=?x-unknown?q?25590=3A__Schuller=3A__fwd=3A_S=E8_Simone=3A_?==?x-unknown?q?Eulogy_for_a_Heroine_=28fwd=29?=

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Mark A. Schuller <marky@umail.ucsb.edu>

Sè Simone: Eulogy for a Heroine

 Beverly Bell, July 2, 2005



"It was thanks to God and Sè Simone".  I heard this over and over as I was
interviewing rape survivors in Martissant, one of Port-au-Prince's ubiquitous
slums.  The women were battling the devastating emotional and often physical
effects of rape and beating at the hands of the soldiers and paramilitaries
during the coup d'etat of l991-1994.  They were simultaneously facing blame and
social stigma from their community for having been raped, frequent rejection by
their male partners, threat of political repercussions if they spoke out,
indescribable poverty, and the exhaustion of trying to keep themselves and
their children alive each day.  My question to these women, which so often
invoked Marie Simone Alexandre's name, was "From where have you found the
strength to go on?"

I resolved to meet this force whose name was regularly uttered next to God's.  I
did, and --like the women of Martissant and so many others-- was utterly
inspired.  Our close personal and political relationship lasted for more than a
decade until this week, when Simone slipped away from a coma after her third
operation for a large brain tumor.

It turns out I had met Simone many times before, though each of us was faceless
and nameless to the other.  Still, our relationship had been a close one,
forged during the years of the U.S.-backed coup when rape was regularly used as
a weapon of war.  My end of our partnership involved generating broad publicity
and international pressure to the rape, as well as the other crimes of the
illegal regime.  The chilling statistics and devastating testimonies regarding
sexual assault and other violence were faxed out of Haiti under cover of night
from constantly changing underground locations.  The origin of much of the
information on rape, I learned years later, was Simone.  She gathered it at
tremendous risk to her life, venturing where all others feared to tread to
document the brutality and transmitting it to SOFA, a women's advocacy
organization.

Simone told me in an interview for the book Walking on Fire, where she appeared
under her chosen nom de guerre Louise Monfils: "I gathered information from
many women, house after house.  The [women] trusted me so much that if they
learned of another woman, they would run to tell me.  They would bring that
woman to me.  I would say, 'Thank you, my sister.' Then I would meet with her
and help her like the other ones.

"I couldn't write anything, absolutely nothing, in front of them.  My head had
to be clear.  When five or ten people were telling me the story of their rapes,
I had to remember all the names, all the details.  I'd take the information and
I'd say, 'Okay, I'm going to leave now, but I'll see you soon, hear?  I'll come
back to see you.'  As soon as I got on the road, I'd look for a place I could
stop.  I'd sit down and write down everything the women told me.  And the next
time I met with them, I'd bring my notebook.  They'd think it was a personal
notebook.  I'd question them again, trying to review my earlier notes very
subtly without their knowing.  Then I could verify that the previous
information was correct.  If I missed something, I could add it.  Cheri, that
was very difficult work but I had to do it.  I did it because I needed the
information."

Simone was not only a front-line human rights worker, she was a self-taught
therapist and organizer.  It was not hard to see why survivor after survivor
cited Simone as one of their two fonts of healing.  Acting out a typical
encounter with a woman who had suffered rape in her evocative high theatric,
Simone described how "she would start to cry.  She'd put her head on my
shoulder and cry and I'd rub her back.  I'd say, 'You shouldn't be ashamed.
It's those guys who should be ashamed!  They're savages.  Only beasts could do
such a horrid act.'  I'd tell her, 'Love is something that's too good, too
precious, for you to feel ashamed when you've been a victim.'  I would tell her
not to cry because we're there for her.  We're there!"

And here would come in her role as a tireless organizer.  "Meeting with them as
victims of rape wasn't enough.  When we finished taking their testimony, we
needed to get them together and get them to form a women's organization.  We
helped them understand their rights.  Also, we wanted to help these women be
the owners of their bodies.  No one else may have control over their bodies.
Nobody may have authority over them."

Simone's whole life was about helping marginalized people attain knowledge,
voice, and power.  In the l980s she organized peasant groups and Christian base
communities.  She helped community members gain popular education, build
collective silos to store grain and seeds, and organize themselves into the
democracy movement.  Much of her life then, as later, was spent underground,
especially when in the l987 attacks against the tilegliz (little church)
movement to which Simone was deeply attached.  She repeatedly fled from one
area to another, often running with nothing but the clothes on her back.  "I
ran though the forest, through the woods and the bushes.  I slept at different
friend's houses along the way: one night here, another night there.  Once, oh!
I was so hungry.  I went into a strangers garden and pulled up a cassava plant.
 I took three cassavas.  I said to myself, Well, if they want to arrest me, now
they can get me for stealing."

In l990, Simone's home and all her belongings were burned by soldiers in Piatte
during their massacre of peasants. Simone almost lost her life, but not the
nerve or the quick thinking that she always employed.  "I ran and hid myself in
some rocks beneath a waterfall.  I saw all the killing, everything they did.
Every little while I stuck my head out to see what they were doing, and I took
notes.  I unwrapped the paper from a cigarette and wrote down everything.  I
folded the paper, put it in the plastic wrapping from a cigarette pack, and
stuck it in a hole in the hem of my dress.  Even if they had searched me, they
wouldn't have found anything.

