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
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