A critical voice for his country
Haiti is never far from the thoughts of an editorial cartoonist forced to flee
‘You almost feel like you could go back in time five years, take a drawing from back then, and send it out again. It’s the same thing.’ TEDDY MOMBRUN on the situation in Haiti
As he talks about the bloodshed and threats that led him to Massachusetts, Teddy K. Mombrun does what he is best known for back in Haiti: He draws.
Mombrun is sketching a political cartoon on his notepad in the Mattapan immigration nonprofit where he works, 1,600 miles north of the turmoil engulfing his home. The image starts to take shape: A small crowd stands before a chalkboard covered with complicated algorithms and formulas. Above the scrawled solutions, Mombrun has written, simply: “Haiti.”
For Mombrun, a 39-year-old doctor who moonlights as a political cartoonist for Haiti’s oldest newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, the drawing is a jab at the convoluted proposals to fix his country’s entrenched crises, which have in recent months metastasized into what some experts call a low-scale civil war.
“The job of an editorial cartoonist is to educate and entertain and serve as a record,” Mombrun said in Haitian Creole through an interpreter.
In his country, he is known for doing just that. Guerlince Semerzier, a nonprofit consultant from Randolph who came from Haiti in 1990, calls Mombrun “very talented.”
“He’s very influential — he is one of the top political cartoonists in the country,” he said.
Mombrun, who fled Port-au-Prince in 2020, two months after he was threatened by armed gang members, now lives in Brockton with his wife and three children, ages 10, 6, and 1, and works in Mattapan, doing graphic design and social media for Immigrant Family Services. He remains preoccupied with Haiti’s ongoing strife and still sketches his commentary on unfolding events.
“When things are going well, I will show in a cartoon what’s going well, but also if something is not going well, and there’s
something that needs to be criticized, I will,” he said. “We don’t criticize authorities just to annoy them or just to anger them. We do it because we feel that the public needs to know what’s going on. Sometimes we feel like we don’t have a choice, we have to.”
Mombrun said his parents warned him he would be targeted for his political drawings. After all, there are only so many cartoonists in Haiti. They may have been right.
In August 2020, Mombrun was driving home from a dayside hospital shift in Croix-DesBouquet with a nurse he often carpools with in the passenger seat. Some 20 minutes into the drive, two motorbikes approached his white Suzuki SUV; one had two riders, the other just one. In traffic, one of the riders conveyed to Mombrun that he had a flat tire and should pull over.
When Mombrun got out of his vehicle, according to Mombrun and a police report obtained by the Globe, the men on motorbikes beat him. They had guns.
“We told you to stop, you better stop,” they told Mombrun, who immediately sensed they were talking about his drawings because he’d been threatened by others before. They did not mention a specific cartoon, but said they knew the route he took to and from work.
The men ordered the nurse out of the SUV and started beating her, too, Mombrun said. A crowd formed around them and started yelling at the assailants, which caused them to flee, Mombrun said. He is convinced they wanted him dead.
Mombrun surmises the men may have been affiliated with Haiti’s opposition party, as he had recently published a series of cartoons in Le Nouvelliste critical of what he saw as a political logjam caused by that party. But he acknowledges that such an assertion is speculation. He still doesn’t know who they were or their exact motivation.
Out of fear, he stopped going to work at the hospital. By the end of 2020, he had come to the United States, at first flying to New Jersey, then moving on to Boston, thinking he’d leave Haiti temporarily, that things would cool down. But in March of the following year, the nurse with whom he carpooled was killed by gang violence.
Charlot Lucien, a 59-year-old Foxborough resident, knows how difficult it can be to navigate the Haitian media landscape. Like Mombrun, he is a political cartoonist. He grew up in Port-au-Prince and drew for several publications, including Le Nouvelliste. In the mid1980s, before dictator JeanClaude Duvalier, known as “Baby Doc,” was overthrown, his anonymous drawings that critiqued the government circulated at demonstrations against the regime, he said.
“The level of acceptance of caricatures is a strong barometer to understand the degree of democracy and in Haiti in particular,” said Lucien, who moved to Boston in 1990.
Media in Haiti, Lucien said, are struggling with a credibility deficit, but La Nouvelliste is still well-respected. Mombrun’s work, he said, shows a clear understanding of the nation’s politics.
“He has a great sense of humor,” he said. “You look at one cartoon and you have a full picture of a political context.”
Mombrun said humor is often the best way to get a message across. Cartoons should also be timely, clear, and easy to understand, he said.
Mombrun is a news junkie. He needs to be, he said, to draw cartoons. Knowledge and context are key. He listens to a lot of Haitian radio. Once he has an idea for a drawing, he said, it only takes about an hour to complete.
Mombrun has enjoyed drawing for as long as he can remember. The first drawing he recalls as a small child was Donald Duck. Growing up, he liked Marvel comics, Dragon Ball-Z, and Tom & Jerry.
For political cartoonists, he counts Nate Beeler as an influence.
He started as a cartoonist with Le Nouvelliste in 2006. One of the chief challenges, he said, is coming up with new ideas as “politics in Haiti is perpetually repeating itself.” The pain points never seem to change: the cost of living, political corruption, and violence.
“You almost feel like you could go back in time five years, take a drawing from back then, and send it out again,” he said. “It’s the same thing.”
Mombrun keeps photos of his drawings on his Facebook page. One, which ran in La Nouvelliste earlier this month, shows a line of children marching into a kindergarten run by CARICOM, a coalition of Caribbean countries, under the gaze of a grim teacher. The children are Haiti’s diplomats, the documents they carry are their plans for their homeland. It’s a commentary on the lack of sovereignty Haiti holds in this moment, as well as the patronizing attitude of the international community.
Another cartoon from years ago showing a pair of identical Jenga-like towers laments the lack of adherence to building codes even after shoddy construction contributed greatly to casualties in the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010.
“Another earthquake today, and the exact same thing would happen, because nothing has changed,” he said.
Mombrun’s parents, who both worked for the government, wanted a different life for him, a good, solid career as a doctor, lawyer, or agronomist.
He went to medical school, he said, to please them. After seven years of school, a one-year internship, and a one-year residency, he was a general practitioner. The irony now is that in the United States, his graphic design work has allowed him to earn a living; his medical licenses don’t transfer.
Mombrun has had to start life over in a country with a new language, different food, and cold weather. He worries about his parents, whom he describes as reserved, quiet, church-going folk, back in Haiti. He’s not sure when he will be able to return. For now, his pen keeps him connected to his homeland. He continues to draw his critiques of what ails it.
“I want to go back to Haiti,” Mombrun said. “But I also want my children to grow up in a place that is safe and secure for them.”
“And right now Haiti is not that place.”