Dispirited
Claudine Corbanese
Brooklyn dazzled under an unexpectedly warm sun for so early in April, yet Lily sat forlorn at her kitchen table: the news she had dreaded was now official, Michel Martelly was the president-elect of Haiti; Michel Martelly, also known as the hard drinker, cocaine user, pop star Sweet Mickey who sometimes wore skirts on stage and occasionally mooned his public.
The forsythia bushes lining Lily’s porch had turned a vibrant yellow and the pink Magnolia on her sidewalk was blooming. Earlier that morning, she heard the coo of starlings and the tireless songs of sparrows flying about the cherry tree in the backyard. As she stared out of her kitchen window, she wished she could rejoice in the promise of spring, but she was too worried about the land of her birth.
She looked forward to seeing her friend Catherine later that morning. Now retired, they often met for lunch and a movie at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, making a day of it, enjoying their decades-long friendship and their lively discussions.
They had attended the same Catholic schools in Port-au-Prince and had done their homework together. As children, wearing their school uniforms, their hair braided and tied with colorful ribbons, they passed shanty dwellings every day on their way home. Women squatted on the side of the road and sold odd items spread on rags in front of them: home baked sweets, cigarettes, two-pieces boxes of Chiclets. Their children loitered around them, playing soccer with empty plastic bottles or making do with grimy stones as building blocks because they had no toys to play with and no school to go to.
This was also when Tontons Macoutes executed opponents and threw suspected dissidents in jail. The lucky ones were hustled to the airport, sometimes in their pajamas, or like Catherine and Lily, were sent abroad to study by their worried parents.
When Lily picked Catherine up just before noon, she was waiting for her sitting on her stoop. Before Catherine settled in the passenger seat, the friends gave each other a peck on the cheek. Lily kept her grey hair in a no-fuss short afro and favored eyeliner to accentuate her hazel eyes; Catherine’s hair was straightened and tied in a low bun. She liked burgundy lipstick. They both wore comfortable flat shoes and pants with elastic waist that their tight-clothes-loving granddaughters wouldn’t be seen dead in.
“How are you?” Lily asked.
“How do you think?” Catherine replied. “Sweet Mickey is the new president. Here we are, 25 years after Baby Doc and a step closer to total disaster.”
Even in elementary school, Catherine was more emotional than Lily and expressed her views more emphatically. A nun once punished her for uttering a few words in Haitian Creole during recess. Only French was allowed on school grounds, but in the heat of a hide-and-seek game, Catherine forgot. Sister Adrienne smacked her fingers with a ruler in front of the class. Lily wanted to cry for her friend, but Catherine looked at her under lowered eyelids, eyes flashing with anger.
“Let’s see what Martelly does,” Lily said.
“Oh please, you know that bum won’t do anything. He is just another power-hungry good-for-nothing demagogue. What burns me up is that we spent years fighting for democracy and here we are, decades later, with a clown for president.”
Catherine stared quietly out of the open car window then finally said, “If I had known this, I would have taken better care of my own life. I would have worked harder on my career. I would have gotten a better house, saved more. Instead I spent lots of energy, time and money on a doomed fantasy.”
Indeed they had spent hours, days, nights, thousands of them around the world, hundreds in New York City, instigating against the dictatorship with radio programs, newspaper articles and public rallies. Lily remembered the morning she saw on CNN the dictator driving to the airport with his family. It had taken 29 years, but at last the Duvaliers were gone. Halleluiah! Change would happen, at last.
As Lily drove slowly through Flatbush Malls, the fragrance of fresh air and wet dirt drifted into the car. Colonial revival mansions, holly shrubs nestled at their feet, large oaks on their lawns, lined the narrow streets. It would normally amuse them to gawk at the corner towers, the Italian cornices and the vast porches with white Roman columns, but Catherine and Lily were too engrossed in the news that troubled them to pay attention to the extravagant houses.
“We failed at everything,” Catherine said after a moment of silence.
Lily glanced at her friend. Of course they had not failed at everything. Catherine was being overdramatic. They had taught in a public school where many of the pupils were Haitians, literally just off the boat because their parents had taken them on the treacherous trip across the ocean, fleeing despair.
