Create Dangerously Part 6

Like Hyppolite, Basquiat was extraordinarily prolific during his short career, and before settling primarily on canvas both men used all types of tools and surfaces from spray paint (Basquiat) to chicken feathers (Hyppolite), doors (both Basquiat and Hyppolite), bed frames (Hyppolite), helmets (Basquiat), and mattresses (Basquiat). Whether any mystical dreams had led him to that conclusion we don't know, but a teenage Basquiat had announced to his Haitian father that he would be "very, very famous one day."

Because he was a lifelong sevite, a devotee of Vodou, an older and more mature Hector Hyppolite-who was fortynine years old when he was "discovered"-saw his art as a gift from the lwas and carefully tried to balance its demands and rewards. The canvas, for Hyppolite, was just one more s.p.a.ce in which to serve the lwas, and when he served them properly they rewarded him with ideas for paintings.

Later, as his career flourished, Hyppolite would continually consult with the spirits, requesting their consent to remain an artist, especially as his hectic engagement with his art began to leave less time for his work as a Vodou priest, or hougan (spelled ougan in today's Creole).

"I haven't practiced vaudou [an alternative spelling of Vodou] for a while," he told Selden Rodman, during one of the collector's visits to the artist's dirt-floored, palm-frond shack. "I asked the spirits' permission to suspend my work as a hougan, because of my painting. . . . The spirits agreed that I should stop for a while. I've always been a priest, just like my father and my grandfather, but now I am more an artist than a priest."

In a collective religion like Vodou, Maya Deren wrote in Divine Hors.e.m.e.n: The Living G.o.ds of Haiti, "to create a physical statement (whether a painting or a drum beat) . . . would require an individual at once saint and artistic genius."

Why?

Because, wrote Deren, "virtuoso is the province of divinity. Only the loa are virtuosi."

Also believing this, even though he was possibly the most famous Haitian artist of his time, Hector Hyppolite painted as though he were what Maya Deren labeled an anonymous inventor, a member of a collective run by the G.o.ds.

Though he didn't always cite the island nation as a direct influence, Basquiat was certainly aware of, if not Hyppolite, certainly Haiti. Basquiat was perhaps asked about Haiti as much as he was about Puerto Rico and the continent of Africa, about which he told Demosthenes Davvetas of New Art International, "I've never been to Africa. I'm an artist who has been influenced by his New York environment. But I have a cultural memory. I don't need to look for it, it exists. It's over there, in Africa. That doesn't mean that I have to go live there. Our cultural memory follows us everywhere, wherever you live."

It is perhaps out of a similar cultural memory that many of Basquiat's Haiti-related paintings emerged, paintings like Unt.i.tled 1982, which has HAITI printed in bold letters on the canvas. Above the word HAITI is a partially masked face and Basquiat's signature crown, floating beneath the word LOANS, highlighting Haiti's ma.s.sive debts and tracing the history of those debts from the conquistador Hernan Cortes to Napoleon Bonaparte, whose first name is crossed out, down to one of the leaders of the Haitian revolution, Toussaint L'Ouverture, whose name is underlined. Even Basquiat's choice of that particular spelling of L'Ouverture's self-designated last name-which is most often spelled Louverture-makes L'Ouverture a figure that is closer to Legba, the master of the crossroads, "the opening," the one through whom we enter. Near the word HAITI in the painting is the word SALT, which is, according to Haitian legend, what one gives to zombies in order to liberate them from their eternal bondage, to make them human again.

Toussaint L'Ouverture reappears with a black hat and sword in Basquiat's 1983 painting Toussaint L'Ouverture Versus Savonarola. Here Basquiat enrolls the Black Spartacus to battle the Italian priest and destroyer of so-called immortal art. Who wins that battle in Basquiat's mind? Perhaps one day this painting may inspire some type of avant-garde video game.

