Between Fort Dimanche Prison and the ocean, no more than a mile in distance, there is a wooded area in which, under cover of night, the executioners of Duvalier's government carry out summary executions. Assisted by the calm of night, and doubtless carried by the ocean wind, the cries of the victims reach us clearly in our cells. The place of execution is about 50 meters from the prison, i.e. from the rear wall. It is this area that the prisoners call the "bayarons" or the secret graveyard of Duvalier. (ibid.)
Back into the Light:
Enough Darkness for one day. I stepped back out into the sunlight, fortified by the several thousand clay "solar disks" baking in the hot sun.
Actually these clay cakes symbolize the opposite of what Fort Dimanche has stood for for decades: not only the life-giving sun obviously, but integrity, completeness, nutrition, even healing, because it has been known for centuries that eating "dirt", and in this case mineral-rich clay from Hinche, has certain bacteriological and microorganism properties that can actually enhance the immune system, as noted in this New York Times article. Eating "dirt", mud, earth, clay or soil is also known as geophagy, or "earth eating", and it has an interesting history. Even the title of Pearl Buck's famous novel, The Good Earth, is an allusion to geophagy.
Here is the woman who was mixing and shaping the clay cakes while we were at the fort. She wets the clay and adds water, salt and either butter or vegetable shortening, I am not sure which, after she has first filtered the clay of any debris and impurities she can find. After the cakes are shaped, they are set aside in the hot sun for four hours or more, depending upon the weather, before they are firm and dry enough for market.
a closeup
the ingredients
Hard at work, bu cheerful doing it.
The future of Haiti: the children. The question is, what kind of future will the world bequeath to them, one that remains forever mired in a dysfunctional, inhumane system based on the paradigm of fear and violence, or one that actually embraces liberty, fraternity and equality and is based on the paradigm of Love? And the return of Duvalier and the pending return of Aristide serve only to anthropomorphize these options, although neither of them represents pure evil or pure good respectively, but they do serve to focus our attention on the stark choice: will Haiti once again evoke the ghosts and demons of the past, or transcend the past once and for all with a higher vision of Haitian society that they can openly work to achieve?
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