her.
“Yes, I realize that I am strong,” she replied. “I am very strong. Some people get a small cut and it gets infected and they die. Look what was done to me and still I survived. Yes, I am very strong.”
In
Courage and Pain
, the undistributed documentary we ended up making, Alèrte and her family are surrounded by nearly a dozen other survivors who, like Alèrte, were nearly executed. They all tell different versions of the same story, of being beaten, macheted, shot, and tortured, and of nearly dying in a country they loved but where they could no longer live.
A few months later, a resolute Alèrte retold her story to Beverly Bell, an American researcher, democracy and women’s advocate, who would later compile the excerpts I have quoted throughout this chapter in an oral history titled
Walking on Fire
.
“Three months after I came back from the dead at Titanyen, I was on my two feet,” Alèrte told Beverly Bell. “I traveled around the United States trying to beat up on the misery of Haiti and the Haitian people. I spoke about women whom the cruel death and terror gangs were raping, little children they were raping, babies in the cradle. I went on television and the radio; I talked to U.S. congressmen, journalists, human rights activists. I spoke at demonstrations, press conferences, churches, congressional hearings . . . to say, “Here. Here is what I suffered.”
She not only suffered, however, but against all odds she also survived and thrived. And her testimony was a great gift to many others who were still trying to stay alive, and to the more than eight thousand others who died under the junta’s rule.
Alèrte Bélance: They killed mother after mother of children. They killed doctor after doctor, student after student. Mothers of children lost their children. . . . The devil has raped the confidence of the people. . . . People of conscience, hear me who is trying to wake you up. Hear my story, what I have experienced . . .
CHAPTER 6
The Other Side of the Water
In the summer of 1997, I flew to Port-au-Prince from New York a few days after my cousin Marius had flown in the cargo section of a similar American Airlines jet from Miami. Once I’d slept past the first half hour after takeoff, I’d strapped on the free headphones and chosen from the in-flight radio selection a pop station playing a song by the rock group Midnight Oil.
How can we dance when our earth is turning?
How can we sleep while . . .
Across the aisle from me, a man in a wrinkled brown suit shuffled a few papers in and out of a large manila envelope onto the tray table in front of him. He wiped his brow with a monogrammed blue handkerchief and then rang the flight attendant call button. When a plump blond woman hurried over, he asked her for a glass of water. When she brought it to him, he asked her when we were going to land.
I recognized the man, who had been escorted by immigration officers past the security checkpoint, right through the gate and to his seat on the airplane. He seemed to be in his late forties, was russet brown and thin with a gaunt face, his jaws speckledwith the remnants of a beard that looked as though a shave had been attempted on it but had failed. He was a deportee.
While looking over at him, I thought of my cousin Marius, who in his own way had also been deported. I had foreseen the two of us, Marius and me, traveling on the same day and my New York flight arriving a few hours before his Miami one so that I could be there to greet him at the airport in Port-au-Prince, but the obstacles to Marius’s flight had been abruptly lifted and he’d gone ahead on his own, before me, to be buried.
Originally, Marius’s departure had been delayed because the undertaker could not locate his papers. Before his mother called us in New York—from Haiti—to announce his death to my father and to ask for our help in getting the body sent to her from Miami, I hadn’t seen or spoken to Marius in years. Only two
“Yes, I realize that I am strong,” she replied. “I am very strong. Some people get a small cut and it gets infected and they die. Look what was done to me and still I survived. Yes, I am very strong.”
In
Courage and Pain
, the undistributed documentary we ended up making, Alèrte and her family are surrounded by nearly a dozen other survivors who, like Alèrte, were nearly executed. They all tell different versions of the same story, of being beaten, macheted, shot, and tortured, and of nearly dying in a country they loved but where they could no longer live.
A few months later, a resolute Alèrte retold her story to Beverly Bell, an American researcher, democracy and women’s advocate, who would later compile the excerpts I have quoted throughout this chapter in an oral history titled
Walking on Fire
.
“Three months after I came back from the dead at Titanyen, I was on my two feet,” Alèrte told Beverly Bell. “I traveled around the United States trying to beat up on the misery of Haiti and the Haitian people. I spoke about women whom the cruel death and terror gangs were raping, little children they were raping, babies in the cradle. I went on television and the radio; I talked to U.S. congressmen, journalists, human rights activists. I spoke at demonstrations, press conferences, churches, congressional hearings . . . to say, “Here. Here is what I suffered.”
She not only suffered, however, but against all odds she also survived and thrived. And her testimony was a great gift to many others who were still trying to stay alive, and to the more than eight thousand others who died under the junta’s rule.
Alèrte Bélance: They killed mother after mother of children. They killed doctor after doctor, student after student. Mothers of children lost their children. . . . The devil has raped the confidence of the people. . . . People of conscience, hear me who is trying to wake you up. Hear my story, what I have experienced . . .
CHAPTER 6
The Other Side of the Water
In the summer of 1997, I flew to Port-au-Prince from New York a few days after my cousin Marius had flown in the cargo section of a similar American Airlines jet from Miami. Once I’d slept past the first half hour after takeoff, I’d strapped on the free headphones and chosen from the in-flight radio selection a pop station playing a song by the rock group Midnight Oil.
How can we dance when our earth is turning?
How can we sleep while . . .
Across the aisle from me, a man in a wrinkled brown suit shuffled a few papers in and out of a large manila envelope onto the tray table in front of him. He wiped his brow with a monogrammed blue handkerchief and then rang the flight attendant call button. When a plump blond woman hurried over, he asked her for a glass of water. When she brought it to him, he asked her when we were going to land.
I recognized the man, who had been escorted by immigration officers past the security checkpoint, right through the gate and to his seat on the airplane. He seemed to be in his late forties, was russet brown and thin with a gaunt face, his jaws speckledwith the remnants of a beard that looked as though a shave had been attempted on it but had failed. He was a deportee.
While looking over at him, I thought of my cousin Marius, who in his own way had also been deported. I had foreseen the two of us, Marius and me, traveling on the same day and my New York flight arriving a few hours before his Miami one so that I could be there to greet him at the airport in Port-au-Prince, but the obstacles to Marius’s flight had been abruptly lifted and he’d gone ahead on his own, before me, to be buried.
Originally, Marius’s departure had been delayed because the undertaker could not locate his papers. Before his mother called us in New York—from Haiti—to announce his death to my father and to ask for our help in getting the body sent to her from Miami, I hadn’t seen or spoken to Marius in years. Only two
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