It Is High Time to Relight the Stars

La grande roue, Antibes, France, August 2024. Photo by the author.

 

Like an illumination streaking across a starlit night sky, a new year begins full of energy and stark passions, plans and goals, hopes and dreams, fears to be overcome and desires to be fulfilled. As it continues, some are realized, some are put aside, some are defeated but, hopefully, the engine that keeps one striving forward continues to churn as, in a final dizzying dash to the finish line, we make it to the end of twelve months.

In just a few hours, a new year, 2025, will beckon to us. To say that 2024 has been tumultuous for me would be an understatement. I underwent a very intense and prolonged bout of chemotherapy for the uninvited guest in my body, that mercifully, was undertaken with relatively few side effects and, though I am by no means out of the woods, I am extraordinarily grateful to be here at all to greet this new year. 

During the past year, I was blessed with the opportunity to see much of this vibrant, heaving, colourful, enthralling world in which we live. I began the year with trips to Jamaica and Haiti, both to seek respite from the cold, as increased sensitivity to the chill is one of the few side-effects my already tropics-oriented body suffered from the chemo, and also to explore the complex current events in both places. In Kingston, the people of Riverton City and August Town were extraordinarily gracious with their time to welcome me to their communities and helped me craft a long piece of reportageon this moment in the island’s history. Dozens of Haitian migrants sequestered in Jamaica’s Robin’s Bay were also kind enough to share their stories of struggle and a flight to a hopefully-kinder future (which the Jamaican government did nothing to make any easier) with me. I also paid what was, for me, an at-once revivifying and moving visit to Haiti’s second-largest city, Cap-Haïtien, where I found, despite all of the country’s challenges, the spirit of revolution and the flickering presence of Haiti’s late president, Jovenel Moïse, still very much present, and the beauty of the coast and little islands ringing the town undimmed. 

In March, allied illegal armed groups in and around Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince launched a coordinated uprising designed under the banner Viv Ansanm (Live Together, a misnomer if there ever was one) to force then-Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who had served as Haiti’s chief executive since Moïse’s assassination in July 2021, from power. During the early weeks of the uprising, I probably did more television and radio interviews than I’ve ever done in my life, trying to explain the fraught and complex implications of what was going on. Henry eventually resigned and was replaced by a CARICOM-brokered “transition council” that was not entirely composed of but certainly dominated by the same political currents who have spent the last 25 years driving Haiti over a cliff. Today, Haiti has continued to be rent by the violence of the armed groups as the council scrambles over miserable power. 

Thanks to the generosity and hospitality of some friends, I was able to pass part of June in London and Spain, visiting mist-shrouded and intriguing Asturias for the first time and reuniting with friends in Madrid and Barcelona. It was a lovely, revivifying trip that I sorely needed, and it reminded me again that there is a lot more to life than simply temporal political concerns. In late August, I was again able to travel across the Atlantic thanks to some miles gifted to me by a friend and spent several days traipsing around atmospheric Dartmoor (Baskerville country) with two friends from London, visiting a friend and her lovely young family in Sanremo (and seeing some of the time-forgotten Ligurian villages nearby), reunited with an old Haiti acquaintance in pretty Antibes before making a return to atmospheric Marseille and a brief visit back to my dear Paris. 

In September, I participated in a wonderful and educational symposium on Haiti at the University of Michigan sponsored by the Haitian Midwest Scholars Society, the Indiana University Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and other partners. The trip out to the upper midwest gave me an opportunity to see the city of Detroit for the first time, a long-held goal, and I was not disappointed by such a fascinating place. 

I returned to Port-au-Prince in October, where I traversed the violence-wracked Haitian capital, interviewing the armed group leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, the great author Frankétienne and others in order to write a comprehensive account on the situation there, and en route was able to give a talk about the important role Haitian literature has played in the country’s social and political struggles at Miami Dade College in front of a very thoughtful and enthusiastic student body. 

