ARTICLE - A SECOND DEATH IN A CEMETERY

A SECOND DEATH IN A HAITIAN CEMETERY
(New York Times Blog) - By Maggie Steber

A few weeks ago, the mayor of Pétionville, Claire Lydie Parent, announced that the old cemetery would be demolished to make way for a bus station. In Haiti, that translates as an open area where buses gather to take passengers to the provinces. Pétionville is an upper- and middle-class neighborhood overlooking the demolished Port-au-Prince below.

Undamaged by the earthquake that struck in January, the cemetery was crowded with brightly painted mausoleums decked out with metal flower wreaths. Names carved in marble marked the final resting place of many families, buried over a long period of time. A cross to Baron Samedi, the voodoo spirit of death, stood in a corner where people would bring him coffee and cigarettes in exchange for a favor.

Until bulldozers came and demolished the whole cemetery.

Where there was once a small, beautiful memorial, there is now a pile of rubble; another victim of Haiti’s earthquake, this time at human hands.

People who had lost so much already were at a loss as to how to stop the demolition, if they even knew about it. Some friends and I went up onto the rubble to look for small remnants of this sacred place. Others went looking for family members.

We photographed anything that might bear witness: tiny things, tragic things, bones, clothing, a shoe, part of a coffin were strewed in with the overwhelming rubble.

Magda Magloire retrieved the skulls of her mother and a brother.

The artist Magda Magloire was lucky, in a sense. Her niece worked in the mayor’s office and called to warn her about the demolition. Magda rushed to the cemetery and retrieved the bones of her brother, Stivenson Magloire, a famous Haitian painter, and their mother, Louisiane St. Fleurant, the godmother of the Saint-Soleil movement in Haitian art.

Stivenson Magloire was stoned to death in the early ’90s during political turmoil. We went to Magda’s house and she showed us the bones.

Outside a hard rain fell and drowned out all conversation. There, on an upstairs porch, stood a big plastic shopping bag filled with bones: long and yellow, several skulls intact — the remains of her brother and mother.

What will you do with them, she was asked.

“I will rebury them someplace safe,” she replied.

The earthquake took many victims in the 45 seconds it shook Haiti: over a quarter million people were killed, one million left homeless, thousands of houses reduced to a pile of concrete pebbles, and now this. For the people of Pétionville, it was as though another earthquake had struck. Neither in life nor in death would anything be spared.