Tagged: dominican republic

Hats

When I was eight,
I kept a picture on my wall
of my father, another man,
and a sea of smiling children.
Behind them was a helicopter
(black in my picture, green in Asia)
and in front of them
(though not in my picture)
were little homes of straw and mud.
In my picture,
he was not much older than I am now.

Not much older,
as I walk along Caille Duarte,
stepping over goat shit and mango pits,
greeted by four little boys
yelling, “Hola, Miguel! Miguel!”
I lose my straw hat to them,
I juggle stones and mangoes for them,
I chase them over cracked pavement
and past rusted barbed wire
covered with wet clothes.
They chatter at me,
as they must have chattered at him,
and I am powerless against their talk
and their tugs and their laughter.

Little Juan took me home one day–
grabbed my hand and my hat after Mass
and led me from the church to the river
on the edge of town, where his mother
kept a tin-roofed shack.
How proud he was of his, pig, his puppy,
his swing made of a stick and a rope!
He climbed into trees for fruit to give me,
and he threw round stones to knock mangoes loose
then led me back to the pastor’s house
and I gave away all my mangoes
walking back to Caille Duarte.

My hat always disappeared during Mass,
as though it crept stealthily
from under my seat and then flitted
from head to tiny head like a yellow-brown parrot.
I always retrieved it from a little cabellero
who wore it nearer his chin than his ears.
Now it’s torn and cracked in places
where small fingers plucked it roughly
like a hard yellow mango.

When I was eight,
I asked my father what had happened
to those children who hung on his arms,
and passed his green hat from head to head.
When I was eight,
he told me that they had to lock him in a room
when that village was burned,
and that he still feels rage at that fire.
If they had lived,
they would be not much older than me.

When I was in the Dominican Republic, I was a favorite of the little kids, who stole my hat and gave me fruit; I could juggle, sing silly songs, and was always up for a game of tag. Kids are great: fearless, funny, and resilient.

My father loved kids, too, and I had a picture of him, snapped for the Stars & Stripes newspaper, playing with a bunch of kids in Vietnam. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that many of those kids were later killed by the Viet Cong, because the village had been too friendly to the Americans. Of course, a good many kids were also killed by the ARVN or American bombs because their villages were too friendly to the VC. One of the many horrors of war is that friendliness can kill you.

I suppose I have a somewhat rosy view of American soldiers because of my father (and my grandfather, who passed out chocolate and gum to kids in Belgium and Germany during the Second World War); at their best, they’re overgrown kids themselves, even though they’re often called upon to do things horribly un-kid-like. The soldiers in the Dominican Republic were a different breed entirely: they swaggered around, swinging their rifles, buoyed by their unquestionable power, bullies every one. Thuggery in arms is a terrifying thing to see.

Of all my leftover poems of twenty years ago, I like this one the best, and I think I’ll end the series with it.

Haiti

From the border hill,
surrounded on three sides by Haitian mountains,
I can see the prison, the old mansion,
the market on my side of the island.
On the other side, nearly invisible in the dust,
is a twin prison, a twin market town.

Our rain and our sugar can cutters
come together from Haiti,
twin black clouds bringing the French island’s
wealth to eastern Hispañola.
And Haiti becomes dry and lonely,
like an old tin cup turned over
until all its blood has dripped out.

Haiti’s colors explode in Santo Domingo’s streets,
purple-skinned boys asking,
in patois-tinted voices,
“Tengo dinero? Tengo dinero?”
Purple-painted canvases declaring,
with their sharp shapes and rounded lines,
that life was vibrant in the twin market.

He brought his gray horse down through the trees
to drink at the stream we were swimming,
two miles into Haiti, unknown to swaggering soldiers.
His rough patois was strange
to my high school French,
but together we learned that he hadn’t eat in two days,
that work restrictions on the rich half of the island
were harsher than ever before,
that a nickel-a-day on Dominican fields
was still shinier than hunger in Haiti.

Old blood still clogs the streams
running north and south across Hispañola,
clotted into a bridge for bare feet
looking for rain and sugar.

The relationship between Haiti and Dominican Republic has been strained and often bloody. In 1937, the Parsley Massacre killed 17,000 to 35,000 Haitians living in the borderlands. (The Dominican soldiers used parsley–perejil to the Dominicans, pèsi to the Haitians–as a shibbeloth to identify their victims).

When I was in the Dominican Republic, we often saw Haitians in the town market, and in the cane fields. One day we ventured a little ways into Haiti, and it was clear that though the Dominican Republic was impoverished, it was a city of gold compared to Haiti.

Reja

Lovely señoritas would lean against barred windows
above the cobbled streets of Santo Domingo,
coyly smiling at the young caballeros
pleading audience from down below,
poetry dropping from their rosy lips
like pearls in the cool Caribbean autumn.

At siesta time Father John and I walk to the pump
to see the children gathered with tin water drums,
and over the splashing and laughing come prison shouts,
shirtless shadows behind barred windows and under guns
screaming “Gringo! Gringo!” and angry Spanish
in the dusty border summer.