Haiti, like Puerto Rico and the continent of Africa, was obviously both in Basquiat's consciousness and in his DNA, but they were not there by themselves. Basquiat did not belong to any fixed collective. He freely borrowed from and floated among many cultural and geographic traditions. Like many other culturally mixed, first- or second-generation Americans, his collectivity was fluid. He was symbiotic and syncretic in the same way that Hector Hyppolite's Vodou paintings were, mixing European Catholicism and African religious rites and adapting them to a world made new by the artist's vision or, in both Hyppolite's and Basquiat's case, visions.

In digging deeper for a Haitian influence in Basquiat's oeuvre, one might identify as Ogoun his arrow-wielding men or as a tribute to Baron Samedi and Erzulie his heart-covered skulls and crosses. But even if this were undeniably true, even if Basquiat were, like Hyppolite, purposely drawing veves and other visual tributes to the lwas, he was also trying to repel ghosts, much like the sad and frightened-looking young man in the painting of that name. A young man who seems almost split in two, wearing a cross (or is it an ankh?) around his neck, while leaning on an old man's cane, like Legba, the gatekeeper, the lwa who mediates between the world of the spirits and the world of mortals, the G.o.d who stands at physical and spiritual intersections, the one to whom one has to say to be allowed safe pa.s.sage, "Papa Legba, please make a way, open the gates for me."

The bottom half of the young man's body in To Repel Ghosts is claimed by an unfinished heart. Might it belong to Erzulie, the Haitian G.o.ddess of love, who often demands ritual marriage to promising men, something to which Hyppolite might have been more amiable than Basquiat? Hector Hyppolite would never think of repelling his ghosts. He welcomed them. They had chosen him, inspired him. They had nurtured his art. Maybe they'd done the same for Basquiat, but something may have been lost in the translation and Basquiat may not have been able to recognize or understand them.

Basquiat died of a drug overdose in 1988 at age twenty-seven. Perhaps if he had lived, he would have learned to embrace these types of ghosts, among his many others. We never got to see, for example, how Basquiat's brief and much-antic.i.p.ated trip to the Ivory Coast might have affected his work. He might have altered his style a bit (or not) or he might have changed directions completely, becoming the poet he'd told friends he wanted to be. Hyppolite too might have changed styles or direction had he not died of a heart attack in 1948 at age fifty-four. Who knows where the spirits might have led them both? Or maybe they had fulfilled their missions and had nothing more to do or say, or create.

In Vodou, it is believed that when one dies, one returns to Ginen, the ancestral homeland from which our forebears were taken before being brought to the New World as slaves. Ginen stands in for all of Africa, renaming with the moniker of one country an ideological continent which, if it cannot welcome the returning bodies of its lost children, is more than happy to welcome back their spirits. In Vodou, it is also believed that possession, trance, is an opportunity for the spirits to speak to mortals and the person who is in trance, or possessed, becomes the vessel, the chwal or divine horseman or horsewoman, through whom the spirits speak. Both Basquiat and Hyppolite were in a type of trance, divine hors.e.m.e.n, possessed, as their hyperproductivity shows, by spirits they were seeking to either welcome or repel. Possession, however, is not supposed to last a lifetime. Neither the body nor the mind could bear or sustain it.

It may be that Basquiat knew this all too well. When Marc Miller asked him about the Haitian primitives who should have been nailed to his walls, perhaps all Basquiat could think of was the primitive in the mirror, the anonymous inventor, who was plucked from obscurity and turned into a G.o.d only to be continually called crude, naive, savage, and later even "a Madison Avenue Primitive," as he was labeled in a November 9, 1992, review by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. Gone, except in these perhaps misunderstood shapes and forms, maybe the Madison Avenue primitive is now side by side with the Trou de Cochon primitive, if not in some collector's storage s.p.a.ce, then in their common ancestral Ginen, or possibly, in a few cheap prints nailed to some young artist's wall.

CHAPTER 11.

