SHORTLISTED
OLUWANIFEMI BAKARE
The recorder is the size of a matchbox and the journalist sets it on the table between them like it is an agreement they have both signed.
Marlene looks at it. She has seen these before. She knows what they take and what they leave.
“Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me,” the journalist says. Her name is Céline Beaumont and she is thirty-two and she is from Lyon and her French has that particular metropolitan smoothness that Marlene’s mother would have called the French of people who never needed another language. Her Creole, which she attempted in the first thirty seconds of their meeting, was the Creole of a woman who learned it to seem like less of what she is. “I know you’re busy.”
“I’m always busy,” Marlene says. “That’s not why I almost didn’t come.”
Céline smiles carefully. She has a careful smile, the kind that has been trained to receive difficult things without flinching, which is not the same as understanding them. She has a notebook too, beside the recorder, with tabs in three colours. Marlene notices the tabs. She notices everything. This is not a virtue. It is what living in this country does to the body — tunes it to threat frequencies until everything registers, until rest is just a gap between registrations.
“Why did you almost not come?” Céline asks.
“Because I read your last piece.”
A pause. The recorder’s small red light blinks.
“The one about the school in Cité Soleil,” Marlene says. “The teacher there — Monique. You described her as extraordinarily resilient.”
“I meant it as—”
“I know what you meant it as,” Marlene says. “That’s why I almost didn’t come.”
***
Outside the window, Marlene can see a tap-tap stopped on the road below, painted yellow and red, DIEU PROTÈGE across its back in tall letters. She has taught forty-one students this year. Thirty-eight showed up consistently. Of those, six have parents who were also her students, from before 2010, from the school that stood where the school now stands, which is a different building in the same wound.
She does not say this to Céline.
She orders coffee. Céline orders water with gas and then looks momentarily embarrassed by it, which is the most honest thing she will do all morning.
“Tell me about your work,” Céline says. “What does a typical day look like?”
A typical day. Marlene turns the phrase in her mouth. A typical day is waking before five because the generator runs from five to nine and she needs that window for everything that requires electricity, which is most things that connect her to the world that people like Céline assume is everyone’s world. A typical day is the twenty-minute walk to school because the money she saves on transport is money she can put toward the chalk she buys herself because the ministry allocation ran out in October. A typical day is thirty-eight children in a room built for twenty-five, and the heat, and Widline in the front row who is ten and reads at a level that would embarrass children in Lyon, who reads with her whole body tilted toward the page as if leaning into a wind.
“I teach,” Marlene says. “I prepare lessons. I assess. I go home. I prepare again.”
“And after everything the country has been through —” Céline pauses, chooses her words with the care of someone defusing something, “— the earthquakes, the political situation, the — you’ve continued. You’ve kept going. That kind of resilience —”
“There it is,” Marlene says.
Céline blinks. “Excuse me?”
“That word.” Marlene wraps both hands around her coffee cup. “You people love that word. You know why you love it?”
The recorder blinks. Céline’s pen is still.
“Because it costs you nothing,” Marlene says. “Resilience. It’s a very cheap compliment. It means: we have noticed that you are still alive despite everything we have failed to prevent or fix or pay for, and we find that remarkable, and we would like to write it down.” She looks at Céline. “Monique is not resilient. Monique is exhausted. There is a difference. I am not resilient. I am here because my children are here and I am their teacher and if I leave, who teaches them? That is not resilience. That is the absence of an alternative.”
Céline writes something. Marlene watches her write it.
“I don’t mean it pejoratively,” Céline says. “I genuinely admire—”
“Your admiration,” Marlene says, “is not something I have worked toward.”
***
Silence. Real silence, the kind that resets a conversation. Outside, the tap-tap has not moved. DIEU PROTÈGE. Marlene wonders sometimes what it means that this country calls on God so publicly, plasters Him on every vehicle and wall, whether it is faith or whether it is an ongoing argument, a refusal to release Him from His obligations.
She was fourteen when her father explained to her why Haiti was poor. He was not a political man — he was a man who fixed motors, who smelled of grease and had hands that could feel a problem before they saw it — but that evening he had been drinking and he told her: the French made us pay for our own freedom. She had not understood then. She understood now. One hundred and fifty million francs, a sum calibrated to punish a people for the audacity of not wanting to be property. Paid over a century. Still paying, some economists said, in the compound logic of what that debt had foreclosed — infrastructure, education, the basic machinery of a functioning state.
