I drew from what I already knew from New York. I played as a child amongst the endlessly tall totems at the old Heye Foundation museum on 157th street reaching up into the skies with their clan emblems. I wanted to make dioramas like the ones in the Museum of Natural History. There was no place really to see the work of self-taught artists at that time. Only in a few books I stumbled across in my father’s library. It was called Primitive. And it was always Rousseau and without knowing why the Rousseaus, the Riveras, the Lam in the lobby were why I went to the Museum of Modern Art. I didn’t have a clue about contexts. It was that these artists held a feral energy in their work regardless of technical perfection, an energy just on the edge of dream and what could be more appealing to a restless adolescent than a promise of dreams.
The first time I went to Haiti conscious of who I was more or less rather than as a kid dragged along with family was the year Joni Mitchell’s Blue came out, 1970. If I had really thought about it I should have stayed in Haiti. There is a time when suddenly what you are and want to be taps you on the shoulder and you are facing your world with a complete self-realization. It teases you on the right drugs perhaps but fades to pleasant memory in the morning. When it happens naturally you are buoyed up by the grand adventure of your life. A line is drawn and if you step across you are freed, at least as long as you are inspired, from the past. I was sitting in the yard of the Hotel Quisqueya drinking soursop juice. And Blue began to play. “I am on a lonely road and I am travelling travellin travellin” But it wasn’t just Blue playing because it was also the compas music playing from ten different radios that didn't stop, the breadsellers cry of “pain” didn’t stop, the song plunked on a banjo made from an anchovy can didn’t stop, it was dusk and the sounds of drums from up around Furcy were just beginning. It was a moment of aesthetic genius dropped by a major DJ. It was a moment to me more epoch changing then Altamont or Janis and Jimi dying. It was even deeper than that, seen later in Hunter Thompsons book when he looks out the window and realizes the world has shifted, the sixties have devoluted at the same time they moved forward, shapeshifted into another form. That whatever had been going on could not go on again, and that the word progress was not automatically positive. Haiti opened the world and I saw that what was in front of me had nothing to do with what I had been doing in California. And if I continued in the same way I could become as obscure as beach sand.
Sometimes it may sound like I am romanticizing the third world, Haiti in particular, but I assure you I am not. I may be a romantic but it doesn't give the world a rosy tinge. Even back then the poverty was soul crushing. I worked in a nursery and labour jobs with Mexican immigrants during college in Santa Cruz and I never kidded myself for a moment that I was an honorary member of the salt of the earth. My skin was white, I was middle middle class and that's who I was. And am. I knew that big difference was that in New York poverty is hidden behind concrete and brick and in Haiti it was public and open. I knew this. I knew I could choose the company I kept by class and privilege. I knew this concept of class was overt here and hidden in the US but no less prevalent. And I knew that a country was its people and not its current government. I felt I owed it to the Haitian people to be exactly who I was. And I was not afraid to be a loner. In fact I loved the feeling. I loved being swallowed up by the daily rhythms. I did not try to be Haitian. There were things about being privileged I could never explain and would only sound like a total ass if I did try to explain. I needed to interpret the world through my burgeoning niche. Art. The history of Haiti is the real history of America. The West and its racialism has hidden their historical identity.
I read a lot of ethnography before I went that time. I sensed it lifting me away from fanatically pursuing a street musician lifestyle. There were clues I didn't see till many years later. Like the fact that in Santa Barbara Sanford Darlings House of a Thousand Paintings was a mile down the highway and I never went because I thought it was a tourist trap. And the Vortex rock festival I went to when I was 19 was where Melvin Edward Nelson met the Aquarians, and invited them to live on his land in Oregon. In many ways what was happening all over the country in the sixties and early seventies was creating a third world lite (white?) for alienated youths. Especially in my case. I didn’t understand privilege at the time so I took the whole drop out thing too damn seriously. Reading Eastern philosophy, sleeping a whole summer in a cornfield, playing flute and panhandling. I even lived briefly in a cave up near Ben Lomond, until on a R&R trip to forage for brown rice and vegetables, and the usual backsliding trip to a Chinese restaurant or a Mexican restaurant for chorizo, menudo, eggs and tortillas I happened to read about a lot of weird murders and high near vigilante tensions between long hairs and short hairs. It was post-Manson.