Acheiropoietos On November 12, 1964, after Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin were executed and their bodies carried away, some say to the national palace to be personally inspected by Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, a lanky thirteen-year-old boy who had been standing in the back of the crowd to avoid the thunderous sounds of the executioner's guns, stepped forward as the spectators and soldiers scattered. He walked toward the bullet-ridden poles, bent down in the blood-soaked dirt, and picked up the eyegla.s.ses that Louis Drouin had been wearing.

The young man, Daniel Morel, only momentarily held the eyegla.s.ses in his hands before they were s.n.a.t.c.hed away by another boy, but in the moment he had them, he'd noticed tiny chunks of Drouin's brain splattered on the cracked lenses. Perhaps if he had kept them, he might have cleaned the lenses and raised them to his face, to try to see the world the way it might have been reflected in a dead man's eyes. Often in Haiti, the eyes of murder victims are gouged out by their murderers because it is believed that even after death, the last image a person sees remains imprinted on his or her cornea, as clearly as a photograph.

Before witnessing the execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, Daniel Morel was not particularly interested in dead men's eyes. He had been like any other boy, going for long walks all over Port-au-Prince and playing soccer with his friends. He sometimes worked in his father's bakery and tried to climb aboard Haiti's commercial train, which brought sugarcane stalks from the southern fields of Leogane to the sugar-making plant in Port-au-Prince. But the execution changed everything.

The next day, he walked by a photographer's studio near his father's bakery in downtown Port-au-Prince, and on the open paneled doors were enlarged photographs of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin's corpses, purposely put on display as deterrents for the country's potential dissenters. These pictures were exhibited there and elsewhere for weeks and young Daniel Morel would walk past them, and even though he had been at the execution, he saw them each day as if for the first time, and was unable to look away.

"That's when I decided to be a photojournalist," Daniel recalled more than forty-five years later, while sitting at the dining room table in my home in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood.

We had met nearly a decade earlier while I was in Haiti with some Haitian American journalist friends. It was All Saints' Day and we had all gone with him to Port-au-Prince's national cemetery to watch groups of people sing, dance, and pray inside the cemetery, to honor their dead.

No one is absolutely certain now where Numa and Drouin are buried, so I know that they were not among the dead being singled out for prayers at the national cemetery that day. From the images I had seen of the execution, I had tried while walking along the narrow corridors between the mausoleums and graves to figure out the location. I had decided that a cracked and graffiti-covered cement wall next to the main entrance might be the spot, a wall with a bustling neighborhood and a trash-filled ravine on its outer side.

I didn't know of Daniel's connection to Numa and Drouin the first time we met. And he did not know of my interest in them. In fact, we did not even speak to each other because he was busy taking photographs. I learned that he had been at the execution site only when I heard him speak at an exhibition of his photographs in New Paltz, New York, in the fall of 2006.

"I immediately wanted to be a photographer so that I could doc.u.ment Haitian history," he'd said that day.

Elaborating during our conversation at my house, he added, "There were no recent or useful photographs in the Haitian history books I studied from when I was a boy. As far as those books were concerned, Haitian history ended in 1957, before Francois Papa Doc Duvalier came to power. In photography, history is something that happened ten minutes ago. Photography doc.u.ments life, movement, but it also doc.u.ments history and death."

"Photography is an elegiac art" the novelist and essayist Susan Sontag writes in On Photography. "All photographs are memento mori". That is, they remind us, as Roland Barthes explains in Camera Luctda, that sooner or later the subject will no longer exist.

"To take a photograph," Sontag continues, "is to partic.i.p.ate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."

Daniel Morel has been trying to doc.u.ment Haiti's relentless melt ever since he saw Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin die. His instantly recognizable images, distributed for fifteen years by wire news services to publications all over the world, are raw and startling, urgent and frightening, like screams rising from an unending nightmare. He does not spare his subjects or his viewers any more than life would spare them. He is a witness, but barely there. You almost have a feeling that the photographs take themselves, because they doc.u.ment acts that you'd expect people to take part in only when others are not around: biting another's dismembered finger, setting a pile of men on fire.

