September 2001
In Search of Jean Dominique
by daniel wolff
On those evenings when, as we sat in front of the house beneath the big chestnut tree and round the table, we heard, from the far end of the garden . . . the double peal-timid, oval, gilded-of the visitors’ bell, everyone would at once exclaim, “A visitor! Who in the world can it be?” And then, soon after, my grandfather would say, “I can hear Swann’s voice.” And indeed, one could tell him only by his voice, for it was difficult to make out his face.
Marcel Proust, Swann’s WayThe widow sits in her garden. Bright red bougainvillea blossoms cascade over the brick wall that separates the garden from the street. The voices of schoolchildren, reciting their lessons, float over, too. The widow is an elegant woman in her fifties, with high cheekbones and long legs and the dark, intense eyes of someone who has not slept. Her husband was murdered a month ago. She is dressed in a black vest over a white shirt, black slacks, black sandals: a black-and-white photograph somehow tipped in to this green, red, and green garden.
A guard, rifle in hand, keeps watch at her front gate. She is asked whether her husband was worried about his safety.
“He was not. Jean had lived tougher years. He was not in any form of-” A car horn blares suddenly on the street, but she continues: “When I met Jean, he had been living in Haiti under the Duvalier regime. He had learned to hide a number of things he felt . . . a number of things he thought. Even in his private life, there were all those barriers, all those walls, all those difficulties in reaching out.”
First one hummingbird, then a second, dart through the leaves of a breadfruit tree. She pays them no mind. Her skin is a very light brown: a creamy color. She’s wearing big hoop earrings that catch the sunlight. She continues: “In 1980, when we went into exile together, Jean was in Venezuela, and I had come out of jail, and I was sent to the States. I think that’s when our relationship became deepest. Then, all the walls, you know, fell. There was a sense, amazingly enough, of freedom. In that first exile. We had lost everything. We were living at my brother’s house in New York. We had a lot of time; and the sense of freedom came, also, from the fact that we no longer had any responsibility. We didn’t think that we would ever go back to Haiti. For us, it was the end.”
The daughter sits in the station her father ran: Radio Haiti. It is at once a dusty and lively place, strewn with books and old reel-to-reel tapes, magazines, and political posters. This morning, the station is milling with people: it’s the first day of broadcasting since her father was killed a month ago. It is a day, people keep saying, of respect.
“My father,” she says, “wasn’t there at my birth. He was in France, where he was studying, and he met me through a letter and a photograph.”
She looks like her father-the sharp beak of his nose, the big white smile-but she is slighter and, today, less open. Her eyes are red: a screen of emotion between herself and the world. The child of an earlier marriage, she is only a few years younger than the widow. “Yes,” she continues, “it’s very funny. I always say that I met Jean. Because I didn’t live with him the first years of my life.” Instead, she listened to her father on the radio. “Tons of young people used to write to him: letters to tell their problems and everything. I wrote him ‘anonymously.’ Obviously, he immediately recognized the handwriting. It was to say, ‘I love you. I love my father, but I don’t know if he loves me.’”
At this, she forces a smile. Where the widow seems fiercely alive, somehow energized by Jean’s death-the sudden, sharp freshness of a cut flower-the daughter is just trying to keep going.
“From ten to seventeen,” she adds, “I did live with him, and it was a difficult period. It was the dictatorship, and it was my own adolescence.” The dictator was Dr. François Duvalier: Papa Doc. The daughter left Haiti as Papa Doc was dying, and his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, was about to become President for Life. Baby Doc continued his father’s tradition of terror and economic brutality.
“I learned to discover [my father] through his letters,” says the daughter, “because he is, at heart, timid. Very discreet, though when he writes, he says things he would never say face to face.”
She has grown up to be a novelist. Her first book opens with a story based on Jean’s childhood. He was born in 1930, during the nineteen-year American occupation of Haiti, and his parents cast the U.S. Marines as the boogeyman. “Americans, Americans,” the daughter has her character shout, “I will drink my milky, so don’t hurt me, American, I’ll be good!” The occupation was enough, she writes, “to accumulate his rage and to form his legacy.”