I also managed to keep churning out stories for both this newsletter, Notes from the World (if you are not a paid subscriberyet, please consider becoming one), and interviews for its eponymously-named podcast, writing about about the United States’ drift towards autocracy, the ongoing war in Ukraine and the political struggles in Puerto Rico (also issuing an appeal for understanding on behalf of the beloved street cats of Viejo San Juan), while speaking to guests about issues as diverse as the conflict in Israel and Palestine, the history of Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War and the significance of the euphoric, unexpected rebel victory in Syria. As someone whose political orientation runs to anti-authoritarianism, to finally, at long last and after such a cost, see the fall of the homicidal, corrupt Assad dynasty, for so long a kind of true north for the world’s worst defenders of tyranny and mass murder, both left and right, was an unexpected balm to a year that ends with the people of Ukraine still under Russian bombs, the people of Sudan still beset by ruthless paramilitaries and an equally ruthless army, the people of the Democratic of Congo still beset by the relentless war-mongering, empire-building of Paul Kagame in neighboring Rwanda and the people of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela still under the thumb of their own pitiless despots. But the fall of Assad perhaps reminded those tyrants, too, that they are not invincible. It is my wish that we see more autocrats fall in the new year.

This year, I also had to say goodbye to two of the beings most dear to me: My beloved and faithful beagle Max, who came into my life in February 2015 off the snowy streets of Newburgh, New York, and my devoted mystic vodou cat Hastings, who had been my constant loyal companion since he strolled into the apartment I was staying at in New Orleans in November 2010. They both passed away very suddenly, Max in May and Hastings almost four months to the day later in September. As I wrote at the time, the right animal can open up extraordinary depths of emotion in a person, perhaps, especially, when one leads the kind of non-conventional, roaming lifestyle that I have over the years, and both Hastings and Max opened up a lot of love in me. In my heart and my mind, along with my cat Winston, who passed away in 2017, they will remain with me forever. Though they are survived by my four other cats - two each from the streets of Miami and the streets of Viejo San Juan - their passing has made the apartment in Baltimore a much quieter and, frankly, sadder place, and I sincerely hope I am able to overcome the financial struggles I have been facing in tandem with my illness to relocate somewhere not so suffused with memoires in the coming months, hopefully somewhere warm as I continue to work on two new books and to grow this little newsletter as a voice for sanity, curiosity and compassion in the world, somewhere warm where I can walk out at night and feed the street cats I happen to find, somewhere warm where life embraces one again, for, as the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire one wrote, Il est grand temps de rallumer les étoiles (It is high time to relight the stars).

I have now been writing these little year end messages since 2008 and have been a working journalist and author for even longer. In that time, I’ve learned a few things about life, I think, chief among them the importance of empathy and patience with our fragile fellow humans and the inestimable value of the interconnected humanity we all share. More and more, the sentiments that the author Albert Camus expressed to poet René Char in a September 1957 letter, which I reproduce first in the original French and then in my own English-language translation below, have come to resonate with me:

Plus je vieillis et plus je trouve qu’on ne peut vivre qu’avec les êtres qui vous libèrent, qui vous aiment d’une affection aussi légère à porter que forte à éprouver. La vie d’aujourd’hui est trop dure, trop amère, trop anémiante, pour qu’on subisse encore de nouvelles servitudes, venues de qui on aime. À la fin, on mourrait de chagrin, littéralement. Et il faut que nous vivions, que nous trouvions les mots, l’élan, la réflexion qui fondent une joie, la joie. Mais c’est ainsi que je suis votre ami, j’aime votre bonheur, votre liberté, votre aventure en un mot, et je voudrais être pour vous le compagnon dont on est sûr, toujours.

The older I get, the more I find that one can only live with beings who free you, who love you with an affection as light to bear as strong to feel. Today's life is too hard, too bitter, too anaemic, for us to endure new servitudes coming from those we love. In the end, we would literally die of sorrow. And we must live, find the words, the momentum, the reflection that creates joy, joy. But that is how I am your friend, I love your happiness, your freedom, your adventure in a word, and I would like to be for you the companion that we are sure of, always.

Thank you, all, for being part of my year. I couldn’t have done it without you. May we all pause to appreciate what unites us as we go forward into the new year and I wish you all happiness and the chance to see all your dreams come true.

