Discovering Aljany, Pt. 2: Violence
Warning: This story deals with rape, violence, and other topics which may be sensitive to readers.
What I have experienced is a direct testimony, based on memories, pains, and fears that may never fade away.
If we were to start somewhere, logic leads me to tell you about my childhood and to return to that period of innocence during which the child is supposed to grow, learn, and discover life.
This is childhood as it is described in books, or hopefully as you have known it. I don't have the same memories of mine.
My mother and father met relatively young. While they gave off the image of a happy couple, they had their difficulties and they certainly knew suffering. But we never lacked anything, and they always gave us a lot of love.
Memories of violence
The author as a little girl.
My parents worked in a school in Cité-Soleil. It’s the largest slum in Port-au-Prince, historically a place where armed gangs controlled large territories (today, that is true for all of Port-au-Prince). Sometimes, they would spend the day under the benches of their classrooms to avoid bullets, not knowing if they would make it home. Every day they went to work, we were scared to death we wouldn’t see them at the end of the day.
My parents would see executions of young boys sentenced to death by bandits and were afraid of being targeted themselves. It was a frequent topic of conversation at home. We were afraid for them. We were afraid of losing them.
In our lives, we started moving early on to get away from this violence. As children, we first lived in downtown Port-au-Prince: a busy neighborhood where armed gangs ruled. They raped young women, robbed and killed in the middle of the day without any fear. Every morning, on our way to school, we would pass dead bodies in the middle of the street or on piles of garbage, sometimes being eaten by pigs.
I remember one morning, we had just woken up and were looking for something to eat, when gang members got into our neighborhood. They were breaking into people's homes, beating men, raping young women and doing whatever else they could think of. There were five of us at home: Mom, Dad, my sisters and I. Imagine how frightened my parents were when they saw the bandits in our house. We were three young teenage girls. But one of them decided to spare us from the horror that had come to our community. To our surprise, it was one of my mother's students – who had joined a gang. He gave the order not to touch anything in our house and we got out safely.
A few months later, my parents had a dispute with a neighbor who lived right across the street from our house. Unfortunately, this problem wasn’t resolved in a simple discussion. Our neighbor hired thugs to murder my father. One day, while he was leaving work, some bandits got hold of my father, put a bag over his head and took him somewhere far from our house to murder him.
Thank God the leader of the gang responsible knew my dad. He refused to kill him and returned the money he had been paid to commit the crime. My father went immediately to the police station in Port-au-Prince and filed a complaint against the neighbor. A police backup accompanied him to the house. When the neighbor saw the police arrive, he went home to get his gun. The police executed him.
Hope, fear, and my way out
It was hard to learn anything in school in that environment. I am and was lost in my memories, these images of death that keep going back and forth in my head. But I loved school, I loved learning, and I was very studious – it was my only escape.
In Haiti, life is increasingly lived at the whim of bandits. In Port-au-Prince, people are killed over jealousy, over hatred, and even over mistakes. It happens sometimes that by inattention and nonchalance, a gangster makes a mistake and kills someone completely uninvolved with gang life – taking with them the future, dreams and hopes of an entire family.
I am not one to propagate the negative image of Haiti where we are too often the victim. This is a matter of not keeping quiet about a phenomenon that worries me, frightens me and challenges me. Violence in Haiti has become more and more commonplace in the past year or so, and I am afraid for my own life and that of my loved ones.
After high school, I had a continuing desire and passion to discover and learn more. I took every job that came my way to satisfy my curiosity. I couldn't stay at home and do the dishes forever: I had to move!
I managed on my own and built a career path according to the opportunities that presented themselves to me. I passed the entrance exam to the State University of Haiti (UEH) and entered the Faculty of Applied Linguistics (FLA). The same year, I joined the newspaper Le Nouvelliste as an intern where I learned the ins and outs of the journalistic profession.
Six months later, I started working for a magazine that promoted the wealth of Haiti (RAJ magazine). Excellence was the expectation, and I forced myself to rise to it. In October 2013, I got my first monthly paycheck, which was set at fifteen thousand gourdes (editor’s note: the equivalent of $345 in USD at the time). A pittance, indeed. But for the first time in my life, I finally saw a possible horizon!
Read the series!
Part Three: The Long-Awaited Meeting
Part Seven: How Can You Be a Journalist Here?
Discover more!
About the Author
Aljany Narcius
Haitian journalist Aljany Narcius is currently pursuing a Master 2 in Media Management, online from France’s University of Lille. With ten years of experience in the fields of journalism and communication, Aljany is a linguist who uses the Creole language as her weapon in the fight against social inequalities, exploitation, and all kinds of violence.
