UNDER THE BONE

By Anne-Christine d'Adesky
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1994)

When we look across the water to Haiti from the safety of the United States, what do we see and how do we interpret it? Do we see a tragic, tortured land...a doomed, land, forsaken by God, sweltering in the stench of fratricidal death and uncontrolled violence? Or do we see only carnavál...hot, black bodies twirling in rainbow colors...brown rum flowing and mixing with sweat...free-flowing sex in forbidden places with exotic peoples? Or when we look across the water at Haiti, do we take the path of our President and Congress, and simply choose to see as little as possible or to not see anything at all?

In "Under The Bone", first-time novelist Anne-Christine d'Adesky has given us a different way to look at Haiti, one from the point of view of those people, both native and foreign, who are attempting in the face of great personal danger to work from the inside to correct that country's many wrongs. It is a profoundly disquieting and disturbing look, with images at times surreal and dreamlike and at other times so sharp and painful that you are forced to pause, take a breath, and look away. "Under The Bone" is a book that lingers long after the last page is turned.

There is a great gap in what little knowledge we in the United States have of contemporary Haiti. When the dictator Baby Doc Duvalier fled the country in the mid-1980's, U.S. newspapers highlighted the bloody, repressive regimes overseen by both he and his father, Papa Doc. We learned, some of us for the first time, of the Tonton Macoute, the private army of armed thugs used by the Duvaliers to terrorize the countryside and to enforce their will. The overthrow of the Duvaliers was hailed as the dawn of the age of Haitian democracy, when the Haitian people could at long last choose their own leaders and run their own country. Secure in this knowledge, most U.S. citizens marked Haiti in the "Our Side" column and turned our attention to Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and other world concerns.

Now, in the early 90's, Haiti has come into sharp view for us once again. The country's elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is overthrown in a military coup and campaigns for re-enstatement from our own shores. Political violence stalks Haiti's streets and hillsides; the Justice Minister is assassinated in daylight on a city street as he walks out of his office. Haitian boat people, refugees from the repression, flood the shores of this country and become an issue...albeit a minor one...in our own Presidential election in 1992. U.S. troops are asked to intervene, and are chased off the docks at Port-au-Prince by a mob. What happened?, we ask.

Set in the period between the overthrow of the Duvaliers and the election that originally brought Rev. Aristide to power, "Under The Bone" provides some answers. It is the story of the struggle of human rights workers, a magnificent and to date unheralded struggle, to stand against the great tide of political repression in Haiti.

Anne-Christine d'Adesky is an author of great skill and subtlety, and she has written a novel that defies easy dissection or description. It's passages move, sometimes abruptly and seemingly arbitrarily, between straight narrative, reprinted agency reports, a satiric play being written by one of the characters, and poetic dream sequences, some of which come from a character whose identity we can only guess at and who we are never certain is either alive or speaking from the grave. D'Adesky is not dabbling in the avant-garde here, however. "Under The Bone" has a clear and powerful story line that holds the novel together from beginning to end. But that story line is presented in such a way that the reader is sometimes called upon to operate in an atmosphere that can be disquieting and slightly unsettling, a faint echo of what it must be like for human rights workers to operate in contemporary Haiti.

At other times, d'Adesky's writing can be lyrically beautiful, a song of hope and the determination of the human spirit to live free, as in these thoughts of a political organizer in hiding from the police, contemplating how he will effect his escape:

"From St.-Raphaël to St.-Michel-de-l'Atalaye, from Camatche to Ennery to Petite-Riviére-Bayonnais. Over to Souvenance, to snatch the star off the temple peristyle, wear it over my heart. Across a plain of candelabra, cactus grabbing my pants, all the way to Gonaïves, town of misery, of fatras, human garbage, 500,000 living on a palm of sand, that is all the bay has left them. A curve of sand to dig their hands into, to cup the water to drink, to plant the stick in, to build the house, to build the life. I could stay there for weeks, fish for eels at night. Then the day would come and the big wave would wash over me and the sea would pull me under the houses. Would that be freedom? Pull me into the current all the way to Ile de la Tortue. ... Look at this map. There is no piece of land that would not welcome my tired feet, give me a corner of rock to make a pillow for my aching head."

Anne-Christine d'Adesky is an American author of French and Haitian descent who has spent most of her life in Haiti and who has spent the past several years reporting on Haiti for various U.S. publications. She was nominated for Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for her San Francisco Examiner articles exposing the military massacres in the Haitian elections of 1987. Unlike many authors, she is writing about something she both cares about and knows about. We ought to pay attention.