I’m about halfway through my second Haiti book, The Comedians, by Graham Greene. It’s easy to feel like you’re living it – not only because all the places are the same – the main setting is the renamed Hotel Oloffson, which is also featured in my Facebook profile pic. It’s also because the characters haven’t changed. Granted, Papa Doc and the Tontons Macoute with their dark sunglasses and terror are gone. But the Westerners – two Brits and an American couple – seem about the same.
As a theme junkie former English major, I love the comedic thread run through the book. Haiti at that time could have been seen as a tragedy. But really, it’s much more like a dark comedy, progressing ever further into the absurd as the book goes on.
The novel starts with three men on a boat bound to Haiti – Jones, Smith, and Brown. It sounds like the start of a joke of three men walking into a bar. The only one who is open about his purposes is Mr. Smith, accompanied by his fiery wife. They are going to Haiti to establish a vegetarian center.
With all the updates I read about misguided mission trips to Haiti, this might as well be happening in real life and the modern day. As the Smiths learn more about what Haiti under Papa Doc is really like, they continue to exhibit hilarious oblivion about the absurdity of their mission. Vegetarianism? In a country where people don’t get enough to eat and meat is a luxury item, a special treat? Sounds like those counterfeit San Francisco Giants t-shirts that are on their way to Haiti right about now.
The other characters are comedians, too, though maybe not as funny as the Smiths. Papa Doc has played a cruel joke on Haiti. Brown, the owner of the hotel Trianon (read Oloffson) knows what conditions are like but doesn’t have the fortitude to do anything more than meet his mistress by the port. Jones turns out to have the sketchiest motives of all – he’s an arms dealer in a fascist state. You hope he’s kidding. But he’s not.
It turns out Papa Doc’s Haiti is a great place for comedy. One of the opening scenes of the book is a suicide from a government minister who’s fallen out of favor with the doctor and kills himself in the Trianon’s pool to avoid a worse death in the hands of the Tontons Macoute. When the clueless Smiths arrive to check into the hotel, the electricity is fortunately out. But when it turns on, they see the body and think it’s a beggar fallen asleep. Smith has a mind to go down and offer him some money. Little does he know that the man who cut his throat in the pool is actually the government minister for whom he brings a letter of introduction, his link to the Haitian government. Great stuff.
This dark comedy is ringing a bell with me these days, as I’ m starting to see all of us blan in Haiti as a kind of comedy. We imagine ourselves on a stage, tangled in our own dramas, convinced of the importance of our passionless work, oblivious to the suggestion that it benefits us more than them, jokers fiddling while Rome burns.
