Those Dead People to Whom I Spoke. Getchens Mathurin
Those Dead People to Whom I Spoke.
by
Getchens Mathurin
Copyright 2020 ,
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ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-3527-5
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To those friends who are ahead of me for eternity following the earthquake in Port-au-Prince on January 12th, 2010.
‘’As for man, his days are as grass:
as the flower of the field, so he flourishes.
For the wind passes over it, and it is gone;
And the place thereof shall know it no more. ‘’
The Holy Bible (1)
‘’The book of life is the supreme book
That we cannot close or open to our choice.
The endearing passage does not read twice
But the fatal slip turns on its own.
We would like to go back to the page where we love
And the page where we die is already under our fingers.’’
Alphonse de Lamartine (2)
Presentation.
It seems we often feel more satisfaction talking about those enchanting souvenirs, those events whose remembrance is sometimes enough to revive moments of happiness, rather than those stories that are only the memory of suffering. Those whose only reminder could mobilize a river of tears. But many people would suggest it is better to be aware that misfortune exists, and its probability of realization is equally shared among all of us. My readers would surely agree that our state of mind needs to connect to the world like it is verily.
I would like to tell you a story about the love shared between two great lovers. Or maybe the success of a fiery young man who has set out in search of happiness and found it in the most spectacular way. These stories would surely fill you with this particular happiness common to so many readers because they would remind you that you too can succeed in your love, you too can achieve success in your professional life. A life whose path is wonderful, where everything is fine, where luck remains with man, where the gods towards him act favorably. I would love to tell a story that shows everything goes well in a perfect world because I acknowledge the truth as a reader, we are sometimes looking for a form of satisfaction of our happiness, a pleasure given through the imaginary of our reading. A world like we wish it all is easier to be found behind the pages of a book than behind the realities of the real world so unfair and unbalanced. Why not choosing to be a part of an imaginary world? Or, at least, embracing the side of the true world where everything seems to be perfect?
Yet life invites us sometimes to remind others that suffering is a human condition we cannot ignore. We are more human because we do face danger, sickness, and even death. Life encourages us to share the pain we have suffered. It urges us to let others know what we have experienced in one day, in a week, in a year, even in our entire life. It pushes us at times to share some misfortunes that hide behind a fragile existence. Perhaps because a man's path is not completely closed to the fate of the rest of men...
Acknowledging this is, in my view, wisdom. Ignoring it is a lie that one makes to oneself, even a danger. The daily tells us there are many unpleasant surprises in this existence. So many troubles that disturb situations of happiness or, at the very least, the calm in which we evolved until then.
This was the case in an evening when everything was going well until in the greatest astonishment the earth under our feet began to tremble and make enormous dance steps. It looked like it was about to be overthrown. What happened to us as person with body, spirit, and soul as a result of such a strange event? What has become the physical envelope of the human being? What happened to our mothers and fathers, our brothers and sisters? And those friends we did not have any news of? What happened to life?
The reader is here invited to join my thoughts to return to this evening when pain, suffering and death have enveloped men and women in distress. At a time when we, humans, under the blue of the sky, no longer knew on which foot to dance. Returning not because we liked this afternoon, enjoyed it well. Returning not because the reader will appreciate it, but because certain experiences become a part of us, influence our character as a person, and contribute to the evolution of our perception of life. Returning because, as is often rightly said: ''The pain of a man is that of every man and the death of a man is that of the whole human race.''
With my loneliness as my only companion, I had engaged in a deep meditation in my room in Brooklyn on the afternoon of January 12th, 2011 marking the first anniversary of the powerful earthquake of January 12th, 2010 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A disaster that took the lives of more than two hundred thousand people. I was then lost in my thoughts, far from my native land at this moment of sad reminiscences.
I imagined what my way of life had once been: university ‘activities, church ‘responsibilities, job’ performance, family ‘duties in the context of the social reality of my country of origin. I saw in my mind this old childhood friend with whom so many complicities have been shared and sealed in my memory for ever. This friend whose education and behavior had been a part in the formation of my character but now were gone. With him - or at least his image- I lived in a certain way because no one can escape his/her childhood. With the reality of dead I also lived because it comes a certain time in our life when death is no longer a speech, a philosophy, but a personal matter that we are dealing with.
I reviewed these houses, in front of me, collapsing as if I was a part of a casting for a science fiction movie like 2012. I revised in my mind this colleague lady who, like me, had worked in the Protocol Office of the Haitian Chancellery. While she was sitting at the front desk waiting for her spouse to pick her up, the locals had collapsed on her. The husband had been late that afternoon and the event had surprised the unlucky wife on the ground floor of the Department of Foreign Affairs. The building had been completely destroyed. I saw in my mind the wounded who had forcibly taken the Foreign Ministry bus that I had been on that afternoon, begging the driver to take them to a hospital. Some had dislocated limbs, others had crushed flesh... and all were covered in blood. I reviewed the roads blocked by electric pylons, electrical wires crossing here and there, concrete walls, tree branches... I was thinking about my colleagues who, like me, had tried in vain to contact their families. The phones were dead in the same way as humans... I was getting off the bus and did not know exactly where I was. The dust that rose high in nature and the radical change in the surrounding environment had left me in great confusion. The scale of the disaster and the astonishment took possession of us: the dead before our eyes, the wounded who were in a close proximity.
The employees, who had abandoned the bus taken by force by so many wounded, forced to walk back to their homes, were therefore obliged to observe the damage... to see paths littered with corpses... and the wounded who were screaming for help... The small pools of water that usually soiled so many streets of Port-au-Prince had been replaced by a river of blood on this funeral afternoon. The streets were then reddened, the nature dark. Suddenly, each tree wore a bleached, white-powdered garment to the point of extravagance. Cries of distress filled the whole capital, but no one represented a great support for the other, since each was under the weight of pain; each had its own burden.
And here I was on the road with one question: "Will I find my wife and daughter alive?"
I reviewed, in this afternoon of meditation and reflection, these people whom I had personally known and who were no longer... I was thinking about this