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“To have cove (many) paintings in the cellar”, says Jordany Jacques (39 years old), showing the paintings of colorful landscapes at home. “In Haiti, around five thirty, the sun sets, it is reflected on the sea and a color like that comes out. I paint it from memory. I have the country in my memory,” adds the father of a little girl born in Chile and another in Haiti, who naturally lets Chileanisms slip into conversation. He learned to paint with his uncle in Port-au-Prince and they both sold their works at the Marché en Fer fair. After the chaotic elections of 2016 and the passage of Hurricane Matthew, thousands of Haitians fled the country in search of better living conditions. Jacques was one of them. He remembers those days perfectly. “There were a lot of them. protests. And when there are demonstrations in Haiti, they are violent. There I said to myself: ‘cutthe country is in bad shape. I hidden that something horrible was going to happen, that I had to leave. » And he was right: the country would once again go through a period of famine, lack of control and looting, all under the domination of gangs. He had a cousin living in Chile who told him he would help him settle in the country. In 2017, Jacques arrived in Santiago with the idea of returning in a year. But that didn’t happen. More than 150,000 Haitians would arrive in Chile between 2016 and 2017.
As Jacques shows the painted scenes of women carrying baskets of fruit on their heads, he has an eternal smile, recounting his vicissitudes. Today, he combines the sale of his paintings, through word of mouth, with work in the CCU company. He has his papers in order. But the beginnings were very hard. His smiling expression breaks when he remembers the time when he worked selling vegetables and a customer refused to serve him because of the color of her skin. Chile has not been a welcoming country for many Haitians. Added to social racism is the difficulty of obtaining residence permits, two of the reasons which explain why, since 2021, there are more Haitians leaving Chile than entering. With the victory of José Antonio Kast, who announced that irregular migrants would be searched, expelled and would not be able to return to the South American country, Jacques does not hide his fears: “Migrants are not responsible for the situation in the country. shit (wrong). There is a lot of xenophobia. I don’t feel well. I would like to return to Haiti, it is my land, it is my blood. But the situation there remains very, very bad.
Another of the Haitian migrants who arrived in Chile in 2017 is Joubert Brutus. At nine o’clock in the morning, he has just set up his metal craft stand at the Lastarria market, in the center of Santiago. While hanging up the shiny, polished pieces, he recounts his beginnings in this country: “The first months were very difficult, I had no job, my cousin returned to Haiti because he had no hope.
Brutus shapes metal parts that he collects from used gasoline barrels. By cutting and striking the material, he defines the silhouettes of angels, fish, hearts, peacocks and even the tree of life, which he sells at prices ranging from 5,000 to 20,000 Chilean pesos ($5.5 to $22). His case is different from that of Jacques: he does not want to return to Haiti, but rather that his wife and two daughters, aged 14 and 16, join him in Chile. The good reception of his craft gives him the strength to pursue his dream of living with dignity in a place located thousands of kilometers from home.
The works of Jacques and Brutus were exhibited in the exhibition Haitian Art in Chile, which took place at the Pereira Palace in Santiago in 2023, curated by Esperanza Hidalgo and Camila Caris, who have been studying the creative work of the Haitian diaspora for several years. This exhibition also included the work of Sandy Joseph, an activist who arrived in the country in 2017, at the age of 15, to reunite with her mother, who arrived a year earlier. Joseph proposed for this exhibition, Faces of Haitian womena ceramic work that depicts the faces of several women who died in Chilean hospitals. “That’s where my work came from, a tribute to these women who died needlessly.”
In addition to visual artists and artisans, there is the creative work of poets. One of the most active is Makanaky Adn, 34, from Gonave Island. Since his adolescence, he had already devoted himself to writing verses, reciting in the cultural spaces and bars of Port-au-Prince and reading national poets like Jacques Viau Renaud. “I started to write kind words, sometimes for girls. Then I started to write about my reality, about my life. My mother emigrated to Guadeloupe, my father and my sisters left too, while I was still little. I became interested in social issues, in the situation in Haiti, in the need that we all share to want a better life.”
Makanaky Adn arrived in Chile in 2016 and worked as a painter and security guard, still without a contract. “After a few months, I went to the Aconcagua Valley so I could do contract work picking fruit. During that time, I continued to write, first in Creole, at night. I started meeting groups of Chilean writers and started translating other people’s poems and writing my own in Spanish,” he says. He found his place and his community in Putaendo, in the valley, where he began to frequent the literary café and mingle with local writers. “For me, going out to have fun is going to a literary café, I don’t like going to the disco or the bar,” he admits, showing a collection of poems that he published in 2019, entitled In the art of lovewhich in Creole translates to Pwezi ak imaj. It is a set of poems that speak of love, childhood or gratitude, but also of the migrant experience. “I reflect on racism in my writing, intellectually. It’s my responsibility,” he says.
It is a way of fighting against discrimination which places words before anger, frustration or hatred, and is also practiced by Jean Jacques Pierre-Paul, surgeon, translator, illustrator and reference for his symbolist poetry. Port-au-Prince in my head It is one of his best works, in which, through metaphors, anaphora and similes, he thinks and feels his experience as a migrant:
“Port-au-Prince is in your mind like an unbearable silence
you are in my spine, in each of my hair
art at the bottom of nothing
the art of falling
the art of getting up
I have no intention of staying in my house as a nostalgic wanderer.
while waiting for the world to change its name and color
I must plant a tree in your hands
I have to teach my birds to cry
I know well that my country is not my destiny
“I am the destiny of my country”
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