|
27 Days
Dedicated to Monsieur Monsignac, his fellow survivors
and those passed on
Written by Keenan Norris and Alexandria White
Originally performed by Alexandria White and Darold
Rawls at Evergreen Valley College, San Jose, CA
He:
They say a man feels it when his woman is pregnant. A
doctor would tell me that after countless days under
this collapsed building what I feel is the corruption of
my organs and the expiration of my body. He would tell
me that this is how death feels. But I know that what I
feel is not death, but new life. I know that this pain
in my stomach is not hunger but a child. This pain in my
sides is not lacerations but a child. This shortness of
breath and this writhing heart and this terror in my
throat is not the end but a beginning.
She: What will this child’s name be? What form will
this child’s body take? Yes, new life is on its way…but
what kind of life. God made birth hard, not to punish
Eve, but to build Eve’s character . . . We must be
strong as Haiti is re-born…but please can someone tell
me what this place will look like? This place that has
been re-born a million times . . . since the pale faces
came on the sea long ago, how many times must one be
re-born?
He:
I am used to doing for myself. I have always worked. I
have always provided for my family. There is barely a
blinking traffic light sometimes in my stretch of
Port-au-Prince, let alone Red Cross ambulances speeding
around all havoc and United Nations officials and
American physicians and Christian missionaries careening
this way and that through the streets, the alleyways,
the fallen buildings, over the rubble that now encloses
me. So it is very strange to me to wait here, like a
trapped firefly in a crumbling jar, for some perceptive
soul to unearth me before I die. The Red Cross has never
cared for my wife. The Red Cross has not raised my
children. The United Nations has not made due when there
is no food in the city and I have survived on chalk and
dirt and slim hope. The United Nations has never done my
surviving for me when the political gangs and the police
have had at it in City Soleil. True, I have been less
than the man that I and my God have wanted me to be. I
have lied. I have cheated. I have not always loved the
ones that I loved enough. But I have survived, I have
made due, I have raised and protected my family. Now I
feel as innocent as the child
She: My man is gone, I fear that he is one of the
lost ones swallowed up by the angry gyrations of the
gods, he is lost, perhaps he wants to be lost, perhaps
he is in the thunder clouds playing swords with Shango,
perhaps he is underground where Limba devoured him
whole, perhaps he recognized that being with me could
only mean having more bellies to fill, he is one of the
lost ones now.
He:
I move a little this way, a little that way. I twist my
body beneath the rocks. My new child and all my children
need me to move and to endure and to rise from beneath
this mountain. I play farmyard-poor games, just as we
poor have always done, with broken things. A sliced
teacup is within reach. I play a single rhythm. Click,
click, click. It is still off key . . . I, from the
race that invented the drum, a man down from the first
people to dance and sing and fear God, people so ancient
that we still lay our dead to rest with a whirlwind of
rhythm. I, now, cannot make a tune. I, a man from a
family and of a people that still proudly fears the
incomprehensible universe, the fathomless heavens and
the glories of this earth, cannot close my two hands in
prayer or lift my voice loud enough that the people
above, let alone the heavens might hear.
She: But still I wonder what this new child will
look like? With the American tanks paroling our
shattered streets while thousands of our people starve
and die of open wounds. While thousands of our people
cry out to God.
He:
I imagine I hear a child or a god below the earth
calling my name.
I cannot turn back. I have survived twenty-four days
beneath this rubble. If I must live life eternal beneath
the living world above, I will. I have survived too long
not to constitute some part of the new Haiti.
She: What will this child look like? What form will
this child take growing in the midst of the fragments
left in this ruptured place?
He:
And now it is just me and my thoughts. The beautiful
thoughts. The sad thoughts. The way my island’s
hurricanes have for all my days since I was a child
reminded me in wind and thunder of love and death. The
way the land beyond the city stretches out and out, and
then the mountains and behind the mountains more
mountains still. And on all sides of us there is water,
water so vast and blue and beautiful that all the money
and human power on this earth is as nothing before what
a Haitian child can see from a good rooftop. We are not
poor. We are not weak. We are not deprived. We are not
desperate. We are not ignorant. We live in God’s careful
hands.
She: We live in God's careful hands. We are of this
land where the magical and the real collide ferociously
. . . like two tyrants fighting for power . . . how
can I look around myself seeing fragments of misplaced
bodies, smelling the rotting, putrid flesh of neighbors
and strangers, and find solace in the unreal turquoise
sky & the endless emerald-lush mountain tops? How does
the magic of the land still reach me within such a
state? How can the sweet & beautiful smells of hibiscus
& jasmine register in my nostrils?
He: And now my stomach moves. It churns, all
havoc. My God: My stomach moves like the new
washer-and-dryers that the American soldier boasted of
to my wife the last time they came down our streets in
their tanks.
She: I am scared. No I am Oya, goddess of war. No, I
am weak & vulnerable because my belly is too big & the
child inside beats my stomach like a drum each night,
making sleep uneasy. No I am Mami-Wata, goddess of all
the children & fertile women . . . no I am scared, I
am lonely, I am hungry, I am tired, I am thirsty. No, I
am the unnamed black slave woman who sliced open the
black pig whose spilt blood meant death to all the white
slave masters and meant the birth of the world’s first
Black Republic: Haiti!
He:
I think about my wife. I know without doubt she is
pregnant. The child is real. It is coming. I feel it
inside me now. It moves me more deeply than the
earthquake when it shook this city to its core. My
unborn child. Lord and all the gods, I feel this new
life coming. My child will be born above this jail of
shattered stone and steel beams. Born, he or she will
be, with a father, and a family, and a history more
horrible and brilliant than the wildest imagining.
She: My man was never lost because God knew where he
lay, and on the 27th day, God allowed him to emerge from
the cement-rubble cocoon. Haiti will never be lost
because the power of Haiti courses through the veins of
the living—the ones who have endured. Haiti could never
be lost because from this Earth rupturing nightmare a
new Haiti will come forward, more powerful than before.
* * *
* *
Ancient African Nations
* *
* * *
If you like this page consider
making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
posted 2 May 2010 |