She thought of Dieudonné, a boat people orphan, who had spent time in a refugee camp before being placed in foster care. He came to her class at 8, illiterate, with eyes still terror-stricken by the ocean’s depth, ready to fist fight his way to the American way of life. But he learned to read and to hope. Most of the kids did. And on Haitian Flag Day, dressed in red and blue, they sang “Pour le pays, pour les ancêtrres.”
The memory made Lily smile. She wanted to share it with her friend to cheer her up, but Catherine was slumped in the passenger seat, quietly watching outside the car window. She was not thinking about their teaching career. She was thinking about Haiti. And that’s what they had failed at. The dictatorship had ended, but the misery and inequalities didn’t.
Lily tried to sum up in her mind what happened since and felt dizzy: military governments, a priest-turned-president-turned-demagogue, de facto prime ministers, contested elections, a seven-year-old United Nations mission. And then an earthquake of biblical proportions that destroyed Port-au-Prince at a time when Haiti was as impoverished and ill-prepared as ever.
“We didn’t fail at everything,” Lily said at last. “We were good teachers. We took good care of the kids. And our own children are doing very well too. All of them are professionals. There are no drug addicts in the group, no alcoholics, no jailbirds.”
“Yes and they are all selfish brats who are only interested in their iPads and iPhones. How many of them worry even a bit about Haiti or get involved in anything serious in this country? Make money and spend it. That’s all they are about.”
“They recycle. They give to charities,” Lily said, intent on keeping positive thoughts alive for both of them.
“They do the easy things that make them feel good: sort their garbage, pledge to Fund-Raising Hollywood concerts, donate to charities.”
Lily wanted to shake the uneasiness percolating in her gut. “Why don’t we go to the Italian place by Prospect Park,” she said. “I heard that they have a brunch now.”
Catherine and Lily liked brunches. For a modest sum, they could get a good meal. Even with their comfortable teacher retirement, they were careful spenders because they never overcame the feeling of uncertainty they grew up in, when a dictator’s cruel moods and power struggles dominated everything.
The restaurant did have a brunch menu: a dish of pasta and coffee for $11.99. The friends chose a table that faced Park Circle. It had been recently renovated and now had a pedestrian island with pine trees and steel benches. Across the intersection, Prospect Park trees looked heavy with new sprouts and blossoms. A group of horse riders on the Bridle Path leisurely crossed Parkside Avenue.
What a picture of wealth and serenity, Lily thought. Poverty was plentiful in the U.S., but it couldn’t be seen that morning on Park Circle. Catherine’s train of thought was the same as her friend’s. “Unemployment is still 9% in this country, right?” she asked.
“This is an affluent area of Brooklyn,” Lily replied. “You don’t see homeless people or beggars around here. And you can’t compare poverty in the U.S. and poverty back home. You know that.”
They both knew it. Poverty in the U.S. could mean homeless shelters and soup lines. Poverty in Haiti, before the earthquake, meant no running water, no electricity and sometimes a dinner of cookies made from mud. Now in the broken landscape of the Haitian capital city, for many citizens, it also meant living under a piece of tarp that leaked.
Catherine had recently gone to Port-au-Prince and came back horrified.
“The tents are now accepted as normal,” she said to Lily then. “The camps are like settled cities with named streets, self-appointed leaders and hoodlums. One of them offered to take me on a tour, for a fee of course, as if a refugee camp is a tourist curiosity instead of an aberration.”
A waitress brought them coffee and asked a cheerful, “Is everything OK?” They nodded in unison. The scene was perfect: joyful Italian folk songs playing in the background, red cotton gingham tablecloths, and penne pasta with vodka sauce sprinkled with parmesan.
Lily liked her coffee strong, sweet and hot. She inhaled its full aroma and sipped it, eyes closed. It felt good. She glanced at Catherine stirring hers. Her dark eyes had a faraway look.
“So, what can we do now to help?” she asked.
