories were worth telling.