"I slipped into the middle of the killers and moved right along with them.  They
thought I was one of them.  People told me later they thought I'd vanished in
thin air.  It wasn't true!  I took a chance and walked right in the middle of
the crowd that had just committed the massacre."

Simone engaged in any work she could find, paid or unpaid, that would empower
people beaten down by repression and poverty.  She served on the board of
advisors of the Lambi Fund of Haiti.  To the best of my knowledge, she worked
as health promoter and women's sexuality educator with CRAD, as community
development worker with American Friends Service Committee, and as outreach
worker with APROSIFA in its project of promoting the Hesperian Foundation's
Where There Is No Womens Doctor. While on a speaking tour with me throughout
the U.S., she blew audiences away with her riveting descriptions of life in
Haiti and her impassioned call for international solidarity.  It seemed that no
one came away from hearing Simone unchanged.

Interactions with Simone were always dominated by her stories of struggle.  As
hard as her life was, her focus was on those whose lives were much harder; she
never forgot their fates for a moment.  Often she would sigh heavily and cluck
her throat in despair, but then would quickly move on to talking about the need
for people --especially women, by whom she was consumed-- to organize to gain
democracy and rights.

Under tremendous duress, Simone put herself through nursing school in the early
2000s.  She was committed to getting quality health care for indigent women,
and fought for the time to study while working at odd jobs that would support
her two sons and pay her meager rent.  Her nursing career was short-lived and
challenging. I recall her talking about her struggle to get the money for the
white stockings that she required to wear, and about how many hours a day she
spent fighting public transportation to get to her job. Simone's eyesight
quickly deteriorated so much from her as-yet undetected brain tumor that she
could not continue her career.

The one time I ever saw Simone happy and relaxed was when she won a fellowship
and plane ticket to attend a two-week meditation retreat in the mountains of
New Mexico.  I drove up from my home in Taos one day to visit her.  I found her
on a silent day, eating lunch in the old lodge.  She led me outside under a
grove of aspen trees to engage in illicit conversation.  "Bev, little sister!
I'm not dominated by horrible images, my heart isn't pounding.  This meditation
is wonderful therapy."  Typically, Simone's first thought was how to export the
healing experience back to traumatized women in Haiti.  We received a
commitment that one of the meditation teachers would go to Haiti to teach a
seminar, but that never materialized.

A couple of years later, in the early 2000s --still traumatized from the
violence that she witnessed and lived, physical as well as structural-- Simone
jumped a tourist visa and settled in Florida.  There, impoverished, alienated,
and undocumented, her work became that of sporadic cleaning of hotels and
working in restaurant kitchens.

Still, her dream was to start an organizing and rehabilitation center for
Haitian women especially survivors of domestic and state-sponsored violence--
where they could claim their dignity and their rights.  Her lack of access,
English, administrative skills, and fundraising knowledge forever thwarted that
dream.

Simone's doctor discovered a brain tumor, and while a first operation seemed to
successfully remove it she was left legally blind.  She was so poor that for at
least a year (until she mentioned the fact to me on the phone one day) she did
not even own glasses.

Over the course of time, some combination of physical and psychological trauma
caused  Simone to increasingly isolate herself in Miami and later Homestead,
Florida.  She broke connections with many former colleagues, turned down a job
offer at Partners in Health, and moved from house to house. She never recovered
from the effects of what she had lived and seen in her native land, and her
brain tumor grew back aggressively.  A second operation for it last week
resulted in internal bleeding; a third emergency operation to repair that was
unsuccessful.

Simone's story reflects many aspects of the story of Haiti.  Her unflagging
determination for justice never succeeded in the large.  It was thwarted by
violent and corrupt leadership, legal impunity, and a U.S. government hell-bent
on stopping forward moves toward democracy and economic rights.  Nevertheless,
Simone's ferocious organizing, advocacy, and counseling were able to nurture
the dream, and to nurture healing and vision within the wounded dreamers.  Her
efforts, among those of so many Haitians, are what fuel hope for the country.

Simone also reflects another element of Haiti's history: lack of support for
Haiti's best resource, its citizenry.  In her work Simone not only had to fight
against institutional powers, but also against some sectors in middle-class
feminist civil society who rejected her.  While she never sought acclaim, she
did need basic resources, open doors, and alliances to sustain her while she
did her imperative work; lack of those things always saddened and frustrated
her. Choosing exile over poverty, thwarted democracy, and lack of solidarity,
Simone was lost to the diaspora, where she became one more nameless ilegal.
In her final year of illness she was lovingly cared for by a U.S. American
member of her church, but otherwise died alone, devastated, and unrecognized
for the heroine she was.

Recounting for Walking on Fire her "true Calvary" of working with rape survivors
during the coup d'etat, Simone told me, "It was like I was walking with my
little coffin under my arm.  But even if the [rapists] had beaten me, it
wouldn't have mattered.  It would have been because I was part of something
just and noble.

"I didn't want to have a heavy heart when I was going to bed because my
conscience was troubling me. With a conscience, when you do wrong, you know it.
 You can't sleep at night.  When you do good, frankly, you feel well.  You lie
down and say, 'Dear God, I feel good',and then sleep carries you away."

Sleep well, Sè Simone.  Ou mewite sa.  You deserve it.