“What we have always done,” Lily replied. “When we can, wire money. When we visit, pack our suitcase with rice, toothpaste, sneakers-”
“A drop in the ocean,” Catherine interrupted.
“Did you give money to Jean-Robert to help repair the bridge in his village?”
“Of course I did.”
“So that’s what we do. Help our families survive. Make a road passable when it rains. Send books for a library. Gather medicine for a hospital.”
Catherine leaned over, boring into Lily’s eyes. “Remember when we believed we could bring about real change?” she asked. “It didn’t happen and it’s getting worse. What we are doing is no different from what our children are doing: well intentioned charity that helps, but resolves nothing.”
Lily stared at Catherine in disbelief. Is that all they were doing: Well intentioned charity that helped but resolved nothing? She felt a lump in her throat.
“But-” she started.
“And we don’t get extra points for understanding more or wanting to do more,” Catherine interrupted. “Yes we make some difference with money, food, books, medicine, but to transform Haiti into a democracy, into a country with education and jobs, to stop the corruption…” Catherine voice trailed off. “That’ll take a whole lot more than that.”
Lily took a sip of her lukewarm coffee. Her search for something positive to say came up empty.
“No one knows how to bring about real change in Haiti right now,” she finally said, “but it happened before, it will happen again.” She looked into her friend’s morose eyes. “Remember, the slaves’ victory against Napoleon’s mighty army? Remember?”
“We always come back to this, don’t we,” Catherine replied. Her voice strained with sarcasm and anger. “When all else fails, we search for pride in our past. The Victorious Slave Revolution! The First Black Republic! It was fantastic, but what have we accomplished since?”
“How about Charlemagne Peralte’s guerrilla warfare against the American occupation?” Lily replied. “How about the popular uprising that ended the Duvalier dictatorship? Do you need any more examples? You know real change can take a very long time. The French revolution happened after centuries of medieval darkness.”
“Oh Lily, that’s a real nice pep talk!”
It was a pep talk, but it was true: momentous change happened before, it would happen again.
Lily wanted to escape Catherine’s gloomy eyes and her own depressing thoughts—if meaningful change could take centuries, what could they expect to achieve then, over the course of their lifetime? She turned away from her friend and faced the restaurant’s large bay window. In her unfocused eyes, traffic around the circle seemed a mute meaningless loop of blended dingy colors.
A little girl skipped on the sidewalk. She was about five-years-old, had pigtails and wore a long blue sweater over a pair of jeans. She stopped in front of a dog, a small terrier with long brown hair, and squatted facing him. Her mother, a few steps behind, extended a protective hand, preventing the little girl from touching the animal. Lily imagined the conversation between the mother and the dog owner. “Can she pet him?” “Of course, he loves children.” The little girl ran her fingers along the dog’s back and then bounced away, pigtails flying in different directions. She reminded Lily of her grandchildren, the next generation.
“Jessica wants to help me set up an herb garden in the backyard,” she said.
“Where did she get that idea?”
“Her high school has an environment class. She also wants me to buy a composter. She says we all have to reduce our carbon footprint.”
“You’re going to do it?”
“Of course, I’m going to do it. I don’t want to disappoint one of my grandchildren. She reminds me of us when we were young and maybe her generation will do better than ours. Maybe there will be a confluence of wills to save the species. After all, if the Earth is not livable, dictatorship or democracy, greed or generosity, indifference or commitment, none of that will matter.”
“Oh Lily, you’re such an optimist,” Catherine replied.
They laughed because otherwise they might have cried. They lingered over their coffee cups, quietly crushed under the weight of their helplessness.
In the end, they didn’t go to the movies. Instead, they strolled in the park, arm in arm; two older women, comforted by the beauty of spring and their friendship. And as they strolled—they couldn’t help it—they debated ways to bring about decisive change in their homeland.
Brooklyn dazzled under an unexpectedly warm sun for so early in April, yet Lily sat forlorn at her kitchen table: the news she had dreaded was now official, Michel Martelly was the president-elect of Haiti; Michel Martelly, also known as the hard drinker, cocaine user, pop star Sweet Mickey who sometimes wore skirts on stage and occasionally mooned his public.
