Rising above the squalor of Port-au-Prince, the Hotel Oloffson is like a fairy-tale castle: a rickety white gingerbread folly surrounded by lush palm trees. At the foot of the hotel steps sits a statue of a grinning man in a top hat: Baron Samedi, the voodoo spirit of the cemeteries.
The hotel was the setting for
The Comedians, Graham Greene’s novel about “this evil slum floating only a few miles from Florida”. Fascinated by depravity, Greene wrote part of the novel during his stay in what he renamed “the Trianon”. It was 1963. Papa Doc Duvalier and the Tonton Macoutes, his thuggish henchmen, ruled. Corpses of their enemies lined the street, school children were forced to witness their executions and the National Palace, now a heap of rubble, hosted an array of medieval torture instruments.Yet when I visited Haiti, following in Greene’s footsteps for my book Travels Without my Aunt, I discovered that most Haitians regarded the Duvalier era as a golden age of law and order. “In Duvalier’s time we could sleep easy in our beds. Now there is no discipline,” one friend told me.
Port-au-Prince already looked as if it had been razed by an earthquake. The shack-lined roads were potholed and buckled and cars swerved constantly to avoid open sewers and vast, rat-infested mountains of rubbish. Haiti’s tiny elite, a handful of Lebanese and mulatto billionaire families who ran the country’s only thriving industry — cocaine smuggling — lived in the now devastated hilltop suburb of Pétionville, served by
restaveks — child slaves purchased from starving parents — and dining on imported French steaks and wines. The view from their mansions was one of unending slums, which even Mother Teresa, that connoisseur of misery, called “Fifth World”. Beyond lay a cesspit Caribbean, too polluted to swim in, and behind were barren brown mountains that were completely deforested. Haitians stole topsoil from the neighbouring Dominican Republic so they could grow something to feed their children. Under its French rulers, Haiti was the richest colony in the world. But a voodoo priest led the slaves in rebellion and in 1804 it became the world’s first black republic. Terrified that other slaves would follow, America treated it as a pariah. The new rulers neglected their infant country for endless power struggles. Before Duvalier took over there had been 22 revolutions. Since his death in 1971, one corrupt government has followed another. Unemployment is 75%; the sole growth industries are kidnapping, prostitution and drug dealing.
The only escape comes from voodoo, which Greene called the “right therapy for Haitians”. Voodoo helps Haitians to transcend their everyday misery, but it also leads to an infuriatingly passive mentality, where everything is blamed on the
loas or spirits.
It was a voodoo priest who sold the Hotel Oloffson to Richard Morse, its Haitian-American owner, for $1. Incredibly it has survived. Morse is Twittering chilling updates: “Death is all over. Doors as stretchers ... decomposing bodies everywhere, looting is beginning. The prison is empty.”
Not even Greene could have predicted such a bleak impasse for his “nightmare republic”.
Comments
Post a Comment