Some Paintings from Haiti

In response to your many emails expressing support for Haiti, and detailing your contributions to Partners In Health: THANK YOU.

Some had inquired if I had a personal connection to Haiti.

I'd initially gone to Haiti as a novice illustrator in 1994 for The New Yorker and The New York Observer, assigned to sketch the Aristide inauguration and Ray Kelly's oversight of the police. While there, an experienced British reporter introduced me to the family of Stivenson Magloire, the well-known Haitian painter who had just been brutally murdered, and I embarked on an illustrated report of his life.

It was a remarkable time to be in Haiti - but what time isn't? I encountered for the first time two CIA operatives (truly not the kind of thing I usually did), and I was surrounded by journalists from around the world, by scores of hard-working U.S. soldiers. But most of all by the remarkable Haitian people, who struck me as beautiful, strong.... and completely unfathomable for their ability to create such joyous art amid such poverty.

Even the Haitian markets were filled with life and color:

The Haitians would paint on anything - beautiful, bold paintings of roosters on walls and garage doors. Paintings of the sea on aluminum fencing. People who didn't have enough to eat somehow found money for paints and brushes, guitars and improvised drums.

But Stivenson Magloire was the rare recognized artist, whose paintings had made him some money and allowed him to live a middle-class existence. Why had he been murdered, and who had murdered him? To this date, it remains unclear.

For years afterward, I felt that I'd failed Stivenson's family by failing to get his story published. (The New Yorker bought it and "killed" the illustrated story, eventually using a sketch I made of a scene at the National Palace for a Tracy Kidder article - see top - and The New York Observer published a page of fevered black and white drawings I'd made of Kelly's police work.)

But Stivenson's story remained untold. I had sat with his mother, the famous painter Louisianne St. Fleurant, who accepted her son's very recent death with grace and equanimity, and who had generously told me his story. And I had failed to do anything with the story after The New Yorker canceled it. I might have gone to another publication. But I just gave up.

I stopped working as an illustrator some time after that, and went into the banking sector, where I worked as a marketing writer. A half-decade or so later, I confided to a journalist friend my feelings of having let down the artist's family - and Stivenson's memory. My journalist friend told me, "Of course you feel that way. I still feel haunted by Haiti."

The problem with Haiti was not that ordinary Haitian people didn't need assistance - but that Americans like myself were so blinded and shamed by the Haitians' joyous refusal to give up in the face of such persistent poverty that we often didn't know how to respond. It seemed too big of a challenge - even though it was a challenge that ordinary Haitian people unashamedly met every day by surviving and leading honest lives.

Unlike Americans, ordinary Haitians did not necessarily view poverty as a sin.

On my travels through Haiti, I witnessed much celebration, and also witnessed a few incidents of political violence. And yet as a white person, I was protected and treated with respect I hadn't earned by the Haitian people, who were in their own fevered state with the return of Aristide. It was truly like walking through someone else's dream.

The urgency of the current crisis gives us another chance - maybe a last chance - to do right. I sincerely believe the U.S. and other nations can join to rebuild Haiti into a stronger, more efficient country that provides for all of its people. I'm glad that former Presidents Clinton and Bush think so, too. This could be, for all the tragedy the earthquake has wrought, a turning point for the people of Haiti.

(The watercolors below are of the studio window of the late artist Stivenson Magloire; and of Stivenson in his convertible next to one of his paintings.)

An ironic note on the last caption above: "...he was killed because he was too sensible." I had mistranslated this from the French. What his friend had meant was that Stivenson was killed because he was too sensitive, too emotional, and had over-reacted to the initial theft of his paintings. This over-reaction had then created a conflict wherein Stivenson, an Aristide supporter, was murdered by thugs, some of whom were motivated by politics, and some by jealousy. ("C'etait un mort politique et de jalousie," his friend had told me.) Over a decade later, I still find it hard to wrap my head around the idea of his murder.