Jean’s voice on the radio is disembodied, as radio voices must be, but so deliberate, so rich in concentration and the need to get exact meaning, that it seems to have a presence. On the streets of Port-au-Prince-or in Brooklyn or Montreal, where his shows were rebroadcast-people would listen, rapt, as if conjuring the body out of the voice.
To see a videotape of Jean speaking is to watch how he made words and intonations visceral. He screws each sentence into the air, turning one hand as he turns a phrase, pausing to draw from his pipe as if pulling meaning from the silence. He hunches his shoulders to drive in a point, flashes a decorative smile. It is construction: he lays the foundation, adds a line of support, stops to make sure his work is level and flush.
“Of course, as everybody can see, I’m mulatto,” he says into the camera. He is being interviewed for a documentary film. “What you call mulatto in Haiti. Which is a very, very complex question. It is like [being] a Jew in Europe, maybe in the United States-either seen as the enemy or the victim, but always as an alien: l’Autre [the Other]. The mulatto are the elite, and I come from a petit bourgeois portion of this elite. My father was an employee in a private business. I went to a good school. My father was not wealthy, no, but I had a good education-in French, of course. That [being educated] was one of the key elements of Haiti’s petite bourgeoisie: the French, Catholic and well mannered. Huh! Well mannered.” A slight smile here, as if grading the surface of that last word. He describes walking past the Haitian Presidential Palace as a boy and seeing a flag ceremony: “And I said, ‘Father, what is that? What does that mean to you?’ He said, ‘That means you are Haitian. Never forget that. You are Haitian. You are from this land. You are not French.’”
Jean’s voice rises; he is being his father: “‘You are not British! You are not American! You are Haitian!’”
Jean’s younger sister, sixty-eight years old, sits in the widow’s garden, her hands folded in her lap. Reserved but determined, she looks like she could be an academic or an ex-nun: a circle of gray hair, bright eyes, no-nonsense blue jeans. “My father,” she says, “was a commercial representative and was always crossing the country to buy coffee for his employer. He was an importer/exporter in coffee and Haitian commodities, and Jean toured the country and Dominica a great deal with Dad. Jean was maybe eight. While I played games, Jean was already arguing over the newspaper in the morning with my great-uncle. I see them both at the end of the long room, in rocking chairs, exchanging ideas on history, politics, the war. Dad used to say [to Jean], ‘But what could you know about it?’ And Uncle Maurice would say, ‘He has very definite ideas. He should be allowed to speak.’” Her eyes now glisten behind thick glasses: “Jean always loved to speak.”
She continues with their history: “In 1955, we were separated for the first time. Jean received a fellowship to go to the School of Horticulture at Versailles. Jean stayed two years in France, during which [time] he got involved in politics, agitated a great deal, kept company with exciting people. It was the time of the [French] war in Algeria. It was the time of shock, and the realization of the shock, of the hope of communism, of socialism, and Jean was excited. But he, like me-we were never inducted into a party. We’re too independent.”
She looks sideways at her brother’s house, where purple clematis climbs a white trellis, and then continues: “He received some very worthwhile offers to pursue a career in France and overseas, in the area of his education, as an agronomist,” she says, proudly. “In 1956, he turned down all these offers, and he came back [to Haiti], because he wanted to work in his country. Jean always had a set idea: not to leave his country except under physical threat.”
Jean’s younger sister takes a breath, and then: “He lived in exile for ten years: two separate times. But it was against his will. I’ve been in France since 1957. I left this country on September 21-the day of the election of [Papa Doc Duvalier]. That day, I gave my car to my brother. Then the rancor of Duvalier fell on all of us.”
Inaugurated on October 22, 1957, Papa Doc jailed more than a hundred political prisoners within his first two months in office. By the following May, he had assumed control of the military, succeeded in breaking the largest labor unions, and declared a state of siege that included a curfew and broad press and radio censorship. The first attempt to overthrow him came on July 28, 1958.
