15568: Simidor: More on Fr. Adrien and Holy Spirit library (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Daniel Simidor <karioka9@mail.arczip.com>

Hidden Treasure
By Alan Friedman

AS HAITI MAKES ITS HALTING WAY BACK TO DEMOCRACY, A PREMIER
ARCHIVAL COLLECTION ON HAITI AND SLAVERY, SCATTERED AND CONCEALED
FOR 30 YEARS IN BASEMENTS OF BUILDINGS THROUGHOUT PORT-AU-PRINCE,
COMES OUT OF HIDING.


BEFORE TAKING REFUGE himself 26 years ago when he fled the
Duvalier regime in Haiti, Father Antoine Adrien delayed his
departure to tend to the politically endangered of another nature.
At a time when so many cultural institutions and historical
records were being destroyed, Adrien vowed to save the Spiritan
seminary library. As if he were sending Moses down the Nile, he
bundled the seminary's collection--10,000 books and 70 boxes of
archives--and stashed it in sympathetic homes throughout Port-au-
Prince.

Now, with democracy being restored, Adrien returned to recover his
precious boxes, brushing off almost three decades of dust from one
of the western hemisphere's most extensive collections on the
histories of Haiti, the Caribbean, and slavery. The library offers
an amazing range of archival documents: records of a 1791 slave
revolt, slave ship journals, transcripts from debates over the
wording of the Haitian constitution, and French-, Spanish-, and
Creole-language newspapers. A sepia-toned photograph of a
slave breaking her back in the fields, another of the liberator
Toussaint L'Ouverture have been returned to their hooks. From a
painting, the Virgin Mary once again watches over this assembly of
nearly lost souls.

Unfortunately much of the material hasn't aged gracefully. Though
faring better than the Haitian people--the bloodiest years in
Haiti's history left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands
exiled--the library's singular collection has fallen victim to
mold and water marks. Books and journals printed on highly acidic
nineteenth-century paper have embrittled to the point of
disintegration. Insects have nested in newspapers dating from 1800.

As experts in preservation and rare books, respectively, School of
Information Sciences profs Sally Buchanan and Father Stephen
Almagno traveled to Haiti expecting to prescribe a plan for
preserving and cataloguing only a modest collection. Instead, they
found themselves in awe of the depth and rarity of the materials.
To Buchanan, that the collection survived the Duvalier and
subsequent military regimes seems nothing short of
miraculous. "Books represent, if not the truth," she reflects, "at
least another version of the truth. It's what they represent that
makes it necessary for them to be destroyed. Information provides
people with the tools they need to decide right from wrong, which
is a great threat to authoritarians. Libraries help to maintain
our democratic state. Duvalier couldn't allow information to be
made available to the poor, the repressed."

"Duvalier was concerned about archives, records," Almagno
adds. "If we destroy you and destroy your family, then it's very
important that we also destroy the records about you. If I'm
expropriating your property, it's important to say that that
property never existed." Of course, the library's manuscripts of
twentieth-century Haitian writers and rare sixteenth-century maps
of Port-au-Prince possess great intrinsic value. But for this
country's impoverished majority, whose political voice has yet to
be heard, what means the most are things like the nineteenth-
century guide to Port-au-Prince, which names every family, street
by street; the room full of newspapers chronicling the day-to-day
affairs of the people. For those from whom so much has been taken,
these records of more peaceful, if not more prosperous, days offer
a source of pride in their state and a more hopeful vision for
their future.

Buchanan and Almagno faced a formidable challenge in trying to
save the library. They prescribed ways to safely clean and repair
the paper and bindings, underscored the value of publicizing the
material on an international bibliographic network, and
recommended microfilming to ensure survival. Almagno points
out that the loss of the library would be tragic. "It preserves
all Haitian culture," he says. "This is really the cultural
patrimony of the nation."

"To move on," former Haitian president Aristide has said, "you
have to be willing to tolerate certain aspects of the past." As a
window into Haiti's history, the library may provide some guidance
to help heal the nation. In fact, with the addition of new books,
the library is setting an example of recovery and growth. Although
a new section focuses on the plight of Haitian refugees, every
page that spent years in hiding is a study in exiles finding their
way home.