Five Short Stories Set in Haiti

Title: The Blue Hill
Author: Rodney Saint-Éloi
Translator: Nicole Ball
Where I Read It: Haiti Noir
With the government's permission, toxic garbage gets dumped near a village. It renders the dirt an unnatural blue and covers people in blue pustules. The story is basically the ravings of a local detective. Sick from the toxins, he lies in bed gripped by visions. And what he shares is compelling: apocalyptic and poetic, with historic flavors and images of dragons and demons. It's a cry in the dark, at once futile and necessary. ("We will at least have the elegance to bear witness.") A story written as a prolonged fit may have dragged or come across as belabored. But it's powerful, and it pulls the reader along through hellish landscapes and images of a battle that the broken people, like the detective, don't have the health or power to engage in physically. It's their souls sending up a cry that no other person hears.

Title: Claire of the Sea Light
Author: Edwidge Danticat
Where I Read It: Haiti Noir
Claire is a young girl whose mother died giving birth to her. After she spends a few years with her mother's relatives, her father takes her back. She wants to stay with him, but he's more ambivalent. He cares for her but feels he can't properly raise her. As a fisherman, he knows he might die at sea or have to move elsewhere at a moment's notice for work. What will happen to her then?

The story is told from his point of view, but still shows some of what Claire experiences, not knowing where she belongs and whether or not her dad wants her. He's holding her at arm's length, because he doesn't know what to do. Along with the fear of being lost to her, I also got the sense that he fears becoming too attached to her, after having lost her mother. (The mother is very much present in her absence.) To Claire, her father's ambivalence may come across as rejection, especially when a wealthy fabric vendor who lost her own daughter expresses interest in taking her in.

There's a beautiful scene in the story, set before Claire's birth, where her mother is swimming among glowing fish in the ocean as Claire's father looks on with concern and wonder. Claire's strongest ties may be to her mother, who in being dead can be safely loved with the assurance that, in a way, she isn't going anywhere.

"They have actual operating rooms... and it's just amazing."

Two videos from CNN on the amazing work carried out by the Israeli army medical corps in Haiti:





They've got a state of the art field hospital set up. They're saving lives, treating difficult medical cases that other makeshift facilities are not yet equipped to handle, and doing so with efficiency, order, compassion, and calm. There's such a disaster in Haiti, but people like these professionals, who've come from so far away and do such great work - they're a fierce bright light in an abyss, a steady strength amid chaos.