Haiti has dishonored the people who died in the earthquake 10 years ago
It is a word that conjures immense trauma and insurmountable pain: goudougoudou. It is unrepentant because the voice tends to break when it is uttered by those who lived it, or otherwise suffered from it — for it left an indelible mark on every Haitian, as if it were tribal scarification. It is the onomatopoeia created to name the rumbling sound of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that shook the country at 4:53 on the afternoon of Jan. 12, 2010.
The souvenirs are there, undiminished and undisturbed. I remember the date, the time, the place where I was standing in my garden, and the names of the extended family members and friends I lost when the fault lines ruptured. Goudougoudou caused considerable damage, including the deaths of close to 250 000 people, when it leveled Haiti.
There hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t thought of those brief seconds that shattered every absolute certainty I had until then. The day before the earthquake, I sat in the Oloffson Hotel restaurant having lunch with Myriam Merlet, one of the country’s foremost feminist leaders. What made the lunch memorable was not the Barbancourt rum in the punch or the creamy avocado in the salad, it was the significant conversation Myriam and I were having about strategies to empower more women to run for political office.
The following day she died, crushed by her house’s debris.
I am tempted to say we should not cry for what no longer exists, but be contented, even happy for what was. Still, I wanted to remember this date, not for its own sake, but rather as a way to honor the departed, in a manner they would feel proud they had died for us.
But in remembering them, I realize that what sets this great tragedy apart from so many others is that despite the massive aid efforts, we missed the opportunity to rebuild our country.
Even harder to comprehend, we did what my wise and since-departed mother often whispered, so shocking the affirmation :
— “In Haiti, we kill our dead.” That is the stuff that forces one to seriously ponder our depravity. We killed the earthquake victims again by not honoring their memory but rather, by desecrating it with unscrupulous political leaders’ lack of action to reduce the country’s pervasive inequality.
The rift between the Haiti of 2010 and the Haiti of 2020 is monumental, but it is one we, Haitians, must deal with.
We have regressed. The men in power in the past decade have not attended schools of morality and public service; they steal, they lie, they kill (humanrights organizations identified government employees as participants in the 2018 La Saline massacre).
They have assaulted our intelligence, our morals, our institutions.
Worse, at night, gangs of thieves and killers roam the streets under the malevolent eyes of the powers that be. Impunity is the norm. Complicity is the sport. Corruption is the religion.
I choose to be brutal rather than sentimental in coming to terms with the decade since goudougoudou. That is because until we reckon with the state of Haiti — as it is today — it will never prosper. Instead, it will continue its downward spiral into even more fragility or somalisation, like Somalia, a non-state.
Fortunately, there is the redemptive power of a movement for social justice and accountability born out of the PetroCaribe corruption scandal. We have gained a reality check and lost our illusions, but have not yet moved beyond this.
So, we commemorated the 10th anniversary of goudougoudou. The president laid a wreath in front of a monument, even though he and his predecessors had a decade to erect a dignified one to honor those who paid with their lives for the lack of vision and bad governance of past leaders.
Worse, nothing significant has been done to avoid a similar occurrence. Claude Prepetit, director of Haiti’s Bureau of Mining and Energy, doesn’t deny the overwhelming evidence of the inevitability of a major earthquake in the near future. His mantra? We need more resources, more people trained on how to survive and more anti-seismic construction.
But we should remember, in Haiti, there is always an unknown element that adds an additional perilous risk: Bon Dye Bon, a Haitian proverb — God is good.
As for my personal reckoning, I closed parts of myself forever. I also opened parts of myself that I didn’t know existed. But we don’t leave the things and the people we love — people I grew up with, people I revered, people I worked with, people I wished I had worked with.
After the memorials on Sunday, as I watched a rainbow decorate the sky and heard the wind bristling, I remembered a poet’s words: “Listen to the wind . . . The dead are not dead . . .” I knew I was listening to Tante Carmelle and Oncle Cavour Delatour, Anne-Marie Coriolan, Magali Marcelin, Myriam Merlet and the 250,000 others who died.