Let's leave

"let's leave," she whispered, "on a ship with smooth white sails and wooden planks that smell like seaweed, with a prow that shines as the ghosts of mermaids dance across the deck."

I've never lived where an earthquake threatens to happen and I've never wondered what it would be like to see the foundation of everything give way, suddenly, and to suddenly not know where my family members are. I don't know what it would be like, any of it, to search and to fear in that way, or die in that way or to be in the dark at night trying to understand why.

I can try to imagine though, and I hope those of us without close family or friends in Haiti will be kind, heartfelt, giving, and compassionate after our first flush of goodwill goes to some good use. The grief and trauma must be almost unbearable and it won't stop after the headlines do and so our care and interest in each other mustn't either.


It seems the history of Haiti is replete with the ways it has been crippled and punished financially by powerful countries, from its remarkable inception out of slavery to the present day, where poverty and a difficult social infrastructure flummoxed by debt create the climate for an even more painful situation than necessary. Is there a way to change these patterns?

 

Little Crippled Haiti (mixed media on aluminium, 48" x 48"), by the Haitian artist Edouard Duval Carrié.Contrasts and combines the resilience and genius of the Haitian people with the history of violation, injustice and migration spanning the globe.