Love,

MD

Books in 2024: A Personal Selection

 Triptych with the Virgin Mary and Christ child flanked by archangels, apostles, prophets and saints, painted by Fre Seyon, Ethiopia, mid to late 15th century. Photo by the author.

Two Years in the French West Indies by Lafcadio Hearn 

Though the Anglo-Irish-Greek author and translator Lafcadio Hearn is best known for his work introducing the culture and literature of Japan to the West, enthusiastic traveler that he was, he also passed considerable time in the Caribbean, some of which is recounted in this lovely book. Despite occasional (though typical for the time) outdated musings about race, Two Years in the French West Indies contains exquisite descriptions of such locales as Georgteown, Guyana and of the dazzling ethnic diversity of Trinidad as they existed in the late 1880s. Focusing in the main on Martinique, Hearn pens, especially considering the time, very respectful accounts of Martinique’s spiritual and cultural life and seems enraptured by the physical beauty present in this part of the world.

Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov

A book suffused with loss as it looks at the life of a beekeeper living in a nearly-abandoned village in eastern Ukraine during Russia’’s 2014 lunge for that part of the country (a precursor to its larger 2022 invasion), this novel brings home some idea of the human cost that Russian imperialism has exacted on the people of Ukraine.

The Dragon Can't Dance by Earl Lovelace

A beautifully-written account of the of the struggles, the hopes, the anger, the pettiness, the sadness and the bravery of a cast of characters living in close quarters in an impoverished quarter of Trinidad’s Port of Spain, this 1979 novel is an expertly-crafted evocation of the reality and rich inner lives of its subjects.

Cairo: The City Victorious by Max Rodenbeck

An interesting 1998 effort by an Anglo-American journalist to encapsulate the dizzying urban multiverse that is Egypt’s massive capital city, this books has its weak points (various military leaders, rulers, and foreign eccentrics are mentioned in passing and then disappear, without making any particular impression up on the reader and the tone - about slavery, for instance - can seen off-puttingly flippant), but it improves as it goes on and is still an admirable attempt to fit a kaleidoscope of human experience into a digestible form.

Journal 1935–1944: The Fascist Years by Mihail Sebastian

A searing first-hand account of the collapse of Romania into hysterical totalitarianism by a young Jewish writer, these journals open with a vivid description of the extraordinary intellectual hothouse that was Bucharest before the war, even as ominous rumblings of virulent antisemitism spread through the very intelligentsia that Mihail Sebastian was part of. The curdling of the nation’s ailing political system into something truly dreadful is vividly and terrifyingly evoked, first in the so-called National Legionary State that saw the quasi-mystical fascist Iron Guard rule in uneasy cohabitation with right-wing General Ion Antonescu, and then under the reactionary and violently anti-semitic Antonescu alone after a failed coup attempt by the Guard which included a hideous anti-Jewish pogrom in Bucharest. Though the book could have perhaps used an editor to pare down some of the rather workman like recounting of some of the author’s romantic escapades and passages about the mechanics of writing, the journals are full of beautiful lyrical passages, such as Sebastian’s description of a football match just before the horrors of war descend:

It has been perhaps one of the last magnificent days of autumn. I went to a soccer match at the O..E.F. (Venus against CFR), not for the match but for the scenery, which I guessed in advance would be gleaming. I wasn't wrong. A weary, powdered, tender light-and far off a bright, steamy, silvery mist from which the city detached itself in an unreal way, as in a painted canvas or a mounted photograph. And how many colors! I didn't know there were so many red houses in Bucharest. From the stadium they look as if they are made of toy bricks. And the leafless trees jut out of the mist as from a damp exhalation of their own. Everything was very delicately drawn, but with an explosive wealth of color. The red grounds, the multicolored billboards, the still-green grass, the football shirts mingling black, white, and blue, the huge crowd: it was all quite dizzying. At the beginning of the second half, the referee blew his whistle for a minute's silence in memory, I think, of a foreign player who died recently. Suddenly there was a massive silence-a silence of some twenty thousand people. The noise of the city could just be heard in the distance.

