Pitching white tents that looked like sails on a vast lawn, five men were preparing for what I first assumed would be a sadly unattended book festival. The tents seem to land on the grounds of this  affluent Long Island country club,  Eisenhower  Park, like a fleet of odd masts. Then Haiti itself seemed an island swarming with all kinds of strange figures and events mixing with sorrow and loss. Stories of their recent, horrific earthquake had reached me through the media.

Today, I had come up by an early morning train, trudged my twenty-five books by shoulder bag, and walked across the golf courses and tennis courts on this sprawling country club asking people where I might find The Long Island Book Festival International sponsored by The Haitian American Foundation for Educational and Cultural Exchange. It was the festival’s first year, and a rainy, windless day, still and humid. “The LIBFI,” the material I received the featured author stated, “was born out a passion for the written word. Our mission stands as our core value. To engage and enrich the lives of everyone through the power of literature.” My inquiry, however, as I wandered about the immense property, asking a few scattered people where I might find the festival, was met only with puzzled faces and shrugged shoulders. Not even the officers and clerks at the tiny police station situated between the club’s riding stables and large center pond knew what I was talking about.

 

What I wanted to do, anyway, was find some shaded corner under a tree where no one would spot me, and catch some sleep. If I couldn't get a good nap in under a tree somewhere unseen, then at least I could get a rest from the restless anger I had lodged in my stomach. It had been a week of fervent and feverish political discussions for me, mostly exhausting as few had any closure or yielded answers. Most friends ending up feeling instead more isolated from each other. On top of that, the Jewish holiday had started, and I missed family who had departed. I had started but could not finish a short essay about how literature was a kind of “faith,” a religion, as reading passages from books always seemed to bring me back into some kind of spiritual order, and integration.

One poem by Whitman especially worked this Rosh-A-Shana, and I had planned, later, to write about it in the essay. It went:

One's-self I sing, a simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Of physiology from top to toe I sing,

Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse,

I say

the Form complete is worthier far,

The Female equally with the Male I sing.

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,

Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine,

The Modern Man I sing.

I meant to bring the book up to the fair. But I forgot it on my messy living room floor. Now a  familiar sadness had descended, but there was nothing in my shoulder bag to chase its demons away.

As soon as I saw the men putting up the tents on the field, I stopped to stare at the strangeness of their delicate shelters made of stretched white cloth and held up by poles in the grounds, the process of erecting these tents in the midst of a cloud-heavy, wet morning was giving me a certain lightness of being, too, even as spectator. It had to be them, the ones who had invited me to be this featured author I thought, and hadn't they warned me the club was enormous? That I could get lost? Waving at them, they waved back with grand smiles, then shouted they would be getting everything in place very soon. Waiting, I tried to draw myself up into presentable form, as rescued by relatives. The long day was ahead, and, though no one knew who they were, and no audience had even arrived yet, my spirits were stirred and to my great relief, finally lifted.

A popular Haitian folk expression claims that Haiti is 90% Catholic and 100 % voodoo. “The creole speaking masses are baptized in the Catholic church and consider themselves as such, but the vast majority of them continue to practice and believe in all features of voodoo.” (I read this from a book given to me later by one of the audience members, a professor of Haitian history at Queen's College. He was teaching a course about the early folklore and rituals of Haitian culture). “Voodoo” like the Jewish Cabala, was a mystical foundation, and its spirit fused powerfully with the literary and artistic sensibility of the book festival. Voodoo still exists in Haiti today, his long study told me, as “an informal religion of action created by and suited to the rural life of the poorer farmers who rent or own land to cultivate. Long ago (voodoo) included the invocation and placation of numerous spirits and gods, water rites magic cults of the dead, music and dance. Voodoo is based on the Christian belief in the Christian God and lesser Haitian and African deities called ‘The Loa.’ God is ultimately good and omnipotent, but is perceived as being rather remote and unconcerned with the small details of life. This is the realm of ‘The Loa’ that possess the same desires and weaknesses as do mankind. There are hundreds of Loa, representing the many characteristics of man.” As each Loa possessed a human being, the person was said to take on the characteristics of the Loa. Under the influence of a snake God, for example, a man can slither up a tree and defy gravity.

The book fair  did eventually fill with people, and under those same tents, now fully erected, my novel about my childhood in  Jerusalem had stirred people into animated talk, one man, actually standing up on a chair, wagging his self-published book, about Haitian history in his impatient fist and shouting, “Listen to me, people! I will tell you what is Haiti, You see? You can understand because you know it is Jerusalem in a way, yes?”

Another  Haitian woman, a social worker who had been sitting on committees for Haitian relief programs for a long time now, soon interrupted him, “No, no, you don't understand a thing about the Haitian world.” (I wasn't sure if she were addressing the shouting man or me, or the small gathering crowd around my table.) “All these non-profit organizations you have here in the States,” she went on, “they are corrupt, they  pocket the money for themselves! Either the non-profits or the corrupt peoples there in Haiti take all the dollars we have raised. I cannot get medical supplies in. How can I help?”

The festivities and panel (another author had joined me, for more lively talk) ended with a banquet. By then, lured by the prospect of dancing and music, my husband took the train after work to join me. My husband and I were awed by watercolor paintings of Haitian seaports and fishermen on the walls of the Marriott Hotel’s ballroom where the banquet was held. The painting portrayed women’s and children’s faces profiled against dirt roads lined with thatched bamboo-made cottages and sugarcane plantations, the mud and lime sidings on simple huts with only soil for floors. Classical and formal Haitian poetry was read, then a few Baudelaire poems. After much conversation around a dining table loaded with salted fish, short ribs, and excellent salads, the evening finished with softer, French-style two-step Latin dancing. By midnight, my own sadness and isolation had been lifted up further by more speeches from the director and his staff about Haitian libraries needing “Books for Everybody.” Beyond this, or because of it, I don't know exactly why or what seemed to possess me. Chandelier light on my face while dancing with my husband, a riot of sound and watercolors and the taste of salty fresh Atlantic fish...I was transmigrating happily into a culture that allowed for magic as much as for erudition and a classical literary point of view. Defying all social rules of distances and differences, I traveled  an ocean, I became a sail...

Where the poem meets the intersection between and “I” and the “Other,” the Loa enters, I am thinking now.

Coleridge said, “Literature is ‘the willing suspension of disbelief,’ or ‘poetic faith.’” Recently, the literary critic,William Egginton, in  an essay for the New York Times entitled, ‘Quixote,’ Colbert and the Reality of Fiction’ added this to Coleridge famous statement: “The fictional worldview, then, ” Egginton proposed, “is one in which we are able to divide ourselves to assume simultaneously opposing consciousnesses, and to enter and leave different realities at will, all the while voluntarily suspending judgments concerning their relation to an ultimate reality. This worldview has had an extraordinarily powerful … affecting equally our thought and politics as thoroughly as it does our art and literature.”

Call it voodoo.

Leora Skolkin-Smith is the author of Edges and The Fragile Mistress. Her new novel, Hystera, will be published by Fiction Studio Books in November.

To continue this conversation, visit us on Facebook.