The Saturday Profile: A Prolific Father of Haitian Letters, Busier Than Ever

Frankétienne has had prophecies of death (his own) and destruction (Haiti’s).

The earthquake that wrecked this country in January 2010? It was foreseen, said Frankétienne, the man known as the father of Haitian letters, in his play “The Trap.” It was written two months before the disaster and depicts two men in a postapocalyptic landscape, now a familiar sight in his Delmas neighborhood here.

“The voice of God spoke to me,” said Frankétienne, 75, later noting he had also long dwelt on the ecological ruin he believes the planet is hurtling toward. As for his death, that will come in nine years, in 2020, he says, at age 84. He is not sick, he says, but he has learned to “listen to the divine music in all of us.”

And so the prolific novelist, poet and painter — often all three in a single work — hears his coda. He is vowing to complete a multivolume memoir “before I leave, physically,” while keeping up an increasingly busy schedule of exhibitions and conferences.

“I am going to talk about everything I have seen from age 5 or 6,” he said recently at his house-cum-museum and gallery. “And stuff that hasn’t happened yet because I am a prophet.”

Eccentric. Abstract. A “spiralist,” who rejects realism and embraces disorder. Frankétienne — he combined his first and last names years ago — embraces chaos as a style he believes befits a country with a long, tumultuous history birthed in a slave revolt more than 200 years ago and scarred by a cascade of natural and man-made disasters.

In chaos he finds order.

“I am not afraid of chaos because chaos is the womb of light and life,” he said, his baritone voice rising as it does when he gets worked up over a point. “What I don’t like is nonmanagement of chaos. The reason why Haiti looks more chaotic is because of nonmanagement. In other countries it is managed better. Haiti, they should take as reference for what could happen in the rest of world.”

Scholars widely view Frankétienne as Haiti’s most important writer. He wrote what many consider the first modern novel entirely in Haitian Creole, “Dezafi,” in 1975, and a play well known here that challenged political oppression, “Pelin Tet.” It is a biting work from 1978 that is aimed, not so subtly, at Jean-Claude Duvalier, the son of the dictator Fran?ois Duvalier and himself a former dictator known as Baby Doc, who returned here from exile in January.

Although not well known in the English-speaking world, Frankétienne has star status in French- and Creole-speaking countries and was rumored to be on the short list for a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009.

After the quake, his works gained more international attention, particularly in Canada and France. “The Trap” debuted in March 2010 at a Unesco forum in Paris that named him an artist for peace; galleries in New York have organized shows featuring his artwork. Still, he also holds informal Sunday workshops with young artists in Haiti to talk about and critique their work.

“He is not only a major Haitian writer, he is probably the major Haitian writer, forever,” said Jean Jonassaint, a Haitian literature scholar at Syracuse University.

Frankétienne’s output, about 40 written works and, by his count, 2,000 paintings and sketches, comprises dense, baroque affairs. He invents new words, blending French and Haitian Creole. Long digressions are de rigueur. His paintings, which he says are selling particularly well these days, blur swirling blacks, blues and reds, often covered with poems.

He admires James Joyce, and it shows. “?‘Finnegan’s Wake’ was like a crazy book, just like I write crazy books,” he said.

Still, the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat said Frankétienne remained popular among Haitians, in part because some of his plays had been videotaped and passed around in Haiti and in immigrant communities in the United States.

“Pelin Tet,” in which the grim life of two Haitian immigrants in New York deliberately echoes the oppression of the Duvalier era on the island, is a touchstone for many Haitians, said Ms. Danticat, who grew up in the same neighborhood as Frankétienne and was, in part, inspired to write by his rise to the top.

“His work can speak to the most intellectual person in the society as well as the most humble,” she said. “It’s a very generous kind of genius he has, one I can’t imagine Haitian literature ever existing without.”

