2023-11-13 17:12:10
The Haitian author signs “Some country among my complaints”, his fifth collection with Cheyne publisher, a poetic tribute to his country struck by pain.
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“It is only with blood that I can fill a page,” wrote Jean d’Amérique in July 2021, in a cri-tribune written after the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse which further plunged his country in chaos. The young author (26 years old at the time and already five books under his belt), also a poet and playwright, said there what it is like to be from there, the identity of permanent witness of a land which tears himself apart, the smell of death trapped in his flesh: “To be Haitian is to be born in blood, to grow up in blood – or often not to have time to grow – and to end up in a puddle of blood. Being Haitian means waiting for your ball. It’s waiting for the bullet that will devour your breath, wherever you are in the country. To be Haitian is to hurry towards the beyond.”
There are still pages to write and blood to draw from. Jean d’Amérique, always prolific, has since directed several notable theater plays. And has just published Some Country Among My Complaints, his fifth collection with Cheyne publisher.
The first lines resonate as an echo of Presley’s In The Ghetto: it’s a child coming into the world, another mouth to feed, a violent birth. In this act I of a book separated into three, dedicated to the “memory of the hunger riots in Haiti in 2008”, it is the entrails which speak (“the call for help of the stomach”, the “scribbling of my intestines”). Hunger awaits the child, it is all around, it has been said, “death resting on our shoulders”.
The second part, which pays homage to the Artibonite River, “where UN soldiers relieved themselves, the infancy of a cholera epidemic that occurred in Haiti in the fall of 2010 and which killed thousands of Haitians”, is full of despair and anger. The third, entitled “moving forward despite,” takes the complaint elsewhere. Because in “this kingdom of dead flesh”, “we resist”. Starting with the poet who puts words and mixes them to try to create meaning in the intimate tragedy which is that of his people. “Moving forward despite, juggling my chances of loss, forming a line among hearses and flowers, standing up against requiems and multiple absences, the daily procession of a city heading towards the great cemetery.” A poetry to say that we can die infinitely and always be reborn.
Jean d’Amérique, Some country among my complaints, Cheyne publisher, 72 pp., 18 euros.
The extract
this country, ah this country, land of poets, we often say through all the windows to give its face some grace, under the arrogant wing of our caresses a formula which sometimes stutters: beyond the pages, beyond warm lights of our rage to live, no symptoms to diagnose us republic contaminated with poetry
this country, ah this country, land of poets, it is often said, but there is no poem in the corridors of parliament, a parliament of pockets to fill, there is no poetry in the wounds corroding our hugs, there is no poetry in the protocol of the embassies which piss in our rooms, our white lips before the empty music of the bowls do not honor the poem, childhood ordered to bet its flesh against bread does not gives birth to no poetry, there is no poetry possible neither in the police lines, nor in the official machine guns which pierce our suns, there is no poetry possible in the public treasury which lives far from the people, no poem no treasure
sometimes anger the aegis, workers’ strike of our waltz, through the streets flowered with tear gas we sail in search of an aroma worthy of the melody of the people, under the cocktails of reprisals we go down to see our struggles end in farewells, new absences which are the business of the major newspapers: “rabble fails to dribble coffins”
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