LETTER FROM HAITI:The rubble of ruin and corruption has not destroyed a culture of superstition and magic, writes LARA MARLOWE
UNTIL I returned to Haiti this week, I'd forgotten how sinister is Graham Greene's 1966 novel, The Comedians. Through some sort of misplaced literary nostalgia for Greene's portrait of Haiti under Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, I wanted to stay at the Hotel Oloffson, where the novel is set.
Just before arriving, I read the passage where the British narrator returns from a long stay abroad to find the secretary for social welfare, on the run from the Tontons Macoute (Duvalier’s secret police), has slashed his throat and wrists and is lying dead, curled in a foetal position, beneath the diving board.
As I climbed the steps to the Oloffson, I couldn’t help a nervous, sideways glance at the swimming pool.
“Everybody does,” Richard Morse, who is usually described as the hotel’s owner, told me later. Morse says he rents the hotel from the family of the man with whom his mother had his half-brother.
The plumbing, electricity and furniture have seen better days, but suites at the Oloffson still bear the names of famous guests, including John Barrymore and Mick Jagger.
Greene described the hotel beautifully: “With its towers and balconies and wooden fretwork decorations . . . You expected a witch to open the door to you, or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him. But in the sunlight, or when the lights went on among the palms, it seemed fragile and period and pretty and absurd, an illustration from a book of fairy-tales.”
“We’re always going to be stuck wondering if the things that happen in the book are happening in our own lives,” Morse told me. For example? “Like those creepy nights when it feels like the Tontons Macoute are in the area, and people are putting pressure on you.”
For Morse (50) is an outspoken critic of the Haitian government and elite. He says the absence of meaningful reconstruction since last January’s earthquake “is them trying to get the money. They’re crooks.” The UN has “red-zoned” his hotel, banning UN personnel from staying there, he adds.
The son of a Haitian singer and an American academic – his father was head of Latin American studies at Yale – Morse studied anthropology at Princeton, joined a punk rock band and came to Haiti in search of his roots in 1985. He is a tall man with long, wavy grey hair and glasses.
For the first day or two of my stay, I was too intent on work to notice the voodoo art in the hotel. In the garden stands the statue of a naked woman playing drums while a snake slithers up her back and over her shoulder to suckle on her nipple.
Another statue, of Baron Samedi, the voodoo commander of the dead, who dresses as an undertaker, dominates the grotto at the bottom of the stairs. A bottle of Barbancourt rhum stands beside him as an offering.
"Are you a houngan?" I asked Morse. "I am a voodoo priest. My mother is a mambo . I inherited it," he answered.
It’s often said that Haiti is a piece of West Africa that broke off and floated to the Caribbean. I don’t dispute the argument that voodoo holds great cultural value, because it maintained the link between Haitians and Africa’s animist faiths.
But what about the devil worship?
“There were slaves naked and in chains in the hold of ships. So who worships the devil?” Morse retorted. The days of slave ships are over, I protested. “The way people are paid in certain factories, the living conditions in certain countries, are the equivalent of slavery,” he replied.
And sacrifices? “The Old Testament has animal sacrifices. The New Testament has one human sacrifice,” Morse continued. “So people who read the Bible shouldn’t be put off by it. Europeans committed such atrocious acts that they had to make their victims appear evil, so they could say they were saving them rather than exploiting them.”
The grounds of the Oloffson are practically the only piece of land in Port-au-Prince that was not invaded by people displaced in the earthquake; no Haitian wants to tangle with a houngan, and Morse's reputation is well-known.
But when his “Voodoo band” RAM (for Richard Auguste Morse) held its first concert since the quake, on the night of July 1st, the Oloffson was packed with people who came to see him perform as Baron Samedi.
Staff at the Oloffson move with the languor of zombies, the living dead who are resuscitated by houngans.
One night, a black moth, big as a bird, flitted across the ceiling of the restaurant. It was either a spirit or a portent of good or evil, Haitians told me.
On my last night in the Oloffson, I heard strange noises. An habitué of the hotel later told me the disused wing adjacent to my room is inhabited by the ghost of a US marine surgeon who died during the 1915-1934 occupation.
The ghost is said to operate at night.