18670: Esser: Haitian Heartbeat (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

The New York Times
February 15, 2004

Haitian Heartbeat
By FIELD MALONEY

ICOT DUPUY got the call in the afternoon at his radio station, Radio
Soleil d'Haiti, in Flatbush, Brooklyn. It was one of his regular
listeners, a man whose nephew had just called from Port-au-Prince.
"The rebels have taken Gonaïves," the man told Mr. Dupuy.

Mr. Dupuy, Radio Soleil's 51-year-old manager and signature voice,
soon took to the air. "Mesdames et messieurs,'' he intoned in his
velvety Creole. "The rebels have taken Gonaïves."

Last week, as opponents of Haiti's president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
led uprisings in more than 10 Haitian cities that led to dozens of
deaths, Mr. Dupuy's words resonated in Manhattan taxicabs, in the
Haitian barbershops and restaurants on Nostrand Avenue in Flatbush
and in mini-mansions in Laurelton, Queens.

In New York's sprawling Haitian community, news travels by teledyol,
Creole for word of mouth. In this city, Mr. Dupuy is teledyol.

Crises back home and in New York are hardly new to Radio Soleil and
its listeners - Haiti is a country that has had 32 coups since 1804.
And in New York, the assault on Abner Louima by police officers in
1997 and the shooting death of Patrick Dorismond by a police
detective in 2000 shocked and galvanized the city's Haitian
community. But even when there is no crisis, Radio Soleil, the city's
first Haitian radio station, serves as a lifeline, umbilical cord and
town hall of the air for New York's 200,000 Haitians.

Near midnight last Tuesday, Mr. Dupuy paced back and forth in Radio
Soleil's cramped Nostrand Avenue storefront. His eyes were red and
pouched. From time to time, he collapsed into one of the armchairs in
the front room. Mr. Dupuy had spent the four days since the capture
of Gonaïves at the station.

His voice, usually as smooth as a good bottle of 25-year-old Haitian
rum, seemed worn and ragged. "Gonaïves is my hometown," he said.

Not all nights at Radio Soleil offer the bitter adrenaline of rebellion.

One slow, sultry evening last summer, for example, Mr. Dupuy spent
several hours preparing for that night's show, gathering Internet
news items to read and discuss from an eclectic pool of news media:
Agence France-Presse, WINS-AM (1010), Le Monde, New York 1, The
Guardian. Before going on air, he relaxed in his tiny office, his
feet up on his desk, his face half-hidden behind stacks of papers and
books, trash and bric-a-brac.

The walls were crowded with framed photos of Mr. Dupuy with
luminaries he has met: Mr. Aristide, Magic Johnson, Nelson Mandela,
Muhammad Ali. Every now and then the phone rang. Mr. Dupuy would perk
up, then answer: "Radio Soleil! Bon soir!"

Mr. Dupuy is no mere conveyor of information; his role in Brooklyn,
and in the city, is a strange mix of 1940's telephone switchboard
operator and the aging-don-as-neighborhood-fixer of the "Godfather''
movies. He is also a go-between for his fellow Haitians and the
puzzling, at times hostile institutions of their new home.

"I spend my day answering the phone," said Mr. Dupuy, who has a
courtly island manner and a foxlike grin. "Seventy percent of the
people that call need help with something. Sometimes young couples
have disputes, and they call me to mediate. People in the community
call me if they need help with city services. I'm there if there are
no other doors to knock. Sometimes I try to find them the right
lawyers."

New York and Miami share the distinction of having the world's
largest communities of Haitians outside Haiti, and since Mr. Dupuy
arrived in New York 33 years ago, during the first big wave of
Haitian immigration, the city's Haitian community has remained fluid
but steady.

In the absence of official numbers, exactly how many Haitians listen
to Radio Soleil is hard to determine. According to the station's Web
site, it has "half a million captive, dedicated listeners,'' a claim
that may reveal less about actual audience size than about marketing
goals.

Haitians tend to travel a great deal between Haiti and America. Many
New York Haitians even send their school-age children back to live
with relatives and attend school there, Mr. Dupuy said, worried by
the atmosphere in inner-city schools. But lately, as conditions in
Haiti have worsened - the average Haitian lives on less than a dollar
a day - movement between the two countries has become increasingly
one-way. In a poll of Haitians last year, more than 70 percent said
they would leave Haiti if they could.

Pockets of the city's sprawling Haitian population are scattered
throughout the five boroughs. But the biggest, densest and poorest
Haitian neighborhood is the section of Flatbush around Nostrand and
Flatbush Avenues, which is where Haitians usually land when they come
to New York.