“That was my brother,” says Jean with a great white grin. He is speaking in a filmed interview. He waits a beat for a reaction, then goes on: “Duvalier was one year in power. My brother was an officer in the army and was expelled by Duvalier because he was mulâtre [mulatto]. He was in exile in Miami with three or four of his colleagues. They rented a boat-the Molly C-and they sailed from Miami. They landed at Deluge [an inlet north of Port-au-Prince]. They had weapons. [The five of them] occupied the Dessalines barracks for one night. They phoned François Duvalier!”
Jean’s eyebrows rise with obvious glee. He mimics the voice of his older brother, Philippe: “‘We take your barracks. You can go.’ Duvalier was scared: [he had] a reservation for a plane to leave [Haiti, but] one of [my brother’s] drivers was caught, and he told the Macoute [a member of the Tontons Macoutes, Papa Doc’s private army], ‘They are only five. No more than five.’ Duvalier immediately organized, and on July 29, 1958, they invaded the barracks and killed all the people . . . including my brother. That was the beginning of Duvalier.”
Jean shrugs, remembers: “So, I spent six months in Gonaïves, in jail.”
The house that Jean grew up in is a pale, two-story stone structure not far from the Presidential Palace. It is unoccupied now, its shutters opened only for this occasion: the visit of Jean’s older sister.
“Mama’s garden!” the eighty-four-year-old exclaims as she walks the grounds, but the garden is nothing but weeds. She sits in a chair in the sunlight and goes back in time to describe the night Philippe was killed: “[Jean’s] daughter was with me. And people are whispering in Port-au-Prince that another man was killed: a white man. And others are whispering (she lowers her soft voice), ‘It is not a white man. It’s Jean’-that he had been cut up into pieces. So imagine!” There is only her voice with which to imagine. “It was necessary for a woman from a Catholic association to tell me: ‘Madeline, I went to see, in person, the bodies. And the body of the dead man who was cut up into pieces is a white man. Your brother is just a . . . mulâtre.’”
It is, in its way, a happy ending. The older sister smiles into the sunlight, her glasses on her lap.
In a filmed interview, Jean tells how he began running Radio Haiti “under the dictatorship of François Duvalier. It was a very, very risky business. Radio then was not a news medium. It was entertainment: playing songs. Haitian songs?” He seems to listen to those long-ago broadcasts for an answer, then adds: “Not that much. French, American, Spanish: it was a very foreign-oriented medium. And I started, step by step, inch by inch, to introduce two things. First, Creole. Because radio in this Creole-speaking country was a French-speaking medium! I tried to introduce Creole, and I tried to introduce information.
“When I said I ‘tried,’ it was really a daily try-every morning.” Here Jean cocks his head and, through his long beaked nose, sniffs the air a few times. “Smelling things, trying to look at power in the eyes, and to know, before going to bed, if we would be able to go to bed!”
He smiles. There was something about this risky business that he clearly delighted in: “I remember, in 1973, I went to a place called Saut D’eau [a voodoo shrine centered around a triple waterfall]. More than sixty thousand people gathered from all over Haiti to pray, to worship, to enjoy, and to bathe. And it was a shock! [It was] the first collective gathering of worship, of the Haitian people, to say no to the Macoutes!” He slices the air with his finger: “No to Duvalier! Those two hours were something like the first broadcast of real protest coming from the bottom.”
He wipes his face with a white handkerchief, leans back as if finished, then goes on: “The women, naked, under the waterfall, were being possessed. And telling all the things like, ‘Yes! I slept with this man! Because this man is a Macoute! He wanted to sleep with me to take my land, my property!’ Everything’s going out [over the airwaves]. Everything!”
Jean ticks off on his fingers the evolution of Radio Haiti: “Creole. Voodoo. Then news. Then the life of the people!”
A month after Jean’s murder, a farmer is sitting in Radio Haiti’s newsroom. He is wearing a T-shirt with Jean’s picture on it: his black skin looks even darker against the fresh, white cloth.
