The Torture and Killing "had Been Going on Forever and was Only Just Beginning": "Street of Lost Footsteps" by Lyonel Trouillot

Lyonel Trouillot 's intense, fragmentary portrayal of a night of apocalyptic violence in Port-au-Prince, Street of Lost Footsteps (Rue des pas perdus) , make Louis-Ferdinand C©line's epochal Journey to the End of the Night seem like a polite tea party. Not that the syntax is broken up, but the main two narrators, a bordello madame (who used to be a school teacher) and a taxi driver who survives in an open sewer (though requiring an amputation) are not among those who believe that the violence will be cleaning in any way.

Moreover, they do not expect the triumph of the followers of the Prophet (based in part on Jean-Bertrand Astride who seems to have approved "necklacing"* for supports of the old regime) are any more humane than the torturers of the dictator Deceased Forever-Immortal (a composite of "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvalier). They have their hands full trying to survive and make a living amidst the spectacular chaos and the violence and corruption of either the brutal dictatorship of old or the supposed reformers taking charge.

(There is also a postal worker who narrates a few of the short chapters. I think that the longest one is five pages. Most are two or three pages in length. And there is no indication preceding the start of each chapter about which narrator will be telling stories and analyzing the situation in which there are roving gangs of killers out and about (and prostitutes eager to join the quest for vengeance).

As cover material aptly puts it, for these narrators (and, I'd guess, for their creator), "the repetitiveness of history has gone beyond tragedy, through farce, and on into insanity." Haiti is a particularly extreme case, but the chaos is not very different from that during the fall of Somoza in Nicaragua (see The Country Under My Skin) with the Reagan-sponsored terrorism that followed, or the "ethnic cleansings" in Bosnia by Serbs and Croats, or Darfur or Rwanda. I wasn't sure which of the narrators noted that

"some people here live only to kill, to get their turn at killing, to repay death with death. There are people here who've even giving up hoping for a better fate, a steady job, a woman, a man, an honest-to-god roof, a decent society, a country. All they have left is a vast rage and if they gird themselves with courage for the next day's waking, they're not dreaming of a beginning but an end: Lord, let me be in on the kill, when the other guy gets it." (p. 11)

Even gone is "the reign of hypocrisy brought to a high pitch of expertise" by entrepreneurs in humanitarian aid from overseas," as every victim calls from graves (marked ones or ditches into which their corpses have been dumped) for revenge. (This is the Madame analyzing the status quo. She also asks "Does death bring back life. If you take a stone out of water and put it to roast in the sun, is the water any sweeter and the stone any less a stone?.... Does fire burn away suffering?")

The driver remarks sardonically that under the rule of the great dictator, "everyone was spying on everyone else; go figure what they expected to find besides poverty and hatred" (p. 20). But he also fears that "with politics, there's always somebody to overhear you, even if you're just talking to yourself" (p. 44).

Like the independent radio journalist Jean Dominique who was the subject of Jonathan Demme's documentary The Agronomist, the narrators of Street of Lost Footsteps do not see Aristide ("the Prophet", the former fiery priest) as putting an end to corruption and violence against rivals/opponents. "In all this misery," Madame wonders, "do we even know where God is? We used to suspect that he was on the side of the rich. Aligned with snobbery and bigotry. Now they say he's with the poor. Do they know where he is while people are killing? In any case, he never came here" (p. 90).

What happens to the narrators and to those they know, I will not reveal, but there are some very gruesome bits. Never having been to Port-au-Prince, the geographical specifics were lost on me, but I have been in other places recently with violence like that condensed by Trouillot into a night of regime change in Haiti (Masaya, Nicaragua, Dubrovnik, Croatia and nearby Bosnia). The pathology dissected in Street of Lost Footsteps is not, by any means, confined to Haiti.

Translator Linda Coverdale provides a succinct overview of the bloodstained history of Haiti in an introduction to the volume. What Trouillot wrote about was not just a single night, but an all-too representative condensation of Haitian history.

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* I associate "necklacing" with South Africa of the 1980s. It involves binding someone's hands, putting a gasoline-soaked tire around their neck, and lighting it.


Lyonel Trouillot (born in Port-au-Prince in 1956) is a founding member of the Haitian Writers Association. Linda Coverdale has also translated Trouillot's Children of Heroes, also published by the University of Nebraska Press, in 2008. Rue des pas perduswas first published in Haiti in 1996. Cloverdale's translation into English was first published in 2003.