Following Romania’s disastrous decision to join forces with Germany, Sebastian and his family live through conflict and displacement within Bucharest, as he tries to retain his sanity by reading Balzac during bombing raids. As the nightmare of fascism drew to a close (to be followed closely by the nightmare of Communist dictatorship), and only nine months before his own untimely death in a traffic accident, Sebastian penned memorable lines in an entry that may read very familiar to the citizens of newly-liberated Syria today: “And now, life begins. A kind of life, which has to be lived. The only thing for which I longed was freedom. Not a new definition of freedom—but freedom. After so many years of terror, we don’t need to have it explained to us what freedom is. We know what it is—and it cannot be replaced by any formula.”

We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh

A wonderful, touching and deeply sad memoir by the Palestinian lawyer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh that, as any good work of literature does, restores subtlety and humanity to a group of people - in this case Palestinians - who are so frequently caricatured abroad. 

The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha

A sprawling and nearly all-encompassing account that places abolition as a movement in its proper transnational context, this tome also illustrates how the abolitionist vision was a multiracial one with African-Americans ever at the forefront.

How Fire Descends: New and Selected Poems by Serhiy Zhadan

This volume is an incandescent and affecting work - part exorcism of horrors witnessed, part rallying cry for a future yet to be won - by a great Ukrainian poet who, since Russia’s 2022 invasion, has also served in the 13th Khartiia Brigade, a combat brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine. The expert translation by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps allows Zhadan’s work to flow beautifully in English in a series of poems that are reminiscent of some of the best work of Mahmoud Darwish or Nâzım Hikmet in their fusing of the personal with the political. 

The World All Before Us Where to Choose

And thus the embers of the candle of the year that was finally flicker out to be replaced by the brilliant light of the flame of the year that is to come, with all the hope and expectation that it brings.

For me, as for the world, 2023 has been a tumultuous year, to put it mildly. It began with a trip to Haiti, where I found a country that has practically become my second home in the nearly 30 years I’ve been visiting and writing about it held hostage by the armed gangs that control most of the capital as well of the roads in and out of it, while an illegitimate Prime Minister and an equally discredited opposition squabble over power. I traveled all over Port-au-Prince, the capital, talking to everyone I could to try and form a complete picture of a country at war and the hundred daily acts of resistance the population engages in to try to build a more decent society amid such chaos. When I returned home, I found not a single editor at the publications I usually contributed to interested in such an article, many of them content to phone in their coverage from abroad, and that led me to launch this newsletter you are reading now, and to publish my observations and conclusions here, so the words of all the people who paid me the honour of trusting me with their stories would not go unrecorded. Though I was doubtful that my little corner of the internet would amount to much, to my happy astonishment “Notes from the World” has steadily been building subscribers, proof, if any was needed, that people - the general public - are willing to pay for quality reporting and analysis, and are still willing to read long-form essays that defy easy ideological categorization. It has been immensely gratifying to see this.

Also this year, after three years of work, I completed and submitted for publication my new book, With the Pen In One Hand and the Sword in the Other: Haiti and the United States in the Nineteenth Century, a work of pure history which I hope will open peoples’ eyes to the complex intricacies of the relations between the hemisphere’s two oldest republics and the vital role that Haiti played as a beacon for liberationist thought and action in the Americas during the 1800s, despite its own internal convulsions.

And then, not to be outdone for drama, I had an unwelcome visitor in my home and in my body, which I continue to deal with and address as best as I am able. I have been touched beyond words at how many people from different eras of my life have reached out with support both moral and material in the last months. You have really made me feel like I had an impact in the world, which is the most moving, precious gift anyone can ask for. Thank you all so much.

