Cultural riches turn to rubble in Haiti quake

Long before its ground started heaving, Haiti was already a byword for a damaged place. Its leaders were considered kleptocrats; its people were jaw-droppingly poor. But there was still a pride that burst forth from the people here, linked both to the country's heroic struggle to break the bonds of slavery and to the vibrant cultural life that united them and enabled them to endure.

The earthquake has caused untold suffering and taken tens of thousands of lives -- more than 111,000 bodies have been registered, the government said Saturday. The pain of the cultural loss cannot compare. But in stealing symbols that gave Haitians their hope and grandeur and a reminder of a common purpose, the earthquake also cast a different kind of cloud over their future.

"You go around and you say, 'Oh my God,' and then you go further and you say it again," said Teeluck Bhuwanee, the Unesco representative in Haiti. "We haven't assessed all the damage at all the cultural sites, but we know it's bad."

The landscape of the capital was in tatters long before this month's disaster, and many symbols of the country's past had been looted and destroyed during the tumultuous political upheavals that racked the country in recent decades.

But Haiti has always clung proudly to its history as the world's first independent black republic, even if governments have not done all they can to preserve it.

Its vibrant arts scene celebrated the country's creation, and its public buildings sought to capture the grandeur of a past that Haitians held onto though political trauma, staggering violence and a string of natural disasters.

The National Palace was the country's principal symbol, Haiti's White House, a grand building surrounded by iron gates that dates back less than a century but was designed in a French Renaissance style meant to evoke an earlier time.

The country was born after a slave revolt against the French, who had exploited its sugar cane during decades of colonial rule.

The quake left the imposing building shattered, its signature white domes collapsed, its Oval Office equivalent a total loss.

The palace had no permanent collection of artifacts, since leaders often stripped the place as they were chased out of office. But presidential aides said they were worried about irreplaceable artwork and sculptures that were on display in heavily damaged ceremonial rooms.

The saddest scenes were at the churches.
Still, there were signs of hope. The country's National Museum was built underground in a park facing the National Palace, and the gate to get in is chained. Experts say that key collections probably survived.

At the National Archives, there was some damage, but important historical documents did not appear threatened, said Bernard Hadjadj, a special envoy for Unesco.

And the Unknown Maroon, a giant sculpture in front of the palace that features a man blowing a conch shell as he breaks the bonds of slavery, is surrounded by squatters but standing.

At one of the many damaged buildings here, an art center that played a crucial role in making Haitian paintings known around the world, a lifeless woman lay amid the rubble, an angelic look on her face, her hands clutched together in a prayer. But the canvas upon which she had been painted was ripped and ruined.

Across the capital, an artist raised his two bandaged hands in the air and let out a sound that was half sob and half roar. More than his physical injuries, what seemed to pain the man, Paul Jude Camelot, a student at the École Nationale des Arts, was the damage to his latest creation, a painting of the universe that had had a clay sculpture representing life growing out of the center.

"That's about all I had left," he said.

Outside the National Palace, where valuable sculptures were shattered in the wreckage, one of the squatters in the park was an up-and-coming surrealist painter, James Cesar Wah.

"I might find inspiration in this," he said, surveying all the suffering. "For now, though, artists need to find something else to do. They have to survive now, to take care of their families, then return to art."

Mr. Bhuwanee of Unesco feared that the Citadel, a historic fort in the north of the country that was threatened before the quake, might have been damaged, although he said he had not yet received any reports from the scene. He also worried about Jacmel, a southern city known for its historic architecture.

Artists say they lost many of their colleagues in the quake, although nobody yet knows just how hard hit Haiti's creative community was. Some of the country's irreplaceable cultural gems were damaged and destroyed, knocked off walls and pedestals.

"This may seem like something superficial, to care about paintings at a time like this," said Ms. Liautaud, who is on the board of directors of the Centre d'Art, which is credited with giving life to Haiti's naïf artistic movement in the 1940s. "Of course, we should care about the people first. But the reason why there is still a country, despite all our troubles, is our strong culture."

She spoke from outside the center, now a tottering building, its walls stripped away and its cache of Haitian paintings exposed to the elements. Some of the artwork was already destroyed, like the painting of the woman praying.

The most valuable works appeared intact, although they were easily available to passers-by daring enough to climb inside.

Patrick Vilaire, a sculptor, met on Thursday night with others concerned about saving some of the country's historical texts. They put at the top of their agenda preserving the private book collection at two private homes. At one, owned by a noted local historian, George Corvington, thousands of collected works on Haitian history were in danger of being lost in the rubble of his residence.

"He's been collecting books for 40 years," Mr. Vilaire said. "It's probably the biggest collection of history books in Haiti."

At the second home, the endangered books were political and economic texts from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Asked how he could focus on old books after such a catastrophic event, Mr. Vilaire said, "The dead are dead, we know that, but if you don't have the memory of the past, the rest of us can't continue living."