Fogged Clarity
>Create dangerously
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| Sara Blake @ Fogged Clarity |
Edwidge Danticat, from her new collection of essays Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, on what it means to be a writer @ The Caribbean Review of Books.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )On November 12, 1964, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a huge crowd gathered to witness an execution. The president of Haiti at that time was the dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who was seven years into what would be a fifteen-year term. On the day of the execution, he decreed that government offices be closed so that hundreds of state employees could be in the crowd. Schools were shut down and principals ordered to bring their students. Hundreds of people from outside the capital were bused in to watch.
The two men to be executed were Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin. Marcel Numa was a tall, dark-skinned twenty-one-year-old. He was from a family of coffee planters in a beautiful southern Haitian town called Jérémie, which is often dubbed the “city of poets.” Numa had studied engineering at the Bronx Merchant Academy in New York and had worked for an American shipping company.
Louis Drouin, nicknamed Milou, was a thirty-one-year-old light-skinned man who was also from Jérémie. He had served in the US army — at Fort Knox, and then at Fort Dix in New Jersey — and had studied finance before working for French, Swiss, and American banks in New York. Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin had been childhood friends in Jérémie.
The men had remained friends when they’d both moved to New York in the 1950s, after François Duvalier came to power. There they had joined a group called Jeune Haiti, or Young Haiti, and were two of thirteen Haitians who left the United States for Haiti in 1964 to engage in a guerrilla war that they hoped would eventually topple the Duvalier dictatorship.
>The çingene were near
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| Tor Dahlin @ Fogged Clarity |
Margaret Özemet @ Anderbo reflects on encountering a gypsy in Turkey.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )A girl’s green eyes met mine as we exchanged the standard greeting, “Merhaba”—welcome. Immediately she returned her eyes to the walking trail. The Turkish heat was setting in and my son’s nap-time was approaching. It was jarring to meet another person on the beaten dirt path behind our building as my son and I returned home to the shelter of our apartment following our morning walk. Our family lives in company housing; usually we see only workmen. Her green T-shirt was wet with perspiration. The girl’s headscarf barely covered her dark hair; its floral pattern highlighted her dark skin. The edges of her long skirt were ragged—it was most likely her only skirt, a cast-off from her too-young mother. Fuchsia sandals made of cheap plastic were the only protection her feet had from the rocks and snakes in the olive grove where she and her family were working, next to the water treatment plant.
She tried to hide the jug of water as we passed. It was close to 109 degrees out and it was not yet noon. How could I be angry that she’d sneaked over the fence for water from our tap? We live at the water treatment plant; here water is plentiful.
altimoniere 