“What are we? Since that’s your question, I’m going to answer you. We’re this country, and it wouldn’t be a thing without us, nothing at all. Who does the planting? Who does the watering? Who does the harvesting? Coffee, cotton, rice, sugar cane, caco, corn, bananas, vegetables, and all the fruits, who’s going to grow them if we don’t? Yet with all that, we’re poor, that’s true. We’re out of luck, that’s true. We’re miserable, that’s true. But do you know why, brother? Because of our ignorance. We don’t know yet what a force we are, what a single force – all the peasants, all the Negroes of the plain and hill, all united. Some day, when we get wise to that, we’ll rise up from one end of the country to the other. Then we’ll call a General Assembly of the Masters of the Dew, a great big coumbite of farmers and we’ll clear out poverty and plant a new life“. (p. 106).

This passage is from the book “Masters of the Dew” by Jacques Roumain, one of Haiti’s most beloved writers. The grandson of a Haitian president, he was a novelist who died mysteriously at the age of 37 while serving as Charge D’Affaires to Mexico on behalf of the Haitian government in 1944. The circumstances of his death have in some places been described as political retaliation, that he was brutalized while unlawfully detained in police custody because of his political affiliations, or because of his opposition to the previous U.S. occupation of his country.

The title of this book is a translation of a Creole expression gouverneurs de la rosee’, which means simply those who control the water for crops, the irrigators. In Haiti as everywhere, water is life. I read this book many years ago and was impressed how Roumain, one of the wealthy elite who had been educated in Switzerland, loved the poor and his country so deeply with his words. He would write about the land the way a man writes about the body of a woman that he knows and has loved. Reading his words causes you to fall in love with his country and his people. Langston Hughes would meet Jacques Roumain shortly after the peak of the Harlem Renaissance. Some years later, he would translate “Masters of the Dew” into English.

There is a danger in Roumain’s writings however, and there is a danger in many of the perspectives that we are being given about Haiti. The danger is in romanticizing poverty and desolation. It is true that the proximity to death causes life to seem more sacred. But it has always been precious. And art and music and wisdom will come out of the rubble of this place. But it isn’t necessary to spill blood to create.

A human strength is our capacity to create beauty from ashes. But it isn’t essential that beauty come from ashes. Beauty and commerce and power can come from any material that is placed before a person or people with imagination and will. Think of the modern city of Dubai. It more than rose from the sands. The developers brought in sand to create the atoll Palm Jumeirah, and then build on it. Parables about the perils of building a house upon the beach aside and necessarily ignoring the oil money that backed this venture, Dubai demonstrates what can be done to reshape a land. In some ways, Haiti has more natural resources available to it than this UAE municipality.

This devastation is new. There are still approximately 4,000 Americans missing beneath the rubble, more than were lost in 9-11. There are estimates that rebuilding this place will take 10 years. How this will be done must be the question that is answered right to win against the opposing teams of poverty, disease, illiteracy, and instability. In the midst of adapting to this new reality, beauty and music and joy and art will be created. But these must be viewed as balms and bandages to help heal and restore strength to sustain what can lie ahead. Refugee tents must not become the permanent abodes. The call to the world must be that we don’t settle for adapting to this desolation and that the views from this calamity don’t become comfortable because they become familiar. Instead, a masterpiece needs to be painted on this canvas.

—
Whitney runs a rock music venue in L.A. She has an M.B.A. and no one cares.

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