![]() ![]() There were men who searched in vain for odd jobs by day and told never-ending Bouki and Ti Malis stories and riddles as the sun went down and rain began to fall on the banana leaves. There were teenage girls who sang along hilariously with the love ballads of Marco Antonio SolĂs, despite not speaking Spanish. I want you to understand that there was poverty and oppression and injustice in Port-au-Prince, but there was also banality. Outside Haiti, people only hear the worst - tales that are cherry-picked, tales that are exaggerated, tales that are lies. I want you to know that, before the earthquake, things in Haiti were normal. Somewhere, outside, I heard people screaming, praying and singing. I was trapped, neither lying down nor sitting, with my left arm crushed between the planks of the shattered doorway and my legs pinned under the collapsed roof. And then I was surprised not to be dead after all. I was surprised to die in this way, but not afraid. I braced myself in a doorway between the hallway and the kitchen, trying to hold on to the frame, and then a cloud of darkness and cement dust swallowed everything as the house collapsed. I had never felt such a loss of control, not only of my body but also of my surroundings, as though the world that contained me were being crumpled. As a child of the San Francisco area, I was underwhelmed at first. I was sitting barefoot on my bed, catching up on ethnographic field notes, when the earthquake hit. ![]()
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