Now I am the kind of person who, upon hearing that someone in the room has had their wallet stolen will immediately pat myself down just to make sure even with absolutely no reason to do so. So I was sure, in that quasi-mystical way of a nineteen year old that some kind of crime wave was going down locally since the Ohta family had just been murdered by a burn out in the redwoods and the local people were at near war with the hippies that I, in my cave of solitude, was going to be somehow right in the middle of it and BANG just like that my Kerouac, Snyder zen savage in the wilderness learning the vicissitudes of living cosmically and hermetically was over. There was a hiatus on hitching up and down Highway 1 till they caught the monster who also was killing and making amulets out of thumbs. It was a locust storm of dark energy moving up the Coast. It was coming toward me. It knew right where my cave was. I headed down the mountain, read about the Ohta killings minutes away from the cave, and decided to re-enroll in school in Santa Barbara. Then my father invited me to Haiti, hoping to coax me back to New York.
So I thought I was cool going to Haiti. It was to be a reconciliation of sorts with my father, which it was to the extent that on this trip we did not really fight about anything. I give him that. On that one trip he allowed Haiti to happen to me. I was a sponge for everything about it. I loved the people I met. I understood the expatriot decadence of some others I met without at that time understanding the downside. I loved the music. I heard it all as music from the sonorities of the kreyol language to the self made melodies of the vendors to the close, wet air and incredible female timeless music of the iron markets to the smooth romantic glide of compas and big band sound with a sweet sadness that has influenced much of the music of the francophone world. The radios played the passion of Vodou along with Bach. I loved the food, such satisfaction in the dark fruited flavours, but most of all I loved the colors. I loved how nuanced the colors of shadows were, how one can spend time seeking shade in the hot sun and, when one found that shade, and a breeze, and the serendipity of a drink and perhaps the yellow sex-meat of a mango it was so easy to give oneself up to the idea that nothing would ever be the same again. I loved the fact that I felt spirits in the very air itself.
Those spirits came back with me to California. They made me restless with what the whole counterculture thing was about. I wanted deeper into world culture. Haiti told my teenage self how the world really was. And I was now permanently craving that depth. That depth which didn't really exist in my Isla Vista world. I had seen the kind of faith and positivity in Haiti that is born from sheer will power. I had seen art in a way I hadn’t ever seen art before….at its most important source….the artists’ homes. I had seen Vodou in its home. I had seen priests paint. And most importantly in terms of this memoir I had met two artists whose very being on this planet would change my life; Georges Liautaud and Andre Pierre. I hadn’t really spoken with them much on that visit; I really just accompanied my father who would tell them he was buying the pieces for me so he could get them cheaper. I did not understand art collecting; I was offended by the bartering. But when I met Liautaud his eyes pulled me somewhere. He was hardcore wise. He was, by that time and certainly by Haitian standards, well enough off in a sense. He was humble and projected a spiritual sense. I had only seen that calm among people when they have taken a visionary road. On that first real trip I was more taken with him in his being as Artist then by actually looking at his work. He was gentle and very very strong.
My focus on return added reading about Haitian art and some African art as well. Before the context had always been the rituals and the religion that fascinated me. I found every book on tribal art in the local libraries and it filled me with similar longings. It was hard for me to play bellydance music without having been immersed in the culture, but I saw the music as art as well. It was hard to play jazz and salsa and the rising tide of reggae without having gone to the sources. But I saw the links with art. I had to admit to myself how much I was roleplaying. I wanted into this art world. I wanted to write about it. I wanted to touch it. I wanted to meet these people and put their words and visions before the world. No more God’s eyes and feather earrings. I was hungry for World.