The forsythia bushes lining Lily’s porch had turned a vibrant yellow and the pink Magnolia on her sidewalk was blooming. Earlier that morning, she heard the coo of starlings and the tireless songs of sparrows flying about the cherry tree in the backyard. As she stared out of her kitchen window, she wished she could rejoice in the promise of spring, but she was too worried about the land of her birth.
She looked forward to seeing her friend Catherine later that morning. Now retired, they often met for lunch and a movie at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, making a day of it, enjoying their decades-long friendship and their lively discussions.
They had attended the same Catholic schools in Port-au-Prince and had done their homework together. As children, wearing their school uniforms, their hair braided and tied with colorful ribbons, they passed shanty dwellings every day on their way home. Women squatted on the side of the road and sold odd items spread on rags in front of them: home baked sweets, cigarettes, two-pieces boxes of Chiclets. Their children loitered around them, playing soccer with empty plastic bottles or making do with grimy stones as building blocks because they had no toys to play with and no school to go to.
This was also when Tontons Macoutes executed opponents and threw suspected dissidents in jail. The lucky ones were hustled to the airport, sometimes in their pajamas, or like Catherine and Lily, were sent abroad to study by their worried parents.
When Lily picked Catherine up just before noon, she was waiting for her sitting on her stoop. Before Catherine settled in the passenger seat, the friends gave each other a peck on the cheek. Lily kept her grey hair in a no-fuss short afro and favored eyeliner to accentuate her hazel eyes; Catherine’s hair was straightened and tied in a low bun. She liked burgundy lipstick. They both wore comfortable flat shoes and pants with elastic waist that their tight-clothes-loving granddaughters wouldn’t be seen dead in.
“How are you?” Lily asked.
“How do you think?” Catherine replied. “Sweet Mickey is the new president. Here we are, 25 years after Baby Doc and a step closer to total disaster.”
Even in elementary school, Catherine was more emotional than Lily and expressed her views more emphatically. A nun once punished her for uttering a few words in Haitian Creole during recess. Only French was allowed on school grounds, but in the heat of a hide-and-seek game, Catherine forgot. Sister Adrienne smacked her fingers with a ruler in front of the class. Lily wanted to cry for her friend, but Catherine looked at her under lowered eyelids, eyes flashing with anger.
“Let’s see what Martelly does,” Lily said.
“Oh please, you know that bum won’t do anything. He is just another power-hungry good-for-nothing demagogue. What burns me up is that we spent years fighting for democracy and here we are, decades later, with a clown for president.”
Catherine stared quietly out of the open car window then finally said, “If I had known this, I would have taken better care of my own life. I would have worked harder on my career. I would have gotten a better house, saved more. Instead I spent lots of energy, time and money on a doomed fantasy.”
Indeed they had spent hours, days, nights, thousands of them around the world, hundreds in New York City, instigating against the dictatorship with radio programs, newspaper articles and public rallies. Lily remembered the morning she saw on CNN the dictator driving to the airport with his family. It had taken 29 years, but at last the Duvaliers were gone. Halleluiah! Change would happen, at last.
As Lily drove slowly through Flatbush Malls, the fragrance of fresh air and wet dirt drifted into the car. Colonial revival mansions, holly shrubs nestled at their feet, large oaks on their lawns, lined the narrow streets. It would normally amuse them to gawk at the corner towers, the Italian cornices and the vast porches with white Roman columns, but Catherine and Lily were too engrossed in the news that troubled them to pay attention to the extravagant houses.
“We failed at everything,” Catherine said after a moment of silence.
Lily glanced at her friend. Of course they had not failed at everything. Catherine was being overdramatic. They had taught in a public school where many of the pupils were Haitians, literally just off the boat because their parents had taken them on the treacherous trip across the ocean, fleeing despair.
She thought of Dieudonné, a boat people orphan, who had spent time in a refugee camp before being placed in foster care. He came to her class at 8, illiterate, with eyes still terror-stricken by the ocean’s depth, ready to fist fight his way to the American way of life. But he learned to read and to hope. Most of the kids did. And on Haitian Flag Day, dressed in red and blue, they sang “Pour le pays, pour les ancêtrres.”
