Create Dangerously

CHAPTER 11

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 François “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 eyeglasses that Louis Drouin had been wearing.

The young man, Daniel Morel, only momentarily held the eyeglasses in his hands before they were snatched 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 Léogâne 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 document 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 François Papa Doc Duvalier came to power. In photography, history is something that happened ten minutes ago. Photography documents life, movement, but it also documents 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 participate 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 document 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 document 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 classrooms. They are cradling the bloody 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 dictatorship, 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 assignment was in college, in Hawaii, where he photographed a cooking class. 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 assassination 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 trashing 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 dictatorship 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 assignment 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 document 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 document 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 documented others. I couldn’t die without documenting 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 François “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 dictatorship. Because Orchestre Septentrional d’Haiti was adored by Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes, Daniel Morel had once dismissed them, thinking that they were mizisyen palè, 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 ‘fêtes champêtres’ (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 documentary 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 gods of painful circumstances.

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

Desperate

Trapped

Please take my picture, jounalis

Screw Mr. Eastman

I’m not too ugly

Your camera will not break

I’m not too dirty

Not too black

After four consecutive storms ravaged Haiti, my friend the Miami Herald journalist Jacqueline Charles told me how, when she arrived with the photographer Patrick Farrell at a catastrophic scene where some dead children had been fished out of an overflowing river, a grieving father begged for some clean water to wash his mud-covered daughter and for a pretty dress to put on her before her photograph-which was later part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of photographs-was taken. Knowing that this would be the last image of his daughter, the father wanted her to look her absolute best.

The father, Jacqueline told me, desperately wanted his daughter’s story to be told, knowing that though hers was a singular tale, her face a singular image, it could reveal a great deal about the larger disaster of the storms. In that way, the heartbroken father was following a long-honored tradition, in Haiti and elsewhere, of taking a keepsake photograph of the dead as a way of keeping them with us, and at the same time allowing his loved one’s face to stand for many.

Another photographer, an Israeli named Daniel Kedar, had traveled all over Haiti and taken pictures of peasant farmers who’d never seen photographs of themselves. They sometimes denied their own image to him when he handed them the instantly printed photographs.

“No, I am not that skinny,” some would say. “No, I am not that old.”

When everything does not rely on our image, do we imagine ourselves at all? Is there even a need for it when our face is ours alone? To suddenly become emblematic of a problem, the “face” of a ravaged Haiti, is its own rude awakening, its own culture shock. Yet it allows a larger story to be told that in many ways can be helpful, because it fights complete erasure. It forces others to remember that we were-are-here.

“Pita nou lèd, nou la,” boldly claims the Haitian proverb. Better that we are ugly, but we are here.

“Photography has something to do with resurrection,” Roland Barthes wrote, “might we not say of it what the Byzantines said of the image of Christ which impregnated St. Veronica’s napkin: that it was not made by the hand of man, acheiropoietos?”

Might we not say the same of all impassioned creative endeavors?

“I never intended to become a photojournalist,” Daniel Morel tells me more than once. “I became a photojournalist because at Numa and Drouin’s execution, I felt afraid and I never wanted to feel afraid again. I take pictures so I am never afraid of anyone or anything. When I take pictures, I feel like something is shielding me, like the camera is protecting me.”

Did he, as a boy, want to protect Numa and Drouin? I ask.

He could not protect them, he said, but over the years he has felt as though he’s managed to protect other Numas and other Drouins with his photographs. And during this final conversation, I am even more certain that to create dangerously is also to create fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us, then bravely moving forward even when it feels as though we are chasing or being chased by ghosts.

At the beginning of his 1955 short story “Jonas ou l’artiste au travail” (Jonah, or the Artist at Work), Albert Camus cites as an epigraph the following verse from the book of Jonah.

Take me up and cast me forth into

the sea… for I know that for my

sake this great tempest is upon you.

Creating fearlessly, like living fearlessly, even when a great tempest is upon you. Creating fearlessly even when cast lòt bò dlo, across the seas. Creating fearlessly for people who see/watch/listen/read fearlessly. Writing fearlessly because, as my friend Junot Díaz has said, “a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.” This is perhaps also what it means to be a writer. Writing as though nothing can or will ever stop you. Writing as though you full-heartedly, or foolhardily, believe in acheiropoietos.

There is something about doing your own grieving in a place filled with other people’s grief. The last time I was at the Port-au-Prince national cemetery was for the February 2003 burial of my Aunt Denise. At that time, as at many others, I looked around yet again at a peeling section of the cement wall against which I believed the blood of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin had once been splattered. The story goes that the wall had been built a few decades before the execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, when a pleading female voice was heard coming from the leaves of a massive soursop tree that stood in the middle of the cemetery. The voice coming from the soursop tree was that of Gran Brigit, the wife of Baron Samedi, the guardian spirit of the cemetery. Gran Brigit was known for her generosity in granting money to the poor. So as news of Gran Brigit’s manifested presence spread, massive crowds filled the cemetery, trampling the mausoleums and graves. The wall was built to keep Gran Brigit’s followers out.

I looked around at this massive hamlet of the dead and wondered where Gran Brigit’s tree might have stood. I stared at the old two-story building near the cemetery entrance, the balcony of which was where I believed many had stood to watch the execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin. Neither the building nor the wall may be what or where I thought them to be. I tell this story now with the unreliability of that uncertainty.

On the wall that I believed had served as the background for these executions, I saw political graffiti. Aba-, Down with-. Not the name of a Haitian national figure, but someone I did not know. The words were written in the same type of black spray-painted cursive, the ubiquitous graffiti scrawl that one still finds all over Port-au-Prince, street commentary that suggests that Haiti’s capital may be full of Jean-Michel Basquiats. There was, the last time I was in the cemetery, no plaque anywhere to acknowledge what had happened there to Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin on November 12, 1964.

“If we began to put plaques all over Port-au-Prince to commemorate deaths,” a friend had once told me when I’d pointed this out to him, “we would have room for little else.”

In lieu of plaques, all we have of Numa and Drouin are individual memories like Daniel Morel’s and a few minutes of black-and-white film in which they die over and over again and some photographs in which they remain dead.

The last time Daniel Morel was in the cemetery, there was a pile of corpses as high as the wall itself, all of them victims of the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010. Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin’s death place proved too small a burial ground for the more than two hundred thousand people who had instantly died together in Port-au-Prince that afternoon.

Daniel Morel’s would be among the first pictures of death and destruction to emerge from Haiti soon after the earthquake. He happened to be visiting Port-au-Prince from the United States and was walking the streets when the earthquake struck. There was no returning now to the more “pleasant” images of a city and country that he’d been documenting since he was a boy. His-our-entire city was a cemetery.