Queendom Films

When my plane touched down at Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport in Port-au-Prince in June, I heard the sweet sound of applause, and I knew then that I would like Haiti. Jamaicans also applaud when a plane lands, saluting the pilot and thanking the almighty. My spirit felt like I was returning home, and yet I’d never been there before.

Much of Port-au-Prince feels chaotic. I passed the presidential palace, where the outer walls remain battened up, six years after the Palace fell in the 2010 earthquake. At the Cathedral, only the facade stands, all the remaining walls still lay flattened. I thought to myself, what it must feel like to see the major landmarks that you have grown up with crumble around you, and pass them laying on the ground everyday!

But there are other sides to Port-au-Prince. You can drive out of the city proper into wealthy neighborhoods in green hills overlooking the city. There you will see beautiful homes with magnificent views. You can also visit beautiful galleries to see Haiti’s renowned artists. And there is excellent food here in fine restaurants.

The ordinary people of the city soldier on. At almost every corner in the city, there are people working hard, selling something, making something, finding a way to survive. You can get almost anything to buy on the street: DVD players, mattresses, mangoes, food, clothes, art, handmade leather bags and sandals, paintings, etc.

I went to the Iron Market with a group of people who were shopping for souvenirs. I learned a valuable lesson here. When someone offers you something, don’t ever ask the price casually, unless you are very interested in buying it. The determined seller will not let you walk away without a sale. You will find yourself in a haggling death match, until you reach a price you both agree on. Ask, if you are ready to buy.

I think a part of me likes Port-au-Prince because it hasn’t experienced mass tourism. It is my personal baggage from growing up in Jamaica’s tourist mecca of Montego Bay. I like it when I go to a place and I am a human being and the person selling or working acts like my equal. I like it when I am in a black country and people look me straight in the eye, without deference to my lighter skin or give me that tourist grin, that look of servitude, which happens in some tourist driven places in the Caribbean.

I like that the doorman at my hotel asked. “You only speak English?!” I said, “No, I also speak some French and Jamaican patois.” He said, “You have to learn some Kreyol!” I said, “ I am too tired right now.“ He responded, “Try. You have to try”. He was smiling, but I could see that he was serious.

In other words, the Haitians I encountered, no matter how humble their station in life, still have their confidence. No one begged me for anything in five days in Port-au-Prince, but lots of people tried to sell me something.

I guess the overwhelming reason I like Port-au-Prince is the warmth from people of all classes I met there. There were the many Haitian intellectuals, artists and professionals I met, but the working class people won my heart. There was the lady I bought mangoes from on a sidewalk who labored to explain how I could find someplace nearby, until she told her daughter to follow me a little, to point the way. I don’t speak Kreyol and my french needs work. I took the tap tap minibus and went downtown alone. On arrival, the tap tap driver shook his head at my perceived bravery, “I am going to wait for you and carry you back, because I don’t know how you are going to get back and you don’t speak Kreyol.” Once, a stranger passing by, a professional-looking woman who speaks English, stopped to translate when I was negotiating a price in the street. She looked like she had some place important to go but she said, “Are you finished? Do you want anything else before I go?” She didn’t want to leave before I was done.

I was in Port-au-Prince to attend the Caribbean Studies Conference, a gathering of scholars, artists, thinkers and policy makers whose work focuses on the Caribbean. I had a screening and conversation on the conference program with renowned Haitian filmmaker Arnold Antonin, and Haitian scholar Dr. Clara Rachel Eybalin Casséus, author of the book Transnationalisme Associatif Haïtien et Jamaïcain: Géographie due Dévelopment Local et Politiques Diasporiques. The panel was excellent. But in addition, I was invited by Arnold Antonin to show my film, The Price of Memory, which is about slavery reparations in Jamaica, to a group of university students at his film center, Centre Pétion Bolivar. They were not unlike university students that I have encountered elsewhere, studying law, engineering, nursing etc. But after viewing the film, our conversation went on for over an hour, longer than usual. Most of them were only about twenty years old. I recognized that a large chunk of their lives was taken up by recovering over the last six years. Seeing visible ruins everyday made the concept of repair, real. They asked such excellent, thoughtful questions—some of the best questions I have ever been asked. It reminded me what brilliance lies in every country and the potential in every human being.

At breakfast at my hotel, I got into conversation with a woman sitting at the table next to me. She was a thirty-something Haitian American woman, an executive working for an international NGO. She proudly whipped out her cell phone to show me a photo of a teaching hospital that she had just helped to build. It’s a working hospital but it also trains medical staff. She had left Haiti at one years old and returned for the first time, after the earthquake in 2010, to stay. She left her high-flying career as a medical administrator in California to live and work in Haiti. She told me that she has been very happy over the last six years because she wakes up everyday loving her job and knowing that her work is for a purpose.

That gives me hope, for the brilliant students I met. But I am still ridden with questions about the UN presence, the NGOs, the donors and politicians and all the people who have promised much and delivered too little to the people of Haiti.

That said, I feel in my bones that I will return to Haiti.