The Beauty of Soleil
I have been describing one aspect of my experience of Haiti, a difficulty in seeing a holistic view of Haiti that included their joy, love, and hope. But what I haven't described is how deeply I love and have always loved being here. It has always been and will always be my favorite place on Earth for so many reasons: cultural aspects like it's music and art; its people – their indelible resilience and exuberance towards life; and the tropical, mountainous beauty of the countryside to name just a few.
What can be said about the lens through which I saw Soleil? Was I projecting my internal emotions onto the environment around me? That by unconsciously focusing on the hardship of Soleil, I perceived the Haitians to be more despondent, dejected, or afraid than they actually were? Why could I not see a balanced degree of their joy, effervescence, or hope? Most big distinctions for me are often a distinction of 'to what degree' rather than one of yes or no. I wasn't blind to their moments of happiness or to the times we all joked and laughed together which was often, but there was a degree of imbalance. Over the years, I have found that I can not under estimate my mind and my emotions power to unconsciously distort my perception, whether it is a penchant to see what I want to see or to color the world with my emotional experience like a monochromatic filter. It never fails to be a significant component during important and stressful times.
Yet my monochromatic viewpoint and exaggeration of the misery component of Soleil (not that it didn't describe a significant and valid perception) proved to be much more complex and it would be years before I had teased apart threads of what was projected and what was actually there. By far one of the most difficult and complex internal experiences is that of fear/anxiety. There are so many layers, so deeply rooted, that I believe that gaining skill and understanding in this internal realm will be one of my most difficult and important life skills. I also believe that it may be an underlining default emotion instinctually part of our evolutionary survival, but that's a bit off-topic. Those environmentally and culturally rooted differences that pertained to my early days in Haiti ranged from deep seeded, pervasive biases to others that had a small impact but still subtly skewed many of my interactions and perceptions. Some extremely small ones like the awkward slowness when buying something in a foreign currency or speaking like a two-year-old because of my limited Kreyol were intrinsic parts of the fear of the unfamiliar and the unknown. Or what about less subtle, terrifying, life threatening fears like being mugged or a victim to violence that can happen in any big city, even in environments semi-familiar to those of my own culture? Over the years, I have found that it has been my fear of the unfamiliar and the unknown that is projected outward and culminates in a detrimental force on my perception and relationships - in Haiti and at home.
Bridging the gap between worlds so radically different as my middle class white-American up-bringing and the working class Haitian admittedly borders on unattainable to a degree of intimacy that I have with close friends at home with in the time I have. So far, most of the work in bridging this gap, for me, has been uncovering the habits and perceptions instilled by the environment I grew up in. Multitudes of expectations on every aspect of life: from work, gender roles, parenting, 'appropriate behavior', etc. are uncovered in subtle layer after layer. As I said in my first blog, there's "Nothing like spending time on Mars to see the Earth that before had been too close and too consistent to reveal how profoundly it had shaped me…" My experience of Haiti, even after multiple trips, revealed an internal conceptual and emotional gridlock that proved to be very complex. Yet all the cultural, emotional, and ideological complexity would amalgamate and be presented at times as a subtle sense of anxiety and sadness towards Haiti. As I unfolded these impressionable threads of unfamiliar and unknown anxiety, an equally subtle, but for me tremendous accomplishment, was a certain genuineness to my interactions in Haiti. It was as I put it before, a holistic and balance mode of perception - and for me this is a huge step forward.
Cite Soleil is arguably the poorest, most densely populated urban setting on the planet and this singularity in my mind offers the most 'sincere beauty' humanity can offer. In Soleil's contrasts are revealed the majestic complexity of humanity: our resilience, our matchless resourcefulness, and our untenable drive to live. The pastel dance of light and color in Monet's "Lillies"; the spiritual magnificence of Gaudi's "La Sagrada Familia"; Brindisi's ethereal "Bird in Flight"; or Michelangelo's "God Creating (apathetic) Man" in the Sistein Chapel, are good representatives of western beauty. Yet, they are by contrast, pale shadows, mere hints grasping at the profundity of living, the mystery of existence within and around us each day. In art's failure to articulate this depth and mystery they compensate by striving for aesthetic ingenuity and artistic perfection. True beauty lies in pulling back our habits of perception and revealing the ineffable and incomprehensible miracle of living. Spending time in Cite Soleil, a purely human, diametrically charged range of the human conditions is the truest beauty I can imagine. Soleil's ability to wrench back our protective layers of habit, to reveal the gross, raw inner organs of life in all it's visceral, frail, and complex mystery is an awesome and irreplaceable experience. When has a painting ever stripped us so, that we may behold our beating hearts, pulsating veins, firing synapse hanging beneath Damocles' sword and insisting by example that we face it head-on – with dignity, perseverance, and humility.
No comments:
Post a Comment