Today, May 30, is Fete Dieu, or the feast of Corpus Christi. It’s celebrated on the Sunday after Trinity Sunday in the States but, in Haiti, it falls on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday. It is a big feast, with services of Holy Communion preceded by very large street processions.
I only became aware of the day's significance when our office secretary did not appear for work. As has happened before, I immediately turned to the calendar and discovered today's celebration. In doing some research on Fete Dieu via the internet, I found the article below, written by world renowned Haitian author Edwidge Danticat, during her August 2011 visit to Haiti. If you are not familiar with Edwidge's writing, this article will give you a taste for the power of her words. Her reflections also provide a wonderful representation of the strength of the Haitian people and the permanence, amidst loss, corruption and destruction, of this incredible country.
It’s the morning of Corpus Christi, Fête Dieu, in Haiti. The sun rises early, along with a chorus of voices singing hymns all over Port-au-Prince. Altar boys in flowing white robes and girls in communion dresses weave rosary beads through their fingers. Their parents walk at their side, their faces glowing in the sun.
Larry Towell / Magnum
CORPUS Christi processions are meant to commemorate Christ’s body in pain, but many Haitians
have their own pain. The procession circles a displacement camp where
mothers are bathing their children in front of the layers of frayed tarp
they call home. Before entering the crowd with her grandmother, my
6-year-old daughter, Mira, who is returning to Port-au-Prince for the
first time since the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake, repeats something she’s told us many times since we landed in the city: “I thought everything was broken.”
Built for 200,000 people yet home
to more than 2 million, Port-au-Prince is a city that constantly reminds
you of the obvious, as though you were a 6-year-old. No, not everything
is broken. And no, not all the people are dead. It is a city that
everything—political upheaval, fires, hurricanes, the earthquake—has
conspired to destroy, yet still it carries on. The still-leaning houses
and the rubble that has begun to grow weeds, the tent camps that have
become micro-cities of their own, all bear their own testimony to a city
that should have ground to a halt long ago, yet continues to persevere. The republic of Port-au-Prince, as
it is often called, is a city of survivors. It is a city where paintings
line avenue walls, where street graffiti curse or praise politicians,
depending on who has paid for them. It is a city of so much traffic that
it has become a city of shortcuts and back roads. It is also a city of
cell phones, where conversations sometimes end abruptly because someone
has run out of prepaid minutes.
It is a city of entrepreneurs, a
city of markets where the vendors are as numerous as the products being
sold. It is a city of music, from the street pharmacists who sing the
values of their wares, to the konpa music blasting from the
colorfully painted tap-taps. It is a city of canal-clogging foam food
boxes and discarded plastic. It is a city of trash being constantly
burned, of dust-covered trees.
It is now, too, a city of tremors,
tremors that are sometimes felt based on your level of experience with
previous tremors, where you might be sitting with someone and that
person feels the earth shake and you don’t feel a thing. It is a city
where sometimes you both feel the tremors and panic equally, especially
when others have dashed outside or leaped out of windows in fear.
It is also, you might be surprised
to learn, a city of readers and writers, where at the annual Fête Dieu
Livres en Folie book festival thousands of people stream into an old
sugar-cane plantation to meet 135 Haitian writers. Among those who show
up at the book festival are the former musician-president of the
country, the chief of police, senator-authors, and a former Army colonel
who has written a book profiling the current president.
What do you write when you’re asked to sign the colonel’s book?
You attempt in your best Creole, “Best of luck in your new career as a writer.”
My 25-year-old cousin Pat, who has just spent three days at a Port-au-Prince clinic recovering from cholera and is one of 800,000 Haitians who might get the disease this year, pensively watches this along with an older friend, Nèl, who like many Haitians believes that post-earthquake Haiti should have another capital, but is not sure it ever will.
“Port-au-Prince is one of the most indestructible places in the world,” Nèl likes to say. “People will live or die here, but Port-au-Prince will always remain.”
Edwidge Danticat is the author, most recently, of Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. She recently returned from her Native Port-Au-Prince, where she participated in the country’s annual book festival, Livres En Folie. These are her reflections on a city where she spent the first 12 years of her life and that she visits often.
