October 2013


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When someone says they’ve been to Haiti, spent time in Haiti, found a place in that country’s landscape, been accepted by a warm and friendly people, an unsaid question forms on the faces. Why? This may be followed by a shift of light—like a passing cloud—a revision of the regard for the one who went.

“Haiti does not exist really in our minds, our geography,” says Kwynn Johnson. “If someone has to think about Haiti, they might think voodoo, or collapsed economy. Dr Matthew Smith of Jamaica says, ‘People are just curious about Haiti, not interested’.”

Johnson went to Haiti for the first time in December 2010. The earthquake had occurred on Tuesday, January 12 at 16.53—the epicentre was Leogane, and the destruction was terrible in Port-au-Prince and the coastal town of Jacmel, some 20 miles or so outward from the centre. It is estimated that over three million were directly affected in a population of 12 million. Hundreds of thousands died. It may take up to 12 years to clear the rubble, many more to re-build some of the structures. Today, the presidential palace has been demolished; who knows if it will be re-built. “Not unique to Haiti,” she clarifies, “after the 1985 Mexico City quake, the last tent city was removed 15 years later.”

In 2010, Kwynn simply felt drawn to Haiti. She had spent seven years at the Carnival Institute with Pat Bishop, building the first and only costume archive. Perhaps, she thought, she might undertake a PhD study; something about the “vulgar” way the international media covered the dead and dying. The UWI Cultural Studies PhD gave ample latitude to an artist who had been practising and exhibiting for almost ten years, working in an eclectic range of media from oils and watercolours to embroidery. The PhD prospectus is liberal and encouraging: Research by practice can be considered an active engagement with theory, arguments, thoughts and ideas not only through the written word but also through the critical process of developing/creating paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, films and videos, performance events (dance, theatrical works), musical compositions, installations and other manifestations of practice.”\

Most of 2010 went in planning to travel to a devastated country during its months of crisis. “There was cholera too,” she said. “I didn’t know how to get there, how to get around, or what I would do.” She arrived in Port-au-Prince just after Christmas, for a two-week field trip, her first time in Haiti. She was walking around Port-au-Prince, and in one photograph caught the light through a rose window in the roofless Notre Dame de l’Assomption. It was light that would not have been there had the cathedral not been decapitated.

On that same field trip, a chance excursion led to another revelation. “I wanted to find a particular papier-mâché Carnival mask and I was told that I should go to Jacmel. So I went.” Serendipity lives in her recollection of that first visit. “Jacmel chose me,” she says.

She found a city of artists living in the coastal town after which the port in New Orleans had been patterned. “Journalists, writers, musicians, artists have always chosen Haiti. I am inspired by the fount of Haitian history and culture through Walcott, Rudder, CLR James, Lloyd Best and so many others.”

Those who had been living and working there when the earthquake struck had re-composed themselves to continue. It was a lesson in continuity and creativity in what she calls a ruinscape. Kwynn found accommodation in Jacmel with two filmmakers and has been there on seven field trips so far.

“It’s so comfortable being in Haiti. Everything feels like home—the people, language, seafood, art galleries, carnival, artisan studios, Cine Institute, Haitian rum, fried plantains, simplicity …life.”

“One day, I used the words, vie-ki-vie, dreevay, and everyone laughed and told me those were Haitian. When I am in Haiti, I imagine this is what Trinidad was like a hundred years ago,” she says.

An earthquake alters life—like the Indian Ocean quake and tsunami at Christmas 2004; the tsunami in Japan in 2010; or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. But the ruined landscape—the dislocation—she believes, might be necessary to create cracks in our perception, and let light in.

Jan limye a rantre (how the light enters; comment penetre la lumiere)—as the body of work that makes up this Haiti exhibition is called—captures the ruinscape of Port-au-Prince and Jacmel. These drawings were made on location during her field trips. Many are composites of fractured details, views and human figures weighted down with loads on their heads casting heavy shadows. Her choice of graphite on vellum is for an ephemeral ghostly effect: ruinscapes that have lost solidity and become as translucent as the spirits that traverse them.

Introducing the exhibition, Kwynn wrote, “My drawings represent places and spaces that continue to be meaningful to those who lived through the 2010 earthquake.”

“This practice-based PhD is a study of the visual languages used to describe both loss as well as continuity.” Twenty graphite drawings on vellum were selected for the just ended exhibition in Trinidad.

Next, she travels to Jacmel to open on November 15. “I hope I have done justice to this town that allowed me to work there for three years. I hope I have produced an honest view of the way life continues.” She is hoping that Jan limye a rantre has a part in the collective memory, in the way that the rubble art of Haitian artist Anderson Ambroise does. (Ambroise has taken hand-sized fragments of tile and wall from the rubble of broken buildings and paints on them.)

These drawings are not art therapy, she says. “The artist creates works of art to re-inject meaning”—to ruined architecture, to shattered lives. She refers to the poem A City’s Death by Fire by the young Derek Walcott after the town of Castries was burnt.

Three years later, Haiti is the home of her heart. After the presentation of her dissertation, she intends to “continue this body of work for the next ten years. Haiti is my life’s work, I know that now.” She will go to the Citadelle up north; and then west to Jeremie the town of poets; to be the Trini artist travelling in Haiti “as long as I can do it.”

She calls her Jacmel City of Light, a place where life is lived in the here and now, in friendships, in work, in simple acts of sharing a meal, a conversation, laughter, tears, light. “I felt the best way to write about my three years in Jacmel was to do so in a poem, and to speak about people and places dear to me.” The poem reads in part:

Launder your day in the basin bleu
Stop at Florita for wi-fi and coffee
Pickup a baguette at Cadet’s boulangerie
Send me a vetiver bundle from Paskal
The power comes back at three.
Give Danticat a tourist mask
It will scare off the spirits at last.

Blan! Stop hovering over me,
You are blocking my light.