“I am a farmer from the Artibonite [Valley],” he begins, “who farms rice, who always lived in the Artibonite. My parents were farmers, and ever since I was very young, I’ve been farming. And to this day, that is how I earn a living. I can’t say that I remember the exact date, but I can remember listening to [Jean]. In those days, radio stations used to function on AM bands. I was a child.” Few gestures accompany his words, few smiles or changes in expression. He is doing a job, which is to reach back into the past. His words are like roots, freshly dug, with the dirt still on: “I bought a small radio, [and] I would hide it in the field over night. I didn’t take it home because, in those days, if you carried a radio you could be questioned. ‘Where did you get it? Why do you have it?’” For a moment, his face goes stern to mimic the Macoute who questioned him. Then he settles back into his story, his piece of work.
“It was the first news,” says the widow, pride flashing in her dark eyes: “real news-covering real stories, having reporters in the streets, and, also, reporters covering the news in Creole. When you do investigative reporting in the [United] States, it’s a pretty safe thing, most of the time. When you do it in Haiti, you take your life in your hands!
“It took a while for us to be able to use, take advantage of, a little window of opportunity that was opened with the arrival of Jimmy Carter’s administration [in 1977]. With all [Carter’s] talk of human rights, we started talking about a number of events taking place in Latin America at the time. And ahhh! it was amazing how Haitians started following the story of Somoza [President Anastasio Somoza Debayle] in Nicaragua; it was that fascination with international news. There were Creole phrases used to talk about [foreign] dictators-which people in the street used to talk about our own government. I felt at the time, for the first time, that I was starting to be a professional journalist.”
Jean had once given an interview about this same period, and his voice on tape seems to echo hers: “People decipher the foreign news and digest it in their own culture-and they start responding. They went to the station to give us information. The people started living the news! We discovered the fight of the Haitian people against Macoutism. You call it fascism.”
The widow, alive in her garden, can’t hear his voice, but she answers it: “That’s what Jean called being a militant journalist: not just covering events but being able to go beyond events and seeing the impact on people, on their lives, and putting things in perspective.”
“So, that’s what it was,” Jean’s daughter says: “Our daily life at Radio Haiti: [Jean had] his morning show, Face l’opinion, and then, finding breaks during the day, we would talk to each other. We would obviously talk about the political situation, but he used to speak to me as well about what he was reading. Toward the end, he was reading Proust. I always found Proust a bit hard. And Jean, he used to tell me, ‘But you don’t understand.’”
The daughter is speaking as her father-with his raised eyebrows, his abrupt hand gestures, his lifting voice: “‘You should reread Proust! You read him wrong. You read him at a time when you couldn’t read him.’” She listens to her own voice repeating her father’s advice, and she considers: “It’s true that I read Proust when I was nineteen.” A pause, a smile, and then: “So, perhaps I’ll reread Proust.”
“November 28, 1980.” The widow, in her elegance and in the kept beauty of her garden, announces the date as if to engrave it on some collective memory.
“The military police were coming to Radio Haiti with the Macoutes,” she recalls, “and they destroyed the station. They first started arresting people. Jean was not at the station at that time; they were looking for Jean. They started destroying every single piece of equipment that was in that station. [Over the air], everyone, all of Haiti, could hear only a very strange sound-toc, toc, toc-that you hear when a record is stuck.”
She smiles. It was, she knows, a moment when Radio Haiti conveyed to the whole nation the sound of being silenced.
“All of Radio Haiti,” she continues, “was taken to Casernes Dessalines [state prison]. That’s where the military men were questioning political prisoners. I heard them torturing Richard Brisson; he was in charge of programming at Radio Haiti. They started torturing, also, another one of our journalists, Robert Filo.
“I was jailed with four other women in a cell in the Cassernes Dessalines for about three days. Then we were transferred to the National Penitentiary. Four days later, we were escorted to the airport with the clothes we had on and, from the airport, sent to what we found out later was Miami. I borrowed twenty-five cents to call my brother in New York. And that’s how I got into exile in New York. Two days later, I was in touch with Jean. [He had received refuge at] the Venezuelan Embassy [in Port-au-Prince].”
