CHAPTER 5

I Speak Out

Alèrte Bélance: I only have a stub where my arm used to be, and the fingers of my left hand have been severed; I can’t close it. That hand can’t do anything for me. That’s why I say to you: consider that I always lift my face up, I speak out. . . . Look at my martyrdom from when the wicked ones kidnapped me and took me to the killing fields. . . . Hear my story, what I have experienced.

We were speeding through the Lincoln Tunnel toward New Jersey to visit a Haitian woman named Alèrte Bélance. Alèrte was the latest casualty of the 1991 military coup d’état in Haiti. We—the director, the producers of the documentary, and I—had heard about Alèrte through a refugee women’s organization in Brooklyn. We were told that she had been arrested by men belonging to a paramilitary group working for the junta that had led the coup and had become the de facto leadership of the country. Five of us immediately jumped into a small car and, with a trunk full of video equipment, headed for the public housing project in Newark where Alèrte, her husband, and their three children were living. Our documentary was about Haitian torture survivors and we hoped that she would tell us her story.

As we entered the sparsely furnished apartment on the top floor of the six-story building, we were greeted by two young girls dressed in ruffled pink dresses and matching bows in their hair. Alèrte’s son was sitting on a large orange sofa in the middle of the living room. He was a small boy and it was hard to tell whether he was older or younger than the girls, who both appeared to be around ten. The boy never smiled, which made me think that he was indeed older and understood a lot better than his sisters did what had happened.

Alèrte’s husband, a youthful-looking, goateed man, carried in a few chairs from the kitchen for us. Then Alèrte emerged from the bedroom. She was a small woman, her dark face sunken on one side where a machete had nearly chopped off her cheekbone. She was in her late twenties, but looked twice as old, the machete scars and suture marks like tiny railroad tracks leading toward her chin. She was wearing a green blouse, a flowered skirt, and a dark knit cap on her head, and as she limped toward the couch she greeted each of us with a nod.

Somewhere downstairs a baby was crying.

“These apartments are sometimes used for battered women,” she said in halting Creole.

Still, her voice was a lot clearer than we had expected, since during the attack her tongue had been cut in two.

While lingering on her voice, it was also hard not to stare at her right forearm, the pointy black stub filled with keloid scars. Leading to the tip were more machete scars, as though the person—the people—who had chopped off her arm had tried extremely hard to do it. You could not look at that arm and not wonder where the rest of it was.

My brother Kelly also has a missing forearm. Unlike Alèrte, he was born that way. I am not exactly sure what happened with Kelly, but when my youngest daughter, Leila, was born with a few small indentations in her left earlobe, her pediatrician told me that sometimes in the womb, elongated tissue called amniotic bands wrap themselves so tightly around fetal tissue that they can amputate a fetus’s arm or leg. My Vodou-and Santeria-practicing friends, however, tell me that when a person is born missing any piece of flesh—be it a limb or otherwise—it means that the person has lost a twin in the womb and that lost twin has put a visible mark on the living twin.

At last, I’d thought, I had two possible answers to the mystery that was my beautiful brother. Kelly’s missing forearm had dissolved inside my mother, becoming a part of the tissue, and spirit, that had helped create him. Alèrte’s missing forearm had dissolved in a mass grave, becoming a part of the country that had helped create her.

Alèrte Bélance: They sliced me into pieces with machete strokes. They cut out my tongue and my mouth: my gums, plates, teeth, and jaw on my right side. They cut my face open, my temple and cheek totally open. They cut my eye open. They cut my ear open. They cut my body, my whole shoulder and neck and back slashed with machete blows. They cut off my right arm. They slashed my left arm totally and cut off the ends of all the fingers of my left hand. Also, they slashed my whole head up with machete blows.

Once the lights and cameras were set up, the director, my friend Patricia Benoit, tried to begin gently.