The memory made Lily smile. She wanted to share it with her friend to cheer her up, but Catherine was slumped in the passenger seat, quietly watching outside the car window. She was not thinking about their teaching career. She was thinking about Haiti. And that’s what they had failed at. The dictatorship had ended, but the misery and inequalities didn’t.
Lily tried to sum up in her mind what happened since and felt dizzy: military governments, a priest-turned-president-turned-demagogue, de facto prime ministers, contested elections, a seven-year-old United Nations mission. And then an earthquake of biblical proportions that destroyed Port-au-Prince at a time when Haiti was as impoverished and ill-prepared as ever.
“We didn’t fail at everything,” Lily said at last. “We were good teachers. We took good care of the kids. And our own children are doing very well too. All of them are professionals. There are no drug addicts in the group, no alcoholics, no jailbirds.”
“Yes and they are all selfish brats who are only interested in their iPads and iPhones. How many of them worry even a bit about Haiti or get involved in anything serious in this country? Make money and spend it. That’s all they are about.”
“They recycle. They give to charities,” Lily said, intent on keeping positive thoughts alive for both of them.
“They do the easy things that make them feel good: sort their garbage, pledge to Fund-Raising Hollywood concerts, donate to charities.”
Lily wanted to shake the uneasiness percolating in her gut. “Why don’t we go to the Italian place by Prospect Park,” she said. “I heard that they have a brunch now.”
Catherine and Lily liked brunches. For a modest sum, they could get a good meal. Even with their comfortable teacher retirement, they were careful spenders because they never overcame the feeling of uncertainty they grew up in, when a dictator’s cruel moods and power struggles dominated everything.
The restaurant did have a brunch menu: a dish of pasta and coffee for $11.99. The friends chose a table that faced Park Circle. It had been recently renovated and now had a pedestrian island with pine trees and steel benches. Across the intersection, Prospect Park trees looked heavy with new sprouts and blossoms. A group of horse riders on the Bridle Path leisurely crossed Parkside Avenue.
What a picture of wealth and serenity, Lily thought. Poverty was plentiful in the U.S., but it couldn’t be seen that morning on Park Circle. Catherine’s train of thought was the same as her friend’s. “Unemployment is still 9% in this country, right?” she asked.
“This is an affluent area of Brooklyn,” Lily replied. “You don’t see homeless people or beggars around here. And you can’t compare poverty in the U.S. and poverty back home. You know that.”
They both knew it. Poverty in the U.S. could mean homeless shelters and soup lines. Poverty in Haiti, before the earthquake, meant no running water, no electricity and sometimes a dinner of cookies made from mud. Now in the broken landscape of the Haitian capital city, for many citizens, it also meant living under a piece of tarp that leaked.
Catherine had recently gone to Port-au-Prince and came back horrified.
“The tents are now accepted as normal,” she said to Lily then. “The camps are like settled cities with named streets, self-appointed leaders and hoodlums. One of them offered to take me on a tour, for a fee of course, as if a refugee camp is a tourist curiosity instead of an aberration.”
A waitress brought them coffee and asked a cheerful, “Is everything OK?” They nodded in unison. The scene was perfect: joyful Italian folk songs playing in the background, red cotton gingham tablecloths, and penne pasta with vodka sauce sprinkled with parmesan.
Lily liked her coffee strong, sweet and hot. She inhaled its full aroma and sipped it, eyes closed. It felt good. She glanced at Catherine stirring hers. Her dark eyes had a faraway look.
“So, what can we do now to help?” she asked.
“What we have always done,” Lily replied. “When we can, wire money. When we visit, pack our suitcase with rice, toothpaste, sneakers-”
“A drop in the ocean,” Catherine interrupted.
“Did you give money to Jean-Robert to help repair the bridge in his village?”
“Of course I did.”
“So that’s what we do. Help our families survive. Make a road passable when it rains. Send books for a library. Gather medicine for a hospital.”
