By Marc Vincent
The March earthquake and tsunami in Japan have driven the dire predicament in Haiti from the headlines and, perhaps, from our collective consciousness. This makes "Tent Life: Haiti," a poignant and beautiful work of photojournalism, especially timely and important.
Wyatt Gallery has spent more than a decade documenting life in the Caribbean, as well as the aftermaths of disasters like the Southeast Asian tsunami of 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Last year, Haiti was devastated by a 7.0 magnitude quake, the strongest in two centuries, which killed more than 200,000 and rendered 1.5 million homeless.
Gallery photographed the vast tent cities that mushroomed around the capital, Port au Prince. There, he encountered "an intense sense of hope, resilience, and, at times, joy."
The book opens with a poignant essay by novelist Edwidge Danticat, who recounts the story of her second cousin, Jesula, a young woman who takes refuge in a tent across from the destroyed National Palace.
She and others struggle to maintain normalcy -- in shacks made of wood and corrugated metal, or simple lean-tos covered with bedsheets and tarps, or small, one-person tents housing entire families. They form security brigades and clean-up crews. They open beauty parlors and barber shops. In many photographs, their clothing is pristine, expertly pressed and ironed.
But life remains extremely difficult. Rain reduces tent floors to mud; there is sexual and physical violence. Privacy is impossible. Inadequate waste disposal and lack of clean water feed the outbreaks of cholera.
A brief timeline tracks the history of the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere: a successful slave revolt against the French, independence in 1804 to become the world's first black-led republic. Then two centuries of brutal dictatorships and natural calamities -- hurricanes, earthquakes and mudslides -- amplifying the woe.
Most of Wyatt's large color photographs are close-ups of individuals in their tents or outside. He also studies the destroyed Cathedral and National Palace, and presents heart-wrenching panoramas of tent cities and trash-strewn heaps of rubble.
Some of the most moving scenes illuminate the daily struggle to obtain clean drinking water, as children walk long distances with heavy buckets and canisters.
Many of the photographs are so artful as to resemble contemporary abstractions. Bright red, blue or yellow tents, when empty, exude a chapellike aura of pure, radiant color; others are strewn with haphazard assortments of random possessions.
The Haitian people, too, are shown in all their variety, from children to grandparents, from workers in neckties to the barely clad. Some smile wearily; others wear a grimly determined look. Their portraits evoke Jesula's unvarying response when asked how she is doing: "Nou la, an che an os." (We're here, in flesh and bone.)
As of this January, only 5 percent of the rubble had been cleared, and no major reconstruction had begun -- the tent cities are becoming permanent shanty towns.
The book is a poignant reminder of the hardships entailed in rebuilding a nation that was poor and struggling and politically unstable to begin with -- it serves as a stark contrast to the unfolding situation in Japan.
But the Haitians pictured here are indomitable. The book quotes a Creole poem by Emmanuel Ejen: "You can cut me off/uproot me, toss me away/you can roll me,/ burn me to cinders/ but birds won't quit/nesting in my roots and /hope doesn't wither/but instead blossoms in me."Mark Vincent is a professor of art history at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea.