From We Remember: Speaking When There Are No Words Edwidge Danticat, January 12, 2015 A family friend, MJ, who five years ago, spent 48 hours trapped in the rubble of her house in Port-au-Prince, has taken up crochet. Her husband died in the earthquake. She and their three children were only found alive because the youngest child, 15 months old, could not stop crying. That’s how the neighbors knew where to dig for them. MJ crochets now, she says, because she wished she’d had something to do, besides praying and crying, while she crouched under a staircase, with dozens of dead bodies nearby. She makes small bags that expand a little when you fill them. Like one imagines a heart might. Today prayers will be said. Wreaths will be laid on mass gravesites. Churches will fill up. Radio stations will play sorrowful music. Privately, faces will be remembered, voices, smiles. And we will mourn the 300,000 people--each of them indispensable and special to someone—these irreplaceable human beings who so tragically lost their lives five years ago. There is also the political crisis. That both the anniversary of the earthquake and the potential of renewed autocratic rule in Haiti should take place on the same day is doubly heartbreaking. This weekend also brought news that the United Nations will not be held liable for the fact that 8070 Haitians have died and 720,000 have been infected with cholera after U.N. “peacekeepers” discarded their fecal waste in one of the country’s largest rivers. So today both in Haiti and in the diaspora, our multidimensional heartbreak continues. Some will crochet and some will write. Some will go to church or hold vigils. Some will protest and march. But we all in our own way are trying to honor both the living and the dead.”
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 15:35:11 +0000
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