Some eventually move out to more prosperous and suburban Haitian
enclaves in outer Queens, like Laurelton and Cambria Heights.
(Laurelton, in fact, is home to many of the Duvalier-era elite.
Emmanuel Constant, also called Toto, an anti-democracy paramilitary
leader, was last known to be living in his mother's brick colonial
there.)

But Mr. Dupuy swears by Flatbush. "You've got to be in Brooklyn,'' he
said. "That's where the action is."

And Mr. Dupuy seems to enjoy his stature. "Everybody knows me here,''
he said. "Once you come here, you've got to know me." The city has
many ethnic radio stations, but it is probably fair to say that no
other immigrants pursue radio with more intensity than the city's
Haitians do.

The Power of the Transistor

In Haiti, radio is king. In modern times, whenever there is a coup,
the first places to be shut down are the airports and the radio
stations.

When the father of Haitian radio, Jean Dominique - after almost a
quarter-century of antagonizing dictators, inciting popular
uprisings, weathering death threats and bombings, and helping both
topple and restore regimes - was assassinated four years ago outside
his Port-au-Prince radio station, he was given a state funeral in a
soccer stadium. The event was attended by tens of thousands of
Haitians, including Mr. Aristide. That day, the offices of Radio
Soleil were filled with mourners.

In 1971, when Mr. Dupuy left Haiti at 19 with his mother, radio was
emerging as a powerful means of grass-roots resistance. The previous
decade had brought the small, cheap, battery-operated transistor
radio, a godsend in a country that was then, and still, largely
without electricity. Mr. Dominique had started a station, Radio Haiti
Inter, that reported the news in a frank, take-no-prisoners style.

For Haitians, who were accustomed to a newspaper and radio culture
that for decades had essentially churned out French-language press
releases for the ruling Duvalier dictatorship, that approach was a
revelation.

And, as it happened, large swaths of the country's citizens had
recently been given transistor radios by American Protestant
missionaries. Tramping through the Haitian countryside and inner
cities in search of converts, those missionaries had handed out
transistor radios to poor Haitians to let them receive spiritual
direction from the 24-hour evangelical programming on Radio Lumière.

Despite the missionaries' intentions, Haitians soon spent more time
tuned into Mr. Dominique's Radio Haiti Inter and the dozen or so
small independent Haitian radio stations that had mushroomed in its
wake.

"The vast majority of the Haitian population is illiterate, but
Haitians are very politically astute," said Jonathan Demme, director
of a documentary about Mr. Dominique, "The Agronomist," that is
scheduled to open in New York in April. "Before Jean Dominique, the
airwaves were strictly French language. It was a way for the
Duvaliers and the upper classes to exclude the Creole-speaking masses
from radio and the national dialogue. Radio became the literature of
an illiterate people."

Mr. Dupuy added: "The transistor radio was a symbol of resistance.
All of a sudden, under the harshest dictatorship, there was a way for
people to say things they wanted to say." And gradually, he added,
"the transistor brought down Duvalier father and son."

In 1986 a popular uprising toppled Jean-Claude Duvalier, ending the
Duvalier family's 28-year dictatorship. Mr. Aristide was elected
president four years later.

Into the Void, a Voice

When Mr. Dupuy arrived in New York, there were no radio stations
serving the city's burgeoning Haitian community; today there are also
Radio Tropicale and a few Haitian newspapers to complement Radio
Soleil. Mr. Dupuy, who had dabbled in radio as a student in Haiti,
soon started a show on the radio station of Medgar Evers College in
Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Throughout his early years in New York -
while he worked as a bike messenger, earned a master's degree in
economics and finance at Pace University in Lower Manhattan, served
as host of a local public access cable show and worked in the audit
department at Chemical Bank - he was always running some kind of
Haitian radio news program at various community radio stations.

Eleven years ago, Mr. Dupuy was among the group of people who
renovated the humble Nostrand Avenue storefront that is home to Radio
Soleil. Friends gave them their old speakers and turntables, and they
bought additional secondhand equipment. They soundproofed two back
rooms with blue foam padding, hung up the red and blue Haitian flag
and a large photo of Mr. Dominique, and recruited a few men and women
who had worked in radio back in Haiti, and soon Radio Soleil was up
and running. (Soleil leases a subcarrier channel from the Spanish
station MEGA, effectively piggy-backing, at a different bandwidth -
97.6 SCA - off its Manhattan radio tower.)

Jean Monfistou, a cabdriver, is a typical Radio Soleil listener. For
nearly two decades Mr. Monfistou had been listening to Mr. Dupuy in
his taxi, on a radio cobbled together from used parts. He went by the
station to buy a radio so he could listen at home. (Because Radio
Soleil broadcasts on a subcarrier channel it requires special
receivers, which most of its listeners have rigged up on their own,
but Mr. Dupuy also sells them, and frequently gives them away, at the
station.)

