30106: Arthur (news) Haitian artists: forged in the fire (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: haitisupport@gn.apc.org


Haitian artists: forged in the fire

A group of young Haitian artists has created an extraordinary sculpture to
commemorate the abolition of slavery. And next week it goes on show in Britain.
Andrew Buncombe visits their workshop in Port-au-Prince to see the work in
progress

Published: 24 February 2007, The Independent (UK)

Dreams disrupt Natalie Fanfan's sleep. In them the young woman finds herself
walking in the street. Her friends are there and she waves to them. But rather
than greeting her, as she might expect, the friends confront her with guns
drawn. "This is our reality, how we live," she says. "It does not faze us
because it's happening all the time. It's being played out."

For Evelyne Lapaix, the mise en scène is a little different. She finds herself
in a war zone with the chaos of battle all around her. The 20-year-old
reflects: "There are so many gun shots all the time, on a daily basis it has an
effect on you. When you go to sleep you have these thoughts."

These are just two, brief snapshots from the lives of young people growing up
in
Haiti, the poorest and most broken country in the Western hemisphere, a country
just 90 minutes' flight from Miami, yet one that is rife with HIV and where 70
per cent of the population survives on just $2 a day. In this country that won
its independence more than 200 years ago, violence, rape and kidnapping are
commonplace. Equally as widespread is the desire among its young people to
leave. There is a certainty that Haiti has little to offer them.

Haiti is a country that rarely makes the headlines. When it does, it is almost
always for the wrong reasons - for a coup or a famine, for a hurricane that has
wrought disaster on its flimsy flood-prone communities. But Evelyne, Natalie
and
10 or so other young Haitians have been given a chance to tell their stories
and
share their experiences as part of an intriguing sculpture project that has its
physical and artistic roots in the very heart of Haiti's frantic capital,
Port-au-Prince.

Amid the junk and noise of an inner-city district, a group of Haitian artists
has been working with these young people to build a sculpture, jointly
commissioned by an international aid group and a British museum, designed to
reflect both the history of their country and their own personal experiences.
For the young people it has been an opportunity to discover more about
themselves as well as Haiti's past. And such rare insights will also be
available to people in Britain when the sculpture is unveiled on Monday at the
Merseyside Maritime Museum.

It is mid-morning on a hot November day and we are kicking our way past the
chickens and filthy puddles to reach the workshop of Jean-Hérald Celeur, André
Eugène and Frantz-Jacques Guyodo. Located off Grand Rue, one of the crumbling,
pot-holed main roads that bisect the capital, the workshop has steadily grown
into a jaw-dropping gallery of industrial, almost survivalist art that has been
built, literally, from society's debris.

Their work - deep, stark, sexually charged and yet sometimes humorous - has
been
put together from engine parts, hub caps, broken TV sets and scraps of metal.
Incorporated in the pieces are discarded shoes, plastic dolls, old batteries
and twisted pieces of rusting iron. Originally they collected their material
from the junkyards and workshops that surround their homes but nowadays they
have to pay for much of it. These days in Haiti nothing is given away.

Much like the group of young people they have been working with, the three
artists grew up amid the country's violence, and their work reflects that.
Guyodo leads the way into a tiny bedroom that also serves as a workshop. The
dark, humid room is full of images of despair; there are works made from human
skulls.

"The reason you see that sense of despair in there is that I also live in
there," he says. "You can see my pain and suffering in there ... This is where
I grew up. As a teenager there were many different choices but I chose to be an
artist. It was very hard for everybody during this period of time, but
regardless of the violence I also wanted to convey something more." He adds:
"Today we have to be about unity. To me it's time we started having a
discussion and a dialogue - Haitian to Haitian."

During the weeks that they have spent working with the three sculptors and the
project's artistic director, Mario Benjamin, an internationally recognised
Haitian artist, the young people have also been encouraged to think about art
and its power to reach people. They have visited the city's art collections and
taken virtual tours of international galleries by means of the internet. In a
world where every day can be a struggle to survive, they have been challenged
to think about the role of an artist in society and what that role ought to
be.

But driving the project has been the young people's own experiences and their
own narratives. You are the story, they have been told. What have you got to
say?

As it is, this group of a dozen or so young people, aged in their late teens
and
early twenties and all from the densely populated Carrefour Feuilles district
of
Port-au-Prince, has plenty to say. When we meet in the upstairs room in a
building owned by a local charity, Aprosifa, they sit in a circle of chairs and
share their experiences of Haiti.

Ronald Cadet is 22. His mother has 11 children, his father has five by another
woman. Asked to talk about the conditions in the country in recent years he
recalls an incident in the early spring of 2004, during the uprising that
ultimately led to the ousting of the former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
when clashes between pro- and anti-government forces were terrorising parts of
the country. He remembers how an armed gang of so-called chimères (violent
thugs), loyal to Aristide, were hunting for student opponents in
Port-au-Prince.

"At the time, the country was split into two. There were two groups shooting.
After the shooting there was a ceasefire and people went to their own places
but the Aristide group saw my friend and thought he was a student. They beat
him up and then they took him away," he says. A few days later his friend's
body was discovered. "They found him in the street."

Rosemine Almonort is 21. She tells how the country's constant backdrop of
insecurity and violence has had a clear psychological impact on her and others.
"You lead a stressed life. You always have the expectation of something bad,"
she says. "When someone you know goes out, you are always worrying about them
until you see them come back. My father works at night, he has no specific job
but whatever he can do to make a living. Sometimes he helps people moving and
lifting heavy things. One time he was attacked and robbed. Sometimes he will
leaving the house in the morning but not return until 9pm. It's a battle every
day."

