Free Heading South by Dany Laferrière Page B

Public Library, but I was never interested in the painting’s origins. The landscape existed so concretely to me that I never thought of attaching it to any particular place. Except for the place that existed inside me. But I took that place with me wherever I went. One day I was meeting an old friend at a bar not far from moma (the Museum of Modern Art in New York), and as I was a bit early (a mania with me) I decided to kill some time at the museum. There happened to be an exhibition of Haitian naïve art. And there, to my astonishment, were these enormous canvases (enormous in their quality more than in their dimensions) in the same style as my little landscape. It wasn’t so much that I had found a country; I had discovered a universe. An enchanted world. Brilliant colours. Animals, people (lots of people), mountains. Thatched huts on the flanks of blue mountains. Fish flying through the air. Cattle crossing swollen rivers. Cocks fighting. Marketplaces. Tall, slender women calmly walking down from the hills with heavy sacks on their heads. Children playing in dreamscapes. The sea. Everywhere, the sea. And no one looking at it. Natural life. Only after I had made a complete circuit of the exhibition did I begin to notice the names of the painters. The signatures danced in the corners of the canvases. Salnave Philippe-Auguste, the friend of the Douanier Rousseau (“I want to speak of Rousseau’s Dream. Just as one could say that everything is contained in the Apocalypse of Saint John, so, I am tempted to say, this huge painting includes all poetry, and with it all the mysterious gestations of our time . . .”—André Breton, 1942). The quote was printed across the back wall of the room in which the massive jungle scapes of Salnave Philippe-Auguste were hung. In another room: the imaginary villages of Préfète Duffaut. The maniacally delicate precision of Rigaud Benot. Jasmin Joseph’s candor. Saint-Brice, who drew me in and frightened me at the same time. And the immense Hector Hyppolite (a Homer who used colour instead of words). Most of all, what sealed my loyalty to these magical works was the natural way they dealt with death. Life and death intermingled. They even made me wonder if death didn’t precede life. For me, who had always been afraid of the dark, this was the first time I had felt calm when confronted with symbols of death (especially in the paintings of André Pierre). I don’t know what happened (the security guard came and cast an uneasy glance into the room, even though I was the only visitor), but I no longer felt as though a block of cement were sitting on my chest, preventing me from breathing, as I had felt since my childhood. These are my people! These are my people! These are my people! I must go back to my people! I felt like an animal that had strayed from its herd, and years later was beginning to find traces of it. I absolutely had to get myself down there immediately. It was a matter of life and death.
    I LEFT NEW YORK the next day, and have been in Haiti ever since. I lived in Port-au-Prince for a few months (I couldn’t stand the Bellevue Circle crowd for much longer, completely self-absorbed as they were; I wasn’t interested in re-creating in Port-au-Prince the artificial life I had just left behind in Manhattan), and then I met Solé, a farmer from Artibonite, and followed him here. I look after the house and our son Choual (which means “Horse”)—he’s the little blond-haired black boy playing football down there with his schoolmates— and sell the produce from our rice fields. Artibonite is in the part of the country that produces the most rice. Our rice is very aromatic. It’s the best in Haiti. If you’re ever in the region of Haiti that includes Hinche, Verrettes, Petite Rivière, Pont Sondé, Marchand-Dessalines, Saint-Marc or even Gonaïves, ask for the white farmer, and they’ll direct