KreyolArtNov98 13 Nov. 1998 (LeGrace Benson/Arts of Haiti Research Project)

"Haiti is the warehouse for all the souvenirs and art of the whole Caribbean," the hotel manager said. Travelers, gallery and boutique owners said so too. I'd seen it for myself. At the northern-most fetch of Caribbean water turning outward toward Europe, a Haitian of the Diaspora sells sculptures, paintings, bowls, urns in the open-air market; each piece carefully marked "souvenir of Charleston."

Visitors to Chan Mas or the area around Lapos in Port-au-Prince can select pieces from multiple "galleries" or from itinerant hawkers. I look over these in some detail each time I visit Haiti. The works are usually awkwardly made, colorful but without rhyme or reason to their combinations of hues. In certain galleries, in the Centre d'Art, at the Musˇe d'Art Ha•tien, and at Ste.-Trinitˇ Craft Shop, one may find little gems of thoughtful painting the size of post cards, lovely toys, decorative housewares and jewelry. Sometimes there is an object such as the one a colleague purchased recently, carved by a parent of one of the schoolchildren at Ste.-Trinitˇ. It was a small stela in acajou wood, about 50 centimeters tall, done in high- and low-relief. Jesus Christ gazes straight ahead, surmounting thirteen Apostles. "They look up at him," my colleague said, "with a poignant combination of longing and tranquility." The thirteenth face, tucked in on the left side of Jesus and at the bottom of the stela in very shallow relief with its eyes closed, we surmised was that of Judas the Betrayer. The piece elicited appreciative murmurs and merited discussion.

It is rare to find a single piece at Lapos (Post Office plaza) or Chan Mas (Champ de Mars), of such quality. But stop a moment and reflect. No single piece is complex or profound, yet taken together they are the visible sign of something that surely is. Many objects are graceless in facture and garish in color, yet there are also skillful inventions from the facile hands of iron workers or wood carvers, seamstresses and embroiderers. Nearly every one of the paintings and sculptures traces directly back to motifs originated in the 1940's and 50's by Grand Old Masters of Haitian art, yet there are occasional fugues of individuality. Adroit or clumsy, all the works are vigorously related to the dirt or sidewalk they rest on and to the people who made them and sell them. Souvenirs of Haiti are natif-natal; clear signs of something that keeps tenacious roots in Haitian geography; maybe even deep enough to cause the regeneration of the lost trees they portray.

At quite the other end of the imaginary scale of quality (an invention without existence in the actual world), there are recent works in the galleries of discriminating directors and collectors. The artists represented are highly sophisticated by training and attitude. They are cosmopolitan, transnational. Yet, visibly, they, like the anonymous vendors and forged signatures on the Chan Mas, breathe the same Haitian air. Perhaps they even take some with them when to fly off to Miami or Lima or Paris. (Do you remember Marcel Duchamp's suitcase with the bottle of Paris air?) Eliot wrote that "April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of a dead land..." Haitian artists and artisans, Pˇtionville gallery or Chan Mas, are breeding hibiscus out of a dead land. The vital signs they put forth tell that the land may be suffering a coma but is not in fact dead. This warehouse for all the souvenirs and art of the whole Caribbean holds more than an inventory of its physical objects would reveal. In Edwidge Danticat's rich phrase, it is "breath, eyes, memory."

LeGrace Benson