“Oh, change is a fight,” says Jean, sighing. “You must understand that for the Haitian people, at least (I don’t know for the French; I don’t know for everywhere, anywhere, but for us), change must be the result of a long fight.” It isn’t clear to whom he is talking. He is being interviewed for a documentary film, but he seems to be arguing with someone somewhere out in the blank space before him. “In Haiti,” he declares, “there is what I call the guts feeling of the fight. It’s a guts feeling, because the poor people of Haiti never read those sophisticated books about revolution. But they know strategy. Remember in 1985 when, in November, the poor people of Gonaïves started going in the street-for the first time in twenty-five years of Duvalierism, of Macoutism? [They were] shouting, ‘Down with Jean-Claude!’ They were waving the star-spangled banner.”
He is amazed at this. His eyes pop in surprise, like those of a little boy-the little boy who grew up with the U.S. Marines occupying his country. “When Jean-Claude Duvalier fell on February 7, 1986,” he continues, pausing between each syllable as if to taste it, and then shaking his head in wonder: “I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but after six years, the Haitian people remembered. The day Jean-Claude left the country, the people went in front of Radio Haiti (what we made of Radio Haiti) and asked for our return! Less than one month after that, I went back to Port-au-Prince. It was very wonderful there for me, because more than sixty thousand people went to greet us and to go along with us to the [radio] station. Twenty cents by twenty cents, we collected sixty thousand dollars. And I was able to repair the station from scratch and start again.”
The rice farmer describes why and how he traveled to the Port-au-Prince airport the day Jean returned from exile: “There is a saying, ‘Farmers shouldn’t waste time in the city.’ Going to the city was something everyone feared, [but] this time was the opportunity for me to see the face. Not to talk to him or anything; just to see the face. I had three dollars in my pocket, the equivalent of fifteen gourdes. I paid seven gourdes to get there, and I needed seven gourdes to go back, so I was left with one extra gourde.”
He explains his finances deliberately, methodically, the way a man will count out the few worn bills in his pocket: “From the balcony of the airport, everyone saw [Jean] when he got off the plane. I felt I, too, played a part in welcoming him. I saw him; I walked near the car, followed the car to the [radio] station.” The way the farmer tells it, this was the closing of a circle: finally seeing the man whose voice had reached him from a hidden transistor radio.
“Up and down was the way of life. More down than up,” says Jean, recalling the years after his return. “But there was up,” he says: “Days like March 29, 1987, when 1.2 million Haitian, poor Haitian people, illiterate, went freely to the polls to approve a piece of paper called the Constitution. It was one of the most wonderful days of my life!
“The second was December 16, 1990, when more than two million people went freely to select a new president: President Aristide. December 16 is our day,” he continues. “Nobody gave us that day. There was no given; there was no God-given; there was no star-spangled-given. It was our day! I was in Cité-Soleil [the poorest section of Port-au-Prince], and there were those long lines of Haitians-poor, desperate Haitians, illiterate, dirty Haitians-under the sun. It was two o’clock p.m. I went down and asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ Jean makes an inquiring face at an imaginary voter from years before. He has an imaginary microphone in his hand. He is back in history, asking:
“‘What are you doing here? You have a small white paper in your hand. Who gave you the money to steal?’”
Jean assumes the voice of the invisible voter: “‘Nobody.’
“‘What are you doing in line without any soldier to kick your ass, to make you stay in line?’
“‘We are expecting-’” the invisible voter begins to answer.
“‘What?’
“‘To vote.’”
Jean is getting to it now-to the core question-and he leans toward the invisible Haitian.
“‘What does that mean for you, to vote?’
“‘Today is the end of the season where we were ghosts.’” This is what the invisible man answers, and Jean smiles. “‘We were ghosts. Now-today-we become human beings. Human beings.’”
“We were about to hit some hard times,” says the rice farmer. In his slow, methodical way, he has continued his story up to the September 1991 military coup that forced President Aristide into exile just seven months after he’d taken office. “When the coup was announced, we took to the street. It was with the same little radio; we took to the street . . . protesting. We thought we could reverse the coup. We protested the first day and the second day. But now” (and it is not now, it is then, but the rice farmer’s expression argues otherwise) “we began to hear of assassinations.”
Jean is being filmed during his second exile in New York City. As he describes the 1991 attack on his radio station, which coincided with Aristide’s expulsion, he puts a lighter to his pipe, puffs, puffs again, then sets it aside.
“You must realize,” he says, “that Port-au-Prince suffers from sporadic blackouts. So, this Monday morning, we were running our own power plant. [It was] not [powerful enough] to support central air conditioning. The lights, the equipment, yes; but not the central air conditioning. So,” and he pauses, “the doors of the studios were wide open. At seven-thirty, two trucks of the army stop in front of the station, and [the soldiers] started shooting. Automatic shooting.” Because the studio doors were open, he explains, still careful with each word, “my listeners could listen to the shooting of the radio station by the soldiers!”
His eyebrows go up; he spreads his hands wide. There is that wicked, delighted smile. “O.K.? It was in the open. On Tuesday, on Wednesday, we repair the station. On Thursday, I had the privilege of having, over the phone, President Aristide, who was in Washington, D.C. I had a one-hour interview with the president. And I start broadcasting this interview at Radio Haiti on Friday morning. It was delirious to Port-au-Prince, to all Port-au-Prince! We received a lot of phone calls, a lot of threats. And we kept,” Jean circles a finger as if stirring a pot, “telling the news about the situation, about the coup, who was in the coup, and giving excerpts from the interview by the president.
“At two p.m. on Friday, we receive a phone call from a friend [warning us]. We closed the gates, and I ordered my people to clear the place. [Soldiers began] shooting at the station. [The next] afternoon, I was at my home with my wife. [The soldiers] were on the street shooting at us in the house. It was the first time in six years that they had shot at me. They spent maybe ten minutes shooting. And I said, ‘No.’ I decided to leave. I rapidly packed, and we left. I spent,” Jean shrugs, “fifteen days in hiding. They were at the station, shooting. Dah, dah, dah.” His shoulders hunch; his fists clench. “Shooting. Dah, dah, dah. Two or three times, they went at my place shooting. But I was not home. On December 31, [1991], just on New Year’s Eve, we took a plane and we flew to Miami. “The military coup was not only to topple a president,” Jean adds. “There have been a lot of military coups in Haiti; there have never been four thousand people killed.” His voice wants to underline those words in the air, on the air, so they can never be erased: “It was not only to topple a president. No. It was something carefully planned to break the backbone of the Haitian people. To kill democracy. So, it is the reason why they tried to kill the radios. Because democracy in Haiti is rooted on radio broadcasting. It is not Aristide; it is democracy. It is the poor people of Haiti trying to free themselves. Understand?”
“It took us about five months to get everything together,” says the widow, describing their final return to Haiti in 1994. “We didn’t have a home to live in. You know, we were more or less going from one place to the next. We didn’t have our house yet.” Their house rises, white and cool, behind her. Her words are the only clue that it has not always been like this. “Actually,” she remembers, “we got back to living at the radio station for a while. Activists from the coup were still around. They were still in the judicial system, they were still in the administration, they were still all over the place. We are a commercial radio station. We depend on advertisement. Who controlled the advertisement? The people who were responsible for the coup! And [the Haitian people] were starting to be disappointed by the fact that it took so long for things-not even to change [but] to get back to the way they were before.”
The rice farmer is describing a speech he made in 1995. René Préval had been elected president after Aristide, and the rice farmer had stood up at a public meeting to describe the situation in his valley to the new president: “‘President, personally I don’t believe in this type of democracy. I truly believe in a revolution. I believe that only a revolution can put this country on the right track. We haven’t done anything since 1991. They have stolen the government from us. They have sent us a government very disguised. We must have a revolution in this country in order to save this country!’”
