Thursday, March 28, 2024 Mar 28, 2024
70° F Dallas, TX
Advertisement
Publications

TRAVEL PRIMITIVE PLEASURES

Haiti is another place in time.
By Dorothy Haley |

IT TRULY is a land of contrasts: a land of appealing geniality and appalling poverty; a land eager for tourists, with natives eager for escape; a land practicing Roman Catholicism by day and voodoo by night. Haiti seems a land left behind, or maybe just standing on the outside of this century, looking in.

The “Pearl of the Antilles,” Haiti comprises the western third of the Caribbean island Hispaniola, nestled in between Cuba and Puerto Rico. It has the typical rugged beauty: a jagged, jutting coastline; sun-warmed, sandy beaches; turquoise sea; and a misty-mountain backdrop.

But the most stunning aspect of Haiti’s beauty is that of its people. There is a warm, congenial, small-town ambience that lacks resentment, greed, or hostility. Unlike its neighbors, Haiti offers an honest friendliness to its tourists.

The capital and largest city, Port au Prince, is the usual point of arrival, and tourists should expect one rude experience: a baggage search by customs in the Aeroport Francois Duvalier for illegal weapons. Once on your way into the city, it will quickly become obvious that riding in a motor vehicle makes you part of an elite minority. Many Haitians ride in tap-taps (brightly painted trucks converted into buses that look like circus calliopes); others ride rusty, balloon-tire bicycles, but the majority of the population is on foot.

In the central business district, driving is nearly impossible in the sea of wall-to-wall, curb-to-curb people. A visit to the Iron Market, the major craft and food market, is essential. It’s a visit to another world – dark, dingy, and packed with hundreds of stalls and vendors; parts of the market smell like raw sewage, other parts like rotting fish. Every hawker wants you to buy, but no one cares if you don’t. The Mahogany Market, a few blocks away, offers a more subdued selling atmosphere; a peep into the back room is a look into a 19th-century sweatshop. Logs of mahogany are stenciled, split, carved, chopped, and lathed into furniture, bowls, and statues, all by the light of a few bare bulbs and a stream of sunlight in one doorway. The dust, noise, dark, and lack of safety would give OSHA a heyday. In another back room is the ever-present collection of brightly colored paintings, the typical bargains “just for you.”

If Haiti is known internationally for anything besides poverty, it is “naive” art. Samples of this stylistic school of oil painting can literally be found anywhere. The vivid yellow, red, turquoise, and green-colored canvases line the walls of countless shops, and are propped against fences along the docks in a manner reminiscent of Paris’ Montmartre.

Haitian art did not receive international attention until 1951, when the Episcopal cathedral St. Trinite opened its doors – and provided the paint and brushes – to native artists. The result is an acclaimed collection of murals depicting religious and biblical scenes in Haitian settings. What shocked the locals astounded the world; it is a celebration of color and form as much as of the Bible.

Religion has played an important role in Haiti, and Roman Catholicism is the officially sanctioned church, claiming 85 per cent of the population. But that is an inflated figure, a result of the days of slavery under the Spanish and French, when voodoo was outlawed and Catholicism was mandatory on all plantations.



Voodoo, on the other hand, is the unofficial religion that still thrives. Not “that ole black magic” that many conjure up at the sound of the word, but an involved series of rituals that seems to suit the needs of the impoverished people. It is a secret religion, one practiced in the back woods late at night. Any one of a number of spirits, called “loa,” is summoned to enter the person’s body, lured by offerings of food, drink, an animal – whatever suits the liking of that loa. If the ceremony is successful, the spirit will “become one” with the Haitian, transforming the person with symbolic gestures, facial expressions, and dancing.

While it is virtually impossible for tourists to witness a true voodoo ceremony, there is plenty of opportunity to see reenactments and representative dance presentations. One such group, Les Ballets Bacoulou d’Haiti, performs weekly in hotels and Club Med, giving the tourist a sampling of other traditional folk dances as well. While voodoo may appear to be a secretive, primitive religion glorifying sacrifice and possession by spirits, all represented by sensual dances, it is the life force of this country. Odette Weiner, director of the Bacoulou dance group since its inception in 1957 – and a well-educated world traveler – says seriously, “Voodoo is the purest of all religions.” It’s quite clear that she believes it.

For more typical nightlife, Port au Prince offers the expected – good continental dining in the hotels, folk dancing, disco dancing, and the unexpected – legal gambling in the city’s casinos. Currency is no problem. Five Haitian gourdes equal one dollar, but American dollars are seen more frequently than gourdes, and are acceptable everywhere.

If the prospect of dealing with the sights, sounds, and smells of the city seems too much, a stay at the new Club Med may be in order. Once inside the club (which is an hour’s drive north of Port au Prince along the coast), you’re in an isolated playground. It’s an “all-you-can” atmosphere, which applies to eating, drinking, swimming, sailing, snorkeling, dancing, sunning, funning. The club offers a package vacation with total isolation from your normal world: no television, radio, telephones, or newspapers.

There’s the option of a tour-bus trip into Port au Prince for shopping one day of the week, and an excursion north to Cap Haitien, the second-largest city. That is the historic tour, with a jeep and horseback ride into the mountains to see Sans Souci, a deteriorating royal palace built in 1807. Designed to rival France’s Versailles, the palace had marble and mosaic floors, mahogany walls covered with imported paintings and tapestries, and was ingeniously air conditioned by streams diverted under the floors.

Towering above the Sans Souci is the Citadel. Completed in 1813 (after taking 200,000 men 10 years to build), it was the young black republic’s defense against invasion by Napoleon Bonaparte. Its 12-foot-thick walls are topped with cannons that were never fired – Napoleon didn’t invade Haiti after the Citadel’s completion.

On the four-hour drive from Cap Haitien to Port au Prince, sugarcane fields, banana trees, mud huts with thatched roofs, and plenty of unemployed people who seem to spend their day crossing and re-crossing the highway are all common sights.

Stops for gas at the roadside Texaco or Shell station bring out a flurry of young entrepreneurs selling everything from Chiclets gum to the right to take their picture for the price of new tennis shoes. This is a country with a per capita income of $190 a year, and a daily minimum wage of $2.20 and hustling tourists can be very lucrative work for all ages.

The other striking common sight is the wealth of signs and graffiti on fences, walls, and tap-taps. Education is beyond the financial reach of most families, but there is evidence that Haitians are thirsty to learn and display whatever they can, beit in French, English, or Creole. The signs are always accompanied by local artistic efforts in vivid, splashy colors that remind the tourist that this is the land of naive art because it is, after all, still a land of naive people.

Related Articles

Image
Basketball

Kyrie and Luka: A Love Story

It didn't work last season, but the dynamic duo this year is showing us something special.
Image
Politics & Government

Q&A: Senate Hopeful Colin Allred Says November Election Is ‘Larger Than Our Own Problems’

The congressman has experience beating an entrenched and well-funded incumbent. Will that translate to a statewide win for the Democrats for the first time since 1994?
Advertisement