“Kijan wye?” How are you? Patricia, who was born in Haiti and moved to the United States with her parents when she was six, has a soft, hesitant, but cajoling voice in Creole. Fluent in English, Creole, and French, she is not only trilingual but also tritonal, having a distinctive timbre and pitch for each language she speaks. Patricia has often filmed in Haiti and has seen other victims of other horrors, so when she said to Alèrte, “Kijan wye?” it did not sound like small talk, especially in this nearly empty room so far from all of our homes.

Alèrte settled on the couch and with her semifunctioning hand began tugging at the dark knit cap on her head. She removed the cap and underneath were more scars and a military-style buzz cut. She quickly put the cap back on.

“We’ll do this any way you want,” Patricia said softly, “but you look nice with your cap off.”

With her cap off, even with the machete scars so visible, Alèrte’s injured cheekbones emerged. Her eyes had a glint of onyx and she had a coy smile that came from only one side of her mouth.

“I look like a boy,” she said, nervously rolling the cap in her hand.

She asked her husband to get two faux pearl earrings from a box in the bedroom. When he came back, he leaned down and, because she could not, put the earrings on her ears. Then he sat down next to her, as though to shield her from the camera.

What did you do for a living in Haiti?” Patricia asked Alèrte.

“I sold food in the market,” she said.

Her husband, she said, was a welder. He was also involved in some neighborhood committees that organized rallies for Jean-Bertrand Aristide when he was a presidential candidate.

Patricia guided her slowly toward the moment when the paramilitary men, called attachés, came to her house in Port-au-Prince.

They wanted to wipe out everyone who’d voted for Aristide, she said. Her husband, because of his election organizing, was targeted. They came knocking on her door. When her husband saw who they were, he escaped through a window in the back of their house. He thought that if they didn’t find him they would simply go away. He never thought they’d take her in his place.

They put her in the back of a pickup truck and drove her to a deserted stretch of land outside of town, Haiti’s so-called valley of death, a vast mass grave called Titanyen. There two men hacked her with machetes. When she realized that they were trying to kill her, she stopped fighting, lay down, and played dead. She lost the arm, she said, trying to shield her face and the rest of her body.

When the paramilitary men saw that she had stopped moving, one of them said, “Look, it seems like she’s dead.”

“They had more people to kill,” she said, “so they left me there.”

She waited until they were gone. Then she dragged herself back to the side of the road and waited until morning.

As she spoke, slowly but firmly, as if reliving every second of these horrors, I wrote a summary translation on a legal pad for one of our non-Creole-speaking producers. I felt tears run down my face. This was perhaps unprofessional, even disrespectful. The telling of that story was such a courageous act, I thought, that only one person in that room had the right to cry.

Alèrte Bélance: I woke up again the next morning and found myself stuck on top of a briar path where the zenglendo threw me. My whole body was full of prickers. I didn’t feel them, though, because my whole body was dead. I’m not positive where I was because I couldn’t see—my eyes were stuck together with blood—but I think I was up in the air, perched on the side of a hill, just over a hole. I felt myself shaking, my whole body was trembling. I unstuck my eyes and then I saw that I wasn’t too far from the road. But I couldn’t see up or down, I couldn’t move to the left or right. Anywhere I turned, I would fall into the hole.

Patricia then moved on to her incredible survival.

“How did you get found?” she asked.

In the morning, on the precipice by the side of the road, she saw many cars speeding by. She stopped to raise her bloody arms to catch their attention. Some drivers, stopped and gawked and then got back into their cars and kept going. By then she was covered with the pikan, the thorns that are common in the area. One potential good Samaritan even said, “She’s not dead,” but kept going. Finally an army pickup truck came by and—proving that not all soldiers are the same—one of the two soldiers in the truck said, “We can’t leave that woman here.” They picked her up and put her in the back of the truck.

Tearful, Alèrte stopped talking and her husband picked up the narrative from there. During the entire interview, he referred to her in Creole as dam la, the lady, a rather formal but not impersonal designation.

After escaping to his aunt’s house in another part of town, Alèrte’s husband returned home the next morning. The children told him that their mother had been taken away by the men who’d come the night before. That same morning, a soldier came to the house and asked who he was. He hesitantly told the soldier his name. The soldier said, “You should come quick to the hospital. Your wife is sick. She may even die before you get there.”

When he got to the hospital, he did not recognize her. “That’s not my wife,” he told the doctors.

Alèrte had the presence of mind to nod her head to indicate to him that she was indeed Alèrte.

“She had long hair before,” he said, pointing to her buzz haircut. “But when I saw her, she was like the chopped meat they sell at the market.”

Later a human rights group would publish a brochure filled with pictures of Alèrte taken in the hospital after her attack. I had never seen anything like it: picture after picture of hollowed pockets of severed and swollen tissue all over her face, arms, and legs.

The doctors had to hide her when several attachés came looking for her in the hospital. There were many instances of attachés coming back to kill torture survivors in hospitals. A young man who had been left for dead in Titanyen was later taken to the hospital, and then was murdered in the hospital by paramilitary men as his grandfather watched helplessly. That precedent forced the doctors to hide her.

She was lucky to have had the doctors she had, she chimed in. Doctors like that are hard to come by for poor women in overcrowded hospitals in Haiti. The doctors hid her and, when the killers came by, they would say that she had died.

Slowly, she said, reaching up to touch the scars on the side of her face, she began to heal. But she did not want to give the impression that it was quick and easy, as in a movie. She remembered the infections over her entire body, when most of her wounds were filled with puss. She had to be on oxygen a lot of the time because her nasal cavities were too inflamed to take in enough air.

As she talked, her daughters played nearby. They had heard all this before, it seemed, and they could ignore it now, or they were simply protecting themselves by giggling together on the floor and disturbing the shoot. Their childish giggles reminded Alèrte to say that after all this, after she went from being a plump, voluptuous, long-haired woman to a skinny, buzz-cut amputee, her daughters also did not recognize her. Because of her new appearance, they did not know who she was. The younger of the two would pull a picture from the side of the bed, a framed picture of Alèrte looking fleshy and healthy and smiling. The child would carry the picture to her and say, “You are not my mother. This is my mother.”

It took the children a while to get used to her new body and the new, deeper voice she had as a result of her tongue having been cut in half and sewn back together again. The tongue had been hanging by a thread of flesh, but the doctors sewed it back on and, miraculously, it healed.

“It healed,” she said, “so I can tell my story, so people can know what happened to me.”

Her strength and resolve seemed to grow with each word, even as she said she got depressed sometimes because she couldn’t do much for herself or her family. She ached all the time from the wounds we could see and others we could not see. At night she ached even more because of the seren, the twilight air, which affected her bones. Her husband had to bathe her and comb the children’s hair. Something a man ought not to have to do, she added.

Her son was sitting quietly in a corner observing the shoot while her daughters played and ate candy in their Sunday dresses. Watching the girls, it occurred to me that when they are grown, they may look exactly the way their mother used to look.

“I think we are done,” Patricia said at the end of the interview.

Alèrte’s body slid down on the couch. She seemed relieved. Her eyes traveled around the room, and then she asked Patricia, “Kote w soti?” Where are you from?

Patricia told of her origins in shorthand. Born in Haiti. Mother French. Father Haitian. Raised in Queens.

“Do you like New Jersey?” Patricia asked.

She did not go out much, Alèrte said. People stared. She had just been invited to appear on the Phil Donahue Show, though, and had agreed to go and, with a translator, tell her story.

“If it helps Haiti,” she said.

Suddenly, her son edged closer. Patricia asked him if he wanted to say something.

The boy said yes.

On camera?

The boy nodded.

Patricia asked Alèrte and her husband if it was all right to let the boy speak on camera.

They both nodded.

We started filming again, and the shy little boy told of seeing his mother in the hospital for the first time.

“She looked like chopped meat,” he said, echoing his father’s words.

Tears ran down the little boy’s face as he spoke. His body was tense but it seemed as if he was finally releasing a knot in his stomach. He could not stop crying.

We all began to cry along with him, even those who did not speak Creole and could not understand a word he said.

As we drove back though the Lincoln Tunnel, leaving Alèrte and her family behind, we all wondered if there was more we could have said. Was there something else we could have done? I kept asking myself what Alèrte’s life with her husband was now like, what their relationship was like beyond his being helpful to her. A question I could not ask was whether or not they were still attracted to each other, still in love.

A few months later I got my answer.

She became pregnant.

Alèrte Bélance: I remember lying in the hospital bed and trying to imagine how I was going to live in the situation I’m in now. I don’t have two arms. My left arms sticks to my body but serves no purpose for me. . . . Killing Alèrte Bélance was supposed to mean that Alèrte Bélance couldn’t speak for a better life. Contrary to their stopping me, I’m progressing because I’m still bearing children. They tried to take my life away, but not only couldn’t they do that, I’m producing more life.

The following week was the taping of the Phil Donahue Show. The producers of the Donahue Show asked our producers to find Haitian audience members, and Patricia and I, along with Jean Dominique and a few other friends, were in the audience.

The point of the show was to encourage the Clinton administration to do something about the junta that was killing or maiming people like Alèrte. The lure was the celebrity supporters of Haiti, including Harry Belafonte, Susan Sarandon, and Danny Glover, as well as the TransAfrica Forum founder Randall Robinson, who went on a hunger strike to press the Clinton administration to act. Alèrte did not get to speak very much on the show because she had to use a translator, which slowed down the process of telling her story. Instead, Phil Donahue held her arm up in the air; her story was told more visually than in her own voice.

After the show aired, however, Alèrte became the face of the junta’s atrocities in Haiti. I ran into her again at several events and rallies where she loudly demanded the return of the democratically elected government. At one rally, she even shared the stage with President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had requested to meet her.

Later, she faced off with some paramilitary leaders on Haitian radio in New York and, with the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed a thirty-two-million-dollar lawsuit against FRAPH, the paramilitary organization to which the attachés who’d attacked her belonged. More than a decade later, the case against FRAPH was decided in her favor, but it is unlikely that she will ever recover a dime.

As her visibility grew, she was featured in several U.S. newspapers and magazines and got a small speaking part in the Jonathan Demme–directed film version of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In the film, Alèrte plays Nan, a woman “who used different words.” Jonathan Demme had Alèrte say Nan’s lines (“She threw them all away but you”) to the lead character, Sethe, in Haitian Creole.

When one first saw Alèrte Bélance, what was most visible about her were her “marks,” her scars. But eventually it was also easy to recognize her spirited defiance.

“Do you realize how strong you are?” Patricia had asked her.

“Yes, I realize that I am strong,” she replied. “I am very strong. Some people get a small cut and it gets infected and they die. Look what was done to me and still I survived. Yes, I am very strong.”

In Courage and Pain, the undistributed documentary we ended up making, Alèrte and her family are surrounded by nearly a dozen other survivors who, like Alèrte, were nearly executed. They all tell different versions of the same story, of being beaten, macheted, shot, and tortured, and of nearly dying in a country they loved but where they could no longer live.

A few months later, a resolute Alèrte retold her story to Beverly Bell, an American researcher, democracy and women’s advocate, who would later compile the excerpts I have quoted throughout this chapter in an oral history titled Walking on Fire.

“Three months after I came back from the dead at Titanyen, I was on my two feet,” Alèrte told Beverly Bell. “I traveled around the United States trying to beat up on the misery of Haiti and the Haitian people. I spoke about women whom the cruel death and terror gangs were raping, little children they were raping, babies in the cradle. I went on television and the radio; I talked to U.S. congressmen, journalists, human rights activists. I spoke at demonstrations, press conferences, churches, congressional hearings . . . to say, “Here. Here is what I suffered.”

She not only suffered, however, but against all odds she also survived and thrived. And her testimony was a great gift to many others who were still trying to stay alive, and to the more than eight thousand others who died under the junta’s rule.

Alèrte Bélance: They killed mother after mother of children. They killed doctor after doctor, student after student. Mothers of children lost their children. . . . The devil has raped the confidence of the people. . . . People of conscience, hear me who is trying to wake you up. Hear my story, what I have experienced . . .