Elégie de Port-au-Prince

“This rather clean city, with its fountains and sculptures, could have been compared to Geneva…”. Like a final cursive, coloured trace of a city that will only remain in its inhabitants’ imagination, in songs, paintings and films, this voyage narrated by the actor-poet Dominique Batraville captures the enormity of the event without falling into the clichés of news reporting. Haiti, year zero: still battered by the very recent earthquake, the “dream-like Port-au-Prince” lacks even a modicum of comfort, and its former magnificence will soon be irretrievably razed to the ground. On a pile of rubble, the land surveyor sings a Lazarus-like lament to “this city of damnation”, to “the treacherous soul”. Aïda Maigre-Touchet has found the perfect guide, someone who, by the poetic force of the words he chooses and the aspects of the landscape he points out, touches only lightly on the event while communicating its enormity. “I haven’t eaten any coconut/How is it that my house trembled…?” Recited amidst the rubble, his poem, which is both allegorical and concrete (he talks about “trembling with joy in front of the tents”), well deserves a soup.

Charlotte Garson