Abroad, we watched the heroes of Ukraine continue to defend their homeland against the imperialist, fascist Russian invaders, despite the cynical drip-drip of aid dangled before them by Western nations who still seem unable to fully grasp that if Ukraine falls, not only Moldova but the Batlic states and Poland will almost certainly be next. The sadism of Putin’s Russia was not confined to Ukraine, of course, as he helped the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad terrorizedefenseless civilians there, as well.  Cuba’s jails continued to groan with more than 1,000 political prisoners, includingsome of the leading writers, musicians, artists, feminist and LGBTQ voices in the country as its creaking dictatorship demanded “sacrifice” from anyone but its own bloated, cosseted members. Venezuela’s ruling narcokleptocracy, attempting to inject some advantage into elections it is sure to lose if they are fair (they won’t be), began issuing bellicose threats against its neighbor, tiny, democratic Guyana, as if ruining one country utterly is apparently not enough destruction for them. Iran’s ossifying theocracy desperately attempted to silence critical voices abroad as well as at home as a reportrevealed how security forces there used rape and other forms of sexual violence amounting to torture to intimidate and punish peaceful protesters during the 2022 “Woman Life Freedom” uprising. In Afghanistan, fully half of the population remained erased from public life as the violently misogynistic Taliban, whose illegal usurpation of power was celebratedby such low-dwelling fellow travelers as Greece’s former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, continued their misrule. Sudan remained torn asunder in a war between its military and the Rapid Support Forces militia, living down to their pedigree as the spawn of the genocidal janjaweed - itself descended from the Muammar Gaddafi-supported Arab supremacist Tajammu al-Arabi - as it conducted  horrific ethnic cleansing in Darfur. And in Israel and Gaza, the slaughter went on, provoked initially by a group of atrocious rapists and mass murderers and now prolonged by a government of fanatics and cynics that will do anything to stay in power and for whom the safety of Israeli hostages is far down on the list of priorities. 

But there are signs of light in the darkness. In Europe, the nations that have seen firsthand the sharp end of the imperialist designs emanating from Moscow are leading the fight to defend the continent’s democracy and autonomy from the Kremlin’s tyranny. Chile’s young president, Gabriel Boric, despite facing a series of setbacks at home, has proven himself to be a strong defender of democracy and human rights throughout the region and beyond. 

In Guatemala, in a victory that almost no one (including me) saw coming, Bernardo Arévalo, the son of that nation’s first democratically-elected president, Juan José Arévalo, won the presidency in a triumph that sent the criminal monarchy that has run the country directly or through political proxies for decades scrambling for a Plan B that has, thus far, mercifully, failed. In Arévalo and his Movimiento Semilla party, one sees the beginning of the fruition of the long-delayed Guatemalan Spring that began in 2015. An extraordinary country with immense potential, those committed to democracy and human rights should be prepared to watch closely and assist Guatemalans however they can as the latter attempt to reclaim their nation from the grupos clandestinos who have plundered it for so long. 

In Puerto Rico, mi querida isla del encanto, although many environmental problems and structural and systemic problems with the political system persist, in the alliance between the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño and the Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana there is an opportunity for the forces of change on the island to take advantage of the progress of the 2020 elections during next year's vote to break once and for all the two-part duopoly that has ruled - and failed - the island for so long. 

And, despite the dire moments it is living through, I continue to believe in the inevitable renaissance of Haiti, for a country that has done so much for the cause of human freedom cannot be and will never be extinguished. Ayiti pap peri.

And as for me? And for us?

On New Year’s Eve, 1917, the French novelist Marcel Proust penned a letter to his financial adviser and dear friend Lionel Hauser where he mused  J'ai renoncé à croire que les années soient nouvelles et puissent apporter un bonheur qui est désormais derrière moi. Mais cela ne me fait pas désirer moins vivement que soient heureux ceux que j'aime (I have given up believing that years are new and can bring happiness that is now behind me. But that doesn't make me less eager for those I love to be happy).”  But, eh bien, ma chère, even with the uncertainty that now stretches before me, I can say that there is so much to love and to value and to look forward to in this world. The caress of the tropical wind on an island in the Caribbean just before plunging into the relief of the blue-green foam of the sea; the hum of the life of the natural world in a field in the Loire Valley in the deep summer; the wonderful carefreeness of watching kids just starting out on their journey hanging out and partying and flirting along the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris; the song of the coquí on a starlit night outside of Aibonito; the purr of a cat or the smile of a dog that has come into your life; the sound of a beloved’s voice in the next room followed to see their face a moment later in which intense joy and endless possibility reside.

Be brave. Be free. Love and allow yourselves to be loved. I wish you all jouissez sans entraves (joy without limits) and the most wonderful happiness in the new year and beyond.

With love,

M

Jouissez sans entraves (Joy without limits) - Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, May 1968.