The farmer’s face is dark with recalled emotion: “I felt very charged at the time. The first person who stood was Jean. He left the spot where he was and came to stand next to me. Jean put his hand on me and said, ‘I need you.’”
The farmer, his face worked into a single point of concentration, is coming to his conclusion now: “I must tell you: for me, my interaction with Jean Dominique was like attending school. My journey with Jean Dominique from ’96 up until this day [he is speaking a month after Jean’s death] has allowed me not to be”-he takes a breath-“not to be afraid. Not to be scared of any man, regardless of his strength. No matter what his degree or knowledge or his doctorate level in political studies. As long as we are talking about this little country, or the issues surrounding this little country, I am not afraid to face anyone for any type of debate.”
The newsroom at Radio Haiti is full of people looking at nothing: not at each other, not at the posters on the walls. They are, instead, listening to Jean’s voice come over Radio Haiti for the first time since he was killed. It is a voice from the past. Later in the day, President Préval will sit at the desk from which Jean used to run the station. Behind him, there will be a photographic collage of victims who met their death under the Duvaliers’ regime. He will recall the beginnings of both his political career and his long friendship with Jean: “I remember the first organization I set up. I thought a base to rally around would be the struggle to make sure that people wouldn’t forget what happened. Because the dictatorship didn’t allow us to speak to one another, and I wanted for all those relatives of victims to dare to speak. It’s the first project that [Jean and I] shared together.”
But that would be later in the day. Now, with Jean’s voice on the radio, President Préval rises and walks to the window. He leans out into the warm air and looks down the hill at the ramshackle ups and downs of Port-au-Prince. He keeps his back to the people in the room, the better to hear the voice behind him and to hide his emotion. He lights a cigarette and listens.
At six-fifteen a.m. on April 3, [2000], a gunman entered the courtyard of Radio Haiti Inter and shot to death pioneering radio journalist Jean Dominique, sixty-nine, as well as the station’s caretaker, Jean-Claude Louissaint. Dominique, who was just arriving by car to prepare for his hugely popular seven a.m. daily news roundup, was struck by one bullet in the head and two in the neck. He was loaded with Louissaint into an ambulance, but both men were pronounced dead on arrival at the nearby Haitian Community Hospital in Petionville. [Haiti Progrès, April 5-11, 2000]
“Concerning any change in our policy at Radio Haiti,” says the widow, all business, eyes dry, looking straight into the future, “we don’t expect to have any. The one big change is Jean’s absence. You know it’s difficult to replace fire.”
She drops the phrase as if it were commonplace, as if it were one of the bougainvillea blooms cascading from the tree behind her.
“It’s essential that the dream continues. [What matters is] the radio station, our skills as journalists, our ability to go places and talk to people-to get all those tools to the service of the people who most need it. And I think that has not changed, that will not change. You know, we made that promise to Jean. We made that promise to ourselves.”
And then she returns to the dropped phrase, as if lifting it off the green grass to look at it more closely: “Earlier, I said that Jean brought fire to the newsroom. Jean brought fire to our relationship, also. I think there was a Promethean quality to Jean. He stole that fire from the gods, and maybe that’s what he was punished for. That fire . . . was a moving force for a lot of Haitians. I realized this when he died. When he died, everyone was saying, ‘The void, the void.’ That big hole. Because that energy was no longer there, that fire was gone.”
Out of empty space, bodiless, the voice of Jean rises. It doesn’t happen mystically. No, it is as commonplace as the radio. His voice is on audiotape, being transmitted over space and time. He says, fiercely, “You cannot kill the truth! You cannot kill justice! You cannot kill what we are fighting for! Participation of the citizens through the community business: you cannot kill that.”
Then another voice, the interviewer’s, says with a laugh, “You can knock the shit out of it, but you can’t kill it.”
That sets Jean laughing, too. From the sound of his laughter, you can almost see his white teeth, his head cocked back. And then he says, again, “You cannot kill it.”