She has never said this to a journalist. She has watched other people say it and watched the articles that followed, careful and contextualized and ultimately filed under complex history where it could be acknowledged without consequence.
“Can I ask,” Céline says, “what keeps you going? Personally. What is it that—”
“Widline,” Marlene says.
“Sorry?”
“There’s a girl in my class. Widline. She is ten. She found a book somewhere — I don’t know where, a market stall, somebody’s house — a French novel, Le Petit Prince, you know it —” she watches Céline nod, of course “— and she read it in two days and then she came to me and said: Maîtresse, the little prince is sad because nobody sees him properly. She’s ten.” Marlene pauses. “She read that book and she found the loneliness in it. She found the specific loneliness of being unseen.” She looks at the table. “I’m not going to leave Widline.”
Céline is writing fast. Marlene knows this will be in the piece. She knows how it will sit in the piece — the anecdote, the child with the book, the devoted teacher. She knows it will be the emotional center, the part that makes readers in Lyon and Paris feel something, feel that complex warm feeling that is concern and relief braided together, the feeling of: there is still beauty there, still hope, still—
“You’re going to use that,” Marlene says.
Céline looks up.
“The Widline story. You’re going to put it near the end. Maybe the last paragraph. Something like: but it is in her students that Marlene Joseph finds her reason to continue. Something like that.”
Céline’s mouth opens slightly.
“It’s fine,” Marlene says. “It’s true. I’m not accusing you of lying. I’m telling you what you’ll do with the truth.” She takes a sip of coffee. It has gone lukewarm. “And the people who read it will feel good. They’ll feel like Haiti is — manageable. Like it is a place of suffering but also of beauty, of resilience —” she does not flinch at the word this time, deploys it flat as a stone, “— and they’ll share it on their phones and say this moved me and then they’ll go and eat dinner and the dinner will be good and that will be the end of their relationship with Widline.”
Céline sets her pen down. This, Marlene notes, is new.
“What would you want them to do?” Céline says. And her voice is different.
Marlene considers.
Outside, the tap-tap finally moves.
“I want them to understand that Widline is not here for their feelings,” she says. “She is here because she was born here and this is her country and her country has been managed — let’s say — by interests that are not hers, for two hundred years, and she will be a grown woman managing the consequences of that before she ever understands that it didn’t have to be this way.” She pauses. “I want them to understand that my teaching her is not a beautiful story. It is the minimum. It is the absolute floor of what a society owes a child. And we are operating at the floor. We have always been at the floor. And people write beautiful articles about us standing on the floor and call it resilience and I am —” she stops.
“You’re what?” Céline says, quietly.
Marlene looks at her. At this young woman from Lyon with her color-tabbed notebook and her careful smile, who is not, Marlene decides in this moment, a bad person. Who may even be a good person. Who is sitting across from her at nine in the morning in a hotel whose rates she could not afford, genuinely asking.
“Tired,” Marlene says. “I’m tired.”
It is not what she was going to say. What she was going to say was furious. She changed it at the last moment and she cannot tell you why except that tired is also true and fury, she has learned, is a fire that needs feeding and she needs that fuel for other things.
Afterwards, in the street, the heat comes down like a verdict.
***
Marlene walks back toward school. She passes a wall where someone has painted, in large white letters, something in Creole that has been partially painted over by someone else, so that only part of it remains: nou pa— we are not. We are not. The rest is grey paint; the rest is someone’s decision about what should not be said.
Nou pa.
She teaches at one o’clock. Widline will be in the front row, tilted toward whatever Marlene brings. The others will be loud and then settle and then be loud again and she will move through it the way she always moves through it, from the front of the room, from the only position available to her.
The article will come out in six weeks. She knows this without being told. It will be titled something like Rebuilding from the Inside or A Classroom in the Ruins and it will have a photograph, probably the one Céline took at the end without asking, when Marlene was looking out the window, which will look contemplative and strong, which will look, in other words, resilient.
Marlene will not read it.
She has a lesson to plan.
Nou pa fin.
We are not finished.
The grey paint cannot hold everything.
