In the humid, velvet-black Haiti night, we talk on a hotel terrace overlooking Port-au-Prince. Five years have passed since the earthquake that razed parts of this city and its island nation to the ground, taking up to 300,000 lives with it. One Haitian man remembers roads lined with bodies – “pow, pow, pow, like that”, he says, chopping out lines with his hand. Many more died from starvation and disease in the aftermath.
Haiti, which declared itself free from slavery in 1804, has paid a high price for its presumption. Natural disasters, the refusal of the US to recognise its statehood (Thomas Jefferson feared an autonomous republic of former slaves), the dictatorships of the Duvaliers (1957-86) and continuing political corruption combine to suggest a land in bondage to a cruel fate. Little wonder the few white outsiders who venture beyond the city without the protection of charities, NGOs or the UN find themselves fascinated by the Haitian practice of vodou.
As evening draws on, Jean Michel, an elegant young man who has lived in Toulouse and Paris but was born and brought up in Haiti, tells me about the Iwa – the spirits of the sea. As a boy, alone on a deserted beach and throwing stones, Michel was approached by an elderly man who told him to stop what he was doing. He was disturbing the people who lived down there, the old man said. More than one person I meet is keen to emphasise that Haiti is 80 per cent Catholic and 100 per cent vodou.
Although the Catholic bishop I meet is at pains to distance the Church from superstition, he is diplomatic in his response to my inquiries about the way that vodou blends Catholic saints and feast days with African animism, pragmatically and metaphysically. Far from the lurid image cooked up by Hollywood, vodou has an intimate, spiritual relationship with nature; and although some of its rites still involve animal sacrifice, there are even vegan vodouists today.
Outside my window the capital sprawls darkly, bereft of the electric fug one expects in a major city. Mountains hang over it like black whales. At dawn the next morning, I am driven through the streets. The sensation is extreme; to take a photograph would be an unforgiveable theft. Walls spill out on to roads that are seemingly composed of rubble. Elegant wardrobes with full-length mirrors stand in the dirt. Sun-faded murals advertise everything the city has to offer: “Nouvel Complex Medical”, “Christ Auto Parts”, “Titi Lotto”. There are more lotto booths than anything else, with the day’s winning numbers chalked on boards. They vie with political graffiti and religious slogans – “Dieu Vous Aime” – equally democratic in their assurances.
Nothing is complete, everything is in flux. Skeletal dogs stalk the streets, another substratum of hardscrabble life. And yet none of it seems desperate, partly because of the extreme beauty and apparent calm of the people who throng these markets and alleyways.
On the city limits stands a UN compound painted white and blue, which carries a promising slogan of its own: “Control and surveillance”. The UN is hated in Haiti, my driver explains. “We are paying for them to be here,” he says. The UN is also accused of importing cholera in the aftermath of the quake.
Above us, the hills are bare. Much of the central island has lost its tree cover to charcoal burning, setting in train a new environmental disaster. In 1986 when Jacques Cousteau temporarily forsook the sea to make a film about Haiti, Waters of Sorrow, one inhabitant told him: “Our mountains are showing their bones.”
Two numbing hours later, we arrive at the coast where, with Andrew Sutton, a British film-maker, I’m investigating a plan by the Haiti Ocean Project to declare the entire Haitian coastline a marine reserve. At an estimated cost of £35m, it seems an impossible ambition, given the conditions in which most people live. Yet the blue of the sea offers a vision of redemption. If tourism is to bloom here, it is the sea that will summon visitors – although not its pollution. Like the streets, the water is littered with plastic: bottles, margarine lids, forks and other waste. Even in its trash, Haiti is a victim of the overdeveloped world.
As we sail out, a boat full of people comes rowing towards us, at their centre a mambo priestess in a white dress and turban, casting offerings to the watery Iwa. Out here, on the vivid, translucent blue sea, we watch a sperm whale raise its vast flukes against the island’s shores before diving into waters three thousand feet deep. It’s hard not to see this enigmatic animal as an Iwa itself, invoked by the mambo. An elemental spirit, an emblem of a beautiful place that cannot escape its past but which may yet be offered a new future.
For more information on the Haiti Ocean Project, visit: haitioceanproject.net
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