Children in quiet distress-as Daniel and many of the other youngsters may have been while watching Numa and Drouin die-often appear in his oeuvre. They are carrying heavy objects, cement blocks, buckets. They are dwarfed by mountains of trash or packed in tiny cla.s.srooms. They are cradling the b.l.o.o.d.y heads of their dying friends on the street. When among the skeletal dead, they are nearly falling off the edge of crowded gurneys, a limb hanging down, as if reaching for the earth in which no one can afford to properly bury them.

During the Duvalier dictators.h.i.+p, Morel, now a gray-haired and bearded soft-spoken middle-aged man, explains, no one was allowed to walk around with a camera in front of Haiti's presidential palace. If you did, you risked being mistaken for a spy and getting shot. Pictures, except when used for fright and propaganda, were taken at home or inside professional portrait studios, where people sat and posed and tried to look either pensive or satisfied. He wanted to reclaim the power of propaganda photos from the state and return it to the subjects, but he could not do that before leaving Haiti at seventeen.

His first photography a.s.signment was in college, in Hawaii, where he photographed a cooking cla.s.s. For the second, he photographed former president Jimmy Carter while Carter was visiting Hawaii. Surrounded by an army of photographers, Daniel was seduced by the clatter of all the shutters and flashes around him, what Roland Barthes calls "the living sound" of a photograph and what Daniel Morel refers to as "the klak klak klak klak" of it all.

The nonpersonal photographic images he often has in mind while working are of the death of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, the a.s.sa.s.sination of John F. Kennedy, and Jack Ruby's televised shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, which he saw, as a boy, in graphic stills in the pages of Paris Match magazine. He would later capture similar images in his work, leading some to criticize him for his penchant for showing only the harshest, most violent side of Haitian life.

"A lot of people see my pictures," he says. "They tell me 'you make the country look bad.' People sometimes say my photos are too negative. They're shocked by them, but that's exactly the reaction I want to get from people. I am not tras.h.i.+ng Haiti or denigrating it. I am just showing people the way things are because maybe if they see it with their own eyes, they'll do something to change the situation."

In 1980, Daniel returned to Haiti from Hawaii. He traveled across the Haitian countryside photographing country weddings and wakes. He began taking news-related photographs after the end of the Duvalier dictators.h.i.+p in 1986, when the streets were filled with the corpses of the Duvaliers' former henchmen. He worked for several Haitian newspapers and took the occasional freelance a.s.signment from foreign newspapers until he was doing most of his work for wire news services.

In 2004, after the second departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and a personal tragedy in which his wife was brutally mauled to death by a guard dog, he left Haiti and moved back to the United States, where he has been struggling to make a living as a photographer. Now, as an older immigrant, he finds it much harder to rebuild his life and career.

"I have no country now" he says. "I can't live in Haiti and I can't live in the U.S. In Haiti they called me jounalis la, atis la, the journalist, the artist," he says, "Here, I feel like I have little value."

He does not feel sorry for himself. He has seen too many horrors for that. If anything, he would like to doc.u.ment this stage in his life, frame by frame, day by day.

Eight months before we met in Miami, he was beginning to lose his balance, and then fell and hit his head so hard that he cannot remember where he hit it. He suffered a concussion and some bleeding in the brain, and when he went to the hospital for an MRI, a benign tumor was found in his brain. Before he could have the surgery, he had to be given plasma and spent nineteen days in a New England hospital, and every day he photographed the daylong frost and striking winter sunrise and sunset outside his hospital room window. Sometimes a sparrow would show up in the window and peek in at him, and he would be convinced that the sparrow was the spirit of his dead wife. Though he had been unable to bring himself to photograph his wife's body after she died, he photographed the sparrow, seeing in this bird a chance to salvage some beauty out of horrible tragedy. During his stay in the hospital, he photographed the staff and all his procedures. He used overhead mirrors to photograph himself photographing himself. Before his brain surgery, he asked the surgeons to photograph his open skull and exposed brain, a picture of which he later showed me.

What was it like, I asked him, turning the camera on himself, to doc.u.ment his own mortality?

