By Patrick Sylvain
The wind in Port-au-Prince that morning was thick with ash and gunpowder, braided with the scent of burning tires and boiling oil. Solange Saintclaire stood in the middle of Avenue Jean-Jacques Dessalines, her arms outstretched like the branches of a scorched almond tree. Her West African-style robe, patterned in red hibiscus and ochre, fluttered like a wounded flag. Her mouth was open, not in speech, but in a primordial cry too ancient for words.
Behind her, flames devoured the twisted shell of a motorbike. Around her, men with cloth masks—some with eyes red from tear gas, others swollen with grief—darted between barricades made of tires, crates and broken bottles. The street festered like an open wound, raw and unrecoverable. But Solange—Solange remained still, paralyzed by bewilderment and grief. Her own wailing had startled her awake, like the jolt from a nightmare’s end, when the heart races but the body cannot move. It was as though her spirit had returned from some unreachable distance, confused by the wreckage of the present. She longed for something, anything to cling to: a pillow, a body, a tree root, even a piece of cloth. Something to ground her, to prove she was still human in a city that now felt like a graveyard of hope.
It had been a year since Paul Saintclaire, her husband of twenty-three years, was taken. A quiet man with ink-stained fingers who taught literature at the Lycée Toussaint Louverture and believed that revolutions were born not only of bullets but of books. He had stepped outside one October evening to smoke his pipe and never returned. They said he’d been mistaken for someone else, another face in the wrong place, the wrong hour. Solange never found his body—only his glasses, shattered, by the gutter outside their home.
And now Jean-Paul.
Jean-Paul, their only son. Their miracle child born under candlelight during the embargo years, when milk was rationed and prayers doubled as lullabies. He had finished his studies at the National Faculty of Law with distinction. “The law must kneel to justice,” he once told her, standing tall in his faded uniform shirt, the sleeves rolled like a soldier readying for battle. He did not believe in justice as punishment, but as a restoration of dignity—especially for the poor, the misnamed, the disappeared. His father’s killing had turned something inside him. Though he rarely spoke of it, Jean-Paul kept a small notebook filled with quotes from Aimé Césaire, Jacques Roumain, other writers, scrawled alongside sketches of his father’s old pipe and glasses. "They kill the mind so the body follows," he once said, touching the shattered lens Solange had kept wrapped in cloth.
But Jean-Paul refused to be consumed by vengeance. He believed the state must answer not with silence but with truth, and that the people’s voice—organized, educated, loud—was a force no bullet could silence forever. “Justice,” he said, “is not found in the courtroom. It’s in the streets, in the soil. It’s how we remember, how we refuse to disappear.”
Last Tuesday, she ironed that same shirt for him. “Maman,” he had said softly, “if I come back late, don’t worry. We march for dignity today.”
By nightfall, his name was on the radio.
She found him at the unrefrigerated morgue the next morning. A single bullet had perforated an unheroic ending across his chest, just above the heart.
Now Solange stood alone in the street, clutching the rosary Paul had given her on their wedding day. Her voice, raw and tremulous, tore through the din.
“Yo pran lavi m’! Yo pran tout sa m’ te genyen!”
They took my life. They took all I had.
No one stopped her. Not the journalists with long lenses and guarded eyes, not the police in black body armor with visors down like shutters against guilt, not the children who watched from shattered balconies with the stunned silence of those too young to understand, yet too old to forget. Her lament pierced the air like incense in a desecrated church—half wail, half invocation, a raw liturgy for the dead. It was not simply grief, but ceremony. Each syllable was a naming, each breath a protest. It was a benediction for the unburied and the unmourned, a summoning of spirits too weary to rise, and of angels who had not yet earned their wings nor their chariots.
The street seemed unmoving around her. Buildings leaned as if in mourning. Even the wind, once strong, fell to a hush. Solange stood within a hollow space between memory and madness, where time unraveled and stitched itself back in bursts. Her grief was not clean—it snarled, it blazed, it clung to her ribs like thorns. She was aware, dimly, of how her own voice echoed off cars and walls, how her body must have looked—a woman undone, barefoot, her robe speckled with ash. Yet she did not care. What dignity remained was not in composure, but in persistence. In refusing to let the silence have the final word.
She remembered the sound of Jean-Paul’s laughter, the way his mouth curled like his father’s when he was amused but trying to be serious. She remembered the weight of his baby body, the hunger she bore through to keep him alive. Now all of that—the hope, the toil, the breath of twenty-three years—had been snuffed out in a second, and no one, no one, had come to say sorry.
Behind her, black smoke curled into the sky, like the spirit of the city itself rising to answer her call. She dropped to her knees. She pressed her forehead to the pavement where blood had dried like varnish. She wept not just for Paul or Jean-Paul, but for every mother who sewed a graduation shirt and buried it the next week. She felt the weight of the sky on her back. She wanted to run. Run far, far away from this place of distress.
Instead, from her pocket, she pulled a scrap of cloth—a piece of Jean-Paul’s uniform—and tied it to a crooked post beside the barricade. A new flag. Not of victory, but of her own private witnessing.
“I will not go quiet,” she whispered, rising slowly. “My son will not be forgotten.”
Somewhere nearby, a new chant began. A low, insistent thrum, taken up by many voices: “Satan, ban m’ pitit mwen! Satan, give me back my child!” Solange did not start it, but she walked toward it, her back straight, her footsteps steady.
She had lost everything. And so she feared nothing.
And the city, wounded and watching, made way for her.
Sylvain is a poet, writer, social and literary critic. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Published in several creative anthologies, journals, periodicals, and reviews including: African American Review, Agni, American Poetry Review, Cagibi, Callaloo, The Caribbean Writer, Chicago Quarterly Review, Ep;phany, Magma Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Small Axe Salon, SpoKe, and Transition. Sylvain has degrees from the University of Massachusetts (B.A.), Harvard University (Ed.M.), Boston University (MFA), and Brandeis University (PhD). Sylvain is an Assistant Professor at Simmons University, and he is also on faculty at Harvard University’s History and Literature Division. Sylvain’s poetry chapbook, Underworlds, is published by Central Square Press (2018). Sylvain is a featured poet on Benjamin Boone’s Poetry and Jazz CDs The Poets are Gathering, and Caught in the Rhythm (Origin Records, Oct 2020, Nov 2023). Sylvain is the leading author of Education Across Borders: Immigration, Race, and Identity in the Classroom (Beacon Press, Feb 2022). His updated bilingual collection, Unfinished Dreams // Rèv San Bout will be published by Central Square Press, July 2025.