He greeted Mr. Dupuy as if he were a celebrity. After the cabbie
left, radio in hand, Mr. Dupuy said: "The community is first. I'll
drop whatever I'm doing to go out and shake their hands and talk to
them. Some people get happy just to see me."

Fittingly, Radio Soleil was the first radio station to broadcast Mr.
Dominique in the United States. And, in a sense, Mr. Dupuy, politics
obsessed, a born showman and talker, emerged as Mr. Dominique's New
York heir.

Mr. Dupuy is a dogged supporter of Aristide, who he says has been
undermined by a Haitian press in the lap of a dirty-handed opposition
and by the antipathy of the international community.

But for some New York Haitians, Mr. Aristide's presidency is a
subject of debate. Down the street from Radio Soleil, a straw poll of
a group of Haitian men hanging out in a laundry indicated that Mr.
Aristide must go. When told of this, Mr. Dupuy sniffed that they had
been found in what was probably "an anti-Aristide Laundromat."

He added: "Millions of Haitians support Aristide. Forcing him to
leave goes against every notion of democratic fairness. The guy was
elected. The Haitian Constitution has to be the arbiter."

'Talking Is a Drug'

As the offices of Radio Soleil are a shrine to teledyol, it seems
appropriate that they also function as a community hangout and social
club, a place where radio is piped into the rooms and pours out onto
the sidewalk through funky little speakers. Impromptu groups of
Haitian men, and a few women, are always gathered in the front room,
lounging on two worn sofas under the Haitian flag and chatting away
in Creole.

On long summer nights - the closest Brooklyn ever comes to Haiti,
when the streets of Flatbush become most alive - the crowd spills out
onto the street in front of the storefront, the men leaning on parked
cars, the women rocking baby strollers along the curb.

On one such evening, Mr. Dupuy sat in his office, shirtsleeves rolled
up, fanning himself with a newspaper. He complained of fatigue, of
all the people who needed to see him. He had only 10 minutes to talk,
he said, but soon close to an hour had passed, and he was reminiscing
about his days in amateur theater in Haiti.

"I love Ionesco,'' he said. "I love the theater of the absurd. Life
is absurd. We talk because we are afraid of silence. Talking is a
drug."

Later, there was a knock on his door, and a clean-cut young man in a
leather jacket and khakis entered. Each day, short obituaries of
community members are read over the air, accompanied by traditional
music of mourning. The young man, speaking perfect English, told Mr.
Dupuy that he was waiting for his father, and that they had a death
announcement to give him.

Soon, a thin, wrinkled man in a white guayabera came in. He greeted
Mr. Dupuy, grabbing him by the shoulder as he shook his hand. The
country frankness in his manner contrasted with his son's urban
reserve. The son hung back as his father and Mr. Dupuy spoke in
Creole.

Finally, the son spoke up: "The police came to our house on Tuesday.
They had found my older brother's body in the woods in Prospect Park.
He had been strangled. We don't know when, perhaps Monday night."

Mr. Dupuy took down the obituary as the old man read the words he
wanted from a crumpled piece of notebook paper, and then escorted the
men out.

Back at his desk, he shook his head and let out a low, sad whistle.
"Strangled at 28 in the bushes in Prospect Park,'' he said. "There
were all kinds of questions the journalist in me wanted to ask back
there." But, he added, his job is to serve the community, and please
the family of the deceased. "So I just listened, and made sure I got
the spellings and the facts right."

With his homeland in free fall, Ricot Dupuy is grappling with how to
live up to Mr. Dominique's ideal that "radio could hold a mirror up
to the Haitian people, so they could bring about social change in
their own country."

For Mr. Dupuy, for all Haitians, nothing they can see in that mirror
seems clear, or hopeful. Last Thursday night, after finishing his
show, Mr. Dupuy shook his head and considered the day's news:

In Saint-Marc, the police had shot their way through a slum where
rebels were holed up, providing cover for burning and looting by
Aristide loyalists. In Cap Haitien, pro-Aristide militants torched
the house of a reporter for the opposition Radio Maxima. In Gonaïves,
rebels killed a man suspected of being an Aristide hit man by
"necklacing" him - putting a tire around his neck, dousing him in
kerosene and setting him on fire.

"Thirty years of military brutality in Haiti under the Duvaliers is
something no one can comprehend if you have not lived through it," a
weary Mr. Dupuy said. "It left deep scars on every Haitian. With
Aristide, we thought, 'Never again. That would never happen in my
country again.' "

Field Maloney is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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