"I was joyful," he said. "I was happy. Even if these were my last pictures, I would have died with the camera in my hand. I have doc.u.mented others. I couldn't die without doc.u.menting myself."

As he recovered from the surgery, though, he began thinking of his archive of twenty-five years' worth of pictures, each image, he was happy to discover, still imprinted on his brain, just as they'd been before the surgery. He is thinking, however, of concentrating now on other types of images.

"I'd like to take pictures with less conflict and tension, less provocative pictures," he says, "I'd like to show the beauty of Haiti because when I lived there I saw as much beauty as ugliness. I smelled as much trash as the great smell of bread baking in my father's bakery in downtown Port-au-Prince."

He is working on a book about Haiti's oldest musical group, Orchestre Septentrional d'Haiti. The band had once written and performed songs honoring Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Perhaps they had done this as a means of survival because they'd witnessed from the stage how people were brutally beaten and sometimes even shot dead by the Duvaliers' henchmen at their shows. The musicians of Orchestre Septentrional would later write and perform songs encouraging resistance and struggle and celebrating the end of the dictators.h.i.+p. Because Orchestre Septentrional d'Haiti was adored by Duvalier's Tonton Macoutes, Daniel Morel had once dismissed them, thinking that they were mizisyen pale, mercenary artists. But one time he had a flat tire near a club where they were performing and, while waiting for the tire to get fixed, he fell madly in love with their music without realizing it was theirs.

"In Haiti music is a big part of the political landscape," he writes, along with his collaborator Jane Regan, in the after-word to their still unpublished Septentrional book. "Each regime has had music that helped it take power. And each used music to stay in power. And music was also often used to help bring regimes down. Haitian politicians figure out which bands are the most popular and they support them-with instruments, funding for carnival and 'fetes champetres' (country festivals) appearances and so on. . . . Septentrional has so far survived the political and social storms which have ravaged Haiti the country and the musical and cultural ones which threaten to bury all that is Haitian."

He appreciates the group so much now that he's also working on a doc.u.mentary film about them. When he stopped by my house in Miami, he was on his way to photograph the funeral of one of the group's oldest leaders.

"I am not going to photograph his death," he said, "I am going to photograph his life. Someone can be in a coffin and you can bring them back to life if you capture them well enough, if you capture their spirit. I don't photograph death at funerals. I photograph life."

I ask him if he thinks there's a link between photography and death, and he laughs and says, "Posing is death. I think when you make people pose for a photograph, you kill them."

I tell him about a studio photographer in Little Haiti who says that he became a photographer because his mother died when he was a baby and, since there were no photographs of her, he never got to see her face. Now this man purposely takes portraits of other people's mothers and imagines his own in them.

I also cite my favorite Haitian poem that mentions photographs, Felix Morisseau Leroy's "Tourist," and together we recite a few lines we both know by heart.

Tourist, don't take my picture

Don't take my picture, tourist

I'm too ugly

Too dirty

Too skinny

Don't take my picture, white man

Mr. Eastman won't be happy

I'm too ugly

Your camera will break

I'm too dirty

Too black

At the heart of this, we agree, is a plea from the voice at the other end of the lens-a very rare moment when a poverty-stricken photography subject actually speaks-of the fear of being misread, mis-seen, and misunderstood, of being presented out of context. It is a fear that is very similar to that of other subjects who worried that their souls might be stolen through the narrow lenses of a machine that exists outside of their experience. Allowing one's self to be photographed, both when the photographer is a stranger and when it is someone we know, is an act of great trust. And one can sense when there is comfort and discomfort between the subject and the lens, the capturer and the captured. And captured is what many of the subjects of Daniel's pictures are. Even before their photographs were taken, they were already captured by the G.o.ds of painful circ.u.mstances.

On the flip side, though, of one person begging not to be photographed is another paradigm. Please take my picture, someone caught in an impossible situation might say.

Jounalis la, please take my picture

Please take my picture, atis la

I'm needy