Natalie, who is 23 and lives with her mother and father and five siblings in a
tiny, two-roomed home set alongside a ravine on the edge of Carrefour Feuilles,
said such insecurity, combined with the nation's grinding poverty, means that
all young people of her age think about leaving Haiti. They dream of getting
out, of escaping to the US.

"All Haitians think like this. It's a general mindset," says Natalie, whose
mother, Jessula, earns whatever money she can cooking and cleaning for other
families in their neighbourhood. "There is no hope here. You want to leave
because [elsewhere] you can have a life. Here you are just trying to survive.
It's fighting just to survive."

The sculpture on which the artists and the young people have collaborated was
commissioned jointly by Christian Aid and National Museums Liverpool, an
organisation that includes eight museums on Merseyside. A central idea of the
project - which will eventually go on permanent display in the city's new
International Slavery Museum - was to reflect that 2007 marks the 200th
anniversary of the f end of the transatlantic slave trade (though slavery
continued in parts of the British Empire until 1928). Furthermore, though
Haiti, a former French colony, became the first black republic in 1804, the
organisers wanted the young people to consider whether the country's poverty
and insecurity continued to act as a form of enslavement.

But perhaps just as importantly, the project has done something as simple as
providing a platform for ordinary Haitians to speak. One afternoon, sitting on
the verandah of the crumbling Olofsson Hotel, made famous by Graham Greene in
his novel The Comedians, Prospery Raymond, Christian Aid's programme officer in
Haiti, outlines some of his country's image difficulties.

"One of the biggest problems facing Haiti is that the world does not see
Haitians as they would like it to see them. In general it's always bad news,"
says the good-natured Raymond.

"When something good happens in Haiti the media never come. Even when we had a
good election [Haiti's most recent presidential election, in February 2006, was
largely peaceful and judged to be fair by international observers], the press
didn't write about how we had a fair election but how there was no electricity
in the office where they were counting the votes."

Of course, Haiti's problems must be put into a broader context. Those who would
wish to dismiss it as a "failed state" ignore its history of political
intervention, economic isolation and the string of thuggish dictators -
François "Papa Doc" and Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, Henri Namphy and Raoul
Cédras - who have wielded power from the white marble presidential palace in
Port-au-Prince.

> From its birth the country has faced tough challenges. Its independence from
France came at a price of 150m francs (an estimated £11bn in current money)
which Haiti sought to pay via the disastrous means of borrowing money from
France. Such was the burden that Haiti, occupied by the US between 1915 and
1934, only finished paying its "reparations" in 1947.

More recently, the outside world, in conjunction with some of Haiti's
wealthiest
individuals and members of its military, has undermined the nation's efforts at
developing a democracy. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, first elected in 1991, was
ousted in a CIA-backed coup that year, only to be reinstalled by President Bill
Clinton three years later. In 2004 Aristide was again ousted by opponents who
received backing and support from Washington.

Today, with the government headed by René Préval, Haiti is still struggling to
overcome the economic stranglehold of regulations imposed by the international
community when Aristide was returned to power in the mid 1990s.

In a recent report on the woes that economic liberalisation have brought to
Haiti, Christian Aid pointed out how the virtual absence of import tariffs has
devastated the country's agricultural sector - its largest income earner. In
Port-au-Prince the rice, milk, and sugar is more likely to be imported from the
US - where these industries are heavily subsidised - than locally produced.
Around 80 per cent of the country's export earnings go to buy imported food
while Haiti is ranked with Somalia and Afghanistan as having the worst
worldwide daily calorific deficit per head of the population.

"The gains made from trade liberalisation that the country has received are
few," says the report. "Any benefits that have been felt have mainly accrued to
a small number of privileged businesspeople who became involved in trade as
importers."

When we finally see the sculpture that the artists and the young people have
been working on, it quickly becomes apparent the weeks of effort have not been
in vain. The result is remarkable. Located within the mangled, multi-layered
metal are 27 faces, there are limbs, there are bodies. There is part of a
computer, there are pieces from a motorbike, there is part of a shovel and a
pitchfork. Before the work is shipped to Britain, the artists say it will be
sprayed with metallic silver paint.

"It's the past, present and future," enthuses Eugène. "The lower level is
people
suffering. They have to work to support the others ... the person on top is
seeking freedom for the rest of them."

Any project involving so many people cannot help but involve making
compromises.
Benjamin, the artistic director, expresses concern, for instance, that placing
violence and insecurity at the heart of the sculpture will only perpetuate the
country's desperate image. He yearns for a day, he says, when he, Celeur,
Eugène and Guyodo are judged simply as artists, rather than Haitian artists.
"Some people focus totally on the fact we're from Haiti," he says.

Yet, the assessment of the young people about the sculpture is overwhelmingly
positive. One after each other, they line up to explain what the sculpture
means to them, how it reflects their experience of living in Haiti.

"When I look I see a group of people coming together fighting for freedom. That
is what it represents. It's a revolution," says 22-year-old Sadraque Saintilus.
Evelyne, the young woman who has nightmares of being in a war zone, says: "To
me, when I look at it, it shows when we were bound and in chains and the fight
we had to free ourselves." Daniel Cadeau, another 22-year-old, says: "I think
it reflects our future. It talks about the past but it is also telling us about
the time ahead."

For Natalie, who was chosen to accompany Benjamin and the three other artists
to
Britain, the sculptors have somehow managed to incorporate everything the young
people discussed with the artists during their workshop sessions. This piece of
art, built from scrap and inspired by experience, speaks of Haiti's slave
background, its rebellion against the French, its struggle to compete in the
modern world. Yet, perhaps most powerfully, she suggests that it represents
people coming together for the common good. "It's a group of slaves, 27 slaves.
Each plays a significant role. Two big guys are up front. They are at the head
of the revolt."

For further information see:
www.pressureworks.org
www.atis-rezistans.com



----------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.