Catherine leaned over, boring into Lily’s eyes. “Remember when we believed we could bring about real change?” she asked. “It didn’t happen and it’s getting worse. What we are doing is no different from what our children are doing: well intentioned charity that helps, but resolves nothing.”
Lily stared at Catherine in disbelief. Is that all they were doing: Well intentioned charity that helped but resolved nothing? She felt a lump in her throat.
“But-” she started.
“And we don’t get extra points for understanding more or wanting to do more,” Catherine interrupted. “Yes we make some difference with money, food, books, medicine, but to transform Haiti into a democracy, into a country with education and jobs, to stop the corruption…” Catherine voice trailed off. “That’ll take a whole lot more than that.”
Lily took a sip of her lukewarm coffee. Her search for something positive to say came up empty.
“No one knows how to bring about real change in Haiti right now,” she finally said, “but it happened before, it will happen again.” She looked into her friend’s morose eyes. “Remember, the slaves’ victory against Napoleon’s mighty army? Remember?”
“We always come back to this, don’t we,” Catherine replied. Her voice strained with sarcasm and anger. “When all else fails, we search for pride in our past. The Victorious Slave Revolution! The First Black Republic! It was fantastic, but what have we accomplished since?”
“How about Charlemagne Peralte’s guerrilla warfare against the American occupation?” Lily replied. “How about the popular uprising that ended the Duvalier dictatorship? Do you need any more examples? You know real change can take a very long time. The French revolution happened after centuries of medieval darkness.”
“Oh Lily, that’s a real nice pep talk!”
It was a pep talk, but it was true: momentous change happened before, it would happen again.
Lily wanted to escape Catherine’s gloomy eyes and her own depressing thoughts—if meaningful change could take centuries, what could they expect to achieve then, over the course of their lifetime? She turned away from her friend and faced the restaurant’s large bay window. In her unfocused eyes, traffic around the circle seemed a mute meaningless loop of blended dingy colors.
A little girl skipped on the sidewalk. She was about five-years-old, had pigtails and wore a long blue sweater over a pair of jeans. She stopped in front of a dog, a small terrier with long brown hair, and squatted facing him. Her mother, a few steps behind, extended a protective hand, preventing the little girl from touching the animal. Lily imagined the conversation between the mother and the dog owner. “Can she pet him?” “Of course, he loves children.” The little girl ran her fingers along the dog’s back and then bounced away, pigtails flying in different directions. She reminded Lily of her grandchildren, the next generation.
“Jessica wants to help me set up an herb garden in the backyard,” she said.
“Where did she get that idea?”
“Her high school has an environment class. She also wants me to buy a composter. She says we all have to reduce our carbon footprint.”
“You’re going to do it?”
“Of course, I’m going to do it. I don’t want to disappoint one of my grandchildren. She reminds me of us when we were young and maybe her generation will do better than ours. Maybe there will be a confluence of wills to save the species. After all, if the Earth is not livable, dictatorship or democracy, greed or generosity, indifference or commitment, none of that will matter.”
“Oh Lily, you’re such an optimist,” Catherine replied.
They laughed because otherwise they might have cried. They lingered over their coffee cups, quietly crushed under the weight of their helplessness.
In the end, they didn’t go to the movies. Instead, they strolled in the park, arm in arm; two older women, comforted by the beauty of spring and their friendship. And as they strolled—they couldn’t help it—they debated ways to bring about decisive change in their homeland.
About the author
Claudine Corbanese was born and raised in France, but has lived in New York City in the midst of the Haitian community with her Haitian husband for decades. Over those years, she witnessed her friends’ determination against the Duvalier dictatorship, their elation when it was overthrown, and their high expectations when Aristide became president. The election of Michel Martelly brought more discouragement than she ever saw before. Many of her friends felt that they had failed at bringing about meaningful change in Haiti and that, because of their age, the possibility of accomplishing it in their lifetime was fading away. It is those feelings that she tried to convey in “Dispirited.” Claudine Corbanese’s work has been published in Temenos Journal, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, the MS Society’s Viewsletter, and several e-zines.