On the edge of our village was a small prison on a hill; we walked by it sometimes to visit the water pump, and often elicited angry yells that we (at least Father John and I) could barely understand, probably for the best. I was raised on Kingston Trio songs like “Señora” and “El Matador” that painted a romantic picture of colonial New Spain, a world still visible in parts of Santo Domingo, which made a strange contrast with the realities of the modern Dominican Republic. “Reja” is a kind of ornamental ironwork originating in Spain in the 16th century.

Drought

I.

The bean plants fall into the cracked clay
like the damned into some pit,
their dusty leaves writhing arm-like
in displays of supplication.

When the mud from the last rain dried
it buckled up in the middle of the street
like a small range of sharp mountains
stamped into craters by goats’ feet.

Drought clings to my hair and shirt
when I walk along the mountain road,
turns to thin mud when I stand under
the rusty pipe in Mercedes’ shower.

II.

The expectant sky breathes hard and shallow,
moist air from a straining bellows
shaking dry cornstalks.
When the drenching birth of rain finally comes,
we all run out to midwife the storm,
Bachanal dancing.
The rain feels like snow in the hot air,
stinging the skin with its cold,
steams when it strikes stone.

The dust mountains in the streets burst
and spill into rivers that wind through
the garbage in the roads,
save the burning bean stalks only to drown them,
and pull the hillsides down into valleys
to carry them into the sea.

My month in the Dominican Republic was the “rainy season”; every afternoon, so regularly you could set your watch by it, a downpour flooded the streets. All the kids in the village, and the gringo visitors, ran out to play in the rain and mud, while the adults made sure the rain barrels were positioned to collect water. The government controlled the water that came from pipes, and we could only be sure the faucets would work until about nine in the morning.

The region had been so badly deforested that the downpours were more a cause of erosion than replenishment; it was worse over the border in Haiti. Farms clinging to the steep hills were always in danger of washing away, and the mud turned back to dust by evening.

El Mercado

Dried fish and sacks of sugar,
rice and beans piled high on sheets,
crushed coffee, frying platinos,
coconut dulces and lemons.

Haitian contraband t-shirts from America,
shoes for an army mis-sized and tattered,
hand-stitched trousers and woven jackets,
straw hats with flowery bands about their middles.

Old women twirling strands of tobacco,
leaves burning in hand-carved pipes;
campo men haggling over burros,
looking longingly at domino bars;
soldiers swaggering with heavy guns,
forcing personal paths through the crowd;
shoe-shine boys tugging at my shirt,
offering to buff my sneakers for a peso.

The massacre of chickens, their feet pedaling
in buckets upside down;
the waiting of mules, picking at the scrabble
on the church lawn;
the chanting of flies, Te Deum hymns to the sun
and strips of meat.

The town I visited in the Dominican Republic had a regional market, which was the most amazing crossroads of goods and services. I had never seen anything quite like it, though I’d read about places like it in Bowles and Burroughs. In my neighborhood now I visit places like El Mercado Central and the Midtown Global Market that have a good mix of things, but no open-air poultry abattoir nor dried meat rotting in the sun.

Coffee

Mercedes gives us the best family china cups
filled with pitch tar from the tin pot,
two heaping lumps of sugar to cut the bitter,
before we bathed in rust-brown water.
It fills the mouth like solid food–
“Petrol por humanos,” John says brokenly–
and slides into the belly warm and black.

The afternoon’s muddy trail cut through
a dirt farmer’s field of platinos and coffee–
we see him lashing his ox with sharp cries
and leather sting, grinding plow in ground–
and I touch a green coffee bean with timid finger.

On the bus going east on the army highway to Haiti,
we passed fields of sugar cane–
nickel-a-day wages for los Negros–
and in our village I stood in a ruined refinery,
its walls pledged to Ballaguer and Bosch both.

I cradle the demi tas in my fingers
as though it were a fragile bird made in Taiwan,
and gently kiss its eggshell lips
while swallowing the black island.

In the summer of 1990, I spent a month in the Dominican Republic, in a village on the Haitian border. It was part of a youth ministries program based in Orlando, Florida; I was an intern at the Green Bay Catholic Diocese, and I was along to gather information to write a grant to support a similar program.

It was a great experience, especially for a middle-class American kid. I stayed with a family in the village, sharing quarters with a priest from Scranton, PA, who was along to determine whether to accept a mission calling. The mother of the family, Mercedes, prepared meals for us, and I especially remember the breakfasts: thick slices of toasted bread, sweet fried platinos, milk with clots of fat still floating in it, and incredibly strong and thick coffee. The hospitality that the village gave us was incredible.

This section of the Dominican Republic is off the beaten track for tourists; we had to get there by bus, sharing space with crates of chickens. On the outskirts of the town was a ruined mansion that once belonged to Trujillo, the Dominican dictator from 1942 to 1961; a little further down the road, less than mile, was the border with Haiti. It’s a dry, dusty, mountainous area, and the people get by as best they can on subsistence farms, and sugar and platino fields.

This is the sort of place Americans ought to see. It’s poor, grindingly so, but also dignified, not at all like the Third World poverty Americans are likely to encounter on the edges of cruise ship destinations. Family and church were very important to the village, and an ethos of mutual aid and support suffused the culture. Isolated from the world and largely ignored by the government, the people in this region did their best to make a civilized life with limited resources.

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