 

Cases Without Borders: Without His Mother’s Milk, a Haitian Boy Is Lost

I got up and walked over to the hospital entrance. Because the emergency room had only two beds, and the hospital itself had limited resources, patients were sent through triage at the gate, and only those who could be treated were brought in. The others were turned away to seek care elsewhere.

Arriving at the gate, I could already smell the sharp odor of diarrhea. A young woman was holding a baby wrapped in a stained and tattered blanket. From the interpreter, I learned this was a 5-month-old boy with watery yellow diarrhea, vomiting and a decrease in oral intake during the previous four days.

Opening the blanket and looking at him, I was amazed that he was still alive. His chest looked like a chicken breast picked clean of meat. His mucus membranes were pasty dry, his eyes and fontanel were sunken and his skin hung off his arms and legs as if it were three sizes too large. At 5 months he weighed less than four and a half pounds.

The gastroenteritis, it turned out, was only what had tipped him over. On further questioning we learned that his mother had stopped nursing shortly after he was born because her “milk was bad,” and had been bottle-feeding him with watered-down 7Up soda.

Because he was so dehydrated, his veins had collapsed and the nurses in the emergency room weren’t able to place an intravenous line to give him fluids. It was clear that I’d have to insert a thick needle directly into his shinbone to deliver sterile saline solution with a syringe, an ounce at a time.

Never having done this before (though I had practiced on a raw chicken leg), I was nervous about the procedure. The only needle available was longer than his leg was thick, and I was afraid I would push it through and pin him to the mattress.

He hardly whimpered as the needle entered the tibial cavity with a crunch. We gave him the fluids and admitted him to the pediatric ward, but had no way of measuring his electrolytes. He continued to have severe diarrhea and died several hours after being admitted. While gastroenteritis can be fatal in otherwise healthy infants, his extreme malnutrition had made him more vulnerable, and we were unable to save him.

The Haitian belief in “bad milk” — “lèt gate,” in Creole — is well described by Paul Farmer in his book “Partner to the Poor” (University of California, 2010). It is one of the main reasons for the premature stopping of breast-feeding in Haiti, often with deadly consequences for the infant deprived of safe and dependable nourishment.

That same week, one of the nurses in our group was able to prevent something similar from happening to another infant for whom we were caring. Born a few hours before we arrived, and several weeks before his due date, he, too, weighed less than four and a half pounds.

He was placed in an incubator and given antibiotics, and he seemed to be doing well except for one thing: His mother refused to nurse him, or even to express milk to feed him by bottle. Denise, the nurse who cared for him the week we were there, could not understand why the mother refused so adamantly to feed her son.

She pressed the mother every time she saw her, explaining the advantages of breast milk over formula, until finally the mother explained that a previous child of hers had died in infancy, and that a houngan (voodoo priest) had told her that her milk was no good and that she must never nurse any subsequent babies or else they, too, would suffer a similar fate.

Each day Denise pleaded with her to try to nurse. On the third day, the maternal grandmother came to visit and had a long conversation with Denise, asking whether her daughter’s milk was somehow tainted. Denise assured her it was not.

The next day the mother agreed to try nursing her son. He had difficulty latching on, and she expressed a small amount into a bottle, which he eagerly gulped down.

The following morning she returned, nervous about how he had fared. Once she saw that he was fine, she unbuttoned her blouse and again tried to nurse, this time with better success. Over the next few days she continued to nurse him until she no longer needed to express into a bottle, and looked much more relaxed and in better spirits than she had since he was born.

The difference between breast milk and calorically depleted drinks, or formula prepared from water potentially contaminated with organisms that cause diseases like cholera, can be a matter of life or death. And so encouraging this young mother to give her son the sustenance he needed was a potentially lifesaving intervention, achieved through patience, education and the building of trust.

While it may not sound like much, the sad truth is that in Haiti all of these are hard to come by and remain very much in need.

Dr. Dennis Rosen is a pediatric pulmonologist at Children’s Hospital Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School.

 

Cases Without Borders: Without His Mother’s Milk, a Haitian Boy Is Lost

I got up and walked over to the hospital entrance. Because the emergency room had only two beds, and the hospital itself had limited resources, patients were sent through triage at the gate, and only those who could be treated were brought in. The others were turned away to seek care elsewhere.

Arriving at the gate, I could already smell the sharp odor of diarrhea. A young woman was holding a baby wrapped in a stained and tattered blanket. From the interpreter, I learned this was a 5-month-old boy with watery yellow diarrhea, vomiting and a decrease in oral intake during the previous four days.

Opening the blanket and looking at him, I was amazed that he was still alive. His chest looked like a chicken breast picked clean of meat. His mucus membranes were pasty dry, his eyes and fontanel were sunken and his skin hung off his arms and legs as if it were three sizes too large. At 5 months he weighed less than four and a half pounds.

The gastroenteritis, it turned out, was only what had tipped him over. On further questioning we learned that his mother had stopped nursing shortly after he was born because her “milk was bad,” and had been bottle-feeding him with watered-down 7Up soda.

Because he was so dehydrated, his veins had collapsed and the nurses in the emergency room weren’t able to place an intravenous line to give him fluids. It was clear that I’d have to insert a thick needle directly into his shinbone to deliver sterile saline solution with a syringe, an ounce at a time.

Never having done this before (though I had practiced on a raw chicken leg), I was nervous about the procedure. The only needle available was longer than his leg was thick, and I was afraid I would push it through and pin him to the mattress.

He hardly whimpered as the needle entered the tibial cavity with a crunch. We gave him the fluids and admitted him to the pediatric ward, but had no way of measuring his electrolytes. He continued to have severe diarrhea and died several hours after being admitted. While gastroenteritis can be fatal in otherwise healthy infants, his extreme malnutrition had made him more vulnerable, and we were unable to save him.

The Haitian belief in “bad milk” — “lèt gate,” in Creole — is well described by Paul Farmer in his book “Partner to the Poor” (University of California, 2010). It is one of the main reasons for the premature stopping of breast-feeding in Haiti, often with deadly consequences for the infant deprived of safe and dependable nourishment.

That same week, one of the nurses in our group was able to prevent something similar from happening to another infant for whom we were caring. Born a few hours before we arrived, and several weeks before his due date, he, too, weighed less than four and a half pounds.

He was placed in an incubator and given antibiotics, and he seemed to be doing well except for one thing: His mother refused to nurse him, or even to express milk to feed him by bottle. Denise, the nurse who cared for him the week we were there, could not understand why the mother refused so adamantly to feed her son.

She pressed the mother every time she saw her, explaining the advantages of breast milk over formula, until finally the mother explained that a previous child of hers had died in infancy, and that a houngan (voodoo priest) had told her that her milk was no good and that she must never nurse any subsequent babies or else they, too, would suffer a similar fate.

Each day Denise pleaded with her to try to nurse. On the third day, the maternal grandmother came to visit and had a long conversation with Denise, asking whether her daughter’s milk was somehow tainted. Denise assured her it was not.

The next day the mother agreed to try nursing her son. He had difficulty latching on, and she expressed a small amount into a bottle, which he eagerly gulped down.

The following morning she returned, nervous about how he had fared. Once she saw that he was fine, she unbuttoned her blouse and again tried to nurse, this time with better success. Over the next few days she continued to nurse him until she no longer needed to express into a bottle, and looked much more relaxed and in better spirits than she had since he was born.

The difference between breast milk and calorically depleted drinks, or formula prepared from water potentially contaminated with organisms that cause diseases like cholera, can be a matter of life or death. And so encouraging this young mother to give her son the sustenance he needed was a potentially lifesaving intervention, achieved through patience, education and the building of trust.

While it may not sound like much, the sad truth is that in Haiti all of these are hard to come by and remain very much in need.

Dr. Dennis Rosen is a pediatric